In an essay called “On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts During Speech,” German playwright Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) gives his reader advice for what to do when “there is something you want to know and cannot discover by meditation.”1 Kleist says you should seize upon “the first acquaintance whom you happen to meet,” not in order to extract from them the knowledge you seek but, rather, to hand it over to them: “You yourself should begin by telling it all to him.” Kleist expects that in the past “you spoke with the pretentious purpose of enlightening others.” He instructs you to change course: “I want you to speak with the reasonable purpose of enlightening yourself.” Kleist reports that when he is stuck on a mathematical problem, he explains it to his sister, whose very presence, in spite of her lack of mathematical training, works its magic: “I have only to begin boldly, and . . . to my surprise, the end of the sentence coincides with the desired knowledge.” He says Molière did something similar with his servant girl, and that the phenomenon is commonplace in public speaking. “I believe that, at the moment when he opened his mouth, many a great orator did not know what he was going to say.”
Kleist anticipates that his reader will be surprised by his advice: “I can see you opening your eyes wide at this.” We tend to assume that we couldn’t have more to say to another person than we would to ourselves—that if I have anything to tell you, I could as well have told it to myself. We are familiar with the fact that we often communicate less than what we believe—when we lie, or conceal our views, or simply refrain from expressing them—but it is surprising to think that the reverse also happens, that there are contexts where we can be more generous with others than with ourselves.
Kleist’s insight—that I can give you more than what I seem to myself to have—is Socratic. It is also very alien to us, so alien that we are not ready to receive it until we remove the assumption that stands between it and us. The full depth of the insight is alien even to Kleist, whose failure to identify the relevant assumption and to detangle the troublesome knots to which that assumption gives rise consign him to appreciating only the thinnest edge of the Socratic wedge. When tasked with explaining how it is that we can give more than we have, Kleist observes: “The human face confronting a speaker is an extraordinary source of inspiration to him.” This is not exactly wrong, but in his focus on speechifying to a silent, ignorant audience, Kleist misses how much potential hides behind the human face. “Socrates converses with Alcibiades not by saying words to his face, but by addressing his words to Alcibiades, in other words, to his soul,” says Socrates to Alcibiades.2 Speaking to the soul of a person—which entails letting them talk back to you—allows you to share something with them that you don’t have.
What blocks us from fully appreciating the Socratic insight here is our tendency to assume that thinking is like breathing: something each person does for themselves. If each of us must do her own thinking, then no one has more to offer to another than what she has privately constructed, albeit perhaps quite recently, in the workshop of her mind. Kleist suggests that the presence of others incites one to speed up the construction process, for example, when we think they might be about to interrupt our mathematical exegesis:
During this process nothing is more helpful to me than a sudden movement on my sister’s part, as if she were about to interrupt me; for my mind, already tense, becomes even more excited by this attempt to deprive it of the speech of which it enjoys the possession and, like a great general in an awkward position, reaches an even higher tension and increases in capacity.
Kleist recognizes that other people often supply us with the energy or optimism for constructing thoughts; Socrates goes one step further and suggests that we can construct thoughts with other people. But in order to take this second step with him, we have to learn to recognize the pervasive distortion created by the assumption that thinking is a private, inner, mental activity. The distortion extends to our experience of Socrates himself, generating a kind of double vision that leaves us seeing two Socrateses.
In the Apology, Socrates describes Athens as a sleeping horse, and himself as a gadfly sent by the gods to awaken it from ignorance. He stings and reproaches his fellow citizens, asking them questions that reveal the absence of the knowledge they felt sure they had. His refutations put people in a state of confusion in which they do not know where to go, what to do, which way to turn. The Greek word for this state is aporia: etymologically, it is composed of the word from which we get “pore” and a privative prefix meaning “not,” so literally it refers to the absence of a route or a way forward or path by which to proceed.
Socrates shocks people into recognizing just how lost they are, by making them aware that they are in fact missing what they purport to know. People subjected to this treatment describe themselves as feeling numb, unable to speak, as seeing their words waver back and forth. Unsurprisingly, they find this disconcerting. The individual who goes around removing others’ pretensions to wisdom is going to find himself surrounded by a lot of grumpy and resentful people—that much is obvious to anyone, or at least, to anyone but Socrates, who, having taken up the project of systematically refuting all the politicians in Athens, reports with surprise the moment when “I realized, to my sorrow and alarm, that I was getting unpopular.”3 So that’s the first Socrates: the refutational gadfly.
The other Socrates is Socrates the midwife. In the Theaetetus, Socrates claims that not only was his mother a midwife, but he, too, is a kind of midwife—only for men rather than women,4 and for the soul rather than the body. Though he is himself “barren” of insights, others are not. When people converse with him, “they discover within themselves a multitude of beautiful things, which they bring forth into the light. But it is I,” he boasts, “with God’s help, who deliver them of this offspring.”5 Going along with the “midwife” image is Socrates’ claim, in the Meno and Phaedo, that what his interlocutor is doing is “recollecting” something they already knew, and he is only helping them in that process: bringing hidden wisdom to light.6 In the Symposium, the upshot of philosophical learning is not being purged of false beliefs but something undeniably positive: giving birth to true virtue and thereby earning immortality. In the Charmides, he describes his philosophical activity as having the goal “that the state of each existing thing should become clear.”7 In the Gorgias he says, “All of us ought to be contentiously eager to know what’s true and what’s false about the things we’re talking about. That it should become clear is a good common to all.”8 At the end of that dialogue he describes the conclusions that he has arrived at multiple times, through multiple routes, with multiple people—Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles—as now “held down and bound by arguments of iron and adamant.”9
In these passages Socrates seems to suggest that he is engaged in activity that makes positive progress toward figuring out the truth. Socrates the midwife is someone whom it would be natural to experience as productive and helpful. Talking to him gives you more than what you had when you entered the conversation; you are on firmer ground, you are less lost. The expected response to encountering such a person would be gratitude.
