Write a short, objective summary about” What is the Socrative Method?” by Christopher Phillips of 250-500 words which summarizes the main ideas being put forward by the author in this selection.
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WHAT IS THE SOCRATIC METHOD?
excerpted from Socrates Cafe by Christopher Phillips
The Socratic method is a way to seek truths by your own lights. It is a system, a spirit, a method, a type of
philosophical inquiry an intellectual technique, all rolled into one. Socrates himself never spelled out a
“Method.” However, the Socratic method is named after him because Socrates, more than any other before
or since, models for us philosophy practiced – philosophy as deed, as way of living, as something that any
of us can do. It is an open system of philosophical inquiry that allows one to interrogate from many vantage
points.
Gregory Vlastos, a Socrates scholar, and professor of philosophy at Princeton, described Socrates’ method
of inquiry as “among the greatest achievements of humanity.” Why? Because, he says, it makes
philosophical inquiry “a common human enterprise, open to every man.” Instead of requiring allegiance to
a specific philosophical viewpoint or analytic technique or specialized vocabulary, the Socratic method
“Calls for common sense and common speech.” And this, he says, “is as it should be, for how man should
live is every man’s business.”
I think, however, that the Socratic method goes beyond Vlastos’ description. It does not merely call for
common sense but examines what common sense is. The Socratic method asks: Does the common sense of
our day offer us the greatest potential for self-understanding and human excellence? Or is the prevailing
common sense in fact a roadblock to realizing this potential?
Vlastos goes on to say that Socratic inquiry is by no means simple, and “calls not only for the highest
degree of mental alertness of which anyone is capable” but also for “moral qualities of a high order:
sincerity, humility, courage.” Such qualities “protect against the possibility” that Socratic dialogue, no
matter how rigorous, “would merely grind out . . . wild conclusions with irresponsible premises.” I agree,
though I would replace the quality of sincerity with honesty, since one can hold a conviction sincerely
without examining it, while honesty would require that one subject one’s convictions to frequent scrutiny.
A Socratic dialogue reveals how different our outlooks can be on concepts we use every day. It reveals how
different our philosophies are, and often how tenable – or untenable, as the case may be – a range of
philosophies can be. Moreover, even the most universally recognized and used concept, when subjected to
Socratic scrutiny, might reveal not only that there is not universal agreement, after all, on the meaning of
any given concept, but that every single person has a somewhat different take on each and every concept
under the sun.
What’s more, there seems to be no such thing as a concept so abstract, or a question so off base, that it can’t
be fruitfully explored at Socrates Cafe. In the course of Socratizing, it often turns out to be the case that
some of the most so-called abstract concepts are intimately related to the most profoundly relevant human
experiences. In fact, it’s been my experience that virtually any question can be plumbed Socratically.
Sometimes you don’t know what question the most lasting and significant impact will have until you take a
risk and delve into it for a while.
What distinguishes the Socratic method from mere nonsystematic inquiry is the sustained attempt to
explore the ramifications of certain opinions and then offer compelling objections and alternatives. This
scrupulous and exhaustive form of inquiry in many ways resembles the scientific method. But unlike
Socratic inquiry, scientific inquiry would often lead us to believe that whatever is not measurable cannot be
investigated. This “belief fails to address such paramount human concerns as sorrow and joy and suffering
and love.
Instead of focusing on the outer cosmos, Socrates focused primarily on human beings and their cosmos
within, utilizing his method to open up new realms of self-knowledge while at the same time exposing a
great deal of error, superstition, and dogmatic nonsense. The Spanish-born American philosopher and poet
George Santayana said that Socrates knew that “the foreground of human life is necessarily moral and
practical” and that “it is so even so for artists” – and even for scientists, try as some might to divorce their
work from these dimensions of human existence.
Scholars call Socrates’ method the elenchus, which is Hellenistic Greek for inquiry or cross-examination.
But it is not just any type of inquiry or examination. It is a type that reveals people to themselves, that
makes them see what their opinions really amount to. C. D. C. Reeve, professor of philosophy at Reed
College, gives the standard explanation of an elenchus in saying that its aim “is not simply to reach
adequate definitions” of such things as virtues; rather, it also has a “moral reformatory purpose, for Socrates
believes that regular elenctic philosophizing makes people happier and more virtuous than anything else. . . .
