Socrates
The city that invented open debate would tolerate — even prize — the man who took the examined life most seriously.
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
Table of Contents
The instrument. The patent holder of Socratic Irony irony: profess ignorance, ask small questions, let the expert’s own answers do the demolition. The Greek eirōneia was an insult — the sly dissembler — before he made it a method; his contemporaries could not always tell whether the modesty was real, which was the point.
The recoil. Three recoils, actually. The democracy famous for parrhesia — frank speech — convicted its frankest speaker of corrupting the youth, at the trial where he compared himself to a gadfly sent to sting a lazy horse; the horse voted. Second: the man who claimed to know nothing was declared by the oracle at Delphi the wisest in Greece — and resolved the paradox by concluding that knowing the size of one’s ignorance was the wisdom, an interpretation his execution ratified. Third, quietest: the philosopher who distrusted writing wrote nothing, so the master of feigned positions is known to us entirely through other men’s scripts. We cannot verify a single word — a fittingly ironic archive for irony’s founder.
Threads
- Forms: Socratic Irony · Dramatic Irony · Historical Irony
- Rhymes with: A Modest Proposal (the held pose), The Unfeeling Curator (the unverifiable speaker)