What Is Socrates’ Method?

I’m reading Plato’s Laches again. I signed up for a week long seminar this summer to discuss this text (along with the Protagoras). I’m reading it quite closely and as I do so, I’m asking myself, “What is the Socratic method and what is it designed to do?”

The easy answer is unsatisfying: it is a mode of conversation that is designed to convince a supposedly knowledgable interlocutor that he doesn’t know what he thinks he knows. The invariable result is the famous aporia where the interlocutor is confused not only about the topic but about himself because he cannot put his beliefs into words. The moral value of the aporia is this realization of one’s own ignorance and the commitment to keep on searching for the truth of the question posed in the course of the dialog. While the dialogs typically end without achieving a clear definition, there has been an historical tendency to assume that the answer remains possible and inherently desireable. In other words, we don’t typically question the characterization of knowledge itself that drives the dialog. We accept that to know something is to be able to define it completely and without contradiction using the words available to us.

After reading the Laches again, I think this characterization of the Socratic method is incomplete. Must we accept that to know something is to be able to define it? Must we accept that a true definition needs to encompass all of the possible examples of the topic at hand (past, present and future), whether it is courage, temperance, piety or even something as mundane as “speed”? Do we need to accept a definition of knowledge as a relentless drive toward idealistic abstractions? I think that Plato’s answers to these questions was no. So then I must ask myself, why would Plato’s Socrates insist on a method that routinely fails to provide those clear definitions to the point where it seems to be impossible to arrive at a complete and satisfactory answer for any topic, ever. Why, in other words, insist on a method that is destined to fail?

To be clear, I don’t think that Plato wants us to accept this characterization of knowledge as stable and incontrovertible definitions. I’m going to use this meditation to understand why I think this and if it is justified. My hope is to end up thinking about Plato in different terms than those handed down to us by intellectual tradition and the history of philosophy.

The key question that I want to try to answer for myself is what, exactly, the failure of the dialog consists of? What specifically breaks when failure (as aporia) occurs? I don’t think that this is easy to answer, but it is fundamental to understanding how Plato is grappling with the relationship between deeds, words, courage, virtue and knowledge in the Laches. My suspicion also is that we’ll find a very un-Platonic version of Plato as his epistemological and metaphysical views of the world break down under scrutiny. I don’t mean that they don’t hold together logically. Rather, I mean that Plato’s own text will show that he doesn’t buy into them as definitive answers to what it means to know something and how reality is structured. He is concerned less with epistemological and metaphysical issues in the early dialogs than he is with ethical issues and what it means to educate and create good citizens.

A side note: If we raid Plato’s text looking for a coherent metaphysics and epistemology behind the scenes, we’re reading Plato Neo-Platonically. We’re assuming that there is some stable and definable Truth lurking in the background of the text that can be turned into a clear and stable definition. Reading Plato becomes an act of textual interpretation the purpose of which is to grasp the Form behind the text, which is at best an imitation of the Form of Plato’s thought. In other words, all of the texts then must be understood to be representations and imitations of this Truth. (And if we take Alfred North Whitehead seriously, all of philosophy since Plato would fit into this model of text and Truth.) This, I think, is a bad way of reading Plato and forces us to miss a lot of what is relevant to our own time, especially his views on ethics and conversation as important to a well functioning society.

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To start, I want to look at a key move that Plato’s Socrates frequently makes in his questioning. This move shifts the topic of the discussion from a particular question to a more general one. This is well known in the scholarship. In the Laches, the particular question — should we teach boys hand-to-hand combat — is replaced by two more general questions of “what form of instruction or practice would make them [Lysimachus’ and Melesias’ sons] turn out best” and, following that question, “what is courage?”

How does Socrates manage this movement? In section 190 Socrates redirects the conversation from the value of learning hand-to-hand combat as good for the sons of Lysimachus and Melesias to a discussion of virtue as the underlying topic that they really want to discuss. This door was opened by Lysimachus when he framed the discussion in terms of “what form of instruction or practice would make [our sons] turn out best.” The dialog immediately moves from this to learning hand-to-hand combat. Socrates will return to this when he begins to speak in earnest from 184D to 185E. His purpose is to shift the discussion from learning how to fight to a much broader discussion of what it means to raise good men: “So do we now declare that we are considering a form of study for the sake of the souls of young men?” (185E). Socrates now controls the terms on which the argument will proceed. He’s shifted from a discussion of a particular question (is learning to fight part of a proper education of boys) to one of generalities and universals (“a desire that the boys’ souls should become as good as possible” 186A). This move is complete at 190D when Socrates succeeds in getting everyone to agree that learning hand-to-hand combat is a means to the end of teaching the virtue of courage.