Indeed philosophizing is so important for human welfare, on his view, that he is willing to accept execution
rather than give it up.”
Socrates’ method of examination can indeed be a vital part of existence, but I would not go so far as to say
that \tshould be. And I do not think that Socrates felt that habitual use of this method “makes people
happier.” The fulfillment that comes from Socratizing comes only at a price – it could well make
us unhappier, more uncertain, more troubled, as well as more fulfilled. It can leave us with a sense that
we don ‘t know the answers after all, that we are much further from knowing the answers than we’d ever
realized before engaging in Socratic discourse. And this is fulfilling – and exhilarating and humbling and
perplexing. We may leave a Socrates Cafe – in all likelihood we w;7/leave a Socrates Cafe – with a heady
sense that there are many more ways and truths and lights by which to examine any given concept than we
had ever before imagined.
In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche said, “I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in all he did,
said – and did not say.” Nietzsche was a distinguished nineteenth-century classical philologist before he
abandoned the academic fold and became known for championing a type of heroic individual who would
create a life – affirming “will to power” ethic. In the spirit of his writings on such individuals, whom he
described as “supermen,’, Nietzsche lauded Socrates as a “genius of the heart. . . whose voice knows how
to descend into the depths of every soul . . . who teaches one to listen, who smoothes rough souls and lets
them taste a new yearning . . . who divines the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness . . . from
whose touch everyone goes away richer, not having found grace nor amazed, not as blessed and oppressed
by the good of another, but richer in himself, opened . . . less sure perhaps… but full of hopes that as yet
have no name.” I only differ with Nietzsche when he characterizes Socrates as someone who descended
into the depths of others’ souls. To the contrary Socrates enabled those with whom he engaged in dialogues
to descend into the depths of their own souls and create their own life – affirming ethic.
Santayana said that he would never hold views in philosophy which he did not believe in daily life, and that
he would deem it dishonest and even spineless to advance or entertain views in discourse which were not
those under which he habitually lived. But there is no neat divide between one’s views of philosophy and of
life. They are overlapping and kindred views. It is virtually impossible in many instances to know what we
believe in daily life until we engage others in dialogue. Likewise, to discover our philosophical views, we
must engage with ourselves, with the lives we already lead. Our views form, change, evolve, as we
participate in this dialogue. It is the only way truly to discover what philosophical colors we sail under.
Everyone at some point preaches to himself and others what he does not yet practice; everyone acts in or on
the world in ways that are in some way contradictory or inconsistent with the views he or she confesses or
professes to hold. For instance, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, the influential founder of
existentialism, put Socratic principles to use in writing his dissertation on the concept of irony in Socrates,
often using pseudonyms so he could argue his own positions with himself. In addition, the sixteenth-
century essayist Michel de Montaigne, who was called “the French Socrates” and was known as the father
of skepticism in modern Europe, would write and add conflicting and even contradictory passages in the
same work. And like Socrates, he believed the search for truth was worth dying for.
The Socratic method forces people “to confront their own dogmatism,” according to Leonard Nelson, a
German philosopher who wrote on such subjects as ethics and theory of knowledge until he was forced by
the rise of Nazism to quit. By doing so, participants in Socratic dialogue are, in effect,’ ‘forcing themselves
to be free,” Nelson maintains. But they’re not just confronted with their own dogmatism. In the course of a
Socrates Cafe, they may be confronted with an array of hypotheses, convictions, conjectures and theories
offered by the other participants, and themselves – all of which subscribe to some sort of dogma. The
Socratic method requires that – honestly and openly, rationally and imaginatively – they confront the dogma
by asking such questions as: What does this mean? What speaks for and against it? Are there alternative
ways of considering it that are even more plausible and tenable?
At certain junctures of a Socratic dialogue, the “forcing” that this confrontation entails – the insistence that
each participant carefully articulate her singular philosophical perspective – can be upsetting. But that is all
to the good. If it never touches any nerves, if it doesn’t upset, if it doesn’t mentally and spiritually challenge
and perplex, in a wonderful and exhilarating way, it is not Socratic dialogue. This “forcing” opens us up to
the varieties of experiences of others – whether through direct dialogue, or through other means, like drama
or books, or through a work of art or a dance. It compels us to explore alternative perspectives, asking what
might be said for or against each.
