The Health of your Soul
When Socrates talks more practically about how to live well, he tends to do so in terms of having a healthy soul. A brief technical caution is needed here, however, because the concept of ‘soul’ that Socrates is talking about does not easily translate from Ancient Greek to modern English. This is one of many cases in the history of Western philosophy where a concept – in this case the language of ‘soul’ – gets entangled with Christianity (and other influences) for over a thousand years, before being spat out the other end carrying some heavy religious baggage. There is some overlap between the later religious notion of ‘soul’ and the earlier philosophical notion of ‘soul’ that Socrates uses, not least because much of the early Christian thinking about ‘soul’ was heavily influenced by the Socrates-rooted Platonist philosophical tradition that was dominant at the time, but there are some important differences.
The Ancient Greek word for ‘soul’ is psuche. We are familiar with this in the modern English word ‘psyche’, the root of ‘psychology’, which basically means your ‘mind’. During the Enlightenment period, at a time where there was renewed interest in Ancient Greek philosophy, this word was chosen to distinguish the more scientific notion of ‘mind’ from the more religious or mystical notion of ‘spirit’ or ‘ghost’. And, of course, psychology is the science of the mind, not of ghosts. But the colloquial meaning of ‘soul’, influenced by religion and popular culture, is perhaps closer to ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit’.
The tricky thing is that the Ancient Greek concept is somewhere in between. It is not only spoken about as if it were the ‘ghost’ inside you, that leaves when you die and maybe goes to the underworld; it is also sometimes only the mind, the intelligence, the will, the personality. Because the concept is somewhere in between, when Socrates is talking about the ‘health of your soul’, he is talking about more than just a healthy mind, but less than a healthy ghost or spirit.
If I were forced to simplify and choose, strip away the non-essential and ambiguous connotations and modernise the concept, I would have to say that Socrates’ notion of ‘soul’ is probably closer to our modern understanding of ‘mind’. So when he talks about a ‘healthy soul’, we could read him as talking about a ‘healthy mind’, albeit with some additions. The additions are of an ethical nature: modern psychology is mainly about being healthy and happy; Socrates is talking about being healthy, happy, and good. Because, as we’ve seen with all other things that seem to us to be ‘good’, health and happiness are only good if they are part of a life lived well; a healthy and happy tyrant is not a picture of a life lived well, because they are a tyrant.
Practical Soul-Health
Talking about ‘living well’ in terms of having a ‘healthy soul’ is very useful because it allows us to aim for ‘living well’ in the same way we aim for ‘health’. It’s just that the health we’re aiming for is not only of the body, but also of the mind or spirit.
When it comes to bodily health, we have a pretty clear idea about what to do. There are some mysteries in medicine, obviously, and a good deal of good or bad luck, but even the Ancient Greeks understood that a healthy body needs good nutrition, exercise, protection from infection, and a doctor when things go wrong. These are all useful analogies for a healthy soul.
A healthy soul needs sustenance in the same way a healthy body needs good nutrition. Feed your body bad food and you will end up unhealthy and sick. Feed your body good food and you will have a better chance of being healthy. In the case of the body, you are what you eat. In the case of the mind, you are what you think. Feed your mind bad thoughts and it will end up sick. Feed your mind good thoughts and you will be healthy.
Good or bad thoughts can come from the inside, in your own internal workings, but they can also come from the outside in terms of outside influence. There are many relevant examples here: education, friends, culture, circumstances. We are all subject to these outside influences. Each of them can be a healthy source of good nutrition for our souls, or a poison. If you are educated well, you will have a healthier and well-fed soul. If you have good friends, you will have a healthier and well-fed soul. If you are exposed to good culture – art, music, literature, etc. – you will have a healthier and well-fed soul. If your circumstances are good, you will have a healthier and well-fed soul. In contrast, we can be poisoned by bad education, bad friends, bad culture, and bad circumstances.
