 "[O]n a Socratic view, philosophy is relevant to just about everything, high and low. It isn't a set of problems that some care about and some don't. Philosophy means thinking carefully about whether you believe all that you say and whether it's true. It is the effort to stay awake." --Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook. "Man is the rational animal." So says Aristotle. We are animals. We share much of our nature with them. We differ from them, however, by our power of reason. People today misunderstand the nature of reason. They assume it is a mere calculator for getting what we want. That is a very debased conception of it, which is typical of modernity. The classical understanding of reason is of the ability to know and to love. To see what is true and what is good. To exercise wisdom, and by means of wisdom, virtue. To see the forms of things, their essence, patterns, implications. This matters, because our lives are the product of what we do with our minds. Socrates invented philosophy as we know it. It is the exercise of reason, in the pursuit of what is true and good. In my work I invite you to live the Socratic life. I teach you how.. The Socratic life is for all men, whether your IQ is 80, 100, or 120. For we are all rational creatures, and our life depends on the good use of reason. Many people today imagine that they reason well, but in reality they mostly just ruminate, or assume, or self-flatter, or fantasise, or reinforce, or rationalise, or are dogmatic and think in black and white terms. Reason challenges us. It does not serve us, so much as it challenges us to serve reality. It turns out that serving reality, in the sense of shaping our minds according to what is actually true and good, beyond our egos, is the best thing for us. It serves our true interests. Reason is natural to us, in fact it is what distinguishes man from the animals. Of course, bodily health is natural to us, and yet we have to work on it. Soo too reasoning: it is also a skill we must learn and work on. Not many people do that. Socrates was a working man: a potter, a soldier. He engaged people in conversation in the midst of life: in the marketplace, on the way to court, wandering together to a festival, or during drinking parties (he could drink anybody under the table). Socrates method of rational questioning drew on the examples of ordinary, practical life. He challenged to give an account of what they were doing, and to define the values which lay under their actions. "You say that prosecuting these people is just, but what do you mean by justice?" A long discussion would ensue, where it might emerge that the person had a faulty sense of what justice is. Socrates was not trying to talk people out of prosecuting others--sometimes that is just, sometimes it is not--rather he wanted individuals, and his whole society, to live by clear, true concepts and values. The motivation was a concern for truth, goodness, justice, beauty, happiness, flourishing. Socrates recognised that a man’s life is the consequence of his beliefs. A man operates from a set of assumptions about love, success, duty, self-respect, justice, truth, fidelity, happiness, and so on. Some of these beliefs are explicit, but he may view them as self-evident, and so not interrogate them. Many of his beliefs are implicit: unexamined, assumed, inherited. They are often absorbed from the culture instead of being built upon reason and experience. Socrates did not think that tradition was bad--quite the contrary, at least insofar as tradition and culture are wise and healthy. Then they are like a good parent, raising us well, and guiding us even in adulthood. But Socrates recognised that, like every individual, teh wisdom of any culture will be mixed with error. Whether your concepts and beliefs are explicit or implicit is not the main issue. The main issue is that many of them are unexamined--you have not rationally interrogated them, or not to an adequate degree--and this matters because some of your concepts and beliefs are faulty. Thus you build your life with immense effort and sincerity, only to find as time goes by, that you are unhappy in confusing ways, or you suffer disasters in your life which you did not anticipate, and cannot quite make sense of. In your desperation to find an explanation, you become angry with yourself, or others, or with life. But the flaw is not in those things. You look outwards for an answer, but to do so is merely one more mistake. The problem lies within. It is in your concepts, your beliefs, your thinking. Socrates saw that there is more to life than a self-satisfied life. This is where philosophy takes us well beyond therapy. It is not only that your faulty beliefs undermine the happy and successful life you want. It is that you are not the truly good man you could have been. The good man you should become. At his trial, Socrates said that goodness is the most important thing in life. However, like Plato and the Stoics, he also saw correctly that deep goodness is also deep happiness. I said that Socrates was not an enemy of