I got recommended a fascinating YouTube Short the other week, which I have been thinking about since. Young Adult author John Green was riffing on the question as to whether people who came up with iconic quotes knew they were iconic; he cited his own experience of having written a line that was, not world-historically iconic, but ‘it had a moment in 2014’.
He describes sitting in a Starbucks in Indianapolis trying to write a scene in which two characters realise they are in love—a scene that he was ‘struggling’ with. He describes himself ‘writing around it instead of writing it’, until he suddenly came up with one central line that helped him see how the whole scene would come together. His immediate response? ‘I was like: “that’s a fucking banger.”’
I didn’t know the line he was talking about, so I took to the comments, which consistently identified it as this one:
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once. [John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, chapter 8.]
That’s quite a nice line! I would be proud of that if I’d written it. But I think my pride would have been more qualified than Green’s seemed to be; for Green did not mention in his YouTube Short another quote that immediately popped into my mind.
‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked.
‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’ [Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, book 2, chapter 13.]
Green’s line was, without question, influenced by Hemingway’s. The latter quotation is, after all, incredibly famous.1 I dug a little and Green, as you might expect, has read The Sun Also Rises. And they’re just too similar.
I do not say this to impugn Green (I don’t read his books but I’m not his target audience, and he seems to be a personally really cool guy who has done great philanthropic and campaigning work on global health). If he were aware of the Hemingway allusion, it still wouldn’t be a problem, and certainly wouldn’t be anywhere near plagiarism: he transformed the line from a witty joke to a serious romantic reflection. Artists all remix the greats, and it’s a mark of respect, like quoting in a jazz solo.
What grabbed my attention is just that Green maybe wasn’t aware? He did not mention Hemingway, didn’t acknowledge how closely his ‘iconic’ quote matched another writer’s. Green’s line was definitely building on Hemingway—there is no way the similarity is just a coincidence—but he had, it seemed, built on Hemingway without knowing that he’d done so. I was almost screaming at my phone: ‘There’s no way he doesn’t know? Why isn’t he mentioning it?’
I later realised, of course, that Green maybe just couldn’t fit a full account of the genesis of the sentence into a brief Short. (I dislike shortform video for this reason, among many.) But I was obsessed for a few days, and it made me really think: what would it mean if he really didn’t know?
The Meno is an interesting text. It starts off like a typical early Plato work, with Socrates interrogating the presuppositions of his dialogue partner and demanding definitions of his key terms. But then our title character has a moment of immense literary self-awareness: Meno essentially figures out that he’s in a Socratic dialogue and, grasping the conventions of the form, realises he is heading towards aporia. Revelling in this self-awareness, he begins to flirt with Socrates:
Socrates, before I even met you I used to hear that you are always in a state of perplexity and that you bring others to the same state, and now I think you are bewitching and beguiling me, simply putting me under a spell, so that I am quite perplexed. [Plato, Meno, 80a, trans. G. M. A. Grube as revised by John M. Cooper.]
Socrates flirts back for a little bit, but he is clearly on the back foot (especially since he has little interest in flirting—Alcibiades had the measure of the man). And so after Meno introduces a facetious ‘debater’s argument’ that makes fun of the entire Socratic method,2 Socrates backs off from his gadfly approach and tries to get Meno to take the matter seriously by actually proposing a concrete theory of knowledge.
They say that the human soul is immortal; at times it comes to an end, which they call dying; at times it is reborn, but it is never destroyed, and one must therefore live one’s life as piously as possible…
As the soul is immortal, has been born often, and has seen all things here and in the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things. As the whole of nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything, nothing prevents a man, after recalling one thing only—a process men call learning—discovering everything else for himself, if he is brave and does not tire of the search, for searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection. [81a–d.]
