Can Virtue Be Taught?

The Meno is a dialogue that begins as if someone had burst through the door. Meno, a young and wealthy Thessalian, fires his question at Socrates without so much as a greeting: Can virtue — arete in Greek — be taught? Or is it acquired by practice, or present by nature, or gained in some other way? (70a) Behind the question stands the shadow of his teacher, the Sophist Gorgias: the Sophists promised to teach arete for a fee, as the key to political advancement. And Meno is an impatient student, eager to obtain a serviceable answer as quickly as possible.

Socrates' reply is the reversal that shapes the entire dialogue: before asking how something is acquired, one must know what it is. With mocking modesty he remarks that thanks to Gorgias the Thessalians have turned philosophers, while wisdom has emigrated from Athens, where there is now a drought of it (70b–71a). As for me, he says, never mind whether virtue can be taught — I do not even know what it is; nor have I ever met anyone who does (71b). Can someone who does not know who Meno is say whether he is handsome or rich? In philosophy the question "what is it?" precedes the question "what is it like?". And so the dialogue turns into an inquiry after the definition of virtue.

Three definitions, three refutations

First attempt: a swarm of virtues. For Meno the task is easy: a man's virtue is to manage the affairs of the city ably, a woman's to run her household; child, elder and slave each have virtues of their own — a different virtue for every task and every age (71e–72a). Socrates' reply is the dialogue's first brilliant simile: I asked you for one virtue, and you hand me a swarm of bees. Bees may be many and various, but the common nature that makes them bees is one in all of them. If health is the same health in a man and in a woman, and strength the same strength, then virtue too must carry in everyone a single essence that makes it virtue. Meno in fact concedes the point: neither household nor city can be well governed without temperance and justice; so whoever would be good — man, woman, child or elder — needs the same qualities (73a–c). Meno keeps listing examples; Socrates is after the form that stays the same across all the examples, the common essence. The relativism of the Sophists and Socrates' search for an objective essence collide here for the first time.

Second attempt: the power to rule. Meno regroups: if one formula must cover all the cases, virtue is "the capacity to rule over people" (73d). Socrates refutes it in two moves. First, scope: the definition cannot apply to a child or a slave — a slave's virtue can hardly be to rule his master; a definition, if it is to be one, must hold for everyone. Then, content: must we not add the word justly? Meno adds it; his justification is ready to hand: justice, after all, is virtue. Socrates' question is a fine one: is justice virtue itself, or a virtue? Just as the circle is not "shape" but "a shape", so justice is a virtue; beside it stand courage, temperance, wisdom (73e–74a). We have fallen back into plurality: the one virtue that runs through all the virtues is still nowhere to be seen.

Here Socrates breaks off the dispute to give Meno a lesson in defining; to the young man who cannot define virtue, he will show on an easier example how defining is done. His first attempt is deliberately flawed: shape is that which always accompanies colour (75b). Meno objects: what if someone doesn't know what colour is either? Socrates' reply is a small lesson in the ethics of argument: were my interlocutor one of the combative, eristic sort, I would give my answer and tell him that if it is wrong, refuting it is his business; but when two friends are conversing, the answer must be gentler and more constructive, built from concepts the other already knows (75c–d). Following that standard he gives his second definition: shape is that in which a solid terminates — in short, the limit of a solid (76a). For colour he offers, at Meno's insistence, a definition of the showy kind Gorgias would enjoy, leaning on Empedocles' doctrine of effluences: colour is an effluence from shapes, commensurate with sight and perceived by it. Meno adores this ornate answer; Socrates is sure the plain one was better (76d–e). The lesson is clear: a good definition rests on clarity, not display — and dressing up what one cannot define in fine words is not knowledge.

Third attempt: desiring fine things and the power to obtain them. This time Meno takes his cue from a poet: virtue is to desire fine things and to be able to obtain them (77b). Socrates dissolves the first half step by step. No one desires what is bad knowing it to be bad: those who desire bad things either take them to be good — in which case it is really the good they desire — or else they know that the bad harms its possessor and that the harmed man is miserable; and no one wishes to be miserable and luckless (77c–78b). So the desire for the good is common to all; no one surpasses another in wanting. This piece of reasoning carries the core of Socratic ethics: evil is born not of ill will but of ignorance; no one is bad knowingly and willingly.

