There’s a question you are avoiding. Even now, as you read this sentence, you’re avoiding it. You tell yourself you don’t have time at the moment; you’re focused on making it through the next fifteen minutes. There is a lot to get done in a day. There are the hours you spend at your job, the chores to take care of at home. There are movies to be seen, books to be read, music to be listened to, friendships to catch up on, vacations to be taken. Your life is full. It has no space for the question, “Why am I doing any of this?”
True, you might sometimes have to pause to ask: Should I take a vacation? Move? Have a(nother) child? Or you might find yourself faced with a moral dilemma or a romantic crisis. But in those cases you frame “What should I do?” as a question about which option fits best with what you had antecedently determined that you have to do and like to do. You are careful to keep your practical questions from exploding beyond narrow deliberative limits within which you confine them in advance. It is fine to be open-minded and curious about all sorts of questions that don’t directly impinge on how you live your life—How do woodpeckers avoid getting concussions?—but you are vigilant in policing the boundaries of practical inquiry. 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.
By his own lights, what Tolstoy discovered is that the examined life was not worth living. Although he found an escape from these questions—and from suicide—in religious faith, Tolstoy is clear that faith is a way of setting them aside, not an answer to them. He expresses envy for the simple existence of peasants who, at least in Tolstoy’s imagining, enjoy blissfully unexamined lives from birth to death. Confession reads as a cautionary tale: Stay away from fundamental questions! Keep yourself busy enough to ensure your gaze never has time to turn inward, because, once it does, you put yourself on the road to self-destruction. Even if you escape the temptations of suicide, you’ll never recover your once untroubled calm. You can’t answer these questions, and you can’t unask them, so the best strategy is to keep the lid on Pandora’s box secured as tightly as you can. Taking life fifteen minutes at a time is a Tolstoyan strategy. The name for the opposite strategy is “Socratic.”
Like Tolstoy, the philosopher Socrates found himself confronted with profound questions he did not know how to answer; and yet Socrates came to the conclusion that this confrontation was the best, not the worst, thing that ever happened to him. Whereas Tolstoy struggled, with only partial success, to find a way to return to his old life, Socrates never once looked back. He pursued happiness not by avoiding or moving on from these questions, but by diving headlong into them, to the point of forsaking the thought of ever doing anything else with his life. Tolstoy found that the “why” question made existence unbearable: “I had no life.” Socrates described the prospect of spending an eternity inquiring into it as “an extraordinary happiness.”
Unlike Tolstoy, or Plato, or Xenophon, or Aristophanes, Socrates did not write great books. And yet he is responsible for one truly great creation: the character of Socrates. Socrates made himself into someone that other people could be. He fashioned his very person into a kind of avatar or mascot for anyone who ventures to ask the sorts of questions that disrupt the course of a life.
Because Socrates understands that he is not wise, he is pleased to be shown to be wrong—and that is the kind of person he also needs Gorgias to be.
Talking to Socrates is like encountering argument in the wild, in its natural habitat. By comparison, your usual argumentative practices come off as unnaturally distorted by social considerations: the same kind of animal, but trapped in a cage in the zoo. Socrates’ interlocutors couldn’t help finding themselves inspired to want to become the kind of people who think ignorance is the worst thing there is. That is why the space around Socrates becomes peopled by Socrateses. It is a space dedicated both to acknowledging one’s ignorance in the face of, and to overcoming one’s fear of, the “why?” question.
Why isn’t there a Neo-Socratic ethics? Why hasn’t Socratic ethical thought been revived as the basis of an ethical framework that might compete with those drawn from other ancient sources? The answer is that Socrates’ ethics is typically understood in purely negative terms. In this view, the reason we can’t live our lives Socratically is that Socrates, unlike Kant, or Mill, or Aristotle, didn’t have answers. Socrates could criticize the overconfident answers of others, but had nothing to offer in their stead. “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.
So goes one story about Socrates. This book tells a different one. It argues that people have overestimated the degree to which a Socratic approach can be layered on top of what we were doing anyways. When Socratism is adopted as a style, it has a tendency to land the one who so stylizes themselves in a performative contradiction. For example, consider the plight of my own university, the University of Chicago, declaring its commitment to “the principle of complete freedom of speech on all subjects” by insisting that “this principle can neither now nor at any future time be called in question.” Apparently, our freedom to question extends to all subjects but one. People will announce, “Question everything!” without noticing that they have just uttered not a question, but a command. If the Socratic method is a tool, it is a strange kind of tool, one that has the audacity to dictate both how it should be used, and for what purposes.
How should the method be used? With another person, who has taken on a role distinct from yours. One of you offers answers to some fundamental question, while the other explains why he or she cannot accept those answers. Thinking, as Socrates understands it, is not something that happens in your head, but rather out loud, in conversation. Socrates argues that it is only by recognizing thinking as a social interaction that we can resolve a set of paradoxes as to how thinking can be open-minded, inquisitive, and truth-oriented. The Socratic motto is not, “Question everything,” but “Persuade or be persuaded.”
When it comes to the purpose of the Socratic method, Socrates had colossal ambitions. He believed that all of the trouble we have leading our lives, all of our dissatisfactions, all of our failures to progress, all of our moral imperfections, all of the injustices we commit, large and small, stem from one source: ignorance. Socrates’ claim that “I know that I know nothing” isn’t an empty gesture of skepticism, but rather a plan for life. It tells you that the key to success, whether you are navigating difficulties in your marriage, your terror at the prospect of death, or the politicized minefield of social media, is to have the right kinds of conversations. Given that we cannot lead lives based on knowledge—because we lack it—we should lead the second-best kind of life, namely, the one oriented toward knowledge.
Socrates discovered that between the acknowledgment of one’s own ignorance and the ideally knowledgeable life lies a substantive ethics of inquiry. 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 is, and this means getting other people to show you when you are wrong. Instead of implementing a principle—such as “Achieve the greatest good for the greatest number!” or “Obey the categorical imperative!”—you should inquire. Socrates insists that there is no greater benefit he could receive from another person than being shown why he is wrong, and that the only sure way to treat another human being with respect is to either answer their questions or question their answers.
In this book, I aim to reintroduce Socratic ethics as a novel and distinctive ethical system, complete with its own core theses and distinctive ethical recommendations. Unlike the other three traditions, Socratic ethics does not take its bearings from the savage commands of one’s body, or one’s group. Unlike the other three traditions, Socratic ethics 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. A follower of Socrates is ethically required to inquire into Socratism, whereas no such intellectual requirements constrain someone who wants to be a good Kantian, a good Utilitarian, or a good Aristotelian. Those traditions purport to rest on a bedrock of ethical knowledge that is immediately available to be acted on: no further philosophizing is required. Socrates boasts of no such bedrock. Nonetheless, Socratic ethics offers concrete practical guidance: it tells you that you should live a philosophical life, and helps you see how to do so.
It is common today to hear advisors to young people unwittingly echoing Callicles, praising a philosophy major on the grounds that it gives you “analytic tools” and “critical thinking skills” valued by employers. The message is: Do philosophy, but don’t overdo it. We live inside a bubble of caution and wariness that can only be sustained by maintaining the conviction that, when it comes to the question of how to live our lives, we are already being intellectual and critical and thoughtful enough. The assumption is that no one—not even a professional academic philosopher—needs to be living their whole life in a philosophical manner. This book is an argument to the contrary: it makes the case for a philosophical life.
Part One: Untimely Questions
The Tolstoy Problem
My question, which at the age of fifty brought me to the point of suicide, was the very simple question that lies in the soul of every human being, from a silly child to the wisest sage—the question without which life is impossible, as I experienced in actual fact. The question is this: What will come from what I do and from what I will do tomorrow—what will come from my whole life?
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.
I believe that Tolstoy identified a special class of question that I am going to call “untimely questions.” An untimely question is a question that comes at the wrong time—namely, after it has been answered. Untimely questions are remarkable not only because they are hard to answer, but, first and foremost, because they are hard to ask; and they are 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. We are familiar with the circumstances under which a person will be unable to get others to engage with her question—when they won’t let her talk, or when she doesn’t want to admit that she doesn’t know the answer, or when there is simply no one around. But can’t one always pose a question to oneself? No. Some questions are so elusive that if you write them down on a piece of paper, and then go on to read what you have written out loud to yourself, over and over again, to the point where even after you stop talking, the words of the question are echoing through your head, you still won’t be asking the question. You’ll be going through the motions of inquiry without actually inquiring into anything.
The reason why you can’t ask yourself untimely questions is that you think you already have the answer to them, and the reason you think you have the answer is that you are using the answer. Such questions don’t show up to you as questions; by the time you get them in view, you find that they have hardened into the shape of answers. Untimely questions come too late.
Why seek material prosperity? Why educate my children? Why care about the welfare of the people? Why does literary fame matter? These are untimely questions, and they form a contrast with the sorts of questions that float free of what we are currently doing, questions where open-mindedness is possible, questions whose answers we needn’t rely on already knowing. Those sorts of questions come at the right time.
Suppose I firmly believe that cloning is immoral. I won’t be able to ask myself, “Is cloning immoral?” because, when I check in with my beliefs, I see that one of them already answers the question. In order to inquire into that question, I would have to take “cloning is immoral” off of the list of my beliefs. At that point I could look into whether I can derive it from other beliefs that I have, or whether any new information I might acquire could settle the question for me. But if what I am currently doing is advocating against cloning, then I cannot take “cloning is immoral” off of the list of my beliefs, because I’m relying on its presence. If someone asked me, “Why are you doing what you are doing?” I need to be able to answer, “Because cloning is immoral.”
If it strikes you as somehow brutal and uncaring that Tolstoy is willing to countenance such thoughts as “Why should I care about my children” and “So the peasants are suffering, what’s it to me?” your judgmental response—How dare he?!—points to the unaskability of the corresponding question. You are not supposed to regard those questions as open, precisely because you are supposed to already be using the answers, in the caring that you are currently doing. But in that case, how was Tolstoy, who did care about his children, and about the welfare of the peasants, able to ask himself those questions? The answer is that he wasn’t. He could say the words of the questions to himself, but he couldn’t ask them.
I have been drawing your attention to two striking features of the account Tolstoy provides in Confession. The first is that although Tolstoy repeatedly refers to fundamental questions about the meaning of life, he never succeeds in asking himself those questions. The second is that he firmly, passionately, and with certitude espouses a conclusion—life is meaningless, suicide is mandated—to which he has not reasoned and from which his behavior repeatedly wavers.
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.
Tolstoy was not able to ask himself whether his existence mattered, because he could not pause the activity of living for long enough to inquire into an answer. Tolstoy imagined that he had formed a settled judgment against the meaning of life, but he had not. Rather, he failed to articulate any kind of sustained argument against the meaning of life, and his incessant wavering made it impossible to find any sense of closure or contentment in the conclusion he pretended to have decisively arrived at.
Wavering is not a phenomenon consigned to the ancient world, though it has gone by many names. The philosopher Bertrand Russell called one species of it “emotive conjugation”:
I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig-headed fool. I am righteously indignant, you are annoyed, he is making a fuss over nothing. I have reconsidered the matter, you have changed your mind, he has gone back on his word.
Russell is noticing 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; we call revenge “accountability” when we like it; we call consequences “punitive” when we dislike them (otherwise we just call them consequences). Consider the difference between “tribalism,” which always references something we don’t like, and “loyalty,” which is what we call the same phenomenon when we approve of it. Likewise, consider how we applaud someone’s behavior as “cooperative” when we like the fact that she is doing what works for others, and reject her behavior as “conformist” when she’s once again doing what works for others, but this time we happen to dislike it. Those who risk their lives for a cause they believe in count as “courageous” to those who also believe in the cause, whereas disbelievers are likely to say these people are “fools” or “indoctrinated.”
Folk wisdom is another place to see wavering. Pick a maxim or adage and you can usually articulate a counter-maxim that people will use to cover the case where they wish to praise the opposite: “Look before you leap,” but “He who dares, wins”; “Slow and steady wins the race,” but “Time waits for no man”; “Birds of a feather flock together,” but “Opposites attract”; “Silence is golden,” but “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” And so on.
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. Did I say “Silence is golden” on the basis of a principle that allows me to determine when it is or is not the time to be a squeaky wheel? Or did I say “Silence is golden” simply because, in the here and now, I don’t want you to talk? 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.
If we never inquire into untimely questions, the thinking we use to guide our lives will be unstable. We will never be able to rely on it for very long—perhaps no more than fifteen minutes or so—before it is subject to being overturned. But we don’t experience these overturnings, because we are accustomed to smoothing over the bumps created by wavering. Again, we rationalize. This is why it comes as a shock to his interlocutors when Socrates, using his probing questioning, forces the wavering into the light. Socrates brought the Tolstoy problem to the attention of people who would otherwise never have noticed it.
