In the very next chapter Xenophon will introduce us to Socrates, not the general but the philosopher. Socrates was a man that Xenophon liked and trusted. We mostly know Socrates through Plato's presentation of him, and it is interesting that Xenophon presents Socrates as being somewhat different from the Socrates we get in Plato.
An honest man, Xenophon was no trained philosopher. He could neither fully conceptualize nor articulate Socrates's arguments. He admired Socrates for his intelligence, patriotism, and courage on the battlefield.... Like Plato's Apology, Xenophon's Apologia describes the trial of Socrates, but the works diverge substantially and, according to W. K. C. Guthrie, Xenophon's account portrays a Socrates of "intolerable smugness and complacency"....In Memorabilia, he defends Socrates from the accusations of corrupting the youth and being against the gods; essentially, it is a collection of various stories gathered together to construct a new apology for Socrates.
This is thus a good time to point out that Socrates also knew one of the generals just under discussion. As mentioned in the comments to the post below, the general Menon is the same as the Meno that is the namesake of one of Plato's dialogues, the Meno. It is nothing but an account of a discussion Socrates and Meno had about the nature of virtue. Meno had been a student of Gorgias, one of the more infamous Sophists, and Socrates engages Meno in a discussion about virtue -- whether it is a sort of knowledge, whether it can be taught, and what its basic nature might be.
This foray into philosophy instead of adventure story won't be of interest to everyone, but it fits the theme here well enough that I would feel remiss not to include it. After the jump, we'll do a very quick run through the Meno.
Plato assumes that his audience will know who all these people are, as they were major characters in the events of his day. He therefore portrays Socrates' introduction to Meno without explaining the backstory that Socrates and Gorgias were in deep disagreement about the philosophical issues involved or the proper role of philosophy in society. Gorgias described himself as a teacher of rhetoric, an art that he thought was the core art of ruling or governing. He taught his students to speak finely so that they could sway audiences to agreement, and therefore -- in defense of this idea -- states could be governed by discussion rather than force. There is a sort of basic justice to the idea, then, and one that is almost obvious to Americans: our system also intended to let the most persuasive speaker win the most votes, and then assume power to do what he had proposed with the assent of the majority of the people.
Meno, challenged to explain the nature of virtue, thus immediately thinks of this business of governing a state.
Let us take first the virtue of a man-he should know how to administer the state, and in the administration of it to benefit his friends and harm his enemies; and he must also be careful not to suffer harm himself. A woman's virtue, if you wish to know about that, may also be easily described: her duty is to order her house, and keep what is indoors, and obey her husband. Every age, every condition of life, young or old, male or female, bond or free, has a different virtue: there are virtues numberless, and no lack of definitions of them; for virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.
If you step back, it's very odd to think that "administration of the state" -- justice, defined the same way as Socrates' opponent in the Republic defines it, as 'helping friends and harming enemies' -- should be the basic virtue. Rather, one would want someone who wanted to govern others to first show that he could govern himself. In this way the 'virtue of women' is actually a more plausible candidate as presented than 'the virtue of a man,' since it at least pertains to things that are hers: her house, her things, her husband. Meno's account is even odder when you remember that only a very few men will ever be asked to 'administer the state'; thus, only the ruling man or men would have access to manly virtue. Most of humanity would not. Virtue seems like it ought to be a thing that pertains to the individual, something about how he manages himself and something personal.
Socrates doesn't raise any of those objections. He is more interested in the problem that Meno has not told him what "virtue" is, but has instead listed several virtues. He pushes him first to clarify that problem and then for a better definition. This goes on for quite a while as Meno keeps wanting to list examples of virtues -- in addition to justice he names courage and temperance and wisdom and magnanimity 'and many others' -- and Socrates keeps trying to get him to say what unites all of them and makes them virtues. What is virtue simpliciter?
Meno and Socrates extend the argument into analogies of geometry and color theory. There's an amusing portion where Socrates reminds Meno that he was simply supposed to remind him what Gorgias said about virtue -- Meno having been his student -- and Meno says he will do so once Socrates answers him about color. Socrates says that a blindfolded man would know he was beautiful, because only the beautiful speak in imperatives to everyone regardless of age or condition. While I am of the opinion that only women can be beautiful, I have noticed that quality of speech!
However, we do get to a definition of virtue -- and, as one might expect from a student of Gorgias, it is a rhetorical one, cast in the words of a poet.
Men. Well then, Socrates, virtue, as I take it, is when he, who desires the honourable, is able to provide it for himself; so the poet says, and I say too-Virtue is the desire of things honourable and the power of attaining them.Soc. And does he who desires the honourable also desire the good?Men. Certainly.Soc. Then are there some who desire the evil and others who desire the good? Do not all men, my dear sir, desire good?Men. I think not.Soc. There are some who desire evil?Men. Yes.Soc. Do you mean that they think the evils which they desire, to be good; or do they know that they are evil and yet desire them?Men. Both, I think.Soc. And do you really imagine, Meno, that a man knows evils to be evils and desires them notwithstanding?Men. Certainly I do.
There is a lot going on here.
First of all, Meno's definition of virtue is pretty good. It ends up being almost the same as the one Aristotle will end up giving a generation later. The capstone "complete" virtue is magnanimity, which is the virtue of pursuing that which most deserves honor. For Aristotle as well as for Meno, here, the virtue is only real if it actually succeeds in attaining the thing it pursues (philosophers call this quality of virtue thickness).
