As a logical claim, this is nonsense. All throughout history, we have successfully tracked down entities—objects, ideas, places, people—that we had never seen before and, at the start, understood poorly if at all. Moreover, as Socrates pointed out, to imply that searching is futile is to endorse stasis and incuriosity. “I would contend at all costs both in word and deed,” he declared, “that we will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know.” But if Meno’s paradox is absurd as an assertion, as a set of questions it remains important, and largely unanswered. How do we search for things when we don’t know what they are? And how are we supposed to recognize them if we find them?
Consider a very basic form of this problem: you have forgotten someone’s name. Let’s say that you are alone and that it is late at night, so that your only option is to search your own memory. You lie there engaged in a strange form of thinking that involves casting around in the broad direction of where the name might lie. Is it Edgar? Evan? Eric? Ian? Nathan? No—but wait: Ethan! Yes: the name you were looking for is Ethan, and the moment it comes to mind, you know it is correct.
The first notable thing about this kind of thinking is that we are able to do it at all. It suggests that losing a name in our mind has at least one thing in common with losing a wallet in our house: somehow, we know that there are more and less likely places to find it, and we conduct our mental searches accordingly—in this case, ignoring the neighborhood of “Richard” and “Robert” and looking in the vicinity of “Ian” and “Nathan.” In other words, although there is a gap in our mind where the name should be, that gap is not empty; instead it contains, as William James once observed, “a sort of wraith of the name.” That ghostly bit of information helps the mind refine its search, rejecting the wrong answers even though it doesn’t yet know the right one: no, it isn’t Nathan; no, it wasn’t in Chicago; no, it wasn’t on the same trip where the dog threw up in the car. Thus a partial answer to Meno’s question begins to emerge. Even when we don’t know what we’re looking for, we do know what we’re not looking for, and by gradually ruling out, we can gradually close in.
This ability is not limited to our memories. Along with thinking our way back toward what we forgot, we can think our way forward toward what we never knew—toward, even, what no one ever knew. If we couldn’t do this, there would be no internal combustion engine, no general theory of relativity, no Giovanni’s Room, no democracy. As that list suggests, this ability is also not limited to any particular field of inquiry. While William James was busy reflecting on how it feels to try to remember a forgotten name, his brother was reflecting on how it feels to try to write a novel. In the end, Henry James concluded that authors make their way toward new ideas in the same mysterious way as everyone else: “His discoveries are, like those of the navigator, the chemist, the biologist, scarce more than alert recognitions. He comes upon the interesting thing as Columbus came upon the isle of San Salvador, because he had moved in the right direction for it.”
This capacity to arrive at new ideas simply by thinking our way in their direction is one of the defining characteristics of our species, yet we don’t really know how it works. We do know that it proceeds by some means more sophisticated than trial and error, since we recognize and move in the right direction, not merely in random ones. As with rejecting “David” but lingering on “Nathan,” we can somehow sense certain abstract features of a correct answer before we know it, and, as kids playing search games say, we can tell when we are getting colder and when we are getting warmer. We also know, often instantly and absolutely, when we have found what we were seeking. Interestingly, the cues that tell us this are not just intellectual but also emotional: like finding most things, finding an answer is extremely pleasurable. All of us have experienced the low-level version of this, when a lost name or lost fact flashes back to mind, as satisfying and nearly as involuntary as a sneeze, and many of us have had at least one or two genuine eureka moments—“eureka” being Greek for “I have found it.” Such discoveries are like the meteorite in the pasture: a sudden and dazzling appearance, only in the fields of our own mind.
As with everything else we find, we can arrive at these new thoughts slowly or suddenly. Many epiphanies occur after countless hours spent in thought, but others precede an extended period of thinking: with ideas as with terra-cotta warriors, we sometimes need to look for what we have already found. Carl Friedrich Gauss once discovered the solution to a difficult math problem long before he could prove it was right. “I have had my results for a long time,” he supposedly said of that experience, “but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.” Many other scientists and mathematicians, from Barbara McClintock to Albert Einstein, have likewise reported finding answers through sudden flashes of insight that then took weeks, months, or years to verify.
This is the kind of experience that baffled Meno. How can we think something that we have never thought before and know it to be true? Socrates had an answer: we can’t. He believed that during these seeming epiphanies, we are really just rediscovering things we already knew, not in this lifetime but before it. “As the soul is immortal, has been born often and has seen all things here and in the underworld,” he wrote, “there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before.” To Socrates, every apparent instance of thinking something novel or finding something new is really just an act of remembering.
This is a beautiful idea, one that explains Meno’s paradox in the most evocative of terms. Because we have already seen everything there is to see, bits of it sometimes come back to us like cosmic déjà vu: in the gaps of the mind, a wraith of all creation. As an explanation, however, it is compelling only if you share Socrates’s belief that the soul is immortal and capable of retaining memories—and if you aren’t bothered by the insult to the mind, which, in this account, can’t generate new ideas. What’s more, as a practical guide to finding things, this lovely story is useless. Although it claims to explain after the fact how we were able to discover something seemingly novel, it cannot tell us beforehand how to do so.
In fairness to Socrates, though, no other account to date has fully explained this ability either, let alone helped us improve it. That’s a pity, because of all the things we look for, the most elusive entities are also the most important. We seek in the darkness not just for a forgotten name but for many of the most fundamental and fulfilling parts of life. “How, then, do I look for you, O Lord?” Augustine asks in his Confessions, troubled by the question of where to find God and—as a recent convert to Christianity who had once ardently espoused a different faith—how to know when he has found the right one. And we might echo his question about any number of crucial things. How, then, do we look for a calling? How do we look for meaning? How do we look for friends, a community, a home? How do we look for someone to love? Should we go out in search of these missing aspects of our lives? Or must we simply wait until, by fate or chance or design, they finally materialize on their own?
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