A healthy soul needs exercise just like a healthy body. If you do not exercise the body, it becomes fat, slow, and sick. When you do not exercise your mind or spirit, it too becomes metaphorically fat, slow, sick. Note, this is not just a matter of ‘mental exercise’, as a modern psychologist might encourage you to ‘keep your mind active’ to ward off the effects of ageing, for example. We are talking about exercising our souls. This can be done by exercising your mind through doing puzzles or learning something new, but it can also be done by having good conversations with people, laughing, becoming engaged in art or stories, doing good works like teaching, charitable activity, or caring. It used to be more common to find this kind of soul-exercise in your work, but I suspect this is less common nowadays; at least for me, it’s hard to see how many modern jobs can be described as anything other than soul-destroying. But if you find soul-sustenance in your work, good for you.
We need to protect our souls from infection. But just like with the body, this is not something we can always control. We catch colds and get cancers, and we also get exposed to noxious experiences. No one chooses to be abused or suffer injustice, for example, but such a thing can infect your soul; few people have a natural immunity to these kinds of things. As with bodily infection, prevention is better than cure; but when it gets a hold, infection needs to be managed.
When the body becomes ill, we consult a doctor. Who should we consult when our souls are sick? It stands to reason that we should reach out to whoever stands in the same relation of ‘doctor’ to ‘sick body’. We need to find a ‘soul-healer’. In the modern day, this person is the ‘psychiatrist’ – literally the ‘mind-healer’. But a psychiatrist treats only the mind, and we are interested in the health of our souls. If there is more to a soul than merely a mind, such as ethical considerations about what it is to live well, then we need our healer to treat that too. This is not in the remit of psychiatry.
What we need is not a body-doctor, nor a mind-doctor, but a soul-doctor. This is a strange kind of doctor, I think you’ll agree. Do they even exist? If we want to find out, we need to understand what a doctor is.
The Soul-Doctor
A doctor is someone who knows how to heal bodies. Knowledge is essential here; without knowledge, medicine goes very wrong. In fact, medicine is one of Socrates’ favourite demonstrations of the importance of knowledge and understanding. A doctor needs to be knowledgeable: it doesn’t matter how well-intentioned or charismatic they are, if they don’t know what they’re doing, you don’t want them operating on you! For things of great importance, you should trust only those who are genuinely knowledgeable. (There is an important lesson here about the dangers of listening to pseudo-philosophers on matters of how to live…)
But the knowledge that a doctor has is a combination of two types of knowledge: firstly, they have theoretical knowledge about what types of sicknesses there are, what signs show when they are present, what causes them, and what cures them, etc. They ‘know what’ sickness is and ‘know that’ someone is sick. Secondly, they will have some practical knowledge about how to apply this theoretical knowledge; they will ‘know how’ to heal. Both of these types of knowledge, the theoretical and the practical, the ‘know that’ and ‘know how’, are necessary to ‘know what you’re doing’, and both are achieved over long periods of dedicated learning. If someone has these things, and maybe gets a qualification to prove it, then we call them a ‘doctor’, because they know how to heal bodies.
What is the analogue for someone who knows how to heal a soul? It will be someone who has both of these types of knowledge, theoretical and practical, achieved over a long period of learning: firstly, theoretical knowledge about what makes a soul healthy, what signs show when a soul is healthy, what causes health in a soul, and what cures sickness in a soul, etc. And secondly, some practical knowledge about how to apply this knowledge.
This is a description of a philosopher like Socrates! Doing philosophy is the way to find out what it is to live well, which is to have a healthy soul. Philosophy teaches you the signs and symptoms of a life not lived well, it exposes the causes of these mistakes, and gives you a method to get back on track. Philosophy teaches you the theoretical knowledge necessary to understand soul-health and, if you are sick, puts you on the path to heal yourself.
According to Socrates, philosophy is the medicine of the soul. He is the soul-doctor.
A Healthy Soul?
And what does philosophy tell us about what it is to live well? Only that nothing is more important. Therefore, a healthy soul is precisely that which prioritises living well over anything else. A healthy soul prioritises the ethical, an unhealthy soul does not. In all things, we should aim to be good, ethically good, and we should only aim for things if they are ethical.
