Meno

Meno is a work by Plato (-385).

Core claims

• The Meno is not a dialogue about virtue but a demonstration that the soul is structurally incapable of being empty — making it the first clinical proof that the psyche possesses innate content, the philosophical ancestor of the collective unconscious.
• Socrates’ interrogation of the slave boy functions less as an epistemological argument than as a therapeutic intervention: it is the earliest recorded instance of educing latent knowledge from an “unconscious” subject through structured dialogue, prefiguring the analytic method by two millennia.
• The dialogue’s famous aporia — its refusal to define virtue — is not a failure but a deliberate enactment of the principle that genuine psychological transformation requires the collapse of premature certainty, aligning Plato with the depth psychological insight that not-knowing is the precondition of real knowing.

Related questions

• How does Hillman’s critique of the tabula rasa in Re-Visioning Psychology depend on the Meno’s doctrine of anamnesis, and where does Hillman diverge from Plato’s own metaphysical commitments about innate knowledge?
• In what ways does Peterson’s account in The Physics of Value Creation of Plato’s demotion of the thumos in the Republic represent a betrayal of the dialogical, non-hierarchical method Socrates employs in the Meno?
• How does Edinger’s reading of Platonic anamnesis as a prefiguration of Jungian analysis compare with Lacan’s insistence in Seminar VIII that Socratic questioning produces knowledge the subject “already has” — and what do these two readings reveal about the divergence between Jungian and Lacanian conceptions of the unconscious?

See also

• Library page: /library/ancient-roots/plato-meno/

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