So, what is Socrates? Is he the gadfly who leaves people stunned, bereft, lost, and confused, or the midwife who helps birth their beautifully clear idea-babies? Is he engaged in a fundamentally negative refutational activity, of clearing away pretensions to knowledge, or in a fundamentally positive inquisitive one, of finding new items that one can add to what one claims to know? I call this “the Gadfly-Midwife paradox.”
It could also be called the paradox of Socratic humility. Socrates was famous among his contemporaries for the fact that he reputedly “knew that he knew nothing,” or “knew his own ignorance”—this is sometimes called “Socratic humility.” He frequently disparages his own cognitive powers—his memory, his ability to speak well—and also makes specific denials with respect to his knowledge of piety, virtue, courage, and so on. This is midwife Socrates: empty, lowly, ready to occupy a subordinate position. Barren, with no ideas of his own, he is reduced to making himself useful by facilitating the thinking of others. He routinely praises the greater knowledge of his interlocutor.
But Socrates was also famous for his habit of besting the most impressive minds of his day in one-on-one showdowns that were often public. The person who is focused on publicly taking others down a peg—and who is good at it—isn’t typically the most humble person in the room. Socrates the gadfly, negative Socrates, displays the intellectual resources required to foil the most brilliant people. Socrates routinely comes up against sophists, orators, and members of the Athenian intellectual elite angling to display their virtuosity at his expense. Time after time, Socrates prevails.
How could one person be known both for his humility and for his competitive argumentative prowess? The mystery of Socrates is that the two central facts about him don’t seem to fit together. Is Socrates as arrogant as he seems, or as ignorant as he claims to be? Which is he, a provocative gadfly or a cooperative midwife?
Those first encountering Socrates tend to interpret him as either all gadfly or all midwife. Pure gadfly Socrates is personally invested in demonstrating how little others, especially those of high status, actually know. This Socrates is perceived as arrogant and triumphal by virtue of his attraction to and success at such intellectual combat; he is also perceived as mocking or disparaging his interlocutors. When it comes to Socrates’ famed “knowledge of his own ignorance,” readers who favor gadfly Socrates emphasize the knowledge part—and all the self-importance that goes along with it.
Pure midwife Socrates is the intellectual hero whose sincere attempts to learn are maligned and misunderstood by his uncooperative interlocutors—who are the arrogant ones. Midwife Socrates is just trying to make “the truth of each existing thing become clear.” He is honestly inquiring, sincerely hoping that Euthyphro will tell him what piety is, that Laches will tell him what courage is, and so on; he is not trying to refute anyone. Refutation is, if it occurs, an accidental side effect of his noble quest for knowledge. What sets Socrates apart from everyone else is a simple receptive willingness to learn from the people around him. On this interpretation, Socrates’ “knowledge of his own ignorance” is nothing but naïve innocent ignorance. This Socrates is ever hopeful that the next intellectual encounter will be the one that enlightens him.
More sophisticated readers combine the two identities in various ways: there is, for example, Socrates the altruistic gadfly who stings people for their own benefit; and there is also Socrates the skeptical gadfly who doubts there is any knowledge to be had at all. If one leans in the direction of gadfly Socrates, as interpreters from Aristotle onward have tended to do, one might wonder whether we could assign the positive project of knowledge acquisition to Plato—in this view, Socrates refutes and destroys while Plato is the theory builder and creator. The scholarly consensus on the chronology of Plato’s dialogues sees roughly three groups.10 In what scholars call his early period, Plato wrote dialogues such as the Apology, Laches, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Crito, and Phaedo. These dialogues showcase the person and views of the historical Socrates, with a special focus on the events surrounding his death.11 Scholars then identify a middle period (including Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic), in which Plato is beginning to produce and put forward some of his own original ideas, and a late period, where he does so to an even greater degree. In late dialogues such as Sophist, Statesman, and Laws Socrates either does not appear or is not the main speaker. In late dialogues such as Philebus and Theaetetus, where the midwife image is located, Socrates is the main speaker but is often understood as, at least in part, playing the role of a mouthpiece for Plato. Might we, then, segregate gadfly Socrates from midwife Socrates by identifying only the gadfly character with the historical Socrates, and the midwife with Plato?
