separating the earlier fascist pursuit of an absolute beyond the bounds of bourgeoissubjectivity from the later postmodernist pursuit of a “pensée du dehors” ’ (p. 23).This ‘pensée du dehors’ is ‘[t]he postmodern turn to a thought from outside, to arefusal to accept the categories of the given even in the guise of the antique’ (p. 21).Just as Plato once reacted to the dangerous messages broadcast at Athenian dramaticfestivals, so postmodern thinkers have responded to the French modernist re-stagingof antiquity. Moving from Anouilh’s Antigone to Lacan’s reading of Sophocles’version of the tale, we interrogate the possibility of an ethical theory of pure desire.Lacan’s ethical re-reading of Antigone that seems to occlude a political understandingof the play is an issue that is addressed by M. when he turns to discuss Lacan’s readingof Plato’s Symposium. Lacan’s Plato, as M. shows, has a great deal to teach us aboutthe seductive and alluring relationship between psychoanalyst and patient. In his nextchapter M. discusses the place of Plato in the œuvre of Jacques Derrida with especialattention drawn to ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ and The Post Card. M. re-presents the nowclassic arguments of the μrst essay and then discusses the importance of the Philebusin the latter for thinking through the intellectual relationships between Plato andFreud, Freud and Lacan, and Lacan and Derrida himself. The μnal chapter considersFoucault’s care of the self. As well as considering Foucault’s relationships to Deleuze,Derrida and Lacan, this chapter, as the Appendix clariμes, examines how the politicalsigniμcances of Foucault’s discussions of Plato and his ancient heirs have beenunderplayed and mystiμed. Postmodern theory is often accused of being ‘all aboutdiscourse’, detached from the real world and all its urgent concerns. M.’s bookpowerfully shows that postmoderns like Lacan, Derrida and Foucault wereprofoundly preoccupied with making sense of the legacy of world events between1939 and 1945 (to periodise crudely) in the post-1945 period. And it was Plato (interalios) that o¶ered a way of thinking through the ancient and modern tragediesin·icted during the μrst half of the twentieth century.

University of Warwick DANIEL ORRELLSd.orrells@warwick.ac.uk

THE MENO

Ionescu (C.) Plato’s Meno. An Interpretation. Pp. xx + 194.Lanham, MD and Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007. Cased, US$65.ISBN: 978-0-7391-2025-5.doi:10.1017/S0009840X08001844

I. has presented an intelligent, thoughtful and thorough consideration of thisfascinating Platonic dialogue. She argues that its unifying theme is that virtue isknowledge or wisdom, but that this theme is occluded by Socrates’ need to addressrather ‘shallow’ interlocutors (p. xiii), whose notions of virtue, teaching and learningre·ect the non-philosophical views of the many. The dialogue, she argues, proceeds ontwo levels: (1) a superμcial level at which Socrates accommodates the views of Menoand, later, Anytus and (2) a deeper level at which Plato engages the reader.

The book contains a brief introductory chapter followed by three chapters thattrack the Meno sequentially. It concludes with two appendices that deal, respectively,with the lines that go through the centre of the μrst square drawn by Socrates in hisexchange with the slave, and with the initial hypothesis in the argument concerning

The Classical Review vol. 59 no. 1 © The Classical Association 2009; all rights reserved

60 the classical review

virtue’s teachability. In the Introduction, I. lays out the assumptions that underlie thebook. Not doubting that the order of Plato’s dialogues is fairly well established, sheregards the Meno as transitional between the early and middle dialogues in its themes,dramatic form and methodology – not, however, in that it abandons Socratic ideasand methods, but rather in that it reμnes and builds on them. She sees the Meno asuniμed: the epistemological section that is lodged between the two ethical onesactually bridges the gap between them by linking virtue to knowledge. She believes theMeno contains, in its development of the notion of recollection, allusions to‘intelligible realities’ – Platonic Forms. I. acknowledges Socrates’ ironical use offallacious and ad hominem arguments in responding to the unsophisticated thinkingof his ·awed interlocutors.

Chapter 1 argues that the early part of the Meno is its most ‘Socratic’: its concernsare ethical; it proceeds by elenchus; and it tests Meno’s ideas about virtue forconsistency, ‘purging’ his atomistic, and false, notions. Although this section does notexplicitly speak of Forms, it does nevertheless, I. contends, hint ahead to Forms in itssearch for the ‘essence’ of virtue.

In Chapter 2 I. argues that Meno’s sceptical challenge, cleansed of its ad hominemsarcasm, raises the important question how one who does not know can come toknow. She regards the myth of recollection as providing Plato’s answer; the myth isunilluminating, she argues, only when taken literally. Read metaphorically, itestablishes the possibility of attaining knowledge because of the kinship between thehuman soul and the invisible, universal, intelligible Forms that are its objects. Bysupplying the theoretical metaphysical grounding for the possibility of the eventualacquisition of knowledge, recollection encourages the pursuit of knowledge by othermethods: elenchus, hypothetical reasoning and ‘some other systematic dialecticalprocedure’ (p. 75). Socrates’ exchange with the slave is taken as proof that people can,on their own, recover from within themselves true opinions that may, some day,become knowledge.

