The two things to know about Socrates are that he had nothing definitive to say and that he was ugly. Somehow these two features have been transformed in collective lore into the image of wisdom and beauty. Is it so hard to accept that the founding father of philosophy—itself the mother of all the sciences—could be a shabby, unattractive plebeian? Even more interestingly, the transformation of Socrates from mortal rambler to intellectual legend had already begun during his own time. Because he could transform ignorance into a form of wisdom, he could make the unattractive beautiful.
Socrates had nothing to teach, yet is the greatest teacher of them all. How is this possible? The only way to answer this is that the question itself becomes the answer. Socrates is the voice of emptiness, wonder, and doubt that made the philosophical search possible. He is a question mark. Generations of philosophers to come—from Socrates’ student Plato to Spinoza, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, each in his own way—came to inhabit this emptiness. They question, they make us question, live afresh the wonder that is the love of knowledge.
The tradition of unknowingness begins with Socrates. It is a tradition that loves but does not have knowledge, whose love is already knowledge and its knowledge already love. Socrates is the mouthpiece or the mask through which this love story plays out. A reading of two key texts helps explain why this thinker’s legacy still matters to us today, two and a half millennia after its birth.
Introduction to Socrates
Socrates (469–399 BC) is considered the father of philosophy, though he might have preferred a more maternal title. He described himself at times as a midwife who helped others give birth to their own knowledge—a knowledge of themselves. Socrates wasn’t the first philosopher, but his predecessors—and the shards of their work that remain—followed mostly religious or poetic traditions. Socrates and his manner of conversing created the philosophic tradition carried on by his student Plato and by Plato’s student Aristotle.
Socrates was an Athenian citizen who spent his time in conversations about ethics by asking questions about the good life and the virtues of man. He wrote nothing and claimed that writing is a way of forgetting. Our knowledge of him is restricted to the reports of others: most notably, the dialogues of Plato, the Memorabilia of Xenophon, and The Clouds, a comic play by Aristophanes. He had a profound impact on many of his contemporaries, and, from a distance of two and a half millennia, his portrait remains fresh and his life almost palpable.
Scholars typically divide his work into the early, middle, and late Platonic dialogues. In each dialogue Socrates is the main speaker, guiding its course through a unique method of questioning. In the early dialogues Socrates focuses primarily on ethical problems (such as what is virtue or what is the good) without ever arriving at a positive conclusion that affirms one view or the other. The middle dialogues mark the development of the student, as Socrates’ student Plato seeks answers to the Socratic questions proposed. The late dialogues represent Plato’s elaboration, afterthoughts, and even criticism of his own middle period. The first text that concerns us is The Apology, from the early period, where Socrates explains his special kind of knowledge. The second, The Symposium, comes from the middle period, in which Socrates focuses on his special kind of love. The two together will set the route for us and for philosophy toward the practice of loveknowledge.
An Unapologetic Apology
Plato’s Apology, one of the most detailed works about Socrates’ thinking, tells the story of his public trial: he defended himself against accusations of impiety and irreverence in an irreverent, unapologetic—and some might even say self-indicting—manner. In his testimony Socrates explains that he spends his days in adversarial public conversation with anyone willing to argue with him. He challenges the moral complacency of his fellow citizens and embarrasses them when they cannot answer basic questions such as what is virtue, justice, beauty, or goodness—questions they intuitively think themselves capable of answering. In Plato’s portrayal of these early dialogues, Socrates never provides a positive answer to his own questions. Instead he admits that neither he nor anyone else knows the definition of virtue or the good life or anything else that is truly important. His peculiar form of wisdom, as he explains, is the knowledge that he does not know. It is exactly this “negative knowledge” that made the Oracle of Delphi say that he is the wisest of all men.
What is most surprising about the Apology as a text is that it is remarkably balanced. Socrates is virtually the only speaker, and he often comes across as arrogant and unsympathetic. One would expect the writer, Plato, to gloss over moments that cause the reader to identify with Socrate’s persecutors and instead to admire his teacher’s excellence. But what the reader gets is a nuanced portrayal of the living context of philosophy as an activity, not just a static discipline.
