Plato's Meno

By: Plato

Narrated by: William Sigalis, Al Anderson, Travis Murray, Alex Panagopoulos

A dialogue between Socrates and Meno probes the subject of ethics. Can goodness be taught? If it can, then we should be able to find teachers capable of instructing others about what is good and bad, right and wrong, or just and unjust. Socrates and Meno are unable to identify teachers of ethics, and we are left wondering how such knowledge could be acquired. To answer that puzzle, Socrates questions one of Meno’s servants in an attempt to show that we know fundamental ideas by recollecting them.

Plato lived in Athens, Greece. He wrote approximately two-dozen dialogues that explore core topics that are essential to all human beings. Although the historical Socrates was a strong influence on Plato, the character by that name that appears in many of his dialogues is a product of Plato’s fertile imagination. All of Plato’s dialogues are written in a poetic form that his student Aristotle called "Socratic dialogue." In the twentieth century, the British philosopher and logician Alfred North Whitehead characterized the entire European philosophical tradition as "a series of footnotes to Plato."

Philosophy for Plato was not a set of doctrines but a goal - not the possession of wisdom but the love of wisdom. Agora Publications offers these performances based on the assumption that Plato wrote these works to be performed by actors in order to stimulate additional dialogue among those who listen to them.

©2020 SAGA Egmont (P)2020 SAGA Egmont

"What is Virtue and/or Excellence?"

This conversational text was surprisingly easy to follow, and primarily because it employed more than one narrator. The voice actor for Plato sounds like a conniving old man while the one for Meno sounds like a lazy collegiate stoner of whom both are Americans or Canadians.

The dialogue had opened itself with the question “What is virtue?” but the two main characters struggled to differentiate between a definition of “(moral) virtue” and a definition of “(personal) excellence.” Plato attached the opening question to a curious analogy of bees when he asked “Do all types [or species] of bees share a common feature, and if so, do all types of virtue [of all humans] share a common feature?” Both men have not really answered the question even though Meno always valued honor like most ancient contemporaries had, but in my opinion, the answer is yes, that is, the common thread among all types of virtue is selfless sacrifice upon which honor can build and develop itself.

Halfway through the book, Plato brings a third person into the discussion after which the former realizes that the latter was able to reach conclusions based on knowledge that he had never gained; therefore, Plato believes that “the [human] soul is immortal” and that the soul of the the third person had once belonged to a fourth person or several. Personally, I believe in the subconscious mind and in the undiscovered wisdom therein because we humans use way less than half of our brains, and even though I am open-minded to the possibility of reincarnation, I know that if the theory of reincarnation or relayed knowledge were true, it would however partially delay the question rather than answer the question. But even so, I also know that wisdom and knowledge are not the same thing and that wisdom can be inherited if not reincarnated; as a result, it is perfectly possible for the aforementioned third person to reach a profound conclusion with access to minimal knowledge.

Lastly, the two main people conclude that teaching cannot exist without teachers and students, but I know that there are some things that one can neither teach nor study because one must learn these things entirely by oneself and often through first-hand experience or hands-on practice/experimentation. For example, this audiobook is the first of five Socratic dialogues to which I am listening among many Platonic and Aristotelian books and lectures on Ancient-Greek Philosophy.