Socrates is deservedly famous for the art of questioning he discovered and put to good use. Many who came to Socrates with confident beliefs soon came to see, under the light of his incisive questioning, that these beliefs were built upon the sands of confusion, self-contradiction, and superficial misunderstandings. This way of questioning has become known as the Socratic Method.
For Socrates, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and, as the gadfly of Athens, he was committed to autonomy of thought guided by critical reason. He has been called “the ideal thinker.” But not only was he cerebral, he was also passionate in his pursuit of both the rational and the virtuous life. With plenty of “backbone” to spare, he was a skewerer of sacred cows; never one to set himself up as an authority, he was sharply critical of beliefs based solely on authority.
As a teacher, as a “midwife” of knowledge, he nurtured among those who came to him an attitude of healthy skepticism and doubt in regard to received opinion, while, at the same time, helping them to become aware of, and bring forth from within, their own original ideas. His method of teaching was not didactic, but the way of skillful questioning, how to reason things through and think one’s own way into new insights, and the willingness to change or abandon beliefs when they are clearly shown to be in error.
Unlike the wily Sophists who would stoop to specious reasoning to win an argument, Socrates clearly stated that he would rather lose than win an argument if the truth was found to be on the opposing side:
“Now if you are one of my sort, I should like to cross-examine you, but if not I will let you alone. And what is my sort? you will ask. I am one of those who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute—I for one hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing another.” (Plato, Gorgias)
Socrates claim was that he had no knowledge to teach to others, nor is it something that can be memorized from a book; rather it is something that issues out of the dialogic give-and-take of a process of rational argumentation, whether with oneself or another.
This claim that he had no knowledge to impart to others is a good example of what is called Socratic irony: Webster defines irony as “the use of words to express something other than, and especially the opposite of, their literal meaning.” Why “teach” in this roundabout way? In the words of philosopher Gregory Vlastos: “Not, surely, that he does not care that you should know the truth, but that he cares more for something else: that if you are to come to the truth, it must be by yourself for yourself.”
And so this was yet another way of gently forcing others to think for themselves, and it worked like a Zen koan to liberate the mind of some of his students. Irony so used was an original discovery by Socrates, and, as a contribution to the sensibility of the Western mind, Vlastos hails this as one of his chief titles to fame.
The depths of his passion for reason is dramatically shown, at his trial, when he was given the choice, in essence, of abandoning it or his very life. Later, drinking the cup of poison hemlock with complete equanimity among his friends, he chose to die rather than abandon the rational ideal. Indeed, as Thomas H. Warren has pointed out, that this kind of thinking can be dangerous, witness not only the career of Socrates, but also that of two other of its most famous practitioners: Jesus of Nazareth and Gandhi.
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An excerpt from my essay, “Reason It Through: An Invitation to Critical Thinking”
HyC