The Socratic method as a way of knowing and virtuous life

Socrates is such an extraordinary philosopher that the details of the life path and biography seem to reveal to us the secrets of his teaching. Even its origin is in a sense symbolic. Being the son of the Athenian mason and midwife, the thinker seemed to have continued the matter of obstetrics, which was dealt with by his mother, only in the field of spiritual culture. It is not for nothing that the method of Socrates is called maevtika (in translation from Greek - "the art of midwife"). The first Athenian philosopher in history , Socrates was ugly, but he was extremely attracted to people; He had a sensual character in his youth, but overcame it. According to the legends, the philosopher tolerated his quarrelsome wife Xanthippu in order to learn humility. His life passed in a fairly turbulent era for the Athenian state - the Peloponnesian wars.

The method of Socrates was described to them publicly in 399 BC, in the presence of many students. First of all, he spoke quite sharply against the rhetoric of the Sophists, who substantiated the thesis that there is no truth, but only different opinions, and claimed that everything is relative. In addition to the fact that "a man measures everything to his own taste," as Socrates said, there is also an objective factor, which is a subjective judge, is Reason. It is thanks to Mind that one can approach the Truth. The guarantor of this approach is Daimonion (inner voice, conscience), which has a divine origin and is a divine spark in man.

It can be said that Socrates' method was embodied in the very life of the philosopher. For him, again, unlike the sophists, thinking was not a matter of wisdom, but of love for it ("philo-sophia" in Greek). But this love is embodied in a morally impeccable life. Therefore, the main thing in philosophy is not an ontology, but ethics, not a cosmos, but a person, not everything from which everything happened, but how to live properly. Therefore, knowledge for Socrates is primarily ethical. Sophists, as the thinker believed, were right in that knowledge in the field of ontology - these are just opinions. And in this sense it can be safely said that the only knowledge is that in reality a person does not know anything.

Socratic philosophical views in the field of ethics and epistemology actually boiled down to one phrase - one must know oneself. No wonder these words were carved over the entrance to the temple of Apollo in the famous shrine of the ancient world - Delphi. Cognition is the process of searching for the essence, the discovery of the universal, characteristic for diverse things, the method of induction. But it is applicable only in the field of ethics and self-knowledge, because only such knowledge leads to self-improvement and the development of virtues. There are three most important and necessary virtues for a person - restraint, courage and justice. As a rationalist, Socrates believed that the knowledge of virtues in itself leads to him, because, despite his egoism, man is by nature a moral being, and the common goal of people endowed with practical reason is the absolute (joint) good.

The Socratic method is a kind of dialectic of investigating ethical problems. A multifaceted discussion, a dispute where a particular problem rises from various, even shocking and unexpected points of view, ultimately leads to truth, "the philosopher said. When the interlocutor sees contradictions, he himself moves in the direction of truth, as if a child being born are moving towards the exit to the light. And this truth begins with the definition of the concept. So for the first time in the history of philosophy it was stated that if there are no clearly defined concepts - there is no knowledge. Since for Socrates, objective truth and knowledge exist only in the moral plane, he concluded that good and evil can not be considered relative concepts - the difference between them is absolute.

However, most of the contemporaries did not understand the meaning of Socrates' teaching. He was often confused with the sophists (at least, so Aristophanes ridiculed him in his comedies), and since the philosopher believed that he was a "vegetable" of the Athenian democracy, and often criticized her (by the way, in order for her to improve), he was accused In espionage, atheism and corruption of the youth. The result of the trial was the death penalty. The philosopher himself drank the poison prepared for him, saying before death: "Asclepius, I must cock", meaning that death is for him not a non-being, but a recovery and a transition to a better world (in ancient Greece it was customary to bring the god of healing to Asclepius A sacrifice of thanksgiving for getting rid of the disease). The disciples of Socrates were Plato and Xenophon, and from their works we mainly know information about the life and thoughts of the philosopher - he did not write down his ideas.