How to Learn the Socratic Method

The two-column technique and its relevance to Stoic philosophy

Almost everyone today knows of Socrates, the famous Athenian philosopher, and most people have at least heard of the Socratic Method, the question-and-answer approach to philosophy made famous by him. Very few, however, can describe what the Socratic Method looks like in practice.

Various methods dubbed “Socratic questioning” are used today in teaching law and medicine, and in the practice of psychotherapy, especially cognitive therapy. However, these are only very loosely related to the original Socratic Method. In some regards, they’re quite at odds with the approach Socrates actually employed.

Nowhere is Socrates depicted saying: “Here’s how my philosophical method works…”

We have, as it happens, ample evidence of the Socratic Method, as we can observe it being deployed in the Socratic dialogues written by his students Plato and Xenophon, about eighty of which, in total, survive today. Nevertheless, we lack a clear outline of the method. Nowhere is Socrates depicted saying: “Here’s how my philosophical method works…”

Socrates explained his method by means of a simple teaching aid, a diagram consisting of two side-by-side lists.

It surprises many people to learn, therefore, that tucked away in an obscure dialogue from Xenophon’s Memorabilia Socratis (2.4) we do find an account of Socrates explaining the best way to start learning his philosophical method. In fact, he does so by means of a simple teaching aid, a diagram consisting of two side-by-side lists. Coming from a background in psychotherapy, it struck me that what Socrates described is remarkably similar to one of the most common methods used in cognitive therapy today, known as the “Two-Column Technique”.

The Socratic Two-Column Technique

Socrates was concerned that the young men of Athens were merely learning opinions rather than true knowledge or understanding. One such young man was named Euthydemus. He arrogantly considered himself to be the wisest of his generation because he had amassed a very large and expensive library of books. From them he had learned, and could repeat from memory, what he called the “maxims of the wise”.

Euthydemus was what we call today a “self-help junkie”. He was obsessed with moral and psychological self-improvement. Socrates actually praised him for realizing that the maxims of the wise are worth more than any amount of gold or silver. However, he also put Euthydemus to the test, using the Socratic Method, to see whether he had acquired real wisdom or merely the appearance of wisdom.

Euthydemus aspires to be a great political leader and claims that his studies have made him knowledgeable about what is just or morally right. Socrates therefore draws a simple diagram, consisting of two columns headed “Right” and “Wrong”. (Actually, he writes the Greek letter Δ for dikaiosune, meaning “justice” or what is morally right, and Α for adikia, meaning “injustice” or wrongdoing.) He may have used a wax tablet to do this, although this isn’t specified in the dialogue.

Euthydemus says that it’s particularly easy to name common examples of wrongdoing. Just as today, we all like to complain about politicians and other public figures. Socrates therefore asks him if things like lying and stealing belong under that heading. Euthydemus thinks this seems obvious. We have thereby started to define wrongdoing by giving various examples, and we can infer that the what is morally right probably consists in doing the contrary, and refraining from behaviour such as lying and stealing. This initial phase of the Socratic Method often seems slightly banal, because it elicits answers that Socrates’ partner in the dialogue assumes are common sense.

The Socratic Method proper begins with the next phase of the exercise. Socrates proceeds to ask Euthydemus whether the examples he gave of wrongdoing might be moved across to the other column under certain circumstances in which they become morally right. Over the course of the dialogue, Socrates brings up and discusses, among others, the following counter-examples:

• What if an elected general were to deceive the enemy during a war — that may be lying but would it still be considered morally wrong?

• What if the same general captures the weapons and armor of the enemy — that might be considered theft but is it wrong?

• What if a parent conceals medicine in the food of a small child in order to get them to take it, believing that it will benefit their health — that’s deception but is it morally right or wrong?

• What if your best friend is depressed and suicidal and you hide his sword from him for his own safety — that’s deception and theft but does it still constitute moral wrongdoing?

