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

• Each of his conversations is a high-wire act in which Socrates manages to sustain an inquiry into the very question his interlocutor is least likely to tolerate. These are untimely questions.
• There is a pattern to how many people respond to Socrates' questions: they first feel that the questions are so straightforward as to hardly deserve consideration, and then give "answers" that amount to performative self-affirmations.
• A belief that one needs to have is a belief that one is acting on.
• When I talk to you about the location of the supermarket, I am handing you a special kind of thought - one that is, as it were, currently moving my legs forward.
• When the question is untimely, we "hand over" an answer that is guaranteed to be found on the tip of our tongue, because we were already speaking it - to ourselves.
• I regain the freedom to ask myself the question, "Which way is the supermarket?" or more broadly, "Where should I go?" only once I stop using an answer to that question. I could keep walking, but I could not keep walking to the supermarket.
• What makes a question untimely for a given person is the fact that she is enacting its answer, but there are important differences between the size and scope of our practical projects. The most interesting and elusive questions will be the ones whose answers we must give at every moment of our lives, for their whole duration. In terms of the degree to which we, as agents, rely on them, these answers bear the heaviest load.
• We cannot ask, "Why did you decide to be a good person?" No one will be able to account for that decision; as far back as we stretch our minds, we will find that the decision was already in place.
• One doesn't need to be very old to confront questions of justice, and as soon as one does, one finds that one is already in the business of indignantly insisting on one's rights.
• By the time a question of justice arises, one find oneself needing to hit the ground running with an answer.
• Measuring is how we check what works and what doesn't; measurement matters.
• If I care enough about what you think to be angered, insulted, and hurt by your estimation of me - then I do not see our difference of opinion as being "merely subjective". The idea that the dispute is "merely subjective' is more likely to reflect the point of view of an onlooker who wishes the parties to stop their squabbling. The parties themselves fight because they see the question as in some way objective - decidable in the light of the truth, in spite of the impossibility of measurement.
• We fight over questions that cannot be decided by measurement - but not over all such questions, because we do not fight over matters of taste, nor over questions where the instrument of measurement has simply not been invented yet. What questions, then, do we fight over? We fight over those questions whose answers are practically operative, rendering the suspension of judgment impossible. Untimely questions best explain why we fight when we do.
• People are prepared to fight and even kill over disagreements on questions of ethics. Their inability to inquire into them stems from the fact that they are currently making use of the answers.
• Measurement exists only where detachment is possible.
• What is distinctive about questions of measurement is not that they are "objective" but that it is easy to separate the asking of the question from the answering of it.
• Calling a question of justice "subjective is a confused way of getting at the mysterious fact that the answers to such questions seem to have always been with us.
• We navigate our lives by way of answers as to what things matter or have meaning. These answers map the world for us: without a sense of what to aim at, we are floating, purposeless. Most of the answers that anchor our agency in the world concern our relationships with the people we are close to. It is with reference to those people that our abstract commitments to being an empathetic, kind, loving, helpful person become concrete directives with action-guiding force; and so when, for example, some of those people die, or betray us, we experience a profound disruption and disorientation. We cannot live without answers, and so when some of our most important answers are, or stand to be, removed from us, we experience that even in the form of strong, negative emotions.
• You might not notice it, but as you make your way through each day, there are many, many things you are counting on. Our load bearing answers to untimely questions tend to give rise to predictions that specify what needs to be true in the future in order for my answer to guide my action in the present.
• No one can live without making predictions about those parts of the future that are of special concern to them.
• The name for the load-bearing predictions is "hope". And it is worth observing that hope is fragile. it is difficult to sustain, since it comes with the prospect of grief and loss if we are disappointed, so at times we recoil against it by "detaching" ourselves from the goal - or pretending to: "I know it won't happen and I don't care."
• While a juror might gradually become more convinced of guilt as the evidence mounts, the mother of the accused's epistemic path is more likely to take the shape of "flipping" from hopeful certainty of his innocence to despair and rage over his guilt.
• There seems to be a big difference between the experience of loss and the experience of being wronged, or slighted, or treated unjustly. This difference is important to understanding untimely questions - or rather, it is important to understanding how to classify the answers we give to those questions.
• You can be angry at people but you cannot be sad at them. Anger is a powerful and all-consuming driver of action, thought, and feeling. When I am angry enough, I do not care that I am hungry. Anger presents itself as a problem that can be solved and it aims at this solution. Sadness, by contrast, can only be made to wane under the force of time or distraction: it ebbs away, but we do not "resolve" or "fix" it.
• If I am angry, I want other people to be angry on my behalf (and may well get angry at them for failing to do so).
• Anger is fundamentally directed at the wrongdoer, on the grounds that the wrongdoing indicates a failure to give a shared answer. My anger moves me to try to restore that answer as a collective answer, by somehow forcing you to give it, or ensuring that you will give it in the future.
• When I am angry, I am in an unstable state where I feel that something that is supposed to be collective is being held only by me, and I must rectify that situation.
• Some answers to untimey questions are given only individually, whereas others are collective, given by one because they are given by a group. The first kind of answer exposes a person to sadness, or fear, or despair; the second kind to anger.
• When people find that the answers on which their lives depend are slipping away from them, they become willing to do almost anything in order to secure them. This is because nothing - including the consequences of violence - matter unless these answers are secured. The answers are how things matter.
• If nothing mattered to you, many impediments would be removed from your life. You wouldn't get into fights, the stakes would never seem high, you wouldn't find any questions "touchy" or "sensitive", and you would have no trouble taking unbiased, impartial, detached perspective on things.
• But this invulnerability is wasted on you. Your detachment from what matters has mad it impossible for you to live.
• The load-bearing answers we give to untimely questions are both the sources of our problems and the sources of all our reasons to care that we have problems.

