What Would Socrates Do?

Christians often ask themselves, as a guide to living, “What would Jesus do?” In her new book Open Socrates, my podcast-cohost Agnes Callard suggests we instead ask “What would Socrates do?”

Over 2400 years ago, Socrates gained fame by asking people questions on important topics, and then finding contradictions in their answers. Most didn’t like it, and eventually his city Athens killed him for it.

Callard elaborates a Socratic ethics wherein doing what he tried to do is the highest ideal; other things are good mainly via embodying or promoting Socratic inquiry. And as Socrates, like Jesus, is just the sort of person it makes sense to model after, this a worthy project.

Lest you think I exaggerate:

[He] inspired [people] to want to become the kind … who think ignorance is the worst thing there is. … 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. … Socratic ethics … inserts itself everywhere, into every interaction, infusing every corner of life with the demand to become more intellectual. … Inquiry is the best thing one can do with one’s life, given that one does not know how to lead it.

This is a contrarian position among philosophers:

Academic philosophers are… eager to allow that one can live a perfectly happy and fulfilled life without ever engaging in philosophy. They are also careful to shield the rest of their lives from their philosophical activities: … taking off their philosopher hat when walking into their homes, … and …whenever things get serious. … when it comes to the question of how to live our lives, we are already being intellectual and critical and thoughtful enough. … This book is an argument to the contrary. …

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 satisfy both at the same time.

What is so bad about not being Socratic? Inconsistency:

When we settle on answers to the central questions of our lives without ever having opened up those questions for [Socratic] inquiry, that is a recipe for wavering. [Such as] … acting inconsistently, … “I go back and forth about all this”, … language is hostage to its user’s approval, … pick a maxim or adage and you can usually articulate a counter-maxim, … refusing to say the same things about the same subjects, … in favor of free speech, except when it comes to people you disagree with, … weakness of will …

My body might tell me that I have to do one thing at one time, but, at a later time, fill me with regrets and pains for having obeyed it. The commands generated by other people— one’s kin group— have the same fluctuating character. … Why is … avoidance of wavering so important? … [Because] in retrospect… you would be forced to acknowledge there was no point to what you did.

Okay, sure, consistency sounds nice. But 2400 years of inquiry of all sorts into central value questions seems to have only resulted in modest progress. And few who have inquired into such questions, whether successfully and not, have chosen to use Socratic-style inquiry much, though most have been well aware of that option. So how could a typical person expect their personal Socratic inquiry to cut their personal value inconsistencies enough to justify substantial efforts here?

Callard fills much of her book arguing that Socratic ethics does actually offer substantial progress on many big questions:

We remain at sea when it comes to managing politics, handling love affairs, and confronting our own deaths. Socratic ethics … tells you that the way you should conduct yourself in each of these three domains is: inquisitively. … 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. …

On war, courage, moderation, and piety:

War is really a form of conversation. … Each of the traditional virtues of justice, courage, moderation, and piety is to be equated with knowledge. …Human goodness is primarily expressed in how a person conducts herself in inquiry. …

On fights, justice, free speech, and freedom:

When people think that they are fighting injustice, they are, instead, imitating refutation. … Speech is free if, and only if, it is inquisitive. … Our three most cherished political ideals— justice, freedom, and equality— are, in fact, intellectual ideals. They are norms that pertain, in the first instance, to the shared quest for knowledge. …

On equality and respect:

The proper home of equality and respect is … the world of the conversation. … What defines you, within the conversation, is only your orientation toward the truth, … Our most fundamental wish: to be treated not as a physical thing, nor as a social thing, but as an intellectual thing. … The only way one can get such respect is from the person who inquires with you. …

On love and romance:

The proper activity for lovers to engage in is philosophy. … They can be neither admiring nor accepting of one another. … We don’t love human beings. … Socratic (philosophical) love purports to be the stable reality of which romantic (sexual) love is a wavering image. … Socratized romance would force us to leave behind: … taking people as they are: … romantic exclusivity … sexual intercourse … working together to stay alive, live comfortably, and transmit humanity into the future via children … none of these things truly embody the spirit of erōs. … Socrates replaces the fickle love of individual people with what it imitates: a shared love of argument. …

On death:

What helped Socrates face death was not his belief that the soul was immortal, but his inquiry into whether it was. … The problem of death … 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.

Okay, if our key questions are on what is good, and we accept the key assumption that Socratic inquiry is the main good, with other things being good mainly via embodying or promoting that, well yes that does plausibly give us answers to many key questions. But why should we accept that assumption? After all, we could similarly answer them via assuming pleasure is the core good, with all else good via promoting that.

Alas I’m stuck here, as Callard says addressing that is a job for another book:

Let me emphasize that I am not putting forward this series of Socratic critiques as valid. … When it comes to Socratic ethics, we are still at the stage of saying what it is— and that is a big enough task for one book.

An assumption the book often invokes in support of Socratic inquiry is that most apparent conflicts are actually confusion due to our all really pursuing the same good. If only we knew what were the good outcomes in each case, we wouldn’t fight over what to do. But biology, law, political science, and economics have long seen many real conflicts of interest, not due to confusion. Different people really can have conflicting goods that they pursue.

Let me note some other book claims I disagree with, claims that aren’t central to the above main thesis. For example, on 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. … 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.

The standard explanation for such behavior in biology, law, political science, and economics is deterrence. It can make sense to commit yourself to hurting someone after they hurt you, to discourage them from hurting you. The book doesn’t consider this possibility.

I also think Callard exaggerates on supposed unique powers of Socratic inquiry:

I cannot pose to myself a question such as “What does it take to be a good mother?” … in a dispassionate and detached way. … 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. … Socrates found a way for two people, together, to ask and answer untimely questions that neither could inquire into on their own. … 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.

Yes, people who don’t share our beliefs can help us to question them, often making that process faster and cheaper. But that doesn’t imply it is impossible to question our own assumptions, even those that underly key continuing life choices. For example, sometimes we can just list all plausible positions on a topic, and iterate methodically, considering each one in turn.

Callard distinguishes problems from questions, with the later being less well defined. But as she didn’t try to define “question”, I didn’t learn much from that discussion.

Finally, I make an appearance in the book:

Freud, Marx, Girard, Becker, Goffman, Hanson, and Simler— make what we might call the anti-Socratizing move: taking a large and apparently heterogenous field of human phenomena and saying that it is best understood in terms of something lower than what it appeared to be. … 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.

I don’t mind explaining via lower motives, if that explains well. I’m not yet convinced Socratic ethics explains as well.

This post was revised a bit Jan. 18.

After reading the book and this review, ChatGPT says that by asking about the practicality of Socratic inquiry, I neglect the aspirational spirit of the book.