Thomas Aquinas: On the Teacher, Disputed Question on Truth. Question 11, Articles 1 and 2 of Questiones Disputatae de Veritate. Ralph McInerny translation. London: Penguin Books, 1998.

 

Here, Aquinas replies to Augustine’s dialogue, On the Teacher, presenting the topic in the manner he would perfect in the Summa Theologica: raising questions, articulating answers with which he will disagree, then refuting the arguments supporting those answers—the ‘disputation’ form of Scholastic teaching. This genre retains one characteristic of Platonic dialogues, the dialectical clash of opinions, while removing the personal drama. One need not think of a main character and his interlocutors, the ways in which those persons speak to one another, how they shape their speeches mindful of the characters and political standing of those they are speaking with, and those who are listening. One need only follow the argument.

Within the eleventh Disputatio, “On the Teacher,” Aquinas poses four questions: Can a man teach and be called a master or God alone? Can someone be called his own teacher? Can man be taught by an angel? Is teaching an act of the active or the contemplative life? Of these questions, the one on angels is the only one not addressed by Augustine in his dialogue. Why is it here?

Aquinas lists eighteen reasons for denying that a man can teach, for believing that only God can teach. In Matthew 23, Jesus condemns the scribes and Pharisees, who teach one thing and do another, loving “the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogue, and to have people call them rabbi.” But you, the “crowds and disciples” whom I am teaching, “are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher,” the Messiah, “and you are all students.” That is, the issue is humility: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Jerome’s marginal note to his Latin translation of his passage in the Bible warns against “attribut[ing] to men divine honor” or “usurp[ing] what is God’s.” Aquinas replies to the objection by clarifying “how this prohibition should be understood.” As Jerome’s gloss goes on to say that we are not to call a man ‘master’ in the sense that he plays “the principal role in teaching.” That “belongs to God.” We must not rely on “the wisdom of men” but rather “in what we hear from a man, consulting the divine truth, which speaks in us through the impress of His likeness.” Aquinas, who is teaching would-be teachers, ignores the majority of Jesus’ listeners, the “crowds,” mentioning only the would-be teachers of Jesus’ day, the disciples. In this sense, he is less ‘democratic’ than Jesus. His main point is sound, however. Obviously, Aquinas himself is a teacher, a teacher teaching the next generation of teachers. He does not deny that human beings can teach, only that they are the truest Teacher. Teachers should keep an eye on themselves, since it is easy to ‘master’ students in knowledge.

The second objection directly addresses one of Augustine’s arguments, distorting it. [1] Man teaches through signs because merely acting in answer to a question leaves too much room for ambiguity. In Augustine’s dialogue, if someone asks me what the sign ‘walking’ means, and I get up and walk, he may think walking is getting up, or moving from one place to another, or some other thing. In the vocabulary of Scholasticism, one does not know from observing an action whether the meaning of the action is to be denoted from the “substance” of it (e.g., the act of walking) or “some accident of it” (e.g., walking fast, making haste). Yet, signs are also inadequate “because knowledge of things is more important than knowledge of signs.” Therefore, “no one can pass on knowledge of things to another and thus he cannot teach him.” God is the only teacher because teaching itself is humanly impossible—miraculous, an act of divine intervention. To this, Augustine replies that the knowledge of signs doesn’t give us knowledge of things; as Augustine argues, I learn nothing if I ask what a word means, and you answer with a synonym. I only learn if I tell you what the word means according to its “principle.” If you ask me what a human being is and I say, ‘Man,’ that is unhelpful, but if I say, ‘an animal capable of reason,’ that gets to the principle of the thing. “The knowledge of principles, not knowledge of signs, causes in us knowledge of conclusions.”

The closely related third objection also originates in Augustine’s dialogue. If I propose a sign to designate something, either you know the thing I’m talking about or you don’t. If I say, ‘human being,’ you will only know what I’m talking about if you already know what I’m talking about, not through the word-sign I have used. “If all a man does in teaching is to propose signs, it seems that one man cannot be taught by another man,” at all. To this, Aquinas offers not a refutation but a distinction. “The things of which we are taught by means of signs we indeed know in one respect but do not know in another.” If I try to teach you something about what man is,” you must indeed “know something of him beforehand”—that he is an animal, for example. In a syllogism, to learn a conclusion “we must previously know what the predicate and subject are.” “All learning comes from previously existing knowledge,” as Aristotle says in his Posterior Analytics. 

But what is teaching? It is “nothing other than causing knowledge in another in some way,” as the next objection defines it, and since knowledge is in the intellect, and signs merely strike the senses, they cannot teach. Teachers attempt to teach by the use of signs, and “therefore, a man cannot be taught by a man.” This is congruent with the first objection, which is that only God can teach because only God can communicate with his creature without physical signs but spiritually. No, that isn’t what happens, Aquinas replies. We do indeed receive sensible signs through the “sense power,” initially. But by those physically sensed signs “the intellect receives intelligible intentions, which it uses for bringing about science [knowledge] in itself.” An intelligible intention is rational, free of contradictions; it is one’s reason, “moving discursively from principles to conclusions,” that learns—as argued both in Augustine’s dialogue and Plato’s Meno.

Very well, “if science is caused in one man by another, either the knowledge was in the learner, or it was not.” If it wasn’t in him, it would need to be created out of nothing, as no human being can do. If it was in him, fully, then he has learned nothing; if it was in him potentially, “as a kind of rational seed,” such seeds are “inserted in nature by God alone.” However knowledge comes to be in the human mind, no man put it there. Aquinas concurs with the concept of the rational seed, “naturally put in us.” God creates man, man does not create himself. But this seed is only a seed, not fully “actualized.” What a human teacher can do is to bring it to actuality, nourish it and induce it to grow.

Yet, given that science is an “accident”—a characteristic of a thing that does not alter its “substance,” as, for example, greenness does not alter a leaf’s ‘leafness’—and given that “an accident cannot pass from its subject”—a green leaf does not transfer its greenness to a brown leaf, or vice-versa—and “since teaching seems to be the transfer of the master’s knowledge to the student,” then “one man cannot be taught by another.” But, answers Aquinas, “the teacher does not transfer knowledge into the learner” as a bank might transfer money to another bank. Rather, “through teaching there comes to be in the pupil knowledge similar to that which is in the master, brought forth from potency,” the rational seed, brought “to act,” i.e., to actuality. The rational seed, the potential to know, already exists in the pupil in the form of reason. The teacher causes an attentive student to discover or learn by stimulating that innate capacity.

The objector returns to Scripture, specifically, to Romans 10:17: “Faith comes from hearing.” Jerome’s gloss elaborates, saying that while “an outward herald proclaims” but “God teaches within.” Because “science is caused in the interior of the mind and not outside in the senses,” only God teaches, not men. In answering, Aquinas has recourse to an analogy. A physician acts externally, nature internally; together, they cause health. Similarly, a teacher who teaches truth states the truth outside the mind of the student, while “God teach[es] within,” having implanted the rational seed that actualizes itself when truth is brought to it from outside.

Quoting Augustine in The Teacher, the eighth objection notes that just as a farmer does not make the tree he cultivates, so a man does not make knowledge occur in the student’s mind but only “disposes” the student’s mind for knowledge. Only God can truly make knowledge occur. Aquinas objects to the objection by remarking that Augustine does not “deny that a man teaches from without when he proves that God alone teaches, because God alone teaches within.” The ‘external’ teachings enunciated by human beings have real content, and they do reach inside the human intellect, although God alone has planted the rational seed that enables that content to be understood, known.

The objector then switches to a new metaphor. To teach truth is to illuminate the mind, “since truth is the light of the mind.” But according to John 1:9, John the Baptist, “sent from God,” came in order to “testify about the light, in order that all may believe through him.” John himself “was not the light, but he came in order that he might testify about the light—the light, the true one, who enlightens every man, was coming into the world.” God Himself is the light and therefore the enlightener, not any man, even if that man’s testimony is given him by God. This is another reason why “no man can truly teach another.” But on the contrary, Aquinas insists, John the Baptist was indeed “a true teacher and a teacher of the truth and enlightener of the mind,” not in the sense that he “infus[ed] light to reason,” but as one who “aid[ed] the light of reason to the perfection of science through what he externally proposes.” That is why Paul writes in Ephesians 3:8-9, “Although I am the very least of the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.” 

Very well then, but if a teacher brings a potential knower “to the state of actually knowing” then the potential knower has changed. This changes science or wisdom itself, contradicting Augustine’s observation in his book, Eighty-three Questions, “where he says that when wisdom comes to man, it is the man who changes, not wisdom.” Aquinas asks his reader to consider that there are two kinds of wisdom, created and uncreated. Both kinds of wisdom “are said to be infused in man,” making him “changed for the better.” Uncreated wisdom is unchangeable. In one sense, created wisdom is also unchangeable, existing in God, eternally. Wisdom created in the human intellect is also unchangeable “with respect to the eternal things.” But, in another sense, created wisdom is changeable “according to the existence it has in its subject,” by which Aquinas means that the subject himself “is changed from having it potentially to having it actually.” Wisdom is knowledge of “the intelligible forms; these are “both likenesses of things,” unchangeable, and “forms perfecting the intellect,” agents of change which themselves change in the sense that they have become something they were not before: agents of change. 

But if “science seems to be nothing else than the inscription of things in the soul,” the “assimilation of the knower to the known,” no human being can “inscribe in another’s soul the likenesses of things,” inasmuch as only God can “work within” a human soul.” This makes teaching is impossible. No, Aquinas replies, since “intelligible forms” are already “inscribed in the learner,” and “it is through them the knowledge acquired through teaching is constituted.” God’s work within the human intellect has already been done, at least insofar as human teaching is concerned. “For the teacher proposes signs of intelligible things from which the agent intellect receives intelligible intentions and inscribes them” in an intellect God made capable of receiving them. The intellect has no difficulty in receiving impressions of things outside of itself—physical objects—so, how much more it can receive impressions formed with intention by another human being. The intellect’s own intentionality makes it receptive to intentions from other persons.

At this point, the objector brings in the authority of Boethius. Admittedly, as the observer paraphrases him, “through teaching the mind is summoned to know, but one who summons the intellect to know does not cause it to know, any more than he who summons another to bodily seeing causes him to see.” Plato’s Socrates does this, as does Augustine in On the Teacher. This criticism requires a more elaborate reply than any other. Aquinas begins by observing that “intellect and bodily sight are not wholly alike”; the objects we see are visible as soon as we direct our eyes toward them; we need no one outside ourselves to “incite” us in order to see, except when someone points something out to the person who isn’t looking at it. (Or, it might be added, if some other sense prompts the eyes to look, as when a sound attracts attention.) But the act of seeing itself needs no intermediaries.  This is true of ‘the mind’s eye’ with regard to self-evident truths, but self-evident truths may lead the intellect to wonder about things that are not self-evident, things that it “cannot understand save through the office of reason by explicating.” To understand those things, the intellect “needs a mover which actualizes it by way of teaching.” “The teacher stirs the intellect to knowing what he teaches, as an essential mover brings actuality from potency.” To show something to someone by bodily sight is only an accidental cause of the knowledge of the one directed to look; the looker sees without any further assistance. Self-evident truths known to the intellect operate the same way, but knowledge founded on those truths may require guidance from outside the student’s mind, in the form of an argument, a set of deductions based upon the self-evident truths. Aquinas takes the ideas of essential and accidental causes, actuality and potentiality, from Aristotle’s Physics Book 8, in which Aristotle addresses the problem of motion. Motion occurs when an object that has the potential to be moved has that potential actualized by something intrinsic to it and/or something extrinsic to it. Growth is an intrinsic principle of motion; a brick being pried out of the pavement is subject to an extrinsic principle of motion. The teacher is an extrinsic cause of knowledge, but only because the intellect he seeks to instruct has the intrinsic potential to change, to receive and incorporate what he teaches.

