The Socratic Method

THE SOCRATIC METHOD
(with thanks to an important mentor: Ray Linn, LAUSD)

The key teaching method used in this class is called the “dialectic” or “the Socratic method.” This approach consists of a continual dialogue including questions, answers, and criticisms/clarifications of answers. It is one way of pursuing truth, and it can be used directly in conversation or indirectly in discussing literature that has been read in class. The method is so simple that at first it doesn’t seem like much of a “method” at all. It is, however, and I think it is the best method for pursuing truths about human beings and their assumptions about reality and abstractions such as values, culture, and the social foundations of education. The dialogue which follows illustrates how the Socratic method was used in a high school class to explore the topic of status as a possible goal of human existence. The dialogue is rearranged and idealized, but it provides an idea of how the Socratic method works and where it took participants in their discussion of a widely held value of modern society. As you read it, consider your own private desire to be held in high esteem by others and, by imagining yourself in the role of Student, ask yourself how you would answer the questions in the dialectic.

Teacher: Is there anyone in this room who is not greatly concerned with achieving high status? Is it worth living for?

Student: What else am I to live for? I sure don’t want to be a loser, and I know that when I make it I’ll be happy.

Teacher: Don’t all desires make you unhappy with your present situation in the world? If you want to be big, you must now feel small, and thus you aren’t happy.

Student: Perhaps, but when I make it...

Teacher: Make what? Just what are you going to “make,” and how will it make you happy? Society might give you some sort of symbolic prize for your efforts, but you are essentially a body with desires. How can a symbol satisfy a desiring body?

Student: But after I’m rich and famous, I’ll have lots of fine bodies to choose from!

Teacher: Perhaps, but as Philip Slater says, you’ll do without them while striving for that carrot, and how long will it take? And even if you’re right about what will happen after you hit the big time, what makes you think you’ll be loved for who you are? If it’s money that brings you to her attention, perhaps it’s money that she loves.Besides, the problem with status-lovers is that they’re always trying to show that they are superior to the people around them. To have status is to act superior. Do you truly love people who think they’re superior to you? Do status-conscious people produce the impulse of love, or the desire to tear them down?

Student: So? (NOTE: This student is not “superior.”)

Teacher: Isn’t it inevitable that status-seeking separates you from other human beings? Since status is a self-centered goal, it focuses your attention on what’s going to happen to you—which automatically separates you from the people around you. Do you prefer the feeling of loneliness?

Student: No, but nobody wants to be close to a loser either.

Teacher: Why not try to meet the Other as an equal? And if you persist in defining yourself as the “superior,” are you different from the slime that joins the Klan in order to establish a sense of superiority in the world? As long as the desire to be high dominates your consciousness, don’t you have to look down on the Other? Isn’t it logically impossible to define yourself as superior without defining someone else as inferior? And isn’t this what you, just like the Klansman, are doing all the time?

Student: Maybe so, but I’m not a loser.

Teacher: What are you, essentially?

Student: As Descartes said, “I am a thing that thinks.” To be presently aware of these thoughts, I must exist as an unchanging mental thing.

Teacher: Are you such a “thing?” As Hume says, look again: can you find an unchanging thing, in addition to your changing thoughts and feelings? When I introspect all I find is a bunch of changing thoughts and feelings and impulses—are you so different?

Student: OK, I can only be certain of the changing thoughts and feelings.

Teacher: But is this the reality you pay attention to when you try to rise up and be the best thing around? Or do you ignore this changing internal reality when you act like you’re the top rat in the rat race? Is Tolstoy right when he says that the great thing that you want to be is merely a pretense, and that in attempting to become it you must ignore the real life that is within you? Since society only gives status to fixed positions like “judge” or “executive,” doesn’t the status-seeker have to ignore the real, changing feelings and impulses that are within? If so, is Tolstoy right in saying that status-seeking leads to death?

Student: What else should I do with my life?

Teacher: Why not return to the “living” by ignoring your desire to be superior, and instead focusing your consciousness on the reality of human needs and feelings? Why not focus on meeting the needs of people around you?

Student: I don’t care what you say, achieving a high position is important to me.

Teacher: Look around the room. Would your status with your peers still be as important if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?

The actual classroom dialogue went way beyond this brief and condensed version, and it contained twists and turns not mentioned here, but these are some of the questions, answers, and criticisms of answers which were expressed in class. In analyzing the Socratic method of pursuing truth, several things may be stated: first, it is essentially a negative method. People using it are often trying to tear down the ideas they hear; they listen to others’ propositions, usually with one ear turned toward what is wrong with it. If they don’t listen in this critical way, if they aren’t willing to think negatively, the method cannot exist.

The Socratic method works best when its practitioners have developed a sensitivity to logic and semantics—specifically, to what makes a good argument and what doesn’t (logistical fallacies), and to language that is vague, misleading or meaningless. Asking clarifying questions such as, “What do you mean?” is essential to the Socratic method. In Preface to Plato Havelock argues that this question marks beginning of this particular approach to the search for truth. Questioning the meaning of the key terms in an argument is especially important in using this method. So is an awareness of the vague clichés of the day, e.g., “He’s making it…” “This idea sucks…” “That’s sick…” “It’s awesome…” etc. Again, for the Socratic method to work practitioners must be willing to think negatively, to look for and identify instances of insufficient evidence, and for sloppy use of language.

