Socrates and Debate Culture
By Meher Sethi
Much of today’s concerns regarding politics lament the demise of civil ‘debate.’ During high school, I recall the countless youth organizations aimed at revitalizing the supposedly lost art of debate—to reinvigorate public discourse with civil yet energetic intellectual combat.
However, is debate necessarily productive? Participants are encouraged to take sides in a constructed binary towards partial victory. Yes, the activity promotes well-reasoned and logically precise argumentation (or what we might call philosophy). However, the forefathers of philosophy thought of ‘argument’ in a much different context.
In Plato’s dialogues, we observe Socrates approaching his interlocutors and examining their arguments through rigorous questioning. It is inquiry—a sense of wonder and curiosity—that motivates the Socratic method. Ultimately, his end is truth; not victory, not compromise.
Through questioning, Socrates highlights flawed arguments in search of the argument that will ultimately stand the test of philosophical dissection. It is in a spirit of cooperation and a relentless ‘love of wisdom’ (the direct translation of philosophia) that he and his interlocutors discuss, an atmosphere quite foreign to the debate stage, where the most noble champion persuasion and the least champion competitive victory.
That said, part of the Socratic method rests on his metaphysical premises. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates lays out a theory of forms or ideas (eidos). He imagines the physical world as a world of appearances, while the truer, more perfect reality consists of eternal forms common to certain appearances. For instance, individual Platonic dialogues aim to discover the form of virtue or the form of justice—by this, they mean to understand the elegant, timeless, and general argument that describes virtue or justice in all its particular, instantaneous appearances in the world.
If we don’t accept the conjecture that there are precise forms of truth that a seasoned philosopher might uncover, what does it mean to work together towards the ‘truth’? At a certain point, disagreements may only find resolution through persuasion or compromise.
Regardless, our overemphasis on the practical application of philosophical thinking towards ‘debate’ as opposed to Socratically inspired endeavors demands reconsideration.