What remains is the definition's second half: virtue as the power to obtain good things — for Meno, gold, silver, office. But is obtaining them unjustly also virtue? Of course not, says Meno; it must be with justice. And with that the plate is broken once more: virtue has been defined by justice, which is a part of virtue. To define the whole by a part, when the whole itself is unknown, is a vicious circle — explaining the unknown by an unknown part of itself (79a–c). Three attempts, three failures.

The torpedo fish and Meno's paradox

Meno's patience runs out, and one of the liveliest moments of the dialogue arrives: he compares Socrates to the torpedo fish that numbs whatever it touches. His tongue and his mind, he says, have gone numb; not a single answer is left to him — he who has delivered such brilliant speeches on virtue before crowds; and it is a good thing, he adds, that you never leave Athens: in another city they would arrest you as a sorcerer (80a–b). Socrates accepts the simile with one correction: if the torpedo numbs others while being numb itself, then I resemble it; for I do not confuse people while knowing the answers — I confuse them because I am confused myself (80c–d). The confession of ignorance is, in Socrates, not a pose but a method.

Whereupon Meno draws the eristic weapon left over from his Sophistic training and advances the argument that has entered the history of philosophy as "Meno's paradox", the paradox of inquiry: a man can search neither for what he knows nor for what he does not know. Not for what he knows, since he knows it already; not for what he does not know, since he does not know what to look for — and even if he stumbled upon it, how would he recognise it as the thing he sought? (80d–e) Conclusion: inquiry is either superfluous or impossible. The paradox may be framed in bad faith, but the question it raises is serious, and Plato takes it seriously: how is knowledge that does not come from experience — like the essence of virtue — possible at all?

Recollection: learning is remembering

Socrates' answer is the first positive doctrine ever advanced in Plato's dialogues: anamnesis, the theory of recollection. He reports what he has heard from priests and priestesses and from inspired poets like Pindar: the soul is immortal; it has been born many times and has beheld all things, both here and in the beyond. And since all nature is akin, one who recollects a single thing — if only he does not tire — can draw out all the rest from within himself. What we call learning is nothing but remembering what lies latent in the soul (81a–d). Thus the knot of the paradox is untied: in a sense we already know what we seek; inquiry is the awakening of what has been forgotten. Socrates also counts surrender to that eristic argument a moral danger: it would make us lazy, whereas trusting in recollection makes us brave and industrious in the search (81e).

Then comes one of the most famous scenes in the history of philosophy: the examination of the slave boy who has never learned geometry. Socrates has the boy — born and raised in Meno's household — called over, and promises to do nothing but ask questions. A square with a side of two feet is drawn; its area is four. The question: what is the side of the square whose area is double, eight feet? The boy answers confidently: the side must be doubled too — four feet. Socrates has it drawn: a side of four gives an area of sixteen, not eight. The boy corrects himself: three feet, then. It is drawn again: three by three is nine; still not eight (82c–83e). And the boy surrenders: he openly admits he does not know the answer (84a).

Here Socrates pauses and turns to Meno; this moment is the heart of the dialogue. Have we harmed the boy by numbing him? Quite the opposite: at first he did not know but thought he knew; now he not only does not know — he is aware that he does not (84a–b). This state of perplexity and impasse — aporia — is not the obstacle to learning but its precondition; for the man who thinks he knows does not search. The questioning continues, and the boy sees with his own eyes that the square built on the diagonal of the original square is exactly double it; no one told him the solution — he found it himself (84d–85b).

Socrates draws the lesson: true opinions were in the boy; stirred by the questions, they moved like newly awakened dreams. If the same questions are put often enough and along different paths, these opinions will turn into stable knowledge (85c–d). If the boy did not learn these things in this life, his soul must have carried them always — in which case the soul must be immortal. Yet Socrates' closing note is strikingly cautious: I would not swear to every detail of the tale; but that believing we can search for what we do not know makes us better, braver and less idle — that I would defend in word and deed (86b–c). The theory is offered not as a dogma but as the confidence that makes inquiry possible.

