Plato's "Meno": A Philosophy of Man as Acquisitive (review)

Book Reviews Robert Sternfeld and Harold Zyskind. Plato's "Meno": A Philosophy of Man as Acquisitive . Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. Pp. xvi + 176. $11.85. Sternfeld and Zyskind (henceforth S and Z) have written an unusual book. To one habituated to the standard detective work in explication de texte in Platonic scholarship there is ready acknowledgement that, without some bravado, nothing except textgrubbing is likely to result. S and Z's bravado, however, leaves one a bit breathless rather as Dr. Watson was left breathless by a lengthy Holmesian account garnered from very few clues. Largely from imaginative reflection upon the last part of Meno, with its apparent endorsement of the acquisition of political vqrtue (arete) only by the acquisition of divinely inspired true opinion, S and Z construct a Plato who is "operationally " and "pragmatically" oriented, an orientation given detailed development by S and Z under the heading "paragenics." Indeed S and Z use the occasion to develop a complex set of hints toward a "general paragenics" and an equally complex assessment of the present and recent scene in philosophy using the presumed standards of "general paragenics." S and Z provide us with (a) a detailed interpretation of the text of Meno, (b) an account of the unity of the dialogue in terms of its "paragenic" orientation, and (c) a plea for the acceptance of "general paragenics" as a promising program for orientation in philosophy now. Though I shall try to show the motivation for c, I shall in what follows pretty well confine myself to commenting upon a and b. Since the term "paragenics" plays such a large role in S and Z's account of Meno, I should note that it is derived from the greek verb paragignomai with the meaning (in Liddell and Scott) "to be at hand, to be gained, or to accrue to one," with the dative and normally said of things, goods, and so on. Thus S and Z think of paragenics as something like the study of the acquisition of goods (i.e., good things). And they give their book the subtitle "A Philosophy of Man as Acquisitive," thus providing the Socratic commonplace to the effect that all men desire good with the rather intriguing twist: all men are (naturally) acquisitive. Like everyone else, S and Z divide the dialogue into three parts: (t) the opening section, consisting largely of attempts to define virtue (arete); (2) Socrates' response to Gorgias's paradox of coming to know with the doctrine of recollection and the slaveboy illustration; and (3) the move to virtue as (brought about by) true opinion, where the latter is the gift of the gods. Most students of the Meno text have had some difficulty accommodating 3 to ~ and l, especially in the light of Plato's tendency [497] 498 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY elsewhere to associate virtue With knowledge (whether epistemeor phronesis). S and Z have no doubts about the linkage. They find it in the "paragenic" orientation. This, they claim, gives dramatic unity by illustrating the, sort of guidance which Socrates (or a philosophical counterpart) can give to practical men like Meno. And, they claim, it gives intellectual unity by offering a resolution of the definitional failure and exhibiting a parallel between true opinion induced in the slave boy and the true opinion which the statesman requires. "The treatment of virtue in the Meno marks a distinctive achievement in Greek thought regarding the relativity of political processes. In the large, the Men0 stands between the rhetoricians and sophists, on the one hand, and the naturalists and theoreticians on the other--with Protagoras and Isocrates exemplifying the former and Aristode and Plato's Republic the latter"(p. 86). As the quotation suggests, S and Z eschew the search for any sort of development in Plato, though they are obviously conversant with the dialogues and a large body of secondary literature. They think of Platonic definitions as "end points of inquiries. Such definitions, when achieved, are our understanding of diverse aspects of that which is"(p. 30). They deny, however, that there is any subject-neutral pattern of definition either throughout or developing in the Platonic dialogues. Their Plato...