Open Socrates

Introduction: The Man Whose Name is an Example

• Why am I doing any of this?
• You make sure your thinking about how your life should go doesn't wander too far from how it is already going. You appear to be afraid of something.
• Taking life fifteen minutes at a time is a Tolstoyan strategy. The name for the opposite strategy is "Socratic".
• The Epicureans heard the voice of the body, as it screams out to us, in the language of pleasure and pain, and demands that we promote and protect and serve it. The Stoic's heard the voice of the group, when it draws each individual's attention to the fact that she is part of a larger community, and demands that she regulate her behavior accordingly.
• The action that best promotes the greatest good for the greatest number is not guaranteed to be the same, in all cases, as the action that shows respect for the dignity of another person. (This conflict is what the set of philosophical thought experiments called "trolley problems" is designed to reveal.)
• The predicament of the anti-intellectual: he is the secret slave of not one but two masters, and these masters are at way with one another. But the darkest secret of all is that these warring masters are merely feeding him back, in disguised form, the savage commands, either of his own body (Save me!) or of his own group (Cooperate with us!).
• "Being like Socrates" just means being open-minded, and willing to admit when you are wrong, and unafraid to ask challenging questions. This is not an ethical theory. It is more like a critical-thinking "sauce" that can be poured over any ethical theory, or simply over common sense. Whereas "Kantian" or "Aristotelian" refers to a set of ideas about how to live, "Socratic" refers to a style.
• The way to be good when you don't know how to be good is by learning. You should do everything in such a way as to be learning what the right thing to do it, and this means getting other people to show you when you are wrong.
• Unlike the other three traditions, Socratic ethics does not take its bearings from the savage commands of one's body, or one's group. It does not present itself as a finished system, but rather awaits its own elaboration by those who now do, and those who in the future will, understand themselves as Socratics.
• Untimely questions are marked by the fact we need answers to them before we are prepared to ask them. Our default answers - the ones available to us absent philosophizing - come from unreliable sources: our bodies, and other people. These sources issue savage commands, contradicting one another and themselves, leading us to act in confused and haphazard ways.

