Why do I say that Socrates is the philosopher who, more than any other, defines the Western philosophical tradition? There are a few reasons. Some of these reasons are straightforwardly historical: Socrates was the teacher of Plato, who was the teacher of Aristotle, and variations of the two eponymous branches that resulted – ‘Platonism’ and ‘Aristotelianism’ – have been the most dominant forces in Western philosophy during its long history. Each has had its time at the top: a modified Platonism was dominant in the early stages of Christianity, and the Platonist influence on Christian doctrine is still obvious today. Aristotelianism came to be more dominant in the Islamic world, and via that into medieval Christian thought in Europe, until the Renaissance ushered in a new era of Platonist influence that lasted well into the age dominated by modern science. More recently, Aristotle’s moral and political thought has experienced a resurgence through the renewed interest in ‘virtue ethics’.
So if it’s all about Plato and Aristotle, why claim Socrates is the most definitive figure of Western philosophy? The answer to that question is also the answer to the question of what defines Western philosophy, because what philosophy is is what Socrates does. And what Socrates does is ask the right questions in the right way. The questions that Socrates asks are the questions that Plato and Aristotle, and all that followed, have tried to answer. And they have tried to answer them in a way that holds itself accountable to the Socratic standard. Philosophers are still doing this today. All Western philosophy emulates Socrates, whether it knows it or not.
The Platonic Dialogues
Most of what we know about Socrates we know through the writings of his most famous philosophical student, Plato. Some works by other students of Socrates survive, such as Xenophon’s, but Plato’s is the dominant voice in the philosophical record. Socrates appears occasionally elsewhere in the historical record, where he is reputed to have been brave on the battlefield and always stood up for justice, but for the most part he is known for walking about the marketplace of Athens, barefoot, pestering passers-by with questions about virtue. He is famously ugly. He is likened to an irritating biting insect. Ultimately, this irritating habit of standing up for justice and questioning the virtue of powerful people made Socrates more than a few enemies. And, unfortunately for Socrates, these enemies were influential people who used their influence to have Socrates arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for ‘impiety’ and ‘corrupting the youth’. Socrates was ordered to kill himself by drinking hemlock (a poison), which he did, dutifully carrying out the sentence of the court rather than fleeing to exile. A final act of heroic consistency for one who believed we have a moral duty to obey the laws of the land.
In terms of philosophy, we have to rely on Plato, and a few of Socrates’ other students, because Socrates didn’t write anything down. Instead, he had conversations. Socrates chose this very deliberately, thinking that the truth was too vulnerable to being lost in translation. There is often so much more to the communication of truth than mere words can tell. Often it is how we say it, as much as what is said, that really matters. Sarcasm, humility, irony, humour, disdain, sincerity; these are all very difficult to get across in text. There were no emojis in Ancient Greece (#sadface). But even now, assuming the reader knows that we are being sarcastic or humorous, for instance, is often an assumption we cannot afford to make. Sometimes you need to look someone in the eye to really know what they are talking about.
Consider this straightforward example: ‘Building more nukes: that’s a great idea!’ The presence or absence of sarcasm makes a big difference here. To know what this statement is really saying, it would help to know a bit about the person saying it, how they say it, to whom they are saying it, the context in which they say it, etc., etc.
To try to capture the more nuanced communication of truth that can be found in a conversation between two people, Plato represents Socrates’ philosophy in the form of ‘dialogues’. These are staged dramatic conversations, a bit like a script for a play, that try to show Socrates doing what he did, rather than merely saying what he said. We are given the context, the time and the place, the characters, in the people to whom Socrates is talking, and then we are invited to witness the conversation as if we were really there. This requires a certain imaginative involvement. When it comes to reading Plato, we always need to remember that we are reading a dramatic portrayal rather than a straightforward philosophical treatise. The context and the characters matter. We need to pay attention to how the characters are talking and not only what they are saying. Are they being mocking, insincere, lazy? Are they engaged in serious philosophy, acting as if they really want to find the truth, or are they just trying to win the argument with wordplay? When Socrates responds, does he do so seriously, or ironically? There is so much irony and sarcasm in the dialogues that it can sometimes be difficult to know exactly where Socrates stands on a given issue.
