Plato’s “Meno” (Notes and Discussion Credits)
** In-Class Writing (to be revised, later): Answer one of the following questions in your notebook and we will discuss them, in class. **
1. What is virtue? Why is it so important?
2. What is knowledge, and why is knowledge valuable?
3. What did you learn from Plato’s “Meno”; how does that learning help you?
4. How might pointing out someone’s errors help increase his or her knowledge?
5. Is learning from a mistake a good or a bad thing? Why?
6. How does a person’s knowledge about something expand? And, when it expands,
what makes that a good thing?
7. How do we define something, and, why is defining something so important?
● From the Gorgias, Apology, and Crito we derive a clear sense of Socrates as someone who likes to challenge people about what they believe by engaging them in a conversation. Typically the conversation has Socrates requesting clarification from someone about a particular claim, almost invariably a moral claim (e.g., that orators are good or that to be an orator or to study oratory is a good thing, or that the highest and best life is one of pleasure or power, and so on). Socrates requests clarification about the meaning of the words in which the response is framed and then, by repeated questions and answers and the introduction of various analogies, Socrates proceeds to lead his conversational partners to the realization that the original formulation of the moral claim is inadequate, meaningless, or contradictory.
● But, more importantly, these are rules of enquiry, perhaps a development of a code of virtuous ethics. They get at the problem of sustaining real learning. Enquiry is the main element of the Socratic method—to question until further understanding is gained.
The question arises, “Tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught?” This is not a basic ontological examination, which would appear more like, “What is virtue?” Even though Meno does not ask the direct question, Socrates reverses him and makes him re-examine his own question, thus going back to the original setting of the would-be important question -- the basic ontological asking, what is virtue . . . for once we answer that, we can answer Meno’s paradoxical enquiry.
Yet, the question arises: How can one inquire into something if one cannot even (intend to) say anything about it?
Again, this goes back to “The Allegory of the Cave” and the importance of distinction.
Meno offers a paradox (a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth): An individual cannot look for what he or she already knows, because he or she has it. One cannot look for what one does not know because one does not know what to look for.
● Meno acts as the interlocutor which provides grounding for Socrates to deliver solutions to his ethical quandaries. Socrates then, sort of coyly, offers the theory of recollection—that we may not know what we are looking for yet but we will recognize it when we see it. For Socrates, then, there is and must be a distinction between true opinion, knowledge (and ignorance, as well).
● This is a philosophical enquiry that begins as ontological (reality) and eventually turns epistemological (knowledge). Philosophical enquiry, to Plato (via Socrates and Meno) helps people improve the: consistency, justification, and coherence of any statement or further action.
● Socrates claims: However common or numerous the virtues may be (temperance, courage, justice, etc…), they all have “a common nature,” an ontological essence that makes them distributable to all human beings, no matter how each culture may use them, etc.
● Virtuous motivations should produce good actions. The four main Greek virtues (through Aristotle’s readings of Plato and through Ancient Greek cultural practice) are: temperance, courage, justice, piety. In Greek, virtue is translated into the term arěte (meaning “human excellence”) . . .
Socrates, however, says that he lacks knowledge of what virtue is and we can take this at least two ways: he is trying to expose Meno’s ignorance or he is fronting because he wants interlocutors to dsicover or uncover it for themselves. . . or, truthfully, he literally means that he does not know.
Basically, if we take him at his word, he definitely wants more than true opinions (doxa) about virtue.
● This is an examination of the possibilities of what we: understand, know, say, and do. In light of that, they are interwoven into the individual, but none of them are the same.
** What We Do with Our Lives **
TED Talk Video // Further Discussion of Plato’s “Meno” & Business Ethics
< http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/paul_zak_trust_morality_and_oxytocin.html >
● We must make distinctions between things, especially knowledge and true opinions (doxa). This helps us decide how close we have come into the arena of the questions being placed before us. In the sense that, if I ask, what is happiness, and the response is “a brain reaction” or “an emotion” . . . which of those is a more accurate response? Truly, neither. They are categorical responses. So, science and the scientific method do not really tell us what something is (the ontological), rather, they tell us what we know about something. Let’s discuss that in light of the Paul Zak talk. . .
● Is it by teaching or by practice that we come to know things? That is still the big, paradoxical question.
● Early in the dialogue, Socrates discusses the idea of the figure with Meno and Meno’s young slave. That the figure is understood, both, as a form and as a reality encompassed by variant details is vital to a combined learned experience of understanding and knowing about whatever figure one examines.
● If we examine the figure of business operation through the lens of “Meno,” we can understand a successful business ethic, better.
(1) Every business is an agent of its own trajectory.
(2) This abstract free will means that it is also possibly moral.
(3) Sociopolitically and legally, businesses are treated as legal “persons” (in the US, the
Constitution granted business personhood status in 1796).
(4) A business has many angles an sides but does not cease at its own borders.
(5) Those who operate the business possess an understanding of the business and of the
market, but, must look to competitors and to similar agents for further knowledge to
increase innate understanding. Basically,
understanding is the guide and knowledge is the advice.
(6) A business must be carried out according to the main Platonic virtues—courage,
temperance, piety and justice.
(7) Since a business is an organization, as well as a legal person, it must be understood that
the organization is only as ethical as the human individuals involved in all its
operations and thus if ethical practices carry out virtues and the virtues are timeless, or
at least, sustainable, then it can be understood that any business not engaging its own
ethical practices in a virtual manner will, in fact, fail.
(8) Ethical practices benefit all parties involved—consumer/employee/management, etc.
● Think of any business that has been involved in a public ethic scandal – WorldCom, Enron, Lehman Brothers, GoldmanSachs, Firestone, Toyota, Gap, Big Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, etc.) and then think about those companies’s recovery strategies. Ethics are always immediately engaged following a scandal and when they are not, profitability, corporate-evolution, the Market itself, all are affected in negative and further unethical ways.
● Ethical business practices do not simply imply: Do the right thing. What we gather from “Meno” is that a business must both know and understand the internal workings and the external factors.
● This requires a thorough examination of the organization’s LoC (locus of control).
● Constant enquiry (Socratic/Platonic) is required. This includes: perpetual knowledge of market-patterns, cultural adherence (what do consumers need/want, not need, not want), resource understanding, cultural respect, among many other facets of business operation.
- If we concern ourselves with virtue, and align the Socratic examination of the Forms of virtue with our modern era, might we come closer to an ethical approach to our actions, especially our business actions? Most likely, yes.