What draw us to the figure of Socrates, and what makes this character so alive, is the use of irony. When Socrates speaks eloquently about his inability to speak, or when he knowingly analyzes his lack of knowledge, we feel that the man is not entirely genuine or that his intentions do not match his words. We can sense the tensions between the speaker and what is said, which means that we cannot reduce the speaker to what is spoken. This is remarkable because we are faced with a text, not a person, yet the text brings a person to life, and it does so by showing him becoming other than himself.
In the introduction, Socrates denies that he has any skill in speaking other than the skill of speaking the truth.1 He asks the judges to excuse his plain speech, which he has been accustomed to using in the marketplace. He also mentions his old age and the fact that he has never been accused before, so he has never appeared in court. His string of excuses amount to a perfect introduction to one of the most brilliant examples of rhetoric, because ironically, after the disclaimers, he delivers a masterpiece of a speech.
His speech conforms perfectly to the rules of rhetoric. The diction is impeccable, and the structure concise. It begins with an introduction, then states his case and outlines the plan of the plea. Then he presents the refutation, a digression, and a summation. This speech shows Socrates to be a master rhetorician. Usually rhetoric is defined as power of persuasion, indifferent to truth. Socrates’ speech, on the other hand, aims to discover the truth and excellence of the soul, indifferent to pleasure or pain and irrespective of gratification and personal interests. So the second level of irony is that, in the process of using perfect rhetoric, Socrates proves that rhetoric alone is not enough to win his case. On trial for his life, the man who cannot speak speaks too well—and not well enough.
There is something insolent and arrogant about Socrates’ humble claim that he does not know. He seems to be consciously proving the accusation correct while in the process of attempting to refute it. Is his mock-humility a form of suicide by legal means? And what can he mean when he says he knows he does not know? What is it that he knows? Is he sincere in claiming ignorance or is he merely faking it to tempt his interlocutors into conversation?
I believe that Socratic irony does not allow us to decide between these options. His ignorance is both sincere and feigned, or perhaps it is neither. Irony, the famous mark of Socrates, is a force that disturbs the usual binary oppositions. It somehow hovers in between, disturbing or provoking, relating while untying the ends. It is this paradoxical stance—more performance than theory—that makes the lover of knowledge so effective.
Irony is culturally specific. In America today it stands for the reverse of sincerity. The new generation of teenagers excels, so they say, in hiding behind what is called “the mask of irony.” They do not let their emotions come forth, and, when they do, these emotions are already distanced from them because they are expressed with an air of self-mockery. Irony can quickly deteriorate into an unproductive sort of detachment. But textual irony functions differently. It allows us to see beyond what is said, which means that it makes us more engaged. We find that our reading of the text and our attitudes toward it are exactly what makes the text meaningful. We, the readers, are part of the dialogue just as much as Socrates’ partners in dialogue. Naturally, no text exists without its readers. But this one is more demanding. We are not only reading it, but our impressions and the changes we experience are the very subject of the text. Socrates’ slippery speech lulls us into a sense of false confidence that proves, in retrospect, our unknowingness. Here is Socrates. Here is his story. Nothing can be clearer, and we can follow along and evaluate the claims. But then what does he mean? Is he really ignorant, and why would he fake it? This rhetorician who denounces rhetoric proves himself guilty of impiety while arguing against the charge. Now it looks like we are guilty of ignorance and self-delusion. Now we know we don’t know; moreover, we realize how natural it is for us to think we know and how difficult and disturbing it might be to discover that we don’t. This trial is not Socrates’ but ours. This text is not about him but about us. We have no position outside the text, and we too, like Socrates’ partners in dialogue, find ourselves unknowingly conversing with a blank mirror. And it proves us ignorant.
The Informal Accusation
Socrates begins his defense by saying that, in addition to his formal plaintiffs, he has a large body of old, informal accusers within Athens. The court of public opinion has already found that he is “a wise man [more like a wise guy], who speculated about the heavens above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause,” says Socrates himself (18b). Socrates considers this informal charge more dangerous than the official one. As he says, it is a view that circulates among the Athenians to which he can attach no particular name. His old accusers are the most difficult to deal with, “for it is impossible to bring any one of them forward as a witness and cross-examine him. I must rather, as it were, fight with shadows in making my defense, and question where no one answers” (18d).
In today’s terms, fighting with shadows sounds like a metaphor for a struggle with an unconscious opponent. It is of the nature of the unconscious to work in anonymity, like a shadow—a fact that makes the achievement of self-knowledge so difficult. Socrates refers to this old accusation in terms of prejudice. As always, his task is “to remove from you in this short time that prejudice which you have been so long acquiring.” He is well aware that his short verbal defense cannot defeat such prejudice but “the law must be obeyed and a defense conducted” (19a).