At this point, Socrates can now enforce his method that can only be designed to fail:

Then let us undertake first of all, Laches, to state what courage is. Then after this we will go on to investigate in what way it could be added to the young, to the extent that the addition could be made through occupations and studies. But try to state what I ask, namely, what courage is. (190E)

Why does Plato (via Socrates) insist on making the interlocutors in the drama pursue a method that he knows will fail? Plato clearly feels no obligation to provide a definitive definition of courage to bring the dialog to close. In fact, the discussion of the proper “occupations and studies” never occurs, and Plato knows that it will never occur in this dialog. We will never finish the definition. So why does he offer the sequence? This is, I believe, because he wants to dramatize the failure as a form of success. While we won’t end up completing this sequence — solid definitions on which we can base instruction and education — we will have a happy ending. Education will continue; it just won’t be on the traditional terms. In this way, the failure will be a kind of success. Everyone who authentically participates in the conversation will be better people as a result, even though they haven’t arrived at a satisfactory definition of courage.

I want to take a few moments to understand how this failure occurs because its repetition is the driver of the dialog. This repetition of failure has a definitive three-part rhythm to it. In the first part, Socrates insists that the interlocutor states a clear definition of what he is supposed to be an expert in — courage in the case of Nicias and Laches, temperance in the case of Charmides, piety and holiness in the case of Euthyphro. The second part is to invalidate any given attempt at a definition by offering counter-examples. The counter-examples are assumed to be relevant to the definition thus requiring the definition to be revised. (I’ll set aside for the moment how the counter-examples are legitimately included in the scope of the definition.) In the third part, the interlocutor breaks down when it seems impossible that any definition will satisfy Socrates. This last part is commonly called the aporia.

Rarely do we find the interlocutors pushing against these moves. To illustrate, let’s take an example from the Laches where Socrates is faulting Laches for having too narrow a definition of courage. From 190E through 192B, Socrates gets Laches to accept that there are examples that don’t fit his too-narrow definition: “if a man is willing to remain at his post and to defend himself against the enemy without running away, then you may rest assured that he is a man of courage” (emphasis added). Socrates counters that Laches has only offered an example of courage, but he has not offered a definition. Examples are emphatically not definitions for Plato’s Socrates who proceeds by offering other examples of courage that force Laches to admit that his definition is too narrow. Can’t one be courageous in retreat or moving across the battlefield “quickly this way and that” so as to keep the enemy guessing? Neither of these are captured in a definition that prohibits one from “running away” or “remaining at his post.” Standing one’s ground is not, it turns out, essential to the definition of courage as Laches offered it.

Laches’s example (that he thinks is a definition) is also too narrow because it is exclusively a military example. Socrates thus pushes beyond battlefield examples to include “those who are brave in dangers at sea, and the ones who show courage in illness and poverty and affairs of state”:

and then again I wanted to include not only those who are brave in the face of pain and fear but also those who are clever at fighting desire and pleasure, whether by standing their ground or running away—because there are some men, aren’t there, Laches, who are brave in matters like these? …. This is what I wanted to find out. So try again to state first what is the courage that is the same in all these cases. (190C-191E, emphasis added)

A valid definition must encompass all of these examples (and presumably more) and therefore must be generic enough to be “the same in all of these cases.” This seems like a highly vulnerable assumption about what it means to know something. So why doesn’t Laches just say that he doesn’t agree that all of these things should be contained in the same definition? Why do we have to broaden the scope of courage so much that all the particulars loose their specificity? This seems like an easy objection, but Laches doesn’t offer it.

He doesn’t offer this obvious objection because Plato needs to dramatize Laches’s failure in a particular way. So why is Laches failing in this discussion? Why must he start over again, and why must his starting over follow the same procedures of stating what courage is? Aren’t we foreshadowing Einstein’s definition of insanity? I want to be clear with myself on this. When Laches expresses his frustration at 194B, what is in question is not that he doesn’t know what courage is. Rather he cannot “pin it down in words and say what it is.” It is worth quoting the entire moment of aporia. We pick up where Socrates wants to get Laches to affirm that some aspect of courage includes endurance:

SOCRATES: … If you are willing, let us hold our ground in the search and let us endure, so that courage itself won’t make fun of us for not searching for it courageously — if after all endurance itself is courage.

