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ANALYTIC TEACHING AND PHILOSOPHICAL PRAXIS VOL. 38, ISSUE 1 (2017) 

  
 
 

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Socratic Aporia in the Classroom and the Development of 

Resilience 

 

Stephen Kekoa Miller 
 
 

 

’d like to talk about the value of unlearning, of undoing, of disruption. Especially in the early 
aporetic dialogues of Plato (those ending in perplexity), Socrates famously takes his interlocutors 
on a journey that at least initially appears to end in failure: at the dialogue’s conclusion, there 
seems to be no answer to the questions that inspired the conversation. There has been a lot of 
recent debate about the so-called Socratic method and accusations that it may be deflating, 

resulting in less, rather than more original thought in students. In particular, the much-discussed 
work of Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, suggests that this method in fact masks a move of 
the teacher to subordinate rather than liberate the student. Adding to this the contemporary trends 
towards emphasis on content over critical reasoning in education and understandings of critical 
reasoning as consisting of categories to be memorized, and the use of questioning as an educational 
tool and as an end point can seem problematic indeed. How can one answer the question of what 
philosophy actually teaches? It is precisely because of its problematic, risky and disruptive nature that 
Socratic aporia works so well both in a particular class and over the course of a whole course. 
 

While Rancier’s critique only applies to some limited uses of questioning as a method, is it worth 
the risk?  At the end of the day, does a dialectical method that leads us to see fatal flaws with both 
sides of important topics stand in danger of leading to nihilism, to a belief that we can’t know and 
that it doesn’t matter?  In an interesting recent article in the New York Times, Justin McBrayer writes 
“What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not 
true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised? I was. As a 
philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there 
are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have 
spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral 
claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.” (NY Times) The article 
discusses how the Common Core has introduced an understanding of the difference between fact 
and opinion as claiming facts are true and opinions are things people believe.  Is this moral relativism 
caused by poor definitions, or has a Socratic method caused this too? 

First, what is this method, and what’s wrong with it?  Rancière states that “good masters who 
follow this Socratic model use questions to discreetly guide the student’s intelligence — discreetly 
enough to make it work, but not to the point of leaving [the student’s intelligence] to itself” (p. 29). 

I 



 

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On this view, Socratic teachers aim not at intellectual liberation, but instead, “interrogate because 
questions are a more effective means to intellectual subordination, to stultification, than lecturing.” 
(Fullam, p. 55) If the goal is acquiescence and the acquisition of facts, this method sounds effective.  
At the end of a session, students ought to be subdued, beaten down and ready to bow to defeat, much 
like Thrasymachus at the end of Republic Book 1. 

 
The problem with Rancière’s analysis is that it describes a method rarely used in most high 

schools.  According to Avi Mintz, “There is a distinction that can be made between the texts of 
Socratic teaching and those of the Socratic method. The Socratic method uses cases which 
simultaneously teach the law and provide an opportunity to engage in the kind of reasoning about 
these cases that is necessary for the practice of law (i.e. the case method can make students “think like 
a lawyer”). In contrast, Socratic teaching does not use texts as instruments of knowledge. Rather, 
Socratic teaching often uses rich, complex works which serve to enlarge the students’ experiences, as 
well as to improve their thinking processes.” (p. 490)  In short, outside of law school, it’s rare to find 
teachers using questions to batter students into accepting an answers they had in mind all along, 
contrary to Rancière. 

 
If Socratic teaching isn’t abusive in this way, doesn’t it still risk leading to nihilism?  I strongly 

remember the first time I taught a college ethics course. At the end of the term during the review 
session, I realized with horror that my course had inadvertently followed a pattern of exposing the 
students to an idea such as utilitarianism or Kantianism, explaining the idea and then exposing it to 
such criticism that the students couldn’t have thought it still had value.  Then the course moved to 
the next key concept to destroy.  At the end of the term, the course had unintentionally suggested to 
the students a morally relative or nihilistic conclusion. I had to ask myself whether the students had 
in fact been harmed by the course…had I left them with less understanding of the topic than they 
started with?  This is the more interesting and more disturbing possibility arrived at not only from 
Socratic method per se but from any academic course aiming for critical thinking and analysis rather 
than rote learning. 

