Book Review: Open Socrates (Part 2)
Yesterday I posted Part 1. Read that first. This is Part 2 of 2.
Table of Contents
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.
Can that really be all there is to it? Yes. That is the Socratic method. (2213)
Yeah, no, that’s not The Socratic Method. As we will see throughout Book Two, there are plenty of things that are what is described above, and do not count as Socratic. The Socratic reply is ‘no, other methods don’t count because you Did It Wrong.’
Nor is there any reason to think that methods of this type could result in this magical fully confident ‘knowledge’ that is distinct from ordinary so-called knowledge.
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. (2217)
Do we? I don’t think we do.
Ah, yes. The Paradox Paradox.
The Paradox Paradox
I dub The Paradox Paradox that serious thinkers believe the following three points related to Doing Philosophy, which are introduced early and then featured extensively in book two, are paradoxes, whereas they… simply aren’t?
We don’t need some convoluted philosophic solution to any of it?
Each of its three parts—inquiry, open-mindedness, and truth-seeking—conceals a paradox.
The paradox as to how inquiry is possible is called “Meno’s paradox”: How can one search for what one does not yet know? How will one recognize it when one finds it?
Open-mindedness is paradoxical because it requires a person to be willing to admit that she is wrong—which, if you consider it carefully, is a form of self-awareness that is not easy to make sense of. It is not hard to admit that you were wrong, but very hard to admit that you are wrong. This is called “Moore’s paradox.”
The third paradox is about pursuing the truth and avoiding falsity, two activities that, far from being identical, turn out to be in tension with one another.
In order to believe truths you must believe something, and that means you run the risk of believing something false. You could avoid false belief by believing nothing at all, but that would frustrate the aim of believing truths. (342)
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. (2222)
Meno’s Paradox. Emperor’s New Clothes, there’s no issue. That’s simply… not how knowledge works, or how evidence works, or how thinking works, at all. I can gather evidence. I can do the math or reason. I can do verification in various forms of potential answers. I do these things called ‘thinking,’ and ‘gathering information’ and ‘running experiments’ and ‘verification’ and so on. Have you heard the probably good news of Bayes Rule? Huh?
Moore’s Paradox. Again, the first version of this is Emperor’s New Clothes. There’s no issue of logic here, only one of grammar. The supposed paradox is a magician’s trick of trying to force disperate things to be unified when they’re not. The second version is also a grammar problem, in that it treats humans as being unified minds with logically consistent viewpoints that hold constant under time and framing, for all purposes, and that is not how humans (or LLMs) work.
There’s two versions of this: The version stated here, and the more powerful version as stated in chapter 6 where the person anticipates that the apparent contradiction will sustain itself.
Two simple ways out of the easy version are simply to say ‘I was wrong, I now see that, so I have changed my mind’ or ‘I see that the model of this (or the belief I am currently basing decisions upon) is wrong, so I should alter it’ and then you alter it.
That is obviously what I usually mean when I say ‘I am in the wrong (now).’ Whether or not I could ‘suspend’ my judgment I clearly have changed it, and if you say I couldn’t do that then I would ask the person saying it cannot be done to not interrupt the person doing it.
But the best way out is perhaps to simply notice that all knowledge and belief is probabilistic, and constantly being updated for new information, and what are we even talking about?
So to conclude, you can obviously say things like ‘without this information I was 99.9% sure that mommy wasn’t kissing Santa Claus, but with this new information I now think she is 99% to be kissing Santa Claus, or at least some dude dressed like Santa Claus, because I did indeed see mommy kissing Santa Claus, right there, ew gross.’ What’s the issue?
One can also note the mind is not one uniform object, and that its updates and the realization of implications often take time, and the part that talks can get ahead of the rest.
As in, I believe [X]. I go through logic that causes me to conclude [~X]. I haven’t gone and reversed my belief in [X] yet because it is cached, and there’s no invisible force that mandates that I can’t have this temporary contradiction running around, then notice it, then reconcile it. Everything’s fine.
In Chapter 6 this is expanded to statements that don’t involve an imminent update, “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 (1873–1958), who first singled them out for philosophical attention.” They certainly reflect a weird situation, but again yes it is obviously possible for people to believe things they know objectively to be false, and sometimes it is instrumentally useful to be able to do this.
The third ‘paradox,’ Gadfly-Midwife, is that there is a seeming contradiction between believing true things and not believing false things. Once you realize belief is probabilistic, there’s not conflict at all.
But even if your beliefs are binary, and you do need to choose to either believe or not believe things, or functionally do so, then that’s simply a trade-off between Type I and Type II errors. We all do it every day. There is no issue.
These paradoxes are supposed to be justification for the unique use of the Socratic method. Except they pose no difficulties for non-Socratic Bayesian reasoning.
Agnes asks ‘what is inquiry?’ and seems to think it contrasts with a problem, and thus uniquely involves non-measurement and not having a particular use for the answer. It’s like the mathematician who is terrified someone might find an application for their work.
There is an important sense in which explaining the Socratic method is not a matter of offering new information. Instead of adding to our store of knowledge—as the biographer, or the cartographer, or the biologist might—Socrates demonstrates that we already have, in us, ideas we do not quite know how to live up to.
Learning philosophy is less like filling a void and more like untying a knot. Philosophy begins not in ignorance, not in wonder, but in error. (2252)
I think this is mystical gibberish.
Yes, of course most of us have ‘ideas we do not quite know how to live up to’ but that doesn’t mean those ideas are right, or complete, or that we secretly ‘know’ any let alone all of this underneath it all, without the need to gather additional data. That goes double for this Socratic standard of ultra-knowledge. All the time, Socrates and others in the dialogues refer to data they have that is drawn from experience or observation or being informed of it, and would benefit from more data that they lack, and demonstrate methods to us.
One could narrowly say ‘you already know how to do each of the moves within an inquiry’ but I don’t see how that means you don’t need new information. The information on how to use which information you already have is new information.
Rubber Ducking
In an essay called “On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts During Speech,” German playwright Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) gives his reader advice for what to do when “there is something you want to know and cannot discover by meditation.” Kleist says you should seize upon “the first acquaintance whom you happen to meet,” not in order to extract from them the knowledge you seek but, rather, to hand it over to them: “You yourself should begin by telling it all to him.” (2266)
Kleist’s insight—that I can give you more than what I seem to myself to have—is Socratic. (2280)
But in order to take this second step with him, we have to learn to recognize the pervasive distortion created by the assumption that thinking is a private, inner, mental activity. The distortion extends to our experience of Socrates himself, generating a kind of double vision that leaves us seeing two Socrateses. (2297)
In software engineering they call this rubber ducking. You describe your problem to someone else, and by the time you’ve explained it you realize what the answer is, without them saying a word. Then you take it a step further and you instead say it to an actual literal rubber duck. The active ingredient is explaining yourself out loud.
Writing it down takes it to the next level. Explain it to everyone, in a systematic way. You’d pay to know what you really think, and this is how you find out. Except no, you didn’t actually really think it until you wrote it down, or in Kleist’s case until you said it. You had the information and tools to get there, but you weren’t there yet.
The Socratic version and method suggests you generate your knowledge in dialogue rather than in isolation, not only use the other person’s presence as impetus. As usual, there’s no conflict here. If you do all your thinking in isolation, you’ll get stuck. If you do all your thinking in pairs or groups, that also won’t work.
I want to say ‘you won’t have time to think,’ which suggests the word is being overloaded - you won’t have time to think-2 if you only think-1 and think-3 (as per lining up with Kannaman, I suggest think-1 would be instinctual thinking and acting, think-2 is engaging your system 2 on your own, think-3 would then be engaging your system 2s together in a group), and you need to do both, the same way the brain needs to sleep. Sometimes you should do one thing, and sometimes you should do the other.
Coherent Extrapolated Volition
In some sense you could try to say that ‘what you would think if you thought about it’ and ‘what you think’ are the same thing. They very much aren’t.
AI is philosophy’s final exam, in that soon we may have to figure out how to formally write down The Good, what we want to aim for, the full extent of our preferences, and then put that into practice. Most things you write down kill you. Most things you write down, that don’t kill you, and that sound like good ideas, don’t turn out well. Most of the ones that ‘turn out well’ relative to now still miss out on a lot.
Eliezer Yudkowsky proposes we solve this via ‘coherent extrapolated volition.’ The idea is, the AI takes everyone, and figures out what we would answer if we had unlimited time to think about what to say, and then combines those answers.
This is certainly a better solution than ‘someone takes a guess and writes it down,’ but I would expect this exercise to go badly, even if it works as designed, because I expect most people to still try to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods based on a wrong model of the world (and of what is valuable in it) derived from poor thinking and for all of their mistakes to fail to cancel out.
I don’t think my terminal preference disagreements with the bulk of others are what Scott Alexander refers to as Mistake Theory. I think we have big real disagreements, on top of the big real places they someone is wrong about how the world works.
It is possible that I am wrong about that, and it would be fine if we could pull this whole trick off. But if that is true, then I don’t think that answer would be well-described as ‘what people already think.’
The Cult Leader Breaks You Down
[In Apology, Socrates] stings and reproaches his fellow citizens, asking them questions that reveal the absence of the knowledge they felt sure they had. His refutations put people in a state of confusion in which they do not know where to go, what to do, which way to turn. (2301)
Socrates the Gadfly convinces people that their so-called knowledge and skills are imperfect, and uses this to induce this paralyzed state of aporia. Rationalists are familiar with this state.
It reads like a nerd’s fantasy. You walk in with your superior insight and intellect, point out how wrong they are and they are stunned into silence and paralysis. He also does this while repeatedly saying he knows nothing and claiming to be humble. He pretends to play low status so you’ll let him question you and trick you into accepting his frames, and then wham, he hits you with contradictions and claims high status.
Perhaps this was such a new idea that no one had defenses to it yet? Modern people would just shrug and go about their day and not like you.
[Socrates] reports with surprise the moment when “I realized, to my sorrow and alarm, that I was getting unpopular.” (2309)
If that was a surprise, yeah, he really did know nothing.
Going around as an ugly person with no credentials (in various senses), telling people how wrong they are, being a nitpicker and word manipulator and rhetorical sucker puncher who lures people into asserting they know things, equating that with being able to answer every question on a topic with absolutes, leading them down garden paths of contradictions and then humiliating them into being forced to say they don’t know anything when they obviously know many things and prove that by being useful people doing things, leaving them non-useful people not doing things?
And then tries to convince such people of whatever else he had in mind that day?
Yeah, when they realize what happened that’s going to piss people off, you’re in a situation a lot less sympathetic than this one was:
Douglas Adams: It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smart-ass.
It’s also rather dangerous. If you let such cognitive tricks work on you, that’s what cult leaders or the military do first in breaking you down, convincing you that you are worthless and clueless, and only they can provide the insights. Then they are free to transform you and your beliefs into whatever they want.
That’s the Midwife, or ‘second Socrates.’
The Cult Leader Builds You Back Up
Once you sufficiently break someone down, which Socrates would call ‘suspending judgment’ and ‘realizing you lack knowledge,’ you can then imprint them with a new set of ideas.
The Socrates twist is to, when entering this mode, pivot to pretending to play low status, instead of doing it from a position of authority and high status.
Midwife Socrates is just trying to make “the truth of each existing thing become clear.” He is honestly inquiring, sincerely hoping that Euthyphro will tell him what piety is, that Laches will tell him what courage is, and so on; he is not trying to refute anyone. Refutation is, if it occurs, an accidental side effect of his noble quest for knowledge. (2348)
he is remarkably consistent in representing his motivations in a positive manner. He says that he is talking to his interlocutors in order to learn. Here’s a representative passage: “Protagoras,” I said, “I don’t want you to think that my motive in talking with you is anything else than to take a good hard look at things that continually perplex me. I think that Homer said it all in the line, Going in tandem, one perceives before the other. Human beings are simply more resourceful this way in action, speech, and thought. . . . How could I not solicit your help in a joint investigation of these questions?” (2368)
Look, no, that’s bullshit, yes he asserts these things but the man is very obviously lying. Refutation is a necessary step in the game, so that you can then assert whatever supposed truth you have in mind.