As you can see, the Socratic Method doesn’t consist in asking formulaic questions so much as in using creative thinking to come up with novel and unexpected questions, which potentially expose various exceptions to the original definition, in effect highlighting certain contradictions in our thinking. Socrates was exceptionally good at doing this, in part, because he spent most of his time practising these skills.

Euthydemus is embarrassed to realize that although he started off very confident in his knowledge of what is right and wrong, he is now forced to admit that he feels confused and is unsure how to revise his initial definition. He realizes that he is ignorant with regard to the nature of justice and morality. When Socrates exposed the ignorance of some people they would become very angry with him and would even physically assault him in the street. However, others became eager to educate themselves and devoted to the practice of philosophy.

Socrates explains that he interprets the famous Delphic maxim, Know Thyself, as referring to our ability to grasp the limits of our own knowledge in this way, through self-examination and questioning our assumptions. He says that ignorance of ourselves is perhaps the greatest threat we face in life. We can only truly know ourselves, though, by putting our assumptions about the most important things in life to the test, and finding out whether or not they’re mistaken.

Euthydemus, to his credit, asks Socrates how he should begin applying the Socratic Method in his daily life, if he wants to genuinely improve himself. Socrates advises him to examine his knowledge of what is good and bad in life. In other words, he should start by clarifying his understanding of what is good for us, which, in Greek philosophy, is synonymous with eudaimonia, or human flourishing, otherwise known as the goal of life.

Euthydemus says that physical health is obviously good for us, as is everything that contributes to it, whereas their opposites, sickness and whatever damages our health, are bad. Once again, this appears like common sense to him, and he assumes most people would agree. Socrates points out, however, that being in good health and able-bodied might, in some circumstances, be the reason we’re recruited for a disastrous military campaign or as sailors on a fatal expedition. The weak and sickly who are left at home, ironically, might be the only survivors. (Something like this actually happened during the notorious Sicilian Expedition when forty thousand Athenians and their allies were lost in the most catastrophic military campaign of the Peloponnesian War.)

Euthydemus is perplexed and offers instead that wisdom is surely something inherently good. Many wise men, says Socrates, have been captured and enslaved by powerful kings because of their technical expertise, and others have been persecuted by those who were envious of their cleverness. He seems to think, in other words, that whether or not we consider wisdom to be good rather depends on how we define its meaning. Many men with a reputation for wisdom have fallen into misfortune, and do not provide good examples of flourishing.

Xenophon concludes the dialogue as follows:

Many of those who were treated in this way by Socrates stopped going to see him; these he considered to lack resolution. But Euthydemus decided that he would never become a person of any importance unless he associated with Socrates as much as possible; and from that time onwards, he never left him unless he was obliged to, and he even copied some of Socrates’ practices.

Presumably, Euthydemus adopted the two-column technique that Socrates had taught him, and continued to use the Socratic Method to examine his own preconceptions about the most important things in life.

Conclusion

Socrates viewed wisdom more as a cognitive skill than a set of beliefs. You therefore can’t acquire wisdom just by memorizing the sayings of wise men. You have to test your skills by engaging in philosophical dialogue about the goal of life, human flourishing, virtue, and other important concepts. Although there’s certainly more to the Socratic Method than this, the two-column technique provides a very simple way of honing some of the core skills underlying it. As Socrates makes clear in this dialogue, it’s a good starting point, if you’re interested in applying philosophy to self-improvement.

As a cognitive therapist, it struck me that Socrates was teaching his friends and followers cognitive flexibility. That’s the term modern researchers use for our ability to overcome rigid assumptions or tunnel vision and see events from a broader variety of perspectives. We know that cognitive rigidity, overgeneralization and selective thinking, is associated with mental health problems like clinical depression and certain anxiety disorders. Socrates was a creative thinker, whose philosophical method treated cognitive flexibility as a trainable skill. For example, a depressed individual may assume that losing their job is something shameful or catastrophic. Socrates would help them identify examples of circumstances in which it might actually turn out for the best. In my experience, incidentally, although losing a job is often very stressful and challenging, in every single case I can recall, it did lead on to better things for the individual concerned.