The objector persists. If, as Augustine says in The Teacher, knowledge/science differs from opinion or belief in being certain, then this makes teaching impossible. Teachers attempt to teach through the senses of the learner; since “what is in the senses is always oblique to what is in the intellect,” there can be no certainty in what is conveyed through them. Teaching is impossible. Aquinas replies that scientific certainty derives not from the senses but from the principles, as “conclusions are known when they are resolved into the principles” by reason. “The light of reason” has already been “divinely inserted within” the intellect; this is how “God speaks in us.” When a human teacher speaks to us, he does indeed communicate through our senses, but it is reason that resolves what we would now call “sense data” into principles.

If so, if “an intelligible light and species are required for science, but neither can be caused in man by another man” because only God causes them, then “a man would have to create something” in order to teach, which is manifestly impossible for a mere human. Aquinas agrees that “the man teaching externally does not infuse the intelligible light” but although it doesn’t ‘create’ species it does “cause” them to exist in the intellect of others “in some way,” having “propos[ed] to us certain signs of intelligible intentions, which our intellect receives from the signs and stores in itself.”  

The objector reaches for a bit of sophistry in his fifteenth try. “Only God can form the mind of man”; “science is a kind of form of mind”; “therefore, God alone causes science in the soul.” Aquinas bats that away by remarking that while “only God can form the mind, this should be understood of its ultimate form,” not of the “many” other forms that the mind stores within itself. God forms only man’s “rational nature.”

Another dubious effort is the false analogy that follows. Both ignorance and guilt are in the mind. Only God can purge the mind of guilt. Therefore, only God purges the mind of ignorance. Once again, Aquinas pounces. Guilt is in the affection, not in the intellect. Only God can “make an impression” on the affection. But ignorance, which is indeed in the intellect, can be diminished by “a created power,” as previously shown.

Back to the certainty of true knowledge, then. Merely to hear someone speaking hardly causes certainty; if it did, “whatever is said to him by a man would hold certain for him.” Certainty occurs “by hearing the truth speak within,” and since only God can make that happen, a man cannot bring another to certainty. Aquinas is beginning to lose his patience: “As has been remarked,” he emphasizes, “the certainty of science is in God alone, who instils in us the light of reason, through which we know the principles from which the certainty of science derives; yet science is caused in us in some way be man as well, as has been said.”

The objector tries one final time. If I could have given the correct response to a question before it was asked, I could not be said to have learned that response from anything my would-be teacher tells me. Yes, but potentiality isn’t actuality. My teacher doesn’t instill the intellectual principles that enable me to reach a conclusion, but he does lead me to the conclusion itself.

As always, the core of Aquinas’ answer consists first of an interpretation of several authoritative texts, usually the Bible. Two citations from 2 Timothy clearly show that human beings are entitled to teach Scripture, so long as they avoid false doctrine. He also essays an extraordinarily far-fetched argument derived from an image from Augustine’s Against the Manicheans. Before sin, Augustine writes, the earth was watered by a spring, but, after sin, the earth needed “rain descending from the clouds.” Aquinas claims that the earth represents the human mind, “made fruitful by the spring of truth, but after sin needed the teaching of others, like rain descending from the clouds.” This supposedly shows that “at least after sin, a man can be taught by another man.” It might as easily be said that it shows that after sin, a man must be taught by God and/or by angels.

Can a man teach and be called a master, or God alone? Aquinas begins his substantive response by observing that there are three dimensions to the question: 

1. Bringing forms into existence.
2. The acquisition of virtue.
3. The acquisition of knowledge.

He canvasses several opinions that he will refute. Avicenna and others claim that forms, virtues, and knowledge all come to the human mind from “an external agent,” whether it is “a giver of forms,” a “substance perfecting the souls of men,” or an “agent intelligence.” Others make the opposite claim, that forms, virtues, and knowledge are all latent within us, and that a “natural agent does nothing other than to bring them from a hidden to a manifest condition.” This includes the apparent claim of Socrates in the Meno that teaching merely leads the soul to “the remembrance or consideration of what it previously knew.”

Avicenna’s error is to assume that first causes are the only ones, that there are no “proximate causes.” It is one thing to say that God is the first cause of an effect, quite another to say that He doesn’t act through human or angelic agents. But “the first cause out of the eminence of his goodness not only makes things to be but also to be causes.” The Creator-God has so articulated His creation so that parts of it can cause things to happen. The Muslim claim that God causes all things and all events directly ignores this. This goes for teaching, also: The claim that forms, virtues, and knowledge are latent within us, that the proximate causes or lesser agents do nothing but “make the hidden manifest by removing impediments whereby forms and the habits of virtue and the sciences were obscured,” derogates from the importance of those causes and agents.

Aristotle’s “middle way” is more accurate. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphasizes the importance of “habit,” a term whose root means “to have,” Aquinas remarks. A habit is a disposition whereby someone is inclined by his acts, to good or bad, in relation to the passions—good and bad defined as the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of human nature, which exists in every person but in large measure only ‘in potential.’ Here, Aquinas extends this understanding of habit to teaching, discovering, and learning. “Natural forms do indeed pre-exist in matter, but not actually,” not in action, as Avicenna says and Plato’s Socrates seems to say, “but only potentially, from which they are brought into act by the proximate external agent, not only the first cause.” The same goes for the virtues, which “pre-exist in us in certain natural inclinations” but must be “brought to their fitting completion” by instruction, example, discipline, and, finally, habituation.  And when it comes to knowledge, “the seeds of the sciences pre-exist in us”; they are “the first conceptions of the intellect which are known right away by the light of the agent intellect through species abstracted from sensible things, whether these be complex, like axioms, or incomplex, like the notions of being and one and the like, which the intellect apprehends straightaway.” The teacher then leads the mind of the student “from this universal knowledge to the actual knowing of particulars.” This contrasts noticeably not only with Avicenna and Plato’s Socrates, but with the later ‘epistemology’ of Locke, for whom knowledge of the particulars comes first, in the form of ‘simple ideas’ or sense perceptions; the intellect ‘constructs’ complex ideas out of the sense perceptions. Exaggerated, Locke’s claim can lead to the impasses of subjectivism, relativism, ‘postmodernism,’ and so on.

Aquinas takes care to observe that natural potentiality can be either “complete active potency, namely, when an intrinsic principle is sufficient to bring about a perfect act” (e.g., healing) or “passive potency,” when the intrinsic principle does not so suffice (e.g., fire, which needs air). This is not always a sharp dichotomy. The body can heal itself, possessing complete active potency, but the physician’s art works with the body’s nature, his medicines hastening the natural healing; this is still an example of active potency because the physician “ministers to” the body.

Teaching can actualize both kinds of potential. In the case of complete active potency, the teacher (or other “extrinsic agent”) supplies the “intrinsic agent” with whatever it needs to “come forth to actuality” (e.g., the physician who prescribes a medicine that helps the wound to heal). A student may acquire “knowledge of the unknown” by way of discovery, yet that discovery may be guided by the teacher who assigns a book to read. In the case of passive potency, the extrinsic agent really takes the lead (“this way is called learning“), as when the teacher lectures, or when he shows the student exactly how to make bread. The first instance is knowledge by nature, the second knowledge by art.

“The process of coming to knowledge of the unknown by discovery is to apply the common self-evident principles to determinate matters and then to proceed to particular conclusions, and from those to others.” The teacher “show[s] signs” to the student “so that the natural reason of the pupil, through what is proposed, as through certain instruments, comes to the knowledge of the unknown.” Aquinas cites Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics: “demonstration is a syllogism that causes one to know.” This is very different from telling someone something that is not based upon self-evident principles, a process that “will not cause knowledge, but perhaps opinion or belief,” which may be true or false. Because “the light of reason by which” self-evident principles “are known is placed in us by God,” and “all human teaching is only efficacious because of the power of this light, it follows that it is God alone who teaches within and principally, just as nature principally and within heals.” Human beings teach in proximate or secondary ways—an important function, because they can lead or mislead.

The second question Aquinas raises—Can someone be called his own teacher?—has an important implication. If no one can be self-taught, then what is taught would be comprehensive, leaving no possibility of discovery or innovation, no possibility of philosophizing. The objector presents six reasons for affirming that a human being can indeed teach himself.

First, because “the principal cause of the science caused in us is the agent intellect,” which is “more of a teacher than the man outside” who is only “an instrumental cause.” To this, Aquinas answers that although the agent is a more principal cause than the teacher “in a certain respect,” science or knowledge “does not exist completely” in the agent intellect, as it does in the teacher. Insofar as he teaches truth, insofar as he really knows his stuff, his knowledge is perfect, superior to the knowledge of the learner. Second, the objector argues that learning entails “certainty of knowledge,” which occurs “in us through principles naturally known in the light of the agent intellect,” not via instruction from outside that intellect. Aquinas simply refers the objector to his answer to the first objection, which equally refutes the second one.

Third, citing Matthew 23:8, the objector recalls that there is only one true teacher, God, who “teaches us insofar as he gives us the light of reason by which we judge all things.” That light, not the light brought by a human teacher, brings us knowledge. Aquinas replies that although the student may indeed be “more equipped to know” than his teacher (Aquinas himself being a notable example), the teacher’s knowledge is more perfect. And while the brilliant student may discover a science on his own, the teacher, “who explicitly knows the whole science, can lead us to science more expeditiously than anyone can be brought to it on his own because he foreknows the principles of the science in some generality.”

The objector then cites Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, who teaches that “to know something by way of discovery is more perfect than to learn from another”; does this not imply that self-teaching ranks much higher than any teaching from without? The same goes for virtue, as “those who come to the works of virtue without an external instructor or legislator are said to be a law unto themselves.” The objector cites Romans 2:14, the middle verse in the passage where the Apostle Paul says, “For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified. When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires these though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thought of all.” Aquinas replies that what law is to practice, principle is to theory. To know the law is not necessarily to ‘have’ it in the fullest sense, to act according to it, to have it as a habit. Similarly, to know the fundamental principles, such as the principle of non-contradiction, to possess the capacity to reason, is not to think rationally on all matters. That is what a teacher can stir one to do. 

Finally, since proverbially “the physician heals himself,” one can teach himself. Jesus cites this saying in Luke 4. There, described as having been “full of the Holy Spirit,” Jesus is tempted by the devil for forty days in the wilderness, challenged to prove that He is the Son of God. Jesus refuses, commanding, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” Returning to Galilee, he teaches in the synagogues, “praised by all,” but upon teaching at the synagogue in his home, Nazareth, he read from Isaiah 61, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” anointing me “to bring good news to the poor,” to “proclaim release to the captives,” to “bring sight to the blind,” to “let the oppressed go free,” and to “proclaim the year of the Lord’ favor.” This day is the day of the Messiah, and Jesus announces that “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Knowing, or supposing that they know, that Jesus is merely the son of Joseph, not of God, the Nazarenes are indignant. This is when Jesus says, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Physician, cure yourself!'” That is, if you are who you say you are, prove it by performing miracles—exactly the same temptation the devil had essayed. If you cannot, then you are lying, mad, demon-infested. To which Jesus calmly continues, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown,” proceeding to enrage the congregation further in citing the story of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, miracle-workers, thereby implying that He is Elijah. The Nazarenes drive him out of town, intending not to tempt him to jump off a cliff but to throw him off one, in vain. They have proved unteachable, even by the supreme Teacher. A raging soul is unteachable, as is its opposite, the soul which takes nothing seriously, jesting Pilate. The context of the phrase the objector cites itself indicates the error, indeed the serious fault, behind the phrase.