This absolute priority of the ethical is expressed well in some (in)famous sayings: Socrates says ‘a good man cannot be harmed in life or after death’. This is a stark statement of prioritising the ethical. What he means is that, if all that really matters is living well, being good, then if you are a good person with a healthy soul, nothing really counts as ‘harm’ for you. If you are a good person and live in a way such that you always do the right thing, no matter the cost to yourself, then none of that ‘cost’ that you incur really counts as ‘harm’. It’s obviously not to say that you cannot suffer, because clearly good people suffer all the time. What it means is that a good person’s suffering is not really a ‘harm’ because they have the only thing that really matters: a healthy soul. Having a healthy soul makes bad things good, just as having an unhealthy soul makes good things bad. Even suffering can be made good when it is borne by a healthy soul. As such, a healthy soul cannot be harmed.
Another saying is ‘it is better to suffer evil than to do it’. Compare two people: one is good and behaves well but is the victim of a mugging in which they are beaten up and have their money stolen; the other is bad and behaves badly and is the perpetrator of the mugging. One suffers evil, the other does it. Who is better off?
The overwhelming intuition, in Socrates’ time and now, is that it is preferable not to be the victim of a mugging; it is better not to suffer that physical, psychological, and economic harm. By contrast, the mugger might seem better off, especially if they escape punishment. Imagine the scenario in which the perpetrator gets away with it. They now have more money, perhaps a sense of physical triumph over a weakling, perhaps even glory amongst their friends. Imagine they are a bad person and therefore suffer no guilt or shame. The one who suffered evil suffers a great deal, but the one who perpetrates evil doesn’t seem to suffer at all. Surely, then, we should conclude that it is better to do evil rather than suffer it?
Not according to Socrates. What Socrates points out is that the evildoer has incurred a heavy cost in terms of the only thing that really matters: a healthy soul. Their soul is sick: sick for perpetrating the evil, sicker for benefiting from it, and sicker still for feeling no remorse for it. If they felt remorse, at least that would be a sign of some inkling of soul-health. Their lack of suffering is what shows them to be unwell. Counterintuitively, the less they suffer from their evil actions, the worse off they are! If we really commit to the idea that the only thing that matters is the health of our souls, or living ethically well, then if we really wanted evildoers to be harmed, if we really wanted revenge, we should want them all to get away with it. That forces them to remain, in ignorance, in the worst of all possible soul-sickness, which is the worst thing you can suffer, even if you don’t realise it.
By contrast, whilst the victim might have lost their money, they have kept their soul-health. Psychological and physical injuries can heal, and they will heal all the better when your soul is healthy. They don’t have the villainous glory that the mugger experiences, but they can be consoled by good friends who are not ashamed of them. They can hold their head up with pride, even having been knocked into the gutter, because they have done no wrong. If we prioritise the ethical, the victim is much better off than the perpetrator. Hence, it is better to suffer evil than to do it.
These are hard principles to live by. Almost everyone agrees, in Socrates’ time and since, that they are probably too hard to be realistic. One of my favourite moments in all of philosophical literature is when Socrates is met by the challenge of Callicles. In the dialogue Gorgias, after Socrates has concluded that it is better to suffer evil than to do it, that the man who escapes punishment for having committed an evil act is more miserable than the man who is punished, that it is preferable to be tortured and die than be an unjust tyrant, Callicles turns to a bystander (not to Socrates) and asks, ‘Is he serious, or is he joking?’
It is a moment of stunned incredulity. Callicles understands perfectly well what Socrates is saying, he just cannot believe he is saying it and saying it seriously. He can’t even bring himself to ask Socrates directly but feels he has to check with someone that he’s understood what’s going on. The game of wordplay disappears, the pretence of trying to be clever disappears, and Callicles comes to the crashing realisation that this is a serious conversation, that Socrates really means what he is saying. At that point, he speaks out and speaks truly, as himself, and what follows is one of the finest expressions of a counter-argument to Socrates’ position that you will find in the dialogues. Finest, not necessarily because it is the best argued (it isn’t), but because it is so transparently sincere. No more wordplay, no more games; finally, Socrates has someone that he can really talk to! Which he acknowledges to Callicles by calling him the ‘touchstone’ he has been looking for, against which he can test his metal.
