Chapter 3 Savage Commands

All around you, the air is thick with commands. You can’t escape them. They follow you wherever you go. You don’t see them: they’re invisible. You can’t hear them: they’re inaudible. You feel them. The feeling is pain, accompanied by the prospect of pleasure.

Even when the command takes the form of some relatively sophisticated attitude such as ambition, or jealousy, or existential ennui, it has physical manifestations. When the command is urgent, you feel it in a particular part of your body, or by way of your heart pounding, or the breath catching in your throat, or an inability to move, or an inability to stop moving. Before it gets urgent you may not have any strong feeling associated with its presence; nonetheless, you know what to anticipate.

Even a relatively unsophisticated command, such as what we get from feeling hungry (Eat!) or tired (Sleep!), is associated with mental images and fantasies and ideas about actions we could perform in relation to the pain. The pain promises to go away if you do one thing, to increase if you do anything else. The pains don’t always keep their promise: sometimes obedience leads to more pain—you eat and then get a stomachache. And sometimes disobedience works out just fine—you ignore your terror of public speaking, get up on the stage, and somehow the world doesn’t end.

These commands are savage, employing the tools of the torturer—pain, fear of more pain, the purely contrastive pleasure of temporary release from pain—to get you to do what you may see no other reason to do. The commands are also unreliable, since they have a history of not always panning out. Like a capricious tyrant, they are prone to reversals, filling you with regret for having acted as they ordered. Why do we obey such savage and inconsistent masters?

The answer is not: because they overwhelm us. It is rare that you are so hungry that you couldn’t restrain yourself from eating what was in front of you, if you knew, for instance, that it was someone else’s food. When we disobey a command, it is usually at the prompting of another command—for instance, the command to observe social niceties might trump the command of hunger. We don’t obey these commands because any one of them moves us with overpowering force. We obey whichever is strongest, because we have no other options. These commands are our answers to untimely questions. To see how we ended up with them, you only have to turn back the clock.

As soon as you were born, you had to hit the ground running. You were forced to start leading your life even though you had no idea how to do so. What did you do? You screamed, you wiggled, and you took in information about how the world reacted to your screams and wiggles: Does this make the pains go away? Does that? By the time we have the conceptual wherewithal to wonder about how we should live our lives, we’ve long been taking heaps of answers for granted.

From a young age, I was mostly left to my own devices after school. My dad was not the interfering type, and my mom, who was, was busy interfering in other people’s lives, which is to say, saving them from dying of cancer. But I recall one day my mom came home from work early and was surprised not to find me there. I had, unbeknownst to her, developed the habit of reading a book on the way home from school; I was working my way alphabetically through the junior high school library. What should have been a twenty-minute walk often took me hours.

That day, when I got home, she peppered me with questions about where I’d been, what homework I had, when I was planning to do it, whether I had any tests coming up, my time-management plans. In retrospect I can see she must have been worried about me—all of this took place before portable phones—but at the time I thought she was trying to suddenly take charge of my life.

I wasn’t exactly annoyed or angry at her. Instead, I had an odd feeling of detachment: Today is the day you want to start parenting me? But I already have a way of doing things. I felt sure that the next day would be much like the previous ones: I’d get a new book from the library, wander home over hours, pausing whenever I reached a particularly exciting passage, rely on my peripheral vision to cross the street while I read, ignore my homework until the last possible minute. None of that was how my mother wanted me to live, but I felt sure I’d keep living that way. And I was right.

As a parent, I’m now on the other side of this conflict, but the basic story is the same. Every time I approach my kids in a corrective mode, to nudge them toward what I see as a superior way of living, I feel as though I’ve walked onto the stage of a play where the characters were given their direction at some previous time, by some other person. Sometimes it amazes me: How could it be that I missed my chance to give them my instructions, given that I’ve been around since the minute they were born?

The truth is that parental instruction is almost always corrective rather than primordial.* You wouldn’t give a two-year-old a lecture about homework; you would give the lecture to a ten-year-old, precisely when she refuses to do it. The sign that a child is ready to hear your instruction is that she is acting in conflict with it.

