Yesterday, I explored what irony is. I roughly characterized it as experiencing multiple, related and sometimes conflicting truths simultaneously. It is the capacity of a mind to subdivide itself into interlocutors.
Today I’m looking at a book on Socratic method, and seeing better why Nietzsche called Socrates “the great ironist”.
On a Socratic view, denying what someone says is the act of a friend; you should want friends who deny what you say.
Such denials produce good things. If someone has a talent for denying your claims (hopefully with some indirection and tact), you might change your mind for the better. If not, you’re at least likely to end up with a better sense of why you think what you do. You will more clearly see the details and qualifications that go with it. You might become less sure what you think altogether. That will feel like a loss, but you will be closer to the truth, even if it’s a truth that, in some cases, you may never finally reach. In that event you still hold beliefs, but you hold them a little differently. You’re more humble, more aware of your ignorance, less likely to be sure when you shouldn’t be, and more understanding of others. Socrates regarded these as great gains in wisdom.
All this is what Socratic partners try to do for each other. They are good-natured and subtle contrarians. In practice this might nevertheless sound like a set of instructions for becoming unpopular or getting yourself killed. That’s what it was for Socrates. Take heart, though: describing the method as something practiced by one person on another is mostly a convenience to illustrate how it works. In real life and when reading Plato, too — Socratic questioning is better viewed mostly as a way to think about hard questions on your own.
You challenge yourself and harass yourself and test what you think and deny what you say, all as a Socrates would. That might sound easier than doing it to others. In fact it’s considerably harder. But it’s also more rewarding and less dangerous.
The ability and inclination to “challenge and harass oneself” in order to become less complacently cocksure of one’s own convictions, and consequently wiser, is to be an ironist. One of the more refined and effective ways to be an ironist is to adopt the Socratic method for your own autointerrogation practice.
By the way I like the author of this book, Ward Farnsworth. He teaches law at UT, and writes books on all sorts of topics. The book I quoted is The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook. He also wrote a companion volume, The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual. I’ve read bits of both books, and they are simple and entertaining, but not dumbed-down in the least. He’s also written on argumentation, rhetoric and chess. I think I’m a fan.