But Aquinas explains the matter in terms of a rational distinction rather than in terms of narrative implication. Yes, the physician heals “insofar as he has health, not actually, but in the knowledge of art.” Thus, he really can heal himself, even when his own body is unhealthy. by applying the knowledge of his art to himself. But the teacher teaches “insofar as he actually has science.” He conveys that science/knowledge to the student by his signs, in contradistinction to the physician, who does not convey his own health to his patient by his art. The physician is part of a process of active potency, while the teacher, in bringing the student to learn, is part of a process of passive potency. Put simply, “the teacher must have knowledge where the learner does not”; “therefore, no one can teach himself or be called his own teacher” insofar as he is a learner and not a discoverer.

For “it should be said without any doubt that one can, through the light of natural reason placed within him and without any external aid, come to the knowledge of many unknown things, as is evident in all who acquired science by way of discovery.” Aristotle is right, as far as that goes, and of course the Apostle Paul and Jesus are also right; by nature, innately, one may know come to know many things and physicians can indeed heal themselves. Aquinas identifies two “agent principles” in natural things, as per Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The first is the “perfect agent,” which “has within itself everything that it causes in the effect.” The other is what might be termed a contributing or partial cause, necessary but not sufficient to effect something. “In the primary agents there is action in the fullest sense, but not in agents of the secondary sort, because a thing acts insofar as it is actual.” A secondary agent is not a “perfect agent.” Teaching “implies the perfect act of knowing in the teacher or master”; he must really know what he’s talking about. If not, he’s not really teaching. “When someone acquires knowledge by himself through an intrinsic principle, what in the agent cause of science does not possess the science to be acquired, save in part, namely with respect to the seminal causes of science, which are common principles.” That is, before I discover a truth, I do not have it and therefore am not perfectly knowledgeable with respect to it. In Aquinas’ sense, I haven’t truly taught it to myself, even though I have come to it ‘unaided’ except for the “seminal reasons of science” God implanted in me, by nature.

In these two questions, then, Aquinas considers teaching first with regard to the teacher, second in regard to the one taught. Knowledge in a rational animal can lead that animal either to pride or to humiliation. As an Aristotelian, Aquinas rejects the extremes, seeking the middle, readiness to teach and to discover and to learn. As a Christian, he must establish the ground of humility by distinguishing what God can teach from what man can teach, what man can learn by exercising his God-given nature and what he can learn only by God’s revelation. Teaching is humanly possible because a man can lead another man from self-evident truths to particulars. To be taught is humanly possible because human beings have been endowed by God, acting through nature, with reason, the capacity to discover and to learn the particulars, especially once reason has been “stirred” by the signs the teacher transmits through the senses to the intellect. 

 

Note

1. On Augustine’s dialogue, see “Who Is the Teacher?” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”

 

Augustine: The Teacher: A Dialogue between Augustine and his son Adeodatus. In Augustine: Earlier Writings. Edited and translated by John H. S. Burleigh. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953.

 

The son of Romanized Berbers, Augustine’s name derives from Augustus, denoting ‘venerable,’ a name that reflects the civil status of his family, who numbered among the honestiores or ‘honorable men,’ the aristocratic class. His own son’s name, Adeodatus, means ‘gift from God.’ If one were given to symbolism, the difference between the two names might be taken to register conversion to Christianity and the moral consequence of moving away from pride of family in the City of Man to humility before God in the City of God, the transfer of citizenship from one regime to another. Citizenship must be passed down from father to son or, for Christians, from the Father to the sons of God. But thoughtful citizenship in the City of God still requires education on earth. Augustine knew that the would-be teacher of virtue, Christian or other, faced serious problems, as shown in Plato’s Meno. The Teacher is in some ways a Christian reply to the Meno. Unlike Plato, Augustine makes himself a character in his own dialogue, along with his son; Anytus in the Meno assumed that fathers could readily teach virtue to their sons, and Augustine may think that Christians, unlike pagan aristocrats, can succeed. Jesus had recommended that sons break with their pagan families, but now that ruling families are Christians, families themselves need to be re-founded along the lines of the new Christian regime. To do so, the classical education that linked the generations also needed to be re-founded. Hence The Teacher.

Augustine begins with a teleological question: “What do you suppose is our purpose when we use words?” We want “to let people know something, or we want to learn something”—making a statement or asking a question—Adeodatus replies. Augustine corrects him, saying that a question also lets people know something, namely, that we do not know and want to know—thereby suggesting a limit to the desire to learn, one that will vary from student to student. We are telling someone that we want to be told, we want to be taught. It might be that if Christians consider the Bible to set down what virtue is, that they need only to consult it, learn God’s words, in order to know virtue. Plato would reply that learning moral principles is not the same as being virtuous, and of course Augustine, that eminent chronicler of sin, knows that.

But, Adeodatus objects, we use words to sing, often singing alone, not telling anyone anything. Yes, Augustine replies, “there is a kind of teaching, and a most important kind, which consists in reminding people of something”—a major theme of the Meno. [1] Augustine thereby broadens the purpose of words to include reminding. Music, Plato knows, gets into the soul; it is not mere knowledge but morally influential, setting the rhythm of the soul, causing harmony or disharmony among the ‘parts’ of the soul. But “I very rarely sing to remind myself of anything, almost always simply to give myself pleasure,” his son replies, giving his father a glimpse into his soul. Yes, but “what pleases you in singing is the melody”; we sing in words set to music, which isn’t the same thing as speaking. Birds sing, but do not speak (unless they are parrots, but parrots don’t tell us anything, that way, communicating in earnest only by squawks and shrieks). “You agree, then, that there is no other reason for the use of words than either to teach or to call something to mind?”

Very well, then, Adeodatus says, but what about prayer? When we pray, we use words but not to “teach God anything or remind him of anything.” God is the supreme Knower. Augustine agrees, remarking that we speak to God in “our inmost mind”—the Christian answer to the problem of outer appearance and inner reality seen in the Meno is that God does not need to guess or to inquire into the true nature of any human soul. “God is to be sought and prayed to in the secret place of the rational soul, which is called ‘the inner man.'” And God is very close by, indeed, because his Spirit dwells in you, as the Apostle Paul testifies in First Corinthians. For a Christian, as distinguished from Socrates, the Logos is the Jesus, Son of God, accessible to the soul thanks to the Holy Spirit, residing in “the inner man.” The mind is the temple where God dwells, where we sacrifice passions and false beliefs to God, to Reason.

There is also public prayer, prayer by a priest in front of congregants. One might expect Augustine to say that prayer is speech, talking to God, telling Him what we want or telling him that we fear and love Him. But by using words, Augustine means audible speech, and prayer is inaudible, except when a priest prays in a religious service, “not that God may hear, but that men may hear and, being put in remembrance, may with some consent be brought into dependence on God.” The audible prayer of priests tells the hearers what the priests want them to hear, and to believe. In the Meno, remembrance really means thinking—at best, ratiocination—but for Christians it is a re-centering of the mind on the presence of the Holy Spirit within them, consenting to his guidance; for a Christian priest, speech extends to both Christians and to non-Christians, the latter to be ‘reminded’ of their consciences, that element within their souls which is receptive to the Holy Spirit. “Such speech is nothing but a calling to remembrance of the realities of which the words are but the signs, for the memory which retains the words and turns them over and over, cause the realities to come to mind.” Public prayer calls up the “memory” of the Holy Spirit and His teachings. This is the kind of memory a Christian will cultivate, a memory of words, of the Word, not so much a ‘memory’ or set of logical deductions concerning geometric figures, as in the Meno.

But more generally, “speech is nothing but a calling to remembrance of the realities of which the words are but the signs, for the memory.” As Adeodatus will later say, we use speech “in order to teach or to call to mind.” This shifts the dialogue (itself obviously an exchange of words, by definition) back from the purpose of speech, logos, to the elements of speech, words, logoi—from teleology to analysis. The men agree that words are signs, and that signs signify, that is, they mean something. “Things which do not signify something beyond themselves cannot be signs.” To consider this more carefully, Augustine then quotes Virgil’s Aeneid, Book II, line 659: Si nihil ex tanta superis placet urbe relinqui (“If it pleases the gods that nothing be left of so great a city,” namely, Troy). The sentence has a purpose but analytically considered, do the words composing it have a purpose, a meaning? Do they refer to anything beyond themselves? If not, can a sentence, a thing composed of words, really mean something? Can we learn anything, know anything, by means of words? 

There are eight words, thus eight signs, in the verse. “I suppose you understand the meaning of the verse.” Yes, says Adeodatus, by which he may mean the whole verse, the phrase. But Augustine wants him to analyze the verse, break it down into its elements. The first word, Si signifies not a thing but a “state of mind,” doubt, an answer Augustine accepts “in the meantime.” As for nihil, it seems to Adeodatus to signify “that which is not,” but Augustine raises an objection: if words signify something, how can any word signify nothing? Augustine suggests a tentative solution to this aporia in saying that nihil may also signify “a state of mind rather than a thing which is nothing,” joking that we should not let ‘nothing’ detain us. “At the proper time we shall understand more clearly this kind of difficulty, if God will.” In the Aeneid verse, nothing evidently means absence, the end of a war in which something, Troy, is reduced to nothing, a destruction approved by the pagan gods, the gods of the ‘City of Man’; in the Bible, God does the opposite, creating the heavens and the earth out of “nothing.” And in the beginning was not merely a set of words but the Word, the Logos. The Christian teacher needs to understand and to use the power of that Word, and of the words that compose the Bible. In the Meno, Socrates associates ‘memory’ or learning with geometry; in The Teacher, Augustine associates it with words because he is a Christian. Some of the moderns (notably Hobbes and Descartes) would attempt to undermine the Word by reconnecting reason with mathematics. Others, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, would undermine not only the Word but all words by deeming them mere conventions.

On to ex, a preposition, which means either ‘of’ or ‘out of.’ What the gods may want is for the Greeks to bring nothingness out of Troy, reduce it to rubble, although some Trojans might (and indeed did) survive, one of them going on to found Rome, the new “great city,” the one that would be conquered spiritually by Christians, re-founded in a manner pleasing the one God, not the gods to whom Virgil’s hero prayed, false gods—nothings that would make bring Troy to nothing. Augustine demurs: “I want you to show me, if you can, what are the things of which these [words] are the signs.” But Father, “what you ask cannot be done in conversation, where we cannot answer questions except by means of words.” Admittedly so, but can you not say a word and point to the thing it signifies, the reality it signifies? Only with “names signifying corporeal objects.” Really? What about color? It isn’t a corporeal object but “rather a quality of a corporeal object.” True, but by “corporeal objects” I mean “all the qualities of bodies which are susceptible to sense-perception,” or, more exactly, all visible objects. After all, I cannot show the corporeal object I mean to signify by a word if that object is out of sight. It is true, however, his father remarks, that one can point out invisible things, as deaf people do by the gestures of ‘sign language’ and as dancers “unfold and set forth whole stories” on stage? All right, Adeodatus concedes, but that doesn’t solve the problem of how to understand the word ex, which “neither I nor your dancing actor will ever be able to point out” the meaning of. 

“But suppose he could,” Augustine says, persisting. Whatever that gesture was, the actor would still be using a sign, not the thing signified. He would still be “explain[ing] a sign by a sign.” In that case, what I just said, that is there “nothing”—that word again—which “can be shown without signs”? Yes, there is, because if—that word, again—I asked you what walking is, you could get up and walk, “using the thing itself to show me, not words or any other signs.” Embarrassed for the first time in the dialogue, Adeodatus admits that he overlooked this. At the same time, Augustine continues, not everything could be signified clearly without signs, since if I asked you what “hastening” means, and you walked fast, I might “conclude that walking was the same thing as hastening.” They soon agree that “there are two classes of things that can be demonstrated without signs: those which we are not engaged in doing when we are asked” and those we can immediately start doing, such as walking when asked what walking is, “and those in which the action consists in simply giving signs,” in the manner of deaf persons and dancers. Signs can be used to signify other signs, but only if “the question concerns signs merely.” To put the matter more generally, if words are only signs of signs, no one can learn, since in explaining one sign I am only substituting another sign for it. And if I point or gesture at something in an attempt to show you what the sign signifies, I need to know what the thing is that I’m pointing at, before I understand the sign. 