The question “How should I live?,” posed to oneself, faces a resistance similar to the resistance parents face when trying to correct their children. By the time that question shows up on the scene, there is already a way in which you are living. That means it’s too late to ask, How should I live? You can say those words out loud, you can inflect your voice at the end so that it sounds like a question, but you’re fooling yourself if you think you’re opening some kind of inquiry. Our attempts at self-parenting—at taking ourselves firmly in hand, giving ourselves a good shake, and confronting ourselves with the basic or fundamental questions about the meaning of life—all of that is liable to feel otiose, as though we are decorating the surface of life, leaving its deep structure untouched.

When you need answers to a question before you know how to ask it, that is when you become susceptible to a form of speech that can only be described as a command. Think about it this way. If I ask you what I should do and, in answer to my question, you reply, “Do jumping jacks,” you’re giving me advice, or making a suggestion, or maybe making a guess as to what you think I’d like to hear. That’s one scenario. We get an entirely different scenario if you say the same thing—“Do jumping jacks”—but you say it of your own accord, not as a reply, without me having asked you anything at all. If you just walk up to me and say, “Do jumping jacks,” you are commanding me. A command answers the question “What should I do?” when no one asked it. In general you can’t reconstruct the original question based on the answer alone—“Reykjavik” could be the answer to a lot of different questions—but commands are a case where you can do so, because of the form that the answer takes.

We are the sorts of beings who need answers before developing the ability to ask questions, and who therefore rely on answers to unasked questions. Which is to say: commands.

In the previous chapter, we described the answers to untimely questions as “load-bearing,” insofar as they guide our actions over long stretches of time, rendering us vulnerable to intense emotion if disrupted. In this chapter, we will see that to the extent that the corresponding questions were never asked, we can also call these answers “commands.” It is only if we become dissatisfied with all of the ways in which we are being commanded that we will be moved to seek out a different kind of answer, by inquiring. This is why Socratic ethics opens with a critique of commands.

I. The Bodily Command and the Kinship Command

Socrates describes bodily appetite as a source of answers to unasked questions: “Wouldn’t you say that the soul of someone who has an appetite for a thing . . . nods assent to it as if in answer to a question?”¹ Aristotle gives a similar gloss on the distinction between mere sense perception and desire: “To perceive then is like bare asserting or thinking; but when the object is pleasant or painful, the soul makes a sort of affirmation or negation, and pursues or avoids the object.”² Perception tells me what is the case—it informs me as to what items populate the world—whereas desire dictates which of those items should serve as my target. It is one thing to perceive a glass of water on the table before me, alongside a book and a pen. When I’m thirsty, I pick out the water from the other items as the answer to an unasked question; thus, my thirst can be understood as an affirmative reply or as a nod of assent.

Someone motivated to pursue something is armed with an answer to the question, “What should I do?” For example, someone who feels thirst thinks that she should drink: “The soul of the thirsty person, insofar as he’s thirsty, doesn’t wish anything else but to drink, and it wants this and is impelled towards it.”³ When it comes to getting fed or hydrated or staying warm or facing some imminent threat, our bodies are ready to issue loud and definitive answers to the question “What should I do?” The questions never had to be asked; the answers somehow just came to us of their own accord. It is not quite right to say I am commanding myself, since the voice that arises in me is not one that I speak, whether silently or aloud. I am the cause of the voice, but not because I decided to say something. Those who are puzzled by the fact that human beings are capable of such half-baked ideation should consider the phenomenon of dreams.

Our bodies are not the only source of savage commands. Each of us stands in a variety of overlapping relationships with other people, relationships that are predicated on bonds of reliance, support, and identification with them. The Greek word for this kind of bond is philia, which is usually translated “love” or “friendship,” but philia is broader than either of those words. People in Socrates’ world saw themselves as standing in a relation of philia to their fellow citizens as well as their parents, children, siblings, and friends; and they would speak of philia in contexts—for instance, those of business—where we would use a weaker word than “friend,” such as “associate.” Philia covers all the various ways in which I use the concept “mine” to talk about other people: my family, my friends, my city, my military regiment. Nowadays, we might include: my religious denomination, my social class, my educational or professional cohort.

Perhaps due to improved technology for travel and communication, less geographically bound categories have, in the modern world, become available as groups with which to identify oneself. Sexual orientation, gender, disability, and race are now grounds for ties of belonging, and some people feel solidarity with those who share their personality type, aesthetic sensibility, or hobby.

