Modern Wisdom
#864 - Donald Robertson - The True Story Of History’s Greatest Philosopher
Thu, 14 Nov 2024
Donald Robertson is a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, an author and an expert on ancient philosophy. If you were to divide philosophy into two eras, it would be pre-Socratic and post-Socratic. Socrates is history's greatest philosopher, and today we get to discover new lessons about his life and his teachings. Expect to learn the benefits of thinking like Socrates, why he was so influential, what the Socratic method actually is, the hidden gem lessons from Socrates on how to live a good life, the insane story of how he died and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why should we think like Socrates?
dude i love every time that we get to speak i adored all of your last books and you've done a new one about socrates why would anyone want to think like socrates why would anyone care about this old dead white guy or whatever he i love socrates i i love marcus aurelius but socrates is like the next level you know i really am excited to to be able to talk and and write about him and stuff
Socrates was... I'll tell you why. This is going to seem like an odd answer, right? There's Eric Clapton, right, and guys like that. And then there's Jimi Hendrix, right? Eric Clapton's an amazing guitarist, but Jimi Hendrix, to me anyway, sounds like he's from another planet, right? Jimi Hendrix took his guitar to bed with him.
He woke up in the morning, strapped his guitar on and fried eggs wearing his guitar. He went to the lavatory wearing his guitar, right? Psychologists call that time on task, like he was constantly practicing and stuff like he was obsessed with it.
Socrates reminds me, in that solitary regard of Jimi Hendrix, because the way he's described to us is that he's a guy who abandoned everything else and just spent all day every day discussing what he considered to be the most important questions in life with anybody, the greatest intellectuals that he could find in the known world, prostitutes, politicians,
slaves, you name it, everybody from all walks of life. So he had, he was like the Jimi Hendrix of philosophizing. Like he never took his guitar off. He was constantly doing, I can't imagine someone in modern society spending that amount of time really analyzing the contradictions in someone else's thinking. So Socrates to me is a kind of a unique individual and it comes through. We don't know.
There's this thing called the Socratic problem. that we don't know, but we should acknowledge at the beginning, that we don't know for sure how close a representation Plato's dialogues or the other sources that we have are of the real Socrates. But I think his character comes through to some extent. Those dialogues are probably semi-fictional, like they're embellished a bit.
But the real guy kind of shines through to some extent. And he must have been an extraordinary individual. He's somebody who has a tremendous capacity for thinking outside the box, for spotting logical contradictions. And he said some of the most radical things in the history of Western philosophy. Not only that, I see him as the godfather
of modern self-help and self-improvement psychology or the great, great granddaddy of cognitive behavioral therapy. So as a psychotherapist, a cognitive behavioral therapist, you know, I look to Socrates as somebody who stands at the very origin of our tradition. But also I think in some ways we've kind of gone astray in ways that he warned us about.
So by going back and looking at what he originally said, I think we can figure out maybe and see beyond some of the mistakes that we might have made along the way.
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Chapter 2: What is the Socratic problem?
As time went on, he starts to use Socrates more and more as a mouthpiece, probably for his own views. Like Plato's famous metaphysical theory, the theory of forms, probably wasn't something that Socrates ever actually said. Socrates' way of doing philosophy seems to be more kind of homely, down to earth, more focused on applied ethics in daily life, basically. So we have those.
And, you know, dude, Plato's dialogues are just incredible. You know, Plato was also a genius. And so we have the writings of a genius about another genius, basically. You know, some of these texts are the most profound and moving pieces of literature in the Western canon. And, you know, I seldom recommend books to people, funnily enough, unless I know them very well.
but my one exception to that is that i think everybody should read plato's apology because i think it's a masterpiece and it only takes a couple of hours to read as an aside so we've got all that stuff and then we have xenophon another student of socrates and his dialogues are less well known but we have a bunch of like 30 or 40 dialogues shorter ones more down to earth from xenophon as well um
Then we have this really weird thing, which is a play by Aristophanes, which is a satire ridiculing Socrates that was written and performed during his lifetime. And we learn almost nothing from that, or it's hard to tell anything from it because it's a caricature, but it tells us that he must have been pretty famous.
during his lifetime for people to have, you know, ridiculed him, caricatured him like that. And then we have what's called the anecdotal tradition, which is like basically a bunch of little anecdotes and quips about Socrates said this, Socrates did that, that we tend to find in later authors.
So they're a more dubious reliability, but altogether, all this stuff tells us something about what we could frame as the literary character of Socrates. So Marcus Aurelius and other subsequent thinkers that followed the subsequent Socrates would have known of him mainly through these writings.
So we could say what's influencing them is the character of Socrates that was passed down by other writers. And there's a big question mark about how closely does that correlate to the real guy? We'll never know.
Why was he so influential?