There are so many questions about human life that we never stop to ask ourselves, because we are too busy moving on with our lives, deploying our answers. They are questions about how to treat other people fairly, what kind of greatness to pursue in life, what it means to love and be loved, how we should face death, how society should be organized, who our real friends are, how to raise our children, what the demands of justice are, and quite generally, what to do with our lives. These are questions about the things that matter most to us, about projects we have a standing investment in, questions we have always already answered. 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.
Socrates is here distinguishing an opinion that one simply has from an opinion that is formed by way of an inquisitive process. When the opinion is the conclusion of a process of inquiry, whose steps can in turn be retraced (“an account of the reason why”), our wavering stops. “After they are tied down, in the first place they become knowledge, and then they remain in place. That is why knowledge is prized higher than correct opinion, and knowledge differs from correct opinion in being tied down.” 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 completed 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 even opened it.
When it comes to untimely questions, the challenge is not simply to find answers. We can have those without inquiring. We can even have true answers (“right opinion”) without inquiring. What inquiry gets us are answers that are both true and stable. When we have not really reasoned our way to a conclusion, it is easily reversed—especially under conditions of urgency. The preference for knowledge over mere “right opinion” is the preference for answers that have been stabilized by inquiry.
If you confine your gaze—never looking back, never looking too far ahead, always only making it through the next fifteen minutes—you can avoid being confronted with evidence of your wavering. But suppose you succeed at this: you put one foot in front of another, over and over again, all the way to the end, which is to say, right up until the moment that your journey is cut off by death. What will you have achieved? The answer is that you will have maintained the appearance, to yourself and others, that your behavior has a conceptual infrastructure. It will seem to be true that all your various doings hang together, bound by some through-line that makes them intelligible as parts of a whole life. You will have put on a good show of being someone whose life is supported by ideas, someone who knows what they are doing.
But the only explanation for why a person would put on this show is that she wants it to be reality. Some part of her desperately wants to live a life that makes sense. The philosophical project springs from this desire. The inquiry into untimely questions is the search for a life that doesn’t need to be shielded from reflection, a life you live by understanding it. Viewed in this light, “philosopher” is not the name of a profession. It is just a way—an especially open, direct and straightforward one—of being a person.
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. Let’s examine them more carefully.
At first, Socrates’ interlocutors often conflate the activity of defining the concept in question with that of showing how it applies to and affirms their own behavior.
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. This pattern is not a sign of any arrogance peculiar to Socrates’ milieu. It is, instead, a direct consequence of how Socrates has chosen his questions. Someone who asks a child, “Do your parents really love you?” cannot expect the child to approach this question in a detached, reflective manner. The child needs to believe that his parents love him, and, more generally, people need to approve of the choices that they are, at that very moment, making. Socrates’ questions pinpoint beliefs the person needs to have—and his questioning applies targeted pressure on that critical, load-bearing, spot.
What does it mean to say that we “need” some belief? Imagine we are walking together chatting, and you ask me, “Which way is the supermarket?” I say, “I’m going that way right now, do you want to come with me?” Or even more simply, I might answer, “Just follow me!” Notice that my response to you does not require me to revisit the question “How does one get to the supermarket?” I don’t open an inquiry into a question that I take myself to have already answered. If, by contrast, you had asked me directions to somewhere I was not going—e.g., the post office—I might have had to pause for a moment, consider my mental map of my neighborhood, locate myself in it, and then offer you instructions: “You will have to turn left at the next intersection.” A belief that one needs to have is a belief that one is acting on. I give directions differently when I’m already heading to the same destination. I don’t pause to consider how an action should be performed when I am already performing that action. Notice that my failure to employ the reflective, detached, post office procedure when asked about the supermarket is not a sign of misplaced self-confidence; the difference in how I answer is simply a function of the fact that the relevant belief is already operational. 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.
But suppose you gave me good reason for thinking that I might be headed in the wrong direction: “That supermarket is closed today; you should go to a different one.” If your claim is credible, its effect on me will be visible: I will stop. Now, I both can and must ask myself which way I should go. The moment this becomes an open question for me is the moment I put my walking on hold for long enough to inquire into it. Once stopped, I can approach this problem in the same detached, speculative manner I had earlier adopted for the post office, because I am not acting on any answer to it.
One mark of an untimely question is the availability of one’s answer. It is not only that one (feels certain that one) has an answer, but that, because that answer is currently at work in propelling one forward, the expression of the answer takes the form of using it (“Follow me!”) rather than explaining it (“This is how... ”). It is akin to the difference between responding to “Do you have a pencil?” with “Yes,” and responding by handing over a pencil. 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. Or at least we assumed we were. Socrates catches people in the awkward moment of transfer where everyone suddenly realizes that the hand that both parties had supposed to be holding the pencil is, in fact, empty.
In this story, “Which way is the supermarket?” was an untimely question, but a relatively lightweight one. A small amount of pressure—for instance, your telling me it is closed today—would be enough to get me to stop using that answer. At that point I would be free to stop walking and ask myself which way I should go. To be clear, I have at all points been free to go somewhere else. My freedom of movement has never been in question: no one is forcing me to go to the supermarket, and none of the paths before me are blocked. But in order to exercise the freedom to go wherever I want to go, I give up some freedom to think about whatever I want to think about. 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.
Not all projects are so easily put on hold. For example: I am a mother all the time. Even when I’m away from my children, I cannot pose to myself a question such as “What does it take to be a good mother?” without thinking about whether my own mothering meets the standard I am describing. I can’t step off the mothering treadmill long enough to consider the question in a dispassionate and detached way. The same is true of other substantial roles, such as being a student. Unless a student is somehow truly alienated from their education—just going through the motions to please others—they will be unable to approach the question as to what makes for a good student in an impartial and dispassionate manner. Their answer will have the marks of being currently in use, because they can’t take time off from this pursuit. Time off from studying, such as vacations or study breaks, cannot be equated with time off from taking the concept “student” as crucial to one’s self-understanding. One could stop being a student by dropping out of school, and perhaps one could stop being a parent by cutting off contact with one’s children, but those are high costs to pay for opening up a question. And notice that the person who paid those costs and became “open” to these questions by divesting themselves from the corresponding commitments would be precisely the one who had little reason to care about the answers.
The most interesting and most 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. Socrates tends to drive his inquiries toward such questions. One example is: Am I a just (i.e., good) person?
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. One can wonder, in a detached and curious spirit, whether there is life on other planets or how fast the fastest bird flies; one cannot wonder disinterestedly whether some harm that has been done to us is unjust. By the time a question of justice arises, one finds oneself needing to hit the ground running with an answer. There is no space for either a practical, deliberative activity such as “deciding,” in which one evaluates a proposed option for goodness; nor is there space for an inquisitive activity such as scientific analysis, in which one evaluates the truth of a claim—and this is what leads to our fighting about claims of justice (“Lousy cheater!”).
Our standing investment in the answers to untimely questions explains their contentiousness much better than the usual explanation, which is to dismiss these questions as “subjective.”
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.
It is a mistake to use the word “objective” to mean measurable, since “objective” picks out the larger category of questions where there is a fact of the matter about who is right and who is wrong. As mentioned, we all think questions of justice have this property—at least when we are worked up about them. 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. Questions amenable to measurement are readily detachable from the project of living of one’s life. Instead of saying that questions of justice are “subjective,” we should say that when it comes to a question of justice, my pursuit of the answer is inflected by my personal investment in how it gets answered: while asking it, I am necessarily already engaged in answering it.
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 event in the form of strong, negative emotions. These negative emotions are the most straightforward indication that not every case is like the supermarket case. Our inability to simply stop engaging in certain activities—loving someone who has died, caring about a job we’ve been fired from—serves as a way of demarcating those questions that are fundamental, those answers that bear a heavy load. Emotions such as rage and despair are how we respond when something happens to us that we were counting on not happening.
The name for these 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.” People are sometimes plunged into exaggerated certainty that they will fail or be frustrated in their aims—during these times, they might be far more pessimistic than they have reason to be. At other times, they might jump to the opposite extreme. When you are counting on the future to unfold in a particular way, because your ability to orient yourself within it depends on its unfolding in that way, you become inclined to flip back and forth—to waver—between positive and the negative certainty, alternating moments of hopefulness with those of despair. When something matters to our ability to navigate our lives, we need to have a belief about what will happen, because we make use of that belief, in the activity of living. For the same reason, those who trust are, in many contexts, given to waver into distrust: trust is that species of hope that pertains to whether others will hold up their end of the bargain.
Anger points to the presence, in us, of shared or collective answers to untimely questions. If there is something that I value privately—a beautiful cup—and it shatters, I will be sad. This cup was a (small) part of my answer to “How should I live?”—look at the cup, use the cup, show the cup off to other people—and now, due to events outside my control, I can no longer enact that answer. Sadness is immobilizing and disaffecting, there is nothing that it makes one do, and indeed it inclines one to spend some time doing just that: nothing. I can’t make the cup unshatter, and so there is nothing to be done.
You might have thought that the same would be true of anger: if I am angry that you wronged me, that wronging is in the past and cannot be changed. The reason why there is nonetheless something to be done about anger is that anger is fundamentally directed at the wrongdoer, on the grounds that the wrongdoing indicates a failure to give a shared answer. So, for example, if you violate my rights, that indicates that you do not see respect for my rights as an answer to an untimely question about how you ought to treat me. But I believed that “respect one another’s rights” was an answer we were giving together—a collective answer. And so, 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, or bringing it about that you are no longer part of the collective who gives that answer—because you are now dead, or an outcast. Setting aside what happens to you, a sufficient amount of clamor and outrage on my behalf may satisfy me, because it indicates that I am part of a group who gives the answer, restoring the status of the answer as “collective.” 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.
The load-bearing answers we give to untimely questions are both the sources of all our problems and the sources of all our reasons to care that we have problems. If we could ask the corresponding questions, we might be able to produce better answers, which would give rise to fewer problems. But it is not clear how someone is supposed to ask a question to which she thinks she has an answer, when she is currently using that answer to guide her life. She is not going to saw off the branch she is standing on. The question we should be asking ourselves is: How did she get on that branch in the first place?
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 when the command takes the form of some relatively sophisticated attitude such as ambition, or jealousy, or existential ennui, it has physical manifestations. When the command is urgent, you feel it in a particular part of your body, or by way of your heart pounding, or the breath catching in your throat, or an inability to move, or an inability to stop moving. Before it gets urgent you may not have any strong feeling associated with its presence; nonetheless, you know what to anticipate. 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 pain. The pain promises to go away if you do one thing, to increase if you do anything else.
These commands are savage, employing the tools of the torturer—pain, fear of more pain, the purely contrastive pleasure of temporary release from pain—to get you to do what you may see no other reason to do. The commands are also unreliable, since they have a history of not always panning out. Like a capricious tyrant, they are prone to reversals, filling you with regret for having acted as they ordered. Why do we obey such savage and inconsistent masters?
The answer is not: because they overwhelm us. It is rare that you are so hungry that you couldn’t restrain yourself from eating what was in front of you, if you knew, for instance, that it was someone else’s food. When we disobey a command, it is usually at the prompting of another command—for instance, the command to observe social niceties might trump the command of hunger. 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.
The truth is that 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. The question “How should I live?,” posed to oneself, faces a resistance similar to the resistance parents face when trying to correct their children. By the time that question shows up on the scene, there is already a way in which you are living. That means it’s too late to ask, How should I live? You can say those words out loud, you can inflect your voice at the end so that it sounds like a question, but you’re fooling yourself if you think you’re opening some kind of inquiry. Our attempts at self-parenting—at taking ourselves firmly in hand, giving ourselves a good shake, and confronting ourselves with the basic or fundamental questions about the meaning of life—all of that is liable to feel otiose, as though we are decorating the surface of life, leaving its deep structure untouched.
We are the sorts of beings who need answers before developing the ability to ask questions, and who therefore rely on answers to unasked questions. Which is to say: commands. In the previous chapter, we described the answers to untimely questions as “load-bearing,” insofar as they guide our actions over long stretches of time, rendering us vulnerable to intense emotion if disrupted. In this chapter, we will see that to the extent that the corresponding questions were never asked, we can also call these answers “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.
When it comes to getting fed or hydrated or staying warm or facing some imminent threat, our bodies are ready to issue loud and definitive answers to the question “What should I do?” The questions never had to be asked; the answers somehow just came to us of their own accord. It is not quite right to say I am commanding myself, since the voice that arises in me is not one that I speak, whether silently or aloud. I am the cause of the voice, but not because I decided to say something. Those who are puzzled by the fact that human beings are capable of such half-baked ideation should consider the phenomenon of dreams.
Our bodies are not the only source of savage commands. Each of us stands in a variety of overlapping relationships with other people, relationships that are predicated on bonds of reliance, support, and identification with them.
