Socrates died by drinking hemlock. Before the city of Athens compelled him to drink it—an event dramatized in Plato’s Phaedo—he awaited execution in a prison cell, and his friend Crito came to visit him. Crito offered to bribe the guards so as to help Socrates escape prison and death, and Socrates persuaded him that escaping would be wrong—their conversation is dramatized in another dialogue, the Crito. Before that happened, Socrates was convicted of impiety by an Athenian jury, and before he was convicted, he made a speech of self-defense, which is dramatized in the Apology. Before he visited the courtroom to defend himself, Socrates made an earlier visit to the same courtroom, to hear what his three accusers (Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon) charged him with; and before he arrived at the courtroom that first time—when he was standing just outside it—he ran into a religious prophet named Euthyphro, and they had a conversation about piety. This conversation, dramatized by Plato in the Euthyphro, is thus the first in a chain of dialogues that end in the death of Socrates.
Euthyphro has come to the courtroom to prosecute his own father for murder. If we would be surprised to hear a son announce such a plan, a contemporary of Euthyphro would have been shocked. Athenian law categorized murder as a crime against the family of the victim, not the state; in that respect, such a lawsuit resembles our civil cases more than our criminal ones, and it would normally only be brought on behalf of, not against, a family member. In fact, Euthyphro’s is the only case of a son prosecuting his father that we know of from ancient Athenian legal history.1 We can almost see Socrates’ eyebrows rising:
Socrates: Whom do you prosecute?
Euthyphro: One whom I am thought crazy to prosecute.
Socrates: Are you pursuing someone who will easily escape you?
Euthyphro: Far from it, for he is quite old.
Socrates: Who is it?
Euthyphro: My father.
Socrates: My dear sir! Your own father?
Euthyphro: Certainly.
Socrates: What is the charge? What is the case about?
Euthyphro: Murder, Socrates.
Socrates: Good heavens! Certainly, Euthyphro, most men would not know how they could do this and be right. It is not the part of anyone to do this, but of one who is far advanced in wisdom.
Euthyphro: Yes, by Zeus, Socrates, that is so.
Socrates: Is then the man your father killed one of your relatives? Or is that obvious, for you would not prosecute your father for the murder of a stranger.2
The story only gets more bizarre from here. The man killed was not only not a relative of Euthyphro’s—he was himself a killer. What happened was this: A family servant killed a household slave, Euthyphro’s father sent for a priest in order to determine the appropriate punishment, and meanwhile bound the killer hand and foot and threw him into a pit. The killer died of exposure before Euthyphro’s father heard back from the priest, and Euthyphro thinks his father is guilty of murder for not taking proper care of the killer while he lay in the pit.
Socrates, having heard this story, jumps at the chance to interrogate a person who could confidently navigate this ethical quandary:
Socrates: Whereas, by Zeus, Euthyphro, you think that your knowledge of the divine, and of piety and impiety, is so accurate that, when those things happened as you say, you have no fear of having acted impiously in bringing your father to trial?
Euthyphro: I should be of no use, Socrates, and Euthyphro would not be superior to the majority of people, if I did not have accurate knowledge of all such things.
Socrates: It is indeed most important, my admirable Euthyphro, that I should become your pupil, and as regards this indictment, challenge Meletus about these very things.3
Meletus is the ringleader of the trio whose accusations of impiety Socrates is about to hear. The philosophical conversation that ensues, between Socrates and Euthyphro as they stand on the threshold of the courtroom, concerns the nature of piety. When Euthyphro prosecutes his father, he runs the risk of being accused of impiety; and it is likewise on charges of impiety that Socrates will, in that same courtroom, be tried and sentenced to death. Whatever piety is, it matters a great deal to Socrates, to Euthyphro, and to the Athenians before whom they will plead their cases.
Each of Plato’s Socratic dialogues features a conversation with high stakes. When talking to a child, Socrates’ question is: “Am I right in assuming, Lysis, that your father and mother love you very much?”4 When Lysis answers yes, Socrates offers an argument to the contrary. He asks power-hungry Alcibiades whether he really thinks he has what it takes to be a ruler. When Socrates asks orators to explain what oratory is, the implied challenge is: Are you able to make a speech about what speeches are, or will that leave you tongue-tied? When talking to a professional virtue teacher, Protagoras, Socrates questions whether virtue can be taught. In conversation with Hippias, a self-proclaimed expert in everything, Socrates argues that the expert is the one who will be capable of the most evil. Socrates asks Ion, a rhapsode who makes his living by reciting Homer, whether Homer really knew what he was talking about. When he runs into Lysimachus and Melesias, who are debating the proper military education for their sons, and the generals Laches and Nicias, who are advising them, he asks whether any of them know what courage is. In a conversation with a young man from a noble family and the guardian charged with making sure he is educated into his proper place in the aristocracy Socrates asks about the meaning of sōphrosynē. Sōphrosynē is notoriously difficult to translate—it has been rendered as “moderation,” “temperance,” “discipline,” and “self-control”—but it can be described as “an aristocrat’s virtue par excellence, involving a sense of dignity and self-command.”5 Thus Socrates is asking the parties to aristocratic education whether they understand its goal. The topic of the Phaedo, the dialogue featuring Socrates’ death, is whether there is life after death—Socrates has, up until this moment, tended to believe that there is, but decides that this is the opportune moment to subject that belief to sharp critique. He asks his friends, all of them devastated by the unbearable prospect of his death, to remain calm, refrain from crying, and inquire alongside him.