The method of hypothesis: if virtue is knowledge, it can be taught

After all these lessons Meno still returns to his first question: so, can virtue be taught? Socrates says that if he governed Meno as he governs himself, they would investigate the essence first; but he yields to the insistence of a young man so fond of his freedom — on one condition: they will proceed as the geometers do, from a hypothesis (86d–87b). Just as a geometer, asked whether a given area can be inscribed in a circle, gives a conditional answer — possible if such-and-such a condition holds, otherwise not — so they too, not knowing what virtue is, will build a conditional argument.

The chain runs as follows. Virtue is good; what is good is beneficial. But the things we call "good" — health, strength, beauty, wealth — benefit when rightly used and harm when wrongly used. The same holds for the qualities of the soul: courage without sense is mere daring and wounds its owner; quickness at learning, a strong memory, temperance — all benefit only when joined with wisdom, and harm when joined with folly (88a–c). If virtue is beneficial, and what makes anything beneficial is always wisdom, then virtue must be wisdom — in whole or in part (89a). From this an interim conclusion falls out: good men are not good by nature; were they so, we would pick out the well-born early and keep them under guard on the acropolis, more precious than bullion (89b). If nature is eliminated and virtue is knowledge, learning is what remains. The proof looks complete.

The test of teachers and the anger of Anytus

But Socrates grows suspicious of his own conclusion and sets about testing the theory in practice: if a thing can be taught, it must have teachers and learners. Does virtue have a teacher? At just this point — Plato's staging is chilling — Anytus sits down beside them: the son of Anthemion, a man enriched by his own labour, himself praised as measured, a leading man of the democracy — and one of the men who, three years hence, will bring Socrates to court on the charge of corrupting the young (89e–90b).

Socrates opens the inquiry with a craftsman's analogy: if we wanted Meno to become a physician, we would send him to the physicians; a cobbler, to the cobblers; whoever would learn the flute goes to the masters who profess to teach the art and charge a fee for it — to try to extract the art from men who do not practise it would be plain folly; and Anytus agrees (90b–91a). Who, then, answers to this description in the case of virtue? The only group who openly profess to teach virtue and take money for it are the Sophists.

Anytus' reaction is out of all measure: they are nothing but the ruin of those who frequent them. Socrates tests him coolly: did Protagoras really spend forty years deceiving all of Greece and corrupting his pupils, earning more money than the famous sculptor Phidias — and in all those years nobody noticed? A cobbler who returned shoes in worse repair than he received them would be found out within a month (91d–92a). It emerges that Anytus has never in his life had dealings with a single Sophist; yet he is sure he knows what sort of people they are — meeting Socrates' mocking reply: then you must be a soothsayer (92b–c). No portrait of prejudice could be drawn more sharply.

If not the Sophists, then, can the good and honourable citizens not teach virtue? Socrates' counter-evidence marshals the greatest names of Athenian history: Themistocles could teach his son Cleophantus to stand upright on horseback and throw the javelin — could he not teach him virtue? Yet no one ever claimed Cleophantus was wise like his father (93c–e). Aristides; Pericles, who had his sons taught riding, music and gymnastics; Thucydides, who had his boys trained by the best masters into the finest wrestlers of the day — all bought their sons every art money could buy; but no son ever came near his father's virtue (94a–d). If virtue could be taught, would these fathers, who spared no expense, have neglected the most precious lesson of all? Anytus' answer is not an argument but a threat: be careful, Socrates; in this city it is easier to do a man harm than good (94e–95a). The shadow of the Apology falls across the dialogue.

Things are no different in Meno's homeland: the respectable men of Thessaly keep saying now that virtue is teachable, now that it is not; even Gorgias never claims to teach virtue and laughs at those who do (95b–c). Socrates finds the same wavering even in the poet Theognis: in one couplet he says that keeping company with the good teaches goodness; in another, that no teacher can straighten a man of bad nature — contradicting himself on the very same subject (95d–96a). If even those counted experts cannot agree on whether it can be taught, can they be called its teachers? The conclusion is unavoidable: virtue has neither teachers nor learners; and what has no teacher cannot be taught. But this rewinds the chain just constructed: if it cannot be taught, virtue is not knowledge (96c). The dialogue is stranded between two incompatible results: as knowledge, virtue had to be teachable; yet no one anywhere teaches it.