Socrates is accused of speculating “about the heavens above” and searching “into the earth beneath.” What does this accusation by public opinion, which Socrates considers more dangerous than the formal indictment, mean? First we should note that speculating about the heavens above and the earth below does not necessarily mean a physical or metaphysical speculation about the nature of the universe. Aristophanes, the comedian, presented Socrates as such a ridiculous metaphysician, “talking about walking on air and babbling a great deal of other nonsense” (19c). The image of the clumsy, absent-minded, and nonsensical philosopher is already part of the repertoire of comedy in the Greek world. As Socrates is quick to explain, he has no interest in this sort of speculation. But the accusation is serious. Behind the image of the absent-minded philosopher, there is the fear that Socrates’ questions disturb the established order of their world—the sky above and the earth bellow. To wit, he questions their general framework for making sense of the world, and therefore his position must seem nonsensical. But, before developing this alternative, we must examine Socrates’ own explanation of the fear and hate he arouses.
In order to explain the reasons for the public hostility toward him, Socrates relates the story of the Oracle of Delphi. According to the story, when asked if there was any man wiser than Socrates, the oracle replied that there is none. This response shocked Socrates: “When I heard this I kept thinking: ‘what on earth does the god mean? What is he hinting at? For I am aware of not being wise in anything, great or small. What then could he mean by saying that I am wise?’” (21B2–5) The answer seemed itself a paradox, since Socrates knew nothing and yet the god cannot lie. So he embarked upon a mission to solve the riddle and sought out wise men to discover how his knowledge stacked up.
First he went to a politician, who “was thought wise by many, and still wiser by himself” (21c). He soon found that the man was not wise, and Socrates explained this to him. Naturally, the man grew to hate Socrates. Next he went to the poets and asked them to explain the subjects of their eloquent poems, but they were unable to do so. “Then I knew that not by wisdom do the poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration” (22c). Then he went to the artisans and found them to be masters of their craft, but ignorant of other subjects. In the process, Socrates says, he made many enemies but found a solution to the oracle’s riddle: his wisdom consists in his knowing that he does not know. He concluded that “God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, he O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing” (23).
This story helps illustrate the cause for the public hostility toward Socrates, but it is hardly a sufficient explanation for his death. We need something stronger than mere annoyance at an arrogant philosopher in order to understand the fear that Socrates’ dialogues agitated. Socrates died a condemned criminal. The accusation of impiety was indeed a serious matter in Athens, because it directly affected the city’s welfare and safety. But Socrates was not impious. His manner was perhaps unusual, and his beliefs might have been opaque, but Athens did not persecute men on the basis of their beliefs. In any case, Athenian religion was not a matter of orthodox dogma but a highly developed form of polytheistic folk tradition—ritual and observance—and a general outlook on life supported by myth, not by doctrine.
So why was Socrates charged with among the most serious allegations the Athenian state could claim against a citizen? Why was he condemned and put to death? What matters here are not the specific historical details, but the philosophical importance of his life and death as brought forth in Plato’s text. What does this death signify as an event in the history of philosophy?
Questioning World Views
How disturbing Athens must have found Socrates that it would put him to death? There is nothing in the formal accusation that helps us figure this out. And so generations of readers have puzzled over the fact that the first democratic state sentenced its first philosopher to death. But there is more here than mere historic accident. It is precisely the new form of democracy that Socrates disturbs, since democracy relays on consensus, and consensus is based on a common way of experiencing and interpreting the world. Tyranny can tolerate oddity and disagreement so long as it does not influence the state. But a democracy is far less flexible in this respect. It is threatened by the kind of questions he presents. His thinking is radical not because he has different ideas (or because he worships different gods, as the mythic language of the indictment goes) but because he simply questions the existing ones. Impiety means just that—disturbing the unspoken order, that collective unconsciousness that governs the community. As Euthyphro, who is featured as a religious expert in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name, explains: “Piety preserves both families and cities and keeps them safe. The opposite of what is acceptable to the gods is impious, and impiety overturns and destroys all things” (14b). Socrates is a radical cultural critic of sorts. Radical because he has no agenda and defends no dogma but only a few methodic principles that keep the dialogue going. His practice is not impious toward Athenian religion specifically, but toward any belief system, any doctrine, and any order, Athenian or otherwise. Socrates’ accusers recognize an important characteristic regarding the Socratic, and indeed the philosophic, way of life.
