knowledge that is already present in the mind includes the cultivation of personal character, which
Socrates identifies as a kind of conversion experience, a“turning-around.”As he says:
“Then, if this is true,”I said,“we must hold the following about these things: education is not
what the professions of certain men assert it to be. They presumably assert that they put into the
soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as though they were putting sight into blind eyes.”
“Yes,”he said,“they do indeed assert that.”
“But the present argument, on the other hand,”I said,“indicates that this power is in the soul of
each, and that the instrument with which each learns–just as an eye is not able to turn toward
the light from the dark without the whole body–must be turned around from that which
is coming into being together with the whole soul until it is able to endure looking at that
which is and the brightest part of that which is. And we affirm that this is the good, don’t we?”
“Yes.”
“There would, therefore,”I said,“be an art of this turning around, concerned with the way in
which this power can most easily and efficiently be turned around, not an art of producing sight
in it. Rather, this art takes as given that sight is there, but not rightly turned nor looking at what it
ought to look at, and accomplishes this object.”
“So it seems,”he said.^6This passage emphasizes the existential nature of education–that it involves the whole person
and a“turning-around”or conversion in the student. Like thepassages involving recollection in
theMeno, it also stresses that education involves working with something that is already present
in the student. Finally, it once again illustrates how Plato turns to a story or image (in this case,
the cave analogy) to communicate his insights into the nature of education. Rather than offering
a theory or doctrine, Plato offers stories and myths that are meant to communicate our partici-
pation in a transcendent reality that cannot be presented adequately in human thought or
language.
Plato’s presentations of Socratic education thus coincide with his view that human beings exist
“between”being and becoming, and that we“erotically”strive toward being from within the realm
of becoming.^7 Human existence is thus characterized by movement between mortality and
immortality or empirical and transcendent reality. The idea of recollection, like that of“turning-
around”calls attention to the need to turn the student’s attention toward his or her participation in
transcendent reality. The Socratic method is thus not simply one educational method among others,
but the necessary way of cultivating persons to become fully what they already are by nature.
Because the knowledge they seek is non-empirical, they must be encouraged to find it for them-
selves. As will be seen, Kant holds a similar view, even if he does not endorse Plato’s idea of
recollection in its entirety.
Kant on Recollection and Ideas
As will be discussed below, Kant argues that the education of reason, especially but not exclusively
in its practical mode, requires the Socratic method. Based on his own account, his reasons cannot
be fully Platonic ones, because he does not accept the full epistemological and metaphysical
implications of Plato’s idea of recollection. Kant wants to maintain a distinction between Plato’s
transcendent ideas, which make a claim about the nature of reality in itself, and his own“tran-
scendental”ones, which do not. Still, he sees the Socratic method as necessary because he agrees
with Plato that the person is not exhausted by empirical reality. Moreover, as will be argued in the
62 Steven F. McGuire