Our souls have seen more than we can remember, and thus have within them accurate information about all topics; we simply need to recall this information, and once we do we will have knowledge. This ‘theory of recollection’ functions to defend the Socratic method, but in doing so, it transforms the method: on this picture elenctic questioning can lead us to genuine knowledge about substantive topics, not merely aporia and ‘knowing that one knows nothing’.3
Socrates then gives a famous little demonstration of the theory with one of Meno’s slaves. He asks the unnamed slave a series of questions about a mathematical diagram; and by reasoning through the questions he is asked and the diagram in front of him, the slave figures out a theorem about the diagram. Socrates then concludes triumphantly and self-referentially, asking a series of questions to Meno, as a result of which Meno comes to know that questioning can lead to knowledge.
SOCRATES: Has [the slave], in his answers, expressed any opinion that was not his own?
MENO: No, they were all his own.
SOCRATES: And yet, as we said a short time ago, he did not know? — That is true.
SOCRATES: So these opinions were in him, were they not? — Yes.
SOCRATES: So the man who does not know has within him true opinions about the things that he does not know. — So it appears.
SOCRATES: These opinions have now just been stirred up like a dream, but if he were repeatedly asked about these same things in various ways, you know that in the end his knowledge about these things would be as accurate as anyone’s. — It is likely.
SOCRATES: And he will know it without having been taught but only questioned, and find the knowledge within himself? — Yes.
SOCRATES: And is not finding knowledge within oneself recollection? — Certainly. [85b–d; emphasis mine.]
Now, we no longer believe in the eternity of the soul. So the theory of recollection has become of interest primarily to historians, looking to reconstruct Plato’s thought and intellectual development; and to teachers of philosophy, for whom it is important to get students to analyse ‘dead dogma’ that they have little interest in defending or attacking, to practice skills that can later be applied to more controversial issues. I'm not sure anyone thinks about the theory of recollection as a live player in modern epistemology.
But think about John Green, struggling to write his key scene. Probably years before he started writing The Fault in Our Stars, he had read The Sun Also Rises and Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy. Sitting in that Indianapolis Starbucks, Hemingway’s line is clearly somewhere in the back of his brain. An allusion to the line would help Green finish his key scene. He has within him the information needed to solve his problem. And after groping around for a while, writing around the scene, suddenly he finds the knowledge of how to finish the scene. He finds the knowledge within himself; he recollects.
The soul, not actually being eternal, does not have all information about all topics. But it has a lot more information than it’s consciously aware of at any one time. Arguments, quotes, experiences, facts and figures and trendlines, concepts and ideas and vibes—we encounter many more of these than we could ever immediately consciously recall. A few we prioritise and are able to recall at will; some are discarded from memory entirely; but most get retained as snippets or vague shapes. Nietzsche had the most compelling description of this aspect of the human condition:
As far as the rest of life is concerned, the so-called ‘experiences’,—who of us ever has enough seriousness for them? or enough time? I fear we have never really been ‘with it’ in such matters: our heart is simply not in it—and not even our ear! On the contrary, like somebody divinely absent-minded and sunk in his own thoughts who, the twelve strokes of midday having just boomed into his ears, wakes with a start and wonders ‘What hour struck?’, sometimes we, too, afterwards rub our ears and ask, astonished, taken aback, ‘What did we actually experience then?’ or even, ‘Who are we, in fact?’ and afterwards, as I said, we count all twelve reverberating strokes of our experience, of our life, of our being—oh! and lose count… [On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, Pref.1, italics in original.]
So, when we face a problem or a question that we cannot immediately solve or answer—say, struggling to write a scene in a novel—our brains have to grasp around in memory for any ideas, facts, arguments that might fit the bill. And sometimes, despite our ‘absentmindedness’, we find something: say, a line from Hemingway.
This is precisely the mechanism Socrates describes in the Meno. We have information about many topics that we are not consciously aware of. Socrates describes the soul as having ‘opinions’ and (elsewhere) ‘beliefs’, which is a sensible way to describe this information so long as we keep in mind that these beliefs will not be obviously or immediately transparent.4 Yet we do not know the information, not least because we can’t make any immediate use of it. It’s too submerged, too subconscious; we do not possess the information in any practically useful sense, and we couldn’t seriously be said to ‘know’ it even if it’s in the back of our minds somewhere.5 But sometimes we are confronted with a situation that leads our brains to locate this information and bring it to the fore, so that we become aware of it and can make use of it; we ‘find the knowledge within’.
