Following Socratesto be lived – an aporia is also a cunning literary device, asking
that the dialogues never be treated as philosophical treatises
that might be thought to wrap things up. They raise questions
that the reader should answer for themselves.
Socrates is also often ironic in the dialogues, particularly when
it comes to confessing his ignorance. It’s a feature that is much
debated among Plato scholars. I think that the irony is not that
he secretly thinks he does know about things after all. It was
just that inevitably, after a while, he reached a point when the
common mistakes that people make in deluding themselves that
they know more than they do became familiar to him. And since
his goal was to encourage them to understand their ignorance,
rather than just tell them about it, he has to go along with them
to tease it out. Like an old teacher in front of a new class, he
pretends that their queries, diffi culties, enthusiasms and conclu-
sions are as fresh to him as they are to them. Sometimes, his
bluff is called: ‘You have gone too far this time,’ Agathon says in
the Symposium when Socrates repeats again that he is ignorant
on such and such a matter. But he insists: he is genuine in his
confession. (Irony is also a good strategy for stirring arrogant
people up: it irritates them by pricking bubbles.)
More positively, at its best, Socratic philosophy is a form of
friendship. Partly because both are nothing if not lived; and
partly because the best kinds of friends are those who make the
best kind of philosopher. They are people who know each other,
can speak freely with each other, are honest and humble towards
one another, and can critique and challenge each other. Together,
they are better able to embrace human limits. In the dialogues,
Socrates has his most rewarding conversations with individu-
als who can accept friendship of this sort (and conversely, those
that cannot are the least productive). To borrow from Emerson,
Socratic friends are like those who exclaim, ‘Do you see the same
truth!’ Something is not just told, it is unveiled.
The most obvious underlining of the belief that it is a sense of
encounter that Plato is trying to conjure up is that Plato wrote
in dialogues in the fi rst place. The Seventh Letter suggests that