Five Practical Tips from Socrates

My notes for The Next Big Idea Club

I was recently invited to contribute an article on How to Think Like Socrates for The Next Big Idea Club. Below are my first four pieces of advice and a link to the original article where you can read the fifth and final tip. There’s also an audio recording, which I narrated on that web page, if you prefer to listen to the article.

The Next Big Idea: Socrates

1. How to practice the Socratic Method.

Socrates, despite being one of the most influential philosophers in history, wrote nothing. At least, that’s what people like to say. However, Plato, his most famous student, tells us that while in prison awaiting his execution, Socrates wrote poetry. More intriguingly, Epictetus, the famous Stoic philosopher who lived four centuries later, claimed that Socrates jotted down countless notes that were designed for his own self-improvement but never intended for publication. Another of his students describes how Socrates taught a young man to practice philosophy by means of a formal written exercise.

For this exercise, Socrates drew two columns, the first headed “Justice” and the second “Injustice.” His companion was invited to list examples of wrongdoing under the heading of injustice, such as theft and deceit. It’s often easier to understand our values if we begin by defining their opposites. However, the basic skill underlying the Socratic Method really comes into play in the next step. Socrates asked his friend to imagine any situations where the things he’d listed under Injustice might be placed under the heading of Justice. For instance, a general who seized the weapons of the enemy during a war might be said to be stealing, but perhaps that’s not unjust. Likewise, a father might be considered justified in concealing medicine in his sick child’s food despite this being a form of deceit. Socrates was skilled at coming up with these sorts of examples.

Training yourself to think of exceptions to rules and definitions can help you avoid applying them too rigidly. This skill is important because the advice and techniques we learn from self-help books are often of limited value. What’s good advice in one situation may become bad advice in another. Solutions that work well for some problems may backfire when applied to others. Wisdom consists of thinking for yourself by adapting rules to fit new situations. Socrates’ two-column technique only teaches one small part of his famous philosophical method, but it’s a great way to start thinking more flexibly and adaptively about life.

2. Generate alternative perspectives.

Epictetus said, “People are distressed not by events but by their opinions about events.” This was one of the main inspirations behind cognitive therapy, the leading form of modern evidence-based psychotherapy. The idea goes back to Socrates, a century before the Stoic school of philosophy was founded. Modern psychological research has confirmed that our beliefs shape our emotions more than we normally assume. By changing the way we think, we can change the way we feel.

An obstacle stands in the way. Some of our beliefs are so entrenched that we find it difficult to imagine ever viewing events differently. When we’re gripped by strong emotions, such as fear or anger, it may feel natural to view certain events as catastrophic or certain people as unbearable. Socrates, at times, behaved rather like a modern-day cognitive therapist. He would ask his friends whether they imagined that the events that upset them might be viewed differently by other people. What you see as a catastrophe, someone else might view as bad but only temporary, whereas a third might even look at it as an opportunity. By becoming aware that multiple alternative perspectives are conceivable, you can attune to the way your beliefs influence your emotions.

3. Separate your thoughts from external events.

Cognitive therapists say our beliefs are like colored lenses through which we look at the world. Suppose you’re wearing blue lenses, which color the world with sadness. There’s a difference between looking at the world through your sad, blue lenses and looking at them. This shift in perspective can be compared to observing your own biases as if you were observing someone else’s.

When we can distinguish between our thoughts and external reality, we experience two main benefits. The most obvious is that our emotions tend to be reduced in intensity. The second is more subtle but arguably even more valuable: We become better at exploring alternative ways of looking at problems. With this flexibility, we find creative solutions to improve how things work out in the long term.

Therapists today have fancy names for this, like cognitive distancing or defusion, but it basically means learning to separate beliefs from the things they refer to. It allows you to view your own thinking with greater objectivity and has been found especially helpful for emotional problems such as anxiety and depression. The simplest way to do this is by writing your thoughts down and observing them from a detached perspective. Another method is to tell yourself, “I notice right now that I am having the thought…” and then state the thought you were having as if you were putting it in quotation marks. You can also imagine that some thought or belief has been painted in big letters on a wall, picturing the color and shape of the letters or changing their appearance until you have a sense of the words being like external objects. Therapists may also ask their clients to repeat a troubling thought aloud rapidly for around thirty seconds or to say it more slowly, with longer pauses. It’s interesting to try worrying in slow motion!

These techniques allow us to experience a thought or belief with greater detachment by looking at our mental lenses rather than looking through them. You’re not avoiding the thought, and you can still discuss evidence for and against it. You’re just experiencing it from another perspective. I believe that Socrates gained this sort of detachment from his own beliefs by discussing them with his friends. He compared self-knowledge to an eye that sees itself, and the best way to achieve this, he thought, was by engaging in philosophical conversations where you view the other person as a mirror for the mind, in which you contemplate your thinking more objectively.

4. Illeism, meaning talking in the third person.

When Socrates finished discussing philosophy with his friends, he would go home and continue the conversation with himself in private. He would imagine another Socrates interrogating him about his assumptions concerning wisdom, justice, and other virtues. Socrates appears to have been known for referring to himself as if he was another person. A similar technique, which involves talking about yourself using your name or third-person pronouns, is called Illeism. It is occasionally used in modern psychotherapy to help clients manage anxiety and other distressing emotions.

The psychologist Igor Grossman heads a center that conducts research on the nature of wisdom at the University of Waterloo, in Canada. He was intrigued by a paradox: we often seem better at giving other people advice than solving our own problems. He and his colleagues carried out a variety of experiments and found that when people write about their problems in a journal using the third person, they exhibit more wisdom than when writing in the first person. He calls this method distanced reflection, and it can improve your ability to reason, especially about problems that normally evoke strong feelings.

Read the original article or listen to the audio recording on the website of The Next Big Idea Club.