 
To get at this, let’s think about the Socratic dialogue Lysis. In this dialogue, Socrates ends up 

discussing the notion of friendship with two young boys, Lysis and Menexenus. Throughout the 
dialogue, the three explore how friendship, affinity and goodness relate. Throughout also, Socrates 
leads the boys, who, importantly, consider themselves friends, to a point where they think the 
question has been answered.  However, each time, Socrates, like Peter Faulk in a Columbo movie says 
“One more thing,” and introduces a problem. The dialogue ends with the words “And as yet we have 
not been able to discover what is a friend!” (Lysis, 75) While no one seems able to define friendship 
here, the boys remain friends. Everyone simultaneously seems to both know and not know what 
friendship is.  Controversially, even the major later dialogues not commonly thought of as aporetic like 
The Republic, end with a real sense that we don’t know if the whole thing is a kind of a joke…does 
Socrates really believe the things he’s said? He couldn’t be serious, and yet, Book X ends with a 
suggestion that the text is to be taken so, “an illustration of Socratic education that is systematic and 
complete, albeit one that is rife with complexity and raises more questions than it answers about the 



 

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usefulness of Socratic education for contemporary classrooms since Socrates seems to intentionally 
lead his interlocutors to intellectual disorientation in which they not only realize the inadequacy of 
their previous answers to questions, but also experience extreme doubt about their ability to find 
answers that are more adequate.” (Mark, p. 41)  

 
Given that these books have been read and taught for 2400 years, what are high school and 

college teachers aiming for in presenting these texts, but even more fundamentally and broadly, in 
designing courses that follow the pattern of the books by arriving at the end of the term without 
giving definitive answers. 

 
A modern academic course carries with it a similar structure. From Ethics to Philosophy of 

Mind, Science or Religion, a well-designed course would optimally investigate a few core questions 
and then query what possible answers would look like. Each position would then be critiqued.   

Even in Intellectual History courses, it’s hard to imagine a modern professor presenting a 
narrative of triumphant progress to the present moment where we have come to know which position 
is right. The best courses I took as a student, and those I have tried to model my practice after as a 
teacher, never reached the end of the semester with a final answer to the central motivating questions.   
Aristotle’s concept of endoxa, of looking at the range of opinion on a particular topic to generally find 
that most views contain part of the truth varies from this in one big way – the modern teacher often 
won’t even say what is true in each position.   

As a teacher, I have noticed that at the end of a course like my high school Existentialism class, 
the students often describe the course as their favorite, but have a hard time saying what it was about, 
what they learned and what conclusions they have drawn. This leads to the fundamental, Socratic 
question about teaching…what can a philosophy class teach?  At the end of the day, do Lysis and 
Menexenus know less than they had before?  When students beg to know a teacher’s view on a 
particular question, are they better served with sly Socratic evasion or direct if coercive answers?  
Despite this, Plato himself warns us in the Republic that the right spirit is needed to do this type of 
work, “I don’t suppose that it has escaped your notice that, when young people get their first taste of 
arguments, they misuse it by treating it as a kind of game of contradiction. They imitate those who’ve 
refuted them by refuting others themselves, and, like puppies, they enjoy dragging and tearing those 
around them with their arguments. (Republic VII 539ab) 

It’s always useful to allow students a chance to speak for themselves.  I asked a former student, 
Jake Cardillo, now a florist, about this.  Here is his exact response: 

Also, I gave a little more thought to your question about philosophy and dialectic being a 
pursuit which doesn't yield answers, and I wanted to give a more considered answer, which is 
this: especially today, we are confronted with too many answers, but we simply aren't taught 
the ability to sort through them and decide which ones make sense and which ones are 
nonsense. That was what Socrates literally spent his days doing: telling people who assumed 
they had all the answers that maybe those answers don't make any sense at all. If philosophers 



 

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just asked  questions that they expected to provide answers to, they'd be  scientists; instead, 
they are questioning the answers themselves, and pointing out that when confronted with 
several  answers to the same question––e.g. in economics, 'what caused  the recession?', to 
which there are competing answers and  theories––there is no obvious method for deciding 
among them,  and perhaps the best approach is to critically evaluate each of  them and end up 
rejecting them as thoroughly as possible,  exposing the inadequacies of 'experts' in precisely 
the areas  they claim to know everything about. Socrates' brilliance is precisely in insisting on 
impracticality, in other words on the interruption of everyday life for a time to realize that all 
the answers that everybody throws at you, and which are indispensable for just living life 
practically, are not  particularly well-founded. Perhaps all that is obvious, but I just wanted to 
give a more thorough response. (April 12, 2015) 