Could it be that Socrates acts as gadfly, and acts as midwife, in that order? (2376)
I call this the two-stage view.
It breaks Socrates’ activity into a preliminary, destructive, error-identification component and, once that has been completed, a secondary, productive search component. Negative refutation paves the way for positive inquiry. Socrates’ interlocutors enter the field of conversation laden with “baggage”: a dismissive attitude toward the project of seeking after such items as knowledge, justice, and virtue, grounded either in the conceit of already possessing those things, or in a cynical denial of their value.* (2379)
Quite so. That’s the whole idea. You convince people that since they can’t answer every question without being caught in a trap, that means they have no knowledge. Everyone involved has to be cleared away in this fashion first, hence refuting Gorgias, then Polus, then Callicles in a row.
What Agnes calls necessary for ‘participation in the search’ I call something else.
And then, Socrates makes a big show that no, he can’t tell you the answers, everything has to seem to be your idea, in part so that he can claim it was ‘within you,’ and in part so the person doesn’t later think they got tricked into it.
And most importantly, Socrates does it because the main goal is to convert this other person into someone who devotes their time and resources to inquiry in the Socratic fashion. He’s not trying to find answers. He’s recruiting.
Alternatively, maybe Socrates just really gets his kicks from using his tricks to ‘refute’ people, since given the rules of this game you can refute anyone and anything that isn’t math or purely factual.
How else can we explain Socrates repeated refusal, noted by Agnes, to offer any suggestions of his own, even when someone is clearly asking for them and happy to listen?
Agnes also draws a contrast with rivals who had their own doctrines, and charged money to teach those doctrines to others. That wasn’t his game, he was playing a bigger and more fun one.
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. (2465)
The problem with this hypothesis is that very obviously they are not the same thing, and indeed the whole Socratic method is based upon the idea that they are not the same thing. Otherwise you would not need asymmetrical roles. Yes, it is useful to know a thousand ways not to make a lightbulb, and in some sense this is the way you figure out one way to not not make a lightbulb, but at best if you insist you will only play the role of the lightbulb inspector you’re being a smartass.
Did You Know There Are Tradeoffs In Epistemics
Two thousand years after the death of Socrates, William James dropped a bombshell:
“We must know the truth; and we must avoid error—these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws.”
No, they’re not. It would save so much trouble to realize that they are not distinct, because everything is probability. But yes, there is a tradeoff between overconfidence and underconfidence, between Type I and Type II errors, that cannot be avoided.
It should come as a shock to hear someone assert that the pursuit of truth and the avoidance of error don’t go hand in hand.
You might protest: if someone believes the truth, then it follows that she avoids error. James has to admit that you are right: if S believes p, and p is true, then S has also succeeded in avoiding error with respect to p. Every truth held constitutes an error avoided. So what’s the problem?
The problem is this: when you talk about truths held and errors avoided, you are looking at an end result, which obscures the tensions intrinsic to the process of arriving at that result. (2472)
… ‘back when there was some doubt in her mind as to whether p.’
The key error or move is in that last line. For any interesting value of [p], there should always be some doubt as to whether [p]. When you ‘believe [p]’ what you are saying is you are sufficiently confident in [p] to reason and act as if [p] is true, up to some reasonable limit. But that often doesn’t mean you would risk your life on the basis of [p], or gamble at heavy odds that [p].
When you choose to use the simplification of treating p([p])=~1 (and yes, that’s why I always try to use [X] instead of [p]), you’re taking a (hopefully) calculated risk, and yes the two goals are in tension.
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. (2485)
You don’t actually get to dodge. You still have to assign a probability to everything, even if you don’t make it explicit, and in doing so you must still avoid error.
Clifford describes those who believe on the basis of insufficient evidence, even if the belief is true, as “sinful.” Clifford’s advice is that whenever you stand at the crossroads of doubt, you should prioritize the avoidance of falsehood by suspending belief. James disagrees. (2497)
The obvious reply to Clifford is, ‘are you sure about that?’
The wise man is talking price. You cannot totally avoid ‘acting as if’ or reasoning as if, and you do not want to always or reason act as if.
Why not think that James and Clifford are both right, and that one needs to combine the activities of scouting for truth and testing for falsity? James’ point is, you can’t. The goal of avoiding falsehood and the goal of securing truths are in tension with one another. (2508)
James is being dumb. Of course you can do this. We all do this all the time. I reach for my phone, both trying to ascertain truth (that the phone is there) and avoid error (in case the phone is not there). If I am inquiring into something philosophical, and I seek to disprove it, then I am obviously seeking to avoid error, but by trying and failing to avoid error I am becoming more confident that the thing is true, and thus seeking truth.
What James and Clifford are claiming to talk is nonsense, but what they are actually talking is, as always, price. Clifford wants you relatively skeptical. James wants to be relatively unskeptical. His examples are friendship and self-confidence, where he is right because errors are small mistakes, and then religion, which seems like a strange place for a philosopher to not be skeptical.
James invokes ‘preliminary faith’ or ‘will to believe,’ for when you need to actually do something but can’t be fully confident, so you act on beliefs that may be false. Agnes finds this unpersuasive. I find it worded oddly and poorly, but correct at heart. You need to act under uncertainty, and indeed you do so all the time, and often the way to do that is indeed to ‘act as if’ within a bounded context.
If I ask many people about such situations, they may conflate this with full belief, or conflate what they are attempting to do with what they are doing.
This is what I intend to be doing: to communicate with you, to engage you. And if you asked me “What are you doing?” I would give those same answers. I’m communicating, I’m engaging. There is a remarkable coincidence between my answers to the question “What do you intend to be doing?” and m answers to the question “What are you doing?”
The two are the same because Agnes is being imprecise.
If you ask me what I am doing right now, I might answer “I am writing a Book Review” or “I am refuting Agnes” but that is shorthand. If I am being precise, especially in the context of a philosophical debate, I would say “I am trying to write a Book Review” or “I am attempting to refute Agnes.” I am fully aware that these things might not happen. This might not (as of now) get finished, and my argument might not be convincing or correct. Agnes might or might not, from her perspective back then, have successfully communicated or engaged, and she clearly knew this. She’s overcomplicating this.
We don’t ‘check whether our lips are moving before saying we are talking’ because we have overwhelming other evidence that this is happening. I only ‘look at evidence’ to figure something out when I don’t already have enough evidence to know the answer. That’s on top of the obvious statement that if you say ‘I’m talking’ you’re never wrong.
Agents can be wrong about what they are doing, so they don’t count as knowing what they are doing.
So once again: Yo, be real. That’s not what ‘knowing’ or knowledge means. If you’re going to use that word to refer to that impossible standard, then fine, unlike Descartes I don’t have time to go all ‘I think therefore I am’ so with notably rare exceptions like math let’s just agree no one ‘knows’ anything, and we can start using ‘justified hunch that is true’ or ‘is very confident and is right’ or whatever. I’m going to keep calling that knowledge.
You Came Here For An Argument
This is all setup for the the idea that Socrates ‘solves’ this problem via having one person pursue truth and the other prioritize avoiding error. The Socratic method. Via refuting all the other person’s ideas, they avoid error, and eventually get to truth.
The same conflict of interest exists between the product tester, insofar as he is instructed to break the product, and the product maker, insofar as she is instructed to make it unbreakable.
There is a tension between the Jamesian demand to know the truth and the Cliffordian demand to avoid the false when one person is responsible for satisfying both demands, but if they are distributed over two people, the tasks turn out to be complementary. (2673)
There are certainly times and places where this is useful. This has little to do with degrees of skepticism, and far more about fresh pairs of eyes and different perspectives and skill sets, and the way we shift modes of thinking and respond to various prompt types, or as Agnes says ‘division of labor.’ One person can and often does play both roles, including in adjacent steps of a conversation, sometimes without breaking stride.
Other times the procedure is that when I can no longer find problems, that’s when I ask others to also look for problems.
Recall Critias’ complaint: I think you are quite consciously doing what you denied doing a moment ago—you are trying to refute me and ignoring the real question at issue.
Critias can be read as demanding: either go ahead and do the thinking, or step back and let me do it! (2687)
You can also read this as Socrates being an ass, and refusing to offer any positive suggestions because ‘that’s not his role.’ That’s not how good practical inquiry works. Even when you are mostly having one person in each role, you still contribute to the other. As you refute, you should try to suggest ways to improve or inquire better.
If all you’re doing is scoring points and then laying back being smug, then that has its uses but yeah, you’re ignoring the real question at issue in favor of a zero sum subtask.
If all you’re doing is proposing things and not bringing up when you see potential problems, you are likewise only doing a subtask and being zero sum.
Is Socrates ‘cooperating’ in such cases? Agnes takes this as a given. I think often the answer is no.
When Socrates and Protagoras reach a stalemate as to the length of speeches that should be permitted in their conversation, the suggestion that they choose a moderator is met with approval by everyone—except Socrates. Socrates insists that the kind of activity he’s engaged in does not require a moderator. (2656)
… Ask questions or answer them. There is no third role.
This is also Socrates being an ass, and everyone knowing this and trying to make him not be one, and him saying no if you don’t let me be an ass and use the format I’ve mastered to trick people I’m taking my ball and going home, and also gaslighting that he’s not trying to score points. He offers to let Protagoras be the questioner, but he knows no one really wants this.
Even if one agrees this is often a useful way of thinking, surely one can also realize that there are other useful ways of thinking, and also big downsides to automatically ‘pair philosophizing.’
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. (2692)
The idea that you aren’t ‘actually thinking’ except in dialogue is deeply silly. The idea that you aren’t thinking when in dialogue is also silly.
So is the Socrates line, commonly pulled out, that if there is an inquiry to be made one must indefinitely drop everything and inquire, or else be blameworthy for not doing so, and he’ll force you to be the one to say uncle. There are infinite questions to ask and we have limited time to do so, and also other things to do.
When someone says ‘I’ll have to think about this more’ they are saying some combination of many highly cooperative and useful things, epistemic things and also social things, such as:
I intend to think about or work on this problem more.
I am now ‘unstuck’ and have avenues of inquiry here worth pursuing.
I am sufficiently ‘unstuck’ that I no longer need to interact with you to continue, and I do not wish to spend our valuable time together on this, or waste your time.
You are arguing with me, or we are otherwise engaged in some form of zero sum interaction or status competition, or I don’t want to look foolish, or debate in front of an audience, or I need to consult other information, and so on, and I need time to prepare a proper reply.
We do not currently have time for a full Inquiry, so it will have to wait.
This is not the central point, so I’m putting a market down and moving on.
I have an intuition that you are wrong even if I can’t justify it, and I want to inform you of this but don’t think it is worth unpacking it.
I notice I am confused.
I need to write about this to know what I think about it.
This can also be an offer to do inquiry on the question, now or later.
Nor does the distinctness of Socrates lie, as many of his followers believed, in an impossibly high standard for knowledge. Socrates was neither possessed of knowledge he refused to share nor did he believe that real knowledge was unattainable. (2701)
Socrates was not an extremist about knowledge and he was not an extremist about altruism. (2705)
That wasn’t the main distinction, but the followers did not believe this without a reason. Yes, Socrates is demanding an impossibly high standard for knowledge, in that he thinks that if you have ‘knowledge of [X]’ then you should be able to answer every question about [X] entirely, without ‘wavering,’ meaning that your conversational answers are always consistent and endorsed, even with conflations of word meanings, or else it turns out you have no knowledge at all. He claims ‘real knowledge is attainable’ but in practice, in the face of these techniques, no it isn’t. People walk away thinking they have knowledge because Socrates wants them to do this, and because there isn’t anyone else pulling similar tricks to stop him.
Socrates was the ultimate ‘I’m Just Asking Questions Guy.’ There’s a reason that is considered a Type Of Guy, and not a good one.
You Have Completed Building The Oracle
Chapter 6 is about Moore’s Paradox of Self-Knowledge. As I noted earlier, this simply is not a paradox, there is no mystery to solve. People make the move, all the time, all on their own, of believing [X], then realizing the facts point to [~X] without having suspended belief in [X], then realizing this, then either (1) no longer believing [X], or (2) noticing they still believe [X], even though in some objective sense they know that [~X].
It happens all the time.
