WHAT ABOUT THE SOCRATIC METHOD?

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 26, 2020

An overview of the COVID-19 Pandemic as an equation in the The Fisher Paradigm:

A viewer challenged me to explain my reason for deprecating the noble Socrates of our Western tradition.  First of all, like Jesus, we only know what Socrates’s thought and believed from others, especially Plato.  Socrates was a sophist, something that Plato hated, and a gifted writer, something Socrates wasn’t, as his whole tradition was oral.   

We actually know Plato through his writing with Socrates the dominant character of his prose.  Plato, who was a student of Socrates, took over his ideas when the great philosopher was forced to take hemlock and commit suicide, giving Socrates back his ideas in Plato dialogues.

What we call the “Socratic Method” is the Socratic Method as expressed in Plato’s writing.

Today we use the term in a rather broad sense to cover our endless search for truth through asking questions rather than discovering creative approaches beyond the pale of what is conventional and known.  This is delimiting because the answers to what trouble us are not with old knowledge already experienced.  It is with what is not known but can be found out with due diligence beyond the Socratic Method.

We saw this reliance demonstrated in the business community in 1981 with the runaway bestseller “A Search for Excellence” by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, as tens of thousands of companies were ready to jump on any bandwagon that promised “excellence.” 

For twenty years, despite Business Week’s (November 5, 1984) cover story (“Who’s Excellent Now?”), a new industry of imitation was created consistent with the “Socratic Method.”

It was as if these authors discovered a truth about “excellence” and wanted to promulgate their good fortune. 

Sophists would say, and Socrates is included in this lot, “Why do we believe there is a truth to be found?”   

Edward de Bono would say, “If truth exists, it is relative truth, and it cannot be found but must be discovered.”  

I have suggested in my writing, “If truth is discovered, it will be your truth but not my truth.” I have since gone beyond that to show how critical culture is to an operation.  For example, A Culture of Comfort is going nowhere in unconscious incompetence; A Culture of Complacency is self-indulgent in conscious incompetence; while A Culture of Contribution is consciously competent with everyone on board in synergy enterprise towards excellence.    

Sophists were even more insistent that there is no such thing as truth; that truth is only an idea meant to persuade people to believe such a thing exists.

“The Socratic Method” rests on the assumption that the knowledge is there, somewhere to answer what is troubling us.  As we have seen, this is by no means always the case.  

Take the mania with which the Coronavirus COVID-19 is shutting down life across the world to a quasi-prison whether a pandemic situation exists or not in that pocket of society. 

The cause of the virus is not known and so the world’s best minds in the World Health Organization (WHO) and in the United States, in the Center for Disease Control (CDC) are following the dictates of the Socratic Method to a tee. 

The world is in Plato’s cave where a person is chained up so that he can see only the back wall of the cave.  At the mouth of the cave, Plato tells us, there is a fire.  Another person comes into the cave carrying an object.  The chained-up person cannot turn around but can see only the shadow of the person with an object that is thrown off on the wall in front of the chained person.

This allegory suggest we go through life looking for truth and chasing causes often only seeing and intimidated with shadows, which have captured our limited vision and then often mistakenly so resulting instead in our panic.

Socrates was trained as a Sophist, and Sophist were into rhetoric and persuasion, or argument for argument’s sake.  He was concerned with the search for knowledge because to him knowledge was virtue, and virtue would protect man from himself.  This has led to a circular argument that is still with us today: when someone acts improperly, we can always claim it is because he lacks perfect knowledge. 

Here is how that might be considered in the current pandemic with the scientific, medical, political and governmental contingent all on board. 

Clearly, these people are doing everything imaginable that could possibly be done, justifying the shutdowns, the confinements, the quarantines, and the abandonment of convention in the interim.  On the other hand, should this fail, should these draconian methods prove counterproductive or even disastrous, it will be because brazen citizens failed to hunker down and take the matter seriously, failing to do what was right.  Or might they have failed to do so because they weren't blinded by shadows?