There isn’t a perfect English word that covers this broad and heterogenous set of connections we have with others, so I will take some liberties with the word “kinship”—usually restricted to family relationships grounded in marriage—and stretch it to cover all of this territory. The bonds I have described can be thought of as a wide variety of ways in which I can see another as “akin” to myself. When someone is my kin, their opinions matter to me just by virtue of the fact that they belong to some group, where the group in question can be defined geographically, or on the basis of an identity category, or in terms of blood relations, or in some other way.
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? Do we believe in God? What kinds of jobs, social gatherings, hobbies, music, home décor, dress, and so on are appropriate for people like us? Who is in charge of our group? More generally: How should we behave in relation to each other? The kind of question that is answered, and the kind of answer that is given, varies depending on the kinship group, but a common denominator is that the members of one’s kinship group are enjoined to help one another—or at the very least, not to do one another harm.
Much of a person’s basic ethical “stance” is underwritten by one or another kinship relation. Group membership, in effect, stands in for the kind of justification one might have arrived at, had one been in a position to ask who or what one should care about. 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 two commands serve up different forms of existential threat: the former pertains to my biological existence, whereas the latter concerns my social existence, which is to say, how my place in my community is demarcated by others’ opinions of me.
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. But isn’t this familiar territory? Doesn’t everyone already understand the dangers of bodily self-indulgence and group conformity? Socrates shows that the answer is no: people wildly underestimate just how much these commands poison our minds, to the point where we’ve normalized the incoherent babbling that comes out of our mouths when we have to explain what it’s like to be driven by them. I’m talking about two phenomena in particular: weakness of will and revenge.
We can all relate: we stay up too late, we overeat, we avoid answering emails, we make impulse purchases, 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” (an English word formed off of the ancient Greek word for the condition, akrasia), or “weak-willed.” The weak-willed or akratic person insists that they wavered with their eyes open. Socrates’ claim is that this story doesn’t hold together.
According to Socrates, the case the akratic wants to describe, where they recognized that one option was better and still freely chose the other, simply can’t happen. And yet we seem to be attached to the phenomenon of “acting against our better judgment” or “knowing full well I shouldn’t eat another cookie but still eating it.” Recall Tolstoy’s reference to the “way of weakness” in which he purports to make the worse choice even though “I know what is best and it is in my power.” Doesn’t this sort of thing happen all the time? Socrates’ answer is, no, it doesn’t ever happen, because it can’t. You could be forced to eat a cookie when you knew that was the inferior choice, because someone shoved the cookie down your throat, but you couldn’t choose to eat it when you knew that was the worse option, because we never do that. You can no more choose what you know to be worse than you can believe what you know to be false. So what’s really going on?
Simple: 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. By the time you are ready to regret the choice, the cookie is far away again (in the past), and your body is now prepared to tell you that you made a mistake. To this description you object: even as I was eating the cookie, I knew it was a mistake! Socrates will correct you: even as you were eating the cookie, you were able to represent to yourself the future state in which you would regret it, and that upcoming command hovered like a specter—Socrates’ word is phantasma—above what you were doing. Don’t confuse your ability to notice that you’d make a different command under different circumstances with actually giving yourself that counterfactual command. Just because you understand that you will regret this choice in the future, it doesn’t follow that you do regret it now.
What Socrates denies the akratic, then, is the point of stability they are trying to insist on when they say, “I knew all along this was a mistake.” 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 Y to be better than X in the next. There is nothing that it knows all along. That is the moral of the story of akrasia.
What is remarkable about akrasia is that it is an absurdity hiding in plain sight. For many of us it rears its head multiple times a day. Our mechanism for conducting our lives doesn’t work, and we see that it doesn’t work, we watch it not working, but we nevertheless tell ourselves, “What I am doing is bad, but I’m doing it because it is also good, I don’t mean good in one way and bad in another, I mean bad overall but a good kind of badness, so that it also seemed good overall—in the sense that I wanted to do it, though I knew it was bad, and I wasn’t taken in by the seeming, except I also was. This is normal.” Socrates says: All you have to do is pay attention to the words coming out of your own mouth to see that what you’re saying can’t be a description of what’s happening. 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 even 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 such cracks.
Just as our bodies routinely lead us to choose what is, in bodily terms, worse, our kinship attachments routinely lead us to choose, what is, in kinship terms, worse. We intentionally harm our kin, and we do so under the guise of kinship. The names we give to this phenomenon range from “accountability” and “justice” to “punching up” and “indignation” and “self-defense” and “retribution,” but I’m going to call it by the name we use for it when we are suffering the harm: “revenge.” 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. It sounds crazy to say that revenge is an act of love—that it is hateful love—but in fact that description is not crazy. What’s crazy is the thing itself.
Let’s go step by step, starting with a definition of revenge: X is getting revenge on Y when, first, X sees the way he is treating Y as good because Y sees it as bad; and, second, X justifies his behavior on retaliatory grounds.
By retaliatory I mean to include, but not restrict myself to, the case where Y did, or was perceived to have done, something wrong first. Sometimes X is incensed at Y in the absence of wrongdoing: X objects not to anything Y has done but to who Y is, resulting in a spiteful desire to take Y down a peg. I think that desire—spite—belongs to the revenge family, as does what we might call “prevenge,” where X harms Y in anticipation of Y’s wronging X. So I’m using “revenge” somewhat broadly, to include all the cases 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.
Socrates’ analysis of all three flavors of revenge shares the basic structure of his analysis of weakness of will: revenge is a form of wavering thinly disguised as non-wavering by a proliferation of terms. As in the case of weakness of will, we use multiple words for the same thing so as to conceal our inconsistency. 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 does not offer up an argument against taking revenge, because he does not need to—any more than he needed to argue against acting akratically. As soon as he gets us to stop using many words for the same thing, the self-contradiction—of being commanded to hurt by the command to help—becomes apparent.
Socrates’ approach to revenge is simple: you shouldn’t ever do bad things. It’s never good to 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 noting that we have a collection of phrases—such as “doing injustice,” “doing harm,” “doing wrong,” “doing wrong in return,” and “behaving shamefully”—that, in the context of the kinship command, all mean the same thing. Nonetheless, we hide behind this proliferation of terms in order to talk ourselves into the idea that sometimes, instead of helping our kin, we should harm them. But if we shine the light of reason on the words we speak, we will have to accept that all of these phrases mean the same thing, that there is just no good way to be bad, and that the kinship command routinely commands us to waver.
This reveals an important truth about empathy. If empathy is the psychological power to import the feelings of others, it follows that empathy is a prerequisite for revenge. Empathy is what allows us to channel the suffering we inflict on others to a sufficient degree to take revenge on them. If this is surprising, that is because we usually use the word “empathy” in a laudatory way that conceals the existence of what we might call “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 empathetically import your joy, and be pained by it (envy), or empathetically import your suffering, and be pleased by it (Schadenfreude). By contrast, in the more heartwarming manifestations of empathy, the ones we usually have in mind when calls for more empathy abound, I am pained by (my representation of) your being pained and feel joy at (my representation of) your joy. But there is a common ground: 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 what’s wrong”; “Being bad can never be what makes something good.” Why would we ever waver from these truisms? The answer is: kinship.
Socrates noticed a simple fact about revenge that we tend to ignore, which is that it is only possible to take revenge against kin. First, because anger is a prerequisite for vengeance and harms only incite anger within the context of the right kinship relation. I might get angry at my husband if he forgets my birthday, or my child if he puts off his homework for too long, or my nurse if I feel her bedside manner is lacking, but I don’t expect birthday recognition from the nurse or a skillful bedside manner from my child. If you are my fellow citizen, and you do not vote, I might get angry at you, but I am unlikely to mind if you are a foreigner, and you don’t vote in the elections of your own country. Notice that even when it comes being violently attacked, I might say I would be angry at anyone who did this, but in fact I am only angered insofar as I see that anyone as a someone, which is to say, a fellow human being. 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.
Second, note that the vengeful person is treating another person in a way that she would ordinarily see as forbidden, were it not for whatever it is she is retaliating for. The constraints on what she would be allowed to do to the person absent the retaliatory justification spell out the relevant kinship relation. She is violating behavioral norms governing how one generally treats one’s spouse, or mother, or neighbor, or fellow human being, on the grounds that the person in some way “deserves it.” So, for instance, you can get revenge on your spouse by just ignoring them, or leaving dirty dishes in the sink, whereas in order to get revenge on a stranger you need to violate those norms that apply to how we treat any human being—physically harm them, insult them, or intentionally impede one of their projects. 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 Socratic view on revenge is not that it is immoral, but that it is impossible. Socrates, who fought in the Peloponnesian War, objects not to violence as such, but to vengeance as a justification for violence. The pacifist thinks that you shouldn’t kill people whereas Socrates thinks that you can’t do good by doing bad. The Socratic position on vengeance should also be distinguished from the attitude of a martyr who accepts mistreatment placidly, with equanimity, by turning the other cheek. The reason why Socrates tried so hard to persuade the Athenians not to kill him is that he thought they would be committing a terrible injustice.† Socrates was no martyr, and when they made their decision clear he objected to it vehemently. The one thing he did not try to do is hurt them back, because he understood that he could not be just by being unjust. Revenge simply makes no sense.
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.
If, when you try to articulate what you are doing to someone else, you find yourself babbling, contradicting yourself, unable to make sense of the words coming out of your own mouth, then even you will become aware that you can’t expect to persuade anyone. This happens to teachers all the time: you learn what you really understand, and what you only appeared to yourself to understand, when you put your supposed knowledge to the test by trying to explain it to someone.
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. This wouldn’t stop you from acting on the basis of a savage command—but in doing so, you would be turning your back on having Socrates as a friend. “Persuade or be persuaded” means refusing to live on the basis of the kinds of answers that only sound like good answers before you’ve explicitly posed the relevant question. 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.
For any given command, we have the idea of setting it aside in favor of something more important. Many people would pride themselves on being able to rise above hunger, or exhaustion, or conformity pressures, if the stakes are high enough. Socrates asks us to imagine becoming 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.
Socratic Intellectualism
There are three main strands of ethical theorizing in the West: the first is Kantian ethics, also known as “deontology” or, in one of its currently popular forms, “contractualism”; the second is what Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick called “Utilitarianism,” and that some of its modern day proponents generalize to a position they call “consequentialism”; the third is Virtue Ethics, which, being inspired by the thought of Aristotle, also goes by the name “Neo-Aristotelian ethics.” The fundamental principle of Kantian ethics is that of constraining one’s actions by respect for humanity (in one’s own person and that of others); that of Utilitarian ethics is to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number; and that of Virtue Ethics is to act virtuously, which is to say, do whatever the decent (just, kind, courageous, prudent, and so on) person would do if he were in the situation you are in.
Common sense distinguishes between what justice demands and what is personally advantageous: although it is valuable to do what is just, and it is valuable to do what benefits oneself, everyday intuition says that these two values do not always overlap, and one can be torn between them. The surprise is that not only does Socrates disagree with common sense on this point, but so do all the other ethical theories described above.
Most of us are, like Alcibiades, drawn to the conceit that we have the resources to distinguish between what is just and what is to our advantage. It seems obvious that there is a particular way that the body picks out something as good—it points us to what’s in our personal interest—whereas our kin groups point us to what’s good from the point of view of the group: the courageous, the admirable, the right, the fair. These cues lead us to conclude that the world contains two distinctive types of goods that we might pursue. Socrates thinks that is a mistake. We’ve mapped our own subjective confusion about the good—our inability to decide what’s best, our inclination to waver back and forth between two incompatible answers to that question—onto the world, as if it were a divide in the things themselves.
At the heart of Socrates’ argument is the claim that all of us would rather have good things than bad things, and that we are “least willing to be deprived” of “the greatest goods.” Socrates would say that “self-interest” and “happiness” and “advantage” are one set of names we apply to this greatest good, and “duty,” “morality,” “justice,” and “what is good for others” are another set of names for the same thing. The first set of names reflect the influence of the bodily command, the second that of the kinship command, so there is a subjective difference between them; nonetheless, there aren’t two kinds of goods “out there.” There is no objective difference; there is no distinctive kind of good to which the bodily command, or the kindship demand, directs us. When Alcibiades goes back and forth between describing the good as “the just,” and describing it as “the advantageous,” he is not describing two things out there. He’s just wavering. There’s only one thing out there: the good.
Ancient Epicureanism offered the first attempt at an enlightened version of the bodily answer. It was an entire worldview organized around the possibility of identifying, in a consistent way, the set of pleasures that are natural to us.
Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick cite Epicurus as a precursor to their own “Utilitarian” view, which offers a systematic way of ensuring consistency in bodily answers: whereas my body tells me what I have to do now in order to avoid what feels like my death, the Utilitarian systematization of this answer tells me that every such demand matters equally. This means my future pains matter as much as my present ones, and this also means yours matter as much as mine. In order to figure out what ought to be done, one must do the math. The problem may be complex, and there may be many unknowns, but in principle there is an answer—a fixed and unwavering one—as to what I ought to do: whatever will maximize pleasure and minimize pain for humanity considered as a totality (and, potentially, for the totality of all sentient beings).