To address this aporia, Augustine first directs his son’s attention to signs demonstrated by signs. Verbal signs come to us by the sense of hearing, gestural signs by sight. “A word is a meaningful articulate sound, and sound is perceived by no other sense than hearing,” but when “a word is written, a sign is given to the eyes whereby something that properly belongs to the ears is brought to mind.” Socrates precedes Plato, God precedes Moses, Jesus precedes the Apostle John. A “name” signifies “something or somebody”—Rome, Romulus, Virtue, a River—which Augustine calls “significables.” But the word “name” itself signifies not a significable but a sign, “the audible sign of audible signs.” “A name, therefore, is a word when it is pronounced articulately with a meaning.” Thus, for example, such words as “if” and “from” are words but not names; “just as every horse is an animal but every animal is not a horse, so every word is a sign but every sign is not a word.” And “all names are words, but all words are not names,” since a word is “the sign of a sign which signifies no other signs,” a sign that refers to a significable. Whereas a name is “the sign of a sign that points to other signs.” This notwithstanding, “in a general sense verbum [word] and nomen [word] have the same range of application” because “all the parts of speech have names”—nouns, verbs, conjunctions—”because pronouns can be substituted or added to them”; any part of speech can be referred to as “it,” any word or name referred to with one or another conjunction, none that “cannot be made the subject of a verb to form a complete sentence.” 

Augustine then makes another distinction, this one directly relevant to teaching. Insofar as it is an articulate significant sound, a word “smites the ear.” But it does so for a telos, a purpose, namely, “that it may be perceived, remembered and known.” A word is “something that happens to the ear,” a name “something that happens in the mind,” in the “inner man,” as he had said near the beginning of the dialogue. The relation between word and name is no simple thing, however. “To use words to treat of words is as complicated as to rub fingers together and expect someone else to distinguish which fingers tingle with warmth and which help others to tingle.” What happens to your ear may register differently in your mind than in mine. If we say of Christ, “In Him was virtue,” we don’t mean that the word the word “virtue” is in Him but that the thing we name virtue is in Him. This raises a serious question about the authority of religious teaching. What if Paul was right—wielding God-given authority with respect to “realities,” the thing we name virtue in Christ—but not with respect to the word which he used to signify that reality, “especially when he himself confesses that he was unskilled in speech”? Adeodatus cannot think of a way out of this aporia. “You think that without authorities reason itself is hardly sufficient, but reason itself demonstrates that all the parts of speech may signify some thing”; if reason did not have the power to generalize, no word in Latin could be equivalent to any word in Greek. It may be that “some man, from greater stupidity or impudence, may not agree, but on the contrary may assert that he will give way only to those authorities who with universal consent are allowed to lay down the law in regard to words,” but reason tells us otherwise. Nature refutes thoroughgoing conventionalism because it can find contradictions, impossibilities, in some conventions. Words are understood not by redundant self-reference but by the ability of the soul to learn, by the logos within the soul, which ‘decodes’ the sign that would otherwise be only a noise rattling in one’s ear. In this, the teaching of The Teacher resembles the teaching of the Meno. Augustine departs from Plato and Plato’s Socrates in taking logos as the gift of the Logos, of God. But no less than Plato and Plato’s Socrates does he insist that we learn by logos working within us, not by thoughtlessly following what supposed authorities tell us.

Augustine then proceeds to show this by asking what “the goal” we have striven “to reach by all these round-about paths.” Conventionally speaking, sons should simply go along with the authority of fathers, but if fathers engage sons in pointless tasks, does paternal authority really consist of, other than their own stupidity and imprudence? Conversely, many people, and not only sons in front of their fathers, become impatient with reasoning and simply want to be told. But if the teacher gives in to this, can he truly be said to have taught his student?

Augustine’s son having demonstrated his capacity to learn, to reason, “You will pardon me, therefore, if I play with you to begin with, not for the sake of playing, but in order to exercise and sharpen our mental powers”—both of ours, not only yours—for the purpose of being able “not merely to endure the heat and light of the region where lies the blessed life, but also to love them.” In Plato’s dialogue, Meno had no such endurance, no such love. Adeodatus does: “Go on as you have begun, for I shall never think unworthy of attention anything you may think it necessary to say or to do.” That is, Adeodatus accepts his father’s authority because, just as he has proven his philosophic mettle to his father, so his father has proven the goodness of philosophy to his son, by bringing him to philosophize, to experience the good effects of philosophizing. Consideration of words, of logoi, entails philosophizing, and philosophizing orients souls away from the conventional dimension of words and towards logos. Sifting out the contradictions now seen in conventions can bring the soul to nature, to what is as it were above the conventions.

Accordingly, Augustine turns from consideration of signs signifying other signs to signs signifying significables. Augustine quickly establishes to Adeodatus’ satisfaction that “we cannot carry on a conversation at all unless the words we hear carry the mind to the things of which they are the signs.” But there is a distinction to be made. If I use the word ‘lion,’ the word ‘lion’ has come out of my mouth, but a lion hasn’t. Adeodatus understands that “our words are signs merely of things”: “it is the sign and not the thing signified which comes out of the mouth of the speaker.” Augustine compliments him, again by invoking reason: “The very law of reason,” the principle of non-contradiction, the capacity to make distinctions, which is “stamped on our minds,” has “awakened your vigilance.” Logos is in us. Thus, one can see that the word ‘man’ is “both a noun and an animal” (in fact, a “rational and mortal animal”). “It is a noun when it is regarded as a sign, and an animal when regard is had to the thing signified by the sign.” “The rule, which naturally carries the greatest weight, is that, as soon as signs are heard, the attention is directed to the things they signify,” and that we should consider “that things signified are of greater importance than their signs,” inasmuch as “whatever exists on account of something else must necessarily be of less value than that on account of which it exists.” It is noteworthy that Augustine places his discussion of the word ‘man’ in the central paragraphs of The Teacher. It is man, not God or beasts, who can learn by reasoning.

Adeodatus demurs. The Latin word for filth is lovelier than what it signifies: “Change one letter and caenum [filth] becomes caelum [heaven]”! Witty lad, he likes puns, but “importance” is not the same as “preferable.” If words signify things, Augustine replies, then they can increase our knowledge. “The knowledge conveyed by this word” from one person to another is “more valuable than the word itself” because, as Adeodatus says, when I use a word “I want to give a sign to the man with whom I am speaking, by means of which I may let him know what I think he ought to know”—that is, I want to teach him something.

Nonetheless, Adeodatus insists, “this does not mean that the thing signified is better than its sign.” Yes, but “knowledge of filth is more important than the name”; the names, ‘filth’ and ‘heaven’ could be reversed but the things signified could not be; some word is necessary to indicate the thing, which is the more important thing to know. Augustine aims at eradicating any tendency in his son toward rhetorical ornamentation. He also would have had little patience for what would be called estheticism, l’art pour l’art, centuries later. 

Hierarchy implies teleology. For example, “the advice to eat in order to live rather than to live in order to eat, is justly praised simply because it shows understanding of what is means and what is end, that is to say, of what should be subordinate to what.” If a rhetorician, “some loquacious lover of verbiage,” some glutton of words, were to say he teaches for the sake of talking, he could be corrected by saying he should talk for the sake of teaching. Generally, “the use to which words are put is superior to the words; for words exist in order to be used, and used to teach”; “knowledge is better than words.”

But if the name, ‘filth,’ is preferable to filth itself, would not the knowledge of the name be preferable to knowledge of the thing? Adeodatus identifies “four terms here: the name, the thing, knowledge of the name, knowledge of the thing,” and just as the thing is “better” (in the sense of more important to know) than the name, so knowledge of the thing is better than knowledge of the name.” Augustine disagrees: knowledge of the word “vice” is “much inferior to knowledge of the vices.”

Yet, squeamish Adeodatus objects, “Do you think that knowledge is preferable even when it makes us more miserable?” Yes, because without the knowledge, we will not know, and thus not be able to correct, the underlying evil. This points to a serious problem that teachers face: the resistance of students to obtaining knowledge of unpleasant things, realities they would rather not think about. But just as physicians need to tell patients what their illness is, in order to get them to take their medicine, and patients should not blame physicians for their illnesses, so student should not blame their teachers for the students’ ignorance or for the wrongly ordered souls that resist corrections.

But there is a “greater problem,” mentioned earlier: Can “all actions which we can perform on being interrogated…be demonstrated without a sign?” The difficulty, as Adeodatus sees, is that if someone asks me, What is walking? and I get up and walk, without any explanation, he might imagine that “walking” means the distance I have walked, not the movement itself. He might suppose that “anyone who walked further or less than I had walked, had not in fact walked at all.” I need to speak or teach, to supplement the visual sign.

Granted, but “don’t you think speaking and teaching are different things?” If all speaking is telling, and we “do not teach in order that we give signs,” merely to swap words, then they must differ. Whether you teach solely with words or with words and actions, “we give signs in order to teach,” do we not? It seems that our conversation has shown that nothing can be taught without signs; that some signs are to be preferred to the things they signify; and that the knowledge of things is better than the knowledge of their signs. If “we give signs in order that we may teach, and do not teach that we may give sings,” then “teaching and giving signs are different things.” But “do you think our results now stand beyond all doubt,” Adeodatus?  “I should dearly like to think that after all these turnings and twisting we have indeed reached certainty,” Father, but since you’ve asked the question, I am “anxious” that there might be more difficulties to come. Augustine commends his son’s fear of aporia as an indication of caution, as “a cautious mind” is “the best guard of tranquility.”

Adeodatus’ caution turns out to be well-founded. To reach a hasty conclusion and hold fast to it will lead to trouble. Giving a fuller answer to the question of whether knowledge is preferable even when it makes us more miserable, Augustine observes that “it is the most difficult thing in the world not to be upset when opinions which we hold, and to which we have given to ready and too willful approval, are shattered by contrary arguments and are, as it were, weapons torn from our hands.” (This may well be the cause of Anytus’ anger in the Meno, an anger that contributed to the execution of Socrates; he fears defenseless, personally and politically.) We should resist the sentiment. Rather, “it is a good thing to give in calmly to arguments that are well considered and grasped, just as it is dangerous to hold as known what in fact we do not know,” falling “into such hatred or fear of reason that we think we cannot trust even the most clearly manifest truth.” That is, misology leads to radical skepticism, the refusal to learn based not on the principle of I know that I do not know but on the self-contradictory principle, I know that I cannot know. In Christian terms, misology would readily lead to hostility toward the Word of God, indeed toward God Himself. Just as Socrates died because he had offended the Athenians with his logical challenges to their opinions, so Christ died because He had offended Jews and Romans alike, as the Logos.

It is true that some men can be taught some things by observing another’s actions, without signs. Natural objects are exhibited by God, and we can learn about them without any instruction from their Creator. Conversely, one often learns little or nothing by signs alone; a verbal description of a cat is hardly more instructive than seeing a cat. The word ‘cat’ is otherwise scarcely more than a sound to me. “We perceive the sound when it strikes our ear, while the meaning becomes clear when we look at the thing signified,” learning “the force of the word, that is the meaning which lies in the sound of the word, when we come to know the object signified by the word.” Whether we are Adam in the Garden or a child at home, typically we see something and then either assign a name to it or ask for the name that has been assigned. Teaching, then, is not simply a matter of talking, even if the aim of the talking is teaching. But the true learning goes on in the mind of the learner. In learning a thing, I do “not trust the words of another but my own eyes,” a fact that Groucho Marx plays with in his celebrated joke. A genuine teacher “bid[s] us look for things,” but does “not show them to us so that we may know them.” “He alone teaches me anything who sets before my eyes, or one of my other bodily senses, or my mind, the things which I desire to know,” inasmuch as “from words we can learn only words.” In passing, one notes that the ‘moderns’ who complained that the ‘Churchmen’ thought only in terms of words hadn’t paid attention to Augustine’s words: “Knowledge of words is completed by knowledge of things, and by the hearing of words not even words are learned,” since we do not yet know what the words mean. When we already know something, a word may remind us of it; in that sense, the teaching of the Meno, that knowledge is memory, is correct; if, however, “we do not know, we are not even reminded, but are perhaps urged to inquire.” That is, if someone uses an unfamiliar word, I know that I don’t know something, and I may ask what it means, preliminary to learning something.