What follows is more questioning from Socrates, probing and challenging Callicles’ counter-claims that it is always better to be powerful, always better to do what you want and get what you want, always better to have pleasure than pain, always better to escape punishment, and we should follow the law of nature that makes some people naturally stronger than others. After the initial rhetorical flourish, Callicles’ responses become shorter and shorter, more and more clipped, until eventually he tires of the relentless questioning and calls on someone else to take over for him. He doesn’t lose the argument so much as lose interest in it. Callicles lets Socrates speak but doesn’t contribute to the discussion. Callicles’ frustration is clear. He cannot accept what Socrates is saying; it would turn the world upside down. We should rather live miserably under a tyrant than live happily as a tyrant? We should rather be robbed than be a robber? We should rather be tortured and die than get everything we want by doing one unjust action? And if we do an unjust action, rather than escaping, we should rush back to face our punishment? No one in their right mind would choose this, says Callicles.
But Socrates leaves us with a challenge to answer. If, genuinely, anything that we call ‘good’ is only actually good if it is part of a life lived well – that living well is what makes things good, rather than the other way around – then it is true that everything depends on living well, that nothing is more important. And if that’s true, then the absolute priority of the ethical directly follows. It is an unavoidable conclusion. The only way to live well, to be healthy in our souls, is to be ethical.
It follows that to be ethically good is both necessary and sufficient for a good life. You cannot live well unless you are good, and being good is all you need to live well.
‘Virtue is sufficient for happiness’, as the sloganized version says.
Prioritise the Ethical
What is it to be ethical? This is an important question that you will have to answer for yourself. To be clear, you are not being asked to settle a moral dilemma: we are asking about general virtues, ways of living, that you consider to be ethical, rather than specific actions or decisions. Moral dilemmas often present themselves as such not because we don’t know the underlying virtue is but because we don’t know how best to respond to it. For example, we want to be compassionate and not cruel, but we aren’t sure whether it’s kinder to tell someone a hard truth or leave it unsaid. We don’t want to be cruel, deliberately, for the sake of being cruel. We want to be kind, recognising ‘kindness’ as the virtue. We’re just not sure about how to go about it. The underlying virtue is not in doubt.
The same is true when we are trying to decide what to do about a particular issue but aren’t certain about the available data: how does one be environmentally friendly, for example? This is often a data-driven decision about costs versus benefits. The underlying aim and value is not in doubt; we just don’t know how best to go about doing it. These aren’t really serious philosophical questions.
There will be some disagreement about virtues, of course. That’s only to be expected. Someone who believes in God might see ‘piety’ as a virtue, which clearly wouldn’t be as much of an issue for a non-believer. But amongst the disagreement there will also be some pretty common themes, such as virtues like fairness, kindness, honesty. And on the negative ‘vice’ side: cruelty, selfishness, prejudice. Socratic questioning, sincerely pursued, will show you what you believe. If we agree to any of these, then it presents some straightforward advice about how to improve the health of our souls: In the case of virtues, do them, be them. In the case of vices, don’t do them, don’t be them. In most cases you already know what these are, you’re just confused about why or whether they matter. Or at least why they should matter more than other good and desirable things like wealth or status. But Socrates has shown you that you do think they matter; in fact, nothing matters more to you. They are what you value most in life, since all value in life depends on them. All that remains is to maximise value in your life by prioritising them.
And yet, how much of your life do you dedicate to other things? How much of your resources do you dedicate to achieving more wealth, more status, more pleasure? Time and time again Socrates implores us to stop trying so hard to get more of what we think is good and instead focus on being more of what we think is good. How much better off you would be if only you spent as much time trying to be more kind, more wise, more courageous, more temperate, as you did trying to get more wealth, status, or pleasure.
