Highlights from The Socratic Method by Ward Farnsworth
Highlights from this book
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“Where in the annals of Western philosophy could we find a sharper antithesis to [the] restriction of ethical inquiry to a carefully selected, rigorously trained elite than in the Socrates of Plato’s earlier dialogues?”13 That’s the right way to think about Socrates; for apart from whatever specific teachings may be attributed to him, he himself was an egalitarian character—poor, ugly, and happy to talk about the most important questions with anyone at all.
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Using the Socratic method yourself isn’t easier than using it in conversation. In fact it’s a good deal harder. The defects in someone else’s views are no trouble to spot. Seeing them in your own is a much tougher challenge. It is like exercise. It’s easier with a trainer, but possible to do well without one. And Socratic questioning is like physical exercise in an additional sense: it’s good for you, but doesn’t feel good when you’re doing it; in fact it’s often good for you just to the extent that it’s uncomfortable. That is why nothing is more common than intellectual obesity.
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A PHILOSOPHY is often thought to mean a system of ideas that provides answers to fundamental questions. Socratic philosophy is different. It is a commitment to a process rather than to a result.
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The Socratic method departs from other styles of teaching and thought, first, in this simple way: the practitioner does not lecture, does not explain, does not scold, and does not tell. The practitioner asks.
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The posture of Plato as an author is of a piece with the posture of Socrates as a character. Plato never comes out and says what he thinks. He hides behind his characters and lets the reader wonder. He creates a hero who likewise states no answers but provokes people to think harder and reconsider what they believe and how they live. The implied point: we’re at our keenest when we work on a question, not after it’s answered. On every level the dialogues help us into that state and hold us there.
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The practitioner of the Socratic method thinks in questions, is at home with uncertainty, and knows how to value a search that doesn’t end.
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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.
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Small questions also are good because they slow everything down. This matters in part just because the truth tends to be complicated. 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.
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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. But you have to visit with a good painting at length, and more than once, and above all without hurrying, to really see what it is and what it means. Socrates looks at an idea in the way that a connoisseur looks at paintings, and he asks the listener or reader to do the same.
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Socrates particularly likes to question beliefs that his discussion partners take for granted. This shows another good reason to want an adversary within your thinking. It breaks your sense of identification with the views you hold. We all have false beliefs about the world or ourselves—views that wouldn’t withstand Socratic scrutiny and don’t usually get it. They’re half-conscious ideas that we take for granted and that are kept out of view. Socratic questioning takes off the camouflage. A belief that had seemed too obvious or sacred to get grilled is put on the stand. For as long as the questioning lasts, the belief isn’t so much a part of you. It had been talking through you; now you are talking to it. Adversarial thinking separates us from our prejudices and expectations.
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Notice that Socrates uses questions to get the agreement of his partner at every step. Didn’t you say this, and don’t you also think that—and don’t they conflict? 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.
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Cumulative consistency is more than reassuring. It leads to enlargement of your knowledge and confidence in it; it snowballs. In this way the elenchus helps along the formation of the self. It causes you to figure out what your moral conscience is made of. There is a conflict in your views; you have to decide which to keep and which to drop. It is like an inner tournament with winning and losing ideas. You understand yourself better after many rounds of it.17 The Socratic method thus helps toward fulfillment of the instruction inscribed over the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: know thyself.18 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 state of search for more confirmation or refutation.
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Callicles says it’s good if you manage to do a wrong without getting caught. Socrates gets him to agree to some other points that end up conflicting with that one, then gives this warning if Callicles can’t find a way out of the argument put in front of him: SOCRATES. If you leave it unrefuted, then I swear to you by the divine dog of the Egyptians that it’ll cause friction between you and Callicles, Callicles; there’ll be discord within you your whole life. And yet, my friend, in my opinion it’s preferable for me to be a musician with an out-of-tune lyre or a choir leader with a cacophonous choir, and it’s preferable for almost everyone in the world to find my beliefs misguided and wrong, rather than for just one person—me—to contradict and clash with myself. Gorgias 482bc This is stronger language than most of us would now use to talk about being inconsistent. It follows from the distinct way that Socrates thinks about living well. When people believe two things that can’t both be right, they’re half-asleep or half-mad. They don’t actually think anything in particular. They just imagine that they do. They lack knowledge of who they are, and so are ridiculous without realizing it.
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The threat posed to the self by inconsistency should not be viewed as an obscure philosophical problem. For many people it is immediate and pressing. They live their lives in ways that are inconsistent—out of harmony, as it were—with their deeper beliefs, whatever those might be. They come to feel lost, stuck, or otherwise miserable. They wonder why. Socrates would regard those results as natural and easy to understand.
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That argument might not seem impressive now, but it displays one type of response to an inconsistency: it may be explained on terms not yet fully worked out. This prospect can sometimes make it rational to persist for a while in holding two beliefs that seem to conflict, especially when the belief under challenge has the sanction of long and seemingly successful usage. How Mill put it: The majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated than has ever yet been the case, before they can be asked to place such reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give up practical principles in which they have been born and bred and which are the basis of much of the existing order of the world, at the first argumentative attack which they are not capable of logically resisting.3
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The remarkable point about consistency is the power of it as a value or goal. When that value is hooked up to the mechanism of Socratic questioning, it doesn’t just annihilate. It can also be productive. It destroys a bad idea but can help confirm a sound one. It can tear down a way of life and then generate one that is better. And it is relevant to every little choice we make, not just to the big ones. The search for consistency thus makes the Socratic method useful in all sorts of situations, not just the kind we usually associate with moral philosophy.