The Stoics believed that our truest attachments are not to our families, or associates, or country, but to a world order governed by fixed universal laws. If you understand your place within this larger order, you will see that within it there can be no conflicting interests, and that you never have any reason for revenge. They advocated against all passions, but especially against anger. The Greek Stoic Epictetus, for instance, instructs his reader on how to feel pity, instead of anger, for wrongdoers. When human beings or even animals more generally appear to be pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, according to the Stoics what is really going on is that they are moved to act in a manner that befits the kind of creature they are: in effect, Stoics analyze appetitive motivation in terms of an animal’s kinship relation to itself. When you appear to be selfishly following the individual dictates of your particular body, what you are really doing is participating in a larger whole by following the rules that govern the kind of thing you are.
Stoic cosmopolitanism is the ancestor of Kantian deontology, which offers an account of kinship grounded in the power of practical rationality. The correct action, on Kant’s theory, is the one that is consistent with respect for the activity of rational thought—in myself and in every other rational being—and thereby allows me to see myself as a member in an (ideal) universal community of beings capable of mutual recognition. Kant calls this community “the kingdom of ends.” Kantianism includes a test—called “the categorical imperative”—that provides a fixed and unwavering answer as to whether an action is permitted or not. The power of reason is here understood as the power of an individual to legislate for oneself—to give oneself rules that work universally, for every member of one’s kind.
Classical Utilitarianism foregrounds the maximization of pleasure, offering up a way to stabilize the bodily answer, whereas deontology foregrounds respect for each individual’s place in a larger whole, stabilizing the kinship answer. The first type of ethical theory centers ethics around experience (“I feel pleasure and pain”), the second around membership (“I belong to the group of rational beings”). It is important to note that while both counsel rationality, it is of different kinds. One operates by creating a giant aggregate of everyone’s experiences, positive or negative, which is then the target of maximization. The other gives a central place to the idea of a moral law. Law is a kinship concept, addressed to a creature who understands itself not as part of an aggregate but as belonging to a kind: a group of individuals who likewise subject themselves to that same law. Utilitarian rationality takes a calculative form; it works by cost-benefit analysis. In contrast, deontological rationality takes a legalistic, regulative form—it works by subjecting what you were antecedently inclined to do to a constraint. The first is a way of caring about advantage, the second about justice.
Both traditions have a response to the Socratic complaint about our blind obedience to savage commands. Contractualists and other modern-day Kantians deny that morality makes us hostage to inarticulate commands: the cleaned-up kinship command is so clean, they insist, that it constitutes the only possible rule in accordance with which a rational being could, on full reflection, choose to live. Blind obedience to arbitrary commands—“heteronomy” in Kant’s lingo—is precisely the fate of beings who don’t give themselves the moral law; by contrast, obedience to the categorical imperative is self-rule, or “autonomy.” The Utilitarian (or, more generally, consequentialist) way of managing our rebellious impulses is to embrace them. Whatever it is you were hoping to get out of whatever you were going to do, they are proposing a way to get more of that. There is no possible reason to rebel, since none of the goods in the service of which you might rebel lie outside all the good that can be brought about by your actions. But notice that the measures taken to render the two commands rebellion-proof also serve to obscure the divide between the just and the advantageous. The war between the just and the advantageous becomes a war that cannot be articulated within Kantianism or Utilitarianism, because it is the war between those theories.
In short, the distinction we take for granted every time we blithely notice a conflict between justice and advantage is one that philosophers have not settled how to draw. We think we are speaking from some stable position when we insist that there is a difference between justice and advantage, but Socrates would say we are merely being blown back and forth. We can now supplement what he would say: we are being blown back and forth between an impulse whose best available rational articulation takes a calculative form, and an impulse whose best available rational articulation takes a legalistic form.
Virtue Ethics, the theory that traces its origins to Plato’s student Aristotle, attempts to harmonize the two commands without subordinating either to the other. The Virtue Ethicist believes that to exercise virtue—to behave as a just, and courageous, and wise, and decent person does—is at once the greatest source of pleasure for the individual who so behaves, and at the same time the greatest source of benefit for his society. The work of harmonizing the two commands is not theoretical, but practical: they will come into line given the presence of a supportive culture, the right social norms, the best laws, a good upbringing, and so on. The claim is that if one is raised well in a good society, one becomes habituated to responding as a decent person would in each specific case. Such a person will not hear the command of the body separately from the command of social pressure, because both of these voices will have been harmonized into the single song of virtue. The virtuous person will heed this voice not as one succumbs to the onerous demands of a tyrannical master, but as one rejoices at the opportunity to do something beautiful and noble.
The Virtue Ethicist holds that in a well-ordered society of well-brought-up people there will not be much of a conflict between what is in someone’s personal interest and what is in the interest of the group. If you frequently find yourself torn in this way, something has gone wrong either with you or with the world you live in. Thus, Aristotle agrees with Socrates: there is really no tension between the value of justice and the value of advantage, these are not two separate goods, and any appearance that they are must be chalked up to error—either an error in the way you see things, or an error in the way your society is organized, or (likely) both.
Socrates believed that savage commands are not the only sources of answers to untimely questions, denying that we are forced to rely on even the cleaned-up versions of those commands posited by the other three traditions. For Socrates, what appears to be a difficulty with life—that it puts us in situations in which we must make “tough choices” between personal and social value—is in fact a difficulty in our thinking about life. What is tough about tough choices is only that we are consigned to approaching them in slavish subjection to savage commands. “What should I do?” is a single question: if you find yourself giving two incompatible answers, that is your ignorance talking. More specifically, what is doing the talking is not any conception you have of the good—if you had one, it would be one conception—but two savage commands, each of which has you at its beck and call, neither of which is willing to explain itself.
For Socrates, ethics consists in inquiring into untimely questions, rather than in finding ways to read answers off of (either, or both) of the savage commands. Socrates’ identification of the quest to be a good person with a quest for knowledge underlies the distinctively Socratic denial that anyone ever acts against their better judgment (“weakness of will”) or does what they know to be wrong. If, unlike Socrates, you think you already know the answers to untimely questions, then you need to explain why you yourself sometimes fail to act on them. How does the Utilitarian explain not donating more to charity? How does the Kantian explain her little white lies? The answer is that neither believes that knowing what you should do suffices for action—they posit an additional something, call it “willpower,” or “effort,” or “commitment” or “respect,” that one has to add to moral knowledge to make it effective.
Socrates would charge all of these views with creating a false ceiling: what they are calling “knowledge” is not yet knowledge. Another, higher kind of knowledge is possible. The mystery substance with which they insist knowledge be supplemented is, according to Socrates, a fiction constructed to cover the ignorance born of prematurely arrested inquiry. If you actually knew what you should do, you would do it. So long as you don’t know, holds Socrates, the proper ethical attitude is an inquisitive one.
These three features of Socratism—that we don’t now know, that if we knew we would act on our knowledge, and that intellectual conversations are the road to becoming a good person—add up to an “intellectualism” that many people find so implausible as to be ready to dismiss it without serious consideration.
Socratic intellectualism turns its back on a very basic human need: the need to already know. Kantianism, Utilitarianism, and Virtue Ethics tell us that we already know how to live, that the formula for how to do so is simply a matter of cleaning up the bodily command, or cleaning up the kinship command, or of looking to the best ways in which the people around us have found to satisfy both at the same time. These ethical theories address the urgent demand for answers now. The human need to know how to live subjects us to its desperate logic: Because I must know, it must be the case that I do know. The passionate confidence with which people are inclined to proclaim their ethical beliefs—often with little ability to defend those beliefs—stems not from flightiness but from a seriousness about the project of living their one and only life. Could it really be true that we will have to go through our whole lives, from birth to death, without ever knowing whether we are doing it right? The answer is yes. If the encounter with Socratic ethics is destabilizing—being refuted was, for Socrates’ interlocutors, like having the ground shift underneath their feet—those who inhabit it accept a much deeper instability: there is no firm ground, and you don’t ever get to take foundations for granted.
The paradox of utopia is that we don’t seem to like it very much. And our dislike for utopia is a point in favor of Socratic intellectualism. Socrates will not accept that the problem could be with perfection itself; he will not permit us to say that some life, or some society, is “too happy.” Instead, he will diagnose the problem as this: every utopia that has ever been constructed has been an imperfect person’s idea of a perfect place. When we encounter a world that matches our template for what a happy world would look like, and recoil from the prospect of living there, that is a sign that our template might not be so good. Our “utopias” reflect our ignorance about fundamental questions; they write it large enough for us to see it clearly. The paradox of utopia suggests that our thinking about how we should live may not yet be complete.
Part Two: The Socratic Method
Your answers to untimely questions stem from savage commands. Suppose you want to replace them with better answers. What should you do? Simple: keep an open mind and inquire, moving toward what’s true and away from what’s false.
But, as you might expect, there is a catch: following the formula, using the method, is not as straightforward as it appears to be. When we try to follow it, we find that each of the three ingredients—open-mindedness, inquiry, and separating truth from falsity—conceals a paradox.
Open-mindedness means being able to admit that you are wrong. This sounds easy enough until you insist that the last three words be interpreted literally. Set aside being able to admit that you were wrong in the past, or that you are the sort of creature who is liable to go wrong, or that what you think at this very moment might be shown to be wrong at some future time, or that there might be some people out there right now who believe that you are wrong. Let’s focus on your ability to know (now) that you are in the wrong (now). If that’s what open-mindedness amounts to, being open-minded seems to entail believing what you also know to be false!
If you are wondering why a person who can admit that she was or might be wrong isn’t sufficiently open-minded, recall that with untimely questions, there is no suspension of judgment. If someone wants to criticize your answer to an untimely question without offering you a replacement, the only way you can be receptive to such criticism is by being able to see what is wrong with what you think even as you continue to think it. Either we cannot be open-minded about untimely questions, or we must somehow be able to think, “p is wrong, even though I believe p.” This is called “Moore’s paradox”.
We are eager to operationalize questions—to turn them into problems—by introducing measurement. So, for example, when confronted with questions such as What is it to be angry? or smart? or good at policework?, people are inclined to look to bodily indicators such as heart rate and skin temperature, or scores on IQ tests, or number of cases closed. The advantage of turning a question into a problem of measurement is that it becomes clear what it would mean to have a solution to it. Now consider this: If I were to treat a question as a proper question, rather than a problem in disguise—which is to say, to ask that question purely for the sake of answering it—could I tell when I had in fact arrived at the answer? This is called “Meno’s paradox,” named after the Socratic interlocutor Meno, who challenged Socrates with one of the most difficult questions in all of the dialogues: “If you should meet with it, how will you know that this [i.e., the answer] is the thing that you did not know?”
It was obvious to everyone who encountered him that Socrates was a gadfly who busied himself with the negative, destructive activity of refutation—but Socrates also characterizes himself as a midwife who helpfully, constructively births the ideas of others. How can he be both? How is the negative project of avoiding falsehood related to the positive project of seeking the truth? I call this “the Gadfly-Midwife paradox.” In order to explain how there is one Socrates, rather than two, we are going to have to settle the question of how a person can go about both pursuing truth and avoiding falsity, when, on the face of it, these tasks are in tension with one another. To get a sense of the nature of the tension, consider that those who want truths must come to have beliefs, whereas the only sure way to avoid falsity is not to believe anything at all.
The Gadfly-Midwife Paradox
Socrates shocks people into recognizing just how lost they are, by making them aware that they are in fact missing what they purport to know. People subjected to this treatment describe themselves as feeling numb, unable to speak, as seeing their words waver back and forth. Unsurprisingly, they find this disconcerting. The individual who goes around removing others’ pretensions to wisdom is going to find himself surrounded by a lot of grumpy and resentful people—that much is obvious to anyone, or at least, to anyone but Socrates, who, having taken up the project of systematically refuting all the politicians in Athens, reports with surprise the moment when “I realized, to my sorrow and alarm, that I was getting unpopular.” So that’s the first Socrates: the refutational gadfly.
The other Socrates is Socrates the midwife. In the Theaetetus, Socrates claims that not only was his mother a midwife, but he, too, is a kind of midwife—only for men rather than women, and for the soul rather than the body. Though he is himself “barren” of insights, others are not. When people converse with him, “they discover within themselves a multitude of beautiful things, which they bring forth into the light. But it is I,” he boasts, “with God’s help, who deliver them of this offspring.” Going along with the “midwife” image is Socrates’ claim, in the Meno and Phaedo, that what his interlocutor is doing is “recollecting” something they already knew, and he is only helping them in that process: bringing hidden wisdom to light.
So, what is Socrates? Is he the gadfly who leaves people stunned, bereft, lost, and confused, or the midwife who helps birth their beautifully clear idea-babies? Is he engaged in a fundamentally negative refutational activity, of clearing away pretensions to knowledge, or in a fundamentally positive inquisitive one, of finding new items that one can add to what one claims to know? I call this “the Gadfly-Midwife paradox.”