Keep this ethos in mind if you ever, for instance, feel tempted to ask a question like this one once posed at
a Socrates Cafe: How can we overcome alienation? Challenge the premise of the question at the outset.
You may need to ask: Is alienation something we always want to overcome? For instance, Shakespeare and
Goethe may have written their timeless works because they embraced their sense of alienation rather than
attempting to escape it. If this was so, then you might want to ask: Are there many different types, and
degrees, of alienation? Depending on the context, are there some types that you want to overcome and other
types that you do not at all want to overcome but rather want to incorporate into yourself? And to answer
effectively such questions, you first need to ask and answer such questions as: What is alienation? What
does it mean to overcome alienation? Why would we ever want to overcome alienation? What are some of
the many different types of alienation? What are the criteria or traits that link each of these types? Is it
possible to be completely alienated? And many more questions besides.
Those who become smitten with the Socratic method of philosophical inquiry thrive on the question. They
never run out of questions, or out of new ways to question. Some of Socrates Cafe’s most avid
philosophizers are, for me, the question personified.
Anthropology and the Abnormal 1
ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE ABNORMAL
Ruth Benedict
Ruth F. Benedict (1887-1948) was a leading anthropologist
of the 20th century. She began her studies in 1919 at
Columbia University under John Dewey, then continued at
the New School for Social Research with Elsie Clews
Parsons. Back at Columbia, she wrote her doctoral
dissertation under Franz Boas, receiving her doctorate in
1923, and staying on as a professor. Apart from more
scholarly work, her book Patterns of Culture (1934) was a
bestseller. What follows is an abridgment of an essay that
first appeared in the Journal of General Psychology, 10:59-
80 (1934). This essay is widely reprinted as making a
strong case for ethical relativism.
Modern social anthropology has become more and more
a study of the varieties and common elements of cultural
environment and the consequences of these in human beha-
vior. For such a study of diverse social orders, primitive
peoples fortunately provide a laboratory not yet entirely
vitiated by the spread of standardized worldwide civiliza-
tions. Dyaks and Hopis, Fijians and Yakuts are significant
for psychological and sociological study because only
among these simpler peoples has there been sufficient
isolation to give opportunity for the development of local-
ized social forms. In the higher cultures, the standardization
of custom and belief over a couple of continents has given a
false sense of the inevitability of the particular forms that
have gained currency, and we need to turn to a wider survey
in order to check the conclusions we hastily base upon this
near-universality of familiar customs. Most of the simpler
cultures did not gain the wide currency of the one which,
out of our experience, we identify with human nature, but
this was for various historical reasons, and certainly not for
any that gives us as its carriers a monopoly of social good or
of social sanity. Modern civilization, from this point of
view, becomes not a necessary pinnacle of human achieve-
ment but one entry in a long series of possible adjustments.
These adjustments, whether they are in mannerisms like
the ways of showing anger, or joy, or grief in any society, or
in major human drives like those of sex, prove to be far
more variable than experience in any one culture would
suggest. In certain fields, such as that of religion or of for-
mal marriage arrangements, these wide limits of variability
are well known and can be fairly described. In others it is
not yet possible to give a generalized account, but that does
not absolve us of the task of indicating the significance of
the work that has been done and of the problems that have
arisen.