This is no accident. All of this invites us to take an active role in the conversation; we have to decide for ourselves how to interpret what is being said; we have to think for ourselves. This is an important philosophical lesson that Plato absolutely intends that we learn. The dialogues are multi-layered teaching materials: on the surface, they give us some philosophical content; beneath the surface, they show us how philosophy is done; and beneath that, they provoke us to do it ourselves.
Sometimes we are even invited to disagree with Socrates, such as when Socrates offers obviously bad arguments or stupid claims. Plato seems to do this to show us that a conversation has gone off on the wrong track. Most of the time this is because Socrates’ interlocutors are not really sincerely engaged with the conversation or properly pursuing philosophy. Maybe they are just trying to win the argument with silly wordplay. In response, Socrates plays them at their own stupid game, as if to show how lousy that way of carrying on really is and how stupid the conclusions that result. That he does so ironically is a point lost on most of those to whom he is talking and is likewise too easily missed by those of us reading the dialogues two millennia later. We need to keep our ears open to irony when we are listening to Socrates. We need to read between the lines.
The Wisest Man in Athens
Socrates was a truly ignorant man. (I hope that ear for irony is open…) In contrast to the boastful sophists, Socrates claimed to know nothing. He claimed to not be wise, or particularly knowledgeable or skilled, nor influential, nor even someone that should be listened to. A lot of this might be a kind of ironic humility, it’s true, but his refusal to claim knowledge for himself is what earns him the title of the ‘wisest man in Athens’.
This title is a defining part of Socrates’ origin story. According to legend, one of Socrates’ friends was told by the mystical Oracle at Delphi that Socrates was the ‘wisest man in Athens’. Socrates hears about this and is puzzled because he wasn’t aware that he was particularly wise. Wanting to understand what the Oracle’s proclamation means, Socrates sets about trying to find anyone in Athens who is wiser than him; he does this by going about town subjecting anyone who claims to be wise to a kind of trial by questioning. Socrates wants to find someone who really is wiser than him, but instead finds that all of those claiming to be wise don’t really know what they are talking about. Socrates has to (humbly) conclude that he must be the ‘wisest man in Athens’ in virtue of the fact that he doesn’t claim to know what he is talking about. He would rather stick with a true ignorance than a false wisdom. That’s what makes him truly wise.
The Socratic Method
Socrates’ method is ‘conversation with questioning’ (elenchus, in the original Greek). Essentially, he talks to people and asks a lot of questions. In doing this, he hopes his conversation partner will come to realise their own errors, if they are in error, or else give Socrates the good answers that he is looking for. Why does he ask so many questions, rather than just saying what he thinks the answer is? Simply because that is the best way to expose errors and find the truth.
Finding the truth is a process, and an uncertain process at that. If you start with the answer, thinking you have found the truth, then you have started at the end of the process and not the beginning. As a result, you are much more likely to get stuck with a false belief. And if you are charismatic or good at arguing your case, you are likely to lead others into false belief with you. This would be a disaster for all concerned.
If you begin with a question, however, claiming not to know what the answer is, you start at the beginning and can follow the conversation where it leads. You might end up somewhere you did not expect. You might find you had the right answer all along, you might not; how will you know unless you subject it to questioning? There is no end to the process of gaining greater understanding; we can always learn more. Answers tend to end the process; questions tend to keep the process going. Who would be so arrogant as to think they knew all the answers?
Since finding the truth is the only real goal, it doesn’t matter who is right or who wins the argument. Whoever wins or loses the argument, if falsehood wins, we all lose. Plato very often sets Socrates in opposition to the sophists, who are only trying to win the argument with impressive and clever wordplay. But they are not really invested in trying to find the truth, only trying to win the crowd. They often end up arguing for the obviously false as a way of showing off. Socrates’ method of questioning deprives him of the opportunity of making grand rhetorical speeches, preventing him from showing off and getting carried away with the competition. Staying with the approach of asking questions from a position of humble ignorance allows him to stay focussed on the goal of finding the truth.
