Plato 2

The essence of things

What is x? questions may be interesting

Big questions, in science and in philosophy are often broached by asking What is...?

What is lightening? we might ask, or What is heat? Or what is thought? What is truth? What is meaning? What is morality?

The question pursued by Plato's Socrates in the Meno is: What is virtue?

We shouldn't be fooled: just because you can frame a question it doesn't necessarily make good sense, or open up a genuine or important or interesting line of enquiry!

What is caloric? for example doesn't make sense any more. What is a url? is a simple question with a simple answer which many people would find not interesting at all.

But What is virtue? sounds as though it might be interesting, if it means something like, How should we behave? Or Is there anything we really shouldn't do? Or What should I do to be happy?

What is virtue? in Plato doesn't mean exactly any of these things, but pursuing it raises these questions and more.

The question is pursued by Plato in more than one of his works. We shall just look at one of them, the Meno.

A word about Plato and Socrates

So I'm saying that 'What is Virtue' sounds as though it might be interesting, might be important.

Socrates' line of argument about virtue

The question put to Socrates at the beginning of the Meno is however not exactly What is virtue? Instead he is asked:

"Can you tell me, Socrates - is virtue something that can be taught? Or does it come by practice? Or is it neither teaching nor practice that gives it to a man but natural aptitude or something else?"

It is Socrates who says the answer to this must depend on what virtue is exactly.

Unidentified virtue Thanks to La Scultura Italiana

Here is what Socrates says:

PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Meno, Socrates, A Slave of Meno (Boy), Anytus.

MENO: Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor by practice, then whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?

SOCRATES: ... I confess with shame that I know literally nothing about virtue; and when I do not know the ‘quid’ of anything how can I know the ‘quale’? How, if I knew nothing at all of Meno, could I tell if he was fair, or the opposite of fair; rich and noble, or the reverse of rich and noble? Do you think that I could?

MENO: No, indeed. But are you in earnest, Socrates, in saying that you do not know what virtue is? And am I to carry back this report of you to Thessaly?

SOCRATES: Not only that, my dear boy, but you may say further that I have never known of any one else who did, in my judgment.

SOCRATES: ... By the gods, Meno, be generous, and tell me what you say that virtue is; for I shall be truly delighted to find that I have been mistaken, and that you and Gorgias do really have this knowledge; although I have been just saying that I have never found anybody who had.

'A woman's virtue ... is to order her house, and keep what is indoors, and obey her husband...' Pic courtesy Nostalgiaville

MENO: There will be no difficulty, Socrates, in answering your question. 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. And the same may be said of vice, Socrates.

SOCRATES: How fortunate I am, Meno! When I ask you for one virtue, you present me with a swarm of them, which are in your keeping. Suppose that I carry on the figure of the swarm, and ask of you, What is the nature of the bee? and you answer that there are many kinds of bees, and I reply: But do bees differ as bees, because there are many and different kinds of them; or are they not rather to be distinguished by some other quality, as for example beauty, size, or shape? How would you answer me?

MENO: I should answer that bees do not differ from one another, as bees.

SOCRATES: And if I went on to say: That is what I desire to know, Meno; tell me what is the quality in which they do not differ, but are all alike;—would you be able to answer?

MENO: I should.

SOCRATES: And so of the virtues, however many and different they may be, they have all a common nature which makes them virtues; and on this he who would answer the question, ‘What is virtue?’ would do well to have his eye fixed: Do you understand?

MENO: I am beginning to understand ...

Plato, Meno,

When Meno is asked to say what he thinks virtue is he gives descriptions of different sorts of people who are virtuous.

'The virtue of a man' is that he knows 'how to administer the state' so that it benefits his friends and harms his enemies.

'A woman’s virtue' ... is 'to order her house', and 'obey her husband'.

He assumes that these are just two examples and that to every position in the social framework there is a virtue. What is it? It is what you have if you do well what is expected of you in that position.

Meno: '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.'

What Socrates means by 'virtue'

Morality Courtesy Southpaw Studio

You will see that Meno at any rate isn't using 'virtue' in quite the way we are used to. We think there is something called 'morality' which puts obligations on us which are sort of general - obligations that are not linked to our 'position' in society but which apply to us as human beings. That is very interesting I think but I ask you to put it on one side for the time being. I am asking us now to concentrate not on 'virtue' but on the way in which Socrates is pursuing this What is x? question. So What is virtue' becomes just an example of a What is x? question.

Socrates' response to the claim that many different ways of behaving count as 'virtuous'

Meno is saying then that there are lots of virtues. How does Socrates reply?

SOCRATES: When you say, Meno, that there is one virtue of a man, another of a woman, another of a child, and so on, does this apply only to virtue, or would you say the same of health, and size, and strength? Or is the nature of health always the same, whether in man or woman?