Philosophers find this deeply puzzling: How can proximity generate difficulties of access? Non-philosophers might be just as puzzled that philosophers care about the paradox. Why does it matter whether one can say, “Honey never spoils but I don’t believe that”? (2843)
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. (2845)
“Intellectually, yes, I know that honey never spoils. But I notice that I expect I will continue to act as if honey does eventually spoil, because the elephant and the rider are different parts of the brain, and something in me worries I’m being tricked.”
Or alternatively, “I agree that the probability of [X] is high, such that I agree that [X], but it is not sufficiently high that I can afford to entirely act as if [X]. Bets should perhaps still be hedged and I am nervous.”
I don’t actually think inability to sincerely assert non-trivial Moore sentences would be an issue. It would be instrumentally annoying in some places, but not intellectually so.
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. (2858)
Well, what if C is dead? This is not a gotcha, as in philosophy C is often very dead. For example, Socrates and Nietzsche are both dead. Or what if B believed C’s views? Certainly B is refuted. Does this not count?
As Agnes notes, in ordinary English A has most definitely refuted C regardless. Socrates, it seems, would want to call this ‘a refutation’ but say that C is not refuted. I think that’s not a good use of language and it is more misleading than useful, and would prefer to say ‘C is not aware they have been refuted.’ I don’t think you can avoid being refuted by sticking your fingers in your ears and saying ‘la la la not listening,’ also many on Twitter functionally disagree.
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.” (2995)
We do this because it is correct with notably rare exceptions. If I assert [P] it is safe to assume I am also asserting I believe P. If I don’t believe P, that is sufficiently weird that it is on me to say otherwise. This is true with any sufficiently strong correlation.
Agnes continues to think there is a problem here in search of a solution. I cannot for the life of me understand what problem that is.
When parents praise a child’s artwork, appearance, or intelligence, the child often doesn’t take that praise seriously. Sometimes, the child may suspect his parents of insincerity, but this needn’t be the case. Even if he believes his parents are saying exactly what they think, he may think that they are incapable of assessing him accurately, because he is too close to them. (3006)
Right, that is exactly how Bayesian evidence works. Smart kid.
To say I am biased toward myself is a wild understatement: I am not more likely to judge my beliefs true; I am utterly incapable of judging them to be false. I am not evaluating them at all, because they are evaluatively inaccessible to me. (3012)
That’s not what that means. I am not ‘biased’ in favor of my own beliefs in any meaningful sense, and of course I am capable of judging them false. It’s highly unlikely I will do this, both because they are usually cached and because there is some reason I believe them. But some people are very capable of engaging in proper ‘modesty’ actions regarding their beliefs, if their beliefs are challenged. That’s a top rationality skill, as is knowing when not to do that.
Consider a puzzle about modesty: if being an unassuming, reserved, humble person—the sort who is averse to self-praise—is a virtue, then it deserves praise. It would follow that the modest person cannot evaluate herself as possessing the virtue of modesty: were she to do so, she would pride herself on her modesty, and thereby lose it. (3015)
What she cannot do is evaluate these features of herself positively.
Many old jokes could go here. Moran emphasizes not taking credit for it, which to an extent extends to internal thinking. This is closer to a ‘paradox’ than the major three supposed paradoxes, but the solution is that what you need to avoid is aggrandizement, or thinking about how it makes you better. You can still observe, so long as you don’t take pride in it or brag or anything like that, I think?
Here’s her third example, where we think very differently:
Try this experiment. Pick something that you usually struggle with—answering emails promptly, staying off your phone, going to bed on time—and promise yourself that you will do better on this front for the next twenty-four hours. Done?
Okay, I predict that twenty-four hours from now, you will have trouble answering the question, “Did you keep your promise?”
Suppose you picked the bedtime promise, and that you do in fact go to bed on time. Couldn’t that be because I drew your attention to the issue, rather than because you felt bound by the force of the promise?
Suppose you stay up late. Why not think that means that you released yourself from a silly promise that was, in the first place, only an example in a philosophy book? (3028)
If you do go to bed on time, then yes, you kept your promise. It doesn’t matter if you would have done so anyway, or you did so due to the attention. Still counts.
If you do not go to bed on time, then no, you did not keep your promise. You cannot ‘let yourself out’ of the promise, you can only choose not to keep it. Sometimes you’ll have a good reason not to keep it, and other times you won’t.
Imagine how much easier it would have been for you to separate my two questions—Did you go to bed on time? and Did you keep your promise?—if you hadn’t had to rely only on your own devices. Imagine that you’d promised your spouse you would go to bed on time tonight. (3036)
No, that’s exactly the same situation. They two are the same question. We agree that you either went to bed on time or you didn’t, and that your reasons for this don’t matter. So why does that change if you made a promise to yourself?
The same way Agnes points out that people respond to whether you keep your promises, you also respond to whether you keep your promises, and update your beliefs based on that. That includes both your promises to yourself and your promises to others. And that’s one good reason to keep all your promises, even if they now seem otherwise silly or counterproductive. You really, really want the ability to commit to things, including to yourself.
Agnes asks ‘can you make promises to yourself?’ The answer is obviously yes, and the real question is whether you can count on yourself to keep them. That’s up to you.
Agnes then tries to draw a similar contrast with evaluating beliefs. Is assessing one’s own beliefs simply ‘each one gets a check mark’? No, obviously not. That’s not what it means to assess beliefs. Agnes would object that you can’t properly assess your own beliefs, and I once again say the person saying it can’t be done needs to stop interrupting the person doing it. Every day we assess (some of) our own prior beliefs with fresh eyes.
Thinking about one’s own thoughts is not a two-person job. I do it alone all the time.
If you can’t do it alone, you’re lacking a particular mental skill. You can fix that.
Agnes even talks repeatedly about ‘suspending judgment,’ and other forms of the idea of being subject and treating other parts of one’s thinking or beliefs as object. She clearly knows you can do that. She does it, frequently. What’s the issue?
Suspending judgment is the conceptual analog to twisting or turning my body to bring parts of myself I can’t usually see into view. (3110)
Over and over, as I reread these passages, I see myself highlighting sentence after sentence saying the same thing: That one cannot look at or evaluate themselves, that these forms of thinking require two people. Except no, they don’t, and the move that is supposedly impossible is downright common.
That doesn’t mean a second person isn’t often useful. There is a time and a place. It’s just not anything like ‘every time and every place.’
How Refutation Works
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. (3142)
This is almost name calling, at this point. If you think differently at different times, if you explore different angles, if you are in a way ‘in dialogue with yourself’ or allow yourself to contain multitudes, or you explore and notice contradictions or conflicts, or places where your definitions don’t carve reality at its joints? Sometimes the book calls this impossible. Other times this is called ‘wavering.’
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. (3148)
Contradiction is one way to disprove something, or one reason not to accept it. It is far from the only one. Socrates keeps relying on it because he convinces everyone to think only in absolutes, and that they can’t alter previous responses, and that he can use conflations of definitions and misleading questions to set traps, and all his conversational partners tend to be rather naive and fall for 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; (3153)
This is technically true, to some extent, by construction. That’s what ‘untimely’ is taken to be. But yes even then you can still suspend that answer within the context of a conversation or thought experiment.
There’s also an implicit rejection of differing epistemic perspectives. I can be selling without any expectation that you will buy, or that you would correct to buy. A wise person will commonly say ‘I believe [X], but I see why you wouldn’t believe [X],’ or ‘I understand you believe [X] but you can understand why I shouldn’t believe [X],’ because we have different sets of experiences and thus different evidence.
We can’t actually invest the time for full Aumann agreement in every conversation, and even if we did there’s no reason we should be able to trust each other on that level or be able to imbue the necessary richness of information, or even be willing to share all our private information. And that is fine.
Yet Socrates systematically translates such one-way untimely questions into questions that are untimely for both parties: his conversation with Lysis quickly becomes “What is a true friend?” with Alcibiades it turns into “What is justice?” with Laches and Nicias he explores “What is courage?” with Euthyphro “What is piety?” (3164)
One might better ask, why does Socrates turn narrow questions into general definitional questions of nebulous concepts that clearly mean very different things to different people and in different cultures and contexts? Why should you expect there to be one clean definition of any of these things that always applies and that can respond crisply to all questions?
The right answer is that you shouldn’t expect that, because no such answer exists. That’s not a claim that I, you, Socrates or Agnes does not know that definition. It’s a claim that there exists no such definition to be found.
Just like the rest of us, Socrates needs to believe that he is a good person, which means that he needs to believe he is conducting himself in the manner of a true friend, with justice and courage and piety. (3167)
Well, tough break, Socrates, Riley, and also everyone else, including the good people. You don’t get to know that, and if you’re being objective you don’t get to believe it, either, because ‘good person’ is not even a thing.
How does refutation work? You show that a person is wrong, or sufficiently likely to be wrong. That can be done any number of ways and doesn’t require that the person agree they were refuted, although them not admitting it rules out many of the benefits.
On the flip side, you can and often do convince someone they were wrong, and they change their mind, despite you not having, strictly speaking, refuted them.
The Problem Is Not Having A Problem
It is so confusing to me that anyone takes Meno’s Paradox seriously. I don’t know how many ways to say ‘this is not how any of this works, at all.’ Or even where to begin. Verification is distinct from generation. Knowing the problem you are trying to solve is distinct from knowing the answer. You can run experiments and gain knowledge. What are we even doing?
Bizarrely, Agnes opens the Meno’s Paradox chapter with the Turing Test.
Turing transformed a vague question—Can machines think?—into a well-defined problem—Can you construct a machine that can pass a specific test? This type of transformation is often useful. (3255)
As Agnes notes, it is often highly useful, especially for practical purposes, when pondering nebulous questions like ‘can machines think’ or ‘which surgeon is good,’ to look for the a metric you can actually measure, rather than asking what do you mean by ‘think’ or ‘good.’
When philosophical questions can be reformulated as problems, that is when they leave the orbit of philosophy. (3269)
That’s the goal. If you do good enough philosophy, or if you do good enough something else, you can move on to more practical solutions in increasingly many realms. The philosopher, like the firefighter, should be happy to have less work to do.
Agnes points out (3334) that when we passed the Turing Test, people mostly said ‘okay time for a new test’ rather than ‘oh so the machines can think now.’ The test was neither necessary nor sufficient. It was highly useful along the way, and having approximations can be highly useful even if they are not so precise, but the question of whether machines think is still within philosophy, although the answer is yes.
Then there are places where you can’t do it at all.
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?”
I mean, yes the philosopher is doing something potentially important but also it very obviously does depend on what you mean by those words. If you’re trying to Do Philosophy without realizing this you’re not going to get anywhere, or you’re going to Do Socrates and use the ambiguity to rugpull and gaslight people. That doesn’t mean you can’t try to better pin down either what people typically mean by the term, or what it ideally should refer to in various senses.
What Is Love Justice?
But, for example, ‘what is justice?’ is both a good question and it is ambiguous shorthand for a number of related but distinct (mostly good) questions, and one correct response to any plausible answer is ‘that just raises further questions.’
I am not confident exactly what answer is right, but I am comfortable saying some answers are plausible and others are wrong, in ways I’d be prepared to defend.
Aristotle’s answer of ‘Justice consists of giving each person their due’ seems like a pretty good short description of what I think justice means and should mean.
It doesn’t tell you much about what is just in any given situation. Having the ‘logos’ of Justice is neither necessary nor sufficient to identify justice or see justice done.
Plato’s answer of ‘Justice is the internal harmony of the soul and the functional balance of the city-state, where every part performs its proper role’ is… not what that word means? Perhaps we are losing a lot in the translation, but it has to point to some very serious disagreements as well.
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.” (3274)
Please, let’s not call it that.
Things That Are Not Entirely Virtuous
Also, I don’t think that’s what this is here?
Plato dramatizes [this scene] in the Meno.
Socrates asks Meno, “What is virtue?” Meno offers three answers, each of which is refuted by Socrates. When Socrates asks Meno to try again, Meno explodes in a shower of incredulous questions:
How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?
Socrates immediately recognizes what is happening. He has clearly encountered this 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. (3286)
Socrates is doing his usual thing in an especially strong form. Meno tries to rattle off particular virtues for particular groups of people. Rather than refute the particulars, which would also have been easy, Socrates insists they must all ‘have one and the same form,’ and turns everything into a series of absolutes, and rather than challenge this Meno keeps walking into the same razor blades.
