We must not regard the Socratic method as we are accustomed to
speak of method in our day, i. e. as something which, as such, was distinctly in
his consciousness, and which he abstracted from every concrete content, but it
rather had its growth in the very mode of his philosophizing, which was not
directed to the imparting of a system but to the education of the subject in
philosophical thinking and life. It is only a subjective technicality for his
mode of instruction, the peculiar manner of his philosophical, familiar life.
The Socratic method has a twofold side, a negative and a positive one. The
negative side is the well known Socratic irony. The philosopher takes the
attitude of ignorance, and would apparently let himself be instructed by those
with whom he converses, but through the questions which he puts, the unexpected
consequences which he deduces, and the contradictions in which he involves the
opposite party, he soon leads them to see that their supposed knowledge would
only entangle and confuse them. In the embarrassment in which they now find
themselves placed, and seeing that they do not know what they supposed, this
supposed knowledge completes its own destruction, and the subject who had
pretended to wisdom learns to distrust his previous opinions and firmly held
notions. " What we knew, has contradicted itself," is the refrain of the most of
these conversations.
This result of the Socratic method was only to lead the subject to know that he
knew nothing, and a great part of the dialogues of Xenophon and Plato go no
farther than to represent ostensibly this negative result. But there is yet
another element in his method in which the irony loses its negative appearance.
The positive side of the Socratic method is the so-called obstetrics or art of
intellectual midwifery. Socrates compares himself with his mother Phaenarete, a
midwife, because his position was rather to help others bring forth thoughts
than to produce them himself, and because he took upon himself to distinguish
the birth of an empty thought from one rich in its content. (Plato TheatcBtus,
p. 149.)
Through this art of midwifery the philosopher, by his assiduous questioning, by
his interrogatory dissection of the notions of him with whom he might be
conversing, knew how to elicit from him a thought of which he had previously
been unconscious, and how to help him to the birth of a new thought. A chief
means in this operation was the method of induction, or the leading of the
representation to a conception. The philosopher, thus, starting from some
individual, concrete case, and seizing hold, of the most common notions
concerning it, and finding illustrations in the most ordinary and trivial
occurrences, knew how to remove by his comparisons that which was individual,
and j by thus separating the accidental and contingent from the essential, could
bring up to consciousness a universal truth and a universal determination,—in
other words, could form conceptions. In order e. g. to find the conception of
justice or valor, he would start from individual examples of them, and from
these deduce the universal character or conception of these virtues. From this
we see that the direction of the Socratic induction was to gain logical
definitions. I define a conception when I develope what j it is, its essence,
its content. I define the conception of justice 1 when I set up the common
property and logical unity of all its different modes of manifestation. Socrates
sought to go no farther than this. " To seek for the essence of virtue," says an
Aristotelian writing (Eih. I. 5), " Socrates regarded as the problem of
philosophy, and hence, since he regarded all virtue as a knowing, he sought to
determine in respect of justice or valor what they might really be, i. e. he
investigated their essence or conception." From this it is very easy to see the
connection which his method of definitions or of forming conceptions had with
his practical strivings. He went back to the conception of every individual
virtue, e. g. justice, only because he was convinced that the knowledge of this
conception, the knowledge of it for every individual case, was the surest guide
for every moral relation. Every moral action, he believed, should start as a
conscious action from the conception.
From this we might characterize the Socratic method as the skill by which a
certain sum of given, homogeneous and individual phenomena was taken, and their
logical unity, the universal principle which lay at their base, inductively
found. This method presupposes the recognition that the essence of the objects
must be comprehended in the thought, that the conception is the true being of
the thing. Hence we see that the Platonic doctrine of ideas is only the
objectifying of this method which in Socrates appears no farther than a
subjective dexterity. The Platonic ideas are the universal conceptions of
Socrates posited as real individual beings. Hence Aristotle (Metaph. XIII. 4)
most fittingly characterizes the relation between the Socratic method and the
Platonic doctrine of ideas with the words, " Socrates posits the universal
conceptions not as separate, individual substances, while Plato does this, and
names them ideas."
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