Euthyphro’s last words in the dialogue, after Socrates encourages him to continue the conversation in spite of many failed attempts to explain piety, express the frustration and beleaguerment typical of Socrates’ interlocutors: “Some other time, Socrates, for I am in a hurry now, and it is time for me to go.”6 And yet what is surprising about these conversations is not the fact that the interlocutor is eager to rush off at the end, but that they stay as long as they do. Likewise, though Socrates is eventually put to death for his philosophizing, it is amazing how long he is permitted to spend doing exactly that: he reached the ripe old age of seventy. The story of Socrates is mostly the story of people putting up with the treatment described above. Each of his conversations is a high-wire act in which Socrates manages to sustain an inquiry into the very question his interlocutor is least likely to tolerate. These are untimely questions. Let’s examine them more carefully.
Some of Socrates’ interlocutors are initially taken aback by how easy his questions seem. Here is how Meno responds to being asked to define “virtue”:
It is not hard to tell you, Socrates. First, if you want the virtue of a man, it is easy to say that a man’s virtue consists of being able to manage public affairs . . . if you want the virtue of a woman, it is not difficult to describe: she must . . . be submissive to her husband; the virtue of a child, whether male or female, is different again, and so is that of an elderly man, if you want that, or if you want that of a free man or a slave. And there are very many other virtues, so that one is not at a loss to say what virtue is.7
Meno remarks on how easy this question is four times over the course of a short speech. Euthyphro similarly thinks he will have an easy time explaining what he means by “piety.” But Socrates has only to apply the lightest pressure to their answers for this appearance of ease to dissolve. Meno, for example, has not considered the fact that there must be something that all of the characters he describes—man, woman, child, slave—have in common, insofar as they deserve to be called “virtuous.” When pressed to explain what this common element might be, Meno makes a second attempt at defining virtue: “to be able to rule over people, if you are seeking one description to fit them all.” But Socrates immediately points out that this description does not fit those whose virtue Meno believes lies in their being ruled. Meno’s definition fits the position he sees himself as occupying in this story, that of being in charge. And this is connected to the fact that Meno is giving the answer that guides his own life: his answer is not just an answer, but a kind of plan he takes himself to be currently following.
Euthyphro initially defines piety as follows: “I say that the pious is to do what I am doing now, to prosecute the wrongdoer, be it about murder or temple-robbery or anything else, whether the wrongdoer is your father or mother or anyone else.”8 At first, Socrates’ interlocutors often conflate the activity of defining the concept in question with that of showing how it applies to and affirms their own behavior.* In the Gorgias, Socrates asks his interlocutor—an orator—to define oratory, and he says it is “the most admirable of the crafts.”9
There is a pattern to how many people respond to Socrates’ questions: they first feel that the questions are so straightforward as to hardly deserve consideration, and then give “answers” that amount to performative self-affirmations. This pattern is not a sign of any arrogance peculiar to Socrates’ milieu. It is, instead, a direct consequence of how Socrates has chosen his questions. Someone who asks a child, “Do your parents really love you?” cannot expect the child to approach this question in a detached, reflective manner. The child needs to believe that his parents love him, and, more generally, people need to approve of the choices that they are, at that very moment, making. Socrates’ questions pinpoint beliefs the person needs to have—and his questioning applies targeted pressure on that critical, load-bearing, spot.
What does it mean to say that we “need” some belief? Imagine we are walking together chatting, and you ask me, “Which way is the supermarket?” I say, “I’m going that way right now, do you want to come with me?” Or even more simply, I might answer, “Just follow me!” Notice that my response to you does not require me to revisit the question “How does one get to the supermarket?” I don’t open an inquiry into a question that I take myself to have already answered. If, by contrast, you had asked me directions to somewhere I was not going—e.g., the post office—I might have had to pause for a moment, consider my mental map of my neighborhood, locate myself in it, and then offer you instructions: “You will have to turn left at the next intersection.” A belief that one needs to have is a belief that one is acting on.