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Most of us deal with most questions without paying any attention to philosophy, at least consciously, and we don’t feel its absence. That is because it is so easy to think of philosophical questions as the kind most people can do without in their ordinary lives. A lot of academic work now described as philosophy does fit that description. But on a Socratic view, philosophy is relevant to just about everything, high and low. It isn’t a set of problems that some care about and some don’t. Philosophy means thinking carefully about whether you believe all that you say and whether it’s true. It is the effort to stay awake.
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Candor. Another rule of Socratic dialogue: say what you think, not what others want to hear.17 It is a practice he claims for himself.
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The one-witness rule keeps them from treating anyone else as a source of authority.22 And it’s a reminder that sound reasoning and popular reasoning are utterly different things.
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Offense isn’t only a problem when it’s given and taken in fact. The risk of offense is a problem in advance because it makes people dishonest. 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.
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The midwife comparison suggests a way to listen to someone else. But its more likely use, as with most of what Socrates offers, is internal. Think of it as a posture of mind when you’re looking at an idea or a hard question. You want to see the idea in full and at its best before you criticize it.
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ALCIBIADES. I solemnly declare, Socrates, that I do not know what I am saying. Verily, I am in a strange state, for when you put questions to me I am of different minds in successive instants. SOCRATES. And are you not aware of the nature of this perplexity, my friend? ALCIBIADES. Indeed I am not. SOCRATES. Do you suppose that if some one were to ask you whether you have two eyes or three, or two hands or four, or anything of that sort, you would then be of different minds in successive instants? ALCIBIADES. I begin to distrust myself, but still I do not suppose that I should. SOCRATES. You would feel no doubt; and for this reason—because you would know? ALCIBIADES. I suppose so.… SOCRATES. Ask yourself; are you in any perplexity about things of which you are ignorant? You know, for example, that you know nothing about the preparation of food. ALCIBIADES. Very true. SOCRATES. And do you think and perplex yourself about the preparation of food: or do you leave that to some one who understands the art? ALCIBIADES. The latter. SOCRATES. Or if you were on a voyage, would you bewilder yourself by considering whether the rudder is to be drawn inwards or outwards, or do you leave that to the pilot, and do nothing? ALCIBIADES. It would be the concern of the pilot. SOCRATES. Then you are not perplexed about what you do not know, if you know that you do not know it? ALCIBIADES. I imagine not. SOCRATES. Do you not see, then, that mistakes in life and practice are likewise to be attributed to the ignorance which has conceit of knowledge? First Alcibiades 116e–17d
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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. We learn that the truth isn’t coextensive with our ability to talk about it or with our powers of comprehension.
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The value of understanding is the same whether we’re gaining it or losing it. So our attachment to whatever wisdom we have should generate an equivalent appetite for more. Put differently, your understanding is currently in a state that you would, with some progress, regard with horror. Best, then, to make haste now.
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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. The issue arises because in English it’s natural to think of happiness as a subjective state: it means feeling good. 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. People can enjoy themselves in despicable ways and so not be described as happy in this Greek sense even if they seem to be having a good time. The opposite of happy, on this view, wouldn’t be gloomy or depressed; it would be a word like wretched or pitiable. This way of thinking about happiness sometimes takes adjustment now (and the adjustment is useful), but it seemed ordinary in ancient times. Socrates treats the achievement of happiness, in the sense just described, as the purpose of life. Everybody wants to live well; if a philosophy leads to that result, nothing more need be said in defense of it.
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Our experience of such moments makes knowledge and virtue seem to be very different things. But Socrates thought otherwise. The rest of the world are of opinion … that a man may have knowledge, and yet that the knowledge which is in him may be overmastered by anger, or pleasure, or pain, or love, or perhaps by fear,—just as if knowledge were a slave, and might be dragged about anyhow. Now is that your view? or do you think that knowledge is a noble and commanding thing, which cannot be overcome, and will not allow a man, if he only knows the difference of good and evil, to do anything which is contrary to knowledge, but that wisdom will have strength to help him? Protagoras 352bc Socrates evidently takes the latter view: if you seem to have a failure of will, it’s really a failure of knowledge. There is no such thing as akrasia.
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In general when the brave feel fear, there is not disgrace in their fears, nor in their confidence when they are confident? True.… Cowards on the other hand, and likewise the rash and the mad, feel fears or cowardice which are discreditable, and can they exhibit discreditable fear or confidence from any other cause than ignorance? No.… Ignorance of what is and is not to be feared must be cowardice. [Protagoras] nodded. Well, courage is the opposite of cowardice. He agreed. And knowledge of what is and is not to be feared is the opposite of ignorance of these things. He nodded again. Which is cowardice. Here he assented with great reluctance. Therefore knowledge of what is and is not to be feared is courage. Protagoras 360bd