Well, the ancient answer to that question is that he wasn't the first philosopher. He wasn't even the first philosopher at Athens. But they used to say that he was the first philosopher that brought philosophy really down to earth and applied it to everyday matters, kind of almost making it into a psychotherapy, basically. He would talk to people about the nature of love.
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Chapter 3: How did Socrates influence modern self-help?
where he says his friend Chirophon went to Delphi, which is a few days walk outside Athens in the mountains. It's an incredible place. It's like something out of Lord of the Rings. And there's a great famous temple to the god Apollo there. And you could ask questions of the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo. She sat on a bronze tripod, supposedly inhaling these fumes, and she'd go into a trance.
And the god Apollo possessed her and spoke through her, right? And Hierophon, who was another philosopher, a weird dude who people compared to a bat, a respecter. I imagine him almost like a kind of goth or something. He was a bit of a misfit, but he was Socrates' best friend. He was known for doing kind of eccentric things.
So he went to the Delphic Oracle and said, asked it, is any man wiser than Socrates? And it replied, no man is wiser than Socrates. Apollo, the god Apollo, replied, no man is wiser than Socrates. And so the weird story in the Apology is that Socrates found this difficult to accept and so he went around grilling the wisest people that he could find and
to try and find evidence that there was indeed somebody that was wiser than him. Because he didn't believe that no one was wiser than him. But he found that when he asked great philosophers and statesmen, often they contradicted themselves. So he thought they can't be wise. They believe that they are. And the sophists literally called themselves wise men.
But often when they were questioned, the things they were saying were full of contradictions and fell apart. And so Socrates thought, well, look, I come to the conclusion that paradoxically, I don't know much either, but neither do these guys. And I am wiser than them by a hair's breadth because at least I know that I'm not wise, whereas they falsely believe that they are wise, right?
And so the central thrust of his method becomes puncturing this kind of intellectual arrogance or conceit. Sometimes it's called double ignorance. So Socrates thought ignorance isn't a problem. Because I might be ignorant about medicine, but if I know I'm ignorant about medicine, I might be motivated to go and consult an expert, right?
I might not know how to fix the engine in my car, but if I go and see a mechanic, I can find somebody that maybe knows better than me. But if I believe that I'm an expert on engines or I believe I'm an expert on medicines and I'm not really, then I'm in trouble because I'll be guided by my ignorance to make lots of mistakes.
So Socrates thought this is one of our biggest problems in life, a bit like the Dunning-Kruger phenomenon, that we believe that we know things that we do not in fact know. So he found that his method was almost like a therapy for curing people of this intellectual conceit. So that's a story that Plato tells, but he also says that he did study philosophy prior to that.
Maybe for decades he'd been studying natural philosophy and learning a bit from other philosophers, but his trademark method developed at some point in his life as a result of this weird incident where the Oracle proclaims that no man is wiser than him.
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Chapter 4: What was Socrates' method of questioning?
is death because many people I think for whatever reason on their deathbed when they look back over the course of their life think is it really worth spending your life just trying to earn as much money as possible Was that what, in retrospect, my life should have been about? Was writing a best-selling book or something really the most important thing?
Or does that seem trivial in retrospect when you've only got a few days left to live or something like that? But, I mean, if you're lucky, maybe you have a brush with death early on and survive and it changes your perspective and it liberates you from these assumptions that we all have. Or sometimes when you're bereaved,
like you know i lost my father when i was quite young and i thought to be honest that really shook me and made me kind of question what's the point of all of that because i saw him um he died of lung cancer like he was bedridden for about a year and so i had about a year just to observe my father dying slowly and think he seemed to be going through this process of questioning what his life had stood for and so when i was like 13 14 years old that kind of made me think gee i don't want to end up like that
like at the end of my life thinking maybe i've spent my time and energy in the wrong way so these things and also sometimes i think having children and looking at your kids and thinking what you want for them and what values you want them to have if we approach it in the right way can help us to gain some insight and start to question what our values are but if we don't do that we just look around us think everybody's obsessed with money and fame and
you know we end up entering into the rat race chasing around after that then one day you end up in your deathbed and the doctors tell you you've only got you know a few weeks left and you think you look back on you think what a huge waste of time a lot of that was like you know maybe i've got like you know millions of dollars in my bank account but it's not you know you can't take it with you like you know does it really do anything that worthwhile in retrospect so that's why i
ancient philosophy is kind of obsessed with this question of death now the other thing that could help us would be reading about philosophers who contemplate the problem of our own mortality like that's why plato's apology is so influential because it depicts socrates standing in court knowing he's about to be executed can you tell us the the story of the end of socrates life what happened what was the build-up why did it occur
It's a slightly long and convoluted story. For some reason, he was brought to trial. Charges were brought against him. So in Athenian law, other citizens could sue you. And he was brought to court under charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. What's impiety?
like that he didn't believe in the traditional gods basically and these are standard charges that were used against intellectuals basically you know there was nothing new but if you were like if you were too clever other people in athens would say you're corrupting the youth right and if you question things excuse for politically incorrect blasphemy
Yeah, you're engaged in blasphemy as well if you're starting to question some traditional religious ideas and stuff like that. So it was kind of like stock charge in a way. There are many reasons why some people think Socrates had certain political views. He also had friends that became controversial in Athenian society.