There isn’t a perfect English word that covers this broad and heterogenous set of connections we have with others, so I will take some liberties with the word “kinship”—usually restricted to family relationships grounded in marriage—and stretch it to cover all of this territory. The bonds I have described can be thought of as a wide variety of ways in which I can see another as “akin” to myself. When someone is my kin, their opinions matter to me just by virtue of the fact that they belong to some group, where the group in question can be defined geographically, or on the basis of an identity category, or in terms of blood relations, or in some other way.

The essential feature of kinship bonds is that they offer communal answers to questions such as: Which people and places and activities matter most to us? Which days do we celebrate? Under what circumstances are we willing to fight and die? Do we believe in God? What kinds of jobs, social gatherings, hobbies, music, home décor, dress, and so on are appropriate for people like us? Who is in charge of our group? More generally: How should we behave in relation to each other? The kind of question that is answered, and the kind of answer that is given, varies depending on the kinship group, but a common denominator is that the members of one’s kinship group are enjoined to help one another—or at the very least, not to do one another harm. We feel called upon to help friends or loved ones in their time of need, and the same holds, though more weakly, for anyone we characterize as a “fellow human being.” For most of us, humanity is the largest kinship group we see ourselves as belonging to, though there are people who see themselves as parts of an even larger “family” that includes all sentient life, or even all life.

The body offers an answer to what I should do in the form of the approving nod of appetitive pleasure or the “no” of pain. Kinship does the same, but it does so by allowing an individual to delegate the project of answering to the group. A kinship relation dictates that “this is how we live, here is how we do things, these are the things we care about, this who we are committed to protecting and providing for.” Belonging to the group gives you an answer. Much of a person’s basic ethical “stance” is underwritten by one or another kinship relation. Group membership, in effect, stands in for the kind of justification one might have arrived at, had one been in a position to ask who or what one should care about.

Whereas the bodily command operates by way of the carrot of pleasure, comfort, and safety, and the stick of pain and the fear of death, the kinship command operates by way of the carrot of status, honor, affection, and camaraderie, and the stick of the fear of exclusion and the various social emotions (shame, pity, sympathy, envy, and so on). The two commands serve up different forms of existential threat: the former pertains to my biological existence, whereas the latter concerns my social existence, which is to say, how my place in my community is demarcated by others’ opinions of me.

The Greek word doxa means both “opinion” and “reputation,” but it is not a homonym, as these are not two independent meanings. “My” reputation is not something I can ever have in my own possession: it is located outside me—outside my body—in the minds of other people in my community. My reputation is identical to—the same object as—other people’s opinions. It is because my peers own a piece of me that if they reject or mock or disavow me, I come to be in a state of social nonexistence. The emotion associated with the prospect of such rejection is shame. The archetypical shame-inducing event is finding oneself naked among fully clothed associates. Clothing signals a person’s social place—stripped of it, she is an animal among humans, bereft of a social role, lacking a social existence.

English words for the phenomenon of psychosocial dependence rely on the prefix “self-” to such a degree that one could interpret this as a linguistic protest against what’s being described. Someone’s “self-esteem” or “self-regard” or “self-image” or “self-respect” or “self-confidence” is largely a function of how others treat her. Imagine yourself in a version of Gulliver’s Travels where the first place you come to is inhabited by people who revere and adore you as the most charming and insightful person around, and later you arrive at the land of magnetically charismatic geniuses, relative to whom you come off as an insipid dolt. It is unlikely that your “self-image” would be very stable over the course of this adventure. Given the degree to which a sense of self-worth is determined extrinsically, it would be more accurate to call it a “sense of other-worth.”

In his book Death and the Afterlife, philosopher Samuel Scheffler asks the reader to imagine an “infertility scenario” in which we learn that the last generation of human beings has just been born.⁴ He suggests that even without the prospect of any violent end—everyone currently alive gets to live out a full human life—the knowledge of the imminent death of the species would be massively destructive of general human morale. He calls attention to the feeling of existential horror that many of us feel at the prospect of the end of humanity, and puzzles over the fact that a person’s terror at group annihilation is often more profound than the terror she has in relation to her own death. Why would it become difficult to feel one’s life had meaning in the infertility scenario? I would argue: We rely on the continuity of kinship relations—the fact that “our people,” in some sense of “our,” will live on—in order to be at peace with our own individual deaths. The disparity Scheffler notes, between our ability to accept that we will die but our inability to accept the same about the species, is thus evidence for the grip that the kinship answer has on us. This helps explain the willingness people sometimes have, in the context of war or other crises, to sacrifice their lives for their kin: they see the relevant question about their existence as a question about a group.

