Platonismo

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===== SALLIS (BEING LOGOS) – TODO E PARTES (MENON 71E-74B) =====
Meno offers three successive answers to the question “What is virtue?” In examining these it is imperative that we avoid assuming in advance that we know in general what constitutes an appropriate answer to this kind of question. If such answers are to be designated as “definitions,” we must take care that this translation does not cover over the issue of the questioning and substitute for it the presumptive self-evidence of a traditional word. Such care is necessary inasmuch as the search for an answer to the question “What is virtue?” is at the same time a determination regarding what kind of speaking (legeo: cf. 76 a, b, 77 b, 78 b; epein: cf. 76 d) (69) is constitutive of an appropriate response to such questioning.

According to Meno’s first answer, the virtue of a man consists in managing the city’s affairs capably, while the virtue of a woman consists in properly conducting her household. Meno adds, without specifying them, that there is another virtue for a child, another for an old man, another for a slave, etc. (71e-72a). Socrates immediately poses his objection: Meno has presented him with a swarm of virtues whereas he asked only for one; and Meno has failed to present precisely that one virtue for which Socrates asked—he has failed to present the one in which all members of the swarm are the same, the being (ousia), the eidos, which makes all of them to be virtues. Meno has presented the many rather than the one in which they belong together; he has presented only the parts of virtue, not the whole. And, Socrates observes, it is the one, the whole, which “ought to be kept in view by anyone who answers the question ‘What is virtue?’ ” (72 c-d). An appropriate answering must somehow proceed in relation to a condition in which the whole is held in view.

There follows a protracted explanation (72a-73c) by Socrates of his seemingly straightforward objection and of what is sought in answer to the question, “What is virtue?”—an explanation which, if regarded only in terms of such intent, appears almost tedious and out of keeping with Plato’s usual dramatic economy, even if it is granted that the need which Socrates presumably sees for such explanation serves to underscore Meno’s ignorance, to stress that he not only has no answer but fails entirely to understand what is asked for in the question. In its full intent, however, the explanation is not a mere repetition of Socrates’ objection to Meno’s answer but, on the contrary, a development of that objection—that is, a development of the problem of whole and parts. What Socrates, in effect, shows is that, in spite of this objection that Meno provided only a swarm of virtues, there is, in fact, readily evident in this swarm a certain unity. Socrates proceeds to collect the swarm into its unity: in the only two cases which Meno explained, the virtue of a man and that of a woman, virtue was presented as a matter of properly directing or governing whatever it is appropriate for the person to (70) direct in view of his particular station. In more general terms it is a matter of the proper practice of one’s art (techne)—though Socrates is quick to add that such practice requires moderation and justice, that it requires certain virtues. The obvious difficulty here, the same difficulty which Socrates turns against Meno in the latter’s next definition—namely that virtue is being defined in terms of virtues—does not, however, entirely veil the definition which Socrates is suggesting: that virtue has to do with the pre-condition for the proper practice of any art. But Meno was oblivious to the question and to the whole for which it asked; he saw only the parts, and only now that the whole has been brought into view by Socrates can he venture the attempt to define virtue as a whole. Yet, in bringing this whole into view Socrates has been reticent to a degree sufficient to allow him to remain with the task of evoking from Meno a sense for the question and sufficient to permit Meno the illusion that the subsequent definition is his own.

Indeed, in a sense it is his own. Virtue, he now says, is “simply the capacity to govern men” (73 c). Again Socrates objects—again in essentially the same terms. He asks whether virtue, so defined, applies to a child or to a slave; the point is, of course, that virtue pertains to the practice of any art, not just to the art of the ruler as Meno has implicitly assumed. Meno’s second answer, though formulated as a definition of the whole, captures at best only a part; in place of that whole which Socrates brought into view it substitutes a part. For Meno the whole is still not in view in the appropriate way even though in a sense his answer is, by means of Socrates’ prelude to it, directed towards the whole. It is in one sense, however, even inferior to the first definition which, though it too delivered only parts, did not in its way of formulation lay claim to grasping the whole and which, therefore, at least escaped that blatant disparity between what is claimed and what is actually accomplished that characterizes Meno’s second answer.

Socrates proceeds immediately to bring another objection to bear on Meno’s definition of virtue as the capacity to govern men: he insists that one must add to this statement the qualification “justly but not otherwise”—that, in other words, the activity of (71) governing men is virtuous only if it is itself governed (cf. Gorgias 491d). Meno agrees to this qualification on the ground that “justice is virtue” (73d), to which Socrates retorts that justice is not virtue but rather a virtue alongside others such as wisdom, courage, and moderation. The outcome is, therefore, that the discussion has led to the same problem encountered in the case of Meno’s first answer; it has led to the discovery of several virtues rather than virtue itself, of parts rather than the whole.

Just prior to Meno’s third answer to the question “What is virtue?” Socrates urges Meno to “stop making many out of one, as the humorists say when somebody breaks a plate.” He adds, “Just leave virtue whole and sound and tell me what it is... ” (77 a). Here Socrates makes it explicit that it is the problem of whole and parts which is the source of the difficulty involved in both of the answers which Meno has given. In both cases Meno has delivered only parts of virtue, not the whole for which Socrates asked, although, indeed, as Socrates suggests without elaborating, there is a difference between the kind of parts yielded by the two attempts to answer the question (74 a). Whereas the first answer presented virtue strictly in reference to those individuals whose virtue it would, in each case, be (largely, but not exclusively, in function of the art practiced by each)—the second answer (as made evident in Socrates’ second objection to it) yielded parts of virtue not in this sense but in the sense of the various virtues (such as justice, moderation, courage); in the latter case the partition of virtue is not a partition with respect to individual men or groups of men.

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