Ever since my social studies teacher in middle school (shout-out to Ms. Bergeron) taught me that while I took notes for class, I could have a “notes to myself” section as well – I have been using it as a technique to gather snippets of inspiration, questions, and general other musings in my journals. (My N2S headings are where half my blog ideas come from, so again, thank you Ms. Bergeron).

This quarter, I took a class called Ancient Philosophy and I have a lot of margin notes that are highlighted and circled over and over again so that I don’t forget to write about them. In this post, I want to talk about the Meno (read here) – a Socratic dialogue that tries to answer what virtue is and how it can be acquired.

Now, you might think – we get it… you are a philosophy major.  But, please bear through my pretension for a few minutes, because I want to make the case for you today, that everyone, every single person, who claims to believe in anything or has any sort of conviction, should read the Meno. Meno and most other short Socratic dialogues are pretty accessible (not accessible like, you can find them in the public domain (which you can) but accessible like, easy to understand – unlike most philosophical writings today.)

Anyway – you should read the Meno, and here’s why:

In the dialogue, while Socrates and Meno try to hash out what kind of a thing virtue is, they end up with two contradictory conclusions (not surprising in a Socratic dialogue). One argument says virtue is knowledge, and the other argument says virtue is not knowledge. Our focus here is not on virtue, but rather knowledge.

Now, we seem to be in a quandary. Socrates and Meno return to their original question of how one acquires virtue. Is it through experience or is it something that can be taught? If virtue is teachable, then it must be a kind of knowledge, but there are no apparent teachers of it – so the problem keeps growing.   

Socrates and Meno realize that perhaps people don’t need knowledge to act virtuously (or to act well). If one has knowledge, one can act well – but if one has true opinion, one can act just as well.

At the end of the day, if you are at a fork in the road, both true opinion and knowledge would be able to guide you in the right direction. BUT Socrates tells Meno that knowledge is obviously preferable to true opinion. At this point, we need to ask why? If both true opinion and knowledge can guide you to do the right thing in a situation, then why would one be preferable to the other?

Socrates explains by way of analogy. Let’s say you own a very nice house with a beautiful garden out front. And there is a majestic statue in the middle of it. True opinion is having the statue there by itself, and knowledge is having that statue tied down.

The problem isn’t that if you have the statue without a stake in the ground it’s more susceptible to disappearing (as if it will come to life and run away, or be stolen in the dead of night). It isn’t that with knowledge, you always succeed in acting well whereas with true opinion, you succeed only sometimes.

You could have the statue and it could stay there your whole life. You could always have true opinion. You could always know what to do to act well. It doesn’t seem all that important to have knowledge instead of true opinion. You still always do the right and virtuous thing! Yet Socrates insists, but if permanence isn’t the issue… then what is?

What is the difference between the statue that’s tied down, and the statue that’s always going to be there?

The answer is ownership. What matters isn’t that the statue stays in your garden, it’s that the statue is yours!

We are all living the same reality. The thoughts we have, they aren’t always ours. Sometimes, our morals (those true opinions) are shaped outside of us, they don’t really belong to us.

And sometimes, we can even lead other people with those borrowed thoughts. And we are virtuous as far as we are useful in guiding those people. But those thoughts don’t benefit us.

To have thoughts of our own, that’s hard work. But it’s the only way they are valuable.

So what’s the point? Why does it matter for everyone to read the Meno? Tie this back to the thesis Nur Banu! (this is a preemptive pun, so appreciate it in advance)

My original margin note is that this is the difference between faith by imitation, and faith by verification. We usually believe things because our parents, friends, or communities believe those things. And those things can be good but they aren’t ours until we question and inquire and prod and poke on our own to affirm or reject them.

The Meno is a must-read for everyone who claims to believe in something, because it makes you question whether your statues are simply in the garden, or tied to the ground.

PS: A serendipitous finding here is that the word for ‘creed’ in Arabic is aqeedah – and it is used to refer to the fundamentals of belief. Linguistically, ‘aqeedah’ comes from the root A-K-D which means to “tie down, fasten.” Isn’t that amazing? We are tying down our beliefs by making sure they are our own, and making sure that we are certain of them. 

Lots of balloons, 

Belle