Toward a Phenomenology of the Mistake: A Reading of Plato’s Meno

Mistakes are commonly held to be a central part of human learning. As educators we often encourage our students to make mistakes and try to learn from them, portraying them as something important and ultimately advantageous (albeit painful). But what are mistakes, and how do we learn from them? In this paper, I will set out to examine the phenomenon of mistakes in learning. I will begin by exploring some of the pedagogical and philosophical challenges in trying to provide a unified definition of mistakes. I will ask what the conditions are for evaluating some form of human activity as a mistake and position the mistake not as a stand-alone thing or object, but rather as a moment embedded within processes of human action, evaluation and learning. I will then offer an analysis of the role of the mistake in Plato’s The Meno. Drawing on Sharon Todd’s reading of the interaction between Socrates and Meno’s slave, I will show that from a phenomenological point of view, the mistake is experienced as a confrontation between the learner and the other, whether this other is another subject, the empirical world, or one’s own self. Finally, I will argue that the mistake, as a confrontation between self and other, produces an anxiety necessary for movement from a natural disposition into a state of acknowledged ignorance.