How to ask awkward questions and annoy people

This article was published in Spiked-Online 5 November 2010

In his endless pursuit of Truth, Socrates made many enemies. Yet his questioning outlook remains invaluable to understanding the present.

Diogenes Laertius, in his Lives of the Philosophers, tells us that Socrates, unsatisfied with the natural philosophy of his day, ‘began to enter upon moral speculations, both in his workshop and in the marketplace’. He devoted his life to investigating what it was for a man to live well or badly.

Socrates’ relentless questioning of received moral wisdom and authority, his struggle to apprehend real existence in consciousness, would make him many enemies. Laertius goes on to tell us that ‘very often, while arguing and discussing points that arose, he was treated with great violence and beaten, and pulled about, and laughed at and ridiculed by the multitude’.