Most people know the word “knowledge” to mean something that individuals acquire through experience or education, but is there a deeper meaning to this word. Is knowledge something that most of us already have installed deep down within? Socrates believed that a person cannot come to know something they have no knowledge of what to look for. Socrates do not think that learning comes from discovering. He believes that knowledge comes from the soul, which took place before birth.
Also, Socrates further believes that our recollection of knowledge is buried within, but forgotten until something in our lives happen and brings the buried knowledge back to surface. To further make sense of Socrates’s idea, he used an example to prove his point. Socrates used one of Meno’s slaves and drew a square. Each side of the square was two feet.
Socrates asked the slave to calculate how long the square would be if it had twice the area of the first one drawn. The slave’s first response was four feet, then three, but he was incorrect each time.So, Socrates helped the slave distinguish that a square that consist of twice the area would have sides with a length that is equal to the diagonal of the square of questioning. However, he helped the slave understand this point without really explaining how to get the correct answer.
Socrates helped the slave by pushing him to concentrate and think the problem through by himself. So, his exampled proved that the boy could reach a conclusion on his own without Socrates directing him.This was Socrates’s way of proving that knowledge could be recollected from something a person already knows. Socrates believed that the slave used his recollection of math, and that the slave already knew how to solve the problem, because it was something that his soul learned in the past life. I think that Socrates ideas was interesting, but I do not agree with them, because I believe we first come to know things once we are given knowledge on how to do something, or what something is.
Socrates actually guided the boy through solving the problems by stating a form of a question. My main reason for not agreeing with Socrates ideas is that his idea contradicts itself. He believes that we already have recollection of knowledge, because we develop it before birth or should I say in our previous lives. We still had to learn it at some point in our lives.
So, the question still remains, “Where did the knowledge come from in the first place? ”
