What Are Socratic Relationships?
We are all familiar with Platonic relationships, but in the 2400 years since Socrates gave his life for its sake, we have scarcely asked or heard mention of what Socratic relationships might be. And since Socrates was Plato’s teacher, you’d think that would be the next logical question. Go figure.
At any rate, we can be sure that they are not the “guess what’s on the teacher’s mind” games so often mistaken to be the Socratic method (of Paper Chase fame).
“A Socratic relationship,” is also NOT (as one internet observer tries to convince us) one in which “you ask a lot of really difficult questions of the other person until they get annoyed and want to poison you.” (The author who wrote this admits, “I have a lot of those.“)
Socratic relationships are, rather, relationships in which each seeks to help bring out the good in the other, to uplift the other's understanding, and to do so by way of a question and answer teaching and learning exchange of ideas. These happen spontaneously when people both open up and listen like a parent talking with a well loved child.
And one key lesson of Socratic relationships is that love and learning are not actually different things – just different ways of looking at the same thing – and understanding is key to both! Which is why Socrates ultimately proclaimed, “Love is the only thing I ever claimed to know anything about.
As Huston Smith so eloquently put it,
“Understanding…breeds love; but the reverse also holds. Love brings understanding - the two are reciprocal. So we must listen to understand…” And “if we are to be true to the wisdom traditions, we must attend to others as deeply and as alertly as we hope they will attend to us.”
Such discussions are rarely inclined toward argument, for participants are not inclined toward winning, but rather arguing in the philosophical sense, that is, to understanding one another and the truth itself. Because the good thing about the truth is, again, that it stays true! And having access to multi-perspectival voices means that all together give us access to whatever it is we need to learn. As we’ve said, bringing depth to our understanding the way a second eye adds depth to what can be seen with only one.
In this way, the truth can be found, again and again, with or without the help of an inspired guide. Certainly it helps to have the voices of those who’ve been up and down the mountain a few times by way of paths we ourselves cannot have traveled, and this guidance can help us avoid predictable obstacles and potholes along the way. But with or without help, we find truth by recognition and recall, not by having it out pointed out to us. In any case, we still have to figure out for ourselves what is and is not true.
Socrates spent his whole life just talking with and bring out the good in as many people as he could, sometimes only with a good hearted jibe aimed to nudge them out of their comfortable ignorance (which, if you think about it, is nothing but the noun consequent of the verb ‘to ignore.’)
At any rate, we at least can see the need for Socratic relationships by way of their absence in our experience. (Certainly our educational experience… In fact, it was the complete dearth of dialogue in Capital-P Philosophy that brings me to write this at all…for what chance do our young, and our young democracy, have if education does not exercise our voices?) And this is why it’s worth writing that book about what Socratic relationships are, and how they differ from what we’ve been taught the Socratic method is.
We do right by our children “by planting the seed in each generation to go to the source of life itself, and to learn to protect those natural-relationships that allow us to be self-determined.” (OI, Parhuli, 314)
Dialectic Thinking in the Classroom
Socrates called dialectic thinking, “the science of all sciences.” Whatever else you do in life, he said, dialectic philosophy will make you a better that! It could connect and integrate all ways of knowing, if not at the highest echelon of academia, at least in the minds and hearts of students.
I discovered many ways to put these dialectic insights to work in the classroom when I began teaching soon thereafter. For instance, the concept can be introduced by way of any handy object – a cup of coffee, a bottle of water, or an eraser. Holding it up, or putting it in the middle of the room, made immediately apparent how different it – or anything - looks from each of our different point of view. And this is true of any object of our knowledge, of course. Discussing how many different perspectives we might take on this or any object of our knowledge make it clear to them that anything can be seen from a virtual infinity of points of view. And importantly, if the object of our knowledge is itself living and conscious, that number would increase by one – infinity, plus one! To understand living things, we must consider them from inside looking out – through their own eyes on the world. And this is true, of course, of anything, living or not, that we might hope to know or understand – they can be viewed from any of many perspectives, and what’s more, must be – if the whole truth about it is our objective. This exercise had staying power, since it came up again and again for the rest of the semester or year.