What about another kind of claim, the claims of historians and, most pointedly, of sacred historians? When it comes to names, “What about those young men of whom we have heard,” Ananias, Azarias, and Missel,” who passed through the furnace fire? “All that we read of in that story happened at that time and was written down, so that I have to confess that I must believe rather than know,” a distinction understood by the Prophet Isaiah himself, who said “Unless you believe you shall not know.” “What I know I also believe, but I do not know everything that I believe.” It is “useful” to believe “many things which I do not know, among them this story about the three youths,” which teaches readers to trust God. “I know how useful it is to believe many things of which knowledge is not possible,” including any historical information, sacred or secular, which did not occur in my lifetime, or, for that matter, information presented by reporters of the ‘news.’ Near the end of the dialogue, Augustine promises a further inquiry into “the whole problem of the usefulness of words, for their usefulness properly considered is not slight.” In this dialogue, he is concerned that “we must not attribute to them a greater importance than they ought to have.”

It is different with “universals of which we can have knowledge,” ideas that we can discover through our own reasoning and need “not listen to anyone speaking and making sounds outside ourselves” to arrive at.  True, “our real Teacher is He who is so listened to,” but he is “said”—said—to “dwell in the inner man,” speaking to us of “the unchangeable power and eternal wisdom of God” not from outside of ourselves but providing us “wisdom [to which] every rational soul gives heed,” although “to each is given only so much as he is able to receive, according to his own good or evil will.” That is likely to be Augustine’s explanation of Isaiah’s monition, “Unless you believe you shall not know”; your soul must be ready to receive the truth, as indeed it must be ready to reason about theoretical or practical matters. Meno and Anytus will not philosophize; atheists refuse the invitation of God. “If anyone is ever deceived it is not the fault of Truth, any more than it is the fault of the common light of day that the bodily eyes are often deceived.”

We need light to see colors, other “elements of the world and sentient bodies,” along with the senses themselves, to “perceive things of sense”—what Christian authors call “carnal things.” The mind then “uses” all of these material things “as interpreters in its search for sense-knowledge.” If I hear words relating someone else’s sense perception, I may believe what he says but I do not know it. The same goes for sense perceptions remembered by others as images in their minds. I may believe their words but I cannot know them to be true. As to “intelligible things,” what Christian authors call “spiritual things,” it is reason that enables us to pay attention to the “inner light of truth.” Put more expansively, regarding the things of sense, words suffice to teach the student that we say we perceive them, but “he learns nothing unless he himself sees what is asking about,” learning “not from words uttered but from the objects seen and his sense of sight.” These sense impressions then imprint themselves on his memory. It is in “the halls of memory [that] we bear the images of things once perceived as memorial which we can contemplate mentally and can speak of with a good conscience and without lying.” We can report them truthfully, but our listener “believes my words”—or not—rather than “learning from them.” The same goes with “the things which we behold with the mind,” with “the intelligence” in the act of noēsis and “with reason,” logos governed by the principle of non-contradiction. The “inner light of truth which illumines the inner man and is inwardly enjoyed” may be reported to another, but “if my hearer sees these things himself with his inward eye, he comes to know what I say, not as a result of my words but as a result of his own contemplation.” Strictly speaking, “it is not I who teach him,” as “he is taught not by my words but by the things themselves which inwardly God has made manifest to him.” Augustine is careful to acknowledge that such contemplation does not typically come as a result of the person’s own efforts. “It often happens that a man, when asked a question, gives a negative answer, but by further questioning can be brought to answer in the affirmative.” That is, Augustine remains a ‘Socratic,’ acknowledging the merit of dialogue and the rational dialectic it entails. Dialogue is necessary, given the “weakness” of human beings, “unable to behold the whole all at once,” but “when questioned about the parts which compose the whole,” can be “induced to bring them one by one into the light.” This of course is what Augustine has done in this dialogue with his son. In a philosophic dialogue, the words “do not make statements, but merely ask such questions as to put [the student] who is questioned in a position to learn inwardly.” (This contrasts with a police interrogation, in which questions are asked in order to force truthful answers out of the one questioned, so that the inquirer, or rather the inquisitor, may learn.) As a teacher, “I must put my question in a way suited to your ability to hear the inward teacher.” 

To teach and to learn, then, both require a degree of humility as well as a degree of confidence. Christianity commends both humility and faith, and so can adapt itself to teaching. If a student hears what I say but does not know whether it’s true, he may believe it, suppose it, or doubt it. If knows that it is false, he “must oppose it and deny it.” If he knows it is true “he must testify to its truth.” But in none of these cases will he learn because he must, as the saying goes, see for himself. I can tell you all about Augustine’s dialogue, “The Teacher,” but you have learned nothing about it from my words unless you read the dialogue and see for yourself. It may be “useful to believe such things so long as ignorance lasts.” But unless some compelling reason prevents it, don’t let your ignorance last. You don’t even know if my words give you a good account of my own mind, since I might be ignorant or a liar. “A speech committed to memory and frequently conned,” as rhetoricians are wont to do, “may be spoken when we are thinking of something else entirely.” (Augustine then goes in for the kill: “This often happens when we are singing a hymn.”) Or the intended meaning of the speaker may be distorted in the minds of the listeners, as when, for example, the speaker has “simply called the thing he has in mind by a different name from the one we are accustomed to use.” This may be remedied by careful definition of the word, as Augustine has done in his own discussion of words, “but how often is a man to be found who is good at definition?”

Even if the teacher’s words are understood according to the teacher’s intention, the student does not learn from those words whether “the words spoken are true.” “Who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn what the teacher thinks?” he asks, rhetorically but reasonably. “When the teachers have expounded by means of words all the disciples which they profess”—profess—to “teach, the disciples also of virtue and wisdom”—the theme of the Meno—then their pupils take thought within themselves whether what they have been told is true, looking to the inward truth, that is to say, also far as they are able. In this way they learn.” If, as educators once loved to say, educare means to lead out or to draw out, this is what the leading consists of.

This goes for revelation and reason, both, including the revelation of truths perceived rationally within the framework of belief in revelation. Adeodatus has learned that “by means of words a man is simply put on the alert in order that he may learn,” and that “in order to know the truth of what is spoken, I must be taught by Him who dwells within and give me counsel about words spoken externally in the ear.” The philosopher loves wisdom, and by Christ’s “favor I shall love him the more ardently the more I advance in learning.”

 

Note

1. On the Meno see “Teaching Virtue?” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”

Plato: Meno. George Anastaplo and Laurence Berns translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004.

Jacob Klein: A Commentary on Plato’s Meno. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965.

 

Usually, inquiring Socrates asks the questions. Not so, on this occasion, initially. A wealthy young aristocrat from Thessaly, Meno, wants to know if aretē (excellence, virtue) can be taught. If not, does it come into being by practice? Or by nature, at birth? Or in some other way? An aristocrat might prefer to suppose that excellence comes by nature, as an inherent, inherited birthright to rule. But Meno isn’t an ordinary aristocrat.

These questions open Meno to a salvo of characteristic Socratic irony. “Meno, it used to be that Thessalians were well-reputed among the Greeks” (70a); in fact, Greeks generally regarded them as disorderly and licentious. They “were admired both for horsemanship and for wealth” (70a); that is, the substance of their good name consisting of a type of physical virtuosity and of money. “Now,” however, “it seems to me, they are to be admired for wisdom [sophia] also” because Thessaly is the home of the rhetoricians and sophists (‘wise’ men), Gorgias being the man “responsible for this happening” (70a-b). Gorgias was a Sicilian, student of his fellow countryman, Empedocles, the poet-philosopher, a materialist who nonetheless taught that human souls are reincarnated. Socrates recalls that “When [Empedocles] came to the city, he captivated the foremost men among the Aleuadai”—the Thessalian ruling class, including Meno’s lover, Aristippus—proof that Gorgias’ rhetorical art worked, at least insofar as it permitted rhetorician-sophists to get paid for changing the character of regimes (70b). Gorgias taught Thessalians the habit or custom Meno may expect Socrates to exhibit: “answering both fearlessly and magnificently whenever anyone asks you anything, as is fitting for those who know” (70b-c). (Then again, it may be that he expects to ‘show Socrates up,’ to establish the superiority of his own art of rhetoric over Socratic philosophizing.) Rhetorician Gorgias always has the answer, presenting himself as a man of ready knowledge (epistēmē). Any Greek, any Hellene, “who wants to question him about whatever one might wish to ask, and there is no one whom he does not answer” (70c-71a). Gorgias is a democrat, or at least one who aims at instructing, and perhaps influencing, anyone and everyone, democrats and oligarchs alike. This leaves open another question, however: Was Gorgias’ answer the right answer? Aside from the art of rhetoric, what does a rhetorician know? How wise is a sophist? 

And what of Meno’s name? Is it good? Klein observes, with his own touch of irony, that “Meno” resembles the Greek mnêmê, which means “mind,” and “we note that in the name ‘Meno’ the sequence of those two letters is somewhat deranged” (45). “Gorgias might well know what aretê is, while Meno might merely know what Gorgias said it is” (45)

Alas, here in Athens, Socrates explains, “the opposite condition prevails”; “it’s as if some sort of drought of wisdom has come about, and there seems to be a danger that wisdom has left these parts for yours” (71a). I, poor Socrates, don’t know if excellence can be taught and I don’t even know what it is. I blame myself for my ignorance. It will transpire that Athenians do assume that they know what excellence is, and how it can be taught, a circumstance that puts Socrates at odds with many citizens who assume that they are virtuous. For the moment, however, Socrates positions himself as just one of his fellow Athenians.

But Socrates, Meno asks, didn’t you meet Gorgias here in Athens? (That is, did you not learn how to have answers to such questions ready to hand?) Yes, but “I’m not a very good rememberer,” the philosopher who forgets nothing replies; “remind me,” and since, Meno, “you know what he used to say” and tell me what excellence is (71c). Gorgias’ student’s strength rejoices in the challenge. A man’s excellence, he replies, consists in “the ability to carry on the affair of the city and while carrying them on to do well by his friends and harm to his enemies and to take care that he not suffer any such thing himself” (71e). By contrast, a woman’s excellence consists in managing private business, managing the household, in keeping the things stored there safe, and in obeying her man. Boys, girls, freemen, slaves likewise have their excellences, as befits their condition. “According to each activity and each time of life to each task relative to each task for each of us there is an excellence, and in the same way I suppose, Socrates, there is also a vice” [kakia]” (72a). As it happened, young Meno would later become a leader of Greek mercenaries in an expedition launched by Cyrus the Younger against his brother, the King of Persia, Artaxerxes II. Xenophon, who went on that expedition, regarded him as treacherous and grasping—indeed “excellent” in managing public business after his own fashion, helping an ever-shifting constellation of friends and harming enemies who once were friends, all while keeping himself safe, at least for a while. Artaxerxes won the war, captured Meno, and eventually had him executed. In the event, the manly virtue of helping friends and harming enemies (both of them shifting categories) could not prevent Meno from being harmed in turn.