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Chapter 5: What led to Socrates' trial and death?
Chapter 6: What does Socrates teach about the good life?
Yeah, there's really frustrating things about the life of Socrates. So this thing about going to Delphi and the pronouncement is presented as a key moment in his life. We've really got no... We don't know for certain when it happened, right? So for instance, we don't know if it happened before or after other key events in his life, and then it would change the whole narrative.
So with things like that, you just have to go, we could write an academic history where we argue about the possible dates, but in order to write a movie, you'd have to go, we have to pick a date, got to pick one. It could be like one of like maybe three different, you've just got to choose one and go with it in order to be able to tell the story.
And that's, I guess that's what liberated me is I just thought it needs to just be approached like we're writing a graphic novel or a movie. Which you did.
You did that as well. You're a man of many literary pathways now.
I take some satisfaction in that. Some authors just write the same book over and over again. And I don't know that I did this deliberately. It'd be like an actor that just plays the same kind of characters over and over, and then you've got other people that do lots of different things. But I look back at the books that I've written.
Although I did actually write three books in a row about Marcus Aurelius, they're all different genres. One's more of an academic history. One's a self-help book. One's a graphic novel. So if I look at the books, I've probably written about eight books, they're all quite different from each other. I feel like I kind of stretched myself.
I mean, the pros and cons of that are sometimes when you stretch yourself and do something you haven't done before, you can kind of fall flat on your face and maybe you figure out it's not your forte or whatever. But the positive side is that that's how you grow, by taking a chance and doing something that's... something you never even imagined that you'd be doing.
I think that was part of it as well. I kind of thought it's too difficult to write a book like this about Socrates. And I thought, well, as I get older, I'm less afraid of making mistakes. And I thought, what's the worst that can happen? Maybe I'll just mess it up and the book will be rubbish or something. I thought, yeah, I think I'd rather just try, have a go at doing it.
I think the other thing that swings it for me is I really – always approach it with this question in mind i imagine that if i could go back in time and kind of give the book that i'm writing to my 17 year old self or when i was 15 or something like i think what would i want to write in a book that i'm giving to my younger self And, you know, would I be kind of ashamed to write a book?
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Chapter 7: How do our societal values compare to Socrates' teachings?
But if I suddenly think about paying my taxes or something, I'll go, that's an automatic thought. And I choose to think that I just popped into my mind. So I kind of train myself to become more aware of that distinction. Then for 10 minutes, I would imagine that I'm in Academia Platanos in Greece, like I wrote about at the beginning of the book. And imagine I'm talking to Socrates, right?
And the first thing I would always do, Chris, is shake his hand, right? And it took a surprisingly long time for him to get used to that. I always remember my imaginary Socrates, in my mind, I insisted on shaking his hand, but he thought it was a bit weird at first. And I would say to him, I'd ask him lots of questions about anything that I was struggling with in the book.
And what I generally found, any of the history stuff, His opinion, well, you know, I'd be like trying to think, we need to kind of eye on this and get it accurate and stuff. And he would always, my imaginary Socrates anyway, would always be like, who cares? You know, it's like, I don't even know why, you know, he seemed to place surprisingly little importance on getting it historically accurate.
and he said no there's just focus on telling the story of the literary character of socrates in a way that gets people interested in the philosophy that's what actually matters right you know there are other books that you can go and read where people try and argue through the evidence and you know yeah try to get to truth i've been thinking about something not too dissimilar a little bit more generalized but i think what you're getting at as well which is
This odd split on the internet that we have at the moment. One is extreme credentialism, which I call experts only. If you don't have the requisite background, a lot of the time you're criticized. What do you know? You're not a dot, dot, dot, psychotherapist, psychedelics expert, sports and physio person, whatever you're pontificating about.
And the reason I don't like it is that it's gotten rid of, I think, what Oscar Wilde called the Oxford manner, which is the ability to play gracefully with ideas. And it seems that very much the Socratic method is that. And then on the other side, you have this sort of over romanticization of the renegade, untrained sort of orthogonal thinker.
So we have these two worlds and you can kind of deploy them to whichever you need in order to make the other side seem stupid. So they don't have the credentials or this person is a flame-wielding truth warrior. Yeah, they did it outside of the establishment. That's how they actually really know what's going on.
But there's a large number of ways where unless you have a completely stellar academic career, it's unfettered by any kind of controversy or falling short at any time. It seems to me that, That bar is unreasonably high for pretty much everybody to get over.
And on top of all of that, it makes for a much less interesting world because nobody's allowed to play with ideas outside of their domain of credentialized competence.
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