Socrates’ Virtue
Having established that nothing is more important than living well or being virtuous, and that how to live well as a human being is something that we all, as individuals, have to work out for ourselves, what is Socrates’ conception of virtue? What does he think it is to live well as a human being? The actual ‘answer’ is hard to come by here, because we seem to get a few different versions depending on which student you listen to. Plato – Socrates’ most famous student – emphasises the rule of intellectual reason over all things: to live well is only to do philosophy and follow your intellectual reason, which encourages a life dedicated to the life of the mind. This makes sense if you follow the ‘knowledge is sufficient for virtue and virtue is sufficient for happiness’ line of reasoning: all you need is knowledge. For Socrates, this meant spending your time having philosophical discussions with anyone able to discourse knowledgeably. But for Plato it meant retreating from the public forum into the ‘Academy’ in order to better focus on intellectual study. (Aristotle, in being Plato’s student, follows in this spirit.)
If you listen to Antisthenes, however – a less famous student of Socrates – you get a very different picture. This picture is fleshed out in the ‘Cynic’ school of philosophy, detailed in a later chapter. I’ll leave a detailed exposition of that for then, but suffice to say it is a very different picture from Plato. Here we find Socrates’ followers emulating their teacher by living a life of poverty, shunning all wealth and reputation, practising self control at every opportunity, relentless in their efforts for the practical achievement of being virtuous. They walk around barefoot and care little for the marketplace of ideas.
What, then, can we say of Socrates’ actual conception of virtue? There is, I think, amongst all the difference in his students, an identifiable common denominator, the seed of an idea that is shared amongst them all yet expressed in different ways. And it also serves to explain why there are different ways stemming from the one teacher. The idea is this: to live well is to live according to your nature. In a sense, to be true to yourself (echoing, of course, the famous maxim carved on the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi: ‘Know thyself’). This idea is shown to be expressed by Socrates from various sources, in various contexts: In Xenophon we find it expressed explicitly, and in Plato we find it expressed allegorically through political philosophy, whereby the ideal state is understood to be one in which every citizen does what their nature is best suited to do. And whilst not recommending much in its minimal form – since it essentially just kicks the can down the road by turning the question ‘what is virtue?’ into another question: ‘what is my nature?’ – its influence can be felt throughout the schools of thought that followed: in Cynicism, Stoicism, and onwards into the modern era with Spinoza, Kant, and Hume.
Align your will with your nature. Know what you are, want what you are, then live as you want. Do this, and you will be living as you are and you will find no contradictions. This idea shows up again and again across the history of human wisdom, voiced by philosophers, artists, and popular country-music singers: ‘Be yourself; everyone else is taken’ was not said by Oscar Wilde (but someone must have said it at some point), and as Dolly Parton did say in 2015: ‘Find out who you are, then do it on purpose.’
And how do we discover our nature? How do we find out who we are? Through philosophy, of course! And in particular through Socratic questioning. Socrates’ incessant questioning is supposed to reveal to you what you are, to show you what you really want. Once you’ve discovered that, then you get to live a life doing only what you want to do and nothing else. All you need to do is examine your life, put your thoughts to the test, and live in a way that is consistent with yourself. That, for Socrates, seems to be what it is to live virtuously. Everything else will follow.
Consistency
A quick technical note to finish this opening chapter: What a philosopher means by the word ‘consistent’ is slightly different from the ordinary usage. It is a very important word in philosophy, and particularly important for my approach to philosophy, and so it will come up again and again in this book. The distinct philosophical meaning of the word ‘consistent’ is borrowed from ‘logic’: the philosophical sub-discipline that investigates methods of reasoning, often by trying to formalise or codify these methods, the introduction of which comes later in the story of philosophy. We can leave those developments for their proper time, but it’s important not to confuse the philosopher’s sense of ‘consistent’ with the ordinary usage. When I say ‘consistent’ I mean to say ‘logically consistent’, as a philosopher would.
