Know thyself: the Socratic method

The phrase "know thyself" was carved in stone on the temple of Apollo, at Delphi, centuries before Socrates was born. There, it was not an invitation to self-examination: it was a harsh warning, remember that you are mortal, and not a god. Socrates inherited that inscription and did something with it that no one had done before. He turned a check into a method.

A warning, not an invitation

In the temple where the priestess answered visitors' questions, "gnôthi seautón" served as a reminder of limits. Whoever arrived there, often lifted up by their own luck or their own fame, needed to hear that they were not a god, and that luck could turn. That, and not introspection, is what the inscription asked for. The temple did not invite anyone to look inward in search of themselves, it invited them to remember their own size before the gods.

What Socrates did with it

Socrates inherits the phrase and completely changes its use. For him, knowing yourself is not rummaging through your own feelings, nor discovering what you like. It is not looking inward for content, in the way we would call self-knowledge today. It is more uncomfortable than that: it is drawing the line between what you actually know and what you merely repeat with confidence, because you learned it from someone, because it has always been that way, or because you never had a reason to doubt it.

A line nobody draws alone

And here is the strangest, and also the most useful, point of the Socratic method: that line cannot be seen in the solitude of your own room. It appears when someone asks. That is why self-knowledge, the way Socrates practiced it, is almost the opposite of modern introspection. It is not an exercise you do by closing your eyes and turning your attention inward. It is a practice that needs two people, one asking and the other answering, until the answer runs into something that no longer holds up.

Why this still bothers us

The contemporary instinct treats self-knowledge as a private task: a journal, a retreat, a moment alone. Socrates proposes the opposite, and that is why his method still bothers us today. He reminds us that there is a kind of illusion about oneself that resists solitary reflection, because the mind alone tends to confirm what it already thinks. Only a question that comes from outside can touch exactly the point the person never examined, because they never had a reason to examine it.

What stays with you

The temple's inscription keeps saying the same thing it always said: remember your limit. What Socrates added was the path to get there, and that path is never solitary. It shows up, for example, in the most instructive scene Plato ever recorded, the one of a boy who arrives on his own at the right answer, but never without someone asking, in Plato's dialogue Meno. It is the same practice that gives its name to maieutics, and it is the subject of the Nous class on Socrates and knowing thyself.

Continue: I know that I know nothing: what Socrates said · Socratic questions: the method, not the list · Socrates and the invention of the soul · Bernini and the Aeneid, by Virgil
Source class: Sócrates e o conhece-te a ti mesmo: autoconhecimento, virtude e maiêutica