2 Plato 3 · On Knowing and Not Knowing. Handed down at the Academy, from his Theaetetus and Meno
From the Theaetetus and the Meno. The first asks what knowledge is, asks for a whole book, and ends with no answer — which is rare among his dialogues, and is exactly what the Order values in it. The midwife is from there: he says he brings nothing to birth himself, he only delivers what is in another. The second asks whether virtue can be taught, and holds the geometry drawn in the sand with the boy. For the man, see the Gospel of Plato. This volume separates being right from knowing. In the fourth chapter Plato explains the boy in the sand by a former life; the Order does not take the former life but takes the Covenant 1.2 — where the gaze of reason falls, the many paths become one, and the real comes to be. His explanation stands and is 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.