The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

by Ward Farnsworth

The Socratic method means, among other things, asking and receiving questions fearlessly; it means saying what you think, and not getting hot when others say what they think; it means loving the truth and staying humble about whether you know it.

Third, the Socratic method is never likely to be popular because it doesn’t offer what most people think they want. The teachings of Socrates don’t propose to make anyone richer or more famous. They don’t offer rewards after death. They don’t answer the questions that torment us, and they don’t confirm that we’re right about what we already think. What the teachings do offer is wisdom, but this good thing is always bought at the price of some discomfort. The human appetite for wisdom, and its tolerance for discomfort, has never been great, in ancient times or ours.

Maybe the real Socrates was a wise and noble philosopher, too honest for his times; maybe he was closer to a cult leader who taught contempt for democracy and equipped his followers to become tyrants. But the political interpretation should at least make us alert to the risk that the students of Socrates sanitized and mythologized him.

What is the Socratic method for? It lets us see something else more clearly: the workings and failings of the mind and its productions.

The mind left to itself tends toward irrationality and idiocy. The Socratic method improves its performance.

In the natural process of growth in the human mind, belief does not follow proof, but springs up apart from and independent of it; an immature intelligence believes first, and proves (if indeed it ever seeks proof) afterwards.

The enemy against whom Plato really fought, and the warfare against whom was the incessant occupation of the greater part of his life and writings, was not Sophistry, either in the ancient or the modern sense of the term, but Commonplace. It was the acceptance of traditional opinions and current sentiments as an ultimate fact; and bandying of the abstract terms which express approbation and disapprobation, desire and aversion, admiration and disgust, as if they had a meaning thoroughly understood and universally assented to.

Our minds stumble and exaggerate and lie; they fool us and are fooled. We think and talk in certainties that feel solid but have nothing much behind them. The Socratic method is a corrective. It exposes this state of affairs and helps us build something humbler and stronger.

First, it proceeds by question and answer. Some of the questions are open-ended, as when Socrates asks Laches to propose a definition. At other points Socrates asks whether his partners agree with what he has said. Regardless, the result isn’t a lecture and isn’t quite an argument, either. Socrates gets his partners to consent to every step he takes.

Second, Socrates is always focused on the consistency of his partners. He probes it with a device known as the elenchus.

Third, his questions identify the principle behind what his partners are saying. Then he shows that the principle doesn’t cover things that it should, or that it does cover things that it shouldn’t.

Fourth, Socrates uses concrete examples to drive his reasoning: soldiers running away, someone playing a lyre, doctors and their patients. The examples often involve everyday people and situations. Sometimes the everyday examples illustrate big conceptual points. Sometimes he uses them to build analogies between things that are familiar and things that aren’t. One way or another, he tries to make headway on large issues by talking about specific cases that are easy to imagine.

Fifth, Socrates doesn’t claim expertise. He confesses his own ignorance, and that is where the dialogue ends: at an impasse, and without an answer.

Here is the Socratic method in crude form: When someone makes a claim about right and wrong or good and bad, question it. Ask what the claim means, and about other things its holder believes, and look for tension between those points; show with your questions that the claim must in some way be unsatisfactory to the person who made it. In effect you deny what your discussion partners say, but the denial is artful. If you do this right, it won’t even sound like an argument. They will refine their claims, and now you do it again.

In that event you still hold beliefs, but you hold them a little differently. You’re more humble, more aware of your ignorance, less likely to be sure when you shouldn’t be, and more understanding of others. Socrates regarded these as great gains in wisdom.

All this is what Socratic partners try to do for each other. They are good-natured and subtle contrarians.

And a failure to think Socratically, in the sense just described, is at the root of most of what’s foolish and infuriating in our ethical and political culture. People routinely say things that they don’t really believe, or wouldn’t believe if they thought longer about it.

The same can happen when you read a dialogue. You aren’t quite convinced by the arguments, so the dialogue seems to fail on its stated terms. But it succeeds on other terms, which are probably its real terms. It affects us.

You don’t wait around to be Socratic until you find someone who wants to be grilled or to perform a Socratic grilling. (It might be a long wait.)

The Socratic ethic can also help explain a certain kind of life story. Some people spend years struggling with hard questions and never quite find peace about them. They sometimes look with envy at others who seem to have found satisfactory answers early. Not having found answers of their own feels like unfinished work, a road half traveled, a test not completed. But the Socratic view is the other way around. Dissatisfaction with the answers you give yourself is a symptom of good health. Coming to rest means surrender to a kind of comfort that is always deceptive, no matter how tempting it looks or how deserved it feels. The Socratic way seeks a different kind of comfort—with uncertainty, with fallibility, and with beliefs that are never more than provisional. On this view the good life isn’t a result reached by winning the struggle. The struggle is the good life.

Beautiful summary. Sounds loke faith

and that during this period many of his principal dialogues were written, from points of view extremely various, embodying in each the latest trains of thought which had passed through his mind on the particular subject.

This sounds a lot like Minds on Fire

An essay or lecture is usually the sound of thought having happened, then polished up so the result is clear and the process of getting there is no longer visible. Ordinarily that’s good. If you know what you think and want someone else to know it, explaining it straight out makes sense. But if you want to provide a model for getting there—for what to do before you know what you think—a dialogue is ideal because it illustrates the process of figuring that out.