There are other virtues to the Socratic method, beyond keeping an open attitude in your pursuit of truth. Firstly, asking questions requires the conversation partner to take an active role in the process. They cannot sit back and be dictated to; they have to think and decide for themselves. That is an essential part of any process of coming to greater understanding, especially in philosophy, and is also extremely important in a therapeutic context. After all, you are responsible for the life of your mind. No book can make you think well, and no one can tell you how to live well – you have to do it for yourself. You have to learn how to do it for yourself. This is why Socrates asks so many questions.
Socrates describes himself as a midwife: he doesn’t give birth to philosophical answers, he helps others to give birth to ideas that are already gestating within them. His questions help to draw these ideas out, letting them breath, giving them life.
A second virtue of Socratic conversation: when you find your answers, the conclusions to your arguments, it’s important that they are answers that you can really stand behind; they need to be conclusions that you can conclude. A real conversation exposes this in a way that other forms of debate, such as the written word, cannot; something all-too-familiar to us nowadays in the phenomenon of the online ‘keyboard warrior’. To look someone in the eye and be asked, ‘come on, do you really mean that?’ can call us to a kind of seriousness that forces us to check our words. But our words are our conclusions, in a philosophical debate. If you cannot stand behind your conclusions, then it’s like you are playing a game without accepting the result, which only shows that you weren’t seriously playing in the first place. It’s too easy to fall into this with the written word or rhetorical speech; it’s harder to do so in a face to face conversation.
Thirdly, it’s also important that these answers are their answers. Conversation is an irreducibly personal process. What I mean by that is that any conversation is in part defined by the individuals having it. Your side of a conversation is not only defined by what you say, but also how you say it and who you are. It matters whether you are really invested in the conversation, whether you are sincere, whether you are someone who we think ‘has something to say’. It matters, for instance, when having a conversation about something like military policy, whether you are talking to someone who has significant experience of war. It doesn’t matter definitively, but it does matter. If someone talks from a position of never having fought in a war, we are inclined to think they have less to say about fighting wars than someone who has fought in many wars. And equally, someone who has experienced the consequences of war has more to say about the costs of it. Their experience matters not only because it might give them more insight, but also because their experience has made them who they are. And who they are is someone who ‘has something to say’ about war, and we would listen to them more than we would listen to someone who might talk the talk but we know has never walked the walk.
What seems like a simple enough method – conversation with questioning – has hidden depths. To be a genuine conversation (as opposed to mere wordplay) requires: that each person be sincere in their pursuit of truth, not just trying to win the argument; that each person speaks for themselves, taking an active (rather than passive) role in the process; that each person stands behind their words, such that their conclusions are really something that they can conclude; and that each person is someone who ‘has something to say’. For Socrates, this method gives us the best way to find the truth. For us, it gives us some clear guidelines for what a real philosophical investigation should look like.
The Need for Philosophy
Ultimately, what Socrates’ relentless questioning reminds us is that, if we’re honest, we know less than we’d like to think. We walk around thinking we have a pretty clear idea about most things, but in truth it’s easier to find answers if you only ask relatively easy questions. Doing this is likely to leave you with inadequate answers. It’s only through hard questions that any lack of understanding is exposed. If we really want to gain greater understanding, about anything, we need to ask the hard questions. We need to put our thoughts to the test. This generates a need for philosophy, as Socrates understood it: a need to find and ask the right questions in the right way. The truth will tolerate nothing less. Most of Western philosophical history has been defined by that task.
Asking the Right Questions
Let me show you an example. 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. (A reminder: it matters that these are 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.
A Contemporary Therapeutic Example
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? 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.
The Priority of Wisdom
Most of the early Platonic dialogues spiral around the same basic idea: there is little point trying to find answers to questions about something until you have a clear idea of what it is that you are asking. So there is little point trying to decide whether or not ‘fighting in armour’ is good for ‘courage’ if you don’t know what ‘courage’ is. There is little point trying to do something ‘pious’ until you know what ‘piety’ is. There is little point trying to decide whether you should exert self-restraint in a situation unless you understand what ‘self-restraint’ is: how can you know whether ‘self-restraint’ is good or bad if you don’t know what it is or what it’s for?! There is not even much point trying to settle on any kind of ‘knowledge’ at all until you have some idea about what ‘knowledge’ is, because if you don’t have any idea about what ‘knowledge’ is, then how would you know if you had it?