There is an important lesson in humility here, for we can all see and remember from this little demonstration, not only how much we all have to learn from one another, especially those who see the world differently from us, those who see what’s in our blind spot, but that those we take to be our worst enemies may well be our best teachers. As Jonathan Haidt concludes in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, “A good place to look for wisdom, therefore, is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents.”(242)
So from this, another classroom exercise grew that became a source of inspiration for how this book is organized. We would begin the semester with an ice-breaker, asking each to share the most important lesson they had learned in life, and how they learned it. I would emphasize that it was probably something they had learned the hard way, and while they might have been or still be reluctant to share the intimate details of their lives with perfect strangers, they would be doing others a favor by saving them having to learn it the hard way. Suffice it to say they did not stay strangers for long, for by the time we got around the classroom even once we had discussed most of the ways that humans suffer and the advice of the ancients for how to minimize this and make good come of it wherever possible, creating an unbreakable bond between them that played out in wonderful discussions throughout the entire year. As Alfie Kohn says, “Such information helps turn someone from an object into a subject, to make the person’s humanity come alive. That, in turn, makes it nearly impossible to act cruelly toward him or her.”(Punished by Rewards, p.245) (I’ve organized the voices of these great thinkers in this way for my book – each giving us what they consider most important first, and then answering to all the others as the dialogue progresses.)
No one has expressed the urgency of this dialogic need more eloquently than Native American elder and scholar, Manitonquat (aka Medicine Story):
“The Original Instructions of living in a circle provide that there will always be a caring person at hand for the child who will listen with compassion and assure the child she only needs to express what she feels and the hurt will pass…and that despite the pain of that moment life will go on being good and manageable. When the children spontaneously express their feelings, and are heard and understood and encouraged, they are quickly forgotten, and the children move on.”
“When you are born and raised in a circle contained by other circles, in an extended family, in a clan, a compound, a village, you come to know well the other human beings there… There are no strangers, no institutions…”(IO, p.21) Such communities incorporate the natural wisdom that “All existence is relationship. Nothing is separate in existence. No one is alone.”(p.18) “They cared for all their beloved children as the children of all. Together they cared for the old ones who could no longer care for themselves.”(OI, p.20)
Whereas “children who don’t have this resource, who have no one to run to, will not finish with the hurt.”(OI, p.23) “Without such resource and support, when they feel alone and abandoned, they retreat and store the confusing feelings. They will forget them, but they stay in unconsciousness memory and will return, making them once more alone and confused. Children…will pile up these old hurts inside them,” where “ they will turn toxic and poison from within with negative emotions and destructive patterns of behavior.”(OI, p. 23)
This is how “human beings have forgotten their Original Instructions,”(OI, xvi) Manitonquat says. And this is the reason it is imperative that we revive these dialogic habits and pass on the ancient teachings now, because it is just such “human beings that have put [the earth] in jeopardy and only human beings that can save it.”(OI, xv)
So it became clear to me as I learned from my students that people crave this kind of dialogue, which can bring out the best in each and all who participate and give us new eyes on the world. Simply being heard and understood has a powerful healing effect that encourages loving to learn - and its compliment - learning to love. So I wasn’t surprise that we had the highest attendance rate on campus. This is what Socratic dialogue is meant to accomplish. And when I was nominated for the Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award, I had to thank the ancients for what they’d taught me, for true learning communities grow by the seeds of their seminal wisdom.
Which brings me back to where I began these introductory thoughts - with the question put to Socrates by his friends: 'What are you good for?' He replied, only half in jest, 'pimping!' By which he meant (he explained once they’d all stopped laughing) bringing people together who have something good to share with one another.
This, I think, captures the overall purpose of Socratic philosophy and the value of dialogic ancient wisdom.... and this blog. I hope it does as much for you and for all readers as it has done for me.
