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Socrates didn’t question people in order to teach us how to question people. He did it to teach us how to think.
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
Plato doesn’t appear. The dialogues depict Socrates having conversations with others. Usually he asks questions to which his discussion partners think they know the answers. Socrates tests what they say, takes apart their claims, and shows that they don’t understand the topic as well as they had imagined. Readers
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.
The Socratic method is a corrective. Before viewing it as a technique, consider it an ethic of patience, inquiry, humility, and doubt—in other words, of every good attitude discouraged by social media and disappearing from our political and cultural
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.
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. (This book will generally refer to the person being questioned as a “partner” of whoever is asking the questions, because that is the best spirit in which to approach Socratic dialogue. The parties are doing something together.)
Then Socrates gets them to agree to other things that turn out to be inconsistent with what they’ve just said. Now they feel compelled to refine their claims or abandon them. Notice that he doesn’t say his partners are wrong. He says, “can we agree that the following idea is true?”—and then his partners conclude for themselves (with his prompting) that something they said earlier wasn’t quite right.
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.
On this view the good life isn’t a result reached by winning the struggle. The struggle is the good life.
socrates. As a discussion which the mind has with itself about whatever it is investigating. Now, I’m not making this assertion as an expert: it’s just that the image I get of thinking is that the mind is simply carrying on a conversation: it asks itself questions and answers them, saying yes or no. And when it reaches a conclusion (which may take quite a long time or may involve a sudden leap), stops being divided and starts to affirm something consistently, we call this its belief. So I call a belief a statement, but one which is not made aloud to someone else, but in silence to oneself.
There Socrates tells Hippias that he—Socrates—needs help in responding to interrogation by an unnamed questioner. It gradually becomes clear (to the reader, but not to Hippias) that the unnamed questioner is an alter ego within Socrates: a part that questions himself. The internalized questioner is a rough customer, full of ridicule and disrespect.3 Hippias is surprised and wonders who could be treating Socrates so mercilessly. hippias. Who is the man, Socrates? What a boor he is to dare in an august proceeding to speak such vulgar speech that way! socrates. He’s like that, Hippias. Not
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A question puts pressure on whoever receives it. If you ask questions of yourself, you are the recipient of the pressure. That’s good. Stating an opinion is roughly the opposite. It releases pressure. Pressure is uncomfortable, so most people think and talk in opinions. But the unpressured mind tends toward laxity and corruption. A true Socratic dialogue is an exercise in which the pressure is intense: a full-court press. But the pressure can be kept healthier, even if less intense, anytime. Some people have dangerously low blood pressure; in others the Socratic pressure is too low. It can be
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This matters because it means, when the final result arrives, that Laches has contradicted himself rather than being contradicted by Socrates. He has full ownership of the problem.
So the Socratic method isn’t just a way to show that big claims made by others (or yourself) always tend to fall apart in the end, though that is one tendency of it. The method can be a way to defend an idea. Or the elenchus can be used to test an interpretation of something—the words of an oracle then, or a text now. Deny it and watch what happens.
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.
Cumulative consistency is more than reassuring. It leads to enlargement of your knowledge and confidence in it; it snowballs.
This theory also explains how Socrates can claim that he doesn’t know anything and yet still have beliefs about hard questions—that doing wrong is worse than suffering it, or whatever else. Those beliefs aren’t quite things he knows. They just seem true to him because they’ve survived all testing so far. An argument, or an adversary, might still appear and be sharp enough to show that the claims Socrates makes don’t hold together in some way. So if consistency is the test of truth, it never settles a question once and for all. It forces you to hold views provisionally, and to always be in a
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An important early aim of Socratic practice is to get rid of fantasies like those. The rightful first subject of skepticism isn’t others. It’s ourselves.
socrates. I like the way you see me as a sort of repository of ideas, so that I can pick one out, just like that, to claim that the theory’s wrong. You’re overlooking what’s been happening: none of the ideas have come from me, but always from whoever is talking with me. My knowledge is limited to a reasonable understanding of ideas which I get from others, the clever ones.
Indifference to consistency. From time to time you will find people whose view goes beyond the resistance just shown. They claim outright not to care about consistency.
tired old points in the same tired old words. If you are foolish, or simply unfamiliar with him, you’d find it impossible not to laugh at his arguments. But if you see them when they open up like the statues, if you go beyond their surface, you’ll realize that no other arguments make sense. They’re truly worthy of a god, bursting with figures of virtue inside. They’re of great—no, of the greatest—importance for anyone who wants to become a truly good man. Symposium 221d–22a
Analogies make the process seem more familiar. He draws comparisons to everyday things and activities—to cobblers and clay. These images give relief from abstraction and create some comfort.