tradition. What he was an enemy of, is thoughtlessness. He loved truth, and goodness, and justice, and beauty, and the profoundly happy life that emerges from these, and his concern was to make sure that our concepts and beliefs, and our traditions and culture, do not merely appear to be true, but genuinely are good. That is the point of reason: to assess, and to guide. If you care about being a truly good man, you should care about reason. Socrates offered not a theory, but a tool: "the Socratic method". That is a method for rationally examining our concepts, beliefs, values, emotions, actions, and so on. It is the work of reason. The Socratic method looks to the unexamined and perhaps hidden beliefs that direct our life. What is the implicit belief that is directing my emotions right now? What are the implicit and faulty beliefs which enable my impulsive or "compulsive" behaviour, such as staring at a screen every night? Do the beliefs which underlie my thinking, feeling, actions, values and so on, make sense? Are they internally consistent? Doe they cohere with what else I believe, and my experience of life, and especially with what else I know to be true? What do wiser people say about such things (of course, I will examine their beliefs, too). The goal of the Socratic method is the discovery of truth through the examination of contradiction and imprecision. On that basis, you can build better foundations for your life: rational, justified, true beliefs. Those better beliefs will function as the new roots of you better emotions, actions, habits, and life. This scrutiny of beliefs and values works at two levels. The higher level regards the conceptual, the abstract, the universal. What is truth? What is justice? What is anger, and what is good anger, and what is bad? The goal, however, is practical wisdom. Having clarified the nature of these things in themselves as universals (as concepts), we move to the particular. What is it for you to be truthful? How are you achieving that, and how are you failing, and how can you improve? Is your habit of anger just and justified? If not, should you erase anger from your life, or is that too a kind of injustice? What do you do instead? All of this is not merely an academic exercise, clearly. Your understanding of justice, and how you live justice out, matters greatly. It matters if you are to be a strong man (justice strengthens). It matters, of course, if you are to be a good man. It matters if you are to be happy, for example success in love and friendship requires justice, and self-respect requires it too. It matters if you are to be successful in your business or career, where your interpersonal reputation matters. It matters if you you are to find life meaningful, for a man who lives by true values can find life meaningful, while a man who lives nihilistically, selfishly, will feel the emptiness. It matters if you are to enjoy a free and clear conscience. It matters, therefore, because it is one of the ingredients of a flourishing life. Socratic examination is not an academic or intellectualist exercise. It is about real life, about the problems that matter to living well, whether they be profound, mundane, and everything in between. Scholarly philosophy has an important place in a thriving civilisation, and anti-intellectualism is cowardly egotism. But scholarly philosophy is limited. The main stream of philosophy was in the ancient world, and needs to be again, this practical form of philosphy, rootred in Socrates. The Socratic method is the heart of my philosophical counselling. I teach you the method through practice. For I will engage you in a Socratic way. We will engage in a conversation which, from my end, embodies, applies, and cultivates reason, and invites and guides you to do the same. You get better by doing. The focus will be your problems and goals, and the application of reason and cultivation of wisdom, and so the cultivation also of virtue. This means that, (1) you learn to reason better, but equally at the same time you (2) make progress regarding your problems and goals, and (3) you are cultivating the virtues which make you strong, good, happy, and successful in general. Alonsgide this "learning by doing", there is a must-read book for developing the skills you need for an examined life. It is Ward Farnsworth's The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook. It is a very accessible and engaging read. It is available in hard copy or audio-book. Of course, you can also read the Socratic dialogues and see him in action. We know of Socrates through the works of his student Plato, who presents Socrates in dialogue with others, as he was in life, and so displays the Socratic method to us. Now we proceed from the path of reason, to the truths revealed by reason: to Plato's map if the soul and of the good life. See here.  Socrates was tried and executed for practicing philosophy. The above is a painting by Jacques-Louis David, which shows Socrates' execution which was administered by drinking hemlock.
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