The only thing I want to add to what Socrates said is that today, in cognitive therapy, we use the two-column exercise in other ways. I think he would approve of these and, indeed, we can arguably find traces of similar practices in the Socratic dialogues. There are three variations worth mentioning here.

1. Evaluating evidence. The most common question in traditional cognitive therapy is “Where’s the evidence for that?” We often use to columns to list the evidence for and against an unhealthy belief. The second phase consists in asking whether some of the evidence for the belief might be illusory or weaker than it seemed at first.

2. Evaluating costs and benefits. This is the familiar concept of weighing up the pros and cons of a belief or a way of behaving, such as a specific coping strategy. What do you gain? What do you lose? The second phase is to ask yourself whether some of the pros and cons could be enhanced in some cases, and reduced or prevented in others.

3. Comparing good and bad versions. This is less common but I think it’s important. How would you distinguish healthy problem-solving from unhealthy problem-solving — the latter is often synonymous with morbid rumination or worry. What would distinguish a good way of using relaxation techniques, or mindfulness techniques, or assertiveness techniques, etc, from a bad way?

Perhaps the written two-column exercise described by Socrates in the Memorabilia was just a off-the-cuff moment that had no influence on later generations of philosophers. After all, it’s largely overlooked today. When I was researching my recent book, How to Think Like Socrates, though, I noticed something similar in Roman literature.

Nearly five centuries after Socrates lived, a Roman poet named Persius wrote a satire about the lectures attended, in his day, by students of Stoic philosophy. “Has philosophy taught you to live a good, upstanding life?” asks Persius. You must, he adds, be able to tell what is true from false appearances, “alert for the false chink of copper beneath the gold.” […] He follows this by saying something that echoes the Socratic dialogue we’ve just discussed: Have you settled what to aim for and also what to avoid, marking the former list with chalk and the other with charcoal? — How to Think Like Socrates

If this Stoic teacher had read the Memorabilia, he would have proceeded to ask his young students under what circumstances the things they assumed should be aimed for in life might actually belong under the heading of things to be avoided. Why don’t we ask this in schools today?

We can find many lists of opposites scattered throughout the Stoic literature. In some cases, it sounds as if the Stoics were, indeed, using them to reflect on possible exceptions, just as Socrates does in Xenophon’s dialogue above. For example, according to Diogenes Laertius, the early Stoics taught that the wise man possesses the following qualities.

• Apatheia, in the sense of being free from unhealthy (pathological) passions but not apathy, in the sense of being hard-hearted and insensitive toward others.

• Indifference to praise or censure, in the sense of being free from vanity but not indifference to other people’s opinions in the sense of being thoughtless.

• Toughness in the sense of being austere and not swayed by bodily pleasures but not tough, in the sense of being overly-critical and severe toward others.

• Virtue in the sense of earnestly seeking one’s own improvement, and avoiding evil in our lives but not the cultivation of a reputation for virtue through the (phoney) appearance of “virtue” in our speech and behaviour.

(I’m paraphrasing here because the original Greek is very concise and a little ambiguous but this is what I take him to mean.)

Clearly, an effort was made here not only to list the main qualities considered good but also to ask a follow-up question such as: Under what circumstances might each of these potentially be moved to the “bad” column?

I hope you’ve learned how easily the central cognitive skills required for the Socratic Method can be practiced just by drawing two lists. Ask yourself whether the things you assumed went in one column might, under some circumstances, go better under the opposing column. That requires creative thinking. Socrates practised doing something similar every day of his life. If you did this for a few weeks, though, I think you’d begin to notice the benefits. Training yourself in the Socratic Method leads, as I said earlier, to increased cognitive flexibility. It helps you to question things more deeply and see through the assumptions made by others. It’s our best defense against uncritical thinking.