NOTES from Plato's Socratic Dialogues:
Truth is best found in the asking of questions.[C390c] For there is a proper method for knowing the forms, which Socrates elaborates on at Theaetetus 168bc, where he is challenged to either state "the case on the other side" or ask questions "if you prefer that method, which has no terrors for a man of sense on the contrary it ought to be specially agreeable to him. Only there is this rule to be observed…” What we are fond of calling the Socratic method resembles nothing that Socrates would endorse, for he insisted – “do not conduct your questioning unfairly...Unfairness here consists in not observing the distinction between a debate and a conversation. A debate need not be taken seriously and one may trip up an opponent to the best of one's power's, but a conversation should be taken in earnest; one should help out the other party and bring home to him only those slips and fallacies that are due to himself or to his earlier instructors. This principle of generosity = the way “friends follow your thought.”(I Ching, p.267) If you follow this rule, your associates will lay the blame for their confusion's and perplexities on themselves and not on you; they will like you and court your society, and disgusted with themselves, will turn to philosophy, hoping to escape from their former selves and become different men.
But if, like so many, you take the opposite course"--like the Sophists, who seek to prove themselves to be of "noble breed of heroes [which] are a tribe of Sophists and rhetors"[C398e]--"heroes in debate"--"you will reach the opposite result; instead of turning your companions to philosophy, you will make them hate the whole business when they get older."[T168bc] This effect is called 'misology' in Phaedo, come of hearing contradictory things both called true, and so learning to hate ideas altogether. Such a method is thus unlikely to prove successful in "making the good appear" or bettering the condition of your partner in dialogue.[T168bc] He himself would have been turned off, Socrates said, if he had not had "so deep a passion" as to adhere him to the exercise of such inquiry.[T169c]
And where arguing to win continues, misunderstanding persists and can escalate into full blown conflict, whereas dialectic thinking invites healthy argument, for the purpose of understanding, that is, rather than to win. As we’ve said, the Socratic method of dialogue involves gently nudging one’s partner toward higher understanding, the way a good teacher or good parent would talk with a child.
And do not trust those who are “fond of using sweet words and honeyed phrases…merely open [their] mouths and make empty promises”(I Ching, p.273)
The Sophists method amounts to manipulating words, beliefs, and selling the appearance of pleasure, and has no end in understanding or promoting the truth about the good. But if 'wisdom' is reduced to the mere ability to change appearances for others, that is, to change their opinions and beliefs, then anyone can create the pretense of being wise, and this will not do because, as they agreed at the outset of Cratylus, the good are the wise, and so only those who help better the actual conditions of others, and not merely those who can change their beliefs and appearances, will qualify as 'wise', in the strict sense of the term. Likewise, only those beliefs which are grounded in essential reality will qualify as 'knowledge'. there may very well be wise men, if they are good, Socrates shows, but these are not the same people who most profess themselves to be 'wise', or think that they 'know' what they only believe to be true.
Socrates warns we should not "basing our argument on the common use of words and phrases, which the vulgar twist into any sense they please and so perplex one another in all sorts of ways"[T168c] by spinning and blurring the issue at hand, as if the purpose were to confuse and perplex, rather than promote understanding.
For this reason, we must "Be on the watch against one another's attempts to catch at words."[T166c] “one might as well try to shave a lion as try to talk sense to someone like Thrasymachus.”
We must rather try to understand words in their true senses… and let us reason with the unjust -- who is not intentionally in error [RepJ BookIX 589], but has never been asked the right questions about what is and is not noble and honorable [RepJ BookIX 590]. Don't blame them for the predominance of their lower nature, but uplift them to be, as far as possible, under his own rule, and baring that, the rule of someone more just.[RepJ BookIX 590]
For there are no bad men, by nature.[C386b] There are only those who are misled about what is good. This is why this kind of dialogue, about high ideals and human potentials, is so important. "We shall not tell a child that, if he commits the foulest crimes or goes to any length in punishing his father's misdeeds, he will be doing nothing out of the way, but only what the first and greatest of the gods have done before him."[C2.377] In fact, "If by any means we can make them believe that no one has ever had a quarrel with a fellow citizen and it is a sin to have one, that is the sort of thing our old men and women should tell from the first."[C2.377] (*connect Confucius and Indigenous stories)
We are all familiar with Platonic relationships, but in the 2400 years since Socrates gave his life for its sake, we have scarcely asked or heard mention of what Socratic relationships might be. And since Socrates was Plato’s teacher, you’d think that would be the next logical question. Go figure.
