Charmides

Core Ideas

Elenchus and the Philosophical Process

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Core Ideas Elenchus and the Philosophical Process

Platonic dialogues that actually involve a significant amount of dialogue generally take the form of the elenchus—this is especially true of Plato's earlier dialogues. The elenchus is both a form of debate and a form of inquiry: by proposing and refuting hypotheses, two people proceed, primarily through negations, toward a positive knowledge (or at least toward an understanding that they do not know what they thought they knew.

The elenchus ties the content of the Charmides to its form in a subtle but powerful way. Temperance as self-knowledge (the primary focus of the dialogue) must involve knowing what one does not know; elenchus (the form of the dialogue) is a process of proceeding toward knowledge through refutation, through a process of realizing what one does not know. In the end, the elenchus as philosophical process is one of the few things we feel we might be able to salvage from the "failure" of Socrates's and Critias's debate.

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