I think the most natural conclusion to draw about Socrates’ own solution to the Gadfly-Midwife paradox is that Socrates equates the negative process of refutation and the positive process of discovery. Socrates the gadfly is Socrates the midwife. Socrates engages in productive inquiry by doing nothing other than refuting people. Which is to say, when he destructively, negatively, refutes people, that constitutes a positive, productive search for the truth. Socratic conversation is inquisitive refutation.
The reason why pursuing the truth requires courting falsehood is that in order to have a true belief about some subject matter you must, in the first instance, have some belief or other about that subject matter. If you don’t believe anything you have definitively failed at the task of believing what’s true—but you have just as definitively succeeded at the task of avoiding error. The two tasks may line up in retrospect; they do not line up in prospect. If you are giving someone instructions, and you instruct them that they must acquire a true belief, that is not at all the same instruction as the instruction to avoid error at all costs.
Socrates didn’t think we have to work in stages, nor was he forced to prioritize either the pursuit of truth or the avoidance of error. Instead, he conceived of learning as a social activity where one person prioritizes the pursuit of truth and the other person prioritizes the avoidance of error. This insight is at the very heart of the Socratic method, of Socratism, and of Socratic ethics.
It is the job of Socrates’ interlocutor to give answers to questions, whereas Socrates’ job is that of refutation, which is to say, applying tests to those answers. Socrates is amazed that sometimes people get “into such a state with me as to be literally ready to bite when I take away some nonsense or other from them.” Such people fail to understand the role that Socrates’ refutations are playing in a larger process.
Socratic inquiry, in which one person tries to maintain the correctness of a given answer to a question, and the other tries to show them that it has not yet been answered, or has been answered incorrectly, might appear to share these features of adversarial division of labor: being zero-sum, being competitive, and involving the adjudication of a third-party moderator or audience. (Recall that many of the dialogues were conducted in front of some kind of audience.) In fact, however, as Socrates repeatedly emphasizes, it shares none of them.
Socrates is regularly in a situation where he has to try to disabuse his interlocutor of the notion that what is going on between them is taking place in an adversarial or competitive context. He tells Gorgias, “I’m afraid to pursue my examination of you, for fear that you should take me to be speaking with eagerness to win against you, rather than to have our subject become clear.” But if refutation is, in truth, a cooperative, collaborative process, why does it appear so adversarial to those whom Socrates refutes? The answer is that they are convinced that they can do, by themselves, what Socrates is trying to help them do.
People find it hard to accept that thinking is a social activity. We persist in seeing it as a private, inner activity. When someone is trying to think with you, you experience that as competitive—as though they were vying, with you, to be “the thinker.” You see the activity of thinking as indivisible, because, at bottom, you’re sure that you can do it on your own. You find it incredible and unacceptable that thinking is something you need help to do. Each of us envisions ourselves as a kind of house, and inside that house is a special being—we call it “a mind,” and it has the power to figure out answers to questions. We conceive of thinking as a “mental activity,” which is to say, an activity of this “mind.”
The misunderstanding endures, to this day, even among philosophers: we are inclined to retreat from conversation to a shelter we call thinking. When someone has a good rebuttal, we sometimes say, “I’ll have to think more about this,” as though the real test comes when I import the claim into my inner sanctum, the place where Thinking happens. We breathe a sigh of relief when some dispute comes to an end and we can, as we say, sit back and think. Arguing is stressful—thinking, we tell ourselves, is enjoyable. Socrates would say: that’s because you’re not actually thinking.
The demand to choose between the pursuit of the truth and the avoidance of error comes as an insult to a person who was taking for granted that they had been doing both. Socrates tells us that our minds are not as powerful as we thought they were. When we shelter from the demands and pressures of the outside world and quietly engage in an activity we call “thinking to ourselves,” that is not in fact when thinking happens. Thinking happens during the uncomfortable times when you permit others to intrude into your private mental world, to correct you.
Moore’s Paradox of Self-Knowledge
Sentences that fit the pattern, “p is the case, but I believe it isn’t”—or its subtly different variant “p is the case, but I don’t believe it is”—are sometimes called “Moore sentences” after the philosopher G. E. Moore, who first singled them out for philosophical attention. It is important to notice that such sentences are not logical contradictions, as is evident from the fact that they can be true. Moreover, the person herself can believe, assert, and know variants of these sentences, for instance ones expressed in the past or future tense. Jones can readily assert “I used to believe that honey spoils, though it doesn’t” and he can also, if he knows he is a forgetful person, tell us that “Honey never spoils, but I, Jones, won’t believe that in the future.” Jones can also be generically aware of his own fallibility: “I am sometimes wrong about food safety.” What he can’t do is believe that this is one of those times. The Moore sentence is not a contradiction; it is a blind spot. A person can be aware that others’ minds diverge from reality, and she can be aware that her own mind can, or did, or will diverge from reality; what she cannot be aware of is the specific way in which it is currently doing so. So goes the philosophical conventional wisdom since Moore.
That conventional wisdom says it’s just straightforwardly impossible to believe or sincerely assert a Moore sentence. No one can do it. It cannot be done. Jones can speak the sentence “I believe honey spoils, but it doesn’t spoil,” he can even shout it, but the one thing he can’t do is mean what he’s saying. Jones can “think” those words in the sense that he can, for example, imagine them scrolling on a screen before his mind’s eye, but he cannot believe the corresponding sentence. He can’t be aware of (exactly) what he’s wrong about.
This bit of conventional wisdom generates a paradox—“Moore’s paradox”—because it is puzzling that such truths would be inaccessible. Consider some other examples of inaccessible truths: many scientific truths are inaccessible to me because I haven’t paid the cost of entry—namely, years of study—whereas others would be inaccessible even if I had, because no one has discovered them yet. I can’t access truths about the past that went unrecorded, or truths about your emotional life that you refuse to share with me. Moore-paradoxical sentences are unlike any of these cases. The facts that correspond to those sentences, and make them true, are inaccessible to us not because they are too far away from us, but because they are, somehow, too close. Philosophers find this deeply puzzling: How can proximity generate difficulties of access?
I am going to argue that it is, in fact, possible to sincerely assert a Moore sentence, and that it is important that this is possible: there exist Moore sentences whose inaccessibility would be a moral and intellectual disaster for us.
If two philosophers meet, and they meet as philosophers, then it is likely that before long one of them will tell the other why they are wrong about something. Refutation is the fundamental form of philosophical interaction; even if most of us are not Socratics, we all share in the Socratic patrimony.
What happens to you when you are refuted? What is it to be in a state of aporia? Let’s start with the notion that aporia—being refuted—is something that is experienced and felt by the person who undergoes it. Suppose that person A shows person B, in the absence of person C, that C’s views are incorrect. Has A refuted C? Not as far as Socrates is concerned: so long as C is unaware of what has transpired, there is no state of aporia, and thus no refutation.
So, what is the experience of being (really) refuted? Is it the same as changing one’s mind, or suspending judgment on some question one used to have a firm belief on? No. First, there are non-refutational routes to changing one’s mind or suspending judgment: I might simply forget my old views, and come to adopt a new one or no view at all, without noticing what I have given up. But even in the case where I suspend judgment because I have been refuted, those two events are not identical. The same point holds for change of mind: it is not the same thing as refutation, but rather is an effect of refutation. Refutation may cause a change of mind or suspension of judgment, but something is not identical to what it causes. Moreover, the qualitative character of refutation is quite different from either change of mind or suspension of judgment. Being refuted feels like ignorance, confusion, perplexity, whereas once you have changed my mind the perplexity is over and I think I am now in the right. And if I have suspended judgment I at least know I am not wrong, so that is a kind of safety as well.
Refutation is a (possible) reason for the suspension of judgment, or change of mind; but refutation should not be equated with the effects of refutation. A change of mind or suspension of judgment is sometimes undertaken in response to a predicament that necessitates it, and it is that predicament that we want to describe. The predicament is an experience to the effect that, until I change my mind or suspend judgment, I am in the wrong, I am making a mistake. One needn’t voice this predicament out loud, but in a philosophical context, it is polite to do so. Instead of skipping directly from asserting p to denying it, or suspending judgment about it, we mark the transition by saying, “You got me” or “You’re right” or “I’m wrong” or “I see now” or “Okay”—or just by pausing for a moment. These phrases (or silences), taken together with their corresponding facial expressions, serve to distinguish cases where one changes one’s mind as a result of being in the predicament of being refuted from cases of simply changing one’s mind.
One possible way to describe what you are doing when you are refuting someone is that you are getting them to contradict themselves. Should we then say that being refuted amounts to asserting a contradiction? That cannot be right, either. Most philosophers, as well as most nonphilosophers, believe that no claim of the form “p and not p” could possibly be true, and that it is impossible to sincerely assert one—and yet these people can still be refuted!
To judge that “p and not p,” is to judge that in some way or other the world is contradictory. But that is not the kind of thought we are trying to produce in refuting someone. We are trying to tell him: the world is not the problem, what is broken is your thinking about it. We insist that there is a way of thinking properly, and it is not his, that he is in the wrong, that his mind is—not was—in some kind of defective condition. We want him to judge that the world does not really work the way he thinks it does. This is just to say, we want to get him in a position to sincerely assert a Moore sentence. The sentence that expresses the content of a refutation is not “p and not p” but “p, but I don’t believe it” (or “not p, but I believe it”). Thus, the possibility of asserting Moore sentences and the possibility of refutation are one and the same. What is at stake in Moore’s paradox is nothing less than the practice of philosophy itself.
When I assess what you think, I compare it to the way the world really is. But looking at how the world really is is how I figure out what I think in the first place. When I ask myself what I think about something, I am already asking what is true about that thing. There is no room for a separate assessment step, which means that my thoughts are evaluatively inaccessible to me. Normative self-blindness is the phenomenon that underlies Moore’s paradox. When I make an assertion about the way the world is, you can also ascribe to me the corresponding belief, as though, when I said, “Honey never spoils,” I had said “I believe that honey never spoils.” The reason you can take this liberty is that these two things—p’s being the case, and my believing that p—are, though distinct from your point of view, identical from my own. If I believe that p, I think I am correct in holding that belief, and that p is the case. When I have a belief, I don’t have the ability to separately evaluate the truth of that belief. But that is not the case when I look at your beliefs: the question of what you believe and whether it is true are not the same question.
People who cooperate with us in the right way make possible a form of normative assessment that has no solipsistic counterpart. This happens when we make a promise to someone, and it happens when someone refutes us. I cannot distinguish between “something I believe” and “a truth about the world” introspectively, because I cannot assess my own beliefs for truth while continuing to believe them; but of course my beliefs are assessable for truth, and the practice of assessing them is one I can participate in—with the help of another. Socrates articulates this point by saying that another person can serve as a mirror to me.
Socrates noticed a simple difference between intrapersonal wavering and interpersonal disagreement. When you say or do one thing and then, later, say or do something that conflicts with it—recall our various examples of wavering, from weakness of will to Russell’s emotive conjugation to young Hippocrates’ discombobulated scuttling—there is no through-line connecting your earlier thoughts and actions to your later ones, no way for you to hold one of those sets of thoughts to the standard set by the other. When you disagree with yourself, you are simply disjointed. But when you say one thing and I disagree with you, and we conduct that disagreement together, then there can be a coherence to our activity of arguing. When, for example, you seek the truth and I avoid error, we are doing one thing, together—disagreeing—in a way that the various time-slices of you are not doing one thing, together, when you disagree with yourself by wavering.
Return to the case of making a promise to someone. Because there is a promisee, there is space for normative assessment: you can see your own action as a failure insofar as it doesn’t meet someone else’s promise-grounded expectation. The refuter affords a similar experience. Here is how it works. If you are the refuter, first you ask someone a question, then they answer, and then, by way of further interrogation, you show them that you can’t accept their answer. You do this by showing them that it contradicts something else that both of you accept, or that it is internally incoherent, or that it simply doesn’t count as an answer to the question once the question has been clarified. Because you are holding them accountable—reminding them of what they said earlier in the conversation, or of what follows from what they said earlier, or of common sense, or of what they’ve agreed to on other occasions—they can come to see their answer as bad. They see that it would rightly be judged unacceptable by anyone who wasn’t caught up in already thinking it.
But that doesn’t mean that they instantly drop it, either. If the question was untimely, they can’t suspend judgment on it, so they can’t simply “give up” their only answer as soon as they see problems with it. Until they come up with a replacement, they continue to accept it, yet at the same time understand why you don’t. They acknowledge that you are right not to buy what they are selling; because of you, they can see a defect in their answer; you are a normative mirror for their thought.