As a result Meno goes on tilt and pulls out this argument, which is like catnip for someone like Socrates. It’s in his wheelhouse, he knows exactly how to respond, he lives for this stuff.
They end up not reaching an answer on ‘what is virtue?’ at all, and I don’t have time to read the Meno but based on some LLM conversations I find the logical hoops they go through later deeply silly even by the standards of the quotes we’ve dealt with already.
I think the real (or best, or most useful) answer to ‘what is virtue?’ is that it is nebulous and messy and particular, but that if I had to try I might say something convoluted like ‘the tendency to cultivate and operate according to heuristics that one would expect to observe on reflection from the outside to best in practice approximate correct decision theory and otherwise lead to desirable outcomes.’
Whereas if you try to say something cute like Aristotle’s ‘Golden Mean’ I think you’re at best begging the question, since either you’re making a statement that is so strong (that the ideal amount of everything is not zero and not the maximum one could practically achieved) it often and importantly isn’t true, or you’re saying something (that you should not hold one absolute automatically ahead of all other priorities) that is true but doesn’t tell you much. It’s a fine heuristic to default to, but only loosely.
Attempts to lay out particular sets of virtues a la Meno are also highly popular, you’ve got the Stoics with 4, the Christians with 7, the Avatar with 8, the Rationalists with 12, the Confucians with 3 and so on. These are useful if not taken too literally.
Compared to those, Meno is giving wrong headed (by our current standards), incomplete and oversimplified and overconfident but conceptually very strong answers, in that he gives different virtues for different people in different circumstances. That’s highly useful, I think a better hint than what Socrates offers.
Socrates, meanwhile, is saying the correct answer must be 1. Why? One could go back to Agnes saying ‘Socrates needs to know all these distinct things so that he can be those distinct things and therefore be a good person’ but doesn’t that directly contradict the idea of concepts having a simple singular logos? If ‘virtue’ and ‘judge’ need to be singular concepts, ‘good person’ should be also, and if you think you get to break down ‘good person’ this way it’s absurd to then say I can’t break down ‘virtue’ or ‘justice’ on principle.
Okay, fine, Socrates, you want a simple Logos for virtue? Fine.
Optimization. Optimization of one’s limited resources. There. I did it. Ya-ta.
Of course, if you want to actually do anything useful with that, and especially if you want to get into a maximally powerful self-reinforcing virtuous basin or get your AI into such a basin, which you should want rather a lot, you’re back to all those walls of text and you have a lot of thinking to do. But that’s the whole point.
And virtue, contra Socrates, very obviously is not knowledge. It is cultivated habit, it is learned patterns of thought and behavior. It is technique. It is metis.
Fun fact: Ethicists, via self-report, are not more ethical than others.
Does Anyone Know A Good Surgeon?
Someone with expertise in the world of surgeons might say, “I can tell you which surgeon has the lowest rage of complications, which has the most availability, which accepts your insurance, and so on.” We are likely to sympathize with the frustrations of a person who is faced with the demand to simply find a good surgeon, and their doubts about what—if not low complications, availability, and so on—the demander can mean by “good.” (3322)
The point is understood, but actually in this situation there are mostly four things a person might mean, and here it’s relatively easy to disambiguate, and the main problem is that people socially don’t want to say out loud which ones they care about:
Are they available and affordable?
Are they high status? Are you blameless if something goes wrong?
Are they going to make you comfortable and tell you what you want to hear and have good bedside manner and other neat stuff like that?
For the first two, you can just say that, and we can figure it out. Easy enough.
For the third, you can scout and get a reasonable sense, or ask around a bit.
If you want to know whether they’re Really Good, or even Insanely Great?
We have a real practical problem there. No one knows who the good surgeons are.
One good heuristic is that surgeons should not look like surgeons, but that doesn’t get you all that far, and often directly against the other basic heuristic for finding one.
As in, we don’t know who has low complications (or at most you get statistics that are heavily manipulated) or any of that. They won’t let us have reviews, do actual results gathering that controls for initial conditions, or use any of the known other ways to measure quality.
So no matter what you mean by good? You’re screwed. You have no idea. Mostly you’re stuck relying on status signals.
This Question Is Starting To Be A Real Problem
Agnes draws a strong distinction between Questions, where you go on a quest for something you want, and a Problem, where your goal is to remove the problem.
I get what she’s trying to do here, although it leads to silliness like this:
Admittedly, we often express problems interrogatively. Instead of commanding you to find my keys, I might ask you where they are.
But “Where are my keys?” is a problem hiding in question clothing. To see this, consider some possible answers. “Not on the surface of the sun” truthfully gives the location of my keys, as does, “Wherever your keys are.”
Nonetheless, these are bad answers, and they are bad precisely because they do not help me achieve the goal—leaving the house, opening a locked door, rubbing my lucky rabbit’s foot—to which keylessness constituted an impediment.
Consider the reply “They are in your room.” This is a good reply if you have a small, tidy room, but if your room is large and cluttered, you might need the location demarcated (3362)
These are mostly quite bad answers (sometimes a variation on ‘wherever your keys are’ is more useful than you expect and you become enlightened), but if you were on a Proper Sacred Quest and had a Question with a capital Q that would still be true. It’s like if you asked me ‘what is justice?’ and I said ‘a six letter word with two syllables.’ When we are on the quest, it is because we seek a new, interesting or useful response.
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. (3379)
What if ‘the thing you were doing before you encountered the Problem’ was ‘asking a Question’? Any Question is usually going to largely be composed of Problems, or be largely unpacked via posing and solving Problems, including the Problem of ‘how do I figure out the answer to this Question?’
I do get the distinction and yes it is meaningful, and yet.
Any time I ask an expert for a piece of information, I am posing a problem rather than asking a question. True, I may put a question mark at the end of my request: When was Napoleon born? What is the atomic number of helium? Where is the ocean deepest? Nonetheless, my readiness to let them be in charge of what the correct answer looks like is the telltale sign that I am not on a quest.
I do not expect, after hearing their answer, to say “Aha!”
The Aha! of understanding is associated with questions, rather than problems. It expresses the feeling that, in getting what you were searching for, you got exactly what you wanted. (3387)
On the contrary. You hear ‘Aha!’ after solving problems all the time. Like, constantly.
Even the original ‘Aha!’ moment, also known as the ‘Eureka’ moment was the Solution to a Problem (‘how do I measure the purity of King Hiero II’s gold crown?’), and if I asked Archimedes how to do it and he told me the answer I would indeed go ‘Aha!’
Asking for a piece of information can totally be a Question rather than a Problem, including but not limited to being part of a broader Question that it could help answer. Imagine having an expert (or LLM) on hand, and not asking Questions except when you had a specific Problem that you were looking to solve. Such madness.
A question, by contrast, counts as answered when I have the answer. There is nothing that comes next. (3397)
Nope again. First, there isn’t obviously a ‘the answer’ to a question. There can be a solution to a problem, but a question will often be open-ended, that’s kind of the point, and permit many answers on many levels. Getting only one of them does not obviously end the inquiry. Imagine asking ‘where are my keys?’ as an inquiry, because you are curious, someone saying ‘not on the surface of the sun’ and saying ‘oh okay that is an answer so I guess that is that.’
It’s often but not always necessary to know to what end a question is being asked or a problem posed, if you want to find a useful answer or solution.
Socrates is always telling his interlocutors to treat what he is saying as a question about what X is, not as a problem about how to find an X. He’ll instruct them not to break X into pieces, or not to simply give an example of X.
In this context, the famously obscure notion of a Platonic Form can be understood in a relatively straightforward way. Socrates sometimes speaks of the Form of Justice, or the Form of Piety, or the Form of whatever X he and his interlocutor are examining.
“The Form of X” simply refers to the version of X that you must have in mind so as to answer the question “What is X?” This is why “The Form of X” is synonymous with “X itself” or “the essence of X.” The Form of X is what you look to in order to produce a definition of X. The Form of X is X, considered as a question to be answered, rather than as a problem to be solved. (3448)
This is partly Socrates clarifying what he is curious about and why, but it is also Socrates dictating the terms of the inquiry, and imposing his Form of answer upon the question. Giving examples of [X] is a highly useful way to learn about [X] and figure out the general characteristics, or Form, of [X]. Breaking [X] into pieces is often a highly useful or even necessary move, as well.
That last paragraph is a magician’s trick. You can answer the question ‘what is [X]?’ while looking at any version of [X] that you like, and different people will come up with different answers. There is a presupposition being snuck in that there is one correct answer, one Form, for this concept, so that is what you must be looking at to answer the question, because otherwise you’d be Wrong, you see.
And no, the Form of [X] is not [X]. The Form of [X] is at best a verification method for identifying [X]. Answering the question ‘what is [X]?’ is not [X] and it is not sufficient in most cases to create or give you [X].
There is also the Problem that the answer to ‘What is the Form of Justice?’ is that centrally Justice is a Solution to a Problem. That’s even more true with Virtue. The Form of Virtue is the Solution to the Problem of selecting algorithms and heuristics for living and acting as best as one can under uncertainty and limited physical capabilities, parameters, compute and data.
Or at least those are my answers.
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. (3459)
Well, it sure sounds like the philosopher is posing a Problem to be solved, no? That Problem is ‘what is the definition of [X]?’ It is obviously frustrating to have the response be ‘well what is the definition of [X]?’ since if she knew that she wouldn’t have had to ask.
Indeed, earlier, remember that Agnes described Socrates as having a Problem, that he needs to feel he is a good person. Thus he needs to know what is justice, so that in turn he can be just, so that he can be a good person. What could be more of a Problem than this? Yet he, like everyone else, is then disguising this as a Question, if you take this lexicon seriously.
This tells us that the terms are non-exclusive. Socrates is both asking a Question and also trying to solve a Problem. Needing the answer for practical purposes does not mean you are not also curious, indeed the two often go together. Curiosity is largely about sensing that inquiring would be useful. If your Questions aren’t aimed at all at eventually solving Problems then what are you even doing?
Solving An Unproblem
An unhint, as per Daniel Strong, is usefully pointing out ways in which a problem is harder than you thought it was.
An unproblem, perhaps, like Meno’s Paradox, is where you have a problem, but the only problem you actually have is that you think you have a problem.
Socrates holds that there is an analog to “picking up the scent” in the space of ideas: when two people both have answers to a question, even if neither of those answers constitutes knowledge, the answers of the one can be tested against those of the other. This is a kind of hunt that cannot be undertaken alone. (3474)
I continue to not understand. Who among us has not had multiple hypotheses, and then compared them? Or had a wrong answer and used that to gain insight into what might be the right one?
Socrates calls Meno’s question ‘a debater’s trick’ because according to Socrates only together could they inquire, but that very clearly isn’t true, and even if it was true, why presume Meno wasn’t asking a question? It seems like Socrates and Agnes think it was a very good question, at least if you don’t already know the answer.
The reader of this book may feel herself tempted to make the same impatient demand: show me some philosophical progress! She wants to stand on the sidelines and watch—passive, uninvested, safe—and assess whether some other people are making advances toward knowledge of untimely questions. If she likes what she sees, then she may decide to jump in.
I can’t satisfy this request as it stands, nor could Socrates. Trying to assess an inquiry into untimely questions from the outside—that is, without recognizing them as your questions, and without asking yourself whether you are making progress—is like trying to assess what water feels like without touching it. (3508)
We can totally document what water feels like, or any number of sensory experiences, in ways that are useful to a third party when reading them. Again, happens constantly.
Of course you can satisfy this request for philosophical progress, even under the Socratic hypothesis, and this is a radical expansion of the claims involved to deny that it can happen, an expansion that proves way, way too much. And indeed, I would say that the book represents, at least compared to some baseline, philosophical progress, and it’s weird to pretend that it doesn’t.
If nothing else, it proves the impossibility of general philosophical progress at all, if it is impossible, from the outside, to show it to someone. It also makes one question, why do the Socratic dialogues have an audience, if they cannot ever see any progress?