Rhetoricians would rule ‘the many’; rhetoricians thrive in democratic regimes like Athens, not only among Thessalian oligarchs. Socrates replies that he had sought one definition of excellence and instead received from Meno a “swarm” of excellences—a ‘many,’ a democratic mob of them (72a). But do bees differ from one another? No, they’re all bees, Meno admits. Then excellences must have something in common, too, something that makes them excellences, just a swarm of bees has something in common, namely, the species, ‘bee,’ the eidos, the idea, the definition. Moreover, health, size, and strength are the same in a man and a woman, are they not? True, men manage public business, women private, but it isn’t possible to rule anything well without phronēsis, practical wisdom, dikaisounē, justice. “Then all human beings are good in the same way,” Socrates urges (73c). Meno might have noticed, as Klein does, that Socrates has composed human goodness of two excellences, not one (Klein, 52), and that will require Socrates to refine his own definition, later. Meanwhile, Socrates asks (now appealing to Meno’s memory of his teacher’s teaching, not to Meno, who has proven himself unequal to the task), what does Gorgias say excellence is? It is “to be able to rule over human beings,” Meno replies (73c), exposing the nerve of Gorgias’ rhetoric, which deploys words at the service of decidedly material, Empedoclean, ambition; words are substitutes for force, the ultimate in ruling materially, but ruling in a cleverer way than force does. 

But if excellence is the ability to rule human beings, how could children and slaves rule, since they too have excellence, according to Meno? Alternatively, if excellence is not the ability to rule, should children and slaves not be able to rule? Socrates’ listeners (if not Meno himself) and Plato’s readers see that the attempt to rule with words, with logoi, opens the rhetorician to the authority of logic, of logos, to the principle of non-contradiction.  To rule with excellence, would one not then need to rule justly? And are there not excellences other than justice, such as courage, moderation, wisdom, and high-mindedness? Meno agrees, but Socrates then observes that we are back to many excellences, “but the one which exists throughout all of these we are not able to find out” (74a). What is excellence itself?

There is a still more preliminary question to consider. Reasoned or logical speech requires a definition of definition itself. Socrates therefore steers the dialogue into a consideration of “figures”—i.e., “shaped surfaces” such as round, straight, and the like (74b). He goes further, saying (as Meno sees) that “figure [schêma] always accompanies color” (75c). That is, a surface always has some color or colors on it; as Klein puts it, “we become aware of surfaces of whatever shape only by seeing color” (59). Meno calls this silly, since Socrates hasn’t defined color. Socrates has thus induced Meno to imitate Socrates, to demand a definition, to turn the tables; like a rhetorician-sophist, he picks up techniques in order to win. He wants to use words, not to define them.

Socrates begins his reply by distinguishing himself from sophists, those “wise men, with a bent for strife and contention” (75c-d), not a desire to arrive at the truth—exercising an art rhetoricians may well include in their repertoire of ruling abilities. Friends don’t do that, a point that recalls Meno’s claim that excellence entails helping one’s friends. Socrates knows how to win arguments by encirclement, rather as a general does, but it is encirclement by means of logic, the “more gentle and more dialectical way of answering” (75d), which wins arguments by disposing of falsehoods, exposing contradictions, illogic. Old Socrates may prove a better general, of this sort, than Meno will prove to be, of the more ordinary sort.

Every thing has a boundary, Socrates observes, “like those things in geometry”; “figure is the limit of a solid” (76a); it defines the solid. Yes, but I still want to know what color is, Meno insists, since you brought it up. Oh, Meno, you are hybristes—assertive, prideful. “You pose troublesome problems for an old man to answer, but you yourself are unwilling to recollect and say whatever Gorgias says virtue is” (76a-b)—this, on the ironic ‘assumption’ that Meno must have been kidding when he said the wise Gorgias called excellence the ability to rule men, when that definition is utterly inadequate and therefore could not possibly have been Gorgias’ opinion. In another attempt at tough-minded realism, Meno chooses to bargain: I’ll tell you the definition you want as soon as you tell me the definition I want. Socrates is up to the challenge. “Even someone who is blindfolded would know, Meno, from conversing with you that you are handsome and still have lovers” (76b). That is, Meno’s words alone reveal what he is, his ‘definition.’ It might be that Meno’s ‘looks,’ whether seen or inferred from his speech, are one source of his hybris. “Why, indeed?” befuddled Meno asks. “Because,” Socrates ripostes, springing the trap (he does have ready answers, at least to some questions), “you do nothing but impose commands in your arguments, the very thing that spoiled people do, so as to tyrannize as long as they are in their prime” (76b). The demand to be told, to be given the answer in the way a beauty expects gifts, suggests that Meno doesn’t want to work for what he wants. Like physically beautiful people, Gorgian rhetoricians get what they want without working. “It is likely that you’ve noticed about me,” Socrates flirts, as “that I have a weakness for beautiful people” (76c). In other dialogues, Socrates does indeed seek beauty, if not physical beauty, and his auditors learn from handsome Alcibiades that the old fellow is quite capable—excellent, even—of resisting physical beauty. Words, which rhetoricians and sophists take to be deceptive, agents of manipulation, can be made to reveal the inner man, his soul beneath the beautiful surface, if they are used ‘dialectically,’ in a procedure of question-and-answer in accordance with the principle of non-contradiction. But Meno’s boundaries amount to things he’s been told, a horizon consisting of mere memories, “the all-pervasive and habitually accepted opinions of mankind” (Klein, 72). Meno has a beautiful surface but an impoverished interior, which he seeks to fill with gifts, attractive opinions, to be acquired with little or no effort by him.

And then, with mockery cloaked lightly by courtly deference, “Do you want me to answer in the style of Gorgias, by which you might be as much as possible, able to follow?” (76c). Socrates then gives a none-too-definitive Empedoclean definition of color, decorating it with a Pindar quote and thereby winning Meno’s laughing affirmation of its excellence. Socrates suggests that Meno approves “perhaps because [the definition] was said in accordance with the way in which you have been habituated” (76d); that is, because it is familiar, a matter of memory, not the kind of knowledge achieved by thinking, by intellectual effort. “Because it is a tragic answer,” one consonant with impressive theatrics, rhetorical declamation, Socrates remarks, driving the nail into the coffin of Meno’s compliance, “it satisfies you more than the one about figure” I had given before, in prose. “But it is not better, son of Alexidemos”—fathers hand down ‘poeticized’ stories to sons— but I “am persuaded that the other [definition] is better”; I, Socrates, use words to inquire into custom, not to reaffirm it or to turn it for my own purposes with some form of rhetoric (76e). And you might agree with me, if you were not obliged to go off before the Mysteries, as you said yesterday; you have only to stay and be initiated in my philosophic ‘mysteries.’ Socrates invites Meno to abstain from traditional religious practices and instead become an initiate to Socrates’ reasoning prose, logos. Meno consents.

Very well then, how about that definition of excellence you owe me? Meno recurs to a poetic quotation, still preferring to remember what someone else said, rather than thinking for himself: excellence is “both to rejoice and to be capable in beautiful things,” to long for them and get hold of them (77b). Socrates immediately rephrases this: “Do you mean that he who desires beautiful things is someone who desires good things?” (77b). Of course, beautiful Meno readily says. This implies “that there are some people who desire bad things, and others who desire good things?” (77b-c). In distinguishing the “beautiful” from the “good,” Socrates suggests that one who is beautiful, accustomed to receiving gifts from lovers, might or might not be good. Some people desire what is bad, thinking it good; others know that something is bad but still desire it. For his part, Meno observes that some people “believe the bad things benefit,” while others “recognize that they injure” (77d), which Socrates explains as wanting the good but mistaking the bad for the good, a mistake that makes one “miserable” and thus “ill-fated” (78a). Eros or desire is universal, but “according to your argument,” as Socrates generously ascribes it, excellence is “a power of providing good things for oneself” (78c). 

What are the good things? Health, wealth (especially gold and silver), public honor and appointments, Meno says. Here we learn that Meno is the “ancestral guest-friend of the Great King” of Persia, whom he will seemingly betray by joining Cyrus’ expedition, before betraying the Greeks (78d). Health, wealth, public honor and appointments are the good things Meno wants and wants more of. But what if one acquires these things unjustly? Socrates asks. You need to “add to this getting” some “piece of excellence,” “or else it will not be excellence, even though it were a thoroughgoing provision of the good things” (78e). The mere “power of providing good things for oneself” does not define excellence. But if one needs to “add” such excellences as moderation and justice to the soul in order to make its strivings virtuous, you, Meno, are yet again breaking excellence into “pieces,” failing to tell me what it is. “Pieces” are the result of analysis, but before you analyze you must know what it is that you are analyzing, the outline or border of it. We have reached an aporia, an impasse in the argument, what English philosophers often call a “puzzle.” We need to start over.

Meno resists. He does not lack spiritedness, but he directs it toward resisting reason, not toward following it to a conclusion. “You seem to me to be bewitching me and drugging me and simply subduing me with incantations so that I come to be full of perplexity [aporia]“ (80a), he complains. Socrates, you remind me of a stingray, whose touch makes one numb, numb in soul and in mouth; I can neither think nor speak. I am usually quite eloquent, having “made a great many speeches about virtue, and before many people, and done very well, in my own opinion anyway”; yet now “I’m altogether unable to say what it is” (80b). Unlike Gorgias, the traveling rhetorician, you, Socrates, should never “sail away or emigrate from here,” because as a foreigner you’d be arrested as a wizard (80b). “You are prudent” not to do so (80b). Socrates refuses to be brought to an aporia by Meno’s rhetorical imagery. You are only comparing me to the ugly, soul-numbing, speech-numbing stingray because, like “all beautiful people,” you “delight in having images” made of you,” as it “pays them” to have that done for them (80c). You say you are perplexed, but (unlike the supposedly wise Gorgias, one may recall), I am the one “unprovided” with answers and “perplexed” (80c) “Nevertheless, I am willing to look with you and seek together for whatever [excellence] is” (80d). Meno finally sees an opening, one that Socrates himself has provided. If answers to the question, ‘What is excellence?’ are inadequate when they consist of multiple examples instead of one general definition, and if, moreover, you profess to know only what you do not know, how will you seek the knowledge you desire? And even if “you should happen upon it how will you know it is that which you did not know?” (80d). You are no better than a sophist, yourself.

Socrates might reply that his interlocutor was the one who asked about excellence in the first place, and justice requires that he give a coherent definition of his own term. But Socrates is more immediately concerned with Meno himself, not his dodgy speeches. Meno’s argument implies “that it is not possible for a human being to seek either what he knows or what he does not know,” since “he could not seek for what he knows because he knows it and there’s no need of any seeking for this sort of person; nor could he seek for what he does not know, because then he does not know what he is seeking” (80e).  Meno is intellectually lazy, preferring to memorize and speak without bothering to know what he is talking about. But he imposes his own sort of aporia upon the argument, leaving Socrates to figure a way out of it, this time.

Unsurprisingly, Socrates is up to the challenge. Since Meno cares most, or at least professes to care most, about what pious authorities—poets, priests, and priestesses—tell him, Socrates will reason with him within the limits of pious opinion. Very well, then, what do the religious authorities, with their mastery of pious convention, say? Socrates cites priests and priestesses, whose “concern” it is “to be able to give an account [logos] about those things they have taken in hand” (81a). Excellence, virtue, is ‘their’ primary topic, their field of expertise. Can they, or such “divine poets” as Pindar, give such a logos, even as Meno admittedly cannot? (81b). They do indeed offer an account, which is the doctrine of reincarnation. “They declare the human soul to be immortal, and that at one time it comes to an end, which they indeed call dying, and again, at another time, it comes into being, but is never destroyed” (81b).  For this reason, one should “live through one’s life as piously as possible” (81b). To this wholesome moral teaching they add an intellectual dimension. “Inasmuch as the soul is immortal and has been born many times and has seen all things both here and in the house of Hades, there is nothing which it has not learned, therefore “nothing wondrous about its also being able to recollect about excellence and about other things, which it already knew before” (81c).”Nothing wondrous”: Socrates gives Meno a sort of ‘revelation,’ a foundational religious belief, but in order to induce him to inquire further, to be “courageous” and untiring in learning (81d). There may be a problem with this priest-and-poet story: it gives an entirely ‘experiential’ account of virtue, an account or logos that leaves no place for logos as reason, no way to verify what the soul has seen on earth and in Hades by enabling it to find contradictions among the phenomena it has seen, if there are contradictions.