No. Even in the early dialogues, Socrates routinely presents the positive pursuit of knowledge as his goal. While it is true that Socrates depicts himself as a refutational gadfly in the Apology, when he is actually engaged in (what look to us to be) refutations—with interlocutors such as Laches, Protagoras, Hippias, Gorgias, and so on—he is remarkably consistent in representing his motivations in a positive manner. He says that he is talking to his interlocutors in order to learn. Here’s a representative passage:
“Protagoras,” I said, “I don’t want you to think that my motive in talking with you is anything else than to take a good hard look at things that continually perplex me. I think that Homer said it all in the line, Going in tandem, one perceives before the other. Human beings are simply more resourceful this way in action, speech, and thought. . . . How could I not solicit your help in a joint investigation of these questions?”12
So, even though the actual midwife image appears in a dialogue usually considered to be late, we can’t relegate midwife Socrates to later dialogues. Another alternative is to adopt a sequential interpretation, not across the dialogues, but within each of them: what if Socrates first refutes, and then inquires. Could it be that Socrates acts as gadfly, and acts as midwife, in that order?
If you accepted that Socrates has both a destructive and a constructive role, you might be inclined to assume that he switches from the first to the second. I call this “the two-stage view.” It breaks Socrates’ activity into a preliminary, destructive, error-identification component and, once that has been completed, a secondary, productive search component. Negative refutation paves the way for positive inquiry. Socrates’ interlocutors enter the field of conversation laden with “baggage”: a dismissive attitude toward the project of seeking after such items as knowledge, justice, and virtue, grounded either in the conceit of already possessing those things, or in a cynical denial of their value.* On the two-stage view, Socrates begins by clearing away bad answers to his questions, thereby motivating his interlocutor to be the kind of person inclined to participate in the search. Socrates can then transition from this initial adversarial stance to the positive, constructive stage of his method in which he and his interlocutors jointly inquire after a satisfactory answer.
We can look beyond the dialogues, to book III of Augustine’s Confessions, to see a clear example of the two-stage approach. Augustine (354–430), then a student at Carthage, is steeped in heretical beliefs and a sinful, sensually indulgent lifestyle. His devout mother Monica approaches a bishop whom she hopes will set her son straight. Augustine reports that she “asked him [that is, the bishop] to make time to talk to me and refute my errors and correct my evil doctrines and teach me good ones.” A literal translation of that last phrase—dedocere me mala ac docere bona—would reveal two forms of the word “teach”: “to unteach me evil things and teach me good things.” On the two-stage view, refutation constitutes the therapeutic “unteaching” stage that must precede any positive teaching. Monica sees the bishop as having the sort of intellectual and religious prowess necessary both to eradicate Augustine’s errors, and to implant truths where they used to be. She expects him to, first, establish a clean slate, and, second, to serve as a teacher.
The bishop declines Monica’s request. His rationale is that her son’s mind is too infected with heresy to be receptive to the truth. As Augustine recounts:
For he answered that I was still unready to learn, because I was conceited about the novel excitements of that heresy, and because, as she had informed him, I had already disturbed many untrained minds with many trivial questions. “Let him be where he is,” he said; “only pray the Lord for him. By his reading he will discover what an error and how vast an impiety it all is.”
The bishop claims that he is unable to teach Augustine because something else has to clear the way first. The bishop evidently specializes in stage two. Some of Socrates’ contemporaries saw him as the counterpart to this bishop: someone who relegates himself to the unteaching stage of education. We find this perspective on Socrates in a dialogue called the Clitophon.13
Clitophon is an associate of Socrates who represents himself as having fully internalized the negative and motivating parts of Socrates’ process, and complains about Socrates’ failure to provide the positive goods. He avows that he has an excellent understanding of exactly why the usual approach to questions of justice and virtue is wrong, and that he fully appreciates the need for better answers. He reports that “I was therefore very interested in what would come next after such arguments.”14 He describes his frustration at what he experiences as Socrates’ unwillingness to get to stage two:
When I had endured this disappointment, not once or twice but a long time, I finally got tired of begging for an answer. I came to the conclusion that while you’re better than anyone at turning a man towards the pursuit of virtue, one of two things must be the case . . . either you don’t know it, or you don’t wish to share it with me. And this is why, I suppose, I go to Thrasymachus and to anyone else I can: I’m at a loss.15
Notice that Clitophon’s vision of what happens in the second stage is that Socrates finally discloses the truth in one fell swoop. Clitophon understands his own slate of conventional views about morality as having been wiped so thoroughly clean that the only option is for Socrates to write the answers on it. Clitophon treats refutation as the prelude to indoctrination—and is disappointed that the indoctrination never comes.
A glance through Plato’s dialogues confirms Clitophon’s observation that there is no separate second stage. In the Laches, after Socrates has refuted Laches’ initial definition of courage as endurance, he doesn’t begin stage two—instead he moves on to refute Nicias’ definition of courage. The same thing happens in the Gorgias. Socrates spends the whole time refuting—first Gorgias, then Polus, then Callicles. When he is done refuting one interlocutor, he doesn’t transition to a more positive activity; instead, he moves on to refuting the next person. The Meno might be the best candidate for a two-stage interpretation. Yet even after Meno wants to give up, claiming to have been struck numb by Socrates, Socrates offers him a hypothesis such that Meno can continue to give answers and Socrates can continue to refute them. Socrates doesn’t seem to ever complete the refutation stage; we don’t see him “moving on,” in the way that the two-stage interpretation would predict.16
In the Euthydemus Socrates encounters two men, Euthydemus and Dionysiodorus, who boast of having great wisdom to sell, and who offer to demonstrate it. Socrates preempts their demonstration with a question: he wants to know whether, in addition to being able to fill willing customers with their wisdom, they are able to convert the unwilling to wanting to buy it. Socrates wants to know whether they are capable of motivating someone toward the pursuit of the thing that they claim to offer, or whether they have delegated that work to another party.17 They answer that they are also able to convert, and Socrates exhorts them to demonstrate only that power and hold off on demonstrating how they fill others with their wisdom.18 If Clitophon had been present, he would have thrown up his hands at Socrates’ refusal to receive “the goods” from Euthydemus and Dionysiodorus: “Look at Socrates, avoiding stage two again!” Is Socrates somehow obsessed with the demolition of the conceit of wisdom, to the exclusion of the acquisition of it?