The Slave Finds The Square Root Of Two
Socrates does a demonstration in Meno where he takes a not especially bright (let’s face it) slave, and asks him to find a square with double the area of the original square.
The slave initially doubles the side length from two to four. Whoops.
Then Socrates points out the answer must be more than two and less than four, so the slave tries three, without any reason to believe that will work. Whoops again.
Socrates then asks what happens if they cut an original square along its diameter, which is basically him giving the slave the answer.
Agnes recognizes that this is a general complaint about Socrates:
Among readers of Socratic dialogues, Meno’s paradox often shows up as the worry that Socrates asks leading questions. A leading question is a question that “forces” an answer, comparable to how a magician forces a card when he offers you what appears to be a free choice but uses sleight of hand to get you to pick the card he wants.
The charge is that Socrates is putting words into his interlocutors’ mouths, the result being a one-sided conversation that simply goes where Socrates wanted it to go. They are not making progress together by comparing their answers; rather, we are just watching the Socrates show. (3578)
I’ve gone quite far in endorsing this criticism in general. I think his default methods are deeply strategic rather than centrally being open inquiries.
In many cases, this is debatable. In this case, contra Agnes, I think it really, really isn’t.
Thus this seems like a really bad example of the Socratic method, unless it is merely a pedagogical tutoring technique so the student better remembers the answer. No, this slave did not ‘bravely step forward into the mathematical unknown.’
Socrates already knew the answer, and decided to let the slave flail around and answer a bunch of obvious yes or no questions before all but telling him. In no way did the two work together to create or discover new knowledge.
Would this particular slave have figured it out on his own, or with a partner similar to himself? Probably not for a while, maybe never. But that’s because this was beyond his power level.
It wasn’t because no one person could figure this out on their own without already having the answer. Most people reading this have solved similarly hard math problems. Claude estimates that about 65% of my readers, assuming they in no way remember the solution, would solve it within 10 minutes, and most would solve it eventually. Whereas I agree with Claude that if you pair those people up, only about 15% of pairs that would have failed individually get to succeed together. The Socratic method isn’t doing much.
Arbitrary Facts
I learn facts far better when I understand why a fact is true and it fits into a larger puzzle. I have always had trouble learning foreign languages, people’s names and other arbitrary facts. There’s nothing to go on.
Compare that example with the predicament of someone who is, for the first time, looking into the question of when Napoleon was born. Wrong answers don’t “feel” wrong to him; he doesn’t say, “I should’ve seen that it can’t be 1768!” When he encounters the correct answer, he does not have the experience of its suddenly falling into place, of saying “Of course! 1769!” (3598)
That depends on whether you already know other facts that force it to be 1769. If you were pointing out he was born in 1769 instead of 1759, because you’d just seen the movie Napoleon where he’s effectively depicted as way older, and relating it to how the Founding Fathers in America were often about nineteen years old, then that’s a different kind of fact, that might indeed ‘feel’ wrong.
On The Diplomat, an excellent show, a few times people say ‘true things sound true.’ Alas, there’s a correlation, but it’s not that high.
The problem is that Socrates is trying to make more out of this than is there, which results in him going seriously off the rails.
Someone who once knew the year of Napoleon’s birth might experience a burst of recognition when presented with 1769.
Socrates is inclined to assimilate these two facts, and posit that even in the case of math we are “recognizing” something we saw earlier—in a past life.
He claims to have heard from priestesses and poets that the soul is immortal, and that our current life represents a reincarnation. This would explain our ability to do math, and it should make us optimistic about virtue. (3608)
Socrates is saying that in our pre-lives, before we were born, we knew things that we can now hope to recover—with an “Aha!” experience—if we search for them. (3617)
This is of course absurd, on many levels, including its physical impossibility and also that it rules out the creation of new universal knowledge, or even discovery of universal knowledge that your particular prior lives hadn’t known, that might result in an ‘aha’ moment, contra many ‘aha’ moments including the Trope Namer.
But then it turns out Socrates doesn’t care about all that, and is fine with you forming false but instrumentally useful assumptions, so long as the use is the one he likes?
Socrates’ point is: Whatever it is that you think is necessary to assume in order to be able to believe in the possibility of searching for the answers to questions—which is to say real questions, by contrast with those that are really problems in question clothing—assume that. If you just believe that “one must search for things one does not know,” you don’t need to commit in advance to any particular theory about how recognition experiences are generated in us. (3642)
In many other circumstances I would shrug but in this one it’s kind of suspicious.
Speaking only for myself, I will say that I prefer to think of inquiry in terms of the aspiration to arrive at a new and better understanding—it will still need to be true that one recognizes it as such!—than in terms of gravitating back to one’s forgotten origins. (3654)
File under things philosophers end up having to say out loud, including then feeling the need to write a book to explain how we can recognize a superior explanation to our current one, even though I’ve done that dozens of times already today.
Many ethical questions are untimely for everyone.
I didn’t notice that line my first time through but I now notice this simply is not true, even if we accept the central frame of untimely questions. Some ethical questions are untimely some of the time, but there are plenty of days I have no particular need to know the answers to most ethical questions, beyond at most basic practical things.
You Are Not Pondering What I Am Pondering
This next passage might be the one I disagree with most fundamentally.
Agnes is outright trying to take the particular Socratic technique she prefers, and say that this and only this, counts as ‘thinking.’
She even claims that you can only sort of call it ‘thinking’ if the questions involved are not untimely. She’ll allow it, but wants us to know it doesn’t really count.
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. (3694)
Here is another way to put my definition: Thinking is using the Socratic method to inquire into untimely questions. But we can also use the Socratic method to inquire into other sorts of questions, as in the case of the slave and the double square. We can call that “thinking,” too, with the understanding that we are referencing its resemblance to the paradigmatic case. (3707)
No, no, no, no, no. Thinking is personal. Knowledge is individual. You do not need to resolve disagreements to have knowledge, nor does resolving disagreements itself create or discover knowledge, other than knowledge of what was agreed upon.
Nor does failure to agree mean you have not gained knowledge through a conversation. At minimum you learn that the arguments were unconvincing. That is often valuable, similar to Edison’s thousand ways to not create a light bulb.
Thinking does not begin, as Agnes says, when someone recognized their account of something is not as good as it could be. Indeed, it could not possibly have begun there, because without thinking there would be no way to realize your understanding could be improved.
At that point, if you were sufficiently invested or curious, you might ask another person to help, or you might think to yourself, or chat with an LLM, or build a toy model, or read a book, or ask a social network, or any number of things.
Agnes knows she is doing the ‘define a word to mean something different’ move:
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.” (3716)
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. (3724)
Agnes is trying to have it both ways. She’s trying to say this is a (I would say highly confusing) term of art within a Socratic interaction, but that it doesn’t apply to general use, while also clearly trying to say that if you’re not doing this then you aren’t thinking.
But she says no, you can’t object to my new definition of [X] by pointing out that my definition of [X] does not match what [X] means?
Unlike stipulative definitions, a Socratic definition can be the target of objections: it is possible to claim that the definition is somehow mistaken, that we ought to emend it or discard it altogether. Unlike in the case of dictionary definitions, you cannot object to a Socratic definition merely by pointing to linguistic conventions.
The fact that it stands in some tension to how we usually talk won’t necessarily constitute an objection to a Socratic definition, because a Socratic definition is itself the product of arguments, and those arguments give you leverage to criticize how we usually talk. (3729)
I would instead say that not matching common usage does not necessarily constitute a fatal objection to a proposed definition, but it definitely is a powerful objection even if it can sometimes be overcome. You get to criticize how people usually talk, but you don’t get to ignore it.
The argument for the definition I have given can be stated in two premises:
First, in order for someone to be thinking, they must keep an open mind and inquire, moving toward what’s true and away from what’s false. (3733)
Second, thinking must, at least in principle, be capable of processing any kind of thought. Unlike “multiplying,” or “remembering,” or “updating,” or “analyzing,” or “planning,” terms that reference specific forms of thinking, thinking itself is an all-purpose activity, accommodating all possible thoughts. Thinking must be the biggest possible tent. (3737)
At best the first statement is only true of ‘good’ thinking. Clearly people often think in ways that move them towards what is false, or do so without a generally open mind.
They perhaps must have an open mind within some subspace in which they are thinking, but that is all. Thus, I can think about how to reach the cookie on the shelf and eat it, without keeping an open mind about whether I should reach or eat the cookie, and it would be absurd to otherwise call my actions ‘not thinking.’
Nor would I need to, in order to do this, if we accept the true-false division, ‘move away from what’s false,’ or even successfully move towards what is true, only at most that I be attempting to move towards a true way to get the cookie. As in, I need to be attempting to move towards ‘truth’ in some sense. I don’t have to succeed. Thinking badly or wrongly, or reaching wrong conclusions, still constitutes thinking, whether or not it then leads to correction and ultimately towards truth.
The Socratic method is how you think about things that you couldn’t think about if it were not for the presence of other people, which is to say, it is how you think about just anything. The method that allows you to think about anything, leaving nothing behind, in its wake, as unthinkable—that method is rightly called “thinking.” (3753)
I reiterate that the set of things you cannot think about without other people present is the empty set, or at most it contains some things that involve those other people sufficiently directly in ways of which you lack sufficient knowledge.
One is amused to think of Agnes meeting Descartes, him saying ‘I think therefore I am’ and her saying ‘nope, you don’t know that there’s anyone else there because you don’t know they’re thinking, therefore you might be alone, therefore you don’t think, therefore you might not be.’
And then Descartes replying, ‘well you might think so, but I’ve just moved away from falsehood and towards truth, which means not only must I be, you must also be, so we’re really making great progress here, but since I indeed am that also shows that I did that before and therefore I was thinking earlier, which means I don’t actually get to be so sure about you.’
And then we go ahead and contradict ourselves, and say that not only does thinking not require two people, it can be done with zero people via a calculator:
On a Socratic account, the use of an algorithm—for example, multiplication—counts as thinking insofar as it is, at least in principle, subject to questioning. (3760)
Is it possible for someone to then question that, as per Agnes’s requirement? Yes, of course, we’ve all said ‘this calculator seems wrong’ at least once.
Except no, Agnes does not see it that way, for reasons unclear to me:
To count as thinking, Socrates will require that the computer fool us in a specific way: by playing either the role of James, or the role of Clifford, well enough to help us inquire into some untimely question. (3770)
To me this highlights how absurd the whole thing is. Why would that be a meaningful distinction where some computers are thinking and others are not? I would suggest that, if you want to talk about a distinct concept, one should pick a new distinct word. Then I would still argue that this is not a useful distinction, but we’d be less confused.
Questions Before Answers
Thus endeth part 2 of Open Socrates.
My hope is that, by (having fun and) laying out a concrete set of strong disagreements, I have illustrated not only what Agnes and her Socrates believe thinking to be and how they want us to go about trying to figure things out, and also how to make decisions (although they seem to mostly be against that part?) but my views as well.
And it gives one the opportunity to, in various ways and at various points, Do Philosophy, and also point out that Socrates lies really quite a lot, including:
Socrates often remarked on his ‘lack of intellectual gifts.’ (141)
Socrates claims to have a bad memory. (141)
Socrates denies any facility with speechmaking. (141)
Socrates claims to know he is not wise at all (161)
Socrates claims to believe the Oracle tells the truth (161)
Socrates made up the entire Oracle story as a narrative device (161)
Socrates says true opinions can only do good. (764)
Socrates claims ‘Socratic humility’ generally. (2331)
Socrates claims he only wants to make ‘the truth of each existing thing become clear.’ (2368)
And also that he was rather painfully wrong about a bunch of important things that even by the standards of his time are kind of crazy, such as:
There is no such thing as weakness of will.
Revenge (in all its guises) is incoherent.
It is always better to have injustice done to you than to do it.
Virtue is knowledge.
The soul is immoral and our life represents a reincarnation.
When we learn something like math we are ‘recognizing’ what we already knew.
What Agnes considers the only method of inquiry or thinking, I consider to be one narrow version of one strategy among many.
I also think a lot of this is relevant to AI.
It would be reasonable to stop here. Looking forward, I find myself thinking ‘I can’t believe I have to say this’ quite a lot, and it would be reasonable to call it a day.