3. Savage Commands

• All around you, the air is thick with commands. You can't escape them. They follow you wherever you go. You don't see them: they're invisible. You can't hear them they're inaudible. You feel them. The feeling is pain, accompanied by the prospect of pleasure.
• Even a relatively unsophisticated command, such as what we get from feeling hungry (Eat!) or tired (Sleep!), is associated with mental images and fantasies and ideas about actions we could perform in relation to the paid. The pain promises to go away if you do one thing, to increase if you do anything else. The pains don't always keep their promise: sometimes obedience leads to more pain. And sometimes disobedience works out just fine.
• These commands are savage.
• When we disobey a command, it is usually at the prompting of another command. We don't obey these commands because any one of them moves us with overpowering force. We obey whichever is strongest, because we have no other options. These commands are our answers to untimely questions. To see how we ended up with them, you only have to turn back the clock.
• As soon as you were born, you had to hit the ground running. You were forced to start leading your life even though you had no idea how to do so. What did you do? You screamed, you wiggled, and you took in information about how the world reacted to your screams and wiggles: Does this make the pains go away? Does that? By the time we have the conceptual wherewithal to wonder about how we should live our lives, we've long been taking heaps of answers for granted.
• Parental instruction is almost always corrective rather than primordial. You wouldn't give a two-year-old a lecture about homework; you would give the lecture to a ten-year-old, precisely when she refuses to do it. The sign that a child is ready to hear your instruction is that she is acting in conflict with it.
• A command answers the question "What should I do?" when no one asked it.
• We are the sorts of beings who need answers before developing the ability to ask questions, and who therefor rely on answers to unasked questions. Which is to say: commands.
• It is only if we become dissatisfied with all of the ways in which we are being commanded that we will be moved to seek out a different kind of answer, by inquiring. This is why Socratic ethics opens with a critique of commands.
• Perception tells me what is the case - it informs me as to what items populate the world - whereas desire dictates which of those items should serve as my target.
• Philia covers all the various ways in which I use the concept "mine" to talk about other people: my family, my friends, my city, my military regiment. Nowadays we might include my religious denomination, my social class, my educational or professional cohort.
• The essential feature of kinship bonds is that they offer communal answers to questions such as: Which people and places and activities matter most to us? Which days do we celebrate? under what circumstances are we willing to fight and die? How should we behave in relation to each other?
• For most of us, humanity is the largest kinship group we see ourselves as belonging to .
• Whereas the bodily command operates by way of the carrot of pleasure, comfort, and safety and the stick of pain and the fear of death. The kinship command operates by way of the carrot of status, honor, affection, and camaraderie, and the stick of the fear of exclusion and the various social emotions (shame, pity, sympathy, envy, and so on). The former pertains to my biological existence, whereas the latter concerns my social existence, how my place in my community is demarcated by others' opinions of me.
• Given the degree to which a sense of self-worth is determined extrinsically, it would be more accurate to call it a "sense of other-worth".
• We rely on the continuity of kinship relations - the fact that "our people" in some sense of "our" will live on - in order to be at peace with our own individual deaths.
• Socrates says that the body "fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense... and it is the body and the care of it, to which we are enslaved, which compel us to acquire wealth." My body might tell me that I have to do one thing at one time, but, at a later time, fill me with regrets and pains for having obeyed it.
• Most of the language of self-care - relax, take time for yourself, don't stress, don't overwork - is a version of the bodily command.
• Intimate relationships - between best friends, or lovers, or close siblings - straddle the divide between body and kin.
