2 Plato 3 · On Knowing and Not Knowing. Handed down at the Academy, from his Theaetetus and Meno
This book divides being right from knowing. In chapter 4 Plato explains the boy in the sand by a former life. This scripture does not take the former life. It takes Covenant 1.2 — where the gaze of reason falls, the many roads become one, and only then is the real born. His explanation is kept and not struck out.
3.1Meno once put a very sharp question to me.
3.2He said: how will you look for something you do not know at all?
3.3If you do not know it, you will not recognise it when you find it.
3.4And if you would recognise it, then you knew it already, and need not look.
3.5So looking is wasted: what you know needs no looking, and what you do not know cannot be found.
3.6What is good about this question? It is good because it looks like a dead end.
3.7Many men stop there for life. They say: since that is so, stop asking, and just do as it is done.
3.8"Stop asking" is the most comfortable sentence in any cave. (cf. 1 Plato 4.10)
3.9I answered him: you have taken knowing to be a thing you either have or have not, and that is how you walked into the dead end.
3.10Most of what a man has in him is half a thing: a shadow with no name, a feeling he cannot give the reason for.
3.11Looking is not going from nothing to something. Looking is making the half thing whole.
3.12A man can hardly do it alone, because he cannot see his own half thing.
3.13So someone must ask him. To ask is to turn out what he already has and show it to him.
3.14Meno did not believe me. I said: then let us take someone who has never been taught, and try.