I give directions differently when I’m already heading to the same destination. I don’t pause to consider how an action should be performed when I am already performing that action. Notice that my failure to employ the reflective, detached, post office procedure when asked about the supermarket is not a sign of misplaced self-confidence; the difference in how I answer is simply a function of the fact that the relevant belief is already operational. When I talk to you about the location of the supermarket, I am handing you a special kind of thought—one that is, as it were, currently moving my legs forward.
But suppose you gave me good reason for thinking that I might be headed in the wrong direction: “That supermarket is closed today; you should go to a different one.” If your claim is credible, its effect on me will be visible: I will stop. Now, I both can and must ask myself which way I should go. The moment this becomes an open question for me is the moment I put my walking on hold for long enough to inquire into it. Once stopped, I can approach this problem in the same detached, speculative manner I had earlier adopted for the post office, because I am not acting on any answer to it.
One mark of an untimely question is the availability of one’s answer. It is not only that one (feels certain that one) has an answer, but that, because that answer is currently at work in propelling one forward, the expression of the answer takes the form of using it (“Follow me!”) rather than explaining it (“This is how . . . ”). It is akin to the difference between responding to “Do you have a pencil?” with “Yes,” and responding by handing over a pencil. When the question is untimely, we “hand over” an answer that is guaranteed to be found on the tip of our tongue, because we were already speaking it—to ourselves. Or at least we assumed we were. Socrates catches people in the awkward moment of transfer where everyone suddenly realizes that the hand that both parties had supposed to be holding the pencil is, in fact, empty.
In this story, “Which way is the supermarket?” was an untimely question, but a relatively lightweight one. A small amount of pressure—for instance, your telling me it is closed today—would be enough to get me to stop using that answer. At that point I would be free to stop walking and ask myself which way I should go. To be clear, I have at all points been free to go somewhere else. My freedom of movement has never been in question: no one is forcing me to go to the supermarket, and none of the paths before me are blocked. But in order to exercise the freedom to go wherever I want to go, I give up some freedom to think about whatever I want to think about. I regain the freedom to ask myself the question, “Which way is the supermarket?” or more broadly, “Where should I go?” only once I stop using an answer to that question. This doesn’t mean I have to literally stop moving my legs, because I might keep walking from the force of habit, or because I found some new reason for walking, such as the desire to save myself from the embarrassment of pausing in front of a shop window and having the people inside notice my confusion. I could keep walking, but I could not keep walking to the supermarket. In the case of the supermarket, we can see that the project is not very fundamental to my life, by noting how easy it is to come to be arrested by a thought such as “Maybe I need to go to a different supermarket?”
Not all projects are so easily put on hold. For example: I am a mother all the time. Even when I’m away from my children, I cannot pose to myself a question such as “What does it take to be a good mother?” without thinking about whether my own mothering meets the standard I am describing. I can’t step off the mothering treadmill long enough to consider the question in a dispassionate and detached way. The same is true of other substantial roles, such as being a student. Unless a student is somehow truly alienated from their education—just going through the motions to please others—they will be unable to approach the question as to what makes for a good student in an impartial and dispassionate manner. Their answer will have the marks of being currently in use, because they can’t take time off from this pursuit. Time off from studying, such as vacations or study breaks, cannot be equated with time off from taking the concept “student” as crucial to one’s self-understanding. One could stop being a student by dropping out of school, and perhaps one could stop being a parent by cutting off contact with one’s children, but those are high costs to pay for opening up a question. And notice that the person who paid those costs and became “open” to these questions by divesting themselves from the corresponding commitments would be precisely the one who had little reason to care about the answers.
What makes a question untimely for a given person is the fact that she is enacting its answer, but there are important differences between the size and scope of our practical projects. Untimely questions about being a mother and student refer to activities that represent a more substantial investment of our agency than untimely questions about being a shopper, which makes the former more interesting but also more elusive. The most interesting and most elusive questions will be the ones whose answers we must give at every moment of our lives, for their whole duration. In terms of the degree to which we, as agents, rely on them, these answers bear the heaviest load.
Socrates tends to drive his inquiries toward such questions. One example is: Am I a just (i.e., good) person? This question becomes the subject of Socrates’ conversation with Alcibiades in the dialogue of the same name:
Socrates: When you were a boy I often observed you, at school and other places, and sometimes when you were playing knucklebones or some other game, you’d say to one or another of your playmates, very loudly and confidently—not at all like someone who was at a loss about justice and injustice—that he was a lousy cheater and wasn’t playing fairly. Isn’t that true?
Alcibiades: But what was I to do, Socrates, when somebody cheated me like that?
Socrates: Do you mean, what should you have done if you didn’t actually know then whether or not you were being cheated?