LACHES: I am ready not to give up, Socrates, although I am not really accustomed to arguments of this kind. But an absolute desire for victory has seized me with respect to our conversation, and I am really getting annoyed at being unable to express what I think in this fashion. I still think I know what courage is, but I can’t understand how it has escaped me just now so that I can’t pin it down in words and say what it is. (194A-B)

Laches’s annoyance that he is “unable to express what I think” directly connects back to Lysimachus’s preamble where he insists on “frankness” (parrhesia) from all the parties in the conversation. Lysimachus’s definition of frankness is specifically to “say what you think.” This definition is important and repeated throughout the preamble. In fact, he insists on this even before he tells Laches and Nicias why he and Melesias have brought them to watch the demonstration of armed combat. Laches has accepted the terms of the discussion and will say what he thinks, but his aporia at 194B occurs in just these same terms — his failure and frustration is his inability to fulfill the pact and to “pin down in words” what he thinks.

What specifically is failing here? Laches is clearly not failing to embrace the pact of parrhesia. He is trying desperately and authentically to adhere to this particular agreement. He is not intentionally obfuscating and “twisting and turning” as he accuses Nicias of later. But every time he offers a definition of what he thinks courage is, Socrates undermines it with a counter-example. This does not undermine Laches’s belief that he has some sense of what courage is. It undermines his ability for his words to express this sense, and this is clearly driven by the breadth and generalness of the definition Socrates is insisting on. Yet he must keep trying. To continue to do so is the point Plato is wanting to make. But is Plato (via his Socrates) driving this point because he thinks that there is ultimately an accurate and complete answer to this question — an abstraction so general that it encompasses every act of courage that we could possibly imagine? Or is he driving this to repeated failure because something else is at stake?

I think it is the latter, and here’s why. It seems clear that Plato’s focus is on the question of what it means to know something. Knowledge is spread across a gap between one’s experience and what one can definitively say about it. Hence the English word that bares the weight of Laches’s aporia is “expression,” which here means the failure to translate what one experiences as courage (and exhibits in courageous deeds) into a universal definition. In other words, embedded in one’s experience of courage is a link to a universal reality outside of oneself. This is why Plato often (always?) characterizes the experience of any given virtue as a kind of “partaking” or “possession” of something universal and external to oneself. The function of expression is to track down that link to the universal and “pin it down in words.” One’s experience of that possession can be pre-verbal and it is the target of interpretation. But it is not an interpretation of your feelings so much as your experience of something that exists outside you and that you are partaking of. Your experience is always an imitation and therefore an incomplete “possession” of the universal virtue, and human experience is, at best, an incomplete lens with which to view the virtue in its purity.

Thus, Laches’s ability to experience courage and to be courageous isn’t failing. He claims to know what courage is but just can’t “pin it down in words.” We could treat this as incidental to the discussion, but I don’t think that is correct. If we take seriously Socrates rhetorical question at 190C (“what we know, we should be able to state”), Laches doesn’t actually know what courage is because words fail to capture what he thinks. But if we look at the way that Socrates frames courage just before Laches’s expresses his aporia, we actually find that Socrates thinks that one can be courageous without being able to define it. What else could he mean when he says that we should search for the definition of courage courageously? How can we undertake the search courageously if we don’t know what courage is? Socrates own language reveals something about knowledge that is more complex than mere definition. In this way Plato must be pointing out the flaw in this method that Socrates insists that his interlocutors follow. Not only is knowledge not completely contained by definitions, any attempt to come up with comprehensive definitions will lead to frustrations, dead ends, and false restarts.

One could say that Socrates is adding to the pact of parrhesia by insisting on courage as a disposition one must bring to the dialog in addition to insisting on “saying exactly what you think.” But as a disposition that Socrates calls for from everyone in the conversation, courage necessarily precedes the definitional knowledge of what it is. Thus knowing how to be courageous in dialog escapes and frustrates one’s ability to put a final definition on it. Words don't do what Socrates wants them to do. (This, of course, will be the topic of the Cratylus.)