Socrates asks if there is an identity between 'desiring the honorable' and 'desiring the good,' which Meno affirms. So does Aristotle, at a lot greater length and with a lot more detail as to how the relationship works. That which most deserves honor Aristotle takes to be the good. In the Rhetoric he spells out how he thinks honor serves as a uniform standard of value that allows people to reason together about different sorts of goods in a way that such goods can be compared and weighed against each other. Is it more important to pursue education or wealth? They are both goods, but of very different kinds; but when we talk about whether the wise man or the rich one is more worthy of honor, we have a uniform standard to weigh them against one another. Gorgias' suggestion that rhetoric is at the core of good governance looks a little better in that light.
Socrates now turns to a favorite question of his, whether it is possible to desire evil if you really know that it is evil, as opposed to desiring an evil by mistake. If virtue is a kind of knowledge, which Socrates seems to believe even though he sometimes disavows the position, then knowing what is good and desiring what is good should be united. Knowing what is evil should not be compatible with desiring it. Meno wants to take the commonsense position that some men do seem to desire evil; indeed, we seem to observe this empirically all the time.
Meno falls into Socrates' trap, which leads us to the conclusion that all men only desire the good; and if that's true, Socrates says, then all men are equally virtuous because virtue was the power of desiring the honorable, which was the same as desiring the good. No, Meno had said that it was both the desiring of the good and the obtaining of the good; and not all men obtain equally.
Thus, we now have a new definition of virtue: the ability to obtain the good.
This is also a fairly good definition of virtue. We wouldn't want someone who knows what is good, desires what is good, but fails in his attempts to obtain the good. That sort of person we might say had a good heart, but the flesh was weak. He certainly wouldn't seem like an adequately virtuous person.
Socrates is still not satisfied, though, as Meno's examples once again show people acting with parts of virtue. He wants to know what is the whole of virtue. Meno begins to fear that he really doesn't know what virtue is; Socrates reminds Meno of Socrates' own claim not to know either. Socrates then proposes a story about 'certain wise men and women.' (Plato is unusual in his careful attention to the equality of women; you'll notice that the breaking out of virtue into men's/women's was put into the mouth of Meno, and Socrates disavows it.) The story is essentially that we are subject to a series of rebirths, and that all knowledge is only a thing remembered by the everlasting part of our souls.
There is a lengthy demonstration of this involving a slave boy and a geometric proof. I will skip over it, but it is probably the most famous part of the dialogue. It's also a fun exploration of how geometry in ancient Greece worked.
Following this demonstration that the slave boy, never taught math, can somehow 'recollect' the proof with relative ease, they return to the questions about virtue. Meno returns to his own most basic question: can virtue be taught? (For Gorgias, the answer is obviously yes; he ran a school claiming to teach the virtue of administering the state, which Meno attended.) Socrates objects to having to answer 'can virtue be taught' without having first settled 'what virtue is,' but allows himself to be persuaded to address the question.
Assumption. If virtue is knowledge, then it can be taught (unstated: because knowledge has to be the sort of thing that can be taught; that's the kind of thing that knowledge is).
Question: Virtue is good. Is it identical with the good, or is it a subspecies of good? If it is a kind of knowledge, then is good itself a kind of knowledge, or are there goods that are not a kind of knowledge?
Addenda to Question: It seems there are goods that can also be evils if they are not properly used. Virtue would seem to be the ability to use these things to obtain what is good, and avoid what is evil, in each of those things.
Conclusion: Virtue must be at least partly wisdom or prudence, which is the quality that allows us to ascertain and obtain the good and avoid the evil in each thing we encounter.
Socrates is of course not satisfied with that, no more than he was with the other fairly good answers generated by this useful discussion. It does suggest that good men are not good by nature -- putting 'good men' as children up safe so they can be used later won't leave us with good men to govern us later. Some sort of instruction or learning experience has to happen. So surely virtue is a sort of knowledge (at least partly! an amazing thing for Socrates to say after insisting so strongly on a unified definition of virtue).
Yet he remains unsure, and challenges the idea from a new direction. Socrates points out that a school of knowledge that can be taught ought to have teachers. Yet, in a lifetime of looking for teachers of virtue he has never found any who were actually what they purported to be. (Unspoken is the obvious criticism of Gorgias here.) If we wanted Meno to become a physician, we would send him to the physicians to learn how; if we wanted him to become a cobbler, we would send him to the cobblers, and sure enough he would develop knowledge of how to make good shoes. Who can teach this thing we want to say can be taught?
Socrates asks another participant in the discussion if the Sophists -- of whom Gorgias is one, but still not named here -- are good candidates for the teachers of virtue. The reaction is rather explosively negative.
What about the great men of Athenian history, statesmen and heroes? Socrates raises here the good point (he raises it in other places also) that if they were possessed of virtue that was a sort of knowledge, and could therefore teach it, would they not have taught it to their sons first of everyone? Yet, as is also empirically verifiable, the sons of great and virtuous men are not always themselves very virtuous. Socrates has several examples ready to go, including Pericles himself.
Coming back around to rhetoric, Socrates shows Meno that the poets have conflicting ideas, even within the mind of the same poet. So here, too, there is no reason to be sure of the idea that virtue can be taught; and if it cannot be taught, it cannot be knowledge.
Unlike most of the Platonic dialogues, Socrates and Meno actually do come to a conclusion at the end of this one: that virtue, shown to be partly a form of wisdom, cannot be wisdom or knowledge at all. Nevertheless, it does exist because there are good men we have all known. Thus, since it cannot be taught and it cannot be learned, it must be a gift from the gods. This is further affirmed by the habit of the era of referring to great men as "divine" -- indeed, in ancient Greece the very greatest men were sometimes thought to ascend into actual divinity, apotheosis.
Thus, virtue is a gift from the gods. That is the knowledge that Meno(n) took to Persia; the timeline is such that he must have been on his way to the expedition at the time of this discussion with Socrates. Whether or not it helped him, who can say?
No comments:
Post a Comment