Much of philosophy has this peculiar character of examining what is most evident and commonplace. It questions the features of life that we take for granted—the views we have grown to accept as givens and realities we take to be natural. Philosophy raises problems we don’t usually raise in our everyday life, such as the question regarding the existence of the world or the existence of other minds. We don’t raise these questions because, on the whole, we never doubt the existence of the world. We grow accustomed to this order and to a host of other beliefs, which Socrates calls our old prejudices, without examination.
Socrates’ practice inserts a measure of uncertainty into our everyday. Some might find this process exciting; others might experience it as endangering deeply rooted ways of life. Socrates’ partners in dialogue discover time and again that they cannot justify the most basic features of their existence or that their existence is based on a set of assumptions they leave unexamined. His interrogation leaves them unhinged. Some find relief and freedom in being loosed from this foundation, but many become anxious and fearful. The Socratic practice is meant to tap into the former and make us accept our lack of knowledge as a source of liberation, joy, and motivation to continue seeking greater understanding.
The Socratic Elenchus
The Socratic investigation asks us to formulate explicitly the views that shape who we are. Usually, those beliefs are too close to be noticed. We are blind to the overall picture that defines our identities, since it stands at the background of our world, providing an invisible framework through which all of our experiences are channeled.
So we can already suggest an answer to the general questions: what kind of knowledge is Socrates aiming for, by what means, and for what end? The knowledge his questions intend to probe is the knowledge of ourselves—the knowledge of who we are, what beliefs we hold, and what convictions shape the way we experience our world. The process helps shape a life of continuous self-examination in which every conviction is brought up to face the scrutiny of reason. Living a life of self-examination does not mean a constant judging of oneself, but a practice of elaborating on what one is. But we still have to answer the question regarding the means for achieving the examined life. How does Socrates get us to question the underlying suppositions that inform our daily lives even when we aren’t entirely aware of them?
The Socratic method is a form of a critical investigation called elenchus (
), which literally means “to examine critically” or “to censure.” In fact, the philosophy of Socrates consists in nothing more and nothing less than this method of investigation. It relies on the premise that Socrates, following his disavowal of knowledge, avoids asserting nearly any positive content. The most precise description of the Socratic elenchus was given by Gregory Vlastos, an authority on classic philosophy and Socrates in particular: “Socratic elenchus is a search for moral truth by question-and-answer adversary argument in which a thesis is debated only if asserted as the answerer’s own belief and is regarded as refuted only if its negation is deduced from his own beliefs.”2 It is important that the elenchus is a search for moral rather than abstract, practical, or objective truth. The Socratic method is oriented toward the good life or happiness. This is intimately related to morality since, for the Greeks, it is impossible to enjoy happiness while being immoral. The good, the beautiful, the true, and the wise are all connected; hence it is only by virtue of having a good character that one can achieve the good life. The person who is practicing self-perfection, who cares for himself, is also the person whose actions are best for others and for the state. The Socratic demand to “know thyself” is simultaneously a demand for self-examination and for moral consciousness.
The search for moral truth necessitates the “question-and-answer adversary argument.” It is only the course of the conversation and not the abstract logic of the argument that can lead the participants to such truth. Finding philosophy through dialogue seems at first like an unusual way to go about the discipline. The dialogic tradition borrows heavily from fiction, and especially from drama, a form that was perfected before Socrates’ methodical examination. But here it serves as a vehicle not for storytelling but for finding truth. So, on a deeper level, the emphasis on dialogue represents a different conception of knowledge in which intelligence is not held by one person as a possession. Instead, it becomes a process between at least two interlocutors. Knowledge is relational or dialectical. It requires a double, and the meaning of the knowledge gained in the process is always circumscribed by the context of the exchange.
This different conception of knowledge goes hand in hand with a different conception of self. An individual is not an object-like thing that can be examined in isolation, but rather a temporal creation that unfolds by means of a dialogic process. Contrary to present-day prophets of self-discovery, there is no way to stop and take hold of ourselves. Simply put, there is no authentic core you discover when you probe yourself. Rather, knowing oneself requires a commitment to travel outside of oneself and join with others. Self-knowledge is a destination not an origin. At the beginning, before examination, we are strangers to ourselves.
