Should We Aspire To Be Socratic?
Agnes Callard's Socrates and the Helpfulness of Being Selfish
Here’s a great new article on Socrates and collaborative truth seeking by Agnes Callard.
One point Callard makes is that Socrates’s main motivation for refuting people is self-interested. Socrates needs people who are willing to speak freely about the beliefs they hold so that he can refine his ignorance, moving from a generic cluelessness about things to a more a shapely one.
Yes, Socrates is a mid-wife who helps others give birth to new insights, but Socrates’s interest is knowledge. Any therapeutic benefit to his pursuit of knowledge is incidental.
I would go further—on Callard’s account, a person who seeks to help others is not Socratic. Because doing so, one would have to presume that one had such a capacity. Rather, if it turns out that the best way to help people in conversation is by being Socratic, this is to say that the best (knowledge-seeking) conversations occur when our goal is to learn rather than to teach. It is condescending and non-Socratic to think that you can enlighten others.
This is another way of stating Socratic irony: the person who is motivated by a desire to learn ends up teaching more than the person who desires to teach.
I wonder what would happen if two Socratic types got together—would the conversation be better, as with two expert boxers? Or does Socratic dialogue need a dupe as much as it needs a Socrates? This latter option seems to be where Callard leads us when she writes that “Socrates and Most People are a match made in heaven.” But if this is so, then we shouldn’t seek a world in which people are more Socratic, or even collaborative. Ironically, Socratic dialogue needs “basic” people as much as it needs Socrates.
But maybe we can learn to play both the Socratic role and the sincere believer role in conversation and to switch it up for best effect. The best conversations might be had between people practiced at playing both the Socrates side and the interlocutor side. On the other hand, perhaps the conversation will not go very well if people treat it as a kind of game or improvisational exercise, and can only work when people are so immersed in it, they forget they are playing and imagine they are being deeply serious. I don’t think the two options are contradictory.
Two questions for further posts:
1) What kinds of connection and understanding does the Socratic mode miss? When is it wrong or unskillful to seek knowledge or truth in conversation?
2) Is Socratic dialogue a skill that can be learned? Or is it simply the outgrowth of a basic skeptical temperament?
Quick announcement: I’m leading a salon on “Heidegger and the Meaning of Life” on August 3rd @ 9pm EST. You can sign up here. Do spread the word! And while I have you here, if you enjoy these daily missives, please share this newsletter with friends and on social media by inviting people to subscribe.
What is Called Thinking? is a practice of asking a daily question on the belief that self-reflection brings awe, joy, and enrichment to one’s life. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this project and access subscriber-only content.
You can read my weekly Torah commentary here.