Alcibiades: But I did know, by Zeus! I saw clearly that they were cheating me.
Socrates: So it seems that even as a child you thought you understood justice and injustice.
Alcibiades: Yes, and I did understand.
Socrates: At what point did you find it out? Surely it wasn’t when you thought you knew.
Alcibiades: Of course not.
Socrates: Then when did you think you didn’t know? Think about it—you won’t find any such time.10
Mothers can think back to before they were mothers, and students can look ahead to when they won’t be students, but there are some projects that take up our whole lives. We can ask someone, “Why did you decide to have children?” or “Why did you decide to go to graduate school?” but we cannot ask, “Why did you decide to be a good person?” No one will be able to account for that decision; as far back as we stretch our minds, we will find that the decision was already in place. Nor will we be able to think back to a time when we were too confused or puzzled about what justice was to have the kinds of responses Alcibiades had to being cheated at games: an attitude of wonder or detached inquisitiveness seems misplaced here. One doesn’t need to be very old to confront questions of justice, and as soon as one does, one finds that one is already in the business of indignantly insisting on one’s rights.
One can wonder, in a detached and curious spirit, whether there is life on other planets or how fast the fastest bird flies; one cannot wonder disinterestedly whether some harm that has been done to us is unjust. By the time a question of justice arises, one finds oneself needing to hit the ground running with an answer. There is no space for either a practical, deliberative activity such as “deciding,” in which one evaluates a proposed option for goodness; nor is there space for an inquisitive activity such as scientific analysis, in which one evaluates the truth of a claim—and this is what leads to our fighting about claims of justice (“Lousy cheater!”).
Our standing investment in the answers to untimely questions explains their contentiousness much better than the usual explanation, which is to dismiss these questions as “subjective.” To see why, consider what sorts of disagreements give rise to fights:
Socrates: I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen or heard people disagreeing so strongly about what is healthy and unhealthy that they fight and kill each other over it, have you?
Alcibiades: Of course not.
Socrates: But I know you’ve seen this sort of dispute over questions of justice and injustice; or even if you haven’t seen it, at least you’ve heard about it from many other people—especially Homer, since you’ve heard the Iliad and the Odyssey, haven’t you?
Alcibiades: I certainly have, of course, Socrates.
Socrates: Aren’t these poems all about disagreements over justice and injustice?
Alcibiades: Yes.
Socrates: It was over this sort of disagreement that the Achaeans and the Trojans fought battles and lost their lives, as did Odysseus and the suitors of Penelope.11
Socrates says that we fight when we disagree about justice, but not when we disagree about health. We cannot explain this difference by claiming that questions of health are unimportant, because sometimes those questions are, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
But don’t we sometimes fight over health? It is true that we become angry when health concerns are ignored or overstated, especially by public authorities, or when the irresponsible choices of some endanger the health or safety of others. In each of these cases, however, considerations of health are bound up with those of justice: deception, misinformation, and reckless endangerment are moral and political concerns, not medical ones.
If you think a high-protein diet is healthier and I think a high-carbohydrate diet is healthier, or if you favor treatment X for a particular disease and I favor treatment Y—even if these are matters of life and death—we won’t necessarily fight. We might fight, if one of us feels the other’s position is due to culpable negligence in gathering or interpreting data—but that is to turn the question once again into one of justice. Assuming no accusations of wrongdoing are at play, even a disagreement over a matter of life and death can be quite peaceable: each of us waits to hear the other’s reasons, ready to change her mind in the presence of sufficient evidence.†
We make space for reasonable disagreement and suspension of judgment in matters of life and death, and this is appropriate. For vulnerable creatures, death and illness are part of life. We try to avoid them when we can, but understand that we cannot escape them altogether. We acknowledge no such limits in relation to injustice. In the Euthyphro, Socrates traces this key difference to the question of measurement:
Socrates: What are the subjects of difference that cause hatred and anger? Let us look at it this way. If you and I were to differ about numbers as to which is the greater, would this difference make us enemies and angry with each other, or would we proceed to count and soon resolve our difference about this?
Euthyphro: We would certainly do so.
Socrates: Again, if we differed about the larger and the smaller, we would turn to measurement and soon cease to differ.
Euthyphro: That is so.
Socrates: And about the heavier and the lighter, we would resort to weighing and be reconciled.
Euthyphro: Of course.