But in another respect authenticity is an important part of the Socratic method. “Say what you believe” is the only condition for entering into a debate. A person whose statements express his beliefs endows his words with the significance of his own life. One does not simply assert a hypothesis, but arguments proceed on the basis of the participants’ beliefs. That means that investigations of these hypotheses become an existential self-examination. Any move in the debate will have an effect on one’s set of beliefs and hence on the way one understands oneself.
In this sense Socrates foreshadows the way modern thinkers emphasize embodied knowledge. Words can be used to imagine or describe, to mount hypothesis or to theorize, but Socrates wants speech to have the effect of a performative promise. It essentially amounts to the claim: here I am, here is what I believe in, here is myself. Anything less will be mere gesturing in the air.
The demand for “truthful expression” seems to conflict with the ironic style so characteristic of Socrates. But, as we have seen, irony does not mean saying something and meaning something else. Socratic irony is a feature of the text, which allows us to detect a life that cannot be captured in words. It is this ambiguity and essential vacillation that amount to Socratic irony. Yes, there is a distance between what one says and what one is, but that distance is a motivating force that propels the investigation forward.
Irony today might at bottom say that “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” As a cultural norm it might even amount to the claim that it is impossible to mean what you say. How different this is from Socratic irony, which urges us to mean exactly what we say and admit that closing the gap between what we are and what we express is impossible. As we shall see following a reading of the Symposium, it is in this gap that love finds its place, as love takes up where knowledge leaves off.
Socrates as a Protopsychoanalyst
The similarities between the Socratic method of elenchus and the psychoanalytic technique have been noted by many commentators.3 This is no accident, as Freud was an admirer of the classical period and referred to the author of the Socratic texts as “the divine Plato.”4
First, the Socratic method of cross-examination is designed to bring out beliefs that underlie the respondent’s claims, about which he might even be unaware himself. In this sense Socrates is engaged in an effort to enlarge the realm of consciousness at the expense of the unconscious.
But it is important to note that the Socratic unconscious is far from a vulgar conception of the unconscious as a storehouse of repressed thoughts or desires—though this understanding of unconscious is an oversimplification of Freud’s original theory. To both thinkers the unconscious—or the part of oneself that represents “not knowing”—is what shapes and channels what we know, believe, think, and experience. The unconscious is not a repository of repressed thoughts and desires but a dynamic process of selection: it ascribes value and determines context and relation. In short, the not of knowledge or the un of consciousness are inherently active in determining what we know or what we are conscious of.
Second, Socrates’ single condition that a person says what she believes bares a remarkable resemblance to the fundamental psychoanalytic principle that requires the patient to state whatever comes into her mind without censorship. The point of both principles of analysis is to reveal that person’s set of psychic commitments because only if one is committed to what one says will the process of questioning have any real effect on the self.
It’s important not to conflate the two traditions, however. As compared to the Socratic tradition, psychoanalysis claims a broader jurisdiction over psychic commitments. It goes beyond the “not knowing” to include behavioral and involuntary evidence such as unconscious slips, free associations, dreams, and other acts that manifest the working of the psyche.
Third, both Socrates and Freud believed in the power of the spoken word to elicit change in attitudes and character. Socrates perfected the technique of an asymmetrical dialogue, in which the one side—the side Freud would call the analyst’s—serves as an empty screen on which the fantasies, desires, traumas, and frustrations of the patient are projected and then confronted consciously and deliberately. Socrates describes himself as a midwife, helping his partner become aware of himself and in this way achieve virtue and happiness. The marked difference between the two traditions is that Socrates also worked on himself. He rejected any fixed position and shaped himself instead as the philosopher while helping others know or become themselves. This positions him closer to a partner in dialogue, with equal responsibilities and privileges.
Finally, the Socratic question of how one should live (which is, in every case, personal, i.e., how I should live) is the only fundamental question of psychoanalysis. It provides both the means and the end of psychoanalytic therapy. Socrates understood that people become who they are in the process of asking and answering this question. And the process of making this question explicit allows us to rethink and recreate ourselves according to our own principles That is why, for Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living, and confronting this problem requires examining how and why the question is lost in everyday routines. How does life become something we take for granted? And, more important, how we can bring it up to awareness again? The Socratic method, like psychoanalysis, opens a space for self-examination. It does not provide answers since the question itself—how I should live—is already the way toward virtue and happiness.
