Conversations with the Torpedo Fish: A Methodological Reading of the Paradox concerning the Impossibility of Knowing in Plato’s Meno and Symposium

Abstract

This article offers a methodological reading of two Platonic scenes in which the problem of beginning philosophical inquiry arises when its object has not yet been defined: Socrates’ inquiry with Meno in the dialogue that bears his name and the refutation of Agathon’s encomium in the Symposium. In the Meno, Socrates’ demand that one first answer the question “what is x?” leads to aporía and to the formulation of the so-called Meno’s paradox, which dramatizes a blockage of inquiry linked to a certain external conception of knowledge and learning. Socrates’ response, articulated through recollection, the examination of the slave, and the use of hypotheses, does not abandon the priority of definition, but rather reorganizes the conditions of inquiry. In the Symposium, Agathon’s encomium, marked by Gorgianic echoes, replaces the question concerning the nature of Eros with a rhetorical accumulation of predicates. Against this, Socrates and Diotima present Eros as an intermediate figure, constituted by lack and resourcefulness, and thus make it possible to clarify the contrast between persuasion, aporía, and philosophical inquiry. Thus, the comparison between the two dialogues shows that lógos can paralyze, but also reopen inquiry when it operates dialectically in each particular case.