Socrates and the elenchus
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He wrote not a single book, founded no school, and charged no fees. Yet Western philosophy splits into “before Socrates” and “after.”
Socrates (c. 469–399 BCE) is the hinge of Greek philosophy. Everyone before him is literally labelled a “Presocratic.” But he left us nothing in his own hand — so everything we know is second-hand, reconstructed from people who wrote about him. Historians call this the Socratic problem: which Socrates is the real one?
Socrates’ philosophy was his method — a live, face-to-face activity, not a set of doctrines to be written down. That method is the elenchus (elenchos = cross-examination, refutation, testing). Socrates asks someone who claims to know something — what courage is, what justice is — a series of questions, then draws out consequences of their own answers until those consequences contradict the original claim.
The immediate result of the elenchus is almost always aporia (aporia = impasse, “no way through”). The interlocutor, who marched in certain he knew what piety was, marches out confused — his confident knowledge exposed as a tangle of contradictions. This is not cruelty for its own sake. Deflating false certainty is the first, indispensable step toward real understanding: you cannot fill a cup that is already (wrongly) full.
What is the immediate aim of the Socratic elenchus?
This connects to the most famous Socratic paradox: Socratic ignorance. The Delphic oracle, asked whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, answered no one. Baffled — for he felt he knew nothing — Socrates cross-examined the city’s reputed experts to refute the god. He found that they thought they knew, but did not; whereas he at least did not think he knew what he did not know. In that one respect he was wiser (Apology 21a–23b).
What is Socrates hunting for? A definition — but a special kind. When he asks “What is piety?” (Euthyphro) or “What is courage?” (Laches) or “What is justice?” (Republic I), he is not satisfied with examples. Euthyphro answers “piety is what I’m doing now, prosecuting a wrongdoer.” Socrates refuses it: give me not a pious act but the piety itself — the one eidos (form, characteristic) present in all pious things, by which we call them pious (Euthyphro 6d–e).
When Socrates asks 'What is piety?', why does he reject Euthyphro's answer that piety is prosecuting a wrongdoer?
How does Socrates differ from the Sophists he is so often lumped with (Aristophanes lumped him in)? Sharply. The Sophists took fees; Socrates took none, and died poor. The Sophists taught how to win any argument; Socrates sought the truth and followed it wherever it led, even against himself. The Sophists sold wisdom; Socrates professed ignorance and only asked questions. Their relativism said “man is the measure”; his whole search assumed there is a real, single answer to “what is justice?” worth pursuing.