Socratic method

“ But, above all, it will confer an inestimable benefit on morality and religion, by showing that all the objections urged against them may be silenced for ever by the Socratic method, that is to say, by proving the ignorance of the objector. ”

“ While I was intent on improving my Language, I met with an English Grammar (I think it was Greenwood’s) at the End of which there were two little Sketches of the Arts of Rhetoric and Logic, the latter finishing with a Specimen of a Dispute in the Socratic Method. And soon after I procur’d Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many Instances of the same Method. I was charm’d with it, adopted it, dropped my abrupt Contradiction, and positive Argumentation, and put on the humble Inquirer & Doubter. ”

“ But Sokrates never permits him to arrive at it: arresting him always by preliminary questions, and requiring him to furnish an intelligible description of the matter which his discourse is intended to embrace, and thus to distinguish it from other matters left untouched. A man who cannot comply with this requisition, — who cannot (to repeat what I said in a previous chapter) stand a Sokratic cross-examination on the subject — possesses no rational intelligence of his own proceedings: no art, science, knowledge, system, or method. ”

“ To penetrate into the depths of the nature of things, and to separate true perception from error and illusion, appeared to the Socratic man the noblest and even the only truly human calling: just as from the time of Socrates onwards the mechanism of concepts, judgments, and inferences was prized above all other capacities as the highest activity and the most admirable gift of nature. ”

“ Socrates, with his method of cross-questioning so fatal to all ideas that should give knowledge any visible form or resting-place, was but the spirit of his time, the spirit of radical inquiry become incarnate and assertive in public places. ”

“ Is the Socratic irony an expression of revolt, of mob resentment? Does Socrates, as a creature suffering under oppression, enjoy his innate ferocity in the knife-thrusts of the syllogism? Does he wreak his revenge on the noblemen he fascinates?—As a dialectician a man has a merciless instrument to wield ”

“ Even, with a negative result, his consciousness that he has gone fairly to the bottom of his subject, as far as his means allowed — the feeling that he has not shunned labour, though that labour may have resulted in laying bare the nakedness of his case — re-acts upon his own mind, and gives it firmness for future work.” (Tyndall, Lectures on Heat, considered as a Mode of Motion, Lect x. p. 332.)
Sokrates considered the negative procedure to be valuable by itself, and separately. His theory of the natural state of the human mind; not ignorance, but false persuasion of knowledge. ”

“ Socrates claims for dialectic debate the valuable privilege that it is constant action and reaction between two individual minds—an appeal by the inherent force and actual condition of each to the like elements in the other—an ever-shifting presentation of the same topics, accommodated to the measure of intelligence and cast of emotion in the talkers and at the moment. The individuality of each mind—both questioner and respondent—is here kept in view as the governing condition of the process. No two minds can be approached by the same road or by the same interrogation. ”

“ Socrates, though both eloquent and persuasive in conversation, was not capable of addressing a large assembly; therefore, on the day of his trial, he asked permission of his judges to use the means of defence to which he had been accustomed; namely, to speak familiarly with, and ask questions of, his adversaries.
“Athenians,” he said, in commencing, “I hope I shall succeed in my defence, if, by succeeding, good may result from it; but I look upon my success as very doubtful, and, therefore, do not deceive myself in that respect. But let the will of the gods be obeyed.” ”

“ Sokrates, refuting Hermogenes, lays down the following doctrines.4 If propositions are either true or false, names, which are parts of propositions, must be true or false also.5 Every thing has its own fixed and determinate essence, not relative to us nor varying according to our fancy or pleasure, but existing per se as nature has arranged.6 All agencies either by one thing upon other things, or by other things upon it, are in like manner determined by nature, independent of our will and choice. ”

“ But whilst the Sophists made it their object, through subjective reflection to confuse and to break up all stable convictions, to make all rules relating to outward conduct impossible, Socrates had recognized thinking as the activity of the universal principle, free, objective thought as the measure of all things, and, therefore, instead of referring moral duties, and all moral action to the fancy and caprice of the individual, had rather referred all to true knowledge, to the essence of spirit. ”

“ He undertakes only the obstetric process of evolving from the respondent mind what already exists in it without the means of escape — and of applying interrogatory tests to the answer when produced: if there be nothing in the respondent’s mind, his art is inapplicable. He repudiates all appeal to authority, except that of the respondent himself.73 Accordingly there 148is neither sense nor fitness in the Sokratic cross-examination, unless you assume that each person, to whom it is addressed, is a measure of truth and falsehood to himself. ”

“ And Socrates understood that the whole world needed him,—his means, his remedy, his special artifice for self-preservation. Everywhere the instincts were in a state of anarchy; everywhere people were within an ace of excess: the monstrum in animo was the general danger. “The instincts would play the tyrant; we must discover a counter-tyrant who is stronger than they.” On the occasion when that physiognomist had unmasked Socrates, and had told him what he was, a crater full of evil desires, the great Master of Irony let fall one or two words more, which provide the key to his nature. ”

“ Trial and Error, the natural process of the human mind. Plato stands alone in bringing to view and dramatising this part of the mental process. Sokrates accepts for himself the condition of conscious ignorance. ”

“ Yet among the so-called sophists there were two who had philosophical leanings, as appears in their willingness to be called by the title of philosopher. First, Socrates, whilst he conceived that the physicists had mistaken the field of inquiry, absolute truth being unattainable, maintained, as has been seen, that one opinion was better than another, and that consistency of opinion, resulting in consistency of action, was the end which the human intellect properly proposes to itself. ”

“ Socrates, as we all know, met the Sophists at every point, not by a bare re-assertion of authority and tradition against their argumentations, but by showing dialectically how untenable the mere grounds were, and by vindicating the obligation of justice and goodness,—by reinstating the universal or notion of the will. ”

