Theme Of Justice In Meno

The Meno poses seemingly unanswerable questions, as the mercenary Meno meets with Socrates in his search for virtue. From Meno’s perspective, their looping and circuitous conversation attempts to come to a clean, digestible close for Meno to take with him and apply to his own life. Socrates, however, is frustrated with Meno’s inability to change his way of thinking about the questions that are being asked of him. The flaws in this dialogue are key to the purpose of the Meno. While there are no final answers to the meaning of virtue, there are lessons that can be extracted from the Socratic method. Lessons in the theme of justice serve as effective contemplation within the dialogue that provide insight into virtue.
There are numerous occasions …show more content…
Justice serves as a foil to the idea Meno had, that any man who is in power is a man of virtue. Meno also finds that obtaining nice objects of silver and gold and creating good things for oneself is virtuous. “...or does it make no difference, to you, but even if someone should provide himself with these things unjustly, would you still call these things virtue?”(p. 13, line 156). To this, Meno says that if the riches of gold and silver and things that are accepted as good are acquired unjustly, they must not have virtue. Socrates once again cites justice behind the actions of something that Meno declared to be virtuous. Socrates’ use of justice as a requirement for something to be of virtue unravels a belief held by Meno, who blindly agrees to Socrates’. In the following portion of the text, the frustration builds to the highest degree and the conversation reaches a point of contention. The progress that once seemed like a possibility has regressed back to where the dialogue started, a symptom of Meno’s inability to think outside of his own ideas of virtue. The following segment of the dialogue features the geometry experiment. Socrates knows that he is looping around and around, and decides to completely deviate from the mental rut that the conversation has created. Meno could continue to list different things that he finds to be of virtue and Socrates could continue to refute those things because of qualifiers that he claims to be virtuous. Instead of continuing to run in circles, Socrates decides to consider knowledge to try and show Meno why he is wrong. The boy enters and Socrates asks questions of basic language to the boy in order to double the area of a square. The questions that Socrates asks of the boy are eliciting responses to correctly answer the math problem. While the boy did not have the