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Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers Socrates and the Socratic Method [The Acropolis image and banner are
used with the permission [A different version of this commentary appeared under the title, "Socrates and the Pedagogy of Critique," in 14 Legal Stud. F. 231 (1990)] What makes the teaching by way of conversation that Socrates undertook of continuing interest to us today? How does Socrates teach? What would bring students and educators who pursue law as our calling to continue this long conversation about Socrates? I am a teacher, one willing to admit that I am no fountain of great knowledge. Still, I see and find hope in teaching. I hope that some of my students learn something of importance as we carry on our conversations about lawyers, the work they do, and the ethics we hope to have in doing the work. But there are days when this hopeful vision seems little more than an illusion. What do my students learn? Does my effort to have each student reach beyond the clichéd images of lawyers provide any real value in their quest to be lawyers? We attempt to talk about ethics in a world in which the moral perspective appears increasingly confused by cacophony of voices. It is my doubt and hope, and the conflict and confusion that swirls
around us that brings me to Socrates. It is a "time of reassessment
of dominant ideas across the human sciences . . . extending to law,
art, architecture, philosophy, literature, and even the natural sciences."
[George E. Marcus & Michael M.J. Fischer, Anthropology
as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences 7
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)]. In times such
as these, we might do well to revisit Socrates. Socrates sets us in
search for what is worth knowing and believing, for methods of seeing
and knowing that will create a more inhabitable world. The search for
meaning, the re-making and re-visioning of the limited worlds we inherit
takes us on a heroic quest. In the archetypal hero quest, the Socratic
journey entails dangers and trials. Socrates, in the imagination of
teachers, is an authentic and tragic hero. How Should I Live? How should one live? Bernard Williams argues that the question posed by Socrates remains the focal point of moral philosophy: "The aims of moral philosophy, and any hopes it may have of being worth serious attention, are bound up with the fate of Socrates' question, even if it it not true that philosophy, itself, can reasonably hope to answer it." [Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy 1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985)]. What work should I take up? How much of myself should be invested in that work? Can I use my work to serve others as I use it to sustain my worldly needs? How does the culture in which my own drama is enacted--the culture I inherit--limit me? What possibilities of freedom does it make possible? What possibilities of freedom and knowledge do I enact in my teaching? What kind of culture will my students create with the education they receive? Socrates raises the moral and philosophical questions that are historical precursors to the questions every student of law and legal studies confronts: what do lawyers do and how can it be justified within the larger moral universe in which all "practices" and "local knowledge" must be judged? How can we justify the way we live and the culture we embrace? How is one to know how to live? Are we simply to take the well-worn path and trust that success will follow? And what can be said about those who hallucinate the voice of an imagined "society" that tells them (and us) who to be, how to think and talk? With what "voices" does culture speak to us? How do we "listen" to culture? How can we recognize culture as it appears in our own speaking? How do we talk back to culture? How is one to talk to teachers, to authorities, to colleagues, to students? What is one to do with the books she reads, the education she is offered? What kind of knowledge do we need this world and the world that is possible? What beliefs and understandings do we now accept that get in the way of knowing how best to live? These questions about culture are questions we inherit from Socrates. Williams argues that
If the question of philosophy is how we are to live, then we are all
in our own way philosophers. "There is no escape from philosophy,"
Karl Jaspers told us. "The question is only whether a philosophy
is conscious or not, whether it is good or bad, muddled or clear. Anyone
who rejects philosophy is himself unconsciously practising a philosophy."
[Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom 12 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1951)] I can, without effort, answer the question--how should one live? We live ordinary everyday lives in which we assume that we know how to live. If I believe that I know what I am doing and that what I do is basically right, then I must know how it is good to live. We resist, in every way possible, the idea that we know less than we think (about both ourselves and the world), and that what we think might have consequences that we have not considered and if considered, would be difficult to accept. We oppose with great energy the thought that our lives might be plagued by self-deception. The struggle, at the heart of philosophy, animated by Socrates' teaching is both the desire and the fear of submitting ourselves to questioning about the life we have chosen, and that we have let others chose for us. Resistance to questioning, Richard Taylor explains, lies in what we think we already know:
Socrates presents us with a paradox of learning and teaching: know
thyself and know the self you find inadequate. Socrates is known for
this dictum "Know thyself" and yet, he is also known for the
equally consistent practice of turning the conventional world of belief
and language on its head. If one seeks to learn only by discovering
the truth within oneself, the truth may turn out to be that we are enamored
with resistance to change and critical reflection, that we are narcissists.
But if the truth within oneself is hidden from oneself, then some means
of excavation and uncovering other than the thinking we are presently
doing will be necessary. Conversation Socrates did not present a philosophic map of a consistent set of propositional principles. (Philosophy does not hold out for us a set of self-evident truths.) James Boyd White says of the Gorgias, as one might say of other early Socratic dialogues, that they seek to "teach" the reader, but not by way of a set of propositions or fixed principles, or even a seamless argument. The Socratic dialogues do not, says White, teach the use of a particular language, even the one being used in the dialogue. Rather, the dialogues teach us "how to remake a language" of our own. The reader of the Gorgias is asked "not to learn a particular set of questions and dialectical responses, to be repeated on other occasions, but . . . how to ask questions of one's own." [James Boyd White, The Ethics of Argument: Plato's Gorgias and the Modern Lawyer, 50 U. Chi. L. Rev. 849, 869 (1983)] Socrates' philosophy is found in the way he speaks, the way he listens, and the trust he puts in conversation and argument. Conversation (found in contemporary legal scholarship under the guise of dialogic politics) is what Socrates would have us put to work in teaching and in public life. We are much in need of re-vitalized conversation, education and public life (to realize what Socrates called "citycraft"). We need in public life a Socratic dialectic on the good. We need Socrates for our teaching and in our teaching. With Socrates we imagine teaching as conversation. We engage our students
in inquiry and struggle and do it by conversation. The Socratic inspired
teacher is "committed to the rigorous examination of the faith
and morals of the time, giving pride of place to those convictions which
are widely shared and rarely questioned. Reliance on consensus and prestigious
paradigms are prime targets." In following Socrates "it is
a point of honor to swim against the stream." [Walter
Kaufman, The Future of the Humanities 22 (1977)]. In Socratic
teaching we explore "compelling alternatives to current fashions."