At any rate, we can be sure that they are not the “guess what’s on the teacher’s mind” games so often mistaken to be the Socratic method (of Paper Chase fame).
“A Socratic relationship,” is also NOT (as one internet observer tries to convince us) one in which “you ask a lot of really difficult questions of the other person until they get annoyed and want to poison you.” (The author who wrote this admits, “I have a lot of those.“)
Socratic relationships are, rather, relationships in which each seeks to help bring out the good in the other, to uplift the other's understanding, and to do so by way of a question and answer teaching and learning exchange of ideas. These happen spontaneously when people both open up and listen like a parent talking with a well loved child.
And one key lesson of Socratic relationships is that love and learning are not actually different things – just different ways of looking at the same thing – and understanding is key to both! Which is why Socrates ultimately proclaimed, “Love is the only thing I ever claimed to know anything about.
As Huston Smith so eloquently put it,
“Understanding…breeds love; but the reverse also holds. Love brings understanding - the two are reciprocal. So we must listen to understand…” And “if we are to be true to the wisdom traditions, we must attend to others as deeply and as alertly as we hope they will attend to us.”
Such discussions are rarely inclined toward argument, for participants are not inclined toward winning, but rather arguing in the philosophical sense, that is, to understanding one another and the truth itself. Because the good thing about the truth is, again, that it stays true! And having access to multi-perspectival voices means that all together give us access to whatever it is we need to learn. As we’ve said, bringing depth to our understanding the way a second eye adds depth to what can be seen with only one.
In this way, the truth can be found, again and again, with or without the help of an inspired guide. Certainly it helps to have the voices of those who’ve been up and down the mountain a few times by way of paths we ourselves cannot have traveled, and this guidance can help us avoid predictable obstacles and potholes along the way. But with or without help, we find truth by recognition and recall, not by having it out pointed out to us. In any case, we still have to figure out for ourselves what is and is not true.
Socrates spent his whole life just talking with and bring out the good in as many people as he could, sometimes only with a good hearted jibe aimed to nudge them out of their comfortable ignorance (which, if you think about it, is nothing but the noun consequent of the verb ‘to ignore.’)
At any rate, we at least can see the need for Socratic relationships by way of their absence in our experience. (Certainly our educational experience… In fact, it was the complete dearth of dialogue in Capital-P Philosophy that brings me to write this at all…for what chance do our young, and our young democracy, have if education does not exercise our voices?) And this is why it’s worth writing that book about what Socratic relationships are, and how they differ from what we’ve been taught the Socratic method is.
We do right by our children “by planting the seed in each generation to go to the source of life itself, and to learn to protect those natural-relationships that allow us to be self-determined.” (OI, Parhuli, 314)
Dialectic Thinking in the Classroom
Socrates called dialectic thinking, “the science of all sciences.” Whatever else you do in life, he said, dialectic philosophy will make you a better that! It could connect and integrate all ways of knowing, if not at the highest echelon of academia, at least in the minds and hearts of students.
I discovered many ways to put these dialectic insights to work in the classroom when I began teaching soon thereafter. For instance, the concept can be introduced by way of any handy object – a cup of coffee, a bottle of water, or an eraser. Holding it up, or putting it in the middle of the room, made immediately apparent how different it – or anything - looks from each of our different point of view. And this is true of any object of our knowledge, of course. Discussing how many different perspectives we might take on this or any object of our knowledge make it clear to them that anything can be seen from a virtual infinity of points of view. And importantly, if the object of our knowledge is itself living and conscious, that number would increase by one – infinity, plus one! To understand living things, we must consider them from inside looking out – through their own eyes on the world. And this is true, of course, of anything, living or not, that we might hope to know or understand – they can be viewed from any of many perspectives, and what’s more, must be – if the whole truth about it is our objective. This exercise had staying power, since it came up again and again for the rest of the semester or year.
