Everything about Socrates is ironic and enigmatic: He is one of history’s most famous teachers, yet he claimed not to be a teacher. He stands at the beginning of more than 2,000 years of texts, yet he wrote nothing himself. Universities have canonized Plato’s Socratic dialogues, yet Socrates was never in an academy, but on the streets of Athens—the city that sentenced him to hemlock.
The Delphic oracle called Socrates the wisest person in Athens, yet Socrates felt he possessed only an ironic wisdom, an enlightened ignorance: “I know that I do not know.”
Of all the versions of Socrates, Plato’s remains the most compelling and influential. Plato’s phrases have entered contemporary English: we speak of “the Socratic method,” “the gadfly to the state,” and “the examined life.” Instead of rigidly defending a single position, Plato’s Socrates shows us how to question all positions rigorously. The Socratic position reminds us—lest we be in a rush to judge others—to recognize how much we do not know. Searching itself is meaningful; questions become as important as answers.
Plato’s Socrates continues to inspire students today, as well as creative minds across cultures. The young Nietzsche called Socrates “the vortex of world history.”
Virginia Woolf, in an essay on the Greek classics, wrote that reading a Socratic dialogue provides “the greatest felicity of which we are capable.” And Martin Luther King, in his 1963 letter from a Birmingham jail, invoked the spirit of Socrates when he called for reform and for “nonviolent gadflies.”
Today, when it comes to humanistic inquiry and hard conversations about controversial issues, Socratic dialogue can provide a valuable model; there’s so much we do not know, and so much we can gain from questioning and searching together.