MENO: I should say that health is the same, both in man and woman.

SOCRATES: And is not this true of size and strength? If a woman is strong, she will be strong by reason of the same form and of the same strength subsisting in her which there is in the man. I mean to say that strength, as strength, whether of man or woman, is the same. Is there any difference?

MENO: I think not.

SOCRATES: And will not virtue, as virtue, be the same, whether in a child or in a grown-up person, in a woman or in a man?

MENO: I cannot help feeling, Socrates, that this case is different from the others.

SOCRATES: But why? Were you not saying that the virtue of a man was to order a state, and the virtue of a woman was to order a house?

MENO: I did say so.

SOCRATES: And can either house or state or anything be well ordered without temperance and without justice?

MENO: Certainly not.

SOCRATES: Then they who order a state or a house temperately or justly order them with temperance and justice?

MENO: Certainly.

SOCRATES: Then both men and women, if they are to be good men and women, must have the same virtues of temperance and justice?

MENO: True.

SOCRATES: And can either a young man or an elder one be good, if they are intemperate and unjust?

MENO: They cannot.

SOCRATES: They must be temperate and just?

MENO: Yes.

SOCRATES: Then all men are good in the same way, and by participation in the same virtues?

MENO: Such is the inference.

SOCRATES: And they surely would not have been good in the same way, unless their virtue had been the same?

MENO: They would not.

So Socrates thinks he has shown that there must be one thing, virtue, even if the behaviour properly called 'virtuous' is not always the same. Virtuous behaviour on the part of a woman will not be the same as virtuous behaviour on the part of a man. But that doesn't mean virtue is two things. What must be the case if both sorts of behaviour are virtuous is that one thing is common to both.

It seems as though as far as Socrates is concerned Meno has described some virtuous behaviour, but he hasn't answered the question of what virtue is.

What do you think?

The elenchus

Elenchus tenuicornis Courtesy Dr Rokas

While that is turning over, let me just point to the pattern of argumentation Socrates is using here. It's a pattern he uses often and it has a special name: the elenchus.

I am using the formulations Peter Herissone-Kelly used last year:

1. Socrates raises the question of what X (e.g., justice, or piety, or virtue) is, and claims ignorance about the answer. (See for instance Meno, 71b.)

2. He asks his interlocutor for a definition of X. More often than not, the interlocutor gives, not a definition of X, but a list of instances of X. What Socrates is after is the essence of X. He wants to know what it is that makes something an instance of X.

3. The interlocutor then offers a definition. Socrates shows that the offered definition cannot be right, since the interlocutor holds other beliefs about X that conflict with the definition.

4. The interlocutor advances other definitions, and is shown that each in turn cannot be right.

But you will want to know: what is the benefit of the elenchus, given that (at least in the early dialogues) Socrates’ interlocutors seem never to come to a satisfactory definition of X? Instead, they are, like Meno, simply reduced to perplexity:

'Socrates, before I even met you I used to hear that you are always in a state of perplexity and that you bring others to the same state …. Indeed, if a joke is in order, you seem … to be like the flat sting-ray, for it too makes anyone who comes close to it feel numb, and you now seem to have had that kind of effect on me, for both my mind and my tongue are numb, and I have no answer to give you. Yet I have made many speeches about virtue before large audiences on a thousand occasions … but now I cannot even say what it is.' (Meno, 80b–80c)

Amongst the benefits that someone might claim for the elenchus, and the perplexity to which it apparently invariably leads, are the following:

• Perplexity is cathartic—it expels erroneous beliefs
• Perplexity brings one closer to the truth
• Perplexity involves intellectual honesty
• Perplexity is a worthwhile state in itself

(Again, thanks to P H-K.)

Socrates seems to think that what you are after in asking a serious What is x? question is the thing that everything which is an x has - ie the thing they all have, the thing in virtue of which they are xs.

That is, a proper answer to the question What is x? will tell us what is common to all the instances of X.

What do you think?

For discussion:

What is a chair?

Try and find an example of a thing or a type of thing which has lots of instances but where there is something which all the instances have in common.

What is a chair?

What is a beauty?

What is goodness?

What is a soul?

Objections to Plato's assumption that there must be one thing that all virtue has in common

Must there always be something common to all the instances of X?

Chicken sexing

Maybe this was what Wittgenstein was addressing when he spoke about family resemblances.

What makes them instances of X, he held, might not be any single 'essence', but the existence of certain 'family resemblances' between instances. (see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para 66-7)

Definition of words

We now make a firm distinction between things and words, and the idea that that things have essences becomes the idea that words have definitions - ?