Q&A: Recollection
Recollection
Question
1. When you speak about the concept of intuition, do you mean what Plato presented as “recollection” of the Form, as appears in the dialogue Meno?
2. Do you agree with the paradox that led to that argument, which asks: if we are trying to know something that we do not know, then how would we even know to recognize that this is the thing we were looking for, if we had never known it before?
3. Could it be that this is what the Sages meant in the aggadah that tells of an angel who teaches the fetus the entire Torah in the womb?
Answer
1. On the face of it, that sounds similar, but I do not know Plato well enough to say. It seems to me very similar to the aggadah in tractate Niddah about the angel who strikes the baby on the face so that it forgets the Torah it learned in its mother’s womb. Even if we speak of recollection, the question still remains: who planted that information inside me in the first place, such that I need to remember it? I see this as non-sensory observation, not as recollection.
2. I do not understand the paradox. Where exactly are we searching for something? In any case, according to my approach there is no problem at all, because this is observation and not recollection.
3. I now saw it. Above I wrote that on my own. 🙂
Discussion on Answer
I did not understand what exactly I missed.
The well-known Tarshish paradox:
At the center of the dialogue stand Meno’s paradox and Socrates’ answer.
“Meno: And in what way will you look, Socrates, for something that you do not at all know what it is? For which of the things you do not know will you set before yourself as the goal of your search? And even if you should happen upon it, how will you recognize and know that it is this thing which you did not know?”
In this challenge, Meno presses Socrates and argues that if the acquisition of any knowledge involves searching for what is not yet known (to the one seeking the knowledge), and knowledge depends on the existence of that unknown thing, then the acquisition of knowledge in general becomes impossible. For how can a person search for what he does not know? After all, even if the thing is found, how will the individual identify it and know that it is the thing he was seeking, if he does not know what he was seeking? On the other hand, if the person knows what the sought-after knowledge looks like, then there is no need to search for it. In any case, then, there is no point in trying to acquire knowledge.
Socrates, in response to this difficulty raised by Meno, presents the theory of recollection. According to this theory, the soul is immortal and has been born into a physical body many times. Knowledge has in fact existed in the soul from eternity, but each time the soul is embodied מחדש, that knowledge is forgotten in the shock of birth. From this it follows that the process called “learning” is nothing other than remembering what the individual forgot. A similar idea also exists in Judaism: in the Talmud it is told that the baby in its mother’s womb sees from one end of the world to the other and learns the entire Torah, but at the time of birth an angel comes and strikes it on its mouth, thereby causing it to forget everything.
Your honor seems to have missed the explicit Wikipedia entry.