Ordinarily, when people say ‘consistent’ they mean something like ‘doing something in the same way over and over again’. So the instruction to ‘live consistently’ would mean something like ‘keep doing the same things over and over again’. This is not what a philosopher means, so it would be a mistake to think that Socrates is asking us to remain doing the same things over and over again.
When a philosopher uses the word ‘consistent’ they mean to say that whatever it is that is being described contains no contradictions. Whether it is a set of beliefs, or ideas, or actions, or any combination of these things, singular or plural, a ‘consistent’ set will not go against itself. It will not assert one thing whilst denying it, or assert one thing whilst assenting to something that entails its denial. Because of this ‘consistency’ the belief or set of beliefs at least has the potential to be true; there is nothing within it to say that it cannot be true; it does not by itself show itself to be false. This sense of ‘consistent’ is opposed to an equally-important sense of ‘inconsistent’, which describes something that is contradictory-in-itself. And because of that self-contradiction it cannot possibly be true. An inconsistent set by itself shows itself to be false; it is its own refutation.
Most contradictions are pretty obvious when they present themselves. If I say ‘it’s not raining’ whilst standing in the rain, I look silly. When we use these kinds of examples – for the purposes of introducing the study of logic – students are often confused by their triviality. ‘The statement “it’s raining and it’s not raining” is inconsistent.’ Do I really need to study logic to understand that? Isn’t it obvious?! But it’s easier to see the point in an obvious and trivial example than it is in something more complex or profound. Other contradictions can be more subtle and require working through. You begin with the easy and obvious examples in order to learn the method, then you apply the method that you have learned to the more complex cases.
This is not the time or place to introduce that complex logical method. But it’s important to establish a clear sense of what I mean by ‘consistency’ and ‘inconsistency’. If something is ‘consistent’ then it doesn’t contradict itself; if something is ‘inconsistent’ then it contradicts itself. This is what philosophers mean when they talk about consistency.
And so when Socrates instructs us to ‘live in a way that is consistent with yourself’, he means that we should not live in contradiction with ourselves. Our thoughts and beliefs should not contradict themselves or one another, and our actions or choices should not contradict with our thoughts and beliefs. Or as Socrates might put it: ‘give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one.’ If we can achieve that then we are well on the way towards living well.
We want to have true beliefs about what really matters and to live in alignment with those beliefs. This is a philosopher’s ideal but, as Socrates knows all too well, often true and complete knowledge is beyond our reach. It’s hard to know what’s really true; time and again we learn our own ignorance. But whilst it’s hard to know what’s true, it’s easier to know what’s inconsistent: that is within my grasp. I can know when my ideas contradict one another, or when my actions contradict with my beliefs, and if I’m not sure then I can expose this inconsistency using philosophical reasoning. Finding ‘the Truth’ is hard but finding inconsistency is easier. And what is inconsistent can never be true. If, therefore, I want to live in a way that is true to whatever truth there is, shouldn’t I start with the easier thing? I should aim to have no inconsistent beliefs nor live in a way that is inconsistent with my beliefs. To ensure this, I should subject my life and thoughts to examination and expose and reject any inconsistencies.
This is why Socratic questioning is so useful. Socratic questioning doesn’t establish truth; it exposes inconsistency. In so doing, it reveals errors, things that cannot be true because inconsistencies are contradictions and contradictions can never be true. If you live in a way that is inconsistent then you live in contradiction with yourself or with the world, and neither can be a ‘true’ way to live. In an uncertain world, a consistent way of living could still be false, but an inconsistent way of living can never be true. Better, then, to aim to live ‘consistently’, in the philosopher’s sense, because that will give you the best chance of living in a way that is true to whatever truth there is.
This is Socrates’ method. This is what Socrates understands to be a virtuous life: to have true beliefs about what really matters and to live in alignment with those beliefs. It remains a philosopher’s ideal. What remains for us is to realise it.
tobybetenson.com 