The Socratic view of the world

The Philosophy Garden: Stoicism and Beyond

Socrates and Confucius, two of humanity’s sages, amiably conversing in the Athenian agora, just below the Acropolis. Photo by the Author.

Summary: Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, revolutionized Western philosophy by emphasizing the examination of life, morals, and good and evil. His method of questioning and seeking precise definitions challenged societal norms and encouraged critical thinking. Despite never writing anything down, Socrates’s influence lives on through his students, particularly Plato, whose early writings, like the “Socratic dialogues,” capture his essence. Socrates, the “midwife of ideas,” used a questioning approach to help others discover their own wisdom, rather than lecturing or providing answers. His method, which emphasized the importance of critical thinking and self-awareness, continues to be relevant today. Socrates’s emphasis on virtue, knowledge, and the pursuit of truth remains a powerful antidote to misinformation and superficiality. Before sharing information or forming opinions, question your knowledge and consider alternative perspectives. Embrace uncertainty and seek wisdom through questioning, as exemplified by Socrates.

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When someone mentions “ancient Greek philosophy,” chances are Socrates is the first name that pops into your head. In fact, this barefoot philosopher from Athens (470-399 BCE) was such a game-changer that we still divide Western philosophy into two eras: before Socrates and everything after. But what made him so special? As the Roman philosopher Cicero would later put it:

“Socrates was the first who brought down philosophy from the heavens, placed it in cities, introduced it into families, and obliged it to examine into life and morals, and good and evil.” (Tusculan Disputations, 5.4)

Socrates never meant to start a movement—he was more interested in having good conversations than founding a school. But his impact was huge. Think of him as the philosophical equivalent of a rock star—everyone wanted to copy his style. His followers went on to create some of history’s most influential schools of thought: Platonism, Aristotelianism, Cynicism, Stoicism, and Academic Skepticism. The Stoics especially saw themselves as Socrates's true heirs, referring to themselves explicitly as “Socratics.”

Here’s where things get interesting: Socrates himself never wrote anything down. Everything we know about him comes mainly from two of his students: Plato and Xenophon. Think of them as ancient biographers who followed their teacher around, taking mental notes of his conversations and ideas.

Plato went on to become the philosophical superstar that we all know. Xenophon was more like a skilled journalist who wrote detailed accounts of Socrates's teachings. His book “Memorabilia” (think of it as “Conversations with Socrates”) was so powerful that it inspired Zeno of Citium to start the entire school of Stoic philosophy.

To really understand Socrates, we need to look at Plato's earliest writings about him. These are called the "Socratic dialogues" because scholars think they capture the real Socrates, before Plato started using his teacher as a mouthpiece for his own ideas. The greatest hits include: the Apology, Socrates's dramatic speech at his trial; the Crito, a jailhouse conversation about doing the right thing; the Euthyphro, a witty debate about the nature of goodness; and the Laches, a chat with two generals about what courage really means. Plato wrote these in his early 40s, about a decade after Socrates's death.

Let's start with The Apology—it's like the pilot episode of the Socrates show. Picture this: Socrates is on trial for his life, and instead of begging for mercy, he uses the opportunity to explain his whole philosophy. And it turns out that he has quite a story to tell. It all started when his friend Chaerephon went to the oracle at Delphi and asked, “Is anyone wiser than Socrates?” The oracle’s answer? “Nope!”

Socrates just couldn’t believe it. In fact, he was so skeptical that he did something pretty gutsy—he decided to fact-check the oracle. He went around Athens interviewing people who were supposed to be wise: politicians, poets, craftsmen, you name it. His discovery? Everyone claimed to be an expert, but when he dug deeper, they couldn't really explain their expertise.

That’s when it hit him: the oracle was right, but not in the way everyone thought. Socrates was wisest simply because he was the only one who admitted he didn’t have all the answers. As he famously put it: “I know that I know nothing.”

[The Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where the oracle pronounced Socrates to be the wisest man in Greece.]

Then there’s the Crito, which reads like a prison drama. Socrates’s wealthy friend Crito shows up at the jail with a plan: he’s bribed the guards, arranged for safe passage out of Athens - all Socrates has to do is say yes to the jailbreak.

But Socrates, being Socrates, turns it into a philosophical discussion. His argument? “Look, I’ve lived in Athens for 70 years, benefiting from its laws and society. What kind of person would I be if I only followed those laws when convenient? That would be like respecting your parents only when they give you what you want.”

Ever wonder if ancient Greeks had political satire? Meet the Menexenus—not one of Plato’s greatest hits, but a dialogue in which Socrates’s take on political spin doctors. Imagine Jon Stewart or John Oliver in a tunic, and you’ll get the idea. In the dialogue, Socrates mocks how politicians give fancy funeral speeches during wartime, saying whatever the crowd wants to hear rather than telling hard truths. Some things never change, right?