Meno’s Paradox
Philosophical inquiry is not an attempt to solve well-defined problems; it is, instead, an attempt to ask important questions. It has often been noted that much, if not all, of the territory now claimed by science once belonged to philosophy. When philosophical questions can be reformulated as problems, that is when they leave the orbit of philosophy.
But not all philosophical questions have been converted into problems. When philosophers and nonphilosophers face off over one of the unconverted questions, the ensuing interactions tend to go awry. The nonphilosopher is liable to be frustrated by questions such as “Is there free will?” or “What is justice?” or “How should one live?”; to reply that “it depends what you mean by ‘free’ or ‘justice’ or ‘should’”; to dismiss the question as ill-defined; to doubt whether the philosopher would have a way of recognizing the answer if it were staring her in the face. The nonphilosopher may be too polite to give full verbal expression to her incredulity, but inside she wonders, “What makes these philosophers think that they are doing anything at all?” Meetings between philosophers and nonphilosophers so reliably result in such a culture clash that the typical encounter deserves a name. I will call it “the primal scene.”
Plato dramatizes the primal scene in the Meno. Socrates asks Meno, “What is virtue?” Meno offers three answers, each of which is refuted by Socrates.
Socrates immediately recognizes what is happening. He has clearly encountered the primal scene before:
I know what you want to say, Meno. Do you realize what a debater’s argument you are bringing up, that a person cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know? He cannot search for what he knows—since he knows it, there is no need to search—nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.
Socrates’ reformulation, which precisifies Meno’s skeptical challenge into a dilemma, is called Meno’s paradox. It calls into question the very possibility of searching: either the search is unnecessary, because you already have what you’re looking for, or it is impossible, because you don’t know what you’re looking for, and so wouldn’t know it if you found it.
The distinction between a question and a problem turns out to be the key to understanding both Meno’s paradox and the “primal scene.” A problem is something you need to move out of the way so that you can go on with what you were doing before the problem arose. A question is a very different sort of beast. To ask a question is to be on a quest: the word “question” comes from the Latin quaerere, which means to seek or search or pursue or hunt. At the end of your hunt, you have caught what you wanted: the answer, or the quarry, or the Holy Grail. Your quest wasn’t a distraction from some underlying project; it was the underlying project. At the end of the problem-solving process, you have eliminated something—the solution to a problem dissolves the problem—whereas at the end of the question-answering process, you have something—whatever it was you are looking for. The question culminates in its answer.
One way to see the difference between questions and problems is to compare how they are transferred. When you present your problem to someone else, you are setting a task before them: this is what you need to solve. They don’t necessarily need to know why you need it solved, because one person can eliminate an obstacle to another’s progress toward a goal without sharing that goal. That is why the transfer of a problem characteristically takes the form of a command—though of course the expression of this command can be softened in the direction of a request (“Please?”), or propped up with added incentives (“I’ll pay you...”). When I pose a question, by contrast, I am not commanding, deferring, or delegating—I am sharing or inviting. I hope to captivate your interest, to whet your curiosity, to make my question your question, to entice you to join me in the hunt. Whereas the symbol for a question is the question mark, the symbol for a problem is the exclamation point. Motives are exogenous to problem-solving, but endogenous to question-answering.
We can now say why the scope of Meno’s paradox is much narrower than it might first appear to be. Most searches aim to arrive neither at what I know, nor at what I don’t know, but at a way to keep doing what I was doing before I ran into a problem. Likewise, most questions are merely inquisitive repackagings of problems.
When I ask for information what I actually want is something distinct from the information itself—namely, to move on with whatever activity was impeded by the problem posed by the absence of that information. There is always an ulterior motive for seeking out information, some use to which I aim to put it, even if that use is merely to relieve the itch of curiosity or a period of boredom. This ulterior motive is precisely what allows me to produce a “well-defined” formulation of the circumstances under which the problem will count as solved. I can tell you, in advance, what stands in the way of my moving on: I want whatever will allow me to fill in the blank on the test, or advance to the next stage of my research project, or leave the house, or sate my curiosity, or ease my boredom.
A question, by contrast, counts as answered when I have the answer. There is nothing that comes next. So if you ask me to tell you what it will be like for me to have the answer, I am forced to reply that I will only be able to do that once I have it. The state of having the answer is simply the state of knowing something that I do not yet know, and so cannot identify for you. But how can it be that when I have the answer, I recognize it as being just what I was looking for (“Aha!”), but I can’t tell you, in advance, what it is going to look like? This is Meno’s paradox.
A misunderstanding characteristic of the primal scene is when the philosopher is asked to provide a definition of the very term she hoped the conversation would explicate. The nonphilosopher sees definition as the prerequisite for solving whatever problem the philosopher wanted us to solve, but there was no such problem. The philosopher wasn’t posing a problem. She was asking a question.
Meno’s paradox poses a real threat to the Socratic project, because all of Socrates’ questions are genuine questions, and not problems. Targeting things of fundamental importance to us, they stubbornly and persistently resist being transformed into problems. Untimely questions ask after the things we actually want, rather than the things we must remove to pursue the things we want. Having an untimely question and having an answer to such a question: we have seen that, and why, these two states come together. But there is a difference—all the difference in the world—between having an answer to a question and having knowledge that the answer is correct.
The difference made Socrates who he was: he himself was defined by his awareness of his own ignorance, which is to say, understanding that his answers to untimely questions did not yet qualify as knowledge. He recognized the space between an answered question and a question whose answer has the finality of knowledge—but equally significantly, he recognized that this space only becomes inquisitively relevant in the company of another. Alone, we do fall prey to Meno’s paradox: our answer either satisfies us or we lose hold of the question. But if you and I both have the same question yet different answers, a path opens up: we can test our answers against each other. This process is Socratic inquiry. The Socratic method is a way you can make progress without knowing in advance how you are going to do so.
We can summarize the conclusions of the three chapters of part two, including this chapter, as follows: The Socratic method is inquisitive refutation, refutation cures normative self-blindness, inquiry allows us to ask questions (as opposed to solving problems). These claims, taken together, add up to an answer to the question with which this chapter began: What is thinking?
Thinking is, paradigmatically, a social quest for better answers to the sorts of questions that show up for us already answered. It is a quest because it has a built-in endpoint: knowledge. It is social because it operates by resolving disagreements between people. Thinking begins when Socrates, or someone like him, recognizes that his account of justice, or piety, or love is not as good as it could be—which is to say, that it does not qualify as knowledge. This realization prompts him to ask another person for help inquiring into questions such as, “Is it beneficial to be just?” “Who is worthy of love?” and “What is piety?”
If the interlocutor’s first attempt at an answer is refuted, he tries another, and then another. If one of the interlocutor’s answers holds up against Socratic pressure, they come to agree on that; otherwise—and this is what we see in Plato’s dialogues—it doesn’t, and the process of refutation draws Socrates’ answer out of him, which becomes the shared conclusion. Either way, the two parties come to agree. This does not mean that the quest is completed: both parties can go on to subject what they have agreed on to further tests of the same kind in future disagreements with others. Each time the answer passes, it becomes more firmly “tied down” with the very arguments used to explain its preferability.
This is thinking. It is completed when one arrives at an answer that is perfectly stable. The arguments with which it has been definitively “tied down” can then be conveyed to others, and this is why, if one has knowledge, one can teach it to others. Thinking is the road from ignorance about the most important things to knowledge about them.
This definition of thinking inverts the usual order of importance between the inner and the outer: the standard approach to thinking privileges what is private and unvoiced and “in the head” as the core case, so that what happens in conversation counts as thinking only insofar as it is an outer echo of an inner event: “thinking out loud.”
My definition of thinking is not a dictionary definition, and it is not a stipulative definition; rather, it is a Socratic definition. A Socratic definition must come at the end, and not the beginning, of a process of inquiry: it is the upshot of having figured out what something really is. (By contrast, my definition of the phrase “untimely question” was stipulative, an invention of my own. I introduced it early in the book, not in order to explain anything, but simply in order to have a convenient handle by which to refer to something that I would go on to explain.)
Part Three: Socratic Answers
Over the course of the Socratic dialogues, Socrates makes three claims to specialized expertise. He claims to be an expert in politics, in love, and in facing death.
Socrates’ point seems not to be that he, individually, happens to be well prepared for death. His point is, rather, that it belongs to and is characteristic of the philosopher as such to have been engaged in the preparation for death. By inquiring into untimely questions, every philosopher has, all along, been preparing himself for death. If we extend that argument to the other cases, we arrive at the conclusion that somehow the trademark ignorance of the philosopher itself amounts to expertise in the domains of love and death and politics. This is quite an astonishing claim—that the practice of Socratic ignorance is a kind mastery of the deepest things. The mechanism of this reversal is something that I call “the Socratizing move.”
One day, a student who was puzzled and intrigued by a sentence from Aristotle’s De Anima told me he was considering getting the sentence tattooed onto his arm. I said: “Why don’t you try to understand it instead? That’s like tattooing it onto your soul.” In claiming that the tattoo he was thinking of getting stood for the interpretative clarity he really wanted, I was Socratizing the concept of a tattoo. What the student sought, by means of the tattoo, was to develop a permanent connection with an idea—but the real way to do that, I claimed, is to understand it. You Socratize something when you show that it must be understood in the light of something else, something of which it is the imitation. In general, the Socratizing move takes the form “A is the real B.” For example, “Understanding is the real tattoo.” With this move, Socrates scrapes the dust and cobwebs off of an ordinary or everyday concept and reveals it to be something higher, more transcendent, more demanding, and often more real than we had thought. “A is the real B” means that B wavers in the way the image of a house, reflected in water, wavers, whereas A is the stable and unwavering house.
“Socratizing” has the opposite effect of the reductive or deflationary or unmasking approach that is usually expressed with the phrase “nothing but”: love is nothing but hormones, appreciation of opera is nothing but posturing, higher education is nothing but a means of signaling to employers, helping others is nothing but a way to feel good about oneself, colors are nothing but wavelengths of light, Cartesian skepticism is nothing but a confusion, philosophy is nothing but a language game. Where “nothing but” demotes, Socratizing promotes. One facet of Socratizing is that it moves upward rather than downward. The other is that it is systematic.
Socrates unified domains as distinct as love, death, and politics not by analyzing them in terms of some underlying common denominator, but rather by seeing them as converging upward toward a single aspiration: inquiry into untimely questions. Instead of arguing that these domains all have a common source or cause or are built up out of common materials, Socrates argues that what they have in common is a goal. To frame the point in Aristotelian terminology: anti-Socratizing unifies by way of a common material cause, whereas Socratizing unifies by way of a common final cause. The Socratizing move seeks out the coherent reality behind the incoherent imitation of the reality that shows up in our everyday lives, and it often reveals that what was going on in everyday life was something very different from what it had appeared to be, for example: war is really a form of conversation.
Politics: Justice and Liberty
When we look at other societies, especially those in the distant past, certain political fictions stand out to us: how they attributed to some individuals a God-given right to rule over others (the divine right of kings); how myths of autochthony allowed them to understand themselves as descendants of an original set of citizens sprung from the soil; how they relied on a caste system that sorted people by birth to determine their social role; how they conceived of slavery as divinely sanctioned, morally acceptable, natural, or all of the above; how they assumed gender or race or religion should restrict someone’s political role. I call these fictions “political” because they pertain not only to how people live together, but more specifically to the question of whose ideas about how to live together count, and to what degree. To say that human beings are social picks out the fact that a normal human life is a life spent with other humans; to say that we are political means something more specific, which is that we live together under a shared idea of how to do so.
I believe that future critics of our current political order will identify, as political fictions, what might be called the liberalism triad: freedom of speech, egalitarianism, and the fight for social justice.
Those bent on getting and keeping political power make a show of navigating disagreements about how to live together, and of producing agreements about how to live together—but it’s only a show. Philosophy is how you actually navigate such disagreements. Philosophy is the real politics, which means that without ever stepping onto the political stage, Socrates could look at those who had done so, and see that they were mimicking him.
“Politicization” is a commonly used word that is rarely defined, even though the concept it refers to is difficult to understand. We all think we know what it means, but I am not sure that we do, so let me specify exactly how I understand it: politicization is the displacement of a disagreement from the context of argumentation into a zero-sum context where if one party wins, the other loses. It converts a question—which of two positions is correct—into a competition between the interests of two parties. If someone claims that a given topic—be it the minimum wage, climate change, the Covid pandemic, or college course syllabi—has been “politicized,” they mean that actions and speech on that topic have to be interpreted against the backdrop of some standing conflict. So, for example, the ostentatious inclusion or removal of a text from my syllabus can constitute a way of positioning myself in a culture war: I might be providing assurances to my allies, or I might be provoking my enemies.
When people criticize “polarized” politics, they should, I think, speak instead of politicization. Polarization is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. A philosophy conference featuring views polarized into two camps won’t necessarily be less interesting to attend than one where the views expressed in the talks are more evenly distributed over a range of intermediate positions; and many of us are more interested in watching a movie that “polarizes” people in the sense that you either love it or hate it, than in watching one that everyone thinks is merely OK. Furthermore, thought is by nature polarized, in that every well-formed proposition is either true or false.
