Socratic Maieutics and the Philosophy of Social Ethics

The Socratic Method: Maieutics

Knowledge needs a method that serves as an important part of the dialogue, acting as an appropriate instrument to cause permanent tension toward truth and virtue. Maieutics consists of progressive steps:

• Irony: Socrates adopts an attitude of ignorance toward his interlocutors regarding the subject of conversation, asking the caller to inform him.
• The Dialogue Itself: An inductive logic process through which, via constructive dialogue, one transcends the consideration of particular cases to express them in language.
• The Definition: Reaching the universal concept or idea, representative of a common quality among special cases, to be linguistically defined by collecting the characteristics by which things are what they are.

Irony, dialogue with inductive logic, and the definition process are the core steps in the Socratic method or maieutics. The philosophy of Socrates is the right therapy to relieve people from ignorance and walk toward the truth. Even if no response is final, it becomes a new question; its purpose is to raise an intense and constant search for truth.

Ethics and Politics: Socrates vs. the Sophists

According to Socrates, ethics must regulate politics, since moral virtue is the highest good (both individual and social) because it eliminates and calms individual and social conflicts. The social conscience has primacy over the external. A citizen's first duty is to obey the laws, which Socrates never considered unfair; only the envy and ignorance of those who condemn unfairly interpret them. Laws express the essence of the universal individual and the state. Man is indebted to society because, without it, there would be nothing.

However, the Sophists argue that societies are governed by positive law (Nomos in Greek) and that the basis of these laws lies in human will rather than natural law.

Individual and Society: Differing Perspectives

The Sophists held a relativist position regarding both the possibility of knowledge and the forms of social and political organization. According to Protagoras, the determinant of social law is not the individual or nature, but all men who live in that society. This explains how the nature of law can be modified. The Sophists understood that society must be employed by individuals.

For Socrates, society is the natural way of human beings because man is not self-sufficient in the production of goods for survival or in moral and spiritual matters. Laws express the essence of the universal individual and society. Man cannot be understood outside the margins of society. Society has priority over the individual.