Here we see Socrates the educator, interested in the upbringing of the young. He asks about schoolchildren. He asks questions of them and tests their understanding with further questions. But for him education is not just for the young. The adults who are their teachers and guardians, no less than the children, need to be tested. Often the best way to engage a reluctant adult is through a child. Socrates seems willing to bring up sophistic objections to children’s definitions in order to bait the adults. Young Charmides is no match for Socrates. Will the wise and seasoned Critias do better? What is temperance? What does Socrates think it is? Is it really as important as the virtue itself? Why does he care so much about a definition?
Socrates seems to have carried out investigations like this day after day in relative obscurity. He wanted to know what virtue was, how people learn to be virtuous, how they can practice virtue. The habit of inquiring into things was well established among Greek thinkers. The inquiry was called historia, the original of ‘history,’ though the Greek term had a wider range of application. Yet before Socrates no one had really made virtue itself a subject of inquiry. The early philosophers of Greece had been concerned about how the world arose, what it was made of, what were the laws of nature that governed changes, what was the shape of the world and the nature of the heavenly bodies, and how astronomical and meteorological phenomena were to be explained (see ch. 4*). Socrates was not interested in the study of nature, but of the human condition, and not just human psychology or behavior or the question of how the human race arose—these had all been dealt with by the natural philosophers—but with questions of right and wrong, good and evil. About this there were no textbooks, and remarkably little in the treatises on nature that the philosophers had written, and only a bit more in the speeches and writings of the sophists. To find the answers to his questions Socrates had no books to read and no experts to consult.
He turned to schoolboys and ordinary citizens. Questioning, always questioning, he haunted the palaestras and gymnasiums of Athens, the marketplace, the money-changers’ tables, the porticoes where people passed their time. If Athens were a virtuous state, it should have virtuous citizens. Virtuous citizens would understand virtue and be able to explain it to him. Parents were concerned for their children’s education, including their moral education. He could inquire of them who taught virtue to their sons, and perhaps find out from these teachers what virtue was. In any case, every responsible citizen should have some share of virtue and some stake in embodying it and inculcating it in others, especially his children. The Athenian democracy was built on the assumption that the average citizen was a trustworthy and responsible individual on whom the burdens of directing the affairs of state could be conferred. Hence the average citizen was the appropriate subject to question.
What perhaps began as an occasional diversion of Socrates became a habit. The habit became an obsession. The answers were not satisfactory, and yet the problem seemed with each failure more urgent. How can we constitute a virtuous society if we are ignorant of virtue? How indeed can we be competent in virtue if we do not even care enough to concern ourselves with virtue? At least, he felt, the question of what is virtue and how we acquire it should occupy every Athenian, much more so than questions of how to gain money, reputation, and power.
And so Socrates went on asking his questions. He went on receiving inadequate, unconsidered, ill-conceived answers. He continued to press his companions for better answers. These answers should at least be consistent with other things a person believed. Yet as he inquired, he found inconsistency after inconsistency. The answers did not square with people’s beliefs.
His young friends began to take an interest in his inquiries. They followed him about, listened to his questions, offered themselves as interlocutors to the increasingly trenchant questions of Socrates. They listened with fascination as he raised his questions with other citizens, and watched with admiration as he dissected their answers and searched deeper into their beliefs. He began to collect a following of disciples. He did not regard them as students, for he had no doctrine to impart, no course of instruction, and no expertise to advertise. Indeed, he did not charge fees or try to make a living from his activities. Rather, he neglected his own financial affairs and increasingly focused on his obsession. His companions, however, began to think of themselves as his disciples. At least they were fellow searchers and fellows in his inquiries, partakers in his magnificent obsession and companions on a common quest. However frustrating the process, they had faith that there were answers to be had, and that if anyone could find those answers, it was Socrates.
Beside his method of asking questions, Socrates developed a technique known as irony. Aristophanes sees him an eirōn, a dissembler, as does Thrasymachus in the Republic.[5] Socrates pretends to know less than he seems to know, and to admire, sometimes almost fawningly, the wise men he converses with. Aristotle’s colleague Theophrastus describes the eirōn as a personality type: “Dissembling (eirōneia, irony) would seem to consist, in general, of pretending to be inferior in words and deeds to what one is, and the dissembler (eirōn) acts accordingly. For instance, he comes up to visit with his enemy, not to insult him; he praises him to his face, while criticizing him behind his back; he sympathizes with him when he is defeated and forgives him for speaking against himself … and he speaks kindly to those who feel he has wronged them and are angry with him.”[6] Theophrastus goes on to give examples of the dissembler’s being an inveterate liar. He is opposed to the braggart (alazōn), who claims to be more than he is.[7]
We have seen Socrates being ironical in the Theophrastean sense with Protagoras and now with Critias. He doesn’t know the answers to his questions; he needs help from his learned acquaintances to solve his problems. Is he being dishonest? Aristotle says the great-souled man speaks his mind freely among his peers (including being open about who are his enemies and who his friends) and uses irony only in talking with the many.[8] Socrates, for his part, seems to dissemble not in order to deceive or stab his rival in the back, but in order to generate a friendly discussion with a rival, lowering the temperature in the room and giving the floor to the interlocutor. Although he needles Critias and once or twice gets testy with Protagoras, he never demeans them and, as Theophastus says of the dissembler, he sympathizes with those who are defeated in the discussion. Even the combative Thrasymachus (below, ch. 20*) never gets Socrates’ goat. Sometimes Socrates seems to go overboard with his dissembling, as when he seems obsequious with the dim-witted sophistic team of Euthydemus and Dionysidorus; but here especially he manages to keep an ugly discussion from degenerating into fisticuffs (ch. 18*). In most cases Socrates models the ideal discussion partner, even when he is being mocked, on the one hand, or destroying his interlocutors’ definitions, on the other hand. (Only in the Gorgias does Socrates lose his composure; see chs. 10, 33*.)
As a dissembler, Socrates typically promotes peace and harmony in the discussion; to be sure, he lays dialectical traps for his interlocutors, but does so, as he will imply later, for their own good. For he sees himself as a benefactor (chs. 25, 31*). Indeed, Socrates may be the first intellectual to try to emphasize cooperation rather than competition in investigative dialogues. Of course he never loses a discussion; but, as he insists, he never wins either.
[5]. Aristophanes Clouds 449, where Strepsiades is learning this skill from Socrates; Plato Republic I, 337a4-5.
[6].Theophrastus Characters 1.1-3.
[7bid. 23.
[8].Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1124b26-31.