The priority of reason. But Socrates treats inquiry as an impersonal affair in other important respects. First, he makes no ad hominem arguments in the sense of the term now most familiar: he never attacks his partners personally. Strictly speaking we might say that Socrates doesn’t argue with them at all; he only causes them to
The one-witness principle. Another rule for Socratic practice: numbers count for nothing. Having a majority in favor of an opinion, or for that matter having the whole world in favor of it, doesn’t matter. The views that matter are those of the parties to the dialogue. A single witness to the truth is enough.
socrates. If you feel like calling witnesses to claim that what I’m saying is wrong, you can count on your position being supported by almost everyone in Athens.… Nevertheless, there’s still a dissenting voice, albeit a single one—mine. You’re producing no compelling reason why I should agree with you; all you’re doing is calling up a horde of false witnesses against me to support your attempt to dislodge me from my inheritance, the truth.
When they are worried about the other side taking offense, they don’t say what they really think, and progress toward the truth is over. Everyone pretends to agree more than they do. That’s a common problem now, as it was then. Pushing past that fear is part of the Socratic method. It takes courage, and a commitment on both sides not to treat the dispute as personal no matter where the ideas may go.
Its job is to be offensive when the ego overrates itself. It pokes at self-importance and hubris when they need mockery; it looks long and hard for the emperor’s clothes and doesn’t find them. And it shows surprise and chagrin when the emperor is enraged.
Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know.
First, Socrates regards unconscious ignorance as the source of great evils. Ignorance is why we go wrong in general. People have vices, do wrong, and make themselves wretched because they don’t really understand what they are doing and why. They haven’t thought hard enough about it.
But there’s a special tier of Socratic dread and contempt for double ignorance—the ignorance of those who don’t know but think they do.
To be a Socratic is not to follow any system of philosophical doctrine. It implies first and foremost an attitude of mind, an intellectual humility easily mistaken for arrogance, since the true Socratic is convinced of the ignorance not only of himself but of all mankind.
I myself, therefore, am quite devoid of wisdom; my mind has never produced any idea that could be called clever.…
The most familiar encounter with aporia for many people comes from thinking about death. If they dwell on the end of their own consciousness, they sometimes end up at a loss. Thinking about anything infinite, or any paradox, can also bring on this kind of feeling. Reason has been exhausted. You can’t advance but aren’t in a position of stability, and you might feel speechless.
The aporetic spur. Aporia can not only prepare you to learn but make you want to learn.4 It feels frustrating. In effect Socrates says: good—now get going on the search for an answer, this time with a better sense of the work it takes. You are made hungry for knowledge by discovering how little you have. Socrates suggests this when he talks about the slave he questioned in the Meno.
And suppose that before his eyes had settled down and while he wasn’t seeing well, he had once again to compete against those same old prisoners at identifying those shadows. Wouldn’t he make a fool of himself? Wouldn’t they say that he’d come back from his upward journey with his eyes ruined, and that it wasn’t even worth trying to go up there? And wouldn’t they—if they could—grab hold of anyone who tried to set them free and take them up there, and kill him?
isn’t easy to persuade others, or sometimes oneself, that such goods exist or are worth much effort to get. All of our usual reasons to desire something are missing. Students of Socrates have come back to this point often. Montaigne writes: That every man is seen so resolved and satisfied with himself, that every man thinks himself sufficiently intelligent, signifies that every one knows nothing about the matter, as Socrates gave Euthydemus to understand.
People to whom intelligence and goodness are unfamiliar, whose only interest is self-indulgence and so on, spend their lives moving aimlessly to and fro between the bottom and the halfway point, which is as far as they reach. But they never travel any further towards the true heights: they’ve never even looked up there, let alone gone there; they aren’t really satisfied by anything real; they don’t experience steady, pure pleasure. They’re no different from cattle.
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
eudaimonia, an idea we will explore in the next chapter.) We might as well call such misfortunes Socratic injuries, because they have a symmetrical relationship to Socratic goods. You don’t know what you’re suffering.
Virtue and happiness. Socratic philosophy treats eudaimonia as its final goal. That word will be translated here as happiness, which is most common.1 Some say eudaimonia is better translated as well-being, or as living well.
Of one who wants to be happy there is no longer any point in asking, “Why does he want to be happy?” There, it seems, the question stops.
socrates. Seeing that all men desire happiness, and happiness, as has been shown, is gained by a use, and a right use, of the things of life, and the right use of them, and good-fortune in the use of them, is given by knowledge,—the inference is that everybody ought by all means to try and make himself as wise as he can? cleinias. Yes.
Socrates famously put the implication of these points in the following way: no one willingly does wrong.9
The beginning of philosophy—at least for those who take hold of it in the right way, and through the front door—is an awareness of one’s own weakness and incapacity when it comes to the most important things.
This sentiment closely resembles the Socratic position shown in chapter 6: anything false that you believe will eventually collide with true things you know. Epictetus seems to have had a similar view. He spoke of an innate moral sense on which people can
said the result of suspending judgment was ataraxia: tranquility and freedom from distress, which was their goal.
“retribution,” then we are at the usual three-way fork in the road. You can accept the premise and ask whether it’s consistent with the claim in the foreground. (Assuming retribution is the point of punishment, why does or doesn’t this punishment make sense?) Or you can test the premise. (Aren’t there other reasons for punishment?) Or the question can be renewed and the pressure to generalize can be continued. (Why retribution?)
