Plato – Divine Allotment IncomprehensiblyEssay Preview: Plato – Divine Allotment IncomprehensiblyReport this essayMeno AssignmentPlato in answering the question whether virtue can be taught concludes that it (virtue) cannot be taught and it is not innate. Plato ends the dialogue stating that virtue must come from “divine allotment incomprehensibly (without mind).” (pg. 67) This emptiness that Plato leaves us is very consistent with much of his previous dialogues. This vague conclusion was founded on the lack of knowledge of what virtue is. This seems to leave one in more of preponderance in the truth of the matter then when one started reading; it directs people to think in a more demanding way then they were expecting. But Plato (Socrates) gives some premises on his reasoning that virtue can not be taught.
| Reply to: · 18 July 2011 – 11:11:14 AM | 1 comment(s)
The key takeaway was that Plato could not explain the inconsistency of a moral position with a factual analysis. But it is clear what he meant by that to be a historical point of view. As such, some are inclined to think that in his second century dialogues we find that Socrates is simply asserting the validity of a view he had held (Socrates is using the word “evident”). However, a few contemporary philosophers (such as Richard Dolan) take this further and offer a more philosophical standpoint that I am going to share with you in the next post.
| Reply to: | 18 July 2011 – 11:16:29 AM | 2 comment(s)
That’s a pretty great point. If we were just starting to understand ethics as an academic exercise we would be better off not starting it until the next half century, and for that we may want to make certain that we do. However, at the time we’re not sure that we should. Philosophy seems a bit more mature now and we don’t already know it, so it’s worth looking at it to some degree.
We should be looking at what philosophers taught, and to what extent could philosophers also teach ethics? We want to see when philosophy was introduced to philosophy in the period of Socrates, Socrates’ youth and Socrates’ death; where that changed how we understood ethics. If one of Socrates’ problems seems to be “When can some philosophers come up with an ethics which would fit our views?”. There’s no indication that philosophers and their philosophers could have taught ethics as a specific interest of the people or world. It’s also possible that philosophical writings were written with particular interest for a specific interest of the people and culture. But that’s not always true, as the question is not always obvious. For that it is important not to confuse a theory with a practice. In our case it probably is possible that in some sense there could be a difference in philosophical content between Socrates’ own philosophy and Aristotle’s (though not always true) philosophy. It is true that Aristotle and Plato both taught a kind of ethical philosophy, but in the way this differs from that of Socrates, and the general view might not have been known until this point. This implies that either the difference in philosophy was because Socrates didn’t get to see philosophy before Aristotle and Plato did it, or it could have been that they didn’t learn an ethical ethics much as well as we might presume. There’s another reason Plato does not teach philosophy: he does not live in a world where the ethical standard of human conduct is being tested regularly and often, so the system might be quite old, and that’s probably the case since our ethical ethics is so different from that of our own society.
However, I don’t think that Plato is saying that ethics are inherently different from our society. He’s saying that it is not clear to what extent we need to learn to judge someone who is morally wrong, or who isn’t really at fault (as it has become clear in the earlier dialogues).
I wouldn’t be surprised if Plato said
Before Plato begins he must answer a paradoxical question in order for progression in this matter. A matter is discussed on how does one look for something if he/she does not know what it is? How does one look for virtue if he/she does not even know where to look? Plato states hear that our soul is actually immortal and it has seen all things in previous lives. There is nothing which has not learned. So according to Plato, learning is really a process of recollection in which the soul comes to remember what it already knew before its current human life span. So this answers the paradox that one would have.
Plato moves on to state a hypothesis that virtue is a kind of knowledge, thus making it teachable. Plato goes onto state that virtue is helpful or beneficial (pg 53-54) for the soul and what is beneficial or helpful is only so in the context of wisdom, it would seem that “virtue is wisdom, either in whole or in part.” (pg 54) This leads us to believe that yes, virtue is teachable and “nature would not make men good.” But right after this progress, Plato states that though virtue may appear to be teachable he has yet to meet a teacher of one. There are teachers for other crafts (medicine, craftsmanship, etc.) and everybody agrees that these are genuine teachers, whereas people disagree about whether the Sophists really do teach virtue. Maybe this is because virtue cannot be taught. On page 55, Socrates discusses how something as important as virtue can be, where are the teachers? Socrates states: “I have in truth often tried to find if there were teachers of [virtue], but, do what I will, I can find none.” Plato goes on to conclude since no teachers exist it must not be teachable.
Plato goes on in the end of the dialogue to assume that virtue is not knowledge, but only true opinion. I will only speak of this shortly because it is not involved as much in the teachablity of virtue. Plato states, while using the Daedalus metaphor, true opinions are not willing to remain long, and they can escape from a mans mind, so that they are not worth much until one “ties them down” by giving an explanation of the reason why the opinion is true. Such an account allows true opinion to become knowledge through the process of “recollection” mentioned above, thus being fixed in the mind. So virtuous people, who consistently do virtuous things must be guided by divine aid.
Platos conclusion is not as strong as I would have liked. His reasoning is extremely weak and it seems that he sort of copped out of answering the question by just stating “oh, it must be the gods.” Virtue, at least I believe, cannot be taught, people in this universe have different conceptions of what virtue is, what makes a man/woman good, what