Part One: Untimely Questions

1. The Tolstoy Problem

• One can avoid Tolstoy's crisis by placing one foot after another, and attending either to whatever strikes one as the greatest danger - either physical or moral - to be avoided, or, alternatively, the greatest source of pleasure or entertainment to be pursued. Whether we see life, pessimistically, as an ongoing crisis punctuated by periods of relief, or, more optimistically, as an ongoing source of pleasure punctuated by periods of crisis, we will find it replete with reasons for postponing philosophical inquiry. If we postpone for long enough, death will rescue us from ever having to come to terms with the meaninglessness of life.
• Untimely questions are remarkable not only because they are hard to answer, but, first and foremost, because they are hard to ask; and they ar hard to ask not only because it is hard to pose them to others, but, first and foremost, because it is hard to pose them to oneself.
• You think you already have the answer to them, and the reason you think that is that you are using the answer.
• Human existence requires a biological infrastructure; human agency requires, in addition, a conceptual infrastructure.
• You are not supposed to regard these questions as open, precisely because you are supposed to already be using the answers, in the caring that you are currently doing.
• Faced with despair over a set of questions he can neither avoid nor confront, he fins himself blown back and forth between the unthinkability of suicide and the necessity of it, oddly confident about his ability to determine which of those states counts as "sobriety", which as "intoxication".
• When we settle on answers to the central questions of our lives without ever having opened up those questions for inquiry, that is a recipe for wavering. A mind tasked only with thinking its way through the next fifteen minutes is likely to find itself acting inconsistently, routinely undoing what it confidently did earlier.
• What causes Socrates to waver is his failure to have inquired sufficiently; to this extent, he is in the same boat as everyone else. The difference between Socrates and those around him is that he wants to do something about this problem. Socrates thinks that his circumstances call for inquiry, whereas his interlocutors are inclined to cut off the inquiry and move on with their lives. As Socrates sees it, by preemptively closing the questions, they consign themselves to a lifetime of wavering.
• Russell notices that the form of wavering that arises from the ways in which ethical language is hostage to its user's approval; we call self-confidence "arrogance" when we dislike it; we call youthfulness "immaturity when we dislike it. Revenge is "accountability" when we like it and consequences are "punitive when we dislike them. "Tribalism" is bad, while "loyalty" is good.
• Folk wisdom is another place to see wavering:
  • Look before you leap! But: He who dares wins!
  • Slow and steady wins the race! But: Time waits for no man!
• You waver when you decide that one thought is suitable for one context and a different one for another, even though you cannot specify any relevant difference between the two contexts.
• Whereas other people criticize Socrates for being repetitive, he criticizes them for wavering - or, as he puts it, refusing to say the same things about the same subjects.
• Wavering often takes the form of weakness of will, where we commit ourselves to one course of action, and end up acting against our better judgement instead. We say we know that e should exercise more and spend less time on our phones and be nicer to our parents and keep our kids away from video games and eat more vegetables and read more novels and be more conscious about our consumption choices and so on and so forth, but quite often we don't act in accordance with this supposed knowledge - instead we act exactly as people would act who didn't know these things.
• Passionate desire pressures us to think no more than fifteen minutes ahead.
• But image being Pierre (in War and Peace) and acknowledging what is happening: maybe the truth is that drinking and partying really are my central concerns; I'm like an animal, battered around by pleasure and convention; there's nothing my life is about. No one could bear to see himself as one of those "people of weak character". The only way to get through the next fifteen minutes is to convince yourself that you're doing something much nobler than getting through the next fifteen minutes. And so you produce, as Pierre does, as Tolstoy does, the illusion of a synoptic perspective on your life as a whole.
• We cannot step back to a detached position from which having no answer at all is permissible: question and answer are magnetically attracted to one another, and the space for thought is eliminated. So we get by without asking untimely questions - or we appear to ourselves to get by, while actually wavering. We waver in our actions, we waver in our thoughts, and we waver most of all when pressed to explain ourselves.
• Fiction was a place where Tolstoy could dramatize, from a safe distance, his own brush with the meaninglessness of life. The Tolstoy problem haunts so much of Tolstoy's fiction: many of his characters confront the question, "What will become of my whole life?".
• All fiction offers up the possibility of escape from everyday life, but great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from.
• The ideal for Tolstoy woould be never having to confront the Tolstoy problem in the first place.
• In much the way that a painting presents us with a landscape but prevents us from entering it, novelists give us a view onto the promised lang, but not more.
• Socrates explains that by pursuing knowledge - which is to say, by seeking a solution to the Tolstoy problem - we stabilize the answers to the untimely questions: "For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man's mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why."
• Socrates is here distinguishing an opinion that one simply has from an opinion that is informed by way of an inquisitive process. Then, the steps of that process can be retraced, and our wavering stops. The thinking that we do in pursuit of an answer holds that answer fixed. Knowledge is simply the name for an answer that is the product of a complete inquiry into a question. Wavering, by contrast, is a sign that one has cut off an investigation before it came to a close - or that one never opened it.
• What inquiry gets us are answers that are both true and stable.
• Action is based on ideas about what is good, ideas that supply the motivating goal of the action. The fact that you think those ideas are true is the only reason you are doing anything at all.
• If, when wavering, you never look back, you can get through your whole life while maintaining the appearance to yourself and to others that your behavior has a conceptual infrastructure, that there is a through line that makes intelligible your whole life. But why put on this show unless you want it to be a reality? The philosophical project springs from the desire to be coherent, to live a life that doesn't need to be shielded from reflection, a life you live by understanding it.
• Philosopher is not a profession. It is just an especially open, direct and straightforward way of being a person.

2. Load-Bearing Answers

• Bulleted list item

3. Savage Commands

• Bulleted list item

4. Socratic Intellectualism

• Bulleted list item

Part Two: The Socratic Method

• Bulleted list item

5. The Gadfly-Midwife Paradox

• Bulleted list item

6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge

• Bulleted list item

7. Meno's Paradox

• Bulleted list item

Part Three: Socratic Answers

• Bulleted list item

8. Politics: Justice and Liberty

• Bulleted list item

9. Politics: Equality

• Bulleted list item

10. Love

• Bulleted list item

11. Death

• Bulleted list item