From Plato’s viewpoint, knowledge, herein the true belief of an account, can be learned
or retrieved through recollection or anamnesis with assistance. While Plato’s theory of recollection is often associated with his work Meno, this paper seeks to explore Plato’s engagement with this idea by analyzing a broader set of texts and argues that recollection is demonstrated through the very practice of dialectic itself.
1. Laches: Recollection of Courage
In Plato’s Laches, Socratesquestions Laches’ claim that courage is endurance by questioning the fundamentality, thus the latent knowledge, that grounds his claim. Through his questioning, Socrates forces Laches, the titular interlocutor, to confront a definitional complication: If courage is endurance, why isn’t endurance invariably a fine and admirable quality like courage?[1]
Such a form of examination is often known as Socratic elenchus— a method of eliciting truth through a question-and-answer dialectic form. An elenchus ends when an interlocutor presents an opinion entirely contradictory to anyof his formerly presented opinions. Moreover, for this process to be effective, Socrates relies on two premises. First, during every stage of elenchus, Laches must truthfully present his own opinions. As such, he is compelled to confront the flawed nature of his own belief system when Socrates exposes contradictions or inconsistencies of Laches’ claims. Second, Socrates presupposes that Laches innately has the knowledge of courage[2], which Laches can retrieve by undergoing the process of elenchus.[3] In other words, by refuting unsuccessful definitions, noting contradictions, and questioning Laches’ true belief, Socrates intends to stimulate Laches’ memory of his preexistent knowledge.
However, the elenchus does not guarantee the acquisition of truth with complete certainty. With every definitional dialogue, Socrates supposes that his interlocutor has the true belief about a concept and that, after the false beliefs are eliminated and filtered, the interlocutor can display a true belief that entails the negation of each of the problematic ones.[4] This method thus depends heavily on recollection and one’s preexistent knowledge.
2. Meno’s Slave: Geometry as Recollection
Plato’s Meno also highlights the idea of recollection. In the dialogue, Socrates questions Meno’s slave about a geometric problem— how to find a square double in the area of any given square. Although the boy has no prior geometric knowledge, Socrates believes that the boy can recollect this knowledge through the elenchus examination.
Initially, the boy asserts that doubling the side length (from 2ft to 4ft) will suffice[5], but Socrates’ questioning reveals to him that doubling the length will quadruple the area (16ft²):
Socrates: How big is it then? Is it not four times as big? — Of course.
Socrates: Is this square then, which is four times as big, its double? — No, by Zeus.
Socrates: How many times bigger is it? — Fourtimes.
Socrates: Then, my boy, the figure based on a line twice the length is not double but four times as big? — You are right.[6]
Here, elenchus aids recollection. After Socrates draws diagonal lines,splitting the square into triangles, the boy finally intuits that the diagonal, a geometric form, holds the answer:
Socrates: That is, on the line thatstretches from corner to corner of the four-foot figure? — Yes. — Clever men call this the diagonal, so that if diagonal is its name, you say that the double figure would be that based on the diagonal? — Most certainly, Socrates.[7]
The boy’s initial errors eliminate false paths, and the truth emerges when he aligns himself with his latent knowledge of the idea of the square.
3. The Negative Knowledge
Another essential feature of Socratic questioning is that it operates via negation. Negative judgments (knowing what something isn’t) logically require prior positive knowledge of what it is. Therefore, when Socrates rejects Laches’ definition of courage, he implicitly puts forth a premise that Laches must have already possessed knowledge of courage— as a pure, self-sustainable universal concept instead of a particular courageous instance. Moreover, since it is impossible to witness pure courage in the physical world (after all, any courageous act can also appear as timid, given varying metrics), it must preexist. Thus, Socrates’ elenchus works onlyif Laches accesses his subconscious to retrieve the form of courage as a universal idea.[8] This recollection lays the foundation for dialectic to succeed.
Socrates’ method is like a search algorithm: input a definition (e.g., beauty is symmetry), test it against negative cases (e.g., ugly symmetries), reject inconsistencies, refine the claim, and repeat. Through this method, the concept of beauty is learned and retrieved not through active discovery but the isolation of it from everything that beauty isn’t. Thus, the idea of beauty preexists before any definition of the concept and can be recollected via trial-and-error of human beings to attach the universal idea (beauty) to particular realities (e.g., beautiful architectures and people).
When Socrates asks what justice is, hedoes not seek particular examples. Instead, he demands a leap into the “other world” of generalities. This shift from “who wronged me” to “what justice is” is only possible if the mind can separate the universal from its particular instances.[9] But how?
One potential way to interpret Plato’s argument is that particulars depend on universals. One cannot recognize a just act without already understanding justice itself. The act of asking what X is is itself a proof of recollection. It’s an attempt to articulate what the human subconscious already grasps. The more abstract the question, the more it relies on prenatal knowledge since no sensory experience can generate such a concept. In early Socratic definitional dialogues, Socrates’ search for definitions presupposes a universal standard rather than the particulars Meno listed:
Socrates: The same is true in the case of thevirtues. Even if they are many and various, all of them have one and the same form which makes them virtues, and it is right to look to this when one is asked to make clear what virtue is.[10]
For dialectic and Socratic elenchus to work, recollection must hold true. Every successful interrogation presumes the interlocutor’s prior contact with universal concepts. Without this, the Socratic questioning would be meaningless. In other words, learning is not a mere sense-driven experience. If it were, the dialectic process would infinitely regress into irresolvable conflicts. Instead, the Socratic method traces all premises to their source: the universal concepts Socrates believed his interlocutors had always known.
This is the foundation of every “What is X?” question ever uttered.
[1] Benjamin Jowett, trans.,“Laches,” The Project Gutenberg EBook of Laches, by Plato, August 22, 2008, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1584/1584-h/1584-h.htm.
[2] Courage here refers to an abstract concept, an idea, instead of particular courageous instances.
[3] Gregory Vlastos, “Elenchusand Mathematics: A Turning-Point in Plato’s Philosophical Development,” The American Journal of Philology 109, no. 3 (1988): 362–96,https://doi.org/10.2307/294891.
[4] Vlastos, “Elenchus and Mathematics: A Turning-Point in Plato’s Philosophical Development.”
[5] Plat. Meno 82e
[7] Grube, Plato: Five Dialogues.
[9] Burnyeat, “Plato’s Theoryof Recollection & Forms.”
[10] Grube, Plato: Five Dialogues.
Works Cited
Burnyeat, Myles. “Plato’s Theory of Recollection & Forms.” Philosophy Overdose, March
6, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3-IONT-RRM.
Grube, George Maximilian Anthony, trans. Plato: Five Dialogues. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002.
Jowett, Benjamin, trans. “Laches.” The Project Gutenberg EBook of Laches, by Plato,
August 22, 2008. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1584/1584-h/1584-h.htm.
Vlastos, Gregory. “Elenchus and Mathematics: A Turning-Point in Plato’s Philosophical Development.” The American Journal of Philology 109, no. 3 (1988): 362–96.https://doi.org/10.2307/2948
