Socratic Dialectic
In the movie “Twelve Angry Men,” a group of twelve white men jurors deliberated whether a troubled youth truly murdered his own father. At the beginning of the movie eleven jurors assumed that the Latin boy was “guilty.” Without reasonably analyzing the case as a whole, the majority of the jurors automatically inferred that the boy was guilty. However, Henry Fonda, the protagonist, in a way emulated Socrates’ reasonable methods in revealing truth.
Just as Socrates talked with others in the Apology by using the Socratic dialectic, Fonda asked the jurors questions in a Socratic way to reveal truth. In the movie Fonda expressed that the others were not trying to seek truth with him: “It's very hard to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And no matter where you run into it, prejudice obscures the truth. Well, I don't think any real damage has been done here. Because I don't really know what the truth is. No one ever will, I suppose.” For this reason, he did not feel comfortable in convicting the Latin boy to death unless he had enough evidence to really lead him to be guilty. Fonda felt that it would not have been fair for the boy to be put to death without talking about it with the rest of the jurors. The jurors were all convinced that the boy was guilty based on the facts that they had heard in court. They had the murder weapon; a man heard screaming who saw the boy leave his father’s house, and a woman who claimed that she saw the murder scene. Henry Fonda was an outcast at first, but the other jurors were forced to stay and talk with him when he voted “not guilty.”
During the jury’s deliberation, the relationship of the father and the son was discussed. In “Twelve Angry Men,” all the jury men discussed the relationship of the father and the son. The father was very abusive towards his son when he was younger. In return, his son would retaliate and abuse his father. All through their lives, there was aggression between the...
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