Socrates: the Prophet of Life-Long Learning

Abstract

While the writer Allan Megill, mentioning in his book Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida has labeled them, “Prophets of Extremity”, by referring radicality of their attack on normal canons of rationality”. It is not important for me whether this labeling is true or false. However, inspired by this labeling, I will call Socrates, “the prophet of lifelong learning”. Socrates, who left no written work and only expressed his thoughts verbally, is probably the most ambiguous thinker in the history of philosophy. This is called the “Socratic problem” in that he has been defined in a vast variety of etiquettes such as sophist, or elitist or even hedonist. His ambiguous identity has prevented us to settle the debate about “who is the real Socrates?” However after so many historical studies and philosophic investigations on Socrates now we have come to understand and identify him more accurately. When we try to understand this majestic figure in a more holistic and humanist approach and try to place him in contemporary developments in education, it seems reasonable to label Socrates as “the prophet of lifelong learning”. Like the sophists Socrates put forth a human centered view by arguing that human beings are the only imperfect beings in the universe and yet has the ability to develop into perfection. For Socrates, human being comes to being as an imperfect entity, yet by lifelong learning mankind can reach to a level of self-fulfillment and completeness. Socrates called his conduct as “philosophy” and himself as a “philosopher” in a way that suggested learning is an unceasing search for knowledge without any regard to finding the right action or reaching an end. Therefore the process of human development goes on and on till death. No one except Socrates deserves to be labeled as “the prophet of lifelong learning” since neither his antecedents nor his descendants insisted on learning as a process of search as much as he did.