Virtue in the Cave: Moral Inquiry in Plato's Meno (review)

Roslyn Weiss. Virtue in the Cave: Moral Inquiry in Plato's Meno. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. x + 229. Cloth, $39.95.

Few monographs have been written on the Meno in English; and much of what is written takes a piecemeal approach, emphasizing the dilemma about the impossibility of learning what one doesn't know, the slave boy sequence, knowledge as recollection, concepts of teaching and learning, or right opinion which is sometimes taken as being asserted by Socrates or Plato. Weiss's book has a lot to recommend it. It is the first monographic study on this dialogue in English since Sternfeld and Zyskind's in 1978. Like Weiss's earlier Socrates Dissatisfied (1998), this volume challenges some of the orthodoxies of Anglo-American Plato scholarship. It is holistic, clear, and coherent. Unlike many other practitioners of the Socratic philosophy approach to Plato's dialogues, Weiss is also sensitive to literary and dramatic nuance.

The overall argument of the book is that the Meno is a defense of Socrates' project as a moral philosopher. Weiss's Socrates accepts that moral knowledge is impossible for ordinary humans, even though this is life's highest aim. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to search for moral knowledge by practicing the Socratic elenchus and appropriate to settle for true opinion. Although her Socrates promotes a doctrine he does not endorse, recollection, doing so is legitimatized by its strategic function of drawing Meno back into the inquiry and because it represents the way to obtain true moral opinion. Socrates deliberately deceives Meno, but this doesn't make him a sophist. According to Weiss, he is a "zealot" (11). Some, however, would describe her Socrates as a sophist and a bully. This whole business is philosophy, though not in the modern professional sense.

The book is a consecutive analysis of the whole dialogue as a defense of Socratic moral philosophy. Thus, chapter 1 presents Socrates' examinations of Meno's attempted definitions as attempts to turn Meno from his desire for power and money, and to encourage him to value excellence instead. But then (ch. 2), as Meno's attempts to define virtue fail, Socrates and Meno come to an impasse at which Meno presents his "paradox." Contrary to prevailing opinion in English-language scholarship, Weiss argues at length (65-126) that in the following sections Socrates does not present the recollection thesis or its attendant metaphysical notions as his own beliefs. They are deployed as ways to get Meno to continue participating in the moral inquiry they have begun. Thus (ch. 3) the slave-boy sequence is a "farcical" lesson in geometry; but recognizing this enables us to see that recollection actually represents the perpetual presence in the soul of true moral opinions that can be recovered through elenctic questioning. In the last sections of the dialogue (ch. 4), Weiss argues that Socrates is trying to benefit Meno even within the investigation's narrowed limits by persuading him that men attain virtue neither by nature nor by teaching nor spontaneously. Socrates is saying indirectly that true opinion is the source of virtue for most of us. In the concluding chapter, Weiss argues that the Socrates of the Meno is consistent with the Socrates of other early dialogues, especially his valuing of true opinion, his fierce commitment to moral inquiry, and his belief that, although the examined life fails to achieve moral knowledge, it is happy and the person who leads it good.

Weiss defends her demotion of recollection also in Appendix I, arguing that the Phaedo's version is a radical departure from the Meno's. Thus they do not evidence a consistent Platonic dogma of knowledge as recollection, but rather show development in Plato's views. Similarly, Appendix II argues that Socratic moral inquiry is abandoned in the Republic with the introduction of the theory of Forms that redefines philosophers...