Knowledge and true opinion: the statues of Daedalus

Socrates looks for the fault first in themselves: our teachers — your Gorgias, my Prodicus — brought us up badly; we overlooked that knowledge is not the only guide of right action, and we have made ourselves ridiculous (96d–97a). What provides the way out is a distinction, the dialogue's last great move: knowledge (episteme) and true opinion (orthe doxa). Socrates' example is an everyday one: a guide who actually knows the road to Larisa leads travellers there. But someone who has never walked the road, yet holds a true opinion about which way it runs, leads them to the very same place (97a–b). For the success of action, true opinion is as good a guide as knowledge. What is it, then, that makes knowledge more precious than true opinion?

The difference lies in permanence and in grounds: true opinions are like the statues of Daedalus, which — so the legend goes — run away unless they are tied down.

True opinions, as long as they stay put in a man's soul, are of great service; but they do not stay long — they slip away like a runaway slave. When we tie them down by working out the reason — thinking through and bringing to light the cause that yields the solution — they turn into knowledge and acquire permanence; and this act of tying down is, for Socrates, once again recollection (97d–98a). Knowledge is true opinion bound to its ground. It is generally acknowledged that Plato here sketches, centuries in advance, the modern formula of knowledge as justified true belief. Socrates' rare moment of certainty at this point also deserves note: he says there is very little he would claim to know, but that knowledge and true opinion are different things he counts among the things he knows for certain (98b) — even his confession of ignorance has its one exception.

This distinction also unties the knot left by the test of teachers — though at an ironic price. Themistocles and his like governed their cities not by knowledge but by true opinion: like seers and inspired poets, they hit upon the truth again and again by a kind of divine inspiration; but not knowing the reason for what they did, they could give no account of it (99b–d). That is why they could pass on to no one — not even to their own sons — an account they did not possess. Is this praise or censure? Plato's irony leaves both ends open.

A gift of the gods — and the question left open

Where the dialogue arrives is this: if the foregoing reasoning is sound, virtue comes neither from nature nor from teaching; it comes to the virtuous by divine dispensation (theia moira), without understanding — until the day a statesman appears who can make another man virtuous as well. Were such a man to appear, he would be, like Homer's Teiresias in Hades, the one solid reality moving among shadows (99e–100a). But in his last word Socrates recalls the real task once more: before asking how virtue is acquired, we must discover what it is in and by itself (100b). Then he says he must go, and makes a bitter request of Meno: soothe Anytus' anger by telling him the truths you believe; if you succeed, the Athenians will owe you thanks (100b–c). The reader knows that anger was never soothed. For all the positive doctrines it has offered, the dialogue ends with its first question open.

This unfinishedness is not a flaw but a position. The Meno is a bridge between the early dialogues that end in impasse and the mature dialogues where the theory of Forms will be built in the open: recollection is Plato's first positive doctrine, and the question of the objects of recollected knowledge is the beginning of the road that leads, in the Phaedo, to the Forms. Even someone who has never read the dialogue knows at once which work is meant when the scene of the slave boy and the geometry problem is mentioned; everyone knows the Meno by that scene.

Seen from today

Viewed from the therapy room, two legacies of the Meno are especially alive. The first is the bond between virtue and phronesis: qualities like courage, temperance and quickness to learn are in themselves neither good nor bad; what turns them to benefit or harm is the practical wisdom that governs their use. Contemporary positive psychology, which holds that character strengths serve well-being only when used in the right place, at the right time and in the right measure, stands on this ancient insight. The second is the long-canonical method of the slave-boy scene: insight is not information delivered from outside but our own true opinions awakened by the right questions; and aporia — that uncomfortable moment when what we thought we knew collapses — is not the obstacle to change but its beginning. The technique that today's cognitive therapies call "Socratic questioning" owes its lineage directly to this dialogue.