Socrates: What subject of difference would make us angry and hostile to each other if we were unable to come to a decision? Perhaps you do not have an answer ready, but examine as I tell you whether these subjects are the just and the unjust, the noble and the shameful, the good and the bad. Are these not the subjects of difference about which, when we are unable to come to a satisfactory decision, you and I and other people become hostile to each other whenever we do?12
It is tempting to think, “The reason we don’t fight over size, or shape, or weight, or number is that those questions are mundane and unimportant.” But that is not any more true than the corresponding claim about health. Questions of weight or size can be the difference between a bridge that stays up and one that collapses; and when we study the healing properties of a drug, or the prophylactic power of a vaccine, we are doing so by way of such “mundane” measurements. Social scientists use measurement to explore questions about what forms of social organization are most beneficial for human beings. Measuring is how we check what works and what doesn’t; measurement matters.
The question, then, is why we fight over what we can’t measure. Is it because we need our disputes to be decidable, and when we can’t decide them by measurement, we try to decide them by fighting? This cannot be quite right, because there might be a contingently undecidable question: when we disagree on a question where measurement would be impractical, or where the relevant measuring device doesn’t exist yet, we do not immediately turn to fighting.
It is at this point in the discussion that people invoke the objective/subjective distinction. They say: The reason we do not fight over what can be measured is that there is an answer out there. Whether we know it or not, there is an objective truth of the matter. We fight only when the question is “subjective,” in the sense that each person sets her own answer, without outside constraint. The claim is: We fight when there is no independent fact of the matter about how things are, apart from how the warring parties think that they are.
But this explanation is not consistent with the observation that there are plenty of questions that are subjective that we do not fight over, questions such as “Is chocolate ice cream tastier than vanilla?” and “Are airplane trips fun?” We might argue sportively over which movie is best or what kind of music is most charming or which joke is funniest, but until the point where these questions get entwined with questions of justice—or otherwise secure untimely status, as they might for those whose identities are bound up with certain favorite novels or films—we do not tend to become angry, hostile, or defensive.
When I am angry at you for (as I see it) having treated me unjustly, I think there is a fact of the matter, and I think that it says that you are wrong and I am right. I see that as objective truth, and I see it with a blazing certainty; the fact that you think otherwise doesn’t make the matter “subjective”—it makes you wrong! Likewise, if I learn that you disapprove of my parenting, or dismiss me as a worthless student, I might brush this off with an indifferent gesture: “That is your subjective opinion; I have my own.” But if I don’t—which is to say, if I care enough about what you think to be angered, insulted, and hurt by your estimation of me—then I do not see our difference of opinion as being “merely subjective.”
The idea that the dispute is “merely subjective” is more likely to reflect the point of view of an onlooker who wishes the parties to stop their squabbling. The parties themselves fight because they see the question as in some way objective—decidable in the light of the truth, in spite of the impossibility of measurement.
Insofar as we treat gustatory preferences, or disagreements about art, or even religious disagreements, as subjective matters, we won’t fight over them. Insofar as we do fight over them, we take there to be constraints governing what our interlocutor ought to believe, regardless of whether she recognizes the existence of those constraints. We fight or argue over the matter in order to bring our interlocutor’s behavior or speech in line with those constraints. So we shouldn’t conflate the question of whether we think there’s a fact of the matter about something with the question of whether we can use a measurement procedure to decide the question.
To recap: We fight over questions that cannot be decided by measurement—but not over all such questions, because we do not fight over matters of taste, nor over questions where the instrument of measurement has simply not been invented yet. What questions, then, do we fight over? We fight over those questions whose answers are practically operative, rendering the suspension of judgment impossible. Untimely questions best explain why we fight when we do.
It is not an accident that the Trojan War was fought over a question of justice as opposed to one about weights and sizes. If you and I disagree over the size of some object, we can each set aside what we think for long enough to go measure it. Even if I have an opinion, I’m able to “step back” from my opinion while we take the time to measure it. The art of measurement exists because sizes, shapes, and weights are things that people are able to tolerate not knowing: a “blank” is permitted to occupy the place where the answer should be. Not so with questions of ethics. People are prepared to fight and even kill over those disagreements. Their inability to inquire into them stems from the fact that they are currently making use of the answers.
Measurement exists only where detachment is possible. This holds true not only for natural scientific properties such as weight and size and health, but also for social scientific phenomena. When economists, psychologists, or sociologists wish to investigate some aspect of human behavior, they can formulate the question as one of measurement only because they have not presupposed that they already know the answer. Questions of measurement require the one asking to “go out and check.” This is why untimely questions are never answerable through measurement, but the converse does not hold: a question that is not amenable to measurement isn’t necessarily untimely. We might be unable to use measurement to decide the question for other reasons, such as the absence of the relevant measuring apparatus, or because it is a subjective matter of taste.
It is a mistake to use the word “objective” to mean measurable, since “objective” picks out the larger category of questions where there is a fact of the matter about who is right and who is wrong. As mentioned, we all think questions of justice have this property—at least when we are worked up about them. What is distinctive about questions of measurement is not that they are “objective” but that it is easy to separate the asking of the question from the answering of it.