One of these problems relates to the customary modern
normal-abnormal categories and our conclusions regarding
them. In how far are such categories culturally determined,
or in how far can we with assurance regard them as abso-
lute? In how far can we regard inability to function socially
as diagnostic of abnormality, or in how far is it necessary to
regard this as a function of the culture? […]
The most spectacular illustrations of the extent to which
normality may be culturally defined are those cultures
where an abnormality of our culture is the cornerstone of
their social structure. It is not possible to do justice to these
possibilities in a short discussion. A recent study of an is-
land of northwest Melanesia by Fortune describes a society
built upon traits which we regard as beyond the border of
paranoia. In this tribe the exogamic groups look upon each
other as prime manipulators of black magic, so that one
marries always into an enemy group which remains for life
one’s deadly and unappeasable foes. They look upon a
good garden crop as a confession of theft, for everyone is
engaged in making magic to induce into his garden the
productiveness of his neighbor’s; therefore no secrecy in the
island is so rigidly insisted upon as the secrecy of a man’s
harvesting of his yams. Their polite phrase at the accep-
tance of a gift is, “And if you now poison me, how shall I
repay you this present?” Their preoccupation with poi-
soning is constant; no woman ever leaves her cooking pot
for a moment unattended. Even the great affinal economic
exchanges that are characteristic of this Melanesian culture
area are quite altered in Dobu since they are incompatible
with this fear and distrust that pervades the culture. […]
They go farther and people the whole world outside their
own quarters with such malignant spirits that all-night feasts
and ceremonials simply do not occur here. They have even
religiously enforced customs that forbid the sharing of seed
even in one family group. Anyone else’s food is deadly
poison to you, so that communality of stores is out of the
question. For some months before harvest the whole society
2 Ruth Benedict
is on the verge of starvation, but if one falls to the tempta-
tion and eats up one’s seed yams, one is an outcast and
beachcomber for life. There is no coming back. It involves,
as a matter of course, divorce and the breaking of all social
ties.
Now in this society where no one may work with another
and no one may share with another, Fortune describes the
individual who was regarded by all his fellows as crazy. He
was not one of those who periodically ran amok and, beside
himself and frothing at the mouth, fell with a knife upon
anyone he could reach. Such behavior they did not regard
as putting anyone outside the pale. They did not even put
the individuals who were known to be liable to these attacks
under any kind of control. They merely fled when they saw
the attack coming on and kept out of the way. “He would
be all right tomorrow.” But there was one man of sunny,
kindly disposition who liked work and liked to be helpful.
The compulsion was too strong for him to repress it in favor
of the opposite tendencies of his culture. Men and women
never spoke of him without laughing; he was silly and
simple and definitely crazy. Nevertheless, to the ethnologist
used to a culture that has, in Christianity, made his type the
model of all virtue, he seemed a pleasant fellow.
An even more extreme example, because it is of a culture
that has built itself upon a more complex abnormality, is
that of the North Pacific Coast of North America. The
civilization of the Kwakiutl, at the time when it was first
recorded in the last decades of the nineteenth century, was
one of the most vigorous in North America. It was built
upon an ample economic supply of goods, the fish which
furnished their food staple being practically inexhaustible
and obtainable with comparatively small labor, and the
wood which furnished the material for their houses, their
furnishings, and their arts being, with however much labor,
always procurable. They lived in coastal villages that com-
pared favorably in size with those of any other American
Indians and they kept up constant communication by means
of sea-going dugout canoes.
It was one of the most vigorous and zestful of the abo-
riginal cultures of North America, with complex crafts and
ceremonials, and elaborate and striking arts. It certainly had
none of the earmarks of a sick civilization. The tribes of the
Northwest Coast had wealth, and exactly in our terms. That
is, they had not only a surplus of economic goods, but they
made a game of the manipulation of wealth. It was by no
means a mere direct transcription of economic needs and the
filling of those needs. It involved the idea of capital, of
interest, and of conspicuous waste. It was a game with all the
binding rules of a game, and a person entered it as a child. His
father distributed wealth for him, according to his ability, at a
small feast or potlatch, and each gift the receiver was obliged
to accept and to return after a short interval with interest that
ran to about 100 per cent a year. By the time the child was
grown, therefore, he was well launched, a larger potlatch had
been given for him on various occasions of exploit or initia-
tion, and he had wealth either out at usury or in his own pos-
session. Nothing in the civilization could be enjoyed without
validating it by the distribution of this wealth. Everything that
was valued, names and songs as well as material objects, were
passed down in family lines, but they were always publicly
assumed with accompanying sufficient distributions of prop-
erty. It was a game of validating and exercising all the privi-
leges one could accumulate from one’s various forebears, or
by gift, or by marriage, that made the chief interest of the
culture. Everyone in his degree took part in it, but many, of
course, mainly as spectators. In its highest form it was played
out between rival chiefs representing not only themselves and
their family lines but their communities, and the object of the
contest was to glorify oneself and to humiliate one’s opponent.