Importantly, even though we are recollecting, all too often we are not aware that we are recollecting. Part of the reason why the information needs to be recalled in the first place is because our brain only has snippets or quotes or vague concepts, wrenched from context; we likely didn’t retain where we got the information, so even if we recall it, we can’t recall where we are remembering it from. John Green remembered the Hemingway line, but he may or may not have remembered that it was a Hemingway line. Again, though, this is Socrates’ point: even as we receive knowledge from recollection we are not aware that it is recollection; Meno needs to be convinced of the theory. This is very much consistent with the overall mechanism: starting from subconscious beliefs, we gain knowledge through recollection.
Now, Socrates also proposes a particular theory of where subconscious beliefs come from: our souls’ latent experience of past lives. I’m not telling you to believe that. But you can accept the premise that our minds contain information that we are not consciously aware of,6 without accepting Socrates’ particular theory of where that information comes from. And if you do so, then you can use the rest of the recollection model as is. Indeed, this model is not merely ‘not unbelievable’: it is a very useful and (I think) convincing picture of learning and knowledge. Much of what we think of as insight, learning, knowing—is just recollection. Faulkner had it, in Light in August: ‘Memory believes before knowing remembers.’
I think we can go a step further than this, although that step will take us further from Plato.
Humans are social creatures, and (since before Plato, and to an unprecedented degree in modern times) we have partaken in a massive division of intellectual labour. We hear from others about matters small and big, and because we could not possibly ‘check their reasoning’ on all matters (we don’t have the background information), we take at least some of it on trust—on the basis of their expertise, or partial reasoning with suppressed premises that we assume will ‘check out’, or their position in political coalitions, or a dozen other reasons. The set of things that we know by acquaintance is incredibly narrow; every man becomes in some measure a specialist. There are many ways in which this division of knowledge can go wrong, of course, which philosophers of science have extensively investigated; but we could not escape it entirely even if we wanted to, and we shouldn’t want to—its benefits are immense.
Indeed, if the mechanism of recollection is indeed a prominent part of human knowledge, to a certain degree it is precisely why such a division of intellectual labour is necessary. It implies a picture of individual human mental faculties as being much weaker than we might expect. Much of what seems, prima facie, to be the intellectual work of an individual mind producing knowledge ab novo is revealed to rely on background knowledge that is largely opaque to the mind itself, never mind to others. To take part in intellectual labour, the mind must already have access to experiences that it can recollect; and since we don’t actually have the boundless experience of a pre-existent and immortal soul, we have to rely on the experience of others, slowly accumulated over time.
But what this tells us is that we do not need to have experienced something ourselves to recall it. We normally encounter new information through others: we hear an enthymematic argument that seems like it checks out, or absorb the results of a study without replicating it, or adopt a concept without absorbing the debates that shaped it. And if our subconscious beliefs are the result, not of direct experience, but of trust in others, then when we recollect them we are (in essence) remembering someone else’s perspective.7 Indeed, if the division of labour is particularly extensive or if the ideas have been changed or altered by new perspectives over time, we may be recollecting the experience of someone who is recollecting the experience of someone else recollecting…
The very last paragraph of Keynes’ General Theory is justly famous. I do not wish to contribute to the tendency to wrench it from context, but I cannot resist quoting a few lines. (I may talk about that context, Keynes’ theory of political change, another time to make up for it.)
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. [The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, chapter 11, section five.]
All people, practical men and madmen alike, are in huge intellectual debt, yet they are not aware of it. A politician boldly declaring that parliament must be able to effectively make decisions without being hindered by the courts, that it is essential that our constitution respect the unity of sovereignty—they are recollecting Bodin. They may not know that they are doing so; they may never have read Bodin; but it is Bodin’s ideas in their mind and his arguments in their mouth. The physicist who unthinkingly invokes the notion of ‘observation’ when talking about quantum mechanics is recollecting a chain of influence that runs through the founders of quantum physics and lands squarely at the feet of Immanuel Kant. The Protestant pastor who speaks of human depravity, ostensibly relying solely on scripture, has Augustine echoing through each line of their sermon. The soul has not lived forever; but it is part of a community that has lived for thousands of years, if not more.