Socratic Answers
The third part is Socratic Answers, where Socrates claims to have answers for politics, love and death, where the man who says he knows nothing contradicts himself to claim he understands these three rather important topics.
Here is Socrates talking about each domain:
Politics: “I believe that I’m one of a few Athenians—so as not to say I’m the only one, but the only one among our contemporaries—to take up the true political craft and practice the true politics.”
Love: “The only thing I say I understand is the art of love”; “my expertise at love.”
Death: “The one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death”; “those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all people.” (3793)
He knows nothing, also the only thing he says he understands is love, and also he is one of the few to take up the true political craft and practice the true politics, only without successfully ever accomplishing anything thereby and eventually being sentenced to death. But that the point of philosophy is that he doesn’t fear that.
One’s initial reaction would be that spending one’s life ‘training for dying’ seems a waste even if it succeeds, since afterwards you are, like Francisco Franco, still dead.
What does it mean to ‘prepare yourself for death?’ That you are not afraid right before it happens? Yeah, screw that. I’d prefer to prepare to try and live.
In general, the Socratizing move takes the form “A is the real B.” For example, “Understanding is the real tattoo.” (3818)
Whereas I think that if someone says ‘A is the real B’ your first instinct should be, as I’ve pointed out many times throughout, that someone is trying to trick you.
“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.
Calling this ‘nothing but’ is strawmanning. They’re saying that a lot of the phenomenon [X] is explained by [Y], and [X] cannot be properly understood outside the context of [Y], not that [X] fully explains [Y] or that [Y] does not also do [Z]. I presume Hanson has said the same to Callard many times. Sometimes yes, people do make the extreme version of the claim, but it is rare.
When they go low, we go high? But why should high lead to better understanding? Sometimes you want to go low, other times you want to go high. And who determines what counts as low or high anyway, why are we trying to sneak in a normative judgment? Especially when Socratic moves usually conflate words for fun and profit.
So, for example, to take some famous thinkers, Sigmund Freud argues that many things that do not appear to have anything to do with sex should nonetheless be understood in terms of it, and Karl Marx makes that claim for class relations, Michel Foucault for power, René Girard for imitation.
All of these thinkers—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. (3840)
These thinkers are saying that their particular consideration is a much larger piece of what we observe than we think it is, and that if we ignore this consideration we will not understand what it happening. You can take each of the above people too far, and I would say that each of them does indeed take themselves and their ideas too far and as too important and totalizing, but not ‘going low’ in these ways is usually a big mistake. I’d affirm that for Freud, Foucault, Marx, Girard, Hanson and Simler, and probably for Goffman, all simultaneously, although not for Becker. I don’t buy Becker.
The Socratizing move is at the heart of Socratic intellectualism. Socrates claimed that each of the traditional virtues of justice, courage, moderation, and piety is to be equated with knowledge. Virtue is identical to, which is to say, is nothing other than, knowledge. (3851)
If knowledge is the end-all and be-all, then we should expect the activity that is directed at knowledge—philosophical inquiry—to be how a person develops courage, justice, moderation, and so on. (3860)
Again, virtue is not knowledge.
I would say, if we take this statement at the strength it seems clearly intended:
If knowledge is the end-all and be-all [K], then activity directed at knowledge is how a person develops courage, justice, moderation, and so on [D]. K → D.
People develop courage, justice, moderation and so on mostly in other ways. ~D. Virtue is now knowledge, they are even surprisingly badly correlated.
If K → D, then ~D → ~K, and ~D, therefore ~K.
The Socratic argument against this is to literally deny that regular people can have courage, or justice, or moderation, in a way that counts, except insofar as they got it via inquiry. Aside from very obviously begging the question and being the kind of thing that gets you killed for corrupting the youth of Athens, it is also turning all the relevant definitions on their heads and asking us to dismiss the evidence of our senses and also any concern for what is useful in understanding, predicting or navigating the world around us.
Rationalists are looking at this guy and thinking, man, he’s got to get out of the house.
One is tempted to end here, but sure, let’s quickly keep going and see what outputs this guy produces.
Politics
Agnes lays out the task as identifying political fictions in our modern culture.
For ancient societies she chooses easy targets indeed: Slavery, divine right of kings, restrictions based on gender or religion.
For today’s societies, I will admit she chooses hard targets.
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. (3884)
As they say: Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Pick two. One better be liberté.
She isn’t saying these are wrong goals, oh no, only that they are ‘not valid as they stand.’ She’s Socratizing them.
She also says Socrates understands politics as the dramatization of philosophy, and ‘philosophy is the real politics.’ Then both Agnes and Socrates deeply misunderstand at least one of politics and philosophy.
These two chapters on Socratic politics contain three counterintuitive assertions about politics.
First, you cannot fight injustice. The conceit that you can is based on symbolically transposing a disagreement about justice into another arena, where it can be fought over as a contest. When people think that they are fighting injustice, they are, instead, imitating refutation. (3914)
Of course you can fight injustice. I see it happening every day. So do you.
Second, all of our standard answers to the question of what it is for speech to be free … fall short of capturing a coherent sense of freedom.
Speech is free if, and only if, it is inquisitive.
That’s not what free speech is for. Free speech is a protection mechanism. And ‘inquisitive’ speech is not the primary use case for free speech or the primary place that speech needs protection, what are you even talking about.
Finally, with reference to equality … we need to distinguish … the feeling of inequality in one or another context… from what it actually means to treat another as their equal, which is a matter of whether they can take one another seriously even when they disagree about what is most important.
That is not what people demand when they demand equality. Agnes must know this.
Our three most cherished political ideals—justice, freedom and equality—are, in fact, intellectual ideals.
In some sense sure, but not in the way Agnes is asserting, even if we take ad argumento that these are our most cherished political ideals (citation needed).
Politicization
Agnes points out that topics can become politicized, such as pronoun use or climate change, and that once that happens statements in that topic must be interpreted in their political context. Yes.
I disagree that people should talk about ‘polarized’ politics in terms of politicization. These are related but distinct things.
Politicians often say, “Let’s keep politics out of this,” using “politics” as shorthand for “what’s politicized”—they mean, let’s temporarily suspend our usual practice of mapping every interaction onto a symbolic battlefield. (3962)
They can mean that. They usually mean more than that, they mean to take all politics-related considerations, and questions of who benefits, off of the table when figuring things out or making a particular decision. The battlefield need not be symbolic.
[Socrates] has a standing fear that his interlocutor will misinterpret him as someone who wants to employ combative, coercive tactics to “win” some battle.
Well, yes, and if he wanted to deal with that fear he should either get over the fear of a bad thing the way he supposedly got over fear of death, or else stop using combative, coercive tactics to win battles. He did that kind of a lot.
Furthermore, thought is by nature polarized, in that every well-formed proposition is either true or false.
I have tried in various ways to explain why this framing is not helpful. Most interesting well-formed propositions are not well-categorized as ‘true’ or ‘false.’
Disagreement tends to fuel an “eagerness to win,” which manifests itself in the practices Socrates described himself as wanting to avoid: “second-guessing and snatching each other’s statements away ahead of time.” Each person misinterprets or twists the words of the other in such a way as to clear the path toward argumentative victory for himself; eventually this degenerates into shameful, abusive speech. Socrates finds this sort of thing intolerable. (3981)
I don’t know why Agnes is still trying to beat this horse, but yes Socrates totally does manipulate and twist words, constantly using their words against them. If he finds it so intolerable I suggest he should have done it less often. The trick, which only makes it worse, is that Socrates is constantly insisting he is not making this into a battle, and that he should be allowed to do this because it is pleasant and calls for gratitude, except then he is always somehow the one that then keeps doing it, because he sets up two distinct roles to allow him to be the one doing it. Remember all those times Socrates gets refuted? Yeah, neither do I. Nice trick.
The best way to win a competition is to convince others it is not a competition.
Suppose I attack you on the basis of an idea you have, setting up some kind of a duel or contest between us in which one of us will be the winner. Each of us might see ourselves as “fighting injustice,” but we are not, because even if I win, the idea in you may nonetheless remain intact.
Suppose I kill you: still others may take up the idea on your behalf. This is exactly what Socrates thinks will happen to philosophy after he is put to death—others will continue to practice it. (4028)
In the context of the claim that one ‘cannot fight injustice,’ this is a classic ‘[X] might not fully solve [Y] therefore [X] cannot fight [Y].’ Which is always nonsense. You can never fully solve injustice, but you can damn well fight against it. And yes, one way to do that is to fight against people who act sufficiently unjustly.
Fighting Is Not Pretend Arguing
If anything, arguing is often pretend fighting.
Agnes strangely misunderstands the opening of the Iliad, where Chryses prays to Apollo to punish the Greeks.
Why not ask for your daughter back directly? Not because Chryses is angry, but because that is how the Greek Gods work, and ‘make those who did wrong suffer’ is a thing Apollo can do, whereas giving his daughter back is not, and also because (as per previous discussion of revenge) it is kind of important to establish that your followers are not, when acting honorably and following the norms, to be f***ed with like this.
Typically, if you didn’t think that someone was wrong about something, there would be nothing to be fighting over. (4053)
In correlational terms I suppose this is true, but it is not true in the intended sense. Fights happen all the time without thinking someone else was wrong about something.
Agnes acknowledges this, but then pulls out an argument she used earlier, that I continue to find rather bizarre:
We call the uses of force in the lifeboat case, or the child protection case, or the animal wrangling case “fighting” to the extent that they bear an outward resemblance to, and therefore remind us of, the fights that are animated by self-righteous anger over disagreement. If it is true that fighting imitates argument, then it makes sense that we are capacious in being willing to apply the term “fight” to what imitates that: “being an image of” is a transitive relation. (4067)
It sure seems to me like this is saying:
[X] is a version (or ‘image’) of [Y].
Yes, often [X] is not a version of [Y].
But in those cases we only call it [X] because it resembles [X]. A metaphor.
Therefore [X] is still a version of [Y].
Huh? This is circular at best.
You cannot defeat or disprove or defend an idea using any kind of force but the force of argument. (4094)
Killing and saving don’t touch ideas: only argument does. (4104)
Would that this were true. It is not. Unless you are counting the barrel of a gun as a (rather compelling) argument.
Massive sections of the world centrally believe things that Agnes and I do not believe, because people with swords went around killing anyone who didn’t profess such beliefs, over the course of hundreds of years. The sword was the argument. It won.
When it is socially beneficial to believe [X], people start believing [X].
Does this win universally or permanently? No, but neither do arguments.
A soldier eager to fight Nazis sees warfare as more than the most expeditious means to prevent future tyrannies; he would not, for instance, accept an alternative that involved rewarding Nazis—not even if he were assured it wouldn’t produce perverse incentives.
Rather, such a soldier’s goal was, by means of killing Nazis, to defend the principle fascism is wrong. In order for an action to constitute a defense of this principle, the action must entail hurting Nazis, making them suffer, and, above all, ensuring that they experience defeat. (4087)
Yes, shooting Nazis defends the principle that fascism is wrong, and makes it far more likely that there will be less people in the future that believe in fascism. It works.
It works especially well with Nazis because the whole idea of Nazis is that Nazis will win in a fight. You should be a Nazi because the Nazis will win, and kill those who don’t join, or are the wrong type of person. Thus, punching can be an extremely effective counterargument.
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. (4112)
Of course you can fight cancer, or choose not to fight cancer. Man versus nature.
And yes, it is totally imaginable that evil ideas could win. Nazis could have conquered the world, if things had been somewhat different. Anti-semites could kill all the Jews. Then they win. You could try to say ‘you have not proven your ideas true’ and they would look at you as if to say ‘huh?’ and then kill you for saying that.
And it is imaginable that good ideas could win instead, and often they have. I feel weird having to type such sentences.
It is fine to say you would rather be right than President, but the choice isn’t obvious.
Freedom After Speech
Agnes says it is easier to say what freedom of speech is than what it isn’t. I disagree. I think that freedom of speech is the ability to say what I want to say when and how and to whom I want to say it, without fear of reprisal, especially government reprisal.
This is not absolute. The government does need to punish speech in some scenarios, despite this weakening freedom of speech, but we should keep that to a minimum and we ideally put very tight restrictions on this. There is also social freedom of speech, which we mostly don’t legislate but matters as well, freedom of speech is not a binary. There were times in the recent past where I felt substantial loss of effective freedom of speech, and then that improved, despite the government not being the enforcer.