Clitophon is not the only one who gets annoyed by Socrates’ failure to move on to stage two. When Critias asks him to do so, Socrates says the problem is that he does not know the answers:
You are talking to me as though I professed to know the answers to my own questions and as though I could agree with you if I really wished. This is not the case—rather, because of my own ignorance, I am continually investigating in your company whatever is put forward.19
This speech leads Critias to expect that Socrates will now transition from recalcitrant refuter into docile recipient of Critias’ wisdom—but in fact what Socrates does next is what Socrates always does, namely, to go on to refute the answer Critias offers. After enduring a few back-and-forth exchanges of such refutations, Critias explodes at Socrates in Clitophonic irritation:
I think you are quite consciously doing what you denied doing a moment ago—you are trying to refute me and ignoring the real question at issue.20
Critias here contrasts what he takes Socrates to have been claiming to be doing—“investigating in your company”—with what he now thinks Socrates was really doing: “trying to refute me.” Critias feels Socrates doesn’t want answers, he doesn’t want to move on to stage two, he doesn’t care about making positive progress on “the real question.” All he ever wants to do is destructively refute people. Critias is vexed that Socrates claims to be a helpful midwife, when he’s really nothing but an irritating gadfly.
Socrates’ response to Critias’ outburst is, as far as the Gadfly-Midwife paradox is concerned, the most important passage in the entire Platonic corpus:
Oh come, how could you possibly think that even if I were to refute everything you say, I would be doing it for any other reasons than the one I would give for a thorough investigation of my own statements—the fear of unconsciously thinking I know something when I do not. And this is what I claim to be doing now, examining the argument for my own sake primarily, but perhaps also for the sake of my friends. Or don’t you believe it to be for the common good, or for that of most people, that the state of each existing thing should become clear?21
The thing to notice about this passage is how seamlessly Socrates transitions from depicting negative refutation to depicting the fruits of positive inquiry. Socrates begins by saying he refutes people for the same reason that he welcomes refutation, namely, to reveal blind spots and expose false claims to knowledge. Socrates is acknowledging that he actively seeks to prove people wrong. That’s the gadfly talking. But in the last sentence, seemingly just by way of rephrasing what he has said before, he describes his goal as being “that the state of each existing thing should become clear”—that’s where Socrates the midwife rears her head. Notice what he doesn’t do in this passage: he doesn’t assert that proving people wrong serves as a ground-clearing preliminary stage in an inquisitive process. Recall his earlier claim that “I am continually investigating in your company whatever is put forward.” Socrates’ view seems to be that his investigations are, at one and the same time, blind spot–exposing and existence-clarifying. Critias and Clitophon may have a two-stage interpretation of the Socratic process, but Socrates himself doesn’t.
Clitophon reports, grumpily, that as a result of Socrates’ refusal to give him answers, he’s been forced to turn himself over to people who will: public intellectuals such as the sophist Thrasymachus and the orator Lysias. He says, “And this is why, I suppose, I go to Thrasymachus and to anyone else I can: I’m at a loss.” These people confidently offer up, usually in exchange for money, a set of doctrines about how to be a winner at life—or in some specific and important domain of life, such as public speaking. When Socrates turns away from the positive part of Euthydemus and Dionysiodorus’ offerings, he is turning away from such “answers.” Socrates seems to think, contra Clitophon, that if the negative, motivating part of the process is done properly, that itself will amount to positive progress toward knowledge—not by filling someone with (possibly erroneous) doctrines but rather through a shared inquiry into the truth.
I think the most natural conclusion to draw about Socrates’ own solution to the Gadfly-Midwife paradox is that Socrates equates the negative process of refutation and the positive process of discovery. Socrates the gadfly is Socrates the midwife. Socrates engages in productive inquiry by doing nothing other than refuting people. Which is to say, when he destructively, negatively, refutes people, that constitutes a positive, productive search for the truth. Socratic conversation is inquisitive refutation. Before I explain how this works, I want to explain why we should have thought, before encountering such a thing, that it couldn’t possibly exist.
Two thousand years after the death of Socrates, William James dropped a bombshell:
We must know the truth; and we must avoid error—these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws.22
It should come as a shock to hear someone assert that the pursuit of truth and the avoidance of error don’t go hand in hand. You might protest: if someone believes the truth, then it follows that she avoids error. James has to admit that you are right: if S believes p, and p is true, then S has also succeeded in avoiding error with respect to p. Every truth held constitutes an error avoided. So what’s the problem?