And now that we see what lies at the essence of the kinship command—it is given to one because it is given to all—we can draw the boundary between the two types of commands a bit more precisely. While the core cases of bodily command will involve literal bodily functions—food, sex, warmth—the body can drive us to pursue many ends beyond those, propelling us toward a great variety of forms of entertainment and self-protection. Socrates says that the body “fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense . . . and it is the body and the care of it, to which we are enslaved, which compel us to acquire wealth.”⁵ Our bodies do not content themselves with commands to eat this or drink that. They also command us to acquire the resources that will allow us to fulfill such commands in the future. Thus, the pursuit of wealth is driven by the body, as is our anxious investment in our health, itself backed by our fear of death.

Our bodies are able to organize us in their service, to the point where even bodily restraint is typically driven by the body. Socrates comments that a person who holds off from indulging in pleasure due to a fear of painful consequences is really driven by “a kind of licentiousness.” He uses a monetary metaphor to describe what such people are doing: they “exchange pleasures for pleasures, pains for pains and fears for fears, the greater for the less like coins.”⁶ Someone who endures pain only for the sake of enduring less pain in the future is being ordered around just as blindly by his body as the person who yields to immediate pleasure. Most of the language of self-care—relax, take time for yourself, don’t stress, don’t overwork—is a version of the bodily command. If someone says that it is “good for you” to unwind or recharge they are channeling the bodily command, encouraging you to think of yourself as a custodian of your own pleasures and pains. “The bodily command” is thus a label for all of those imperatives that address me as me, as an individual animal, not as a member of a social group.

Intimate relationships—between best friends, or lovers, or close siblings—straddle the divide between body and kin. To the extent that my intimate associate is someone to whom I am obligated, with whom I stand in bonds of reliance, to whom I owe loyalty, who holds me to account for living under a set of shared norms, they count as my kin, which is to say, there are some answers that each of us only gives because we give them together. But to the extent that they are someone whose presence relaxes me, whose sense of humor delights me, whose sparkling wit engages me, the sight of whose face brings a smile to mine, someone I greet with warm affection after any time apart, someone whose absence pains me, and so on, then my attachment to them is a bodily one, which is to say, whether or not I have to be around them, I want to. Most intimate associations are a site of both bodily and kinship commands.

The bodily command and the kinship command underwrite much of what we do, think, and feel. And yet, Socrates criticizes both. He draws an analogy between how our bodies mislead us in perception, and how they mislead us when it comes to choice. Just as “things of the same size appear . . . larger when seen near at hand and smaller when seen from a distance. . . . And similarly for thicknesses and pluralities. . . . And equal sounds seem louder when near at hand, softer when farther away,” so too, the body subjects us to practical illusions: “The power of appearance often makes us wander all over the place in confusion, often changing our minds about the same things and regretting our actions and choices with respect to things large and small.”⁷ Socrates says that “the body confuses the soul. . . . It fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense.”⁸ My body might tell me that I have to do one thing at one time, but, at a later time, fill me with regrets and pains for having obeyed it.

The commands generated by other people—one’s kin group—have the same fluctuating character. Socrates often laments the inconsistency of such injunctions, and the consequent impossibility of consistently appeasing “the many” (he also calls them “the majority” or “the people” or “most people”).

Those people who easily put men to death and would bring them to life again if they could, without thinking; I mean the majority of men.⁹

Would that the majority could inflict the greatest evils, for they would then be capable of the greatest good, and that would be fine, but now they cannot do either. They cannot make a man either wise or foolish, but they inflict things haphazardly.¹⁰

Socrates criticizes Callicles on the grounds that “You keep shifting back and forth. If you say anything in the Assembly and the Athenian demos [i.e., citizenry] denies it, you shift your ground and say what it wants to hear.”¹¹ Later, Socrates repeats the accusation, explaining why Callicles is unable to be convinced by Socrates’ arguments: “It’s your love for the people, Callicles, existing in your soul, that stands against me.”¹²

Both the bodily command and the kinship command make us waver. They might give us a loud, clear answer as to what we ought to do, but the answers don’t last. By frequently reversing themselves, they prompt us to take life fifteen minutes at a time.