Chapter 3 makes the case that Socrates holds μrm throughout the Meno to hisquest for the essence of virtue. I. thinks virtue emerges as a form of wisdom, andhence as something that can indeed be known and taught (though not by sophistic orcraft-like methods). It is only virtue as Meno and Anytus understand it – that is, as aset of skills that yield success in political and private ventures – that cannot be knownor taught.

In the course of commenting on the Meno, I. makes several insightful observations.She has an illuminating discussion of the signiμcance of Meno’s calling Socrates awizard and of the ways in which this appellation might be apt (pp. 30–2). She alsotakes a novel approach to reconciling the argument at 78–9 with that at 87–9 andaccounting, at the same time, for the conspicuous absence of wisdom in the μrst partof the dialogue: since genuine temperance and justice are of necessity accompaniedby wisdom, it follows that acquiring good things temperately and justly ‘presupposesalready the presence of wisdom’ (p. 118). Notable, too, is I.’s combining Meno’sominous mention (at 80b) of the danger to Socrates of his leaving Athens, withAnytus’s warning (at 94e–95a) of the dangers of his remaining there: no place onearth, it seems, is safe for Socrates (p. 133).

Some of I.’s ideas, however, though intriguing at μrst glance, are perhaps lesssuccessful. She says that Socrates’ movement in the Meno from contrasting two cities(Thessaly and Athens) to contrasting two men (Meno and Socrates) ‘anticipates theRepublic, which proceeds from investigating virtue in the city to investigating it in thesoul’ (p. 6). Another is her suggestion that the reason Socrates uses bees to illustrate

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his point that things that di¶er from one another may nevertheless share the sameessence is that ‘bees are particularly famous for a communitarian and cooperativemode of life, and thus the illustration anticipates the argument for the integrative andunitary relation among virtues that Socrates will develop later on (88a–89e)’ (p. 12). Athird is her argument that ‘Socrates himself seems to envision virtue as some sort ofruling or at least as dependent on it (86d6–8)’ because ‘the same statement [that virtueis the ability to rule men] is implicitly made by Socrates’ (p. 15), when he chastisesMeno for failing to rule himself.

On several occasions, I. marshals the arguments on both sides of a critical questiononly, in the end, to o¶er an unsatisfying compromise or to dismiss the question asinconsequential. Among the questions she deals with in this way are: whetherSocrates prefers the μrst or second deμnition of shape (p. 22); whether or notSocrates’ reformulation of Meno’s paradox omits the part about knowing one hasfound what one was looking for (p. 44); whether knowledge is a matter of directexperience or of reasoning (p. 142); whether eudoxia, introduced at 99b11, is goodrepute or true opinion (p. 149); and whether the lines in the diagram are transversalsor diagonals (pp. 169–70).

I. sees no irony in Socrates’ purported attempt to help Meno’s slave ‘recollect’ theline upon which a square double the size of the original square is constructed. Yet it isone thing for scholars who deny that Socrates in the Meno is ever disingenuous to takethe demonstration utterly seriously; it is quite another for a reader who sees thedialogue as su¶used with irony to do so. It is here, if anywhere, that Socrates’ tongueis in his cheek (‘be on guard to see if you μnd me teaching and instructing him at anypoint, rather than asking him his opinions’ [84d1–2]).

I.’s view that there are Forms at work in this dialogue is insu¸ciently substantiated.First, it is not at all clear that the myth presupposes Forms: neither the soul’s havingbeen in Hades (which is the realm of the ‘unseen’ only in the Phaedo, and even thereonly by way of a play on words), nor the alleged ‘a¸nity’ between the intelligenthuman soul and intelligible objects (‘All nature is akin’ does not obviously entail thatthe soul and the intelligibles are akin) supports the presence of Forms. Nor, second,are Forms supported by the slave’s presumed advance (pp. xvi, 66, 170) beyond thesquares, triangles and diagonals of the diagram he sees to all squares, triangles anddiagonals, let alone to invisible, unchanging, purely conceptual versions of them:there is, in fact, no evidence in the dialogue that the slave makes either transition. Andeven if we assume that the slave is able to transfer what he learned about this square toall others, we still have little reason to suppose that he can do so only because squaresare ‘ideal mathematical objects’ (p. 81). After all, it never occurs to someone wholearns to tie his shoes that it is only this pair of shoes to which his new-found skillapplies.

In the μnal analysis, what I. takes the Meno to be teaching is the value of the life ofrecollection, ‘a life of constant dialectical reexamination of our moral beliefs’ (p. 153;cf. p. xviii). This conclusion, which suggests not so much that virtue is knowledge asthat it is the lifelong search for knowledge, accords well with I.’s recognition that ‘themoral issue is … more complex and more di¸cult to solve than the mathematicalproblem’ (p. 169; cf. p. 82). If this is so, however, one wonders if the Meno hasprovided su¸cient assurance that virtue, and not just geometry, can be known andtaught.

Lehigh University ROSLYN WEISSrw03@lehigh.edu

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