The problem is this: when you talk about truths held and errors avoided, you are looking at an end result, which obscures the tensions intrinsic to the process of arriving at that result. Let’s wind the clock back on our friend S, back to before she believed p, back when there was some doubt in her mind as to whether p. The road split before her. She opted for the path of believing p, and was thereby correct—she succeeded at the task of having truth—but only by risking a failure at the task of avoiding falsehood. Every time you stand at the crossroads of doubt, there is a path open to you that guarantees success at the task of avoiding error. That is the path of suspended judgment: don’t form a belief as to whether p. Whereas in order to end up with truth you must court falsehood.
The reason why pursuing the truth requires courting falsehood is that in order to have a true belief about some subject matter you must, in the first instance, have some belief or other about that subject matter. If you don’t believe anything you have definitively failed at the task of believing what’s true—but you have just as definitively succeeded at the task of avoiding error. The two tasks may line up in retrospect; they do not line up in prospect. If you are giving someone instructions, and you instruct them that they must acquire a true belief, that is not at all the same instruction as the instruction to avoid error at all costs. As James writes:
Believe truth! Shun error!—these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance.23
James articulates this dilemma as a response to his contemporary, the philosopher and mathematician William Clifford (1845–1879), whose essay “The Ethics of Belief,” comes down firmly on the side of error avoidance.24 Clifford writes that “Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements.”25 He enjoins every person to “guard the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away.”26 Clifford describes those who believe on the basis of insufficient evidence, even if the belief is true, as “sinful.”27
Clifford’s advice is that whenever you stand at the crossroads of doubt, you should prioritize the avoidance of falsehood by suspending belief. James disagrees:
Believe nothing, [Clifford] tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies.28 . . . Clifford’s exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound. It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained.29
There is a foolproof strategy to avoid believing anything false: Believe nothing! Given that you can only believe one of two contradictory claims, there is no similarly foolproof strategy to believe everything true. Still, you’ll raise your odds if you always hold some belief or other, about every matter. So, if you have the goal of avoiding falsehood, you should always suspend judgment (be skeptical), and if you have the goal of securing truths, you should never suspend judgment (be credulous).
Why not think that James and Clifford are both right, and that one needs to combine the activities of scouting for truth and testing for falsity? James’ point is, you can’t. The goal of avoiding falsehood and the goal of securing truths are in tension with one another. There isn’t an obvious or easy way of doing both at the same time. Trying to be credulous and skeptical at the same time is like trying to go forward and backward at the same time, or trying to build what you are concurrently tearing down. Clifford agrees with James about this tension, though he thinks the skeptical motive should dominate:
No man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt and unbiased; so that the existence of a belief not founded on fair inquiry unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty.30
Clifford thinks that unless one’s agency and attention are directed skeptically from the outset, one will not be in a position to identify error later on. One cannot count on “running into error”; instead, one should focus one’s effort and attentions on spotting it, so that whatever truth arrives does so only by having overcome one’s resistance to it.
Clifford’s solution is that you should always prioritize error avoidance. James does not adopt the opposite extreme position—he acknowledges that you should sometimes prioritize error avoidance, for instance in abstract intellectual inquiry. James merely wants to demonstrate that there are more practical cases—such as that of friendship, self-confidence, and religion—where we should prioritize truth acquisition:
Do you like me or not?—for example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases what makes your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the absolutists say, ad extorquendum assensum meum, ten to one your liking never comes. . . . There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.31
James wants to invoke this “preliminary faith,” which he also calls a “will to believe,” only in areas of inquiry where the question is momentous, and where there is a need to act:
Wherever the option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away, and at any rate save ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, by not making up our minds at all till objective evidence has come. In scientific questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to act on is better than no belief at all.32
I find this attempt at a territorial compromise with Clifford to be unpersuasive. Scientists invest large amounts of money, effort, and time into testing a given hypothesis; a mathematician might spend months or years of her life struggling to prove a conjecture; a high school student, writing a paper on King Lear, reads through the text searching for evidence of the thesis statement she settled on in advance. The claims into which they pour these efforts are not chosen lightly. The considerations James raises about friendship—that one would give up quickly without faith that this was headed somewhere—apply very well to the pursuit of abstract inquiry. Even in theoretical pursuits, we are forced to invest in the truth of an idea in advance of decisive evidence.
If not science, is there any area of human life where the Jamesian demand for a will to believe can be safely set aside? Yes: the domains where it is least likely to be true that “a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming” will be those that are far from where we invest our efforts. Sometimes we say, about a question, “I am just curious.” This is a sign that one feels one can allow oneself to be a pure Cliffordian, suspending judgment until enough information happens to roll in to “extract assent.” Personally, I feel this way about much gossip; about the existence of extraterrestrial life; about the solution of famous mysteries (the Voynich manuscript, the Tamám Shud case); and so on. As a nonscientist, I also feel this way about a lot of science. I am inclined to approach assertions that fall into this region with an attitude of skeptical detachment—I might be willing to form a firm judgment eventually, but I will have to be driven there. If a question strikes you as one that leaves you fully free to indulge in the luxury of indefinitely holding out for objective evidence, you can call it a “Cliffordian question.”