One of Socrates’s favorite moves was playing what we might call “Define That Thing!” Here’s how it worked. He’d find someone who should be an expert on something: two generals? “Great! You must be experts on courage.” Two best friends? “Perfect! You can explain friendship to me.” A priest? “Wonderful! You obviously know all about holiness.” Then he’d ask them to define these concepts. Sounds simple, right? But here's where it gets fun...

Socrates wasn’t interested in examples—he wanted complete, foolproof definitions. It’s like he was looking for a recipe that would work 100% of the time. Modern philosophers might say he was asking for the impossible. After all, trying to define something like “courage” or “friendship” perfectly is like trying to catch a cloud—these ideas are just too complex and shifting to pin down completely.

Think about it: Can you define “love” in a way that covers every type of love there is, without leaving anything out? That’s the kind of challenge Socrates was setting up for his conversation partners.

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But here’s the clever part: Socrates wasn’t really trying to be philosophy’s version of Webster’s Dictionary. His real goal was more like being a mirror—showing people that maybe they weren’t as expert as they thought they were. It was his way of saying, “If you can’t even define what courage is, how sure are you about all your other beliefs?”

Imagine thinking you’re a master chef but struggling to explain what “cooking” means. That moment of doubt? That’s exactly what Socrates was aiming for. He wanted to shake people out of their comfort zones and make them question their assumptions. Not to be mean, but to help them grow.

Now, if all this questioning sounds annoying—well, in a sense that’s exactly the point. Socrates actually compared himself to a gadfly (an annoying horsefly) buzzing around Athens. Here’s how he put it during his trial:

“For if you put me to death, you will not easily find another, who, to use a rather absurd figure, attaches himself to the city as a gadfly to a horse, which, though large and well bred, is sluggish on account of his size and needs to be aroused by stinging. I think the god fastened me upon the city in some such capacity, and I go about arousing, and urging and reproaching each one of you, constantly alighting upon you everywhere the whole day long.” (30e-31a)

In modern terms, Socrates was that friend who won’t let you get away with lazy thinking, Keeps asking “but why?” until you really examine your beliefs, makes you uncomfortable in a way that helps you grow, and is annoying, but usually right.

For Socrates, the biggest problem wasn’t being wrong—it was being wrong while thinking you’re right. Think about it like this: which is worse, someone who knows they can’t cook trying to learn, or someone who thinks they’re a master chef serving raw chicken? According to Socrates, it’s that confident wrongness that really gets us into trouble. That’s why his conversations often ended with people feeling confused (in Greek, aporia). But this confusion was actually a sign of progress!

Here’s what made Socrates different from your typical teacher. A regular teacher might say “This is what you need to know”; Socrates will say "Let’s figure out what we don’t know.” In other words, he wasn’t interested in giving lectures or writing textbooks. Instead, he wanted to help people discover things for themselves. Think of him as the original “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage.” The process may look something like this:

“I totally know how this works!”

↓

“Wait... maybe I don’t...”

↓

“Huh, this is more complicated than I thought...”

And that moment when we realize that maybe we don’t know everything is where real learning begins.

As Ward Farnsworth points out in his excellent book on the Socratic method, a good way to trigger aporia is by a series of questions meant to generate cognitive dissonance. Typically, Socrates poses a preliminary question or two and gets an answer. He then proceeds with his inquiry, asking additional questions. At some point, he elicits an answer that is in tension with something the other person had said earlier. At this point Socrates points out the contradiction and lets the guy twist himself into a logical pretzel. You can see this in action in a spectacular fashion in the Euthyphro, for example. Of course, sometimes people do not appreciate the treatment and simply get angry. So be it. But in other cases, for example in the Laches, they get it: if I am sure of both X and Y, and it turns out that X contradicts Y, I better pause and rethink this whole thing. Cognitive dissonance as the road to wisdom.

Socrates had a fascinating way of describing his teaching style—he called himself a “midwife of ideas.” Just as a midwife doesn’t create the baby but helps bring it into the world, Socrates believed he wasn’t putting new ideas into people’s heads. Instead, he was helping them give birth to insights they already had deep down. It’s the difference between being handed a fish and learning how to fish for yourself. Here is Socrates explaining the concept:

“All that is true of the art of midwifery is true also of mine, but mine differs from theirs in tending [to people’s] souls in labor, not their bodies. But the greatest thing about my art is this, that it can test in every way whether the mind of a young man is bringing forth a mere image, an imposture, or a real and genuine offspring. For I have this in common with the midwives: I am sterile in point of wisdom, and the reproach which has often been brought against me, that I question others but make no reply myself about anything, because I have no wisdom in me, is a true reproach; and the reason of it is this: the god compels me to act as midwife, but has never allowed me to bring forth. I am, then, not at all a wise person myself, nor have I any wise invention, the offspring born of my own soul.” (Theaetetus, 150b-d)

But this isn’t entirely true. Throughout the corpus of Socratic dialogues we can easily discern a number of positive doctrines that Socrates espouses. Together, these ideas can be said to constitute the core of Socratic philosophy. They are:

(i) Wisdom, or virtue, or good judgment (as Epictetus will later put it) is the highest good because it determines how we use everything else (this is argued for by Socrates in the Euthydemus, 279-282).

