SOCRATIC EDUCATION

Socrates denies that he is a teacher, and the people he questions often deny that they have anything to learn from him. These denials are tinged with irony, of course, but they contain a grain of truth: Socratic education puts the responsibility for learning on the learner. Nothing is more important to this kind of education than the resources that learners bring to it: their experience, their conceptual and logical abilities, and their desire to know the truth. Still, Socrates is more teacher than he admits; he has firm beliefs himself about the rough outlines of knowledge and human virtue (his main subjects of inquiry); and he often questions people to bring them to see that they too must accept such beliefs, on pain of inconsistency with their deepest commitments.

Socrates speaks humbly enough, but his aim is not modest: it is to transform people’s lives by coaxing them into thinking as a philosopher thinks. And Plato, in writing about this, faces hard questions about the value of the education for which Socrates stands. Three salient features of Socratic education are illustrated in Plato’s work:

1. an emphasis on critical and consistent thinking;
2. a unique concept of teacherless education, contrasted with teaching both as it occurs in Athens and as it would occur in ideal circumstances;
3. the hope that education in philosophy has the potential to transform people’s lives for the better.

By “Socrates” I mean the character of that name in Plato’s dialogues, which are largely historical fiction.1 Socrates is famous for obscuring himself, his aims, and the state of his own knowledge by means of irony. On many points, readers are left to their own devices.

Some think Socrates truly finds himself without answers to his own questions and sincerely continues to seek them. Others hold that Socrates knows the answers, but conceals them, leaving hints accessible only to the most philosophical audiences. And there are positions in between as well. In Socrates, Plato has drawn a personality that consists largely in shifting screens of irony, and we can do little but ask which is the predominate mask that Socrates wears. In this essay I will not try to peer beneath that mask. I will take it that Socrates is serious when he says that he lacks the knowledge he seeks, and that because he lacks such knowledge he cannot be a teacher. That is why his method places the primary responsibility on the learner.


What, then, does Socrates do by way of education, for whom does he do it, and what is his aim in doing so? A large part of his work is critical and issues in refutations of his companions: “With what group do I belong?” asks Socrates on one occasion. “I am with those who would be pleased to be refuted if I should say anything that is not true, and pleased to be the refuter of anyone who should say anything that is not true—more
pleased, in fact, to be refuted than to refute. I think that’s a greater good, you see, insofar as it’s a greater good to be relieved of a great evil than to relieve another of the same” (Gorgias 458a). He is apparently willing to provide this service for anyone, regardless of age or level of education. His aim is to goad his companions into examining their beliefs and their lives, especially in relation to virtue or the good condition of the soul. During his trial, he tells how he would respond if ordered to change his way of life:
as long as I breathe and am able to do so, I will not cease to practice philosophy, exhorting you and charging anyone of you whom I happen to meet, with my usual words: “My very good friend, you belong to Athens, the greatest city and the one most famous for its power and cleverness; aren’t you ashamed that you are concerned to have as much money, fame, and honor as you can, while you are not concerned with true wisdom or the condition of your soul—that it be the best it can—and you do not give this a thought?” And if one of you disputes this and says he is concerned I will not immediately let him go or leave him, but I will question him and examine him and test him, and if I find that he does not possess virtue when he says he does, I shall reproach him for taking the most important subjects least seriously while giving more attention to trivia. These things I will do for anyone I meet, young or old, citizen or visitor…
(Apology 29de)

We do not find Socrates doing exactly this in early dialogues other than the Apology, but we have a report of this kind of Socratic education from the most famous of Socrates’ young companions—and one of the worst behaved. The effect was that the young man came to be ashamed of his life and to wish for improvement (Alcibiades, in Symposium 215a–216a).

What sort of improvement can come through Socratic education? We shall see that consistency as Socrates understands it requires high standards for knowledge claims, so that Socratic learners will be modest in what they claim to know. He also holds that a consistent and well-examined life will serve certain moral ideals, particularly the Socratic thesis that it is worse to do wrong than to suffer it (Crito 49ab).
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Socrates - Classical Education

Socrates (470/69-399 BCE)
Socrates was the son of Phaenarete, a midwife, and Sophroniscus, a stone-carver. In Plato's Euthyphro (lib), he traces his ancestry to the mythical sculptor Daedalus, so it may be that he too practiced his father's craft early in life. He served as a hoplite (heavily armored infantryman) in the Athenian army during the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, where he gained attention for his courage, his capacity to tolerate hunger, thirst, and cold, and powers of concentration that could keep him rooted to the spot for hours on end. Since hoplites had to own property and provide their own weapons, Socrates cannot have been very poor. Still, he seems to have been exceptionally frugal in his habits. He often went barefoot, seldom bathed, and wore the same thin cloak winter and summer. In a society that worshipped male beauty, he was noteworthy for his ugliness. He had a snub-nose, bulging eyes, thick lips, and a pot belly. Yet his personal magnetism was such that many of the best looking young men avidly sought out his company. In Plato's Symposium, indeed, he characterizes himself as a master of the art of erotic attraction (ta erotika), though that characterization no doubt involves some ironic punning, since the verb erotan means to ask questions.

