Thoughts on Plato's Meno (from Twitter)

Discussions of the doctrine of anamnesis in the Meno seem rarely to focus on the epistemic holism with which it is tightly associated. "For as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things, nothing prevents us, by remembering one thing alone… discover all the rest," (Meno 81d). So the integrity of nature and the holism of inquiry are here strictly paralleled. The eschatological dimension of anamnesis seems in this light to provide a point of entry into the circle by a "phase change" of knowledge, so that knowledge of a discursive form may arise from tacit "knowledge" (a basic example might be proprioception).

It isn't important that a reading of the Meno accept the eschatology literally, but it has to grasp the work it's doing. Similarly, the doctrine of reincarnation posits that something can be self-identical while changing any of its attributes. This is what the reading cannot ignore, even if the reader wants no truck with the doctrine as such. I think that what is inescapable in the anamnesis doctrine is this notion of a conversion of knowledge.

I also see in the Meno's parallel between the integrity of nature and the soul's integrity an echo of the Timaeus. In the Timaeus, it is a matter of the parallel between the integrity of the paradigm and of the cosmos ordered relative to it. But then, this relationship is already strictly paralleled in that between the individual soul and its paradigm, the life it has chosen. So there is a fairly tight bond between the Meno, the Timaeus and the Republic in this respect. The value of these connections, I think, is to say that the ultimate ground of knowledge must lie in the existential agency of choice. To choose the good, to experience beauty: these are epistemically indispensable—what is good, what is beautiful, are variables. This is why, before "ontology" is even fully consolidated, there is already a domain beyond ontology in Plato.