Modern Wisdom
#864 - Donald Robertson - The True Story Of History’s Greatest Philosopher
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
Full Episode
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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