On this level of greatness the property involved was no longer
represented by blankets, so many thousand of them to a pot-
latch, but by higher units of value. These higher units were
like our bank notes. They were incised copper tablets, each of
them named, and having a value that depended upon their il-
lustrious history. This was as high as ten thousand blankets,
and to possess one of them, still more to enhance its value at a
great potlatch, was one of the greatest glories within the
compass of the chiefs of the Northwest Coast. […]
Every contingency of life was dealt with in … two tra-
ditional ways. To them the two were equivalent. Whether
one fought with weapons or “fought with property,” as they
say, the same idea was at the bottom of both. In the olden
times, they say, they fought with spears, but now they fight
with property. One overcomes one’s opponents in equiva-
lent fashion in both, matching forces and seeing that one
comes out ahead, and one can thumb one’s nose at the van-
quished rather more satisfactorily at a potlatch than on a
battlefield. Every occasion in life was noticed not in its own
terms, as a stage in the sex life of the individual or as a
climax of joy or of grief, but as furthering this drama of
consolidating one’s own prestige and bringing shame to
one’s guests. Whether it was the occasion of the birth of a
child, or a daughter’s adolescence, or of the marriage of
one’s son, they were all equivalent raw material for the
“Anthropology and the Abnormal” 3
culture to use for this one traditionally selected end. They
were all to raise one’s own personal status and to entrench
oneself by the humiliation of one’s fellows. A girl’s
adolescence among the Nootka was an event for which her
father gathered property from the time she was first able to
run about. When she was adolescent he would demonstrate
his greatness by an unheard of distribution of these goods,
and cut down all his rivals. It was not as a fact of the girl’s
sex life that it figured in their culture, but as the occasion for
a major move in the great game of vindicating one’s own
greatness and humiliating one’s associates.
In their behavior at great bereavements this set of the
culture comes out most strongly. Among the Kwakiutl it
did not matter whether a relative had died in bed of disease,
or by the hand of an enemy; in either case death was an
affront to be wiped out by the death of another person. The
fact that one had been caused to mourn was proof that one
had been put upon. A chief’s sister and her daughter had
gone up to Victoria, and either because they drank bad
whiskey or because their boat capsized they never came
back. The chief called together his warriors. “Now, I ask
you, tribes, who shall wail? Shall I do it or shall another?”
The spokesman answered, of course, “Not you, Chief. Let
some other of the tribes.” Immediately they set up the war
pole to announce their intention of wiping out the injury,
and gathered a war party. They set out, and found seven
men and two children asleep and killed them. “Then they
felt good when they arrived at Sebaa in the evening.”
The point which is of interest to us is that in our society
those who on that occasion would feel good when they
arrived at Sebaa that evening would be the definitely ab-
normal. There would be some, even in our society, but it is
not a recognized and approved mood under the circum-
stances. On the Northwest Coast those are favored and
fortunate to whom that mood under those circumstances is
congenial, and those to whom it is repugnant are unlucky.
This latter minority can register in their own culture only by
doing violence to their congenial responses and acquiring
others that are difficult for them. The person, for instance,
who, like a Plains Indian whose wife has been taken from
him, is too proud to fight, can deal with the Northwest Coast
civilization only by ignoring its strongest bents. If he
cannot achieve it, he is the deviant in that culture, their
instance of abnormality.
This head-hunting that takes place on the Northwest
Coast after a death is no matter of blood revenge or of
organized vengeance. There is no effort to tie up the sub-
sequent killing with any responsibility on the part of the
victim for the death of the person who is being mourned. A
chief whose son has died goes visiting wherever his fancy
dictates, and he says to his host, “My prince has died today,
and you go with him.” Then he kills him. In this, according
to their interpretation, he acts nobly because he has not been
downed. He has thrust back in return. The whole procedure
is meaningless without the fundamental paranoid reading of
bereavement. Death, like all the other untoward accidents
of existence, confounds man’s pride and can only be
handled in the category of insults. […]
These illustrations, which it has been possible to indicate
only in the briefest manner, force upon us the fact that
normality is culturally defined. An adult shaped to the
drives and standards of either of these cultures, if he were
transported into our civilization, would fall into our
categories of abnormality. He would be faced with the
psychic dilemmas of the socially unavailable. In his own
culture, however, he is the pillar of society, the end result of
socially inculcated mores, and the problem of personal
instability in his case simply does not arise.