Questions amenable to measurement are readily detachable from the project of living of one’s life. Instead of saying that questions of justice are “subjective,” we should say that when it comes to a question of justice, my pursuit of the answer is inflected by my personal investment in how it gets answered: while asking it, I am necessarily already engaged in answering it.
Recall Alcibiades insisting that he knows the answer to the question of justice, and that he has always known it:
Socrates: So it seems that even as a child you thought you understood justice and injustice.
Alcibiades: Yes, and I did understand.13
Calling a question of justice “subjective” is a confused way of getting at the mysterious fact that the answers to such questions seem to have always been with us.
We navigate our lives by way of answers as to what things matter or have meaning. These answers map the world for us: without a sense of what to aim at, we are floating, purposeless. Most of the answers that anchor our agency in the world concern our relationships with the people we are close to. It is with reference to those people that our abstract commitments to being an empathetic, kind, loving, helpful person become concrete directives with action-guiding force; and so when, for example, some of those people die, or betray us, we experience a profound disruption and disorientation. We cannot live without answers, and so when some of our most important answers are, or stand to be, removed from us, we experience that event in the form of strong, negative emotions.
These negative emotions are the most straightforward indication that not every case is like the supermarket case. Our inability to simply stop engaging in certain activities—loving someone who has died, caring about a job we’ve been fired from—serves as a way of demarcating those questions that are fundamental, those answers that bear a heavy load. Emotions such as rage and despair are how we respond when something happens to us that we were counting on not happening.
You might not notice it, but as you make your way through each day, there are many, many things you are counting on. For example, you are counting on the fact that you will not die today. Our load-bearing answers to untimely questions tend to give rise to predictions that specify what needs to be true in the future in order for my answer to guide my action in the present. If I orient my life around the prospect of becoming a mother, or going to college, or being publicly recognized for my efforts, or being reunited with a loved one, I am going to need to have a belief about whether or not these things will happen. I might not have a lot of evidence as to whether these projects will succeed, but an agnostically detached attitude—“I simply don’t know what will happen”—will be hard for me to sustain. No one can live without making predictions about those parts of the future that are of special concern to them.
People who are getting married are likely to find the question as to whether they will stay married to be untimely, and parents are in the same position with respect to questions about the health and happiness of their children. On these matters, people don’t simply suspend judgment; and they will find it much more difficult to approach them probabilistically—“there is a 60 percent chance things will work out”—than outsiders do. Whereas you might be able to engage in a detached, impartial inquiry into whether my spouse will ever cheat on me or whether my best friend will ever reveal secrets of mine she has promised to keep, those questions tend to arrive in my mind already answered. Each of us is counting on the future unfolding in some ways rather than others, even though we cannot fully control whether it does.
The name for these load-bearing predictions is “hope.” And it is worth observing that hope is fragile. It is difficult to sustain, since it comes with the prospect of grief and loss if we are disappointed, so at times we recoil against it by “detaching” ourselves from the goal—or pretending to: “I know it won’t happen and I don’t care.” People are sometimes plunged into exaggerated certainty that they will fail or be frustrated in their aims—during these times, they might be far more pessimistic than they have reason to be. At other times, they might jump to the opposite extreme. When you are counting on the future to unfold in a particular way, because your ability to orient yourself within it depends on its unfolding in that way, you become inclined to flip back and forth—to waver—between positive and the negative certainty, alternating moments of hopefulness with those of despair. When something matters to our ability to navigate our lives, we need to have a belief about what will happen, because we make use of that belief, in the activity of living. For the same reason, those who trust are, in many contexts, given to waver into distrust: trust is that species of hope that pertains to whether others will hold up their end of the bargain.
Almost any belief can become load-bearing. Consider Bertrand Russell’s praise for how the logician Gottlob Frege responded to the demonstration that his axiom system was inconsistent:
As I think about acts of integrity and grace, I realize that there is nothing in my knowledge to compare with Frege’s dedication to truth. His entire life’s work was on the verge of completion, much of his work had been ignored to the benefit of men infinitely less capable, his second volume was about to be published, and upon finding that his fundamental assumption was in error, he responded with intellectual pleasure clearly submerging any feelings of personal disappointment.14
One doesn’t usually receive so much credit for being willing to accept that one claim follows logically from another. For example, it happens to be true that when I learned that Frege’s axioms allow for the construction of a set (call it, “S”) of all sets that are not members of themselves, and that this amounts to a contradiction (Is S a member of itself? If yes, then it does not belong to S, if not, then it does), I responded to this discovery with intellectual pleasure. Although Russell describes Frege’s intellectual pleasure as “almost superhuman”; he wouldn’t praise me in those terms. This is because the claim in question doesn’t have the same load-bearing role in my life as it did in Frege’s.