The practical man and the madman both have knowledge, to be sure; they have recollected enough for the tasks that lie ahead of them. Our brain normally only bothers recollecting enough to solve the problems in front of us (if even that). Often it cannot go beyond that: it may not have stored any of the important context, and if the information was the product of intellectual specialisation, it may never have been given that context in the first place. Our opinions are merely ‘stirred up like a dream’, and we have piecemeal and incomplete knowledge.
So that leads me to my final question: is there a way to prompt recollection, to gain knowledge more systematically than just waiting around for it to happen? Plato’s Socrates certainly had an answer: the Socratic method. Indeed, he only brings up the theory of recollection in the Meno to defend the Socratic method as a path to knowledge. If Meno’s slave, or anyone else, ‘were repeatedly asked about these same things in various ways, you know that in the end his knowledge about these things would be as accurate as anyone’s.’ Socratic questions can prompt recollection that is systematic, not merely occasional and quasi-random.
That’s all well and good for when the full context of the idea, not just the idea itself, can be found within. This is, of course, what Socrates assumed: the soul has already experienced all things, and thus has all knowledge. But we can’t join him in assuming this. We don’t have the context of all our beliefs within us—we likely never had the context. So to round out incomplete recollection, we have to go looking for that context, for the moments in history where our thoughts originated and for the changes that occurred as they were passed down. And we have to do this with an openness to the idea that we do not fully understand our own thoughts, that ideas we thought we owned are in fact the property of a whole tradition and that we do not understand the concepts we use in our inferences nearly as well as we think. If we do all that, we stand a chance of recollecting more fully. We call this exercise ‘intellectual history’; it is incredibly important.
A fascinating aside at this point: from what I can gather, there is every chance that Green’s line and its moment in 2014 may have led directly to the current fame of Hemingway’s line. I find few references to the latter that predate The Fault in Our Stars. For those who have read the whole of my post, I think a plausible causal pathway here is in fact partial recollection: people saw Green’s line, stored the vague shape of it in the back of their brain, later went googling for it, and (because it’s in the public domain) were returned Hemingway’s line. If I’m right about this—correct me if you have evidence that I’m not—then Green has a right to a lot of pride, though a qualitatively different species of pride.
Which scholars have tended to take much more seriously than Meno himself did; they call it ‘Meno’s paradox’.
Plato took the idea that ‘knowledge is recollection’ and ran with it in the Phaedo: in that dialogue he used it to solve particularly Platonic problems to do with our ability to grasp the material world without prior acquaintance with the Forms. But in the Meno the connection with the Forms is at most barely hinted at; Socrates brings the theory up as a rebuke to Meno’s flirtatious teasing.
The beliefs may not even seem to be beliefs until they are recollected, in the sense of not issuing in some of the typical dispositions. Those with a strict conception of belief may not want to use the term ‘belief’ here for exactly this reason. But one of my big commitments in ‘descriptive’ epistemology / psychology is that, as a matter of fact about the mind, the line between believing and other propositional attitudes like entertaining, imagining, and modelling is very blurry and vague and thin. (I have no idea whether this makes Moore’s paradox more or less serious.)
Yes: this is an implicit rebuke to readings of the Meno that, leaning too heavily on the ‘moving statue’ passage, take Socrates as endorsing a JTB-esque analysis of knowledge. Plato’s Socrates consistently thinks of knowledge (and virtue) as analogous to a kind of craftsmanship; if his position can be analogised to any modern view it will be pragmatism.
That is (as the philosophers would say), the view that belief is not reflexive. Interestingly, I think Plato’s Socrates is committed to the KK principle, despite (I am here claiming) denying the corresponding principle for belief. I take the position I defend in this post to be independent of KK, although I personally think the principle is false.
This of course introduces another important distinction between my version of the theory of recollection and Socrates’: the subconscious beliefs, since they do not derive from direct experience and rely on trust in others, can in principle be false. We can’t rely on introspection and Socratic questioning to guarantee knowledge; we need a well-functioning division of labour.