We end up lost in a labyrinth of questions and we can’t see the route out. The earlier Platonic dialogues are characterised by a lot of good questions and a lack of good answers. They tend to end in what is called ‘aporia’, meaning ‘no passage’ or more colloquially ‘no way out’. This is a kind of failure to find any satisfactory answer: everyone agrees they don’t really know what they are talking about, but they are glad to have learned this. This shows us something important about Socratic wisdom: know that you do not know. The truth is that you are in this labyrinth of ignorance whether you realise it or not. If you want to find your way out, you need to start asking the right questions. The first step is to recognise that you are lost.
Socrates the Sceptic
This is all very sceptical – meaning it denies and demolishes knowledge, rather that constructing it. By asking the right questions in the right way, Socrates shows us that we don’t know as much as we’d like to think. He doesn’t give us many answers, no map out of the labyrinth, leaving us only the method by which we can make our own map as we wander about in ignorance. If we follow that method, we might slowly construct a good map for ourselves, and if we follow that map then maybe we can find our way out of the labyrinth.
That might not seem very helpful in the short term, but this wrecking-ball style destruction of knowledge is a necessary part of any learning process. In order to be receptive to learning, you need to understand that you do not have all the answers.
I used to joke that a philosophy degree is the only degree where you end up knowing less than when you started. This is easily misunderstood and is probably not the kind of thing to say to the parents of prospective students at university open days. It is obviously not to be taken literally, since a philosophy degree requires a lot of learning. But I think if you are sincere in your pursuit of the subject, you tend to start with strong but basically ignorant opinions and gradually realise that it’s more complicated than you might have first thought, ultimately coming to a more balanced and informed understanding. You learn that you didn’t know as much as you thought you did. This is Socrates’ point: it is wiser to have knowledge of your ignorance, rather than ignorance of your ignorance.
Few of us really know what it is to live well, and fewer still how to do it. If you really know what it is to live a good life, then go ahead and live it. If you don’t know what it is to live a good life, then you acknowledge that you don’t know the answer. Presumably you want to know the answer. The first step on that road is to make sure you are asking the right questions. Hopefully this book can give you some ideas about the right kinds of questions to ask, and the right way to go about asking them. Only you can answer them.
When you find yourself lost in a labyrinth, you should learn how to make a map.
Relationship Advice from Socrates
Here is another quick illustrative example to finish the chapter. The Phaedrus is an outstanding example of a Platonic dialogue. It is really a dialogue about the dangers of trying to achieve philosophical understanding through listening to (or giving) grand rhetorical speeches or writing extended philosophical theses in essays or books. Socrates is predictably sceptical about these methods. They are far removed from the ideals of Socratic conversation. In speeches and writing, the truth is liable to distortion. The speechmaker or author gets carried away with rhetoric and style, prone to telling the audience only what will impress or flatter them, with the audience only hearing what they want to hear. Sincere truth is soon lost.
As if to demonstrate this, Socrates presents a rhetorical speech on the subject of ‘love’. What good is ‘love’, after all? That is the question. He lets himself get carried away with the argument, showing off in a way that might impress an audience. He courts controversy, arguing the counter-intuitive point for the sake of being contrary (a kind of Ancient Greek clickbait) and his monologue takes him into some dark territory. What good is love, he asks, when all it seems to do is cause us trouble? Who in their right mind would invest all their hope and happiness in someone else?! Someone who could, any time of any day, turn around and send you into despair by their bad opinion, rejection, or betrayal; someone that will inevitably die. At which point we are burdened with a grief that will never lift. We are heartbroken. We lose everything that matters. At such cost, what could we possibly get in return for our investment? A few moments of idle pleasure? It hardly seems worth it. What do our loved ones really do for us, after all? And what do they give us that couldn’t much more easily be achieved by other, less costly means? We can have friends for companionship, casual relationships for sex (or pay for it, or satisfy ourselves), and procreation doesn’t need love (and anyway, having children seems liable to the same pessimistic argument – what have our children ever done for us apart from cause us worry?). The conclusion: no one in their right mind would let themselves fall in love, let alone try to find it. We should avoid love at all costs; it’s just not worth it.