• Both the bodily command and the kinship command make us waver. They might give us a loud, clear answer as to what we ought to do, but the answers don't last. By frequently reversing themselves, they prompt us to take life fifteen minutes at a time.
• We stay up too late, we overeat, we avoid answering emails, we make impulse purchase, and we are not always surprised when these things do not end up working out for us. Like Socrates' interlocutors, we might ascribe such choices to being "overcome by pleasure or pain." The person who makes such a claim is called either akratic or weak-willed, and they insist that they wavered with their eyes open.
• According to Socrates, the case they want to describe, where they recognized that one option was better and still freely chose the other, simply can't happen.
• Your body commands you to eat that cookie, presenting that as the best possible option because its judgment about pleasure is distorted by the proximity of the cookie.
• Just because you understand that you will regret this choice in the future, it doesn't follow that you do regret it now.
• The weak-willed person has deluded themselves into thinking that they waver less than they do; they think that, while relying only on their bodies, they can somehow get a stable grip on what's best for their bodies. But that is not true. The body can't take care of itself: it wavers, judging X to be better than Y at one moment and the opposite the next.
• We have developed the habit of using multiple words for the same thing, in order to hide from ourselves the absurdity of our own behavior.
• You're saying that you have some kind of a grip on how you should be acting, but what's actually happening is that you're wavering, because you can't keep that grip for more than fifteen minutes at a time. You waver in how you act and then you waver in how you talk about how you didn't waver when you acted. You can't eve stabilize your sentences for more than a few seconds at a time!
• We've allowed our talk to waver in this way, just because the phenomenon is so common and normal and natural that we can't believe it could be a sign that something is going deeply wrong. But it is. Our problems talking about what is happening reflect a problem in the happening itself. There's a crack at the foundation of human motivation, but we've looked at it so many times that we've convinced ourselves that it is part of the design. In fact there are two cracks: Revenge and
• Revenge is when love wavers into hate. This fact about love - that it disposes us to hate - is, like weakness of will, so routinely subjected to disguises and rationalizations that it is hard to see clearly.
• I'm using revenge somewhat broadly to include all the case where you behave hatefully toward someone - treating harms to them as goods - and understand your behavior as a fitting response to how they have acted, or to how they will act, or to who they are.
• The fundamental directive of the body is to pursue as much pleasure as possible, so when it leads you to pursue less, that is wavering. The fundamental directive of kinship is to benefit one's associates, and so when it leads you to harm them, that is wavering.
• Socrates' approach to revenge is simple: you shouldn't ever do bad things. Bad things don't become good because of who they're done to, or what someone did first, or because they're done in self-defense. No matter what someone did in the past, or will do in the future, they do not "deserve" harm. Being bad is not a way to be good. Harming people isn't good; it's bad. All the ways we talk ourselves into doing bad things are thinly disguised contradictions.
• Socrates is not raising any objection to violence, or killing, so long as they are justified by the good to be achieved, rather than understood as "deserved" in the light of evils done.
• Just as weakness of will entails a prudent image - a kind of "phantasm" - of my future regret, revenge entails an emphatic image, a phantasm of your emotional repudiation of the revenge I am enacting against you.
• Dark Empathy - When I channel your feelings, I can react to those feelings in a way that reverses their valence for you. Thus, I can emphatically import your joy, and be pained by it (envy), or emphatically import your suffering, and be pleased by it (Schadenfreude).
• All forms of empathy, be they dark or heartwarming, begin with my feeling what you feel. Empathy is not a virtue, but a power. Almost every adult has this power to some degree, though some of us have more of it than others, and it can be used for good or ill.
• The Socratic position on revenge can be summed up as a set of truisms:
  • No one deserves to be harmed.
  • It's never right to do wrong.