Government restrictions on speech are especially pernicious. We restrict them more.
One can and should consider two related but distinct concepts, legal and practical freedom of speech, and seek to maximize both.
The Truth Can Lose An Argument
The truth gets refuted all the time. Any procedure that never makes that mistake is too risk averse and not going to say anything interesting, also Socrates explicitly ‘refutes’ a number of claims that are clearly true.
Polus thinks that he has refuted Socrates even though Socrates is unpersuaded; Socrates, by contrast, insists, “The truth is never refuted.” In the real kind of arguing Socrates is interested in, the truth can never lose; it is only in the gamified version of refutation in which Polus wants to engage—the version where you win by persuading people—that someone who is saying true things can nevertheless “lose.” (4197)
The truth is ‘refuted’ in a Socratic discussion when both people agree on something that turns out to not be true. Happens to the best of us. I’ve certainly done it.
Equality
Once again there is an odd quest to ‘prove too much’ and overcomplicate matters via generalization from anecdotal evidence.
Note that Agnes focuses on status inequality, not other forms of inequality. There is mention of unfair divisions, but only as indications of status.
Would people often prefer to be superior rather than equal? Yes, duh, but most of the time you can’t make ‘I in particular am superior’ your platform, and you need a plan that people can justify and agree upon, and humans have strong egalitarian instincts that often fire in bizarre ways, so often one goes with equality.
The moralist tells you to strive to be on par with everyone else, whereas the anti-moralist tells you to strive for elevated status. I want to first raise some reasons for thinking that neither bit of advice will suffice to make you happy, because what you really want is elevated status and equality. I will then explain how, once equality has been Socratized, you can have both. (4263)
Not even both will ‘suffice to make you happy’ because happiness has other facets.
When people meet for the first time, for example at parties, they try to impress each other. (4267)
There’s an ‘often’ missing here. Other times they don’t need or want to.
Agnes claims that people (in particular at parties) are usually ‘participating in a shared quest for shared superiority,’ of equal recognition, to set a ‘high equality point.’ I’d say that happens, but it is one thing that happens out of many. Status is a complicated game, and fleeting interpersonal status positions are a complicated game, and goals vary. Some people actively want relatively or absolutely high status, other times you need a balance to enable cooperation or communication or for good vibes, and sometimes you want to play low status for various reasons. Trying to generalize from examples will mislead you here.
People are generally averse to deceiving one another, but if you look at where we are willing to bend the rules, it is surprising how frequently these exceptions involve maintaining the appearance of equality.
Equality is a value in the service of which we are willing to lie. The defensive practices we use to guard the conversational equilibrium, which range from tactful nondisclosure to downright deception, suggest that what we are guarding is, at most, the appearance of equality. (4305)
I would say we want is often the plausible deniability of inequality, an ambiguity, (especially of the inner sections of a status hierarchy, see Rao), as it would often mess up the dynamics if there was a clear order, often but not always because no one would accept being the one who was lower or even someone else claiming to be higher, as in the example Agnes gives of Ayer interacting with Tyson.
Or skipping ahead to Agamemnon and Achilles, Agamemnon thinks he’s superior, and Achilles thinks he’s at least equal, so they’re not equal but that’s fine until Agamemnon prevents this from remaining ambiguous. Then Achilles tries to kill Agamemnon. The same applies if we unambiguously get less cake.
Indeed, this refusal to accept unambiguously lower status is exactly why we often decline to seek unambiguously higher status. We don’t want to force others into that position, lest they lash out or simply be unhappy. It’s not that we don’t want to be superior, it’s that it’s not worth the consequences. Thus, often the ideal is to be superior but in an ambiguous way.
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. (4310)
This doesn’t match my experience. It is common for people to ‘play low’ with me in this sense, and be very happy that I am talking to them, and it is also reasonably common for the reverse to be true, both personally and with business.
Inequality
Remember the SNAFU principle: Communication is only possible between equals.
That is of course a very Socratic formulation. Communication is possible between those who are unequal, but not fully ‘pure,’ ‘true’ or reliable communication.
Many an ambitious person learns that power, once achieved, does not always translate into the forms of respect they had anticipated. When you come to be in a position to treat others as subordinates, the respect you receive from them is only respect from subordinates. (4326)
It doesn’t have to be, but it is hard to reliably differentiate. You don’t know if they are giving you the respect, or any other information, because they think you deserve it, or because it is in their interest to do so. Note that someone being a subordinate does not have to mean true inequality in this sense.
I also don’t think ‘torturing people isn’t fun even if they richly deserve it’ has much to do with whether one desires superiority. I would like higher status, and I don’t want to torture people regardless of their relative status and whether they deserve it.
No one wants to be dominated.
Okay, come on Agnes, you know that’s not true.
What you want to do among your equals is, at least every once in a while, lead them; lying is bad because it forfeits your right to lead your equals. An unintentional falsehood is bad for the same reason, if not to the same degree: he says we are “mortified” by speaking falsely because it “diminishes our authority to persuade, and always brings some degree of suspicion upon our fitness to lead and direct.” We’re not horrified by having our minds directed by others; we’re horrified by being excluded from the circle of who gets to direct others. (4448)
We live on very different planets. I don’t see much if any link between lying and being unable to lead your equals, let alone being wrong and being unable to lead them. Yes, obviously if you are wrong and unhelpful a lot people stop listening to you, but that seems like a different thing, and also likely to lower your status.
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. (4459)
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. (4467)
Smith’s answer is part of the solution. I think ‘fitness to lead’ is a weird way to describe the thing going to here, but yes, you are providing and establishing value and status, and we’ve learned to associate this with good feeling. You are also moving information, perceptions and world models to align with yours or in ways you have designs upon. You’re enacting your agenda, rather than someone else enacting theirs.
Persuasion Game
Suppose I am trying to persuade you, and I am only pleased if you end up persuaded—but not if you end up persuading me. This is a common enough scenario, and yet it reflects a bizarre mix of motivations.
If I am bent on persuasion, then I’m trying to (however temporarily) dominate you. (4507)
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. (4515)
Not obviously. As Agnes says, this is a common enough scenario, with varying degrees of ‘if it turns out I’m wrong I [will / will not] [gracefully / ungracefully] admit it.’ There are often very good reasons to ‘want to be right.’
I won’t rehash the whole ‘Socrates doth protest too much’ treatment questions, as it seems like we’ve been over that ten times.
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. (4557)
We left politics behind a while ago, along with what people typically care about when they care about inequality. We’re reiterating the Socratic pitch. And once again, I do not agree. I am happy to seriously engage with others perspectives without requiring that we see each others as equals, even within context.
Freedom of speech is simply the freedom to speak truly.
This is very importantly wrong.
This is also what people say when they are about to take away your freedom of speech. They say you are free to speak truly, but of course if someone is found speaking falsely, well, we can’t have that, can we?
Freedom of speech is primarily the freedom to speak falsely.
Socrates’ great insight was to notice that this freedom is not, under ordinary circumstances, available to us.
What Socrates meant here was that we don’t internally feel the freedom to speak any and all truth, because of social pressures and other consequences. That is a different type of freedom of speech. And no, we don’t have freedom from consequences.
What Is Love?
If we compare romantic love, as it appears in our lives, to our romantic ideals, we find ourselves falling very far short. (4623)
Speak for yourself!
As I expected, those who are married mostly disagree.
Do we match the ‘romantic ideal’ in the sense that we hit 99th percentile romantic satisfaction? Generally no. We’d love (there’s that word) to be in that spot where everything is fantastic and easy, but you know what? Life is pretty good on such fronts, and people are remarkably realistic. If you wanted to make my love story into a romantic comedy, you could.
Stably married people will stress the benefits of escape from the hell of dating, the despair of living alone, and the dangers of truly toxic relationships. They might be right. (4627)
These are surely advantages. Dating can be hell, although it can also be a hell of a lot of fun, or often both at once, and yes satisficing or settling is totally a thing and sometimes one is wise to do it. You do want to factor it in. But no, mostly I do not hear stably married people talk like that.
Imagine two elderly individuals sitting side by side on a park bench. They sit there for a long time, hours perhaps, in silence, holding hands. This image is pleasing to many people; it might even be pleasing to the pair of young lovers for whom it would constitute a projection of the future.
But if those young people had to actually sit there, on the park bench, in silence, for hours, they wouldn’t like it. They would be bored. At the present moment, energized by the not yet dulled spark of their romance, they have so many things to say to each other; at the present moment, they want more out of love than “companionship.” (4631)
No, the young people would not want to sit on the park bench quietly. That’s why the old people are on the park bench and the young people are not. Preferences change over time, the park bench thanks you for choosing it as your form of leisure today, and that is fine.
The cynical people who say the young couple are naive because they are have passion and romance and new relationship energy (NRE) rather than marriage and kids? The cynical ones are wrong. There is value in both, and one hopefully leads to the other.
But it is not obvious how the two requirements that make love love—the Socratic requirement that it be rationally oriented toward goodness, and the Aristophanic requirement that it be stable and permanent—are supposed to go together. (4669)
Neither of these is a requirement for love to be love. Love, as they say, is love.
Love is often not oriented towards goodness, nor oriented towards stability or permanence. Once again I feel weird having to write those words down. The people in the Symposium were, in between talking about the joys of raping kids (no, seriously, I still can’t believe they made me read this thing, and yes it’s been 25 years and I’m still mad about it), talking various forms of nonsense.
The idea that there could be very good evolutionary or decision theoretic reasons for the ways we act towards each other does not seem to slip their minds, although in the context of what they’re actually doing I suppose it’s an understandable mistake.
If you are always on the market for someone better than me, then even if you don’t happen to come across her, what you have in relation to me doesn’t strike me as love. (4675)
Why presume that love is rivalrous and limited? There are some forms where it is, or where we choose it to be, but I know various polyamorous people who very much would like a word, and in this case they are right. Even if I would be willing to potentially replace you, that doesn’t have to mean I don’t love you. Most would agree.
If you love someone for particular properties, then of course you can then potentially find someone with more of those properties, or the person you love could lose those properties over time. Most of the time, you love a person over time both for some qualities and inherently, as a form of credible coordination and commitment, and for the experiences and interactions you’ve had and memories you’ve created and identity thus formed and so on, and you’ve accumulated switching costs, creating a buffer.
Instead of efficient solutions to attachment such as matchmaking or arranged marriage, we expend a large proportion of our youths on the dating quest, carefully seeking out the partner who has just the right set of qualities.
This behavior supports Socrates’ thesis that “what everyone loves is really nothing other than the good.” (4679)
No, it doesn’t. If everyone loved only The Good in some abstract sense then we’d all compete to be ranked in Goodness and pair up accordingly, whereas preferences are highly idiosyncratic, often directly opposite for different people, and we largely don’t know what we want, and there are various market failures and barriers that prevent efficient matchmaking, although this margin is too small to explore that fully. Matchmaking is unfairly shamed and looked down upon, and seen as a negative indicator, and also it is expensive and mostly impossible to credibly know who is good at it, and there are variou selection problems involved, and on top of that still greatly underused.
Romantic love today is conventionally located inside of exclusive relationships springing from sexual attraction and armored in shared domestic life. This arrangement has benefits, and it reflects the presence of the ideal of rational attachment in the form of a sliding scale, from the dating market stage that emphasizes rationality to marital fusion stage that emphasizes attachment. But it has also proved unstable: shaken by affairs, subject to divorces, supplanted by polyamory and other nontraditional romantic arrangements.
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. (4687)
I do not understand why, if Agnes agrees that this arrangement has rationality, she thinks it is missing attachment. We can all agree the current arrangements are not first best, that they leave much to be desired and much room for improvement, but that’s a different claim.
Socrates Only Wants One Thing And It’s Disgusting Philosophy
Socrates preserves love as rational attachment by denying Kosman’s two assumptions: he holds that the object of love is not the individual, and that love is, in a certain sense, dissatisfied. It doesn’t take the form of admiring acceptance toward another human being. Rather, it takes the form of philosophical dissatisfaction. Socrates is consistent, in all his many discussions of love, that the proper activity for lovers to engage in is philosophy.
