Mimesis in Plato's Meno

At the beginning of the dialogue, Meno, with his sophistical concept of the teaching process, asks whether excellence is teachable. Socrates claims that there is no teaching, only recollection and that recollection consists in remembering the knowledge of things which already exists in the depths of our souls. The learning process does not require any "teaching" in the sense of "transmission of knowledge". There is nothing that comes from the outside and goes into the soul of the learner. In order to explain his idea, Socrates presents an image which, in its obscurity, is an implicit refutation - albeit not verbally asserted, but mimetically suggested - of the sophistical idea of teaching, according to which truth comes to the soul from the outside. The image is of a geometric figure which requires being inscribed in a circumference. In that image, we can observe an implicit comparison that establishes an analogy between teaching (didaskein) and inscribing (enteinein). The view of teaching Plato seeks to reject is that excellence is teachable -namely, that it can be inscribed in a soul, in the way that figure can be inscribed in a circumference.