Should You Question Everything?

"… In "Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life," the philosopher Agnes Callard aims to rewind the tape to the beginnings of Western thought, where we can see its mechanisms in vivid relief. "What is thinking?" she asks. The Socratic dialogues—the few dozen semi-fictional texts in which Socrates is a main character, written in the fourth century B.C. by Plato, Xenophon, and others—explored a range of subjects, from the nature of virtue to how we should live with the certainty of death. But they were most important because they modelled a new and powerful way of applying our minds to the questions that matter. What was it?

We speak today of the Socratic method—the exploration of ideas through questions and answers. We often imagine the method to be a kind of "sauce," Callard writes, which we can pour over any intellectual endeavor. Professors love the Socratic method: they enjoy peppering their students with questions, partly to test them, partly to humble them so that they're ready to learn. We're also generally familiar with a style of contentious discussion in which we try to poke holes in one another's arguments. "We feel sure that we already are being Socratic," Callard observes.

Yet if all Socrates had done was pioneer the Q. & A., he probably wouldn't have been sentenced to death by his fellow-Athenians. In fact, his intervention was both more radical and more specific. Socrates, Callard argues, inaugurated a whole way of life—a new way of being a person. It's possible not just to employ the Socratic method, in other words, but to live by it. Doing this entails allowing yourself to be questioned about the basic ideas through which you've organized your existence. This is an uncomfortable, even painful, process, since, Callard writes, "by the time we have the conceptual wherewithal to wonder about how we should live our lives, we've long been taking heaps of answers for granted." We're born, we grow up, and before we know it we've made choices that depend on certain ideas. Believing in valor, we join the military; thirsting for success, we go to law school; drawn to love, we start a family. But what's the purpose of valor? What counts as success? What is love? These are what Callard calls "untimely questions." There's no good time to ask them; doing that could mess up our lives, because the way we live depends on answers we've perhaps unreflectingly accepted. But not asking them means living blindly..."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/should-you-question-everything


Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
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