But isn’t this familiar territory? Doesn’t everyone already understand the dangers of bodily self-indulgence and group conformity? Socrates shows that the answer is no: people wildly underestimate just how much these commands poison our minds, to the point where we’ve normalized the incoherent babbling that comes out of our mouths when we have to explain what it’s like to be driven by them. I’m talking about two phenomena in particular: weakness of will and revenge.

II. Weakness of Will

In the Protagoras, Socrates imagines a conversation with people who claim to err knowingly, at the command of their bodies: they say they are “overcome by pleasant things like food or drink” and “do those things all the while knowing they are ruinous.”¹³ They claim to be “unwilling to do what is best, even though they know what it is and are able to do it,” and to “act that way . . . because they are overcome by pleasure or pain.”¹⁴ Socrates first clarifies that by “best” they mean best as far as the bodily command is concerned, which is to say: conducing to more pleasure and less pain. These actions strike them as objectionable not on the grounds of any kinship concern—they are not worried that they are acting immorally, or that others will look down on them or criticize them for behaving that way—but from the simple calculus of pleasure and pain associated with the body. They indulge, and end up with more pain than pleasure overall.

We can all relate: we stay up too late, we overeat, we avoid answering emails, we make impulse purchases, and we are not always surprised when these things do not end up working out for us. Like Socrates’ interlocutors, we might ascribe such choices to being “overcome by pleasure or pain.” The person who makes such a claim is called either “akratic” (an English word formed off of the ancient Greek word for the condition, akrasia), or “weak-willed.” The weak-willed or akratic person insists that they wavered with their eyes open.

Socrates’ claim is that this story doesn’t hold together:

What you’re saying is ridiculous—someone does what is bad, knowing that it is bad, when it is not necessary to do it, having been overcome by the good.¹⁵

Akratics represent themselves as freely choosing “more bad things for the sake of fewer good things.” But no one would make such a choice. If offered $100 and $10, no one who wanted money would choose the $10 because they were “overwhelmed by the desire for money.” Socrates imagines the weak-willed person objecting:

But Socrates, the immediate pleasure is very much different from the pleasant and the painful at a later time.¹⁶

Socrates explains:

I would reply, “They are not different in any other way than by pleasure and pain, for there is no other way that they could differ. Weighing is a good analogy; you put the pleasures together and the pains together, both the near and the remote, on the balance scale, and then say which of the two is more. For if you weigh pleasant things against pleasant, the greater and the more must always be taken; if painful things against painful, the fewer and the smaller. And if you weigh pleasant things against painful, and the painful is exceeded by the pleasant—whether the near by the remote or the remote by the near—you have to perform that action in which the pleasant prevails; on the other hand, if the pleasant is exceeded by the painful, you have to refrain from doing that.”¹⁷

If getting the $10 now is of more value to you than getting $100 in a year—for instance, because you owe $10 and your creditor will kill you if you don’t pay immediately—then you’re not choosing the lesser good by choosing $10, and there’s no mistake. Socrates imagines asking: “Within yourself, does the good outweigh the bad or not?”¹⁸ The answer must be “It does not; for if it did, the person who we say is overcome by pleasure would not have made any mistake.” So, if you choose $10 now because it’s more valuable to you, you haven’t made a mistake. But if $100 later is worth more to you, why would you choose $10? You wouldn’t. According to Socrates, the case the akratic wants to describe, where they recognized that one option was better and still freely chose the other, simply can’t happen.

And yet we seem to be attached to the phenomenon of “acting against our better judgment” or “knowing full well I shouldn’t eat another cookie but still eating it.” Recall Tolstoy’s reference to the “way of weakness” in which he purports to make the worse choice even though “I know what is best and it is in my power.” Doesn’t this sort of thing happen all the time? Socrates’ answer is, no, it doesn’t ever happen, because it can’t. You could be forced to eat a cookie when you knew that was the inferior choice, because someone shoved the cookie down your throat, but you couldn’t choose to eat it when you knew that was the worse option, because we never do that. You can no more choose what you know to be worse than you can believe what you know to be false. So what’s really going on?

