Maieutics designates the midwifery of thinking: the capacity to help another person bring into the world what is already present within them. Unlike the Socratic tradition, maieutics here doesn’t mean the method of a neutral questioner who claims to know nothing, but accompaniment by a concrete person with their own premises, examined positions, and lived experience.
What Maieutics Means
The word comes from Greek: maieutike techne, the art of the midwife. Socrates compared his way of conducting conversation with the work of his mother, who was a midwife. Just as the midwife doesn’t give birth herself but helps the woman giving birth, so the philosopher doesn’t produce his own knowledge but helps the other person bring their own knowledge to light. The image remains influential to this day, and it contains a true core: the other person already carries the knowledge within them; it must be drawn out, not put in. The guide’s task consists in creating the conditions under which this knowledge can come to light.
The correction that Gwendolin Kirchhoff makes to this image concerns a decisive point: the notion of the empty vessel. The sentence I know that I know nothing is traditionally read as an expression of humility. In fact it’s a seizure of power: it declares all existing knowledge null and void and installs intellectual discourse as the only valid path to knowledge. The Socratic questioner conceals his premises, and this concealment makes the method problematic.
Corrected maieutics works differently. The guide brings their own positions, makes them transparent, and exposes them to the conversation. The other person is invited to seek out their own knowledge, in an encounter at eye level where both sides are visible. The difference from the Socratic model is fundamental: midwifery by a person who brings their own experience and discloses it, rather than a questioning technique that feigns neutrality.
A central thought here: knowledge is remembering. This doesn’t mean the Platonic model of conceptual recollection, where definitions are coaxed out in conversation, but something deeper. The human being carries the fundamental laws of the cosmos within. What’s buried waits to be uncovered. The task of maieutics consists in creating the conditions under which this remembering can happen.
Where the Concept Comes From
The history of maieutics is simultaneously a history of philosophical turning points. With Socrates (ca. 469-399 BCE) begins a split in philosophy. The cosmic-spiritual natural philosophy of the pre-Socratics, which understood the human being as part of a living cosmos, gives way to a conceptual intellectualism. Nietzsche analyzed this break sharply in Twilight of the Idols and The Birth of Tragedy. The Socratic equation of reason, virtue, and happiness is a formula of decadence that arises where the instincts have already fallen into anarchy and a counter-tyrant had to be invented. Socratism is a fundamentally dialectical approach: individuals with clear heads discuss, turn over arguments, and arrive at a particular result. What gets lost in this process is the dimension of the bodily, the cosmic, the holistic.
Behind maieutics lies an older concept: anamnesis, recollection. Plato adopted the term and narrowed it to the methodical drawing-out of concepts in conversation. But the word originally had a deeper meaning. In the Eleusinian Demeter cult, anamnesis meant remembering the primal ground of one’s own being. The individual human being knows much more than they know or suspect. They carry within them a knowledge that is only buried, and remembering this knowledge is an act of inner vision, not an intellectual procedure.
Schelling (1775-1854) described in his Philosophy of Mythology the Platonic dialogues as a pattern of an experimental method (peirastike), in which certain assumptions and propositions precede. With this the crucial insight is formulated: presuppositions also precede in philosophical dialogue. Those who deny this merely conceal them. The question is whether the guide discloses or hides their premises.
Maieutics in Practice
In philosophical accompaniment, maieutics shows itself as the art of leading conversation so that the other person gets on the trail of their own thoughts. This succeeds precisely because the guide discloses their own premises, brings in their own experience, and offers the other person a mirror against which their own thinking can sharpen itself.
A recurring pattern appears in the work: a person carries deep knowledge within them that is buried, and they need someone opposite who takes this knowledge seriously, even before it can be put into words. The decisive quality lies in the guide’s spiritual and bodily presence. It’s about creating a space in which what has not yet been spoken can show itself. That’s the difference between a procedure and an encounter. A midwife who claims to have no knowledge of childbirth would be no help. Likewise unhelpful is a philosophical conversation that claims to be conducted from no standpoint.
What therapeutic conversation accomplishes — that what’s hidden comes to the surface and is processed — also happens here. The path is different: the guide brings in the larger context, philosophically, historically, existentially, and precisely this context gives what wants to show itself a framework in which it’s taken seriously as knowledge, rather than interpreted as symptom.
Those who practice maieutics understood this way give up the fiction of neutrality. The midwifery of thinking succeeds because of the guide’s own position, not despite it.
Related Concepts
Maieutics stands in close connection with Philosophical Accompaniment, whose methodological heart it forms. The inner stance that enables maieutic conversation is described in the entry on Thinking Empathy: a thinking that feels, and a feeling that presses toward clarity. What shows itself as result in maieutics — the capacity to form one’s own grounded assessment and take a position — belongs to the field of Judgement. Those who deepen the connection between midwifery of thinking and clarity of judgment recognize that maieutics is a fundamental stance of philosophical work that must prove itself in every serious encounter.