Extreme polarization without politicization is fine; politicization is the real problem. Whenever some topic seems “touchy” or “charged,” that is a good sign of politicization; another is if the answers tend to map perfectly onto existing battle lines. For instance, climate change and abortion have become politicized, to the extent that they are arenas within which a battle between the political Right and the political Left is adjudicated. When laws are passed making it more difficult to secure an abortion, that constitutes a “defeat” for the Left, whereas a new climate deal could be a “victory” for them.
Socrates and his interlocutor are on the hunt for the answer to a question, and, if they clear away a mistaken answer, they have made progress that harms no one, and especially benefits the person from whom it was cleared away. A disagreement is a head-on conflict—if I am right then you are wrong—but it is not a conflict of interest, and thus need not be interpreted in zero-sum terms. A disagreement can be symbolically organized into a zero-sum game, but it needn’t be. Socrates thinks it shouldn’t be, because what we want to work out is not who wins, but who is right. A fight is a conflict of interest, and a disagreement that has been turned into a fight stands at a symbolic remove from the adjudication of the disagreement. When we are working out who wins, we are, at best, pretending to be working out who is right.
A Socratic definition of fighting would be something like this: fighting is politicized arguing. Whether we politicize the argument by using physical force, or emotional force, or whether we fight more indirectly, by way of proxies—think of how, in an especially acrimonious divorce, the ex-spouses might use their children to get at each other—what unifies all the fighting that we do is that the fight represents an argument we are not having.
When we speak of “fighting for justice” we imagine ourselves not only as preventing future injustices—there are a lot of ways of doing that—but specifically as defeating injustice using violence, or patience, or (in the case of some forms of protest) by calling attention to something. The problem is that is impossible. You cannot defeat or disprove or defend an idea using any kind of force but the force of argument. You might, instrumentally, be able to take steps toward a more just world by exerting physical or emotional force; and you might imagine, as you do so, that you’re fighting injustice. But what you’re really doing is pretending to argue.
Everyone understands that you can’t literally fight cancer any more than you can fight a mountain or the color blue, yet many are drawn to speaking as though they really could fight racism or anti-Semitism or fascism or inegalitarianism or any other form of injustice. But notice that although it is imaginable to speak of “defeating” these evil ideas, it isn’t imaginable that they might win. They can’t prove themselves true no matter how many battles anyone wins. But if that’s the case, the same holds for liberalism and justice and so on: one cannot prove them true by fighting. Nor can you fight for your right to exist, because no amount of fighting can bring it about that you have this right. And as Socrates says to Crito just before drinking the hemlock, “To express oneself badly is not only faulty as far as the language goes, but does some harm to the soul.” What you are really doing when you say you are fighting injustice is inflicting harms on people and imagining that those harms somehow transfer to the ideas that are your real enemies. When you say you are fighting injustice, there is something else that you are really trying to do.
Politics: Equality
People bristle at the prospect of inferiority, of being someone’s subordinate, of being at the bottom rung of a hierarchy; most say they want equality. But could it be that what such people would really prefer, instead of equality, is superiority? Is equality a compromise embraced only by those too weak to dominate? Nietzsche seems to believe this, describing the egalitarian impulse as a “slave morality” in which physical and psychological weaknesses get reinterpreted as moral strengths: “The lambs say to each other, ‘These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey and most like its opposite, a lamb,—is good, isn’t he?’” One finds similar thoughts expressed in the writings of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Foucault.
A person wants to be recognized by someone whose recognition she, in turn, recognizes; she wants to be standing on the same plane as that person, and to have that plane be, in some way, elevated. “Elevated” does not mean elevated over the person she’s talking to; and “elevated” also does not necessarily mean “at the absolute top.”
If we thought that conversational status-seeking always aimed at domination, we would be puzzled by how readily its participants gesture at how powerless or oppressed or overwhelmed they are. These self-lowering gestures can be reconciled with status-seeking if we see them both as part of the quest for an elevated equality: we are trying to be high up, and equal to one another.
We reflexively engage in a kind of interpersonal balancing: if I admit I am bad at something, then you have to say you’re also bad at something, or point out that I’m good at something else. We are anxious to even out the appearance of difference in abilities, in social standing, in success. We are especially vigilant in policing asymmetries of affection: if I want to be talking to you more than you want to be talking to me, that is something that it is rarely permissible to be explicit about. Differences in intelligence, attractiveness, and sense of humor are rarely acknowledged by the individuals themselves. For the most part, we make an effort to treat each other as though we were equal, and that often involves tactfully ignoring the ways in which we are not. Much of what gets called “social skill” involves inducing the feeling of equality in the face of all the facts that challenge this feeling.
Living in a world of fragile and partly fabricated equality means living in constant fear of disrespecting others, and being disrespected ourselves. This fear might fade into the background much of the time, but it is always ready to surface; the temperature in the room is liable to increase. All of this is a sign that when it comes to equality, we are only just barely keeping it together. The equality arrived at in social contexts is not the real thing, but only an unstable placeholder.
Inequality is much easier to understand than equality. When someone discriminates on the basis of race, or religion, or gender, they are saying that the equality point does not exist, that they are not going to recognize another person as being, substantively, their equal. One can find such inegalitarianism to be clearly, self-evidently, objectionable without having much of a sense of what it would look like if there were the kind of substantive equality between the parties that suffices for feeling valued and respected. When someone treats you with disrespect, you know that you are not getting what you want, but this doesn’t mean that you are in a position to say what it is you do want. We’re not sure how to put that equality point back where it belongs after we are discriminated against because we don’t actually know where it belongs. We never knew; what we had at the best of times was only the conceit of equality. This problem about egalitarianism is not new; it is ancient.
Neither the status games by which we quest for equality nor what might be called the revenge games by which we try to reestablish it are fully successful at getting us what we were seeking. They don’t lead, in Orwell’s term, to satisfaction. Sticking it to one’s oppressor is as close as the oppressed can get to the concept of equality, but it turns out that it is not very close at all. Making sure no one gets more than anyone else is a good way to prevent complaints over inequality, but as far as substantive equality goes, such actions are at best symbolic placeholders. They stand in for the recognition we truly desire, which is a matter of being seen and valued for the distinctive value we have. Much of the apparatus of our practice of equality—the titles and gestures and modes of address—is likewise symbolic. What does the reality look like?
Real equality means you know that you are useful, important, and valuable to me not because I tell you those things, or send you signals to that effect, but because I am making active use of you, leaning on you, doing something I could not be doing without you. The practice of equality is where equality comes alive.
It is such an evident fact of life that it’s a challenge to shut people up, and a challenge to get them to really listen to one another, that we don’t stop to reflect on how puzzling this is. Think about it: When I communicate something to you, on the face of it, who wins? I’m the one giving, and you’re the one getting. I already know what I’m going to tell you, and you’re the one who doesn’t know it yet. I get nothing, you get something. Communication, is, roughly speaking, how we find things out from one another; one might expect that domain to be filled with under-talking and over-listening. If two people are on opposites sides of a cake stand, and one of them is handing out cake and the other one is receiving cake, and it’s a yummy cake, which person do you want be? Wouldn’t it be weird if we saw people impatiently gobbling down their cake, trying to eat it as fast as possible, so as to arrive more quickly at their turn to hand out the cake? Are we supposed to conclude that the preference for speaking—which is often censured as egotistical and narcissistic—is actually a sign of some deep altruism in us? With most goods, we prefer to get them, rather than giving them. Why does it work the other way with cognitive goods? Adam Smith’s answer is: because when you give someone a cognitive good, what you get, in return, is a signal of your own worth. Their willingness to receive the products of your mind is a mark or a sign of your fitness to lead. I think he’s right.
The power to change your mind bears a more intimate relation to the practice of equality than titles or prizes, but the relation is still not a direct one. In acknowledging, to you, that you can direct my mind, I am allowing you, however temporarily, to play the role of “teacher,” or “leader.” You are in charge; you are, for now, the knowledgeable one; I am your subordinate. But if you really were knowledgeable, you wouldn’t depend on my acknowledgment. There is something very strange in the practice of seeking, from someone, proofs that you do not need such proofs from them.
How can I seek your respect sustainably, which is to say, in a way that doesn’t threaten to destroy your ability to give me what I want? How can I direct your mind in a manner that preserves your equality to me? How can I address an audience in such a way that it sustains them as people before whom I have a voice?
The answer is to stop seeking symbolic displays of how independent one is from the recognition of others, and accept dependence. The orator tries to convince himself, by means of the reverberating applause of the audience, that what he has is knowledge; the philosopher eschews this pretense in favor of actually trying to acquire the knowledge. If I need to be the one who does the persuading rather than the one who was persuaded, then I have something to prove. If I have nothing to prove, then I am no less pleased to be persuaded than to persuade. Notice: If I am no less happy to be persuaded, I won’t use any rhetorical tricks to persuade you. I will only ever give you the arguments that would seem good to me as well. I don’t want you to be convinced on any other grounds than the grounds that convince me, and indeed I want to make it as easy as possible for you to unconvince me.
When Socrates describes the truth as his property, he is clearly not insisting that everything he currently believes is true, since that would amount to a claim to knowledge. Socrates means that he has a right to the truth, that it is his property in an aspirational sense. Just as the status of full citizenship—with all the rights that it entails—is the birthright of every baby born into a given nation, so too, the truth is Socrates’ birthright, in that he is destined to come into it. Respecting someone means that even when they say what you believe to be false, you regard their orientation toward the truth as sufficient to structure your interaction with them.
So: they disagree with you, which means you see them as other, as distinct from you, but you still recognize them as being oriented towards the truth, which means you can nonetheless interact with them as a mind. Putting those together, it follows that you see them as another mind. That is a real accomplishment. It’s easy to mock the Cartesian solipsist who stares out of his window and wonders whether the hats and cloaks moving outside could be concealing automata, but all of us overestimate the degree to which we’ve solved the problem of other minds. It is common to give lip service to a solution to that problem. For example, when we “agree to disagree,” it’s as though each of us is saying, “I’m sure there’s a mind in there somewhere.” Or, when we set our differences aside as being unimportant, we’re saying, “Deep down, we’re of one mind—mine.”
In contrast, actually recognizing the existence of another mind means, first, that the two of us are not of one mind, we’re not united in agreement but rather divided by disagreement; and, second, that disagreement doesn’t close the door to our engaging in a mental activity with one another, to our treating one another as minded creatures, creatures who have a claim on the truth; and, third, the most important condition, neither of us counts as “achieving anything worth mentioning concerning the things we are discussing” except with reference to the other. We’re in a closed system. Our interaction is structured only by our respective claims on the truth. To engage with a point of view that conflicts with your own, but to continue to engage with it as a point of view on the truth—that is what it is to recognize someone as your equal.
Praise for intelligence or intellectual ability touches us so deeply because it speaks to our most fundamental wish: to be treated not as a physical thing, nor as a social thing, but as an intellectual thing. The ultimate form of respect is being seen in terms of one’s power to help others figure out how to live.
So this is my explanation for why the concept of equality has the peculiar structure that it has: we really do care about being on an equal footing with another person, and that concern really does drive us—both of us—on a quest to occupy a position of superiority. Neither of us is trying to be superior to the other, but we are both trying, together, to be superior, elevated. We are dissatisfied with the merely negative sense of equality where no one gets more than anyone else, or in which no one gets respected or mistreated. The equality we seek is not merely the absence of an evil but the presence of a good; we want to achieve some substantial form of recognition.
Ordinary conversation is a quest for an elevated sort of equality, and that kind of equality can in fact be really, truly, stably arrived at in the right sort of conversation. And now we can see that the sort of conversation I’ve specified—and whose details are the topic of part two—is the same sort as the one that can be described as truly free, and as the mechanism by which questions of justice and injustice can be, not fought over, but adjudicated. Such a conversation is free precisely because it is detached from outer consequences, free to be guided by its own internal principle—namely, the pursuit of the truth.
Love
It is a commonplace to chide the romantic passion of new lovers as silly or naïve, in praise of the more “solid” or “permanent” attachments associated with marriage, child-raising, and growing old together. Perhaps it is true that the ideal of young lovers is in some way impossible or unsustainable, but there is nonetheless something remarkable in the mere fact that it exists and persists and continues to capture our emotional attention. It is a powerful ideal, one that has inspired art and literature for thousands of years now. Where did this unachievable ideal come from? Why do we have it? Could it—instead of being simply mistaken—perhaps be merely displaced from its true home? Is there a context in which it would not appear silly, or naïve, but perfectly appropriate?
