Socrates is always asking questions and rarely giving answers. It can be irritating. He says that he does this because he is sincere in his pursuit of truth and that asking questions is the best way to find the truth. If you are always giving answers, you are more likely to get caught in errors, kept locked in your own ignorance, carried away by the impressiveness of your arguments, and if you are good at arguing your case then you are likely to take others with you. Socrates turns away from all this: he has no interest in winning arguments. Socrates would rather lose an argument and learn his error than remain in it by winning. And so he doesn’t give answers: he asks questions.
But not just any questions: he wants to ask the right questions. Understanding which, of all the questions, is the right question, and how to ask that question in the right way, is one of the most important things you can learn from philosophy. If you ask the wrong question you will always get the wrong answer.
One of the earliest Platonic dialogues is the Laches. In this dialogue, Socrates discusses the virtue of ‘courage’ with a group that includes two Athenian generals: Laches and Nicias. These are both famous generals who have extensive experience fighting in wars; if anyone has something to say about courage, it would be someone like them.
The question is this: is ‘fighting in armour’ – a kind of practice fighting similar to modern fencing or boxing – a good thing to encourage a youth to do? Does it make them more courageous, more resilient, more skilled? Each general speaks for or against this claim, citing various arguments. In the ‘yes it is’ camp we cite the fact that fighting in armour gives you some confidence in how to handle and use weapons that you would use on the battlefield. In the ‘no it isn’t’ camp we cite the fact that the best fighters in the Greek world (the Spartans) do not practise fighting in armour, and the best Athenian fencing masters do not dare challenge the Spartans and often end up looking foolish on the battlefield because of their misplaced confidence. Socrates is asked to settle the debate. Socrates says he cannot, because neither of the generals really know what they are asking because they are asking the wrong questions.
What good is it to ask ‘does fighting in armour make a youth more courageous?’ when you don’t know what ‘courage’ really is? To find the right answer, you first need to ask the right question. Socrates and the rest proceed to discuss what ‘courage’ really is, but they don’t come to any satisfactory answers. The point of the dialogue is not to tell us what ‘courage’ is. The point of the dialogue is to show us that we don’t really know what ‘courage’ is, but that all of our questions about courage, such as whether this or that practice makes us more or less courageous, depend on that more basic question: What is courage? Until we ask and answer that hard question, we cannot make much progress on the rest. We need to start by asking the right question.
This is an important and widely-applicable idea, I think. Consider anti-anxiety medication. Is it a good thing for someone with anxiety? Well, just as with our question about whether fighting in armour is good for the youth of Athens, it very much depends on what you want to get out of it. If by ‘a good thing for someone with anxiety’ you mean ‘it will make them feel less anxious’, then almost certainly the answer is yes. If, however, you mean ‘it will cure their anxiety’, then almost certainly the answer is no. Without doing the work to reframe anxiety-provoking situations into something that is not so anxiety-provoking, or else doing the work to overcome the anxiety itself, improving your self-belief, etc., there will always be that vulnerability because nothing has really changed. Medications can help in that process of change by making it easier and more manageable, but no pill can teach you how to cope with anxiety or overcome it.
To ask whether anxiety medication is a good thing for someone with anxiety is to ask the wrong question. You first need to ask what it is to treat anxiety for that person. If your goal is to overcome anxiety, then medication might be of some limited use in the short-term, but generally something to be lent on only when necessary and with the intention of abandoning at the first opportunity. If, however, your goal is only to minimise the suffering that anxiety causes, perhaps because the anxiety is so debilitating that it cannot be reasonably expected to be overcome, then medication can be a very effective solution in the short and long term: it will make you feel better. So what is it that the person wants out of treatment? We shouldn’t expect a ‘one size fits all’ answer here; it will depend on the individual. If you are such an individual then it’s important to recognise that you have to work this out for yourself, because no one else can do it for you. We can ask the question, but you need to give the answer.
Asking the right question in this way reveals something important, I think, at least for me: surely we would rather overcome anxiety, if possible, rather than only alleviate the symptoms? Surely we would rather be better than only seem it, to ourselves and others? And doesn’t this mean that anxiety medication should be used sparingly and only when necessary, and should take a back seat to other interventions? It will differ from individual to individual, obviously, but it is important to remember that the pill is not curing you, it is only enabling you to cure yourself. You are the one that has to do the work and learn how to overcome your anxiety. No pill can do that for you.
If you are struggling with anxiety, you need to develop a clear idea of what it means for you to cure it. Any answer to that hard question will have a profound impact on how you go about treating it.
Read more: Think Well, Live Well: A Free Introduction to Philosophy
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