Conclusion
In Plato’s account, human beings exist in a“between”state, participating in both being and
becoming, morality and immortality, and knowledge and ignorance. Education involves turning the
person toward the transcendent pole of those indices, and he introduces the idea of recollection to
illuminate the process by which a teacher leads a student to recognize the transcendent ideas in
which he already participates. The Socratic method is the only way to accomplish this goal because
the kind of knowledge sought must be elicited from the student’s mind rather than planted in it.
Education in this sense is a cultivation of the person’s nature, and thus maintains and promotes the
student’s humanity and dignity (to use a modern notion).
Kant maintains a modern distinction between the subjective and objective that is not present in
Plato’s thought, which leads him to insist that we do not know whether our ideas conform to reality
as it is in itself. Yet, he acknowledges his debt to Plato’s language of ideas, and seems to overcome
the subject–object divide in his practical philosophy to reprioritize metaphysics to epistemology.^23
Even if he accomplishes this only in practice, it is enough to lead Kant to endorse the Socratic
method as part of his broader attempt to defend the person and human dignity against the instru-
mentalizationof reason in the modern age. This is one way of understandingwhat Kant means when
he famously says in the second introduction to the firstCritiquethat he had to restrict reason to
“make room for faith.”He sees that the source of our personhood and dignity is our participation in
the realities of reason and freedom that transcend the empirical world.
Kant’s project is thus to confine instrumental or theoretical reason to the realm of the empirical to
open a space for freedom and moral responsibility, which is also a space for transcendence and
mystery. Like Plato, he sees that students can only be awakened to their participation in such a
reality through the Socratic method. Kant stands as an instance of a modern thinker recognizing and
attempting to overcome the modern trend to reduce education to vocational or technical training by
employing the Socratic method to cultivate the humanity of his students.
Notes
1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Mary Gregor, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 133 [5:161].
2 Immanuel Kant,The Metaphysics of Morals, Mary Gregor, ed. (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).
3 Plato,“Meno,”inPlato: Complete Works, G.M.A. Grube, trans., John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson,
eds. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 880 [81b–c].
4 For a reading of Plato that reads his use of myth in this way, see Eric Voegelin,The Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin, vol. 16, Order and History, vol. III, Plato and Aristotle, Dante Germino, ed. (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2000).
5 Allan Silverman,“Plato’s Middle Period Metaphysics and Epistemology,”inThe Stanford Encyclo-
pedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta, ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-metaphysics/.
Accessed August 3, 2017. It is subsequently defined in the same entry as the“doctrine of recollection,
i.e., the thesis that our disembodied, immortal souls have seen the Forms prior to their incarceration in
the body.”
6 Plato,The Republic of Plato, Allan Bloom, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 518b–d.
7 This characterization of human existence is present throughout Plato’s works, but is especially clear in the
Symposium.
8Kant,Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 310
[A313–14/B 370].
9 Ibid., 323 [A334/B391].
10 For discussion on metaphysicalerosin Kant, see Richard Velkley,Being after Rousseau: Philosophy and
Culture in Question(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
11 Kant,Critique of Pure Reason, 310–11 [A314/B370-371].
12 Ibid., 313 [A318/B375].
13 Kant,Critique of Pure Reason, 311 [A315/B372].
68 Steven F. McGuire