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The highest form of human excellence is to

question oneself and others.

SOCRATES

“You are a traitor and deserve to die. And it shall be by your own hand.”

Suppose you received an e-mail to this effect from your boss because you had dared to question his judgment on a strategic issue, and had persuaded some of your junior colleagues of the validity of your case. At the very least, you would consider his reaction to be over the top and ask for his decision to be reviewed by the human resources department. Yet this was the opinion of a public court of Athens that found the wisest man in Greece and the father of Western philosophy guilty of heresy and corrupting the youth. He posed an unacceptable threat to his Athenian bosses with his weapon of mass deduction: Socratic dialogue.

Yes, we are talking about Socrates. At the time of his death (399BC), the once mighty Athenian Empire was recovering from defeat by Sparta following a destructive and protracted war between the two neighbouring Greek states. Socrates was highly critical of the Athenian strategy and debated the merits of alternatives with his students, many of them young aristocrats, and one of them Plato. He thus became the focus of the ire of a number of leading public figures. They declared that not only was he openly questioning the authority of the Athenian leadership, but he was involved in fomenting rebellion against it. It was commonly believed that a number of his former students might have betrayed Athens for Sparta, eventually leading to the overthrow of the Athenian government.

Furthermore, his teaching of philosophical enquiry encouraged his students to question the merits and even the existence of divine powers. This was not a good time to choose, as the citizens of Athens assumed that their defeat had come about because their protective goddess Athena had punished them for not believing in her. Decimated by decades of war and with its empire much reduced around it, Athens had no time for the ramblings of a grumpy old man. To the vast majority of the public, his continued questioning of that which had made the Athenian Empire great had seemingly contributed towards its downfall.

The Socratic Method

Of course, this was not true. Socrates was openly critical of the Athenian establishment – and the way it conducted itself – as a result of encouraging his students to go back to first principles and question all established norms. More importantly, he demanded that his students challenge contemporary definitions of key moral concepts such as ‘justice’ and what should be considered ‘good’. This was not to promote ‘injustice’ or ‘evil’ but to understand things better. His method of enquiry, later called the Socratic method, embraced a dialectic form in which answers to questions were a prelude to further questions, which ultimately induced diametrically opposed answers to the ones given in the first place. In a back-and-forth debate on the truth of widely held opinions, Socrates managed to make his conversational adversaries meet themselves coming the other way in arguments.

However, he was convinced that this methodology helped people get closer to their underlying beliefs and the extent of their knowledge. In particular, it unveiled the limitations of their knowledge. By its nature, therefore, the Socratic method is a negative method of hypothesis elimination: as people steadily identify and eliminate those hypotheses that lead to contradiction, better and more resilient hypotheses emerge. During this process, the participants are invariably forced to examine their own belief systems – as well as their value systems – and where necessary revise them. As a result, a Socratic dialogue, once embarked on, becomes a rich and empowering form of conversation, leading to unexpectedly new and radical ideas.

It is highly unlikely that Socratic dialogue on its own posed a threat to the bitter remnants of the Athenian Empire. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that some of those who engaged in this form of dialogue became so adept at political debate that they could run rings around the unbending supporters of the status quo of the Athenian state. It is furthermore clear that, at a cruder level, the powers that be needed a scapegoat to answer for their downfall. “If you’re not for us, you’re against us”, was their battle cry. All Socrates wanted was a better version of the truth. He wasn’t so much a dissident as an asker of awkward and embarrassing questions. His reward for soliciting answers which were at variance with the official dogma was that damning description heard then, and now: enemy of the State.

And so it was that a public court found him guilty and he was sentenced to die by his own hand – a state-mandated suicide. He would ingest hemlock, a neurotoxin that disrupts the central nervous system. Death would be gradual as the poison crawled its way through the system, slowly robbing the extremities of the body of life and movement, turning it cold and rigid in its wake; and then eventually reaching the heart, insidiously crushing it, causing it to collapse.

It has often been asked why Socrates went to his death so peacefully; after all, he had other options, one being to escape. His followers had bribed the prison guards who were willing to assist in this regard. He could have then fled from Athens. Yet instead he chose to drink hemlock knowing that it would kill him. His reasons, as he presented them to his followers, were, typically, philosophical in nature. He said that, as a citizen of Athens, he fully accepted that one should abide by its laws, even if they demanded an unjust punishment. Such an approach represented a ‘contract’ with the State. Should he break that contract he would harm society as a whole, something that was contrary to the Socratic code. He also said that true philosophers should not fear death, especially if in life they had achieved a measure of wisdom beyond their peers.

You have to hand it to Socrates for his conservative attitude towards the law and his acceptance of his fate. Given his disposition to argue the toss on everything, he must have harboured ambivalent feelings towards the people who had condemned him, and the fairness of his sentence. Yet he took it like a man – a remarkable man for any era and any generation. Fortunately for us, he passed on his methodology to Plato who laid it all out in his early works. And the torch still burns today, as you will see.