  • Being bad can never be what makes something good.
• Why would we ever waver from these truisms? The answer is kinship.
• When a boulder or wild beast hurtles toward me, what I feel is fear, not anger. Harms don't generate indignant concerns about accountability unless they strike you as, in some way, disrespectful or offensive, which is to say, as violations of kinship norms.
• When you get revenge, you treat someone in precisely the way that you are forbidden to treat precisely that person. The phenomenon of revenge reveals that the kinship command is capable of ordering us around in a self-destructive way.
• The state of enemy is the product of some event - the person did something wrong, or belongs to a group associated with some wrongdoing.
• Your enemies are people who used to be your friends.
• Our common understanding of self-defense includes a culprit and that means that self-defense, as it is usually understood, hides within it the notion of revenge. The guilt of the party under attack matters more to us than the positive, life-saving value that the act of violence stands to achieve. Guilt transforms kin - whom you were not permitted to harm - into anti-kin.
• The full menu of classic revenge, spiteful revenge, and pre-vengeful revenge allows a person to justify almost any attack on anyone else as being in some sense a case of retaliation against an enemy.
• The kinship command cannot provide stable guidance as to how one should treat those around one.
• Socrates is unwilling to hate anyone, but he is only willing to truly love those people who can see that the aims of kinship - benefits to one's associates - will not be achieved if the kinship command is left to its own devices.
• If your kids have ever said to you, "I wasn't the one who started it," that's a sign that you taught them the logic of revenge. Socrates calls this bad parenting; he doesn't acknowledge such a state as "being provoked".
• Revenge is animated by the desire to teach people lessons and set them straight. Revenge is not pure hate, it is loving hate.
• Revenge and akrasia teach us that our default systems for managing our lives are defective: they make us waver.
• The Socratic method is an alternative to savage commands. It takes the form of a proposal; either you are going to be convinced by me, to go along with what I think, or you are going to convince me to go along with what you think.
• A penalty or reward might suffice to change your mind, but Socrates is not in the business of changing minds. He's in the business of either changing minds or having his own mind be changed, which is to say, the business of figuring out which of those two things should happen. This requires looking into why a person was inclined to do whatever they were going to do, and checking to see whether it makes sense: on examination, does their speech waver, or not?
• It's one thing to be motivationally driven to engage in akrasia or take revenge; it's another to try to explain to someone else why those would be the right course of action. The pressure of objection, refutation, and explanatory clarity exposes the savageness of the command driving you, to the point where you would not be able to demand that anyone else act the way you are acting.
• Everything we do, every choice we make, every action we take, is underwritten by some answer to the question "What should I do?". Socrates' alternative to savage commands allows us to transform our default answers into something different: inquisitive answers.
• Socrates asks us to imagine become people who, instead of setting one command aside in favor of another, discover something better to do with our lives than follow commands. What if you lived, not off of commands, but off of an understanding of what you were doing? Liberation from commands begins with questions.

4. Socratic Intellectualism

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Part Two: The Socratic Method

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5. The Gadfly-Midwife Paradox

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6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge

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7. Meno's Paradox

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Part Three: Socratic Answers

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8. Politics: Justice and Liberty

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9. Politics: Equality

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10. Love

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11. Death

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