[BLANK_AUDIO] This lesson is running a bit long, but you know what? I'm okay with cutting things a bit short concerning this third and final section of the dialogue. There's two reasons for this. First, I think I did a pretty good job in my book. Well, I should be a bit more specific. I think, actually, some of my chapter of commentary on the Mino is, well, not so right. There's an assignment for you. Read my chapter on the Mino. And notice how I say some things there that are maybe inconsistent with what I've said just now in this lesson. Hint, I used to think he took the reincarnation stuff more seriously, and that he was seriously driving towards Euclidean geometry as a model for ethics. I sort of talked myself out of that. But I think the stuff I say, starting on page 203 going to 212, the last few sections, especially the luck stuff. The black swan stuff. My leadership for dummies jokes are really funny if I do say so myself. I also think it reads better on the page than it would play as a lecture. So I recommend you read it if you want my sincere opinions about what Plato is really getting at in part three of this dialogue. But my main reason for thinking it's okay to be a bit short with part three. Is I think, in a way, the dialogue was built to let me hand it off to you at this point. We start with virtue. We staggered around with that for awhile not getting much of anywhere. Then we thought about math and geometry. That gave us some perspective. Some distance. Maybe it gave us too much distance. Your mileage may vary. When we return to virtue. Has all that thinking about math changed your mind about anything? Well, that's for you to say, not me. Let me give you just a few thoughts and that'll be it for this lesson. We meet a new character, Oneidas. He's sort of funny, but not too hard to size up. There's some back story here. Oneidas is ultimately going to be one of Socrates' prosecutors. And he kind of threatens Socrates in this style, and he tells him to watch his mouth. But apart from that, he's a straightforward guy. He has very conventional conservative attitudes about virtue. He says that you can trust any gentleman in Athens, any good man and true, to teach young men virtue. He doesn't trust this fancy philosophy stuff. He knows the Sophists can't be trusted, even though he's never met any of them. Socrates makes fun of that, asking him if he's a prophet, or a wizard, a mantis, that he should be able to know who is good and bad without even meeting them. Oneidas doesn't really appreciate the sarcasm. Anyway, there's only one feature of part three that does make parts of it hard to follow. Per the end of the last video, Socrates does seem to be wrestling with a methodological problem. We don't really have simple axioms we can start with. We sort of have to start in the middle with our uncertain opinions about virtue and about whether it can be taught. So there's a certain degree of hypothetical thinking and there's hypothetical thinking about how hypothetical thinking is even possible about this stuff. Let me say that again. Socrates and Meno are hypothesizing about how it's possible to hypothesize effectively about virtue. At the same time that they are actually hypothesizing about virtue, and that's just confusing. It's like trying to use a possibly malfunctioning tool to calibrate it's own function. I leave the intricate details to you. Good for the soul to crack your head against this stuff. Let me point out just a few high points above this somewhat confusing methodological flow below. Socrates does get around to proposing a hypothetical definition of virtue. It is mindfulness. Virtue is mindfulness, at least in our translation. The word could have been translated wisdom, practical wisdom. But it seems reasonable to get the more brainy conscious connotations of mindful in there. Socrates' argument is a bit sketchy, if you ask me. I encourage you to verify that for yourself. But the gist of his conclusion is rather intuitive. Take any virtue you like. Courage, generosity, moderation, cleverness. Oh, and let's throw in riches and other material goods like that. Sounds sort of funny to call being rich a virtue. But we do say it's good to be rich. Why? Because you can exchange your money for goods and services, that's why. But Socrates makes the point that all these things. The individual virtues, the individual goods, are only sometimes good, sometimes bad. Being courageous that is, rushing fearlessly into battle. Will just get you killed sometimes. Being rich can be a curse, because it gives you more power to buy stuff that isn't good for you. If that's what you're inclined to do. In general, being rich can really mess with your head. Even being clever isn't necessarily good. Meno was kind of clever. He seems to use it mostly as a crutch to keep himself from ever having to actually, you know, learn anything. Being moderate is not a good strategy in an emergency when extreme measures are called for. Being generous is good, except when people take advantage of your generosity. And so on down the line. Socrates doesn't put it this way exactly but his point is that all these so called virtues