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What does it mean to be courageous in the dialog? Socrates has already expanded the examples of courage well beyond the battlefield, but he hasn’t offered what it means to be courageous in dialog. Rather, Nicias is the one who has done this for him. Famously, Nicias predicts, earlier in the dialog, that the aporia will happen eventually for everyone in the conversation if they are authentic adherents to the pact of parrhesia:

NICIAS: You [Laches] don’t appear to me to know that whoever comes into close contact with Socrates and associates with him in conversation must necessarily, even if he began by conversing about something quite different in the first place, keep on being led about by the man’s arguments until he submits to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto. (187E)

This willingness to be undone by the conversation is the courage required to search for a definition of courage courageously. Nicias is expecting the aporia and has turned it into a kind of pleasure of submission for himself (188A), but Laches is unfamiliar with it. Nicias is thus preparing Laches and warning him of what is likely to happen. It will take courage to proceed because you will end up questioning your very way of life.

So now I must return to the question of what fails at the moment of Laches’s aporia? It is emphatically not the failure of the supposedly knowledgeable individual to know how to be courageous. Socrates never questions Laches’s and Nicias’s credentials as courageous public figures: “In deeds I think anyone would say that we [Laches and Socrates] partook of courage, but in words I don’t suppose he would, if he would listen to our present discussion” (193E). He knows that they know how to be courageous, that they live the value when it is called for, albeit imperfectly. Laches’s reputation in the retreat from Delium is certainly less lofty than Socrates, and Nicias clearly failed (by relying on “seers”) at a battle in Sicily. The point of the dialog is not to expose these eminent military men to a reduction of their claim to courage, though Plato certainly does that to some degree. And certainly Plato’s readers would know that Laches and Nicias are not unblemished paragons of courage. Rather, at issue is what it means to state in words the values that one lives by. The failure to say what one thinks is not therefore a failure to live up to the pact of frankness; it is a failure of one’s experience to be transparent and complete enough to yield a universal definition of the virtue.

I want to turn to this problem of experience as the basis for speaking about something with authoritative knowledge. The distinction that Plato’s Socrates makes in 193E is to differentiate between “partaking of courage” and being able to clearly say what one is partaking in. This notion of “partaking of” is more clearly stated in the Charmides:

“Now it is clear that if temperance is present [pareinai] in you, you have some opinion about it. Because it is necessary, I suppose, that if it really resides in you, it provides a sense of its presence, by means of which you would form an opinion not only that you have it but of what sort it is. Or don’t you think so?”

“Yes,” he [Charmides] said, “I do think so.”

“Well, then, since you know how to speak Greek,” I [Socrates] said, “I suppose you could express this impression of yours in just the way it strikes you.” (159A)

As Rosamond Kent Sprague’s footnote to this passage indicates, pareinai will become a technical term in Plato’s later work relating to how something posses (or partakes in) a Form. (The Parmenides is specifically about this issue.) But at this point, the investigation of temperance (sophrysune) links the presence of a virtue in a person to that person’s ability to clearly define it. Laches’s aporia is the result of his failure to come up with a definition of courage that fits Socrates’ criteria for a good definition, but there is no question that his prior “deeds” indicate the presence of courage in his soul. He is clearly trying to interpret this experiential possession of a virtue. (The Charmides is different in the respect that Socrates and Charmides are trying to figure out if the virtue of temperance is actually present in Charmides.)

It should be clear at this point, that to posses a virtue is not at all dependent on one’s ability to define it. To be sure, it flows both ways. Laches and Nicias posses it — their deeds tell us so — but they can’t define it. So their possession of the virtue precedes the definition. The question at hand is whether or not they understand courage well enough be qualified teachers of this virtue. Yet, when Socrates explains that we need to say what courage is so that we can pass it along as instruction to our young boys (190E), he clearly lays out the sequence in the opposition direction. The definition can be used to implant the virtue through instruction.