For a different kind of example, contrast the juror in a criminal trial with the defendant’s mother: the juror might begin the trial without any opinions as to whether the defendant committed the crime, but the mother, sitting in the audience, hears the evidence from a very different position. While the juror might gradually become more convinced of guilt as the evidence mounts, the mother’s epistemic path is more likely to take the shape of “flipping” from hopeful certainty of his innocence to despair and rage over his guilt. The fact that some question really matters to you affects how “freely” and “open-mindedly” you can think about it, because certain answers might make life unlivable for you. The point is not that the mother cannot rationally track the evidence. The point is that for the mother, unlike the juror, there is a psychological cost to such a rational response—it requires her to rebuild her life on a new foundation. For this reason, impartiality constitutes a much greater achievement for the mother than for the juror.
Calling attention to the demands of agency puts hostile encounters in a new light: the reason we fight over certain questions is not that they are “subjective,” but because our answers to them are in use. Similar observations apply to concepts such as “partiality” or “bias.” There is a limit to how much weight advice such as “be more objective” and “be more impartial” can carry, because the root of the problem is that we have to investigate our lives while living them. The cognitive distortions produced by powerful emotions such as sadness and anger are occupational hazards for the occupation that is: living a life.
What is the difference between sadness and anger? That is an example of the kind of question that I see as paradigmatically philosophical. We feel viscerally that there is a big difference, and that it has been staring us in the face all our lives; we would readily describe ourselves as knowing that and how they are different. We might even find ourselves echoing Meno: “It is not hard to tell you” what this difference is, in fact “it is easy to say,” and the difference between sadness and anger is “not difficult to describe,” so that “one is not at a loss to say what it is.” But after we got through that speech, what would we actually say?
Consider the difference between what I feel when I learn that someone I love is killed in a freak accident and what I feel when I learn that that person is murdered. In both cases, my loved one experiences profound harms; in both cases my life becomes unmoored from some of its goals. But in the second case, I feel something in addition to what I feel in the first. Whereas in the first I only feel sadness (at the loss), in the second I also feel anger (at the violation). Likewise, the mother in the trial might feel both anger—at the justice system, or at her son, or at both—and sadness.
Or compare the disappointment of failing at the career of my dreams because I am simply not as talented as my competitors with the anger I feel when my job search fails due to discrimination. There seems to be a big difference between the experience of loss and the experience of being wronged, or slighted, or treated unjustly. This difference is important to understanding untimely questions—or rather, it is important to understanding how to classify the answers we give to those questions.
A good place to start, in explaining the difference, is by noting that you can be angry at people but you cannot be sad at them. You can be sad about what you have lost, and one of the things you can lose is another person, for instance when they die or move far away from you, and you can be sad for another, if they have lost something or someone. But there is a reason we do not describe ourselves, in any of these scenarios, as being “sad at” anyone. Unlike sadness, anger is motivating: the angry person thinks that there is something to be done in relation to what she is angry about, some goal to be achieved in light of the violation—and that goal involves the person she is angry “at.” The “at” captures the sense in which her motivation has a target. She might describe her goal in relation to that person as, “making them pay”; “getting them to regret what they did”; “ensuring they see justice”; “receiving restitution from them”; “holding them accountable”; and so on. But however we phrase it, there is something that the angry person wants to do, and she wants to do it to the person she’s angry “at.”
In fact, anger is not only motivating but very motivating: it is well known as a particularly powerful and all-consuming driver of action, thought, and feeling. When I am angry enough, I do not care that I am hungry. Anger presents itself as a problem that can be solved and it aims at this solution. Anger may not be a desire, but it operates akin to desire: anger aims at its target in much the way that desire aims at satisfaction. Sadness, by contrast, can only be made to wane under the force of time or distraction: it ebbs away, but we do not “resolve” or “fix” it.
We experience anger as a rectifiable disruption of an answer to an untimely question, and this rectification essentially involves other people. I cannot be angry without being angry at, and the target of my anger must be a person, or a group of people.‡ In fact, the rectification involves other people in two ways: first, there is the person I am angry at, but often there is also the group of people I am angry alongside. Anger is in many ways a collective phenomenon: if I am angry, I want other people to be angry on my behalf (and may well get angry at them for failing to do so). Even if I stand alone in my anger, as a beacon of integrity, the passion that burns within me is a social one: to fix the social order by modifying the minds of others. It may be true that misery loves company, but unlike anger, sadness is not a socially directed emotion; it doesn’t drive one to adjust the social order.