In attempting to justify this negative approach to education, we can begin by noting that the Socratic method first grew out of a particular way of thinking about knowledge that surfaced in 5th century Greece. For Socrates, a great many knowledge claims and value claims seemed empty, meaningless, and even destructive. The traditional Homeric view of things was still a major part of Greek education in the 5th century, even though it had little to offer the world in Socrates’ day. In addition, the Sophists had revealed the apparent relativity of all answers about what is real and what is good—so that what might be true in Athens wouldn’t necessarily be true somewhere else. Given this social situation, it was difficult to accept the traditional idea that knowledge was simply the collective memory of the community. In other words, knowledge was no longer thought of as a set of established truths which an older person knows and simply pours into the head of a younger person. In an era of competing answers, cultural relativism, and skepticism, the “lecture method” no longer seemed adequate. When one way of seeing things gives rise to many, it’s difficult to believe that memory alone produces knowledge. Thus Socrates began to think of knowledge in a different way: as something achieved by individuals actively searching for the truth through constant questioning and criticism. Active, critical questioning, rather than the acceptance of secondhand opinion, became the key to knowledge. Thus Socrates tells us that, “The life without criticism is meaningless.” Since we too live in an era of competing answers, cultural relativism, and skepticism, Socrates’ method seems well-suited to today’s classroom. When there are many competing answers about what human beings are like and what they should do, all answers become questionable, and at this point so does a straight lecture approach to education. It seems more sensible to survey the competing answers with a critical mind, actively investigating for ourselves what has meaning for us and what does not.

In addition to providing an ideal method for this skeptical era, there are other advantages to the Socratic method: first, it takes the subject off the page and places it in the student’s life. One problem with a straight lecture/reading approach to education is that it often fails to bring the abstractions into the student’s experience. For example, in some epistemology classes students are simply asked to read and listen to lectures on Descartes, Locke, and Hume; they are asked to get the issues straight, to think about the problem of skepticism, etc.—but they are not asked to relate the issues to their own lives. The problem is that when this relation is ignored education becomes a meaningless, formal exercise. The value of Socratic questions like, “What do you actually observe when you think one event causes another?” and “Do you know more than my dog Brewster?” is that they force students to consider how epistemological issues relate to their own lives. Thinking about this relation is important even when studying something as removed from students’ lives as epistemology; for example, one of the great values of skeptical arguments such as Hume’s is that they tend to discourage rashness (“because I know I might be wrong”) and encourage tolerance/appreciation (“because I know that even foreigners might be right”). But this kind of influence is possible only if the student relates the abstract issue to his own situation in the world.

In connection with this point, it seems that nothing enters a student’s life as much as the concept of “no.” A nonchallenging comment like, “That’s an interesting answer’’ encourages complacency rather than critical thought. “No, you’re wrong” or “Your sentence is meaningless” or “You have no evidence for that,” on the other hand, are challenges to the mind that demand action. “No” is something that must be dealt with, something that must be taken into account rather than ignored. If a teacher referred to your self-centered love of status as “interesting” or as “one of the many things that human beings live for,” would you have thought much about it? Such tepid niceness might allow an extremely self-centered student to feel good about himself, but it evokes little serious thought about what the student is living for. Pragmatists are basically right in asserting that we don’t reflect on our experience until we have a problem. “No” presents the problem in clear relief.

Another advantage of the Socratic method is that it fosters critical thinking skills—skills that remain long after the particular subject matter is forgotten. By “critical thinking skills” I mean the ability to separate what is valid and true and significant from what is nonsense. After prolonged exposure to the Socratic method, students tend to internalize it—so that even in their private thinking when they run a proposition through their mind they simultaneously search for its weakness, e.g., “The teacher’s statement might be right, but where is the evidence?... And what does he mean by…?” This critical way of thinking about one’s private thoughts is not natural, and it is one of the main consequences of exposure to the Socratic method. In an era dominated by the media, modern politics and so much nonsense, developing critical thinking abilities is important. One problem with the lecture approach to education is that it doesn’t encourage the student to constantly think critically, but when he leaves the lecture and faces the modern world he will be better off if he does.

The Socratic method has great value for another reason: it sharpens the teacher’s mind, and leads her to constantly delve deeper into her subject. This is because it forces her to constantly think of the key questions and issues related to the subject she is teaching. The most important questions, key terms, and relations within a particular subject area are not obvious, and more than a few teachers have trouble writing up essay questions because they haven’t thought out the general questions which relate to their subject. If they use the Socratic method, they have no choice: they must search for the key assumptions, terms and issues in order to raise the right questions.

The Socratic method forces the teacher to pay close attention to students. One problem with a lecture/reading-based course is that allows the teacher to ignore student feedback until exam time (and in many college/graduate courses, not even then). In using the Socratic method teachers are forced to consider student responses daily. Specifically, student feedback provides a formative assessment that identifies intellectual blind spots, false reasoning, clichés and unexamined language, inane values, and other needs for improved reasoning. Of course such intimate intellectual contact can be repulsive, but it does enable teachers to think more realistically about how to communicate and relate the lesson to individual students.

Granted: the Socratic method sometimes evokes too much disrespect for authority, particularly in misguided or dimwitted students, because the method tends to assume that authority is meaningless. Granted: the method sometimes evokes such strong emotions that defenses impair or prevent learning. Granted: the method can often be bruising to a student’s ego. However, without bruising the childhood ego would never be left behind, and the typical delusions of ego about one’s self-importance constitute baggage far too heavy to carry in the search for truth. The Socratic method, by subjecting the ego to constant criticism, is helpful in eliminating the ego from discussions of truth. In evaluating this method, consider the alternatives: would students learn more that is important in their lives during the same limited time period if teachers relied on lecture and reading, or Descartes’ introspection (searching within one’s own consciousness for ideas that are clear and certain), or on Buddhist meditation? Would these or any other approach to the search for truth cause you to think as deeply about your own desire to be top rat?

Please be prepared to defend your answer in an online meeting and on your course blog.