The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

by Ward Farnsworth

The ancient Romans built elaborate networks of pipes to deliver water where they wanted it to go. The networks were a marvel. But many of the pipes were made of lead, and the water carried the lead along with it. One school of thought regards this as part of the reason for the decline and fall of Rome: lead poisoning gradually took its toll, impairing the thought and judgment of many Romans, especially at the top. The theory is much disputed; perhaps it contains no truth. But as a metaphor it is irresistible. We have built networks for the delivery of information—the internet, and especially social media. These networks, too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage. It craves confirmation and resents contradiction. Attention spans collapse; imbecility propagates, then seems normal, then is celebrated. The capacity for rational discourse between people who disagree gradually rots. I have a good deal more confidence in the lead-pipe theory of the internet, and its effect on our culture, than in the lead-pipe theory of the fall of Rome. The Socratic method is a corrective.

If I were pressed for a one-word opposite of the Socratic method, a strong candidate would be Twitter.

Right?

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

The rich aren’t disqualified by their positions, either. Sometimes his high-status partners in the dialogues advance views that serve their interests, but Socrates never takes issue on that ground. He doesn’t care. An argument that serves their interests might be valid. Claims are judged strictly by the quality of the reasoning and evidence that supports them.

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.

Instead of moving through a series of certainties, you get used to searching without certainty.

The singular wisdom of Socrates turns out to be this: not thinking that he has it. This is a recurring theme in the dialogues. He reiterates his ignorance often.1

If we treat Socrates as an internalized feature of the mind, then this is its first and constant order of business: uprooting false conceits of knowledge. Otherwise those conceits, like weeds, block the growth of anything better. Socrates regards the actual presence of wisdom and the feeling of having it as inversely related.

Socrates really does have a low opinion of his wisdom. He just has an even lower opinion of everyone else’s because they don’t have a low opinion of their own.

If you were questioned by Socrates, he would eventually convince you that nothing you say is good enough. After getting the hang of Socratic thinking, you may reach the same conclusion yourself. Any statement you make about a big question can be revealed as wrong, incomplete, or otherwise inadequate in some way. This discovery can ultimately lead to a sense of skepticism (see chapter 16). But most immediately it leads to aporia (pronounced ap-or-ee-ah). Aporia is a kind of impasse; literally it means “without a way.” It is the state reached when your attempts to say something true have all been refuted and you don’t know what else to do or think. Sometimes it is described as a state of mind—a sense of disorientation and perplexity; but strictly speaking those states are a reaction to the impasse. They are what you feel when you run out of resources for answering a question.

Aporetic truths. A more radical view of aporia regards it as sometimes inspiring speechlessness because you have arrived at a truth that can’t be spoken. The idea goes: there are unspeakable truths—that is, truths that defy language, and so can be called ineffable.5 Perhaps they are verbal analogues of irrational numbers. But they sometimes can be perceived without words. It may be that justice, for example, can’t be captured by a definition. But it can be encircled by the close failure of many efforts at definition. Instead of that result seeming to be a mess and therefore a failure, the mess is the thing sought. The goal of the effort at reasoning isn’t a conclusion based on the reasoning but a grasp of something larger.

If you have an emotional reaction to any given thing, it’s a response not to the thing itself but to what you think about it—to your understanding of the thing. That understanding arises from your knowledge or lack thereof, and is something you might be able to change.

Invulnerability. Socrates says that “nothing can harm a good man either in life or death.”20 The Stoics took the same view and, as usual, enlarged on it. They describe this invulnerability as a matter of detaching yourself from externals—that is, from all things that are up to others. Instead you identify with what is up to you: your choices, your will, your understanding. No outside force can injure those things.

Skeptic’s paradox. If you’re sure that you know nothing, the claim seems self-refuting. Evidently you do know something after all: namely, that you know nothing. Shouldn’t someone who is in doubt about whether it’s possible to know things also be in doubt about that? Arcesilaus thought so. But the Skeptics may have been misreading Socrates. He never quite says that he knows that he knows nothing. He just says that he knows nothing. Again, the reader can consider how much more modest his actual claim is, and with what consequences.

The quest for a sure grasp of the truth is ennobling even if we never find it.