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So why is it necessary for Plato’s Socrates to insist that it is morally good to pursue this futile game of trying to define clearly and comprehensively what virtues like courage or temperance are. I think he is trying to say that moral development — caring for one’s soul and living a good life — means undertaking the problematic effort of exposing, in words, what we believe. And in the process we will find that the values we live by must continually be “investigated” if we are to build a better human community. This, I believe, was essential to Plato’s view of the world after the death of his mentor at the hands of a flawed democracy. Any society where a majority of its citizens would vote to condemn a man like Socrates must be in desperate need of moral re-evaluation. It is no mere literary convention that Plato has Socrates denigrate “voting” (184D-E) as a poor basis for making decisions about virtue and raising good sons to be citizens. It is also important that this entire discussion is framed on the front end not only as a pact of speaking frankly, but as the explicit recognition of the failure of Lysimachus’s and Melesias’s fathers (who were both eminent citizens and military men) to educate them to be great citizens (179D). Neither Lysimachus nor Melesias want to repeat this pattern. This failure of education — of a vital cultural process in ancient Greece — becomes the occasion for Plato’s Socrates to completely interrogate and upend a core value — courage — by having eminent citizens — who are assumed to be in some way in possession of the Form of courageousness — shown to be inadequate when it comes to defining what courage is and therefore inadequate and unqualified in their ability to pass it along to future generations as teachers.

The Socratic method is both futile and powerful. In one sense — the endeavor to express in words the values that underwrite one’s deeds — failure is inevitable in the Socratic method. But the method succeeds in another more profound sense in that its participants are better people for engaging in the process. Both Laches and Nicias admit at the end that they are not the right teachers for the boys and that Socrates is. The result, when Socrates demures from taking on the task alone, is that all of the interlocutors undertake the education of the boys collectively with the focus of the care of their souls as the endgame. This is the only way that the ethical and political health of the Athenian polis can be remade.

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It now seems possible for me to answer my initial questions about what is the Socratic method and what exactly fails when the method is successful.

First, what is the Socratic method? It is a set of conversational techniques that are designed to expose the ideological baggage of one’s society to scrutiny. The result is aporia that dramatizes the undoing (deconstruction if you like) of the ideological baggage as a psychological event that allows us to imagine new and different ways of living with ourselves and others. As such, it uses language to open a gap between our experience and how we interpret and give meaning to our experience. We fill that gap with more words and more interpretation that move us further and further away from received wisdom.

But the method does not open up a pure outside or otherness that we can easily inhabit. We can’t just leap out of our existing worldview and create entirely new selves built on different foundations created from scratch. We must investigate and undo the received wisdom and re-orient its values and goals in a constant game of self-fashioning. The reorientation happens by reworking the concepts marshaled within the dialog, not by introducing new ones from outside. Lysimachus starts the initial discussion of education as creating “the best men.” He quickly moves to whether or not instruction on hand-to-hand combat should be part of the education. Socrates won’t allow this move and reorients the dialog around what it means to be “the best men.”

Second, what fails when the method is successful? I believe three things fail. The first point of failure occurs when one is unable to create univocal, unproblematic and universal definitions of the values he lives by. There is always another example that won’t fit the definition, or the legitimacy of all the offered examples is questioned. In either case, the game of definitions is never complete, and we end up wondering whether it ever could be complete. The second point of failure occurs when one cannot say what one thinks. Laches can’t “pin down in words” what he thinks, and that is the moment of his aporia. Essentially this is the failure of received wisdom (ideological baggage) to be the proper basis on which to interpret one’s experience. Again, no one claims that Laches and Nicias aren’t courageous. The problem is not only that they can’t say what courage is, but that they only represent one way of being courageous — military affairs. Both forms of failure work together to create an open-ended orientation to ourselves and our relationship with others. Military courage is only one way to be courageous. There are many others, including the courage of allowing the values and beliefs you live by to be undone in the process of the conversation. Both of these points of failure are intimately bound up with each other because the form in which one must “say what you think” must be a definition that sums up not only all of your experience of the virtue but all of the experiences of others who partake in the virtue.

The third point of failure, and I believe this is ultimately what Plato is getting at in the early dialogs, is the failure of traditional modes of educating the future citizens of Athens. Laches and Nicias were both consulted as potential teachers of Lysimachus’s and Melesias’s boys, but they admit in the end to be unqualified. This lack of qualification is the final moment of failure in the dialog. It’s what the dialog has been driving toward. Their lack of qualification is not because they don’t know what courage is, but because the definition of what it means to properly educate young men has changed dramatically at the end of the dialog. This final failure, however, is not a dead end, and Plato insists on this. The education will and must continue. It will continue the next day, but it will do so without relying on traditional methods of instruction — specifically fighting as a method of instilling courage. New grounds must be sought, and we can only seek them by continuing on.