are just heuristics that may fail or may interlock with other virtues in overall dysfunctional fashion. What's a heuristic? Some people aren't going to know that word. A good rule of thumb. That's what a heuristic is. A simple method that often works, but doesn't always work. But virtue, excellence, that can't be something that is sometimes good and sometimes not. Can it? Virtue isn't a heuristic, is it? Virtue is always good. By definition, well we don't actually have a definition, but that sounds right. Therefore virtue must be having the knowledge of when to exhibit all these things that are sometimes good, sometimes bad, and when not to exhibit them. The puzzle here, as you probably immediately realize, is this doesn't sound remotely psychologically realistic. If I'm a generous person by nature, or a cleaver person, or courageous. Well, it's not like I chose those character traits. Much less reasoned myself into them. Much less can I rationally select to turn them on or off like a light switch. And by the way, Socrates, there is such a thing as over thinking a problem. A lot of the time if you think too hard about things work, like what your feet are doing when you're running a race, well that's an excellent recipe for tripping over your own feet. So even mindfulness, like everything else, can go wrong in a pinch. Conclusion, if virtue is having the rational capacity to monitor all this stuff, and fine tune its operation at all times. Then no one has virtue. It has nothing to do with human beings. Indeed, let's make it worse while we're at it. Socrates gets me to agree that being virtuous means being useful. Presumably to other people. Virtuous people are a blessing to their communities, not a cursing on them. That sounds about right, doesn't it? But think about how complicated this gets. Let's go back to the good old bee case. Suppose, this is a toy example, bear with me here, that a healthy hive contains one queen, six workers, and three drones. Now, I hold up a queen and ask, is this not a virtuous bee? Well of course. She's the queen, top of the heap, A number one. She's indispensable to her hive. Wow, I want to be queen. But wait, if there are no other queens, that's right. But if there's already another queen, then maybe this new one is redundant, or positively disruptive to the harmony of the hive, the colony. Being queen may be a great gig, but being an extra queen is presumably unvirtuous in bee terms. So you can't see excellence in this picture at all, without panning back to take in the whole hive. Apply that point, to human society which as many important sociologists have said is complicated. There's all sorts of different sorts of people about the place. And the good ones, I guess those are those that are good for themselves and other folks and the bad ones are bad for themselves and other folks. And we think we can tell that just by looking at them individually? That's like trying to say whether an individual machine part is functioning without understanding the overall mechanism. Ooh, this gear must be working really well. It's so shiny. People can look shiny too. He's courageous. He must be virtuous. We admire courage, well. Do we need another guy around the place who was prepared to rush into battle? Or do we already have enough of those? Too many, maybe. Do you see where I'm going with this? If virtue is mindfulness, then that implies an incredibly heavy rational burden. Much more than any individual can plausibly bare. And, if in, in addition, we have to judge not just individuals. But individuals within the ecologies of their whole societies? Well, that just makes the sort of thing that no individual could ever see. So is Plato just crazy? He has this hubristic, rationalistic, top heavy vision of what human excellence is. Some kind of big brained constant calculation of everything. I guess if you believe all that reincarnation stuff. All of nature is akin, and we need know what, but one thing innately to draw out all the rest. Maybe Plato is really tempted by that astonishing vision. In which case, the rest of us might want to get off that bus. But there's a more modest way to take it. We want to understand virtue. Since virtuous peoples are good for themselves and other people, this is in effect, a sociological question. But that's hard, so we instinctively substitute a simpler one. Who do we admire upon a pedestal? Who do I look up to? Whose biography do I want to read so I can be a great person myself? But if we think a little more about it, maybe we realize that a rational approach to this question is going to result not just in a difficult answer to our question. But a different question needing to be asked. You start out scratching in that dirt of individual biography, nudged along by personal ambition. But what is virtue? That really only makes sense as a question if it's an invitation to ask a different question. Something about sociology or political science? What is the ideal society, the healthy society? How could you ever know what a good person is, apart from that? Gosh, I wonder whether anyone has written about that. Well, hey, Plato's Republic, but that's next lesson.
