Notes on Open Socrates

  • First sentence: “There is a question you are avoiding. Even now, as you read this sentence, you’re avoiding it.”
  • The question: “Why am I doing any of this?” / “What should I do?”
  • (Second person is great, I should try writing in it) (See Story of Your Life for more inspiration) [my thought]
  • Tolstoy’s view: “stay away from fundamental questions!”
    • “You can’t answer the questions, and you can’t unask them, so… keep the lid on Pandora’s Box.” Socrates
  • “Socrates presented himself as a person one can become, as a kind of person”
  • Socrates “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.”
  • “Socrates thought that anyone could become a Socrates; moreover, he had a habit of demanding that they do so… to the orator Gorgias, he says: ‘I’d be pleased to continue questioning you if you’re the same kind of person I am, otherwise I would drop it.’”
  • So what is a Socrates? “And what kind of person am I? One of those who would be pleased to be refuted if I say anything untrue, and who would be pleased to refute anyone who says anything untrue; one who, however, wouldn’t be any less pleased to be refuted than to refute.
    • In my words: a Socrates is a truth-seeker.
  • “Talking to Socrates is like encountering an 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.”
  • “… 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.”

Socratic Ethics

  • “How should the [Socratic] 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.”
  • “The Socratic motto is not ‘Question anything,’ but ‘Persuade or be persuaded.’”
    • ??? I don’t understand this.
  • Another question: what does Agnes mean by “savage commands”?
  • IMPORTANT: “The way to be good when you don’t know how to be good is by learning.”
    • “You should do everything in such as 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.”
  • “There is only one problem, which is ignorance, and there is only one solution, which is to learn.”
  • “Socratic ethics does not confine itself… it inserts itself everywhere, into every interaction, infusing every corner of life with the demand to become more intellectual.”
  • “In this book, I am to reintroduce Socratic ethics as a novel and distinctive ethical system.”
    • “Unlike the other three traditions, Socratic ethics does not take its bearings from the savage commands [???] of one’s body, or one’s group… [and] does not present itself as a finished system, but rather await its own elaboration by those who… understand themselves as Socratics.”
    • “A follower of Socrates is ethically required to inquire into Socratism, whereas no such intellectual requirements constrain [adherents of the other three traditions].”
      • [Chris comment]: Note the memetic property here: the ideology ethically requires you to inquire into it!
  • “In part three, we examine that method’s demands in the three areas of human life where Socrates thought our ignorance loomed largest: politics, love, and death.”
  • “We Socratics are not beholden to Socrates, the protagonist in Plato’s dialogues; nor are we beholden to Socrates, the historical individual. The one to whom we are beholden is the character – that is, the ideal”

The Tolstoy Problem

  • “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.”
  • Socratic Intellectualism
  • “If you actually knew what you should do, you would do it.” (pg 127)
  • Doesn’t this imply that an “enlightened” person has no free will? Is Socrates willing to accept that?
  • “Why isn’t Socratic ethics already a well-established tradition of its own? [Because it’s] intellectualism, and people have a strong and deep aversion to intellectualism.”
  • “Two distinctive features of Socrates’ ethics: that we do not yet have the answers, and that philosophizing is the way to get them.”
  • “If you put these together you get the third and perhaps most surprising feature: viewing the activity of philosophical theorizing as itself having ethical significance.”
  • “… inquiry is the best thing one can do with one’s life, given that one does not know how to lead it.”
  • We have to go through our whole lives, from birth to death, without ever knowing whether we are doing it right.
  • “The paradox of utopia is that we don’t seem to like it very much… our dislike for utopia is a point in favor of Socratic intellectualism.”
  • “Our ‘utopias’ reflect our ignorance about fundamental questions. The paradox of utopia suggests that our thinking about how we should live may not yet be complete.” (!!!)

The Gadfly-Midwife Paradox

  • My claim: this is not a paradox at all. The “paradox” arises from a false dichotomy between belief and non-belief. The solution is to have credences rather than beliefs; rathern than “I believe X”, “I have y% credence that X” or “I believe there’s a y% chance that X”.
  • Soc method: One person prioritizes the learning of truth, the other prioritizes the avoidance of error