You’ll have to take my word for it here that the original is rhetorically impressive. This is Socrates showing off, playing the crowd (even though there is no crowd and he is only talking to his friend). This is the kind of speech that might ‘win the argument’ in a public forum. But is it really sincere? Is it the truth?
What happens next is odd. At least, it is odd if your idea of philosophy is that it’s all about winning arguments. Having just won the day, Socrates changes his mind. He acknowledges, with shame, that he doesn’t believe his own conclusion, that he got carried away with the argument, that he did all the things that he criticises the sophists for doing. He tried to win and be impressive rather than find the truth. Yes, on the face of it, love is irrational; it makes no sense; it is a kind of madness. But in truth it is a kind of divine madness that we would never do without.
To ask ‘what good is love?’, and to answer in terms of a cost-benefit analysis, does not reveal the truth about love; it reveals the shallowness of the question and answer and of the one presenting the argument. Anyone who seriously argues that love is not worth it because it has a tendency to cause us emotional pain shows themselves to not really understand what love is. In truth, anyone in their right mind would choose love regardless of the pain it causes. Parents choose the love for their children over anything else, children the love for their parents, partners the love for each other. Entire lives are dedicated and made worthy by the commitment to love. Only a shallow person would be sincerely cynical about the power that love has to affect us in ways that we cannot understand but would not for the life of us do without. Love deepens our engagement with life, with our place in life and in the world. We can fall out of love, of course, and sometimes for good reason: love is just as vulnerable to corruption as anything else that is good in the world. But to reject love outright, for the sake of avoiding emotional pain, would be petty.
This leads me on to what could be described as Socrates’ advice for those having relationship difficulties. He describes an allegory (probably less odd to ancient Greek ears than it might be to us) involving a flying chariot being led by two horses. Socrates uses this allegory to describe the human soul, but I like to think of it as being equally fitting for human relationships. Of the two horses pulling the chariot, one is lofty and good and wants to lift the chariot up into the heavens; the other is debased and bad and wants to drag us down into the mud. The love we have for a loved one is like this chariot. It is capable of soaring into the heavens or crashing into the mud. We are the charioteer, and we are always being pulled in two directions: our finer qualities recognise the sublime value to be found in genuine love, our baser qualities ask only what’s in it for us. We must remember that we are the charioteer; we are holding the reins; we must manage the two horses, no one else can do it for us. A certain balance has to be struck, but for the most part we need to fight our natural tendency to follow the bad horse. We know we are too prone to getting distracted by petty things. And if we keep doing that, we will end up crashing in the mud. And yet we know, in our heart of hearts, that these petty things aren’t what really matters.
Reflect on any examples of what you would call ‘genuine love’ and you will find that it is not a love based on petty things, it runs deeper in way that is resistant to explanation. That tells us something important. We need to search, find, and hold on to those aspect of our relationships, remembering that they are what really matters.
So if you find yourself getting angry about dishwashers being stacked, bins being emptied, not enough sex or too much, too much socialising or not enough, if you find yourself questioning whether your partner is good looking enough, funny enough, clever enough, wealthy enough, prestigious enough, remember that they are only the petty things and your relationship is much, much more than the sum of those parts. Don’t let the bad horse drag you into the mud.
You will know what, for you, is shallow and petty and what, for you, is deeply important. That’s not for anyone to tell you; it’s something you will have to discover and decide for yourself. And sometimes, of course, the petty can reveal the profound: cheap words can reveal a deeper lack of respect. Words don’t really matter, but respect might.
No one can make your decisions for you. What Socrates reminds us is only that there is this distinction between the ‘deep’ and the ‘shallow’, between the profound and the petty. And the true value of love, if it is there at all, will be found in the profound and not in the petty. If you ask a shallow question in a shallow way, you will get a shallow answer. Making any decision on this basis would be misguided. Ask the right question in the right way.
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