Anamnesis

Learning as remembering

"All enquiry and all learning is but recollection." Plato, Meno (81d), in Benjamin Jowett's translation.

In Plato's philosophy, the soul is eternal. Before birth, it exists in a realm of pure Forms: perfect, unchanging archetypes of justice, beauty, goodness, and truth. When it descends into a body, it forgets. The process of living is, fundamentally, the process of remembering.

This is what Plato calls anamnesis, a Greek word for recollection, sometimes put as un-forgetting. It is not learning new things; it is recovering what was always already known. The teacher is not a transmitter of information but a midwife, helping to draw out what is already inside.

In the Meno, Socrates puts the idea to the test. He questions a young slave who has never studied geometry about how to double the area of a square. The boy answers wrongly, then wrongly again, and then, led mostly by questions, finds the answer himself. Plato wants us to notice how little Socrates actually tells him.

Turning around in the cave

In the Allegory of the Cave, in the Republic, prisoners sit chained, facing a wall, watching shadows cast by objects passing behind them. They mistake the shadows for reality. Education, for Plato, is the process of turning around: first painfully, because the light blinds, then gradually, as the eyes adjust and reality reveals itself in its actual form.

The journey from shadows to light is not a journey from ignorance to knowledge. It is a journey from forgetting to remembering.

A mirror held still

You do not have to share Plato's view of the soul to recognise the experience. Most people have read a sentence, heard a piece of advice or met a person and felt, with some surprise, that they already knew it.

PurposeBased aims to work in that spirit. The reading is not meant to tell you something new about yourself. It is meant to reflect back what was already there. When someone reads their Know-thyself reading and says "this is exactly me," that moment is close to anamnesis. They always knew. They just needed the mirror held still long enough to see.