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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.
These points help explain why the Socratic method isn’t known to most people and isn’t taught in school. But it should be.
It seeks to make the ideas of Socrates, and especially his method, easier to understand.
as the everyday activity of making sense out of life and how to live it—and who want to know what he said about doing that better.
It explains where Stoicism came from. The Stoics regarded themselves as descendants and followers of Socrates, and his influence on them was immense; the ethical teachings of Stoicism can, indeed, be viewed mostly as an elaboration and extension of what Socrates taught.
Many readers like Stoicism because, more than some other philosophies, it has constant practical application to their daily lives. The teachings of Socrates are like that, too.
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 life. It means asking hard questions without fear and receiving them without offense; indeed, it means treating challenge and refutation as acts of friendship.
If I were pressed for a one-word opposite of the Socratic method, a strong candidate would be Twitter.
Nobody likes what is happening, but the resistance has not had a shape, a plan, or a hero. This book nominates Socrates as that hero, and the Socratic method as his plan. It is the natural corrective to the entire family of vices named a moment ago.
A university should be a Socratic gymnasium.
They associate him with the saying that the unexamined life is not worth living (though what he said might be closer to “the unexamined life is not to be lived” or “is not livable”).
What is the Socratic method for? It lets us see something else more clearly: the workings and failings of the mind and its productions.
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.
opinions and current sentiments as an ultimate fact;
The men of his day (like those of ours) thought that they knew what Good and Evil, Just and Unjust, Honorable and Shameful, were,
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.
Then Socrates gets them to agree to other things that turn out to be inconsistent with what they’ve just said.
Let’s say, then, that you just want to get going. Here is the Socratic method in crude form:
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.
Then he gets you to admit that you also believe Y. Then he causes you to see for yourself that X and Y are inconsistent.
If you want to get closer to the truth, working out inconsistencies in your own thinking is a powerful way to do it;
the truth, and its passionate pursuit by rational means.
It may be a perspective from which the chase after the truth is seen to be the highest human pursuit even if (or perhaps because) the complete capture of that truth is not possible.
You’re being Socratic when you press skeptically against easy answers, go many questions deep, and are mindful of your ignorance.
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.
It is a commonplace that Socrates meant to teach us how to think.
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.
writing out your own little dialogues is, in fact, a good way to sort out your thinking and to develop ability with the Socratic method.
But in his view our most urgent problem is that we’re certain when we shouldn’t be and think we know what we don’t.
That is why the philosophy of Socrates mostly isn’t a set of beliefs. It’s an activity.
push. Asking and answering them is like operating a pump. They take work. They can reveal latent beliefs that are surprising to their holders.
When you think and talk in declarations, you aren’t learning anything. When you think and talk in questions, you might be.