In 406 BCE, Socrates served on the steering committee (prytamis) of the Athenian Assembly, where he alone voted against an illegal motion to try as a group the generals who had failed to pick up the bodies of the dead after the sea battle at Arginusae. Later, at the risk of his own life, he disobeyed the unjust order of the Thirty
Tyrants to bring in Leon of Salamis for execution.

In 423 BCE, he was made the subject of Aristophanes' comedy, Clouds, as he was of other non-extant comedies by other authors, including Amipsias and Eupolis. In Clouds, he appears: first, as the head of the phrontisterion, a school where, for a small fee, one can learn the just logic, which represents traditional aristocratic values, and also the unjust logic, which represents the new values of the sophists; second, as the
ascetic high priest of a mystery religion, who teaches a variety of sciences, including a mechanistic theory of the cosmos, on the basis of which he denies the existence of Zeus and the other gods of tradition, worshipping in their place the various forms of Air, including the eponymous Clouds. It is not much of a reach to conclude that Socrates must have looked enough like other sophists to lend popular credibility to Aristophanes' portrait.

In any case, he was brought to trial in 399 BCE on a charge of corrupting the youth by teaching them not to believe in the gods, found guilty (in large part, he claims, because of the prejudice against him fanned by Aristophanes), and condemned by a close vote to death by hemlock poisoning. Central, it seems, to the prosecution's case was one of the most puzzling aspects of Socrates: his daimonion or spiritual voice, which held him back whenever he was about to do something wrong. Though this may, in fact, have been no different from other acceptable forms of religious practice, in someone already suspected of being an atheistic sophist, it no doubt seemed - or could be made to seem - much more sinister and subversive.

Socrates' personal characteristics played, and continue to play, a very significant role in attracting devotees to him. He demonstrates - what every teacher knows - that charisma can be as important as content. If Socrates hadn't been erotikos, if he hadn't had that certain compelling something, who would have listened to what he had to say? As it is, however, many listened. And since Socrates himself wrote nothing, it is to those who did that we must turn for information. The problem is that some of the writings of those who knew him - Antisthenes, Phaedo of Elis, Eucleides of Megara, Aristippus of Cyrene, Aeschines of Sphettos - have disappeared or exist only in very fragmentary form, while others that we do possess - those of Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon - present us with very different portraits. Moreover, Plato's own portrait is a double one, at least: the Socrates of his early dialogues (Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor, Hippias Major, Ion, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus) is thought to be based to some extent on the historical figure (they are often called "Socratic" dialogues for this reason). The Socrates who appears in his transitional (Euthydemus, Gorgias, Meno, Protagoras), middle (Cratylus, Parmenides, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Republic,

Symposium, Theaetetus), and some of his late (Critias, Philebus, Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, Laws, Seventh Letter) dialogues, however, seems to be increasingly a mouthpiece for his own developing doctrines. When we look at Socrates, therefore, we are perforce looking at many potentially different figures. For some were influenced by the historical Socrates, some by portrayals of him only some of which we know, some more by the man and his character, and some more by his specific doctrines.

Nonetheless, a few significant ideas come close to being the common property of these different figures: (1) knowledge or theory (logos) is important for virtue; (2) virtue is important for happiness; (3) the sort of self-mastery (enkrateia), selfsufficiency (autarkeia), and moral toughness (karteria) exhibited by Socrates with
regard to pleasures and pains is important for happiness; (4) the use of questioning based on epagoge (induction, arguing from parallel cases) is important with regard to the possession of knowledge, and so of virtue; (5) eros and friendship have important roles to play in philosophy, and philosophy in life; (6) the traditional teachers of virtue (the poets), as well as the alleged embodiments of wisdom (the politicians), are
deficient in various ways that questioning reveals.

These ideas are vague, of course, and so can be understood in various ways. Socrates could hardly have influenced Cynics, Cyrenaics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics had it been otherwise. Important as these developments are, however, they are overshadowed by the decisive role Socrates played in Plato's thought and, via it, in Aristotle's.
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