Since 9th grade, and some of us even as far back as middle school, nearly every work of literature, from poems to novels to plays, has been followed by some form of class discussion, question and response, essay prompt, or something else loosely related to a “Socratic Seminar”. Yet the formal education on Socrates himself or his teachings for most of us begins and ends with a single surface level slide from a lecture presentation in freshman honors english. From then on, socratic seminars have simply been accepted after every reading, most students hardly listening to their peers or considering their questions, rather putting their heads down, and reading off prewritten quotes and answers probably inspired if not fully copied from Sparknotes, Litcharts, or some other website the English teachers might not have caught onto yet. Sadly, I feel this aspect of our education is just another that has turned more or less robotic, repetitive, and uninspired, to no fault of any individual or group of teachers or students. Though Socrates lived over 2000 years ago, and authored no works himself, the influence of his teachings range from other greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, to the founders of democracy in John Locke or Thomas Aquinas, and just about any philosophic or literary movement you can think of, so I find it criminal for us as scholars and students to remain oblivious and negligent to such influential ideas.
The Socratic dialogue taught to question. Rather than simply saying a “what” by declaring a truth or rejecting a wrong, Socrates questioned the why’s and how’s of the very fundamentals of even the most simple beliefs. In Plato’s Euthyphro, Euthyphro was accused of being “impious” for indicting his own father for a murder. In response, Socrates didn’t offer an opinion of the murder, or the morality of taking your own father to court for it, or even critique a legal system that can punish based on religious grounds (piety is the quality of religiousness or reverence to the Gods). Instead Socrates asks Euthyphro flatly, “what is piety, and what is impiety?”, going on to question what it means to be godly, whether the gods themselves were in agreement of rights and wrongs, or whether an act could be both pious and impious. At no point does Socrates, the “practitioner” of the Socratic method, offer any solutions, insights, or answers himself, leaving Euthyphro to find his own conclusion, leading him only with the questions to answer. As Euthyphro shows, Socrates aimed to enlighten just like any other thinker or philosopher, doing so not through demands or declarations, but through questions.
The power of this method is illustrated best through Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, from “The Republic”. In it, Plato imagines prisoners chained in a dark cave from birth, their heads fixed in one direction, where the use of puppets and a fire allows shadows of animals, people, and plants to illuminate the dark cave wall. Imagine one prisoner is pulled out of the cave and forced to the blinding sunlight, slowly adjusting his senses to the world of light, color, and sensation, then going back to free the others, only to be met with anger, confusion, and downright rejection. The captives’ entire reality exists in these shadows, knowing nothing else, and not wanting anything else than what they know. The newly enlightened man can hardly see in the darkness and shadows anymore, while the prisoners can’t even fathom the idea of a tree or the color green. The Allegory of the Cave tells us that no matter how correct, perfect, logical, or enlightened one might be, a truth as undeniable as the light of the sun can be completely rejected in the right context. The enlightened men of the world, the philosophers, no matter how enlightened, will be rejected and even punished for trying to spread the “truth” when it so radically rejects an accepted idea. To Plato and Socrates, everyone is born in, and lives in this cave, including you and I. Most of us reject a simple change in our own cave, think of how you react when an ethical, moral, or political value you hold is challenged. How do we all react when our views are challenged in our student led discussions? Socrates himself was sentenced to death by the Athenian democracy for corrupting the youth, and accepted his fate, rejecting a chance to escape or run away, literally dying on his hill.
If we listen to Socrates, we should question the beliefs we hold and are presented with. We should ask ourselves what caves we’ve been born into, and ask how we can escape them.
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