The spirit of Socrates? Question everything

Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, infamously said that a knowledgeable person cannot perform a morally wrong act. Evil is only done out of ignorance and lack of wisdom, he said. Only the ill-informed, deluded and self-deluded behave immorally.

To say that this an audacious claim would be something of an understatement. But the notorious gadfly of Athens – who annoyed 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 derived from two axioms.

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, 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.’ From this, we still hear his most famous maxim: the unexamined life is not worth living.

Agnes Callard, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, is an unashamed apologist for Socrates and his unified theory of truth and knowledge. Her 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, the clamorous 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. We live under assumptions.

Why seek material prosperity? Why educate my children? Why care about the welfare of the people? 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?’.

These are seldom asked because they are already – constantly and tacitly – being answered by our bodies and our society, writes Callard. 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 and the fear of death, the kinship command operates by the way of the carrot of status, honour, affection and camaraderie, and the stick of the fear of exclusion and the various social emotions (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.’

This isn’t quite a self-help book, but 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 Greek, it is about how to become a better person and a better citizen. It is timely in its way, too. 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 irresolvable problem afoot in Open Socrates and it begins with the man himself. For all his spirit of irreverence and inquiry, Socrates’s ethical and epistemological philosophy 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 tautological self-reference, and of having to resort to one’s own ‘savage commands’.

Callard, of course, follows Socrates’s lead in seeing doing 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 from what’s false. Can that really be all there is to it? Yes.’

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

Open Socrates is written with erudition and clarity of style. As its title intimates, 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 cleaving most closely to the unsupported and unsupportable moral philosophy of the man himself. But it is at its strongest when abiding by the spirit of Socrates: question everything, and everyone, at all cost.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.