Jake’s insistence on philosophy as being a form of impracticality and interruption is apt. The 
other key piece of the Socratic approach involves his famous use of irony.  Socratic irony is of a 
special sort; Gregory Vlastos demonstrates this by showing how different Greek irony is from our 
usage today, as it intentionally uses deception, but deception not meant to be believed (p. 66).   
Jonathan Lear describes this as “pretense” (Irony, p. 9). No one in the dialogues really believes 
Socrates’ claims to not know anything, and no one reads him as trying to deceive them, however at 
the same time, Socrates does “put [himself] forward in one way or another, we tend to do so in terms 
of established social understandings and practices.” (Irony, p. 16)  Lear’s book A Case for Irony makes 
the intriguing leap of applying this standard to all real teaching – “So, for instance, one way of being a 
teacher would be to be a professor. In the United States and Europe at the beginning of the twenty-
first century there is a fairly well-established range of teaching styles—in seminar, tutorial, and lecture 
course—and a fairly well- established range of evaluative techniques, such as grades. There is even a 
range of dress you can expect a professor to wear, a way of being in front of a lectern and delivering a 
paper. And there are socially acceptable ways of demurring from the role: special ways of not wearing 
the right clothes, not giving a standard talk. That, too, can be part of the social pretense. But in this 
variety of socially recognized ways, I put myself forward as a professor. In this way a whole range of 
activity—including dress, mannerisms, a sense of pride and shame—can all count as pretense in that 
they are all ways of putting oneself forward as a professor… The possibility of irony arises when a gap 
opens between pretense as it is made available in a social practice and an aspiration or ideal which, on 
the one hand, is embedded in the pretense” (p. 11)  

 
Within a class, teachers frequently play the Socrates, feigning uncertainty about an answer or 

leading students into a dead end with a put-on confidence.  Again, from Lear, he shows this 
discomfort to apply to the teachers as well: “But then things get out of hand. I am struck by teaching 
in a way that disrupts my normal self-understanding of what it is to teach (which includes normal 
reflection on teaching). This is not a continuation of my practical reasoning; it is a disruption of it… 
(p. 21) When irony succeeds, the target has an uncanny experience that the demands of an ideal, 
value, or identity he takes himself to be already committed can dramatically transcend received social 
understandings. Finally, then, both teacher and student become “an infinite end” (p. 27), open to the 
world and towards change out of untruth. This form of irony demands of teacher and student alike 



 

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the unsettled feeling of uncertainty.  In the Meno this is made clear: “The truth is rather that I infect 
them also with the perplexity I feel myself.  So with virtue now.  I don’t know what it is . . . 
Nevertheless I am ready to carry out, together with you, a joint investigation and inquiry into what it 
is.” (Meno 80c—d).  We don’t know where we’re going or when we’ll get there.  In the end, however, it 
is just this discomfort, disruptive aporia that is the point.  This view lines up interestingly with recent 
work on cognitive and academic development. 

 
Resilience, grit and hard work in the face of failure have increasingly been shown to correlate 

with both higher levels of success and subjectively reported levels of happiness. The trait of resilience 
is trainable and it is now seen as pretty definitive that the secondary school years are some of the most 
important for this development, as the prefrontal cortex is most actively reorganizing itself during the 
teenage years. Laurence Steinberg in Independent School Magazine writes “It is also the brain region 
most important for self-control, which is the foundation for critical “non-cognitive skills,” such as 
perseverance, determination, and the delay of gratification - a combination that some experts refer to 
as “grit.”  (New Foundations of Adolescent Learning) The key finding here is that “… the changes that take 
place in the brain during adolescence are not so much about growth as they are about reorganization.” 
(Steinberg) Steinberg goes on to claim that “First, because prefrontal development is stimulated by 
novelty and challenge, it is essential to expose students to demanding courses that push them 
intellectually. Many American high school students report that school is boring and unchallenging.”  
In this case, the term “challenging” can best be understood literally.  Rather than just giving students 
difficult problems with a pre-arranged answer, philosophy courses really can challenge them.  It leads 
to exactly this kind of reorganization by unsettling everything, forcing a rethinking of not only a 
particular belief, but the whole web it sits in.  Just as the first learning as an infant involves pruning 
back of neural connections, one of the most powerful forms of learning is unlearning. Also in 
Independent School Magazine, Ann Klotz points out that “To be resilient means a child has endured 
something horrific or, to a lesser degree, difficult. But there are opportunities that do not require 
suffering or loss or exquisite pain, and practicing the habit of resilience helps children learn to 
weather the storms that are an inevitable part of growing up.”  Having one’s fundamental, strongly 
held beliefs cast into doubt serves this purpose well.  Furthermore, “Seligman’s research on ‘learned 
optimism’ and Carol Dweck’s research on ‘mindset’… indicate that a significant barrier to happiness 
and fulfillment is the belief that there are conditions in your life that cannot be changed.”  (Morris, p. 
26).  Realizing that not only one’s core beliefs but fundamental perception can be taken apart may be 
scary but it’s also empowering.   