In one dialogue Socrates seems to argue that the good and the bad amount to pleasure and pain; elsewhere he argues the contrary.

Again, acting

The characters in the dialogue are all saying things that the author is thinking, if only for the sake of satisfying himself that they’re wrong. A dialogue might therefore be regarded like a dream in which every character is an aspect of the self.

Some readers are repelled by him.

Plato teaches the value of a well-developed Socratic function: a capacity to engage in skeptical questioning of yourself. That function is underdeveloped in most of us.

It can be disagreeable in the ways sometimes shown by the literary Socrates: relentless, taunting, sarcastic. Those traits are insufferable to other people. There is just one party at whom they can be directed with impunity and in good conscience: oneself.

a truth-teller, a questioner of convention, an irritant.

Athens would not have survived if everyone were like Socrates, and the self can’t survive on those terms, either. But a city needs someone like him even if it also needs other types. The place of the Socratic function in the self is comparably uneasy. It is a friend and it is disruptive. It exposes the truth and creates discomfort. In many personalities it ends up being served the hemlock.

Most ordinary people don’t like Socratic questioning; challenging your partners to constantly define their terms will leave you without partners soon enough.

In this case the bad habit is the love of holding opinions. It feels good to know what you think. When people turn to philosophy they usually want more of that pleasure—if not more of what they already think, then something else to be sure about. Socrates won’t cooperate, which seems frustrating. Where’s his philosophy?

A steady drip of questions can fill a glass or carve out a canyon; it’s possible to see almost any edifice of thought as the result of many such questions asked and answered, and as a monument to the gradual power of that process, often within one person.

The Socratic approach means fewer declarations and more questions, and especially questions about things presupposed in those other kinds of thoughts. When you think and talk in declarations, you aren’t learning anything. When you think and talk in questions, you might be. Someone says something you hate; instead of saying you hate it, you ask questions.

You give up some of the pleasures of holding strong opinions, and in return the ones you do hold are better founded.

But the unpressured mind tends toward laxity and corruption.

And conversely you aren’t very interested in hearing quick reactions from others—reactions, at least, to anything that matters—because those opinions are worth so little. They are one ply deep. You would rather read a decent debate or wait to hear from someone whose words reflect a debate-like process of thought. This can be a hard taste to satisfy. It makes most public commentators insufferable. They operate under no Socratic pressure, internal or external. It’s like driving on an interstate highway and wanting anything other than fast food. You have to hold out a long time, or go off the beaten path, or make it yourself.

O M G Yes.

Complexity can’t be seen in a hurry. Really understanding an argument—why someone would think this or that, and whether it holds up—is like taking apart a machine and putting it back together. You have to keep track of all the little screws.

And the Socratic method also takes intellectual empathy. You have to look at a problem the way someone else does. You might think you “get it” right away, or that there’s nothing much to get. But that’s probably wrong; it takes a while to actually understand what someone else means.

But slowing down in the Socratic way means having a certain sense of what it is to actually comprehend something. Some people (perhaps all of us sometimes) approach ideas like tourists in a museum who think they have seen all the art it contains because they have laid eyes on all the paintings.

The pacing of the dialogues is an implied argument about this—that is, about the optimal pace of speech and thought. A different kind of pace creates a different kind of person. Socrates displays a sense of equanimity on all occasions, and the slow rhythm of his approach is part of that. He’s never in a rush.

Then his partner settles on a claim, its edges get clarified, and Socrates bears down on it. The questions are no longer open-ended. They are often of the yes-or-no variety: Would you admit X? Can we agree on Y? The dialogue becomes, in effect, a cross-examination.

But adversarial thinking—that is, an adversarial approach within your own thinking—isn’t usual at all and is very constructive. Most of us interpret the world to confirm what we already think about it and what we wish were true.

There has to be an opposition party within the self—something that argues against what you feel that you know. The internalized Socrates amounts to an honorable adversary.

This shows another good reason to want an adversary within your thinking. It breaks your sense of identification with the views you hold.

Adversarial thinking separates us from our prejudices and expectations.

This is the Socratic trade, and it involves a risk. Instead of being sure of too much, you might be sure of too little.

The Socratic trade seems most worrisome when it’s not made symmetrically by both sides to a dispute. We all wish the trade were made more often—by our adversaries. But people naturally fear that if they ask hard questions and their enemies don’t, the enemies will always win. It looks like unilateral disarmament. Thoughtful Socratic types will be overrun by Nazi types who show no doubts and have hordes of followers. We will have Yeats’s result: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” If you aren’t absolutely sure about things, what are you fighting for when your enemies come along?

Callicles could have said that he has no problem with catamites or with cowards. But those options weren’t available to him; he was trapped either by his beliefs or by fear of shame. The proof Socrates uses to defeat Callicles is only as strong as those constraints.

It is the fashion of the present time to disparage negative logic—that which points out weaknesses in theory or errors in practice, without establishing positive truths. Such negative criticism would indeed be poor enough as an ultimate result; but as a means to attaining any positive knowledge or conviction worthy the name, it cannot be valued too highly; and until people are again systematically trained to it, there will be few great thinkers, and a low general average of intellect, in any but the mathematical and physical departments of speculation.

If you find a belief that doesn’t conflict with any others you hold, the lack of conflict—that consistency—is some evidence that the belief is true. It’s a survivor.