The Spirit of Socrates? Question...Question...Question

    Uh-oh...that’s right, kids! It's Book Report time! You know that you love it. I also know that some of you call this Geek Time, or funnier yet, Hall is a Pretentious Idiot Time! I plead guilty to both characterizations, your honor. But as I have said repeatedly; this is what you get for no pay-wall! So let’s do a Huey Lewis and go back in time, shall we? Pretty good, huh? You are such a dork. And to paraphrase a line from the grossly underrated film, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure: “Back to the time when the world looked like the album cover of Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy. It was most tranquil!” I love that film. Anyway, moving on!

    Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, infamously said that a knowledgeable person cannot perform a morally wrong act. He also said that, “Evil is only done out of ignorance and lack of wisdom. Only the ill-informed, deluded and self-deluded, behave immorally.” To say that this is an audacious claim would be something of an understatement. But the notorious gadfly of Athens – who annoyed the hell out of the authorities with his questioning so much that they put him to death for it – was quite serious. For Socrates, this state of affairs was logically obvious, and came to him through two thought processes.

    The first was that “right” and “wrong” are moral absolutes, rather than relative or personal values. Right and wrong are self-evident, immutable entities. The second was that man has the logical capacity and appetite to question, and to seek what is true and right. For Socrates, morality and knowledge were inextricably bound. As he put it: “There is only one good: knowledge. There is only one evil: ignorance.” And from this, we still hear the echoes of his most famous maxim: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

    Which brings us to Agnes Callard, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, and an unashamed apologist for Socrates and his unified theory of truth and knowledge. Her wonderful, and equally readable, new book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, seeks to put his injunction – to examine one’s life – into a modern context. How can we apply his approach to love, life, politics, career, and death today? “Being like Socrates,” Callard writes, “just means being open-minded, and willing to admit when you are wrong, and unafraid to ask challenging questions.” His superficially forbidding philosophy is actually, and ultimately, a self-liberating and rewarding one.

    Socrates was the first and the boldest to question settled customs and mores, cacophony, and inundating opinion of the herd, and the received wisdom we follow unthinkingly. He believed that we are prone to live as ethical sleepwalkers, going through life equating that which exists or is prescribed with that as it should be. In other words, we all live under assumptions. 

    Why seek material prosperity? Why educate my children? Why care about the welfare of the people, or give to those less fortunate? We rarely ask ourselves these questions because we take the answers to be self-evident. A mother in the daily undertaking of rearing her children is already in the unspoken process of answering, “Why should I raise my children?”

    Callard implies, both implicitly and explicitly, that these questions are seldom asked because they are already – constantly and tacitly – being answered by our bodies and our society. In turn, these give us what she calls “savage commands,” which we conform to without question: “Whereas the body command operates by way of the carrot of pleasure, comfort, and safety; and the stick of pain through 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 that come with being excluded like shame, pity, sympathy, envy and so on.”

    In order to live an unfettered life, we must disobey the twin savage commands of kin and culture. The liberated life is attained by living the hard life, pursued by engaging in frank dialogue with each other. We should seek to persuade or be persuaded, refute or be refuted. The “Socratic method” – that question-and-answer process of attempted mutual refutation – makes “positive progress toward knowledge. It does so not by filling someone with (possibly erroneous) doctrines, but rather through a shared inquiry into the truth.”

    Now, I know what you’re thinking, but not to worry; this isn’t your run-of-the-mill philosophical self-help book. Rather, it is a guide to clearer, more honest thinking. It aims to help us strip away the assumptions that lead us blindly through life. In the spirit of the ancient Greeks, it is about how to become a better person and a better citizen. It is timely in its way, as well. Its tone of clinical inquiry is at odds with the irrational, emotive hyper-liberalism that has lorded over the West for the past 10 years, a woke dogma with its all-too-savage commands.

    There is, however, a huge and seemingly insurmountable problem in Open Socrates, and it begins with the man himself. For all his spirit of irreverence and inquiry, Socrates’ ethical philosophy and theory of knowledge begs the question: Who says what is right and wrong in the first place? You don’t have to be an enthusiastic moral relativist to concede that morality is necessarily created by us and can never be objective – unless you believe in a god who legislates on our behalf. To blithely accept and carry on as if ‘good’ and ‘bad’ were self-evident will inevitably lead one into the trap of emotional and philosophical self-reference, and what may be worse...self-reverence. This could lead to the danger of having to resort to one’s own ‘savage commands.’ 

    Callard, of course, follows Socrates’ lead in seeking to do good as bound up with seeking truth. “Your answers to untimely questions stem from savage commands,” she writes. “What should you do? Simple: keep an open mind and inquire, moving toward what’s true and away from what’s false. Can that really be all there is to it? Yes.”

    It really is that ‘simple’ for those who idolize Socrates. In contrast to those who might attempt to follow Immanuel Kant, or utilitarianism for ethical guidance, Callard promises that “virtue ethics simply tells you to be a decent, kind, fair, brave person.”

    Open Socrates is written with literary erudition and a clarity of style that even a dope like me can understand. As its title suggests, it has no definite attainable goal – no easy, trite answers. It simply and exhaustively exhorts the reader to keep on trying, be unafraid to fail, live with uncertainty and not react with rage to those who ask questions of your life and your opinions. Just always “do what is right,” defined here as “not doing wrong.”

    Open Socrates is at its weakest when adhering most closely to the unsupported and unsupportable moral philosophy of Socrates himself. But it is at its strongest when abiding by the spirit of Socrates: Question everything, and everyone…no matter what.

Write to Peter:magtour@icloud.com