Do Cliffordian questions have any kind of Jamesian counterparts? I think so. When faced with the question, “What are you doing?” it’s hard to avoid a Jamesian response. Consider what I’m doing, right now. I’m engaged in a bunch of bodily movements—tapping with my fingers on the keyboard, looking at a screen, breathing—but those movements are not the whole story of what is happening with me right now. I also possess a bunch of intentions. In general, over the course of this chapter I intend to be talking to you about the Gadfly-Midwife paradox—not just talking at you but talking to you, communicating the reasons to think there is such a paradox, as well as suggestions about how, and how not, to approach it. That’s a general intention I have throughout the chapter. At this specific moment, as I write this sentence, I intend to be engaging your interest and holding your attention by using a vividly reflexive example about how I’m intending to do just that.
That is what I intend to be doing: to communicate with you, to engage you. And if you asked me “What are you doing?” I would give those same answers. I’m communicating, I’m engaging. There is a remarkable coincidence between my answers to the question “What do you intend to be doing?” and my answers to the question “What are you doing?” The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe noticed this coincidence. She pointed out that although a person usually finds out what other people are doing by observation—which is to say, by going out and looking at the evidence—a person doesn’t find out what he himself is doing in that same way.33 When I say “I’m talking,” I do so without checking whether my lips are moving, even if I’m looking in a mirror. The way I know I’m talking is that that’s what I intend to be doing. I parlay my awareness of what I intend to be doing into an assertion about what I am doing. It is not surprising that I would have direct non-observational cognizance of an intention, since it is a mental state, but it is surprising that I could claim to have direct non-observational knowledge of a worldly happening, which is what an action is.
Do I actually have such knowledge? As philosophers writing in response to Anscombe noticed, the move from what I intend to be doing to what I am doing is fraught with epistemic danger. Suppose I am copying out a passage from William James’ Writings: 1878–1899 into this chapter, or rather, that’s what I think I’m doing, and what I would answer to anyone who asked me what I was doing, but when I look up from the book, at the screen, I don’t see any of James’ words. My fingers were mispositioned on the keyboard and what I’ve typed is gibberish.34 I intended to be copying out the passage, but that isn’t what I was actually doing. Given that “knowledge” is a success term—you don’t count as knowing that p if p turns out to be false—we shouldn’t follow Anscombe in describing agents as having non-observational knowledge of what they are doing. Agents can be wrong about what they are doing, so they don’t count as knowing what they are doing. Still, a person clearly stands in some especially non-skeptical relation to those events in the world that are her own actions.
One way to capture this point is to say: the readiness to move from awareness of what I intend to be doing to a conclusion about what I am actually doing displays a characteristically Jamesian optimism. An expression of intention that takes the form of a description of an action—“I am currently explaining the Gadfly-Midwife paradox to you”—is a great example of “a fact that cannot exist at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.” The existence of “Anscombean practical knowledge” is hard to defend in the face of counterexamples such as the case where I intend to be typing a word, but don’t know whether I am doing so. But even if we don’t have knowledge of what we are doing, it seems true to say some of our beliefs about what we are doing are distinctive: they seem to have been freed from the usual demand to check whether what we believe is actually the case. We could call these “Jamesian beliefs.”
If we contrast the detached, curious indifference with which we face Cliffordian questions with the unavoidable investment we have in Jamesian beliefs—think about how unsettling it can be to learn that you’re not doing what you intended—we can see that it makes a big difference whether we prioritize the absence of error or the presence of truth. But most questions are not Cliffordian questions, and most beliefs are not Jamesian beliefs, and that means that most of the time, neither of the two demands can be comfortably set aside. How do we combine the uncombinable? How do we follow two rules when we can’t follow both at the same time? How do we achieve knowledge? We might try a two-stage approach. For example, we could start by wiping the slate clean using Cliffordian doubt so as to provide a basis for our eventual construction of a Jamesian edifice. Alternatively, the first stage might involve helping ourselves to some Jamesian intuitions, and we follow up with Cliffordian winnowing: deleting as many intuitions as we cannot render consistent with one another.
The first approach should bring to mind Descartes, who wrote:
Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.35
The second one sounds more like Aristotle:
We must, as in all other cases, set the phenomena before us and, after first discussing the difficulties, go on to prove, if possible, the truth of all the reputable opinions about these affections or, failing this, of the greater number and the most authoritative; for if we both resolve the difficulties and leave the reputable opinions undisturbed, we shall have proved the case sufficiently.36
The problem with the Cartesian approach is that it’s easy to get carried away with step one. Most readers of Descartes’ Meditations find his argument for skepticism—the doubts raised by the whispers of the evil demon—much more compelling than his eventual antiskeptical resolution of those doubts. Although Descartes gives two arguments for the existence of God in the Meditations, neither is his claim to fame. Which is to say, when you start with Clifford you’re apt to get stuck with Clifford.
The problem with the Aristotelian approach is that someone could succeed in reconciling the phenomena to one another but still, due to being insufficiently skeptical about the “reputable opinions,” fall pretty far short of the truth—to the extent of, for example, producing arguments in defense of slavery and infanticide. Which is to say, Jamesian faith in intuitions tends to land you in Jamesian dogmatism. (There is, of course, a direct link between these two approaches: Descartes’ method of doubt is inspired by a desire to liberate science from the elaborate edifice of Aristotelian scholasticism.)
Socrates didn’t think we have to work in stages, nor was he forced to prioritize either the pursuit of truth or the avoidance of error. Instead, he conceived of learning as a social activity where one person prioritizes the pursuit of truth and the other person prioritizes the avoidance of error. The Jamesian rule and the Cliffordian rule don’t conflict if they are given to two different people. This insight is at the very heart of the Socratic method, of Socratism, and of Socratic ethics.