No one civilization can possibly utilize in its mores the
whole potential range of human behavior. Just as there are
great numbers of possible phonetic articulations, and the
possibility of language depends on a selection and standardi-
zation of a few of these in order that speech communication
may be possible at all, so the possibility of organized behavior
of every sort, from the fashions of local dress and houses to
the dicta of a people’s ethics and religion, depends upon a
similar selection among the possible behavior traits. In the
field of recognized economic obligations or sex taboos, this
selection is as nonrational and subconscious a process as it is
in the field of phonetics. It is a process which goes on in the
group for long periods of time and is historically conditioned
by innumerable accidents of isolation or of contact of peoples.
In any comprehensive study of psychology, the selection that
different cultures have made in the course of history within the
great circumference of potential behavior is of great signifi-
cance.
Every society, beginning with some slight inclination in
one direction or another, carries its preference farther and
farther, integrating itself more and more completely upon its
chosen basis, and discarding those types of behavior that are
uncongenial. Most of those organizations of personality
that seem to us most incontrovertibly abnormal have been
used by different civilizations in the very foundations of
their institutional life. Conversely, the most valued traits of
4 Ruth Benedict
our normal individuals have been looked on in differently
organized cultures as aberrant. Normality, in short, within a
very wide range, is culturally defined. It is primarily a term
for the socially elaborated segment of human behavior in
any culture; and abnormality, a term for the segment that
that particular civilization does not use. The very eyes with
which we see the problem are conditioned by the long tradi-
tional habits of our own society.
It is a point that has been made more often in relation to
ethics than in relation to psychiatry. We do not any longer
make the mistake of deriving the morality of our own loc-
ality and decade directly from the inevitable constitution of
human nature. We do not elevate it to the dignity of a first
principle. We recognize that morality differs in every soc-
iety, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits.
Mankind has always preferred to say, “It is morally good,”
rather than “It is habitual,” and the fact of this preference is
matter enough for a critical science of ethics. But histori-
cally the two phases are synonymous.
The concept of the normal is properly a variant of the
concept of the good. It is that which society has approved.
A normal action is one which falls well within the limits of
expected behavior for a particular society. Its variability
among different peoples is essentially a function of the
variability of the behavior patterns that different societies
have created for themselves, and can never be wholly
divorced from a consideration of culturally institutionalized
types of behavior.
Each culture is a more or less elaborate working-out of
the potentialities of the segment it has chosen. In so far as a
civilization is well integrated and consistent within itself, it
will tend to carry farther and farther, according to its nature,
its initial impulse toward a particular type of action, and
from the point of view of any other culture those elabora-
tions will include more and more extreme and aberrant
traits.
Each of these traits, in proportion as it reinforces the
chosen behavior patterns of that culture, is for that culture
normal. Those individuals to whom it is congenial either
congenitally, or as the result of childhood sets, are accorded
prestige in that culture, and are not visited with the social
contempt or disapproval which their traits would call down
upon them in a society that was differently organized. On
the other hand, those individuals whose characteristics are
not congenial to the selected type of human behavior in that
community are the deviants, no matter how valued their
personality traits may be in a contrasted civilization. […]
The problem of understanding abnormal human behavior
in any absolute sense independent of cultural factors is still
far in the future. The categories of borderline behavior
which we derive from the study of the neuroses and
psychoses of our civilization are categories of prevailing
local types of instability. They give much information
about the stresses and strains of Western civilization, but no
final picture of inevitable human behavior. Any conclusions
about such behavior must await the collection by trained
observers of psychiatric data from other cultures. Since no
adequate work of the kind has been done at the present time,
it is impossible to say what core of definition of abnormality
may be found valid from the comparative material. It is as it
is in ethics; all our local conventions of moral behavior and
of immoral are without absolute validity, and yet it is quite
possible that a modicum of what is considered right and
what wrong could be disentangled that is shared by the
whole human race. When data are available in psychiatry,
this minimum definition of abnormal human tendencies will
be probably quite unlike our culturally conditioned, highly
elaborated psychoses such as those that are described, for
instance, under the terms of schizophrenia and manic-
depressive.