(ii) Virtue is a type of knowledge. For instance, courage is knowledge of what is and is not fearful; piety is knowledge of what is and is not welcome by the gods; justice is knowledge of what is or is not fair; and so on.

(iii) As a result of (i) and (ii), virtue and knowledge are necessary, and likely sufficient, for a good life.

(iv) Conventional goods are indifferent in themselves, and only become good (or bad) as a result of what one does with them.

(v) Because of (i), other people can harm our body, but not our virtue. As Epictetus has Socrates saying at the very end of the Enchiridion: “Anytus and Meletus may be able to kill me, but they cannot harm me.”

(vi) Also because of (i), it is never right to do wrong, even to repay an injustice, because to do wrong undermines our virtue.

(vii) Likewise, it is better to suffer than to commit an injustice, because suffering an injustice does not harm our virtue, committing one does.

(viii) Because of (ii), no one does wrong willingly, but only out of lack of wisdom. Sometimes this is paraphrased as “ignorance is the root of all evil,” but the word “ignorance” is best rendered as “unwisdom.”

(ix) Because of (i) and (viii), if someone does wrong it is better to be punished (and re-educated) than to escape punishment.

According to Robin Waterfield, in his biography of Plato, there’s one more mind-blowing insights we get from the Socratic dialogues, one that still hits hard today. Plato noticed that there is a huge difference between the things we know and the things we think we know. Think of it like this:

• Knowledge is like having the recipe and knowing how to cook the dish;

• Belief is like having heard about the recipe from someone who ate at the restaurant once.

In Plato’s view, to really know something, we need three conditions to be fulfilled:

1. We believe it’s true

2. It actually is true

3. We can explain why it’s true

This is sometimes referred to as the JTB (Justified True Belief) model of knowledge. Let’s test this with a modern example:

Claim: “TikTok is bad for mental health.”

• Do you believe it? Probably

• Is it true? Maybe

• Can you explain exactly why? With scientific evidence? Hmm...

Why does this knowledge-vs-belief thing matter in your life? Here’s the thing: most of us are running around making decisions based on things like what we saw on social media, what “everybody knows,” what some influencer said, what “feels right,” what we heard from that one person that one time, and so on.

Socrates would say this is like navigating with a broken GPS—you might get somewhere, but probably not where you meant to go. Think about some “facts” you’ve shared recently: that health tip you reposted, that political claim you argued about, that relationship advice you gave your friend. How many of these were things you really knew, versus things you just believed? Uncomfortable question, right?

Even Plato, Socrates’s star student, struggled with this knowledge problem, and at times he criticizes his own JTB model. His solution was to come up with something that sounds like a philosopher’s version of the Matrix: a perfect realm of Ideas where true knowledge exists. Later philosophers (like Carneades and Cicero) articulated a more practical approach: knowledge is not all-or-nothing, it’s more like a spectrum from “wild guess” to “pretty sure” to “as certain as I can humanly get.” The trick is matching your confidence level to your evidence and being ready to update your views when new evidence comes in.

So here we are, 2,400 years later, still talking about a barefoot guy who wandered around Athens asking annoying questions. Why? Because his big ideas are more relevant than ever. In an age of social media echo chambers, we very much need his “question everything” attitude. In a world of “alternative facts,” we need his rigorous approach to knowledge. In times of moral uncertainty, we need his focus on wisdom and character. In an era of hot takes and quick reactions, we need his careful thinking.

Next time you’re about to share that article, make that decision, or argue that point, try channeling your inner Socrates: Do I really know this, or do I just believe it? Why do I think this is true? What if I’m wrong? Being wise doesn’t mean having all the answers, sometimes it just means knowing which questions to ask. And if nothing else, consider this: a guy who claimed he knew nothing ended up becoming history’s most famous philosopher. I’m confident that there’s a lesson in that.

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Two recent books on Socrates that I recommend are: The Socratic Method—A Practitioner’s Handbook, by Ward Farnsworth, and How to Think Like Socrates—Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life in the Modern World, by Donald Robertson. While not entirely dedicated to Socrates, you may also want to check out my The Quest for Character—What the Story of Socrates and Alcibiades Teaches Us about Our Search for Good Leaders.