There is an important lesson in humility here, for we can all see and remember from this little demonstration, not only how much we all have to learn from one another, especially those who see the world differently from us, those who see what’s in our blind spot, but that those we take to be our worst enemies may well be our best teachers. As Jonathan Haidt concludes in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, “A good place to look for wisdom, therefore, is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents.”(242)
So from this, another classroom exercise grew that became a source of inspiration for how this book is organized. We would begin the semester with an ice-breaker, asking each to share the most important lesson they had learned in life, and how they learned it. I would emphasize that it was probably something they had learned the hard way, and while they might have been or still be reluctant to share the intimate details of their lives with perfect strangers, they would be doing others a favor by saving them having to learn it the hard way. Suffice it to say they did not stay strangers for long, for by the time we got around the classroom even once we had discussed most of the ways that humans suffer and the advice of the ancients for how to minimize this and make good come of it wherever possible, creating an unbreakable bond between them that played out in wonderful discussions throughout the entire year. As Alfie Kohn says, “Such information helps turn someone from an object into a subject, to make the person’s humanity come alive. That, in turn, makes it nearly impossible to act cruelly toward him or her.”(Punished by Rewards, p.245) (I’ve organized the voices of these great thinkers in this way for my book – each giving us what they consider most important first, and then answering to all the others as the dialogue progresses.)
No one has expressed the urgency of this dialogic need more eloquently than Native American elder and scholar, Manitonquat (aka Medicine Story):
“The Original Instructions of living in a circle provide that there will always be a caring person at hand for the child who will listen with compassion and assure the child she only needs to express what she feels and the hurt will pass…and that despite the pain of that moment life will go on being good and manageable. When the children spontaneously express their feelings, and are heard and understood and encouraged, they are quickly forgotten, and the children move on.”
“When you are born and raised in a circle contained by other circles, in an extended family, in a clan, a compound, a village, you come to know well the other human beings there… There are no strangers, no institutions…”(IO, p.21) Such communities incorporate the natural wisdom that “All existence is relationship. Nothing is separate in existence. No one is alone.”(p.18) “They cared for all their beloved children as the children of all. Together they cared for the old ones who could no longer care for themselves.”(OI, p.20)
Whereas “children who don’t have this resource, who have no one to run to, will not finish with the hurt.”(OI, p.23) “Without such resource and support, when they feel alone and abandoned, they retreat and store the confusing feelings. They will forget them, but they stay in unconsciousness memory and will return, making them once more alone and confused. Children…will pile up these old hurts inside them,” where “ they will turn toxic and poison from within with negative emotions and destructive patterns of behavior.”(OI, p. 23)
This is how “human beings have forgotten their Original Instructions,”(OI, xvi) Manitonquat says. And this is the reason it is imperative that we revive these dialogic habits and pass on the ancient teachings now, because it is just such “human beings that have put [the earth] in jeopardy and only human beings that can save it.”(OI, xv)
So it became clear to me as I learned from my students that people crave this kind of dialogue, which can bring out the best in each and all who participate and give us new eyes on the world. Simply being heard and understood has a powerful healing effect that encourages loving to learn - and its compliment - learning to love. So I wasn’t surprise that we had the highest attendance rate on campus. This is what Socratic dialogue is meant to accomplish. And when I was nominated for the Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award, I had to thank the ancients for what they’d taught me, for true learning communities grow by the seeds of their seminal wisdom.
Which brings me back to where I began these introductory thoughts - with the question put to Socrates by his friends: 'What are you good for?' He replied, only half in jest, 'pimping!' By which he meant (he explained once they’d all stopped laughing) bringing people together who have something good to share with one another.
This, I think, captures the overall purpose of Socratic philosophy and the value of dialogic ancient wisdom.... and this blog. I hope it does as much for you and for all readers as it has done for me.