In the Symposium he says that Erōs, the divine spirit of love, is a philosopher. In the Phaedrus, he describes various tiers of love, but the highest kind is one in which the lovers eschew sex and instead “follow the assigned regimen of philosophy,” and live a life of “shared understanding”(4706)
Are you f***ing… I mean, yes he was by all reports, despite his claims that this is not the ideal, but the sentence properly finishes ‘kidding me.’
Yes, of course Socrates gets his kicks refuting people. It’s the author’s barely disguised fetish!
What he denies is that the target of such admiration is a person. (4725)
He thinks we don’t love human beings—not really. (4726)
This language is evidence of the Socratizing move: Socratic (philosophical) love purports to be the stable reality of which romantic (sexual) love is a wavering image. (4750)
That explains a lot. I need say no more.
Here is a surely incomplete list of what 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.
Poems and stories and movies that we call “romantic”
So it’s love except without accepting people, exclusivity, sex, children, living well or staying alive. Oh, or expressing love for another person.
It is natural to react to the list above by telling Socrates that he can keep his so-called philosophical romance, because what everyone really wants is companionship and sex and romantic novels and monogamy and children. But that response is disingenuous. You may say you “just” want sex, but you do not seem to want it in any kind of simple or unproblematic way.
Oh yes, wanting those things is highly problematic, you see. People often can’t live up to it, and it often doesn’t work out. Like, you know, life, and doing the hardest thing in this world, which is to live in it.
I think I very much am going to tell Socrates what he can do with his philosophical romances, which he may or may not say violates the above list.
Agnes repeatedly says, well, you cannot only want [B] because your behavior does not match only wanting [B], clearly it involves [ABCDE], and honestly what people do and say regarding love is super weird. Or that [B] and [C], the ‘attachment’ and ‘rationality’ requirements, are in conflict? Which they can be, but often they aren’t, and yes life involves trade-offs and having to deal with imperfect packaged offers.
So instead you should consider giving up [B]? Or you must really want [X] instead, and that explains everything? Except no, it very obviously doesn’t explain anything, and Nobody Wants This.
The 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. (4848)
Phrased that way this should either invoke pity or utter terror. Maybe both. No, I don’t think Agnes framed this incorrectly.
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.
This explains why, when it comes to the fate of his children after he dies, Socrates seems to be concerned primarily that they have opportunities to be refuted. (5017)
By this point you presumably know what I am thinking.
When people first encounter Socrates—such as in an introduction to philosophy class—they often think that he is a jerk. Many persist in that view. (5029)
Oh, jerk does not even begin to cover it. And the more I learn, the stronger this gets.
From Hegel onward, many philosophers have carried forward this (supposedly) Socratic legacy of positive irony. Following in the footsteps of Quintilian and Cicero, they argue, sometimes with dazzling sophistication, that there is a good way of not saying what you mean. (5092)
I sometimes do not say what I mean, or I don’t say it directly, for a variety of reasons but mostly because I don’t want there to be a pull quote.
Agnes, of course, loves this stuff, or she wouldn’t have written the book.
I discovered Socrates in high school but I didn’t fall head over heels until college, where I read all the dialogues, took classes on them, read commentaries on them, learned ancient Greek so I could read them in the original, learned Greek history so I could understand the context, and read Xenophon and Aristophanes for alternate perspectives on Socrates. Above all, I threw myself into the project of decoding the dialogues, scouring them for hidden meanings, desperate to access the true Socrates. (5128)
I didn’t just want to interpret Socrates, I wanted to be Socrates. (5137)
I have met her. She’s no Socrates, and I mean that in a good way.
She tried to pull off the Socratic trick with random people, who frequently were happy to have a philosophical conversation, and found that no Socratic techniques don’t really work without various skills and the right target, and are rather off putting. You can’t walk up to someone and say ‘what is the meaning of life?’ and expect that to go anywhere.
I notice that, in these sections supposedly devoted to discussing real world topics, we mostly keep getting pitches for Socrates. The thing being described throughout this section mostly is not love, or at least not what we centrally mean when we say love.
And Finally Death
The section starts with Agnes feeling guilty that she feels ‘sadder than she had a right to be’ about the death of her friend Steve. Or rather, if I’m reading this correctly, she feels guilty that she felt more sad about not getting to do more philosophy with Steve then she felt sad about Steve or previously others in her life being dead. Which I suppose is a not crazy thing to feel guilty about, as these things go? Signal is here.
The central pitch here is that if you Do Philosophy well you’ll die well.
The Phaedo shows us how well philosophy prepared Socrates for death; his friend Phaedo, who narrates the story, reports that “in both manner and words he died nobly and without fear.” (5254)
She tells the story of Ivan Ilyich, who had a conventionally successful life but then started experiencing pain and was clearly dying. Everyone, including his wife, friends and doctors, pretended he wasn’t dying and he was lonely and mad about this. When he tries to go about his usual day, he finds it hollow, and (of course given what book this is) he finds himself able to address untimely questions.
Ivan finds, upon examination, that his answers to questions about how to live had been dictated by the savage commands of his kinship group—he did what it took to fit in among the people that surrounded him. (5296)
A goose, chasing Agnes, asking ‘with whom did Ivan do this examination?’
So, I suppose Ivan wasn’t really thinking, then? Since he did it alone? Huh.
And yet, having dismissed his life as a lie, he nonetheless goes on to cling, in the face of death, to a “declaration that his life had been good.”
Tolstoy stacked the deck and determined that Ivan’s life was indeed empty and not good, but it’s not obvious that realizing this earlier would have made things better. Indeed, it likely would have been worse, once he was already going down this path.
You can say that Ivan’s life sucked, but I don’t think you can say his life sucked mainly because those last few months sucked. Ivan took a package deal that involved those last few months sucking. Which is a good deal if the rest was good, not if it wasn’t, and again that’s where the issue is and where Tolstoy stacked the deck
That last day before death doesn’t count that much more than any other day. Nor does it seems obvious we should want that day to feel great.
Tell Me Lies
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. (5349)
Ivan Ilyich spends his last days realizing that he is dying and it sucks.
Socrates spends his last days convincing himself dying is okay because his soul is immortal.
I haven’t read the dialogue, but I’m betting that he wrote that conclusion on the bottom of his mental page and worked towards it best he could given his rules. Because the question was, given the circumstances, rather untimely for him, regardless of what he said. I mean, come on. The whole thing is hella suspicious.
Ordinary conversations—describing the enjoyment of a movie or a meal, grumbling discontentedly about one’s boss, planning for an upcoming vacation—seem unfitting or inappropriate in the face of death. (5364)
I think this is wrong? I mean, obviously, sometimes you need to say things like ‘you must hit the red dragon in the eye with the sacred sword of eye piercing at exactly sundown’ or ‘the force was always within you,’ or ‘here is the password for my crypto.’
Or you might need to tell someone you love or forgive them. Or say ‘rosebud.’
But I think there is nothing wrong, if you don’t have something importantly better to do, with spending that last moment in an ordinary conversation, exactly because it is exploitation, it is getting joy out of life. Telling the stories one last time.
It’s fine to end on ‘more light!’ but it’s also great to end on ‘let us go down to the meadow and rest in the shade of the trees’ and my all-time favorite line is still Oscar Wilde, with ‘either that wallpaper goes, or I do.’
Death trivializes the trivial, until you turn it around and say no, that’s wrong, the trivial stuff was kind of the point all along.
Not that I have anything against Socrates choice of discussing the immortality of the soul.
How could someone who is clinging to the immortality of his soul in the face of his imminent death receive counterarguments in a “pleasant, kind, and admiring way”? (5392)
Pleasant, kind and admiring comes from developing such habits over time. It may or may not include actually treating the questions fairly to varying degrees. Again, I’m betting he didn’t, not really, but to some extent.
When Pierre concludes “there was no answer to any of these questions,” Socrates would say he is mistaking a fact about himself for a fact about the world (5413)
Well, maybe. Pierre could be wrong, and there could be logic or evidence out there to answer the question. But also there might not be. There are questions that we lack the evidence to evaluate. In a technical sense Socrates still has a valid criticism, the soul is either immortal or it isn’t, but that is distinct from the answer being knowable, and what Pierre presumably means is that the answer isn’t knowable.
Then Agnes tells the story of a conference on the unfinished work of her friend Steve, which was happy and interesting and fitting. Which is great. But that doesn’t only work because Steve was a philosopher. There’s no reason you couldn’t hold that conference in my honor, or in anyone else’s honor if they’re doing interesting work. It is not a great look to be claiming some sort of unique privilege here. And yes, it’s fine to miss him, and be sad about that.
Even if it was true that philosophy makes it easier to deal with death, either your own or those of others, I would respond two ways. First, that’s a practical consequence, so how does it compare to opportunity costs? Second, are you sure you are right to be dealing with it so well?
I did not expect Agnes to be defending the immortality of the soul. Whoops?
Those who vehemently deny the immortality of the soul—call them materialists—waver by continuing to care about fulfilling the dead person’s wishes, by thinking it is important to remember them and memorialize them, by describing themselves as still loving them, and by treating invocations of their name as carrying weight: “If X were here, he would be ashamed of you!”
In defense of these practices, materialists might claim that what they care about is not the person themselves, but their “legacy” or “memory” or “spirit.” People invoke these terms in order to avoid a troubling admission of concern for someone who does not exist, who is not there, who is nothing. (5488)
Materialists ought to be more puzzled than they are by their inclination to comply with the dead person’s wishes, requests and intentions. (5496)
Death is real, corpses really are not ensouled, and Socrates will not put up with any superstitious nonsense to the contrary. (5540)
Regular people are remarkably good at intuiting good decision theory, and understanding the importance of reinforcing norms through the generations, and of being able to commit to things. These practices are not puzzling, nor is it wavering.
Not that it’s never wavering. Some people of course waver, because they find the alternative too terrible, because they’re being told various stories, or as part of a way that we hold our norms together, and other similar reasons. Doesn’t change anything.
If one cannot understand why we would want to still bury and honor the dead, despite their corpses not being ensouled, you really should fail the philosophy course.
Believers, as Agnes notes, tend to waver a lot more. Their reactions and moods usually look a lot more like what materialism would suggest, not what their stated beliefs would suggest.
Steve’s death strikes me as premature not only because, at thirty-eight, he hadn’t lived out his biologically mandated lifespan, but—somehow—because he was a philosopher. (5572)
I applaud Agnes for saying that out loud, cause it’s a hell of a thing to say.
Epicurus argues that death cannot be a misfortune, since there is no one around to suffer it (5583)
The Epicurean says that the absence of the subject of experience is the reason why we shouldn’t be afraid of death. According to Larkin, this is silly, because the disappearance of the subject of experience is precisely what we fear in the first place. (5595)
Ah yes, all time levels of cope, still not surpassed in two thousand years, despite many strong efforts.
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.
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. (5638)
I guess? I feel like this is all horribly misnamed, but yes there is the distinction between ‘oh no I will be dead’ and ‘I have unfinished business.’
Unless you were inquiring, Socrates does not care about your unfinished business, any more than he would care about your finished business. He doesn’t seem to even give a flying f*** about his own children, as he commits suicide and abandons them. He says, well, your life wasn’t worth living anyway, so why should I care if you’re dead?
But if so, then the art does not have an end other than itself, as indeed it did collapse into self reflection. What was the point of all this inquiry if you never chop wood and never carry water?
Yeah, I know, mighty insightful of me, such a great freshman myself, and yeah, fair. But it seems important not to hide from that level, if it looks like we haven’t moved beyond it. So much of discourse hasn’t.
Including not accepting that death is a disease.
Don’t prepare for it, other than logistically. You’ll still be dead. Don’t accept it.
Cure it. Fight it. Agnes says that’s impossible. I say, once again:
The person who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the person doing it.
The frustration you express here definitely reminds me of my years of reading epistemology back in grad school before i had the sense to get out (which was a stupidly long time I'll grant you) .
I wonder if a lot of the misunderstanding is because some people cannot engage in internal dialogue? My version of 'talking to myself' can engage with conflicting thoughts where I doubt I could if it was a monologue simply narrating my primary perspective.