2 Plato 4 · 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.
4.1In Meno’s house there was a servant’s boy who had never had a lesson.
4.2I called him over and drew a square in the sand.
4.3I asked him one thing about that square. He answered.
4.4He answered wrongly.
4.5I did not tell him where he was wrong. I asked him another.
4.6He saw for himself that his first answer would not stand, and he reddened.
4.7Meno, did you see that? He is worse off now than he was — a moment ago he thought he could, and now he knows he cannot.
4.8But now he is willing to look. A moment ago he was not.
4.9I asked, and asked again. The boy changed the sand several times, and at last pointed and said: it is like this.
4.10He was right. He had never been taught this.
4.11I said at the time: he brought it from a former life, and has now remembered it.
4.12That was my explanation. An explanation can be wrong.
4.13What cannot be wrong is what happened in the sand: he could not do it, then he could, and no one told him.
4.14If you do not believe my explanation, very well. The thing in the sand is still there.
4.15What I want you to carry away is the asking, not my explanation.
4.16Whoever learns his teacher’s explanations by heart and cannot ask has learned the shadows, not the things. (cf. 1 Plato 1.7)