Socrates and Untimely Questions: The pain of really asking

Our recent insightful and provocative conversation with Stephen Batchelor, on the occasion of his upcoming book Buddha, Socrates, and Us rekindled my curiosity about Socrates. How well do I understand the kind of philosophy he practiced, beyond the cliches?

With most excellent foresight, turns out I had brought with me to Sicily our former Fire Philosophy guest

Agnes Callard

’s new book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life:

Previously Dale and I discussed with Professor Callard her question about what it means to have aspiration— how can you want to become someone or something which you are not quite yet? Do you have to pretend, somehow, to believe in something you don’t yet believe? And how does aspiration differ from ambition and from self-cultivation? Hint: a bit of the Socratic method is involved. You can read and listen to that conversation here:

As a literature aficionado, it was therefore with great delight that I discovered the first chapter in Open Socrates was not only about Leo Tolstoy, one of the masters of literature, Russian or otherwise, but more intriguingly what she calls Tolstoy’s problem. And quite the intractable problem it is.

In his work Confessions, Tolstoy, taking inventory of all his worldly successes which at this point included fame and fortune, asks himself: “What will come from what I do and from what I will do tomorrow—what will come from my whole life?… Why should I live, why should I wish for anything, why should I do anything?”

Callard calls Tolstoy’s question an “untimely” one because it comes at the wrong time— “namely, after it has been answered.” She calls it the kind of question which walks like a question, might even quack like a question, but it certainly isn’t a question because it’s not really being asked; and it’s not really being asked because the source of the question —here Tolstoy, but in your life, you— is already using the answers to those questions to move toward some justification of or other, like toward feeling existential despair in Tolstoy’s case above.

Here’s Tolstoy reflecting more on his questions above: “[They] seemed such stupid, simple childish questions. But as soon as I tackled them and tried to find the answers, I at once became certain… that I could not, just could not answer them.”

Callard points to the speed in which Tolstoy appears to ask his questions, but then immediately— “as soon as” and “at once” asserts with certainty their being impossible to answer. A response which Callard critiques: “When we settle on answers to the central questions of our lives without ever having opened up those questions for inquiry, that is a recipe for wavering.”

In the context of understanding Socrates, wavering is something we do about the definitions of concepts like justice or love or courage because we don’t really ask ourselves what they truly mean. In our context here at Fire Philosophy, where we study the art of living, this insight suggests that we live our lives from the definition we happened to already have at hand. It consequently takes the most convenient built-in answer that arrives simultaneously alongside the question, often delivered to us by our circumstances, our already-being-there, thrust into the middle of life, in medias res. It’s not our fault (mostly) that we believe what we believe; it could not be otherwise. But is there not a next step, or phase that the philosophical life encourages us to take?

I quote in full another juicy repartee between Tolstoy and Callard:

Here is Tolstoy, again, reflecting on his life and the way his questions seem not to be of any use:

“And I searched for explanations of my questions in all the branches of knowledge that human beings have acquired. And I searched long and agonizingly and not just out of idle curiosity; I didn’t search limply but I searched agonizingly, persistently, day and night; I searched as a dying man searches for salvation, and I found nothing.”

To which Callard responds:

“Tolstoy’s ‘I found nothing’ should shock the reader. How could it be that Tolstoy found absolutely nothing to address the question of the meaning of life in all the branches of knowledge that human beings have acquired? Has the whole human intellectual endeavor been a total failure? One might have thought that there would be something useful for thinking about the meaning of life in the vast ocean of human intellectual output—in fact, I would contend that there is much that is useful to be found even in that tiny portion of the sea constituted by Tolstoy’s own literary output.”

What we see on full display is a contemporary philosopher reading a literary genius closely, and discovering that despite the depth of his own work, Tolstoy himself could not truly examine his life. Worse, and much more insidiously, is that he ardently believed he did just that! Look at how long he searched, he says! It took the eyes of a philosopher, in conjunction with Tolstoy’s thoughts immortalized through the gift that is literature, to lead to an authentic inquiry for us reading this book. If the capacity to understand and dramatize human character and humanity’s foibles isn’t enough, and even asking what look like deep questions isn’t enough, then what is? And can we mere non-Tolstoian mortals succeed in authentic inquiry where such giants of insight like him failed?

And why am I asking you these questions, Fire Philosophers?

Because we all waver, and we all ask questions without truly asking them. Because to live, we almost always need instantaneous answers at hand, otherwise we’d be dysfunctional— perhaps we’d refrain from walking through a door, opting to stand there, inquiring what the open hole in the wall might be. So in that sense many of our questions are “untimely” and have built in answers.

But we also refrain from genuine inquiry into our lives because to truly ask a question means there’s a risk of our life’s core assumptions being refuted. And from a non-Socratic perspective, being refuted is shameful and painful. Deeply so. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you openly questioned a political belief and admitted that the opposing party has a stronger argument than you do?

The common lived and felt pain of being wrong is therefore why I start each of my semester’s classes suggesting to my students that they’ve most likely spent their entire educational careers avoiding ways of being wrong, trying to get a 💯 on the exam (avoiding the shaming of the red pen), writing an essay that’s deathly boring but B+ level safe and definitely not looking to ask something that matters but to provide a vague but hard to dispute answer, of staying quiet in class discussion because “I learn better by listening,” or mostly attempting to figure out what the professor wants and giving them just that, no more, no less — a task now made ever easier with AI tools, but I’ll leave that gripe for another day.

Instead, what I take to be one of Open Socrates’s main insights, is that we learn to truly inquire into the nature of things only when we do it in conjunction with another human being. The ability to inquiry is literally a team effort. There are a lot of reasons for this, including the paradox that the eye cannot see itself, which Callard explores deftly and with jouissance.

But if you take the Tolstoy example above seriously, you the reader of Fire Philosophy, who might be as earnest as they come, you, too, might be falling prey to reading without allowing any of our inquiries to trouble you. That which you already believe gets you to nod your head or move your eyes to the next sentence; that which you disagree with might not register, or might be dismissed outright; rare is the reader who voluntarily allows the discomfort of not knowing or being made to feel unsteady. When we/Nietzsche asked: is your life a work of art, how quickly did you move on to the next sentence?

According to Callard, the ethics of the Socratic method are therefore performed as a team and the sport is such that you either persuade or become persuaded; but in either case, the tools at hand are questions without a predetermined answer that are taken seriously by both parties. This is why in the Zen tradition, a student can do zazen for a long, long time, spinning around in their own thought loops that only deepen the grooves of stuckness and assumptions, until the moment they meet with a discerning teacher who can help them see their spinning wheels more clearly and provide an off ramp, not with an answer, but with a koan that reveals the true question that has up to then been left unasked.

I’d be amiss without reminding our readers that Nietzsche wrote some “untimely” meditations himself, which were intended to critique their subjects from a perspective a bit out of joint from his popular culture’s views:

“I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely—that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time, and let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.” (On the Use and Abuse of History for Life)

Nietzsche’s argument is that history is not something that is past, there to be reflected upon; rather, it’s something that “acts counter to our time” in much the same way an inquiry acts counter to our current assumptions about the world. To be brave enough to inquire is to abide by the Socratic method; or the Zen Way; or Nietzsche’s relentless attempt at putting on masks and having socratic contradictions with himself; or the way of Tolstoy, had he only slowed down long enough to read and truly make inquires about his own writing.