We "ask how various orthodoxies of our time look from the outside,
how well grounded our common sense and all sorts of scholastic as well
as non-academic consensuses are, and what might be said for and against
each alternative." [Id. at 29] Tullio Maranhao describes Socrates' famous questioning as the distinguishing feature of Socratic conversation and philosophy.
For Socrates, philosophy emerges from conversation in which confrontational
questions become the basis of mutual inquiry. "The form of the
Platonic dialogue was quite certainly created by a historical fact--the
fact that Socrates taught by question and answer. He held that form
of dialogue to be the original pattern of philosophic thought, and the
only way for two people to reach an understanding on any subject."
[Werner Jaeger, 2 Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture 19 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986)]
Participation in a Socratic conversation requires searching questions, "active listening," and a willingness to confront one's own ignorance (as Socrates pronounces his own ignorance and confronts that of others). Socrates would have us confront, in conversations with others, what we know about virtue and what we assume to be virtuous in our work (our professions). The paradox in Socrates' approach to virtue is his claim that virtue cannot be taught even as he proceeds to demonstrate and do what he contends cannot be done. [For an exploration of this paradoxical quality of Socrates teaching, see Thomas D. Eisele, Must Virtue Be Taught? 37 J. Legal Educ. 495 (1987)]. Tom Eisele, using Plato's Protagoras as his text, explores Socrates' well-known claim that virtue cannot be taught and points out that "Socrates is an example (or exemplar) of virtue or excellence; he enacts or performs excellence in his incessant questioning and questing. He may not be able to articulate fully what virtue is--but this only shows perhaps that virtue is not a matter of propositional knowledge. Socrates is able to embody it. And his example teaches us what virtue or excellence is. We learn virtue from his example." [Id. at 497]. It is Socrates' enactment or demonstration of virtue that has captured the attention of commentators. [See e.g., Walter R. Fisher, Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action 182 (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1987)]. Socrates makes virtue, virtue reflected in what we have already become and what we are in the process of becoming, the basic conversation about the good life. Conversation as Moral and Political Instruction What would it mean to make Socrates the patron saint of our teaching?
To make conversations with our students our teaching? Is it no more
than bitter irony that Socrates is claimed as the patron saint of legal
education? [At least one colleague has argued that it
is Protagoras, not Socrates, that provides a more appropriate guiding
spirit for legal education. See William C. Heffernan, Not Socrates,
But Protagoras: The Sophistic Basis of Legal Education, 29 Buff. L.
Rev. 399 (1980)]. While Socrates may be associated with the revered
and feared law school classroom interaction of teacher and students
named in his honor, law students are never introduced to Socrates, his
philosophy and teaching, or the "method" he actually used
in his conversations In the Protagoras, Socrates, by his questions, calls us to re-examine learning, to judge whether what we seek to learn is worthwhile or merely popular, and whether what we seek to learn might not have the potential to poison the psyche as tainted food poisons the body. In the early Socratic dialogues, we see how conventional views--views
that grow out of everyday thinking popular culture, education, disciplinary
training, and public life -- are themselves problematic. For both Socrates
(and as well as Plato) "it was a special feature of philosophy
that it was reflective and stood back from ordinary practice and argument
to define and criticize the attitudes involved in them." [Bernard
Williams, at 2]. Socrates was a critic and left us a legacy in
philosophy what Alfred North Whitehead described as an attitude of mind
towards doctrines ignorantly entertained." [Alfred
North Whitehead, Modes of Thought 171 (New York: Free Press, 1968)].
"Socrates spent his life in analysing the current presuppositions
of the Athenian world. He explicitly recognized that his philosophy
was an attitude in the face of ignorance. He was critical and yet constructive."
[Id. at 173-174]. A teaching philosophy that follows Socrates,
follows the philosophy that Whitehead says, "reverses the slow
descent of accepted thought towards the inactive commonplace."
[Id. at 174] To penetrate beyond the world of appearances means to allow the studied
transformations of my opinions, my certainties, and finally, my beliefs,
not only about the world around me, but the world I construct with my
knowledge. The Socratic dialogue is a lesson in "seeing through,"
in seeing what is held forth as knowledge is a mistaken or false belief. In the Socratic dialogue the reader/student/teacher is pulled toward a more critical stance. It is, we learn, difficult to be critical, critical in the sense of being open to what we do not know, open to the possibility that we think we know more than we do, and paradoxically, that we know more than we assume and know more than we adequately express in public dialogue. Socrates can help us develop the skill of questioning and listening and seeing. This skill requires that we hear the confusion in our own voices and see how we "misread" texts--of a literary kind, of a conversational kind, and of the kind we make with our lives. When we struggle with this kind of critical thinking and critical searching we act in the spirit of Socrates, the master teacher of an ancient political and pedagogical art that need not be forgotten.
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