Socrates claims, in the Theaetetus, that the distinctive form of social interaction that he pioneered allowed its participants to make astounding intellectual progress. The people who enter into conversations with him do not do so already laden with wisdom: “At first some of them may give the impression of being ignorant and stupid,” and yet they exit those conversations having made “a progress which is amazing both to other people and to themselves.” And this is not because Socrates transfers his own wisdom to them: even though they discover those things with Socrates, they do so not because Socrates taught them anything: “it is clear that this is not due to anything they have learned from me.” Rather, the progress is a result of the interaction between the asserter’s putting forward claims and the refuter’s refuting them.
A careful look at Socrates’ description of his midwifery shows that it seems to consist of . . . being a gadfly:
And the most important thing about my art is the ability to apply all possible tests to the offspring, to determine whether the young mind is being delivered of a phantom, that is, an error, or a fertile truth.37
It is the job of Socrates’ interlocutor to give answers to questions, whereas Socrates’ job is that of refutation, which is to say, applying tests to those answers. Socrates is amazed that sometimes people get “into such a state with me as to be literally ready to bite when I take away some nonsense or other from them.” Such people fail to understand the role that Socrates’ refutations are playing in a larger process. Recall Critias accusing Socrates of “just trying to refute”:
And I think you are quite consciously doing what you denied doing a moment ago—you are trying to refute me and ignoring the real question at issue.
And recall Socrates’ response:
“Oh come,” I said, “how could you possibly think that even if I were to refute everything you say, I would be doing it for any other reasons than the one I would give for a thorough investigation of my own statements—the fear of unconsciously thinking I know something when I do not. And this is what I claim to be doing now, examining the argument for my own sake primarily, but perhaps also for the sake of my friends. Or don’t you believe it to be for the common good, or for that of most people, that the state of each existing thing should become clear?”38
When Socrates is describing only his part of the knowledge project, he describes the benefit in Cliffordian terms: warding off false claims to knowledge. That’s the bit he contributes: Socrates is the master of the Socratic role; he’s a genius at parrying claims to knowledge. But when his destructive testing is combined with his interlocutor’s insistence on knowing—which is to say, when he and Critias are working together—they stand to gain more than just knowledge of ignorance. They stand to gain knowledge of “the state of each existing thing.” The Socratic solution to the problem articulated by James is to treat inquiry as a human interaction: inquisitive refutation is possible because there are two people doing it. That it is possible for two people to work together in the pursuit of knowledge comes, to those unaccustomed to it, as a big surprise.
Socratic inquiry appears, at first, to be an instance of the adversarial division of labor. An adversarial division of labor is one that calls for competition between agents performing the tasks into which the labor has been divided; it stands in contrast to a cooperative division of labor, in which the various sub-tasks complement each other.
So, for example, a cooperative division exists between various stages in an assembly line, or in a household where one person does the cooking and the other does the cleanup. If I do a good job cooking, that does not make it more difficult for you to succeed as a cleaner. By contrast, if our jobs stand in an adversarial arrangement—if you are the prosecutor and I am the defense attorney; or if you are the product tester and I am the product maker; or if you the speaker arguing for one policy in a debate and I am the speaker arguing for another; if you are one presidential candidate and I am the other—then your success poses a threat to mine. Our interests conflict.
In a simple kind of criminal trial, the prosecutor aims for a conviction, and the defense attorney aims for an acquittal. By placing these two parties in a zero-sum game—a contest they cannot both win—we hope that the criminal justice system as a whole can achieve the goal of justice, which requires both defending the innocent and convicting the guilty. The same conflict of interest exists between the product tester, insofar as he is instructed to break the product, and the product maker, insofar as she is instructed to make it unbreakable. Two candidates for the same office are said to be running against each other, and debaters are likewise arguing against each other. In all of these cases, the zero-sum competition between the adversaries results (in theory) in a systemic benefit to some broader group. This happens due to the mediation of a third party who adjudicates the contest: the jury decides on conviction or acquittal, the manager chooses whether or not to move ahead with the product, the voters select their representative, the audience of the debate determines who convinced them.
Socratic inquiry, in which one person tries to maintain the correctness of a given answer to a question, and the other tries to show them that it has not yet been answered, or has been answered incorrectly, might appear to share these features of adversarial division of labor: being zero-sum, being competitive, and involving the adjudication of a third-party moderator or audience. (Recall that many of the dialogues were conducted in front of some kind of audience.) In fact, however, as Socrates repeatedly emphasizes, it shares none of them.