We are as committed to Socratic rationality as we are to Aristophanic attachment. The lover who is so doggedly loyal that he will stick with us in spite of seeing nothing of value in our appearance, character, or company holds little more appeal than the slippery sort of lover who is always looking to trade up. The standard response to this predicament, in the world we live in, is to accept a dynamic compromise between rational appreciation and attached stability. We lean toward appreciation in our early years, with enough allowances for the possibility of comparison and breakups and “shopping around” to make it appropriate to speak of a dating “market,” and toward attachment in the later ones.
The radical insight of Socrates’ theory of love is that you don’t need to trade the two parts of the ideal off against each other. You can have rationality and attachment, if you are willing to rethink both.
Socrates claims “expertise at love” in the Phaedrus and an understanding of the “art of love” in the Symposium; these claims do indeed make sense if the characteristic activity of lovers amounts to inquisitive refutation. But if lovers are to engage in philosophy, they can be neither admiring nor accepting of one another. Admiration and acceptance are both static (“I love you just the way you are”), whereas philosophy is dynamic, aimed at the improved character and life that would be possible if we had better answers to our most important questions. As Socrates says—I would add, lovingly—toward the end of the Laches, “The one thing I would not advise is that we remain as we are.”
Socrates does not reject the idea that love should manifest in wondrous, reverential appreciation and total, unconditional acceptance of the object of love. What he denies is that the target of such admiration is a person. This is the oddest thing Socrates says about love—it might be the oddest thing Socrates says about any topic. He thinks we don’t love human beings—not really. Recall his claim that “love is wanting to possess the good forever.” My love, which manifests itself in the form of my philosophizing with you, aims not at possessing you, but rather, at possessing the good. What I love is the good.
Socratic (philosophical) love purports to be the stable reality of which romantic (sexual) love is a wavering image. If Socratic love is the real love, then we ought to be able to take the language we standardly apply to romantic love and apply it to philosophical love, without that sounding somehow wrong or absurd. And indeed, Plato shows that Socratic love can successfully be dressed in the language that usually clothes romantic or sexual love. All of this mattered, to the ancient audience of the Symposium, because Socrates was selling them a picture of love that differed radically from their romantic conventions. The same is true for a modern audience, though the points of departure are not exactly the same.
Socrates is not saying that sex is dirty, or that you shouldn’t have children, or that monogamy is a mistake, or that love poems should be censored. He is saying that none of these things truly embody the spirit of erōs; they do not achieve the goals that we have when our hearts are inflamed with the kind of passion that is suggested by the language in the Symposium and Phaedrus. That language therefore has the important role of reminding you how romantic you really are.
Socrates can explain why romantic behavior is often puzzling: we are committed both to the rationality requirement and to the attachment requirement, and yet we don’t know how to reconcile them with one another. But he thinks we are not stuck trading them off against one another, because they can be fully reconciled: there is no paradox about how my love can take the individual human being as its proper target if my love does not take the individual human being as its proper target; and once that target has shifted onto something divine and perfect and unimprovable, admiration and acceptance do go hand in hand. It is, indeed, rational to be fully and unconditionally attached to that which cannot in any way be improved. The threat of substitution vanishes. Socrates’ logic is unassailable, even if we can also predict that he will have trouble getting this point across to a bunch of maniacs.
A true lover, according to Socrates, doesn’t really want to be loved for who they are; they want to be loved precisely because they are unhappy with who they are. Socratic love takes the impulse toward the lovers’ ascent as an impulse to change: lovers approach one other as inquirers, and their love is an aspirational ascent to knowledge. It is important to understand, when it comes to the strangeness of Socratic love, that Socrates is not simply inventing a new and unusual kind of love to sit alongside our old versions of it. Rather, he’s calling our attention to the well-known problems inherent in rational attachment, helping us see that romantic love, as we standardly pursue it, cannot solve these problems; and offering a new form of love, inquisitive love, that can.
Socratic love is not exclusive but additive, in that he seems to accumulate a group of regular associates, each of whom can further benefit by philosophical interaction with others in the coterie. One might ask, what is the difference, for Socrates, between romantic love on the one hand and the sorts of love we feel for friends or family members on the other? What is the difference between erōs and philia? The answer is there is no difference: true erōs is a form of philia.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Socrates merges erōs and philia: we do the same by way of our sliding scale. Dating is the erotic end of the spectrum, and marriage is the philia end. (People regularly describe their spouses as “my best friend.”) Any successful solution to the problem of rational attachment will find a way of including, within erōs, the stability and permanence characteristic of philia. We view romantic love as aiming to incorporate the other as a member of one’s family.
The real difference between love today and Socratic love is that the Socratic fusion of erōs and philia goes both ways. Whereas we countenance many sorts of relationships as being full-fledged instances of philia in spite of the total absence of erōs—parents and children, siblings, friends, neighbors—for Socrates real philia requires erōs, because another person can only participate in your attachment to what is truly “your own” if they are part of your inquiry.
Those who have immersed themselves in the study of philosophy in general and Plato in particular are likely to see “Socrates” as synonymous with “irony” and “irony” as synonymous with a positive quality of verbal sophistication. People who are encountering this material from the outside—first-year students, those unversed in philosophy, those approaching the “primal scene” for the first time—instinctively inhabit the point of view of Alcibiades, Thrasymachus, and Callicles. They think that Socrates is being a jerk. The idea that Socrates is a jerk is not taken seriously among Plato scholars, who tend to dismiss this second point of view as a mark of the naïve and uneducated. I agree that the novices are making an error about Socratic irony, but I think that the sophisticates are in fact making the very same error, to wit: believing in the existence of Socratic irony.
As a young reader of Plato, I saw irony everywhere in the dialogues. Being able to point out double meanings made me feel smart, and it made me feel included. If Socrates is not wholly absorbed in speaking to his interlocutors, then I can imagine that some of his attention—and love—is directed outward, past the fourth wall, to me. He’s talking over their heads, trying to reach a real philosopher. Like me. What makes eirōneia offensive to interlocutors such as Thrasymachus and Alcibiades is exactly what makes ironia so attractive to readers such as Cicero or Quintilian or me: the more Socrates withholds himself from them, the more Socrates seems to speak to us.
The most radical feature of Socrates is not his godlike hidden wisdom but the naked vulnerability he displayed in treating others as sources of answers to his questions. That is, for Socrates, what one human being is to another: either a source of answers to your questions, or a source of questions that challenge your answers. Socrates explicitly rejected the kind of kinship relation constructed by the reader who, by reading him ironically, hopes to position herself in the inner circle of the special few who possess the esoteric knowledge required to understand Socrates.
If I approach you with double meanings; or by saying the opposite of what I intend; or with words that are geared only partly to you, and partly to another audience of which you are unaware; or with false praise designed to butter you up or false humility designed to soften your defenses—if I do any of these things, then I am not really serious about inquiring with you.
Over the decades, a lot has changed about how I read Plato, but the single biggest change is that I have come to see less and less ironic distance or detachment between Socrates and his interlocutors. Increasingly, Socrates seems to me to be putting all his cards on the table, and this strikes me as an act of great friendliness, openness, and humanity. Where I once saw Socratic irony, I now see Socratic love.
Death
Over and over again, Tolstoy tells the same story of being unprepared for the confrontation with death. Whether this confrontation occurs at the end of one’s life, as it does for Ivan, or in middle age, as it does for Tolstoy, or in one’s twenties or thirties, as it does for Pierre and Levin, the effect is the same. The prospect of death represents the stopping of the clock that has been ticking the background of everything we do, counting off each fifteen-minute period. All of a sudden, untimely questions can no longer hide in the background; all of a sudden, we are called upon to answer them—but we cannot. We cannot justify our lives, and the attempt to do so will only convince us that life is meaningless. Tolstoy tells this story with courageous honesty. But it is not the only story there is.
If the Death of Ivan Ilyich describes what it’s like to be unprepared for death, the Phaedo shows us what it’s like to be prepared. Socrates passes his final hours inquiring into the immortality of the soul. This activity is of a piece with how Socrates has lived his life—he died as he lived, philosophizing—and, at the same time, fitting or suited to the circumstances he is in, namely, to someone who faces impending death. His usual modes of living neither collapse nor have to be suspended in the face of death.
Tolstoy accurately perceives that many ways of spending your life cannot stand up to death, collapsing in the face of it; philosophy, Socrates demonstrates, is an exception. Philosophy did not consign Socrates to loneliness and alienation in the face of death, nor did the prospect of death undermine his own answer to Socratic questions—even though it invited objections to those answers. Philosophy lives up to the challenge of death. You can be philosophizing—socially, philanthropically, happily—and be facing up to death, at the same time.
We are unable to think about the most important things on our own, and we habitually shield ourselves from this terrifying fact. All of us, even professional philosophers, walk around with a conceit of knowledge separating us from other people. Our feeling of basic mental competence—of having the answers on which the living of our lives depends—keeps us from connecting with others in the ways that benefit us most. Ignorance of ignorance leads us to think that we are to figure these important questions out for ourselves. Ignorance of ignorance prevents us from thinking alongside another person about what neither of us knows. Ignorance of ignorance is the barrier between us. Socrates dismantled that barrier.
It is in fact not obvious to anyone what happens to a person after they die, and if some people claim that it is, their actions belie those statements: those who insist that something called “science” definitively forecloses the possibility of life after death act continue to act as though the souls of their loved ones are still around, those who piously avow a belief in the immortality of the soul mourn their dead loved ones as though their souls have been annihilated, and neither group treats corpses in a manner consistent with their professed account of death. When it comes to the question of what happens to the soul after death, we waver. The name for wavering in this arena of life is superstition. What characterizes the philosophical approach to death, above all, is the principled rejection of superstition.
Why is Socrates so intolerant of superstition? Because wavering between two incompatible results gets in the way of the attempt to inquire as to which of those results is actually true. We are accustomed to looking at death through a panicked haze, so terrified of it that we will not even really accept that it takes place. From that vantage point, we can only feel the fear of death; we cannot understand why we are fearful. Once we die, our bodies will be nothing more than things. To understand the import of this event, you first have to believe that it will take place. Looking at death carefully, and accurately—as neither the religiously minded nor the scientifically minded are inclined to do—does not dispel one’s own fear of death. But it does clarify the situation: we will discover there are two ways to fear death.
The first version is a manifestation of the bodily command. Our bodies savagely command us to protect them, to keep living at all costs. They tell us that being deprived of more life is, per se, an evil, and they do this by filling us with blind, unthinking terror in the face of death. The popular acronym FOMO can be used to refer to the fact that the bodily command instills in us a “fear of missing out” on the future instantiations of the goods we have experienced in the past.
When we speak of “the end of life,” that phrase can refer to the time when life comes to a stop, but it can also refer to the fact that life sets us a completable task. In this second meaning, “end” is synonymous with “goal” or “target.” It is possible to fear that these two senses of “end” will not come together for us, and life will stop before it’s finished. I will call this second version of the fear of death FONA, because it is a “fear of never arriving.” Whereas FOMO is exclusively a fear of being deprived of future goods, FONA is a fear of being deprived of both present and future goods: if I will never arrive at the goal of the activity I am currently engaged in, then I might as well not have done any of it. There is no reason to take the means to an end you will never arrive at: FONA is the fear that you are striving in vain.
It stands to reason that a young man’s fear of death will be more likely to take the form of FONA, an old man’s, FOMO. When we see it as especially tragic that a young person’s life was cut short, we are thinking in terms of FONA; when we see any death, no matter how old, as sad, we are more likely to be thinking in terms of FOMO.
Epicureans wanted to dispel FOMO because the disquiet of worrying about what you might miss out on in the future prevents you from enjoying those very same goods, now. The fear of death is an irritant in the tranquil calm that is Epicurean happiness. Socratics want to dispel FONA for a very different reason: because it can sap your motivation, dampen your energy, and prevent you from throwing yourself into whichever task you fear may be interrupted by death. Epicurean arguments against the fear of death are designed to keep you stably ensconced in the present; Socratic arguments against the fear of death are designed to move you forward.
The mythology of death often involves a confrontation with a divine figure who demands that you explain yourself. He stands between you and a gate that you can only pass through if you succeed in justifying your life. Socrates himself tells some version of this myth multiple times, at the end of the Gorgias, the Phaedo, and the Republic, while at the same time conceding that it is only a myth: “No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them.” Socrates clearly thinks that the myth of being judged at the end of one’s life contains an insight. What is it? I propose that this myth tells us what the problem of death represents for us: it is our way of thinking about the time when there is nothing left that stands between you and untimely questions, when they can be delayed no longer. Preparation for death is preparation for that time, and to do philosophy is to see that time as right now.
Socrates found that you can confront untimely questions without being overwhelmed by FONA, so long as you do so together with others. If you are a philosopher, you routinely ask questions that are too big for you to answer, in conversations that you know will be cut off before reaching their endpoint, and then they are cut off, and you don’t arrive at the endpoint, and you wake up the next day and do it all over again. This is what Socrates means by saying that the philosopher is an expert in death and dying, that he has been preparing all his life for death.