 
Pavlos Michaelides, describes this unlearning powerfully: “For the sage of antiquity divine 

ignorance and unknowing enables and enhances inspiration, bringing into the pedagogical context 
aporia, creativity, resourcefulness, and contemplative silence. Surely, the negativity arising from the 
realization of ignorance is at first deflating as it initiates the negative existential state of aporia, 
impasse, or lack of resource that throws the whole person into uncertainty, confusion, doubt, 
exasperation, despair, anxiety, resentment, and puzzlement. But most positively it purges the conceit 
of holding onto contradictory beliefs and false knowledge. Aporia induces shame and apotropë toward 
one's old stance, at best generating change in orientation directed toward the ethical life but 



 

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concurrently, and ultimately, whether one is aware of it or not, it initiates a change in life-posture” 
(Socratic Ignorance: Lifelong Teaching and Philosophical Education, p. 252). Of course, it is precisely this 
sort of movement that is so hard to measure or to track. 

 
Let’s go back to Justin McBrayer’s question of “Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are 

Moral Facts”. He asks, “So what’s wrong with this distinction and how does it undermine the view 
that there are objective moral facts?  We can do better. Our children deserve a consistent intellectual 
foundation. Facts are things that are true. Opinions are things we believe. Some of our beliefs are 
true. Others are not. Some of our beliefs are backed by evidence. Others are not. Value claims are like 
any other claims: either true or false, evidenced or not. The hard work lies not in recognizing that at 
least some moral claims are true but in carefully thinking through our evidence for which of the many 
competing moral claims is correct. That’s a hard thing to do. But we can’t sidestep the responsibilities 
that come with being human just because it’s hard.  That would be wrong.” (NY Times) 

 
Of course, importantly, this isn’t all that a philosophy course does – it is also part psychology, 

part history, part logic and part science, but at its heart the Socratic, aporetic understanding of 
teaching of philosophy is countercultural.  It violates the spirit of the Common Core and undermines 
most of the answers given by universities when faced with the current Crisis of the Humanities.  By 
measuring the success of a course through a test or, as many universities are now doing, by defensively 
justifying Humanities courses in general by claiming they help students do well at business or law later 
on, these institutions make a comforting but ultimately dishonest claim about the nature and value of 
this discipline.  In the end, it calls for us not to ask what should I believe, but what life I should live.   
As Pavlos Michaelides reminds us, “Socrates’ earnestness of ignorance “bestows upon the human 
renewal and transformation unto its highest humanity” (p. 251).  This transformation has come to be 
called resilience or “growth mindset” lately, but both terms point to improvement through challenge 
rather than content mastery.  Philosophy, when understood properly, should make us unlearn much 
of what we believe, should make us uncomfortable, should make us uncertain and should ultimately, 
then, make us stronger and better.   
 
References 
Flanagan, Owen. The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World.   A Bradford Book;  

Reprint edition (February 13, 2009). 
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USA; 1ST edition (January 25, 1996).  
Flanagan, Owen. Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism.  Harvard  

University Press; Reprint edition (January 31, 1993). 
Frankfurt, Harry. The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays.   Cambridge  

University Press (May 27, 1988). 
Frankfurt, Harry. On Truth.  Knopf (October 31, 2006). 
Fullam, Jordan. “Listen Then, or Rather, Answer: Contemporary Challenges to Socratic Education”.  

Educational Theory. February 1, 2015. 
Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking.  Hackett Publishing.  1978.   



 

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Gutman, Amy, ed. Multiculturalism.  Princeton University Press.  1994 
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(February 15, 2006). 
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(October 6, 2014). 
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Lecture).  Marquette University Press, April 1990. 
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Tradition.  University of Notre Dame Press.  August 31, 1991. 
McBrayer, Justin.  “Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts”.  New York Times.   

March 2, 2015. 
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International Journal of Arts & Sciences 6.1  (2013): 247-262  
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Socrates. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar, eds. Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (May 11, 
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Morris, Ian. Teaching Happiness and Well-Being in Schools.  Continuum (2009). 
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Reprint edition (June 12, 2013). 
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1998). 
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Steinberg, Lawrence. “New Foundations of Adolescent Learning”.  Independent School Magazine.   

Spring, 2015. 
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Harvard University Press;  

Reprint edition (March 1, 1992). 
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University Press, 1992. 
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Wolf, Susan. Meaning in Life.  Princeton University Press (2010). 
 
Address Correspondence to: 

Stephen Kekoa Miller 
Oakwood Friends School & Marist College 
22 Spackenkill Road 
Poughkeepsie, NY 12603 
smiller@oakwoodfriends.org 

 
 
 
 

 

 


