Chapter 6 - The stingray: 79e–80d

Summary

MENO'S ATTACK ON THE ELENCHUS

After the third definition has collapsed Socrates asks for yet another, as if things are going to proceed exactly as before. But Meno has finally reached aporia:

Men. Socrates, even before I met you, I heard that you yourself are just perplexed and make others so. Now it seems to me you're enchanting me with witchcraft and potions – in a word, casting me under a spell, until I'm full of perplexity. If it's appropriate to make a joke, you seem to me to be just like the stingray, both in looks and everything else. It also numbs anyone who approaches and touches it, and I think you have done exactly the same to me. I'm genuinely numbed in mind and word, and don't know how to answer you. And yet I've given very many speeches on virtue on thousands of occasions in front of many people – and very well too, so I thought. But now, I'm not even able to say what it is at all. And I think you are well advised not to set sail from here or travel abroad: if you did such things as a foreigner in another city, you'd probably be arrested as a wizard.

(79e7–80b7)

Meno may be making at least three points here. The first and most obvious is that Socrates numbs his victims into intellectual inactivity.