When Socrates and Protagoras reach a stalemate as to the length of speeches that should be permitted in their conversation, the suggestion that they choose a moderator is met with approval by everyone—except Socrates.39 Socrates insists that the kind of activity he’s engaged in does not require a moderator. If Protagoras wishes to question Socrates instead of answer questions, Socrates is amenable, but those are the only two options: ask questions or answer them. There is no third role. To Crito, Socrates’ formula is persuade or be persuaded. There are no moderators, because there is no conflict of interest. Recall what Socrates said to Protagoras:
“Protagoras,” I said, “I don’t want you to think that my motive in talking with you is anything else than to take a good hard look at things that continually perplex me. I think that Homer said it all in the line, Going in tandem, one perceives before the other. Human beings are simply more resourceful this way in action, speech, and thought. . . . How could I not solicit your help in a joint investigation of these questions?40
Socrates is regularly in a situation where he has to try to disabuse his interlocutor of the notion that what is going on between them is taking place in an adversarial or competitive context. He tells Gorgias, “I’m afraid to pursue my examination of you, for fear that you should take me to be speaking with eagerness to win against you, rather than to have our subject become clear.”41 But if refutation is, in truth, a cooperative, collaborative process, why does it appear so adversarial to those whom Socrates refutes? The answer is that they are convinced that they can do, by themselves, what Socrates is trying to help them do. Socrates comes across as someone who offers to cooperatively divide the task of shopping—and then follows you around the supermarket taking things out of your cart and putting them back on the shelf. If he seems to be interfering with your part of the work, that’s only because you’ve inflated the size of your part.
There is a tension between the Jamesian demand to know the truth and the Cliffordian demand to avoid the false when one person is responsible for satisfying both demands, but if they are distributed over two people, the tasks turn out to be complementary. Spreading out the work of thinking over two people is a way of allowing both demands to constrain the process of thinking. And yet the tension between the two demands seems to persist, for Socrates’ interlocutors, in spite of his presence. They do not jump at the opportunity he offers them, to divide the labor of thought. People find it hard to accept that thinking is a social activity. We persist in seeing it as a private, inner activity. When someone is trying to think with you, you experience that as competitive—as though they were vying, with you, to be “the thinker.” You see the activity of thinking as indivisible, because, at bottom, you’re sure that you can do it on your own. You find it incredible and unacceptable that thinking is something you need help to do. Each of us envisions ourselves as a kind of house, and inside that house is a special being—we call it “a mind,” and it has the power to figure out answers to questions. We conceive of thinking as a “mental activity,” which is to say, an activity of this “mind.”
Which is not to say that we demand the mind always be on duty. We are happy—often, more than happy—to take time off. Clitophon, for example, invites Socrates to go ahead and do the thinking for the both of them. He is ready to sit back and let Socrates dictate the answers to questions, and he is frustrated by Socrates’ apparent uncooperativeness. He cannot see that he is telling Socrates, “Do something you need my help to do, but without my help!” When Gorgias and Protagoras are irritated by being refuted, the conceit of each man is that he can think on his own; likewise, Clitophon’s irritation is driven by the conceit that Socrates can think on his own. Recall Critias’ complaint:
I think you are quite consciously doing what you denied doing a moment ago—you are trying to refute me and ignoring the real question at issue.42
Critias can be read as demanding: either go ahead and do the thinking, or step back and let me do it! It is difficult for Socrates’ interlocutors to understand the novel way in which he is proposing to cooperate with them, and their misunderstanding distorts their conversations into competitions.
The misunderstanding endures, to this day, even among philosophers: we are inclined to retreat from conversation to a shelter we call thinking. When someone has a good rebuttal, we sometimes say, “I’ll have to think more about this,” as though the real test comes when I import the claim into my inner sanctum, the place where Thinking happens. We breathe a sigh of relief when some dispute comes to an end and we can, as we say, sit back and think. Arguing is stressful—thinking, we tell ourselves, is enjoyable. Socrates would say: that’s because you’re not actually thinking.
The demand to choose between the pursuit of the truth and the avoidance of error comes as an insult to a person who was taking for granted that they had been doing both. Socrates tells us that our minds are not as powerful as we thought they were. When we shelter from the demands and pressures of the outside world and quietly engage in an activity we call “thinking to ourselves,” that is not in fact when thinking happens. Thinking happens during the uncomfortable times when you permit others to intrude into your private mental world, to correct you.
Socrates’ real claim to fame is not any kind of secret special knowledge—he was not holding out on Clitophon. Nor does the distinctness of Socrates lie, as many of his followers believed, in an impossibly high standard for knowledge. Socrates was neither possessed of knowledge he refused to share nor did he believe that real knowledge was unattainable. Socrates thought knowledge was there for the taking, and spent his life trying to take it. He was neither a sadist who took pleasure in exposing the weaknesses of others nor a freelance therapist out to rehabilitate the broken citizens of Athens. He was always clear that what drives him, Socrates, to ask people questions is quite simply the desire to know the answers to those questions. Socrates was not an extremist about knowledge and he was not an extremist about altruism. All he was doing was trying to inquire, open-mindedly, into untimely questions—but he understood this as a social process. It is easier to believe in the existence of two Socrateses than to believe that there was ever one person who denied that thinking is a private mental activity.
Our project, then, is to dismantle the illusion of the two Socrateses, which is to say, to inquire into what it means for a social situation to offer up discoveries that are unavailable to the individual. This is easier said than done. It is one thing to say that Socrates inquires by refuting, and a very different thing to actually reconcile refutation with inquiry. The difficulty lies in the fact that in both cases, we are inclined toward misunderstanding, and these misunderstandings are precisely why our double vision persists.
In the next two chapters we will confront the paradoxes that hide just under the surface of the ways in which we usually think, first, about the practice of showing someone to be wrong, and next, about the practice of asking questions in order to find something out. It is only after untangling those two knots that we will be ready, in the final part of the book, to apply the Socratic method to untimely questions in three areas: love, death, and politics.