And how did souls begin to learn? There must have been a time when the soul had no store of memories, when it was young. The account may be an ‘infinite regress.’ Also, the account omits the heavens, as the soul never looks above the earth. That is not where Socrates takes the argument, however, because he is still interested in seeing what might be done with Meno’s soul, if only to exhibit its true nature to the onlookers.

Be this as it may, Socrates has channeled a religious “account” or myth into an invitation to philosophic inquiry. “All nature is akin,” on earth and in Hades, Socrates has said. (81c-d). Nature is a whole, a ‘one’ that consists of ‘many,’ many parts but all connected. This is an inquiry into nature by natural means, reducing the “memory” derived from reincarnation to one thing—to not accepting what you suppose you’ve learned from religious and poetic authorities and instead inquiring ‘on your own,’ or perhaps with the assistance of reasoning friends. If Meno were to accept the invitation, he would move away from rhetoric and sophistry.

To which Meno can only say, ‘What?’ How did remembering suddenly become learning? Ah, you “clever rogue,” Meno, you are trying to catch me in a contradiction (82a). But I can prove to you that learning is remembrance. Lend me one of your slaves, and “I’ll be able to exhibit things for you” (82b). After all, if nature is a whole, and all human nature is one, surely even a slave boy will be able to tell us something about that nature. Socrates then brings geometry back, recalling his definition of definition as a boundary line. He begins the conversation with a simple geometrical problem, drawing four squares within a square. If each square has a side of one foot, then two times two equals an ‘area’ of four square feet, as the boy readily answers when asked. See? I haven’t taught him anything. He got the answer out of himself and is therefore “remembering,” which indeed it is, if one accepts Socrates’ definition of remembering as seeking and learning. He then gives the boy a harder problem, showing that even a slave boy can learn that he knows that he does not know. This aporia, this numbness, about which Meno has complained, is an improvement in the soul of the boy. He now “does not think that he knows” (84b). In this bit of improvisational comedy, Socrates tacitly invites Meno to remember that the same has happened to him, but to see that it is good. Being stunned into a condition of aporia is not harmful, as Socrates-the-stingray is held to be, playfully by Meno and soon, with deadly seriousness by Socrates fellow citizens in Athens. Socrates, philosophic inquiry, is in danger not only if the philosopher travels abroad but just as much if he stays in his own polis. Philosophy is at risk in any polis. People don’t like to have their habits, their customary way of life, their regime questioned. But at least when it comes to the condition of an individual soul, not knowing it doesn’t know is the harmful thing.

By continued questioning, Socrates has brought the boy the answer to the more complex problem. The boy has gone from mistaken opinion to “true opinions,” showing Socrates, and all the gathered witnesses, that “there are true opinions about the things which he does not know” (85c). Since no one taught him—Socrates has “only been asking questions”—he got the “knowledge out of himself,” from Memory 2.0 (85d). You, Meno, know that your slave boy has never been taught any of this, so my claim must be true, perhaps a “true opinion.” “True opinion” is a formula that begs the question of how one arrives at the truth. One way not to arrive at it is to become indignant or embarrassed when your opinion is proven wrong, as Meno inclines to do. In Klein’s words, “to submit oneself to refutation without feeling angry and feeling disgraced is the first and indispensable step in the process of ‘giving birth’ to something true, that is to say, in the process of learning” (105). When Meno goes so far as to admit that he knows that he doesn’t know something (“You seem to speak well, Socrates, I don’t know how.”) (86b), Socrates immediately concurs, while avoiding hybris by confessing that “I would not assert myself altogether confidently on behalf of my argument” (86b) while averring that “I would surely battle, so far as I am able, both in word and in deed,” in “supposing one ought to see  what one does not know we would be able, more able to be brave and less lazy than if we supposed that which we do not know we are neither capable of discovering nor ought to seek” (86b-c)—a firm, implied rebuke of Meno, but one without the stingray’s sting, since Socrates has allowed Meno to see how beneficial aporia can be, without wounding the young man’s considerable pride, by making the slave-boy the example, not Meno himself. As Klein remarks, this “brings back the theme of excellence” (183). It is “the peculiar aretē of Socrates himself” to undertake this fight (183). [1]

Meno remains persistent in one way: he still wants to know if excellence can be taught, or if it comes to men by nature or in some other way. His memory for the things he wants is strong, even as it contradicts his assent to the learning-is-memory theory; he stubbornly wants to be told but is far from firm in his willingness to ‘remember’ in the sense of thinking. He has not really ‘remembered’ Socrates’ lesson. “His answers are not his answers, his judgments,” Klein observes, but merely reproduce opinions of others,” and “his questions are not really questions, since they do not stem from any desire to know” (188). Like some of the figures geometers draw, his soul has no depth, “no ‘inside'” (189). He is “a clever man totally incapable of learning,” perpetually stuck in amathia, ignorance because so weak in the distinctively human excellence (199). It has nothing of “the character of what is called in technical geometrical language a ‘solid” (190).  But the soul and the polis both must be studied in this third dimension, “in depth” (191). [2]

No less persistent, Socrates ‘re-minds’ him: “Yet, Meno, if I were ruling not only myself, but you too”—rather as you are the master of the slave boy, who, unlike you, is willing to make the effort to learn—we “would not first look at whether excellence is something teachable or not teachable before we first sought what it itself is” (86d). Socrates suggests that Meno makes no attempt to master himself because he wants to be “free” (86d). Freedom, for Meno, is giving speeches and taking actions that will boost him into positions of ruling authority and the honor most men give to it, whether by consent or not. Like ‘the many’ as later described by Aristotle, he defines freedom badly, as ‘doing as one likes,’ and what he likes is to rule others by speeches, not so much to rule himself by reason. Socrates pretends to yield, at last, even as he eventually pretended to yield to the Athenian democracy’s jury—that is, yielding with a qualification. “Relax your rule a little bit for me,” Meno, by granting me a working hypothesis, even as geometricians propose when they offer a proof (86e). Without waiting for Meno’s consent, Socrates presses on: We don’t know what excellence is or even what it resembles, so let us posit that virtue is “some sort of thing among those things that have regard to the soul” (87b). Are such things teachable or not teachable? Socrates has not defined excellence, but he has defined the problem, drawing a boundary around it, the soul (which he does not define). Is excellence like or unlike knowledge, which is teachable? If so, it can be taught. (It is also true that falsehoods could also be taught, inasmuch as what Klein calls Meno’s “innumerable accepted opinions” (211) are indeed taught in the polis.) 

“If there is something good, and it is something separated from knowledge, it may be that excellence would not be some sort of knowledge; but if there is nothing good which knowledge does not encompass, then we would be might in suspecting what we suspected, that it is some kind of knowledge” (87d). This recalls Socrates’ claim, and Meno’s concession, that eros ought to seek what is really good, that excellence is the ability to acquire what is genuinely good. If by virtue we are good, and all good things are beneficial, helpful, then virtue must be helpful. Conversely, bad things are harmful. By beneficial, Socrates means “whatever right usage directs,” by harmful, not so (88a). But who or what leads a soul to the good? Taking, then, the long list of virtues Meno has already identified, the thing they all have in common is phronêsis, practical wisdom or prudence. For example, courage is boldness, but with prudence. Without prudence, it will be not beneficial but harmful.” The same goes for the other things Meno admits to be good, such as health, strength, beauty, and wealth. All the things undertaken and endured by the soul when directed by prudence come to an end in happiness, but when controlled by thoughtlessness in the opposite?” (88c). If so, then excellence consists not, or not simply in knowledge, epistêmē, but phronêsis. Prudence is what guides the soul and its characteristics toward a good purpose, a right telos. The same goes for things external to the soul. Wealth and political office too are good if used prudently. As Klein writes, “all that the soul attempts or endures, when led by wise judgment (phronêsis) ends in happiness (eis eudamonian), when misled by lack of judgment (aphrosynē), in the opposite (eis toūnantion), in misery” (214). Excellence is the “exercise of wise judgment” (214). Plato’s reader recalls that near the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates lamented the lack of wisdom, of practical wisdom or wise judgment, in Athens, pretending it had all gone to Thessaly, thanks to Gorgias.

No one is born prudent. If men were good by nature—that is, at birth—then we could, and should guard them on the Acropolis, “setting our seal of them much more than we do with gold, so that no one could corrupt them, and that when they should come of age, they could become useful to their cities” (89b); readers will recall that Meno covets gold, but the lesser kind. Since men are not good by nature, then they must somehow gain their excellence by “learning.” Meno agrees, but mistakenly, saying that “if excellence is knowledge, it is teachable” (89c). He has mistaken knowledge for prudence; he has heard from Socrates what he wants to hear, revealing the answer he wanted to hear from Socrates when he first asked the question. We have learned something—about Meno. His wishes are the fathers of his thoughts; he does not master himself, if right mastery is rule of reason over the desires for external good misconceived as whatever one may want. Rhetoricians and sophists encourage such assumptions, finding them lucrative.

Which turns out to be Socrates’ next point. “If anything whatever is teachable, and not only excellence, are there not necessarily also teachers and learners of it?” (89d). Gorgias’ prize student replies, “Does it seem to you that there are no teachers of virtue?” (89e). I can find none, Socrates confesses, leaving Meno to ponder the implication, with regard to his own supposed knowledge. And indeed to the status of knowledge itself, which only finds right use when guided by wise judgment. Needless to say, Meno does not so ponder. And neither do the ‘guardians’ or rulers of Athens, who listen more attentively to the itinerant rhetorician Gorgias than to its philosophic native son, Socrates.

At this point, Anytos sits beside them. Meno is his guest-friend, a status that was itself a longstanding custom among the Greeks. It is “fitting” to give him a share in the inquiry, Socrates announces: he has a wealthy and prudent father, whose wealth came not by fortune but by that very prudence and effort; his father has a good name generally in the polis, is “an orderly and well-mannered man” who “brought up our man here well, and educating him well, as the majority of the Athenians judge; they elect him, at any rate, to the highest offices” (90b). We understand that the arts, from medicine to shoemaking, can be learned, but what about excellence? Anytos quickly establishes his adherence to the gods of the polis, swearing “by Zeus” (90e). He seems to be a man who orients himself to the gods of his political community.

Can one learn the excellences from the sophists? “By Heracles, watch what you’re saying, Socrates”: the sophists “are the debasement and corruption of those who associate with them,” Anytos bluntly asserts in front of his guest friend, who may have some sympathy for such teachers (91c). It transpires that Anytos has no actual experience of sophists; he ‘knows’ they are bad, has an opinion (whether right or wrong) that they are. Stay away from them, he recommends, and learn excellence simply by consulting “any Athenian gentleman,” who will know all you need to know about the beautiful and the good (92e).

