Forgot to post the link to the paper in the previous post:
The Images of Enslavement Incommensurability and in Plato's Meno
It's the second article.
I'm grateful to that Interpretation makes their back issues available. It's usually very expensive to get access to journal articles (someone explain how this makes sense for Philosophical journals).
Friday, May 6, 2011
Incommensurability in Plato's Meno
I did a quick reread of Plato's Meno (more to get a sense of the general arc from Protagoras to Gorgias to Meno) and was stuck by a few things:
1) The incommensurability of the solution to the slave-boy experiment. Certainly that couldn't be an accident. So there must be some incommensurability involved in self-education that changes who we are?
2) I was quite sure I was the slave-boy. The whole experiment seems to be a mini-dialogue from which we can learn something about our own education.
3) The end of the dialogue, in constantly pointing out that there are no teachers of virtue, is suggesting that there is no giving of virtue from one man to another: it must be a form of self-education. Do we have examples of people who have self-educated? Socrates?
(However, it also seemed to me like the slave-boy experiment shows up the absolute difficulty of self-education, since the solution in that example was impossible to arrive at for the slave-boy, without some kind of help or intervention!)
Then I read Jeffrey S. Turner's "The Images of Enslavement Incommensurability and in Plato's Meno". (Disclaimer: he was one of my undergrad philosophy teachers in Philosophy who I admired, so it was no accident that I read his article.) I'm not sure how much I would have made of these points above on my own; Turner makes some radical claims abut the intent of the dialogue that I just would not have gotten to. I wish the "seeing through" part at the end had more meat on the bones (although he admits that, for the sake of brevity, he can't pursue this in this article), but it also made a strong impression on me. (And perhaps the elusive nature of this idea is itself pedagogical.) In particular, the ideas that the form of learning that occurs is less about the truth of some philosophical proposition, and instead is a form of recognition of ones self-enslavement. Wow. These are the kinds of ideas that make philosophy the kind of life-changing discipline I always felt it should be, but it never seemed to be (admittedly, probably because of my own lack of discipline/focus/attention to detail).
I think the argument in this dialogue starts to answer some questions I had been forming:
a) Why is Socratic ignorance so important?
b) Why is the essence question so important?
c) How can simple ignorance (ie, Socratic ignorance) and the practice of asking questions change a life? Clearly, it changed Socrates' life. But I don't see how it would change my life?
Partial answer: we are enslaved in some way we're not consciously aware of, and Socratic ignorance frees us from that. We believe we are something we are not.
So: how are we enslaved? And how does this affect our lives?
1) The incommensurability of the solution to the slave-boy experiment. Certainly that couldn't be an accident. So there must be some incommensurability involved in self-education that changes who we are?
2) I was quite sure I was the slave-boy. The whole experiment seems to be a mini-dialogue from which we can learn something about our own education.
3) The end of the dialogue, in constantly pointing out that there are no teachers of virtue, is suggesting that there is no giving of virtue from one man to another: it must be a form of self-education. Do we have examples of people who have self-educated? Socrates?
(However, it also seemed to me like the slave-boy experiment shows up the absolute difficulty of self-education, since the solution in that example was impossible to arrive at for the slave-boy, without some kind of help or intervention!)
Then I read Jeffrey S. Turner's "The Images of Enslavement Incommensurability and in Plato's Meno". (Disclaimer: he was one of my undergrad philosophy teachers in Philosophy who I admired, so it was no accident that I read his article.) I'm not sure how much I would have made of these points above on my own; Turner makes some radical claims abut the intent of the dialogue that I just would not have gotten to. I wish the "seeing through" part at the end had more meat on the bones (although he admits that, for the sake of brevity, he can't pursue this in this article), but it also made a strong impression on me. (And perhaps the elusive nature of this idea is itself pedagogical.) In particular, the ideas that the form of learning that occurs is less about the truth of some philosophical proposition, and instead is a form of recognition of ones self-enslavement. Wow. These are the kinds of ideas that make philosophy the kind of life-changing discipline I always felt it should be, but it never seemed to be (admittedly, probably because of my own lack of discipline/focus/attention to detail).
I think the argument in this dialogue starts to answer some questions I had been forming:
a) Why is Socratic ignorance so important?
b) Why is the essence question so important?
c) How can simple ignorance (ie, Socratic ignorance) and the practice of asking questions change a life? Clearly, it changed Socrates' life. But I don't see how it would change my life?
Partial answer: we are enslaved in some way we're not consciously aware of, and Socratic ignorance frees us from that. We believe we are something we are not.
So: how are we enslaved? And how does this affect our lives?
Why does the essence question matter?
Read several articles lately on the Protagoras and Meno which rightly (IMO) say that Socrates is really interested in the what-is question (ie, the answer that says what the essence of a thing is) and not as interested in the what-is-one-of-those question (unless it helps him to answer the question about the essence of the thing). Why is knowing the essence of a thing so important to Socrates?
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