NOTES from Plato's Socratic Dialogues:
Truth is best found in the asking of questions.[C390c] For there is a proper method for knowing the forms, which Socrates elaborates on at Theaetetus 168bc, where he is challenged to either state "the case on the other side" or ask questions "if you prefer that method, which has no terrors for a man of sense on the contrary it ought to be specially agreeable to him. Only there is this rule to be observed…” What we are fond of calling the Socratic method resembles nothing that Socrates would endorse, for he insisted – “do not conduct your questioning unfairly...Unfairness here consists in not observing the distinction between a debate and a conversation. A debate need not be taken seriously and one may trip up an opponent to the best of one's power's, but a conversation should be taken in earnest; one should help out the other party and bring home to him only those slips and fallacies that are due to himself or to his earlier instructors. This principle of generosity = the way “friends follow your thought.”(I Ching, p.267) If you follow this rule, your associates will lay the blame for their confusion's and perplexities on themselves and not on you; they will like you and court your society, and disgusted with themselves, will turn to philosophy, hoping to escape from their former selves and become different men.
But if, like so many, you take the opposite course"--like the Sophists, who seek to prove themselves to be of "noble breed of heroes [which] are a tribe of Sophists and rhetors"[C398e]--"heroes in debate"--"you will reach the opposite result; instead of turning your companions to philosophy, you will make them hate the whole business when they get older."[T168bc] This effect is called 'misology' in Phaedo, come of hearing contradictory things both called true, and so learning to hate ideas altogether. Such a method is thus unlikely to prove successful in "making the good appear" or bettering the condition of your partner in dialogue.[T168bc] He himself would have been turned off, Socrates said, if he had not had "so deep a passion" as to adhere him to the exercise of such inquiry.[T169c]
And where arguing to win continues, misunderstanding persists and can escalate into full blown conflict, whereas dialectic thinking invites healthy argument, for the purpose of understanding, that is, rather than to win. As we’ve said, the Socratic method of dialogue involves gently nudging one’s partner toward higher understanding, the way a good teacher or good parent would talk with a child.
And do not trust those who are “fond of using sweet words and honeyed phrases…merely open [their] mouths and make empty promises”(I Ching, p.273)
The Sophists method amounts to manipulating words, beliefs, and selling the appearance of pleasure, and has no end in understanding or promoting the truth about the good. But if 'wisdom' is reduced to the mere ability to change appearances for others, that is, to change their opinions and beliefs, then anyone can create the pretense of being wise, and this will not do because, as they agreed at the outset of Cratylus, the good are the wise, and so only those who help better the actual conditions of others, and not merely those who can change their beliefs and appearances, will qualify as 'wise', in the strict sense of the term. Likewise, only those beliefs which are grounded in essential reality will qualify as 'knowledge'. there may very well be wise men, if they are good, Socrates shows, but these are not the same people who most profess themselves to be 'wise', or think that they 'know' what they only believe to be true.
Socrates warns we should not "basing our argument on the common use of words and phrases, which the vulgar twist into any sense they please and so perplex one another in all sorts of ways"[T168c] by spinning and blurring the issue at hand, as if the purpose were to confuse and perplex, rather than promote understanding.
For this reason, we must "Be on the watch against one another's attempts to catch at words."[T166c] “one might as well try to shave a lion as try to talk sense to someone like Thrasymachus.”
We must rather try to understand words in their true senses… and let us reason with the unjust -- who is not intentionally in error [RepJ BookIX 589], but has never been asked the right questions about what is and is not noble and honorable [RepJ BookIX 590]. Don't blame them for the predominance of their lower nature, but uplift them to be, as far as possible, under his own rule, and baring that, the rule of someone more just.[RepJ BookIX 590]
For there are no bad men, by nature.[C386b] There are only those who are misled about what is good. This is why this kind of dialogue, about high ideals and human potentials, is so important. "We shall not tell a child that, if he commits the foulest crimes or goes to any length in punishing his father's misdeeds, he will be doing nothing out of the way, but only what the first and greatest of the gods have done before him."[C2.377] In fact, "If by any means we can make them believe that no one has ever had a quarrel with a fellow citizen and it is a sin to have one, that is the sort of thing our old men and women should tell from the first."[C2.377] (*connect Confucius and Indigenous stories)