The Story of Psychology Read Online Free PDF Page A

inside a youth’s garment. Uncommonly homely, with a considerable paunch, a bald head, broad snub nose, and thick lips, he looked like a satyr, his friend Alcibiades told him. Unlike a satyr, however, he was a model of moderation and self-control; he seldom drank wine, remained sober when he did, and was chaste even when in love. The beautiful and amoral Alcibiades, slipping into Socrates’ bed one night to seduce him, was astonished to be treated as if by a father. “I thought I had been disgraced,” he later said, according to Plato’s
Symposium
, “and yet I admired the way this man was made, and his temperance and courage.”
    Socrates kept himself in good physical condition; he fought bravely during the Peloponnesian War, where his ability to withstand cold andhunger amazed his fellow soldiers. After long years of instructing his pupils, he was tried and condemned for his teachings, which Athenian democrats said corrupted youth. The real problem was that he was contemptuous of their democracy and numbered many aristocrats, their political foes, among his followers. He accepted the verdict with equanimity and refused the opportunity to escape, preferring to die with dignity.
    Although the Delphic Oracle once declared Socrates the wisest man in the world, he disputed that pronouncement; it was his style to claim that he knew nothing and was wiser than others only in knowing that he knew nothing. He claimed to be a “midwife of thought,” one who merely helped others give birth to their ideas. This, of course, was a pose; in reality he had a number of firmly held opinions about certain philosophic matters. But unlike many of his contemporaries, he was uninterested in cosmology, physics, or perception; as he says in Plato’s
Apology
, “I have nothing to do with physical speculations.” His concern, rather, was with ethics. His goal was to help others lead the virtuous life, which, he said, comes about through knowledge, since no man sins wittingly.
    To help his students attain knowledge, Socrates relied not on lectures but on a wholly different educational method. He asked his students questions that seemingly led them step by step to discover the truth for themselves. This technique, known as dialectic, was first used by Zeno, from whom he may have learned it, but it was Socrates who developed and popularized it. In doing so, he promulgated a theory of knowledge that would be the major alternative to perception-based theories from then on.
    According to that theory, knowledge is recollection; we learn not from experience but from reasoning, which leads us to discover knowledge that exists within us (“to educate” comes from the Latin meaning “to lead out”). Sometimes Socrates asks for definitions and then leads his partner into contradictions until the definition is reshaped. Sometimes he asks for or offers examples, from which his partner finally makes a generalization. Sometimes he leads him, step by step, to a conclusion that contradicts one he had previously stated, or to a conclusion he had not known was implicit in his beliefs.
    Socrates cites geometry as the ideal model of this process. One starts with self-evident axioms and, by hypothesis and deduction, discovers other truths in what one already knew. In the
Meno
dialogue he questions a slave boy about geometrical problems, and the boy’s answers supposedlyshow that he must all along have known the conclusions to which Socrates leads him; he was unaware that he knew them until he recalled them through dialectical reasoning. Similarly, in many another dialogue Socrates, without presenting an argument or offering answers, asks a friend or pupil questions that lead him, inference by inference, to the discovery of some truth about ethics, politics, or epistemology—in each case, knowledge he supposedly had but was unaware of.
    We who live in an era of empirical science know that Socratic dialectic, though it can expose fallacies or contradictions in