Both the analytical setting and Socrates’ elenchus function dialogically, but the power dynamics is different in each case. In analysis, we begin by thinking that the psychoanalyst knows something more than we do. After all, the treatment means paying a certified professional who has undergone years of training. Participating in therapy involves trusting that an analyst will see through our self-distortions, recognizes our veils, and decipher our inner self—or that’s what we want to believe. But, as therapy progresses, we often learn that the analyst knows very little about us. She only knows what we tell her and what we care to reveal through our behavior, stories, thoughts, and dreams. As analysis progresses, we learn to use the practice differently. The analyst becomes a mirror through which we learn about ourselves. The mirror knows nothing. Instead, it simply delivers us back to ourselves.
Socrates’ power dynamics work in the reverse way. The conversation partner begins thinking he knows better than this arrogant and disheveled old man. Though Socrates already has a reputation for his relentless questioning, the conversation partner thinks he can outsmart Socrates: “maybe others have fallen into his traps, but I fully understand the principles by which I live my life.” This statement, which makes the “I” an exception, is shared by the reader as well. The only difference is that the reader thinks she can outsmart both Socrates and his interlocutors, by seeing how they are led, unknowingly, to the position of not knowing. But, as the dialogue progresses, the roles gradually reverse. The reader observes Socrates as he outsmarts his accusers. But then we are dumb-founded as readers, since outsmarting the accusers, by showing his skill to unsettle conviction, only hastens Socrates’ conviction and death. The reader loses her self-confidence. Is Socrates a wise man feigning ignorance, or is he a fool pretending to be a wise man? The irony soon hits the reader on the head: the teacher proves himself at once powerful and impotent. And this is precisely the lesson. No one can tell us how to live our lives. But, without an incitement, we forget to ask it ourselves. We need to be fooled by a wise guy to appreciate the significance of the forgotten question.
The Irony of Irony
How are we to make sense of Socrates’ disavowal of knowledge? Is he sincere in claiming not to know and asking others for answers, or is he deceitful in pretending not to know in order to lure others into conversation? What does it mean to know that you don’t know?
Otto Apelt, a German philosopher and editor of Plato’s work, has described the Socratic technique as a process of splitting and doubling (spaltung und verdoppelung).5 Apelt describes Socrates as filling two roles simultaneously: the one who knows and the one who does not. This division creates a tension in the reading: as we try to figure out if Socrates is sincere in claiming ignorance, we are split as readers as well—switching positions between knowing and not knowing.
In other words, irony isn’t just a rhetorical device for Socrates. It’s an essential part of unsettling the reader to make him internalize the questions he poses. Socrates’ irony is not an instrument in the service of ideas but, as the famous existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard says, it is his position itself: “Socrates’ life is like a magnificent pause in the course of history: we do not hear him at all; a profound stillness prevails—until it is broken by the noisy attempt of the many different schools of followers to trace their origin in this hidden and cryptic source. His irony was not the instrument he used in the service of the idea; irony was his position—more he did not have.”6 Kierkegaard defines irony as “infinite absolute negativity.” Irony is the voice of negativity itself. This is the doubling effect of irony. It splits the actual moment in two and makes one face the other. But the act of splitting itself is completely empty. It is simply the first, purely abstract move in helping us realize our capacity to reflect, by confronting us with ourselves and opening up the space for self-examination.
The internal split within Socrates is doubled in the reader. The reader too splits and doubles in the process of reading or conversing with the text. The effect is that of self-transformation—becoming other than oneself. This effect was unknown to the Athenians of Socrates’ time, and it is the source of the charges of impiety and corruption against him (24). He is guilty of being the first individual of the Athenian democracy—the first to stand independently of the conventions and customs of his age. Moreover, he is guilty of teaching others how to develop this individuality and therefore guilty of corrupting others who can now stand on their own as well. The accusations against him—both formal and informal—are entirely correct. Socrates is guilty because of his technique. Both simple and elusive, his technique is irony. Socrates is an empty persona—a mask through which we learn to speak for ourselves. He is our demon or our gadfly (30–31), and his questions amount to an invocation to examine our lives. As he professes at the end of his unapologetic defense, he knows nothing but to teach how to “care for the self.”