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Socrates’ personal project, on this theory, is to accumulate truths. His collection slowly grows as he finds more ideas that are all consistent. As his mass of consistent claims becomes larger, it gets easier for him to detect falsehoods and expel them.
For it is a common trap to suppose that Socratic questioning, if only it were good enough, would eventually bring everyone else around to your own opinions or politics.
You get used to the idea not only of being wrong a lot but of being wrong more often than you think
is natural to imagine that a philosopher—a Socrates—would try to talk you into accepting his beliefs as your own. But that isn’t the Socratic method. Or if Socrates wants to show that you’re wrong, you might expect that he would attack what you’ve said as inconsistent with the facts or as morally repellent. That isn’t quite the Socratic method, either. The Socratic method, in its classic form, consists of internal critique. It tests whether you’re being consistent with yourself and believe all that you think you do. Socrates doesn’t tell you that you’re wrong; he shows you that you think
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Internal critique
An ethical system can be built around any number of such values—equality, utility, liberty, and so forth. Socrates starts with the truth: the search for it, the love of it, and the saying of it, no matter how dangerous it might be.
Is truth the best bedrock value?
confidence that truth exists, but humility about whether he knows it.
When people believe two things that can’t both be right, they’re half-asleep or half-mad.
But of course the opposite is also a possibility. There is a real problem—a true inconsistency in your views. You resist seeing it because your views are comfortable. You’re accustomed to thinking what you think, and it hasn’t caused you any trouble until now, so you distrust an argument that calls it into doubt. This time reason is wiser than feeling; feeling has to catch up.
But it can take time and repetition for logic to penetrate the fortifications of belief, if it ever happens at all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood
A true indifference to consistency amounts to an indifference to reason, which some might say is their position but which ends up being hard to sustain.
Philosophy means thinking carefully about whether you believe all that you say and whether it’s true. It is the effort to stay awake.
A definition of philosophy
The Laches is about the meaning of courage, but you aren’t likely to read it now primarily to learn about courage. You read it to learn about patterns of reasoning.
The alternative to such analysis is to say that you don’t need to bother because you know it when you see it—whatever “it” might be (courage, injustice, fairness, etc.). That is how most people think most of the time. It is, as Mill would put it, the approach of the intellectus sibi permissus—the mind left to itself. It seems convincing but is highly prone to error.
Socrates wouldn't be a fan of Jesus parables.
Supposing that you need a definition first has been described, fairly or not, as the Socratic fallacy.
Most atrocities, large and small, are committed by people who think they know it when they see it.
He wants people to care for their insides (the psyche, the soul) with the kind of energy and attention they spend on their physical selves and whatever else they see.
inductive reasoning—that is, arguing from specific examples to general conclusions.
The crowd is not to be trusted. This point is especially important in current times when a “horde of false witnesses” can be summoned on demand by anyone online.
Socratic ignorance generally. A philosophy can start in many places and end in many others. Socratic philosophy starts with “I don’t know.” It ends with “I don’t know.” Between those two points there is progress and improvement, but it isn’t a journey from a question to an answer; it’s a journey from one question to another. It’s also a change in orientation. Instead of moving through a series of certainties, you get used to searching without certainty. There is a lump under the mattress and you toss and turn in trying to deal with it and finally accept that you will never fully come to rest
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First, Socrates regards unconscious ignorance as the source of great evils. Ignorance is why we go wrong in general.
Freud described the discoveries made by Copernicus, by Darwin, and by himself as a tradition of assaults on the “naïve self-love” of mankind.
But when people are wrong but feel unshakably right it takes away their will to learn and eventually involves them in disaster. And if they are put in charge of anything, their double ignorance produces disaster for everyone else, too. Most political calamities can be seen that way.
And if Socrates describes aporia in positive terms but his partner runs off and doesn’t get the benefits, remember that the real candidate for an experience of aporia isn’t the partner. It’s the reader.
Bad for student evaluations
People rarely feel as though they’re in caves. They don’t notice until they’ve gotten out and can look back. (The simplest way to illustrate this for yourself is to think about what a fool your younger self was.) So it helps to have provocations that suggest how much we don’t understand but might. To put it more plainly, nobody walks through life feeling like an idiot, though you can no doubt think of plenty of people who fit that description, and it fits all of us from a certain point of view.
The mind with a Socratic bent looks at itself with some of the same horror and urgency you would feel if you realized you were in the early stages of dementia but might be able to reverse it with effort. In that case you would apply yourself energetically. That is your case, more or less, and everyone else’s.
Everyone bears Socratic injuries. We say things, do things, and otherwise live in ways that would probably cause us embarrassment and horror if we honestly gave or learned answers to every hard question about them, so we don’t. The injuries can become more severe and harder to see as life goes on. We get invested in the defense of bad choices after making them.
But eudaimonia has an objective aspect. It implies a judgment from the outside that someone is doing well. It means a good life, not just a good mood; a good life is one to which felt happiness is the right response.
If someone were to congratulate you on your willpower in declining to take those drugs, you would likely shrug and say that willpower doesn’t really enter into it. You just know better. Socrates thinks everything is like that, or could be. When you have a failure of will, it’s really a failure to reach the state just described: a failure to know better.
When you avoid dangerous drugs or other things, it isn’t only because you can recite their dangers. It is because you know about those dangers in a deeper sense. You are completely conscious of them; they register in full. Sometimes we don’t have that kind of knowledge; we only have the kind that is associated with recital. We have faux knowledge, and we are weak.
You’ve arrived at the same result by a more circuitous route. But the route is valuable because it is cooperative rather than adversarial.
Real persuasion, in a Socratic setting or any other, isn’t a matter of beating other people into submission or confronting them with embarrassing facts. It’s about getting them to see things your way. To do that, you have to start by listening and by seeing things their way. When you understand what they think, you can start looking for a route from that point to somewhere else.