“ This then was the philosophical mission of Sokrates, imposed upon him by the Delphian oracle, and in which he passed the mature portion of his life: to cross-examine every one, to expose that false persuasion of knowledge which every one felt, and to demonstrate the truth of that which the oracle really meant by declaring the superior wisdom of Sokrates. “People suppose me to be wise myself (says Sokrates) on those matters on which I detect and prove the non-wisdom of others.11 But that is a mistake. ”

“ Such intellectual quickening, which could never commence until the mind had been disabused of its original illusion of false knowledge, was considered by Socrates not merely as the index and precursor, but as the indisputable condition of future progress. ”

“ The Sophists had founded knowledge upon perception, with the result {143} that all objective standards of truth had been destroyed. It was the work of Socrates to found knowledge upon reason, and thereby to restore to truth its objectivity. Briefly, the theory of Socrates may be summarized by saying that he taught that all knowledge is knowledge through concepts. What is a concept? When we are directly conscious of the presence of any particular thing, a man, a tree, a house, or a star, such consciousness is called perception. ”

“ Socrates may 318 not have held the doctrine of ideas as exhibited by Plato, but he certainly believed that there were germs of truth latent in the human mind--principles which governed, unconsciously, the processes of thought, and that these could be developed by reflection and by questioning. ”

“ The declaration so often made by Sokrates that he is a searcher, not a teacher — that he feels doubts keenly himself, and can impress them upon others, but cannot discover any good solution of them — this declaration, which is usually considered mere irony, is literally true.98 The Platonic theory of Objective Ideas separate and absolute, which the commentators often announce as if it cleared up all difficulties — not only clears up none, but introduces fresh ones belonging to itself. ”

“ It seems to have first derived its importance, if not its origin, from Sokrates, who began the practice of inviting persons to define the familiar generalities of ethics and politics, and then tested by cross-examination the definitions given by men who thought that common sense would enable any one to define.37 But I see no ground for believing that Sokrates ever put to himself the question — Whether that which an abstract term denotes is a mental conception, or a separate and self-existent reality. ”

“ The theory of rhetoric too is far more Platonic than Sokratic. The peculiar vein of Sokrates is that of confessed ignorance, ardour in enquiry, and testing cross-examination of all who answer his questions. ”

“ You will recollect that every proposition laid down or granted by the respondent carries with it by implication many other propositions; since every affirmation has necessary consequences, more or fewer. Whoever says that Sokrates is a man, has said also that he is an animal, that he is a living creature, biped, capable of acquiring knowledge. If you can disprove any of these necessary consequences, you will have disproved the thesis itself. ”

“ I have also indicated very briefly the counter-principle which Socrates opposed to theirs, and by means of which he reasserted the claims of absolute truth and absolute morality, this principle being the position that man is indeed the measure of the universe, but that he is this, not in his contingent and individual, but in his essential and universal character. ”

“ Sokrates affirms that law is everywhere the same — it is the declared judgment and command of the Wise man upon the subject to which it refers — it is truth and reality, found out and certified by him. ”

“ In these words of Sokrates we read a contrast between practice and theory — one of the most eloquent passages in the dialogues — wherein Plato throws overboard the ordinary concerns and purposes both of public and private life, admitting that true philosophers are unfit for them. ”

“ Intelligence is the regulating principle — Pleasure is the Indeterminate, requiring to be regulated.
Sokrates thus arrives at the conclusion, that in the combination constituting Good, Reason or Intelligence is the regulating principle: and that Pleasure is the Infinite or Indeterminate which requires regulation from without, having no fixed measure or regulating power in itself.28 He now proceeds to investigate pleasure and intelligence as phenomena: to enquire in what each of them resides, and through what affection they are generated.29
28 Plato, Philêbus, p. ”

“ One would almost imagine that, in the reviewer's opinion, things are not members of a class until they are called up publicly to take their place in it—that so long, in fact, as Socrates is not known to be a man, he is not a man, and any assertion which can be made concerning men does not at all regard him, nor is affected as to its truth or falsity by anything in which he is concerned. ”

“ We cannot therefore conclude from this that Socrates did not wish that physics should be cultivated, any more than we are authorised to suppose, that he fancied it possible to form ethics into a science by sufficiently multiplying those fragmentary investigations into which he was drawn in discussing the received opinions on the subject. ”

“ The process of search is considered as being in itself profitable and invigorating, even though what is sought be not found. The ingenuity of Sokrates is shown, not by what he himself produces, for he avows himself altogether barren — but by his obstetric aid: that is, by his being able to evolve, from a youthful mind, answers of which it is pregnant, and to test the soundness and trustworthiness of those answers when delivered: by his power, besides, of exposing or refuting unsound answers, and of convincing others of the fallacy of that which they confidently believed themselves to know. ”

“ However, if you have a desire to philosophize, let any one of you who is sufficiently great, imitate, if he can, Socrates the prince of wisdom. The answer of that man, whenever he was asked about celestial matters, is well known: ‘What is above us is nothing to us.’ Well, therefore, did he deserve from the oracle the testimony of singular wisdom, which oracle he himself had a presentiment of, that he had been preferred to all men for the reason, not that he had discovered all things, but because he had learnt that he knew nothing. ”

“ Compare what Plato puts into the mouth of Sokrates in the Protagoras (p. 347 D) : well educated men will carry on a dialectic debate with intelligence and propriety, “though they may drink ever so much wine,” — κἂν πάνυ πολὺν οἶνον πίωσιν.
Sokrates — an ideal of self-command, both as to pain and as to pleasure.
I have thus cited the Symposion to illustrate Plato’s view of the ideal of character. The self-command of Sokrates is tested both by pain and by pleasure. ”