Simple: your body commands you to eat that cookie, presenting that as the best possible option because its judgment about pleasure is distorted by the proximity of the cookie. By the time you are ready to regret the choice, the cookie is far away again (in the past), and your body is now prepared to tell you that you made a mistake. To this description you object: even as I was eating the cookie, I knew it was a mistake! Socrates will correct you: even as you were eating the cookie, you were able to represent to yourself the future state in which you would regret it, and that upcoming command hovered like a specter—Socrates’ word is phantasma—above what you were doing. Don’t confuse your ability to notice that you’d make a different command under different circumstances with actually giving yourself that counterfactual command. Just because you understand that you will regret this choice in the future, it doesn’t follow that you do regret it now.

Consider how you’re able to think back, while enduring the stomachache the cookie gave you, and recall the appeal it once held. That you can do so doesn’t mean you approve of your decision to eat it. You might well regret having eaten it. But while regretting having eaten the cookie, you also remember what it was like to see the cookie in such a positive light that you opted to eat it. A similar point holds if we wind the clock back, and consider the moment when you decided to eat the cookie: in spite of deciding to eat it, you might have been able to imaginatively project forward into a future where you would regret this decision. Socrates can allow that now you regret and remember enjoying, and that back then you enjoyed and anticipated regret. What Socrates denies the akratic, then, is the point of stability they are trying to insist on when they say, “I knew all along this was a mistake.” The weak-willed person has deluded themselves into thinking that they waver less than they do; they think that, while relying only on their bodies, they can somehow get a stable grip on what’s best for their bodies. But that is not true. The body can’t take care of itself: it wavers, judging X to be better than Y at one moment, and Y to be better than X in the next. There is nothing that it knows all along. That is the moral of the story of akrasia.

But there is another, equally important moral to the story, which is how we talk ourselves into not seeing the first moral. It is worth quoting at greater length a passage I excerpted from above:

For I say to you that if this is so, your position will become absurd, when you say that frequently a person, knowing the bad to be bad, nevertheless does that very thing, when he is able not to do it, having been driven and overwhelmed by pleasure; and again when you say that a person knowing the good is not willing to do it, on account of immediate pleasure, having been overcome by it. Just how absurd this is will become very clear, if we do not use so many names at the same time, “pleasant” and “painful,” “good” and “bad”; but since these turned out to be only two things, let us instead call them by two names, first, “good” and “bad,” then later, “pleasant” and “painful.” On that basis, then, let us say that a person knowing bad things to be bad, does them all the same. If then someone asks us: “Why?” “Having been overcome,” we shall reply. “By what?” he will ask us. We are no longer able to say “by pleasure,”—for it has taken on its other name, “the good” instead of “pleasure”—so we will say and reply that “he is overcome.” “By what?” he will ask. “By the good,” we will say, “for heaven’s sake!” If by chance the questioner is rude he might burst out laughing and say: “What you’re saying is ridiculous—someone does what is bad, knowing that it is bad, when it is not necessary to do it, having been overcome by the good.”¹⁹

We have developed the habit of using multiple words for the same thing, in order to hide from ourselves the absurdity of our own behavior. Even when the downside of eating the cookie is (future) pain, and the upside is pleasure (in the present), we represent the action as “doing what’s bad because we are overcome by pleasure” rather than “doing what’s painful because we are overcome by pleasure,” because if we said the latter we would immediately grasp how silly we sounded. Likewise, we insist that “the immediate pleasure is very much different from the pleasant and the painful at a later time,” even when we also think we have taken this temporal difference into account in our understanding of eating the cookie as more painful overall. As Socrates notes, “They are not different in any other way than by pleasure and pain, for there is no other way that they could differ.”²⁰ When you shine the light of reason on the way we talk about ourselves, you see that we are being ridiculous.

What is remarkable about akrasia is that it is an absurdity hiding in plain sight. For many of us it rears its head multiple times a day. Our mechanism for conducting our lives doesn’t work, and we see that it doesn’t work, we watch it not working, but we nevertheless tell ourselves, “What I am doing is bad, but I’m doing it because it is also good, I don’t mean good in one way and bad in another, I mean bad overall but a good kind of badness, so that it also seemed good overall—in the sense that I wanted to do it, though I knew it was bad, and I wasn’t taken in by the seeming, except I also was. This is normal.” Socrates says: All you have to do is pay attention to the words coming out of your own mouth to see that what you’re saying can’t be a description of what’s happening. You’re saying that you have some kind of a grip on how you should be acting, but what’s actually happening is that you’re wavering, because you can’t keep that grip for more than fifteen minutes at a time. You waver in how you act and then you waver in how you talk about how you didn’t waver when you acted. You can’t even stabilize your sentences for more than a few seconds at a time!