Anger points to the presence, in us, of shared or collective answers to untimely questions. If there is something that I value privately—a beautiful cup—and it shatters, I will be sad. This cup was a (small) part of my answer to “How should I live?”—look at the cup, use the cup, show the cup off to other people—and now, due to events outside my control, I can no longer enact that answer. Sadness is immobilizing and disaffecting, there is nothing that it makes one do, and indeed it inclines one to spend some time doing just that: nothing. I can’t make the cup unshatter, and so there is nothing to be done.
You might have thought that the same would be true of anger: if I am angry that you wronged me, that wronging is in the past and cannot be changed. The reason why there is nonetheless something to be done about anger is that anger is fundamentally directed at the wrongdoer, on the grounds that the wrongdoing indicates a failure to give a shared answer. So, for example, if you violate my rights, that indicates that you do not see respect for my rights as an answer to an untimely question about how you ought to treat me. But I believed that “respect one another’s rights” was an answer we were giving together—a collective answer. And so, my anger moves me to try to restore that answer as a collective answer, by somehow forcing you to give it, or ensuring that you will give it in the future, or bringing it about that you are no longer part of the collective who gives that answer—because you are now dead, or an outcast. Setting aside what happens to you, a sufficient amount of clamor and outrage on my behalf may satisfy me, because it indicates that I am part of a group who gives the answer, restoring the status of the answer as “collective.” When I am angry, I am in an unstable state where I feel that something that is supposed to be collective is being held only by me, and I must rectify that situation.
Consider this example from Sophocles’ Antigone. A watchman has come to tell Creon that someone has violated his royal edict decreeing that the body of Polyneices remain unburied. Creon is enraged, suspects the watchman of having been bribed into performing the burial himself, and orders the watchman to find out who did it—or face torture.
Now listen here. So long as I am reverent to Zeus
I am under oath, and you can be absolutely sure
That if you don’t find the hand behind this burial
And bring him so I can see him with my own eyes,
Death alone will not be good enough for you—
Not till I’ve stretched you with ropes and you confess
To this outrageous crime. That will teach you
Where to look to make a profit. And you will learn:
Never accept money from just anyone who comes along.
Those who take from a source that is wicked, you’ll see,
Are ruined far more often than saved.15
There is too much passion in this speech for us to interpret these proclamations about what is “good enough” for the wrongdoer, what Creon wants to “teach” him, what he will “learn” and “see,” as simple sarcasm. Creon is truly unsettled by the thought that the watchman may have been bribed to break the law. This possibility shakes Creon’s hold on what constitutes, for him, a fundamental norm: that his word, as king, ought to be obeyed. He does not know how to be a king—how to act, in the role that gives his life meaning—if his edicts are not met with obedience. The answer “Creon is in charge” must be given by others; it is a shared or collective answer.
And so, Creon seeks to extract the truth—the “lesson” Creon wishes to teach—from the mouth of the wrongdoer. What does Creon get from this act of ventriloquism? The answer is: a more forceful version of what he gets by vociferously condemning “the outrageous crime.” When angry, we raise our voices, as though that were a way to forcibly inscribe the rules into the minds of others. In this state, our own answers to the salient untimely question do not suffice for us. We need the other party—or perhaps society as a whole—to echo us, so that we can once again come to see the answer as a collective one. Holding the wrongdoer accountable promises to rehabilitate the answer by restoring its shared status.
Some answers to untimely questions are given only individually, whereas others are collective, given by one because they are given by a group. The first kind of answer exposes a person to sadness, or fear, or despair; the second kind, to anger. That is the difference between sadness and anger, a difference whose roots we will explore in the next chapter. The terrible violence that anger renders us capable of reveals how much is at stake: when people feel that the answers on which their lives depend are slipping away from them, they become willing to do almost anything in order to secure them. This is because nothing—including the consequences of violence—matters unless these answers are secured. The answers are how things matter.
If nothing mattered to you, many impediments would be removed from your life. You wouldn’t get into fights, the stakes would never seem high, you wouldn’t find any questions “touchy” or “sensitive,” and you would have no trouble taking an unbiased, impartial, detached perspective on things. You would never rage against your fellow man or feel despair or grief. If you don’t care about anything, including the fact that you don’t care about anything, you are invulnerable. But also: invulnerability is wasted on you. Your detachment from what matters has made it impossible for you to live.
The load-bearing answers we give to untimely questions are both the sources of all our problems and the sources of all our reasons to care that we have problems. If we could ask the corresponding questions, we might be able to produce better answers, which would give rise to fewer problems. But it is not clear how someone is supposed to ask a question to which she thinks she has an answer, when she is currently using that answer to guide her life. She is not going to saw off the branch she is standing on.
The question we should be asking ourselves is: How did she get on that branch in the first place?