Socrates is less than impressed. How did the well-bred gentlemen learn excellence? Was it fortune? No, they “learned from those who were gentlemen before them,” or, Socrates, “don’t you think there have been many good men in this city?” (93a). No mean rhetorician himself, Anytos wants to win the argument by maneuvering Socrates into a choice between insulting the Athenian aristoi or conceding the point. Socrates replies with ironic measure, that “there are good men in politics here” (leaving aside their gentlemanliness), “but have they also been good teachers of this excellence of theirs?” (93a). Have they known “how to hand over to another the virtue in which they were good, or whether this is not something able to be handed over or to be received by any human being from another” (93b).  The reader is left to recall that Anytos’ argument suffers from the same flaw as the reincarnation myth: infinite regress, but Socrates keeps things on a simpler level. Was the great Athenian statesman Themistocles a good man? “The best of all,” Anytos affirms (93c). Was he a good teacher of his own excellence? Anytos supposes so. Except that he wasn’t, Socrates is bold to say. His son, Cleophantos, was taught to be a good horseman—a skill, an art—but he did not learn excellence of character. Many of the most prominent gentlemen of Athens have similarly failed. Indeed, Anytos’ father was such a good man, who gave his son a good education, quite evidently to little effect. Anytos falls into an angry silence, after warning Socrates to watch his mouth. He will later become one of Socrates’ accusers at trial, rhetorically successful in winning a vote of ‘guilty’ from the jury. Klein comments, “Anytus’ anger is rooted in his firm reliance on the prevailing opinion (doxa) concerning the respectability or unworthiness of people, that is to say in his firm reliance on the good or ill repute of those people” (239). Like Meno, his soul is filled with the shadows on the wall of the cave, the Athenian polis, and so he too is a man of amathia, in this respect similar not only to Meno but to Athens itself, “where it is easy to do evil to people, or, for that matter, to do them good, as he himself says,” menacingly (239). The people of Athens have put their regime at risk precisely by assuming, with the foreign sophists and rhetoricians, that excellence is readily taught, passed down either from fathers to sons or from sophistical rhetoricians to rulers who are indeed ‘sophisticated.’ Anytos doesn’t like those foreigners, but in this respect, he thinks just like them.

Meno takes up the argument, observing that his teacher, Gorgias, does not claim to teach excellence of character, and so (he implies) is exempt from the criticism Socrates has leveled at the Athenian gentlemen-politicians. Gorgias the rhetorician claims to teach an art, the art of speaking well, but he laughs at Sophists, who claim to teach virtue, denying that virtue can be taught. Socrates cites another kind of artist, the poet Theognis, whose name sounds like ‘knower of God,’ who contradicts himself on the topic. But “could you declare that people who are so confused about any subject,” Socrates asks, “are, in any authoritative sense, teachers of it?” (96b). “No, by Zeus,” Meno swears, unwittingly raising the question of whether the gods themselves teach excellence. He has finally been brought to wonder, however: “I really wonder, Socrates, whether perhaps there are no good men, or what could be the way of generation for good men to come to be?” (96d). 

In his answer, Socrates initially directs Meno to look not ‘up’ to the gods but ‘in,’ to his own nature. “Above all, we should apply our minds to our very selves,” undertake self-knowledge. and thereby to see “that has escaped us that it is not only when knowledge is directing that human beings act rightly and well in their affair” (96e). Since “right opinion” is as good a guide as knowledge (the man who knew how to get to the city of Larissa would get you there no better than the one who had the right opinion of how to get there), a guide who has walked every step of the way will do no better than the man of right opinion derived by perusing an accurate map (97b). The problem is that “true opinions” tend not to last; “they are not willing to stay put, but run away out of the human soul,” unless someone should bind them with causes by reasoning” (97a).  “This is why knowledge is worth more than right opinion, and, by its binding, knowledge differs from and excels right opinion” (98a). If I know the reason for something, it becomes more than a mere impression on the mind, an impression that will fade. In this, Socrates is surprisingly certain; he knows that he knows this, he says. 

It is nonetheless the case that the rightness of an opinion “presupposes the existence of truth which only epistêmē—or phronêsis—can reach” (Klein 250). Those eminent “political men,” the ones Anytus esteems, use right opinion “to straighten out their poleis,” but “they do not know what they say,” having failed to reason their way to the content of their speeches, their rhetoric (99b-c). (Is Gorgias any different? one might ask.) Like the oracle chanters and prophets and poets and artists, politicians are not rational or knowledgeable. They are radically dependent upon the Other, or others. If Anytos will be unhappy with such dependency, as Meno cautions, Socrates avers, “That doesn’t matter to me” (99e). We’ll have a talk with him, later. Socrates concludes on this note of piety: “But now, if we in this whole account both searched rightly and were speaking rightly, excellence would be neither by nature, nor something teachable, but has come by divine dispensation without intelligence in those to whom it might come, unless there should be that sort of man among the political men who could also make someone else politic” (99e-100a). That is, he now turns Meno to right, allegedly divinely inspired, pious right opinion, having shown that he is unlikely to philosophize.

But (once again) we still need to know “what excellence, itself in itself, is” (100b). That is, we will need to know whether the gods are actually dispensing excellence in two ways: are they really the origin of it? and is what they give us real excellence? 

But “now it is time for me to go” (100b), Socrates announces, with abrupt prudence. In this, Socrates imitates the action of Anytos, but with the opposite effect. No reader is likely to regret Anytos’ departure from the conversation, but many readers may want to hear more from Socrates. As for Meno, Socrates tasks him with an action. Martial your rhetorical art and “persuade your guest-friend Anytos here too about those very same things that you yourself have been persuaded so that he may be more gentle; for if you do persuade him, you will also confer upon the Athenians a benefit” (100b-c). In the event, Meno was unable to persuade Anytos of any such thing. Either his persuasive skill, learned at the feet of Gorgias, lacked the power Meno supposed it had, or he didn’t make much of an effort. And so, Athens lost Socrates.

Plato’s readers have not necessarily lost him, however. Klein concludes, “we, the readers and witnesses of the dialogue, have to continue the search for human excellence on our own” (256). In doing so, one needs to be mindful of the inclination of most fellow-citizens, individually and collectively, to resist thinking.

 

Notes

1. At this point in the dialogue, Klein interrupts his commentary with an illuminating discussion of memory and cognition as presented in other Platonic dialogues in which they figure: the Republic, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Philebus, and the Theaetetus. The Republic features the image of the “divided line” which mark four “states of the soul” (112). The line divides the intelligible, which consists of two kinds of thought, opinions and the cognized, from the visible, which consists of two kinds of visible objects, the images or surfaces of things and the “originals” of those images. The images depend upon the originals, as opinions depend, or should be made to depend, upon the cognized. Typically, we can distinguish the images of things from the visible thing themselves; Plato calls “this faculty of ours, to see images as images” eikasia (114). “We see ‘through’ an image, as it were, its trustworthy original,” an act that bring pistis or trust to our soul (114). The prisoners in the Cave manifest eikasia when they turn their heads away from the shadows of the idols and look toward the cave’s opening, toward the sunlight. On the level of thought, doxa or opinion parallels the images, dianoia or thought parallels eikasia. Thinking or reasoning governed by the principle of non-contradiction enables human beings both to make discriminations and to draw connections among the objects of thought, as seen in arithmetic, inasmuch as “in the act of counting we both separate and combine the things we count” (117). “To begin thinking means—in any conceivable case and for any conceivable purpose—to begin searching for some clarity about the matter we are dealing with” (118). The kind of eikasia exhibited in thinking, leading to noesis or insight, understanding, “could be rightly called dianoetic eikasia” (119). “It is thus that our dianoia makes the visible things depend on their intelligible originals” and it is thus that our opinions can be improved in the ‘light’ of the things we tentatively cognize—tentatively, because “the power to clarify fully the suppositions of our dianoia may not be given to mortal men” (122). On the level of dianoetic eikasia, the human soul is ‘turned around’ or converted, “mark[ing] the beginning of a new life,” the philosophic life, “tolerable only to a few” (124). Meno is not among them; he prefers not to undertake the arduous “action of learning” (172). In the Phaedo, the dialogue presenting Socrates’ last hours before his execution, “recollection” means the rational ability to relate one thing to another, as when one relates images, “the apparently equal visible things,” to “an intelligible ‘original'” (129). Here, the claim of immortality for the human soul, the ‘reincarnation’ theme seen in the Meno, comes to be seen as a continuation of the distinctively human excellence, “the effort of dianoia” in following logos or reason through subsequent generations of thinkers (149). Those who continue Socrates’ quest ‘reincarnate,’ immortalize, Socrates. “The process of ‘recollecting’ would mean nothing but the very process of learning guided by Socrates’ prescriptions” (150). This process itself is ‘immortal’ in the sense that learning “is in no way concerned with any past moment of time but is uniquely interested in the content of the knowledge to be acquired” (150). Then, in the Phaedrus, Socrates shows that “human souls, unlike those of the gods, are not quite able to see all the truth”; their knowledge must “always be tainted with ignorance” and therefore “no man can be wise” but at best only a philosopher, a lover of wisdom (151). In this process of dianoetic eikasia memory has three aspects: it retains “our immediate experience, which is based on our outer and inner sensing”; it stores knowledge; and, in the incompleteness of that knowledge, it is “the source of our desires” for more knowledge and indeed for wisdom (156). Finally, the Theaetetus explores how human beings make mistakes, form mistaken opinions, by failing to “apply our thinking in earnest” and with sufficient logos (162). Still, a certain zetetic caution or skepticism is necessary, as insight into “the highest order of things” can never be fully conveyed by “the fragmenting medium of speech,” which “is not quite capable of coping with ‘wholeness'” (168). This is why efforts to tell people the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—which is what Meno wants Socrates to do and what rhetoricians like Gorgias claim to do—are vain. A philosopher can only go so far as to tell myths better than the ones on offer from rhetoricians, better because more nearly in line with the moments of noesis they have experienced. Those myths are intended less to convey the whole truth than to “initiate an effort in the soul of men and to beget action,” as it is “in action that human excellence and its opposite reveal themselves” (171). This is what Socrates’ “myth of recollection” is for, and it conveys what Socrates does in word and deed, what he avers that he “fights” for.
2. Thus, in the Meno, “the myth of recollection” has “fulfilled its function, not that it had any effect on Meno, but it has helped us to understand Meno’s soul” (209). This leads Klein to another valuable excursus, this time into the Republic and the Timaeus. In the Republic, the education of the guardians consists first of plane geometry, then the science of numbers followed by study of “solids,” of depth, and finally of heights and motion—astronomy. This education “binds the theme of the ‘solid to the theme of the polis” (192), one feature of Socrates’ ‘ideal’ polis or ‘city in speech,’ in logos. Genuine guardians guard the polis against one-dimensionality, against allowing the regime, the politeia of the polis, from “los[ing] its ‘depth,'” abandoning its telos or purpose, which is to seek justice. In the Timaeus, Plato addresses the question of three dimensionality more extensively. To understand the cosmos, one cannot look only to the “Father,” the model of all that is, “accessible only to intellect and thought” (193), or to the “Mother,” the receptacle or indeterminate space or “room” in which all change occurs (194), but also to their “offspring,” the “visible world around us, the domain of everything we sense” (194), including human beings, who however consist not only of visible bodies but of physically invisible souls, as does all of the cosmos. “The stretching of the Soul across the Whole, which stretching amounts to the very constitution of the Universe as a ‘whole,’ is achieved by means of numbers and rations of numbers,” which we study in arithmetic, logic, and harmonics (195-196). Here again one uncovers depth, ‘solidity’ of bodies and of souls, of the Whole and of Soul. The limitation of human knowledge may be seen in the fact that intellect perceives surfaces, geometric shapes, ‘definitions.’ Intellect can, however, perceive that bodies and souls have depth, are three dimensional; a soul has “capacity,” the ability to learn, “which is its capacity to grow on proper nourishment” (199). Intellect can ‘infer’ what the soul is, on the inside. Meno has cut himself off from that self-knowledge, preferring to fill himself with mere opinions. “Socrates and Meno counter-mage each other, Socrates putting the effort of learning above everything else, Meno never relenting in his unwillingness to make that effort, an unwillingness compensated by his readiness to rely on his memory” (201). While Meno’s outside, his body, is beautiful, his inside, his soul is “ugly”; while Socrates’ outside is ugly, his inside, his soul, is beautiful, as Alcibiades recognizes, in the Symposium.