We’ve allowed our talk to waver in this way, just because the phenomenon is so common and normal and natural that we can’t believe it could be a sign that something is going deeply wrong. But it is. Our problems talking about what is happening reflect a problem in the happening itself. There’s a crack at the foundation of human motivation, but we’ve looked at it so many times that we’ve convinced ourselves that it is part of the design. In fact, there are two such cracks.

III. Revenge

Just as our bodies routinely lead us to choose what is, in bodily terms, worse, our kinship attachments routinely lead us to choose, what is, in kinship terms, worse. We intentionally harm our kin, and we do so under the guise of kinship. The names we give to this phenomenon range from “accountability” and “justice” to “punching up” and “indignation” and “self-defense” and “retribution,” but I’m going to call it by the name we use for it when we are suffering the harm: “revenge.” Revenge is when love wavers into hate. This fact about love—that it disposes us to hate—is, like weakness of will, so routinely subjected to disguises and rationalizations that it is hard to see clearly. It sounds crazy to say that revenge is an act of love—that it is hateful love—but in fact that description is not crazy. What’s crazy is the thing itself.

Let’s go step by step, starting with a definition of revenge:

X is getting revenge on Y when, first, X sees the way he is treating Y as good because Y sees it as bad; and, second, X justifies his behavior on retaliatory grounds.

By retaliatory I mean to include, but not restrict myself to, the case where Y did, or was perceived to have done, something wrong first. Sometimes X is incensed at Y in the absence of wrongdoing: X objects not to anything Y has done but to who Y is, resulting in a spiteful desire to take Y down a peg. I think that desire—spite—belongs to the revenge family, as does what we might call “prevenge,” where X harms Y in anticipation of Y’s wronging X. So I’m using “revenge” somewhat broadly, to include all the cases where you behave hatefully toward someone—treating harms to them as goods—and understand your behavior as a fitting response to how they have acted, or to how they will act, or to who they are.

Socrates’ analysis of all three flavors of revenge shares the basic structure of his analysis of weakness of will: revenge is a form of wavering thinly disguised as non-wavering by a proliferation of terms. As in the case of weakness of will, we use multiple words for the same thing so as to conceal our inconsistency. The fundamental directive of the body is to pursue as much pleasure as possible, so when it leads you to pursue less, that is wavering; the fundamental directive of kinship is to benefit one’s associates, and so when it leads you to harm them, that is wavering. Socrates does not offer up an argument against taking revenge, because he does not need to—any more than he needed to argue against acting akratically. As soon as he gets us to stop using many words for the same thing, the self-contradiction—of being commanded to hurt by the command to help—becomes apparent.

Socrates’ views on revenge are clearest in the moment when he refuses the opportunity to take it himself. When Socrates is about to be executed, he is encouraged, by his friend Crito, to seek revenge. Crito says that Socrates, in allowing himself to be executed, is playing into the hands of his enemies and being a coward: when someone tries to destroy you, you are supposed to fight back.²¹ Crito wants to bribe the guards so that Socrates can run away. Although lawbreaking would ordinarily count as wrongfully harming one’s city, Crito insists that it is justified for Socrates to turn on Athens because Athens wronged Socrates first.²²

Socrates’ approach to revenge is simple: you shouldn’t ever do bad things. It’s never good to do bad things. Bad things don’t become good because of who they’re done to, or what someone did first, or because they’re done in self-defense. No matter what someone did in the past, or will do in the future, they do not “deserve” harm. Being bad is not a way to be good. Harming people isn’t good; it’s bad. All the ways we talk ourselves into doing bad things are thinly disguised contradictions. Here is the passage from the Crito in which Socrates explains that:

Socrates: Do we say that one must never in any way do wrong willingly, or must one do wrong in one way and not in another? Is to do wrong never good or admirable, as we have agreed in the past, or have all these former agreements been washed out during the last few days? Have we at our age failed to notice for some time that in our serious discussions we were no different from children? Above all, is the truth such as we used to say it was, whether the majority agree or not, and whether we must still suffer worse things than we do now, or will be treated more gently, that nonetheless, wrongdoing or injustice is in every way harmful and shameful to the wrongdoer? Do we say so or not?

Crito: We do.

Socrates: So one must never do wrong.

Crito: Certainly not.

Socrates: Nor must one, when wronged, inflict wrong in return, as the majority believe, since one must never do wrong.

Crito: That seems to be the case.

Socrates: Come now, should one do harm to anyone or not, Crito?

Crito: One must never do so.

Socrates: Well then, if one is done harm, is it right, as the majority say, to do harm in return, or is it not?

Crito: It is never right.

Socrates: Doing harm to people is no different from wrongdoing.

Crito: That is true.

Socrates: One should never do wrong in return, nor do any person harm, no matter what he may have done to you . . . consider very carefully whether we have this view in common, and whether you agree, and let this be the basis of our deliberation, that neither to do wrong nor to return a wrong is ever correct, nor is doing harm in return for harm done.²³

This passage shares the language-unifying character of the passage about akrasia in the Protagoras. Socrates is noting that we have a collection of phrases—such as “doing injustice,” “doing harm,” “doing wrong,” “doing wrong in return,” and “behaving shamefully”—that, in the context of the kinship command, all mean the same thing. Nonetheless, we hide behind this proliferation of terms in order to talk ourselves into the idea that sometimes, instead of helping our kin, we should harm them. But if we shine the light of reason on the words we speak, we will have to accept that all of these phrases mean the same thing, that there is just no good way to be bad, and that the kinship command routinely commands us to waver.

Just as we were careful to distinguish weakness of will from cases where there’s actually an advantage to having the pleasure sooner (if $10 now is more valuable to you than $200 later, there’s no mistake), we should likewise distinguish revenge from what is going on when an action that would otherwise count as hurting (such as cutting someone’s body) is done in order to help, for instance by a surgeon. Socrates is not raising any objection to violence, or killing, so long as they are justified by the good to be achieved, rather than understood as “deserved” in the light of evils done.

In revenge, the bad that is going to be done to a person is vaunted as the good to be achieved. When we get revenge on someone, we see ourselves as harming them, and, at the same time, as achieving a good result. Moreover, we identify these two events: the harm to them is the good we’re bringing about. Socrates’ insight is that this thought—doing good by doing bad—is essentially confused. If I harm you vengefully and call that justice, I must see what I’m doing as, on balance, good; but I also have a representation of how you see it, as being something that is, on balance, bad and harmful. Thus, I see one and the same action, at one and the same time, as good —that’s my point of view on it, this is justice being done—and as bad, harmful, and evil—that’s your point of view as imagined by me. The more vengeful I am, the more I seem to myself to agree with your point of view, which is to say, to think that you are correct to represent what I am doing to you as evil and harmful and even unjust. And thus I might describe myself as doing something “bad.” Speaking as me, I don’t really think that what I am doing is bad, but speaking as you, I do. Just as weakness of will entails a prudent image—a kind of “phantasm”—of my future regret, revenge entails an empathetic image, a phantasm of your emotional repudiation of the revenge I am enacting against you.

This reveals an important truth about empathy. If empathy is the psychological power to import the feelings of others, it follows that empathy is a prerequisite for revenge. Empathy is what allows us to channel the suffering we inflict on others to a sufficient degree to take revenge on them. If this is surprising, that is because we usually use the word “empathy” in a laudatory way that conceals the existence of what we might call “dark empathy.” When I channel your feelings, I can react to those feelings in a way that reverses their valence for you. Thus, I can empathetically import your joy, and be pained by it (envy), or empathetically import your suffering, and be pleased by it (Schadenfreude). By contrast, in the more heartwarming manifestations of empathy, the ones we usually have in mind when calls for more empathy abound, I am pained by (my representation of) your being pained and feel joy at (my representation of) your joy. But there is a common ground: all forms of empathy, be they dark or heartwarming, begin with my feeling what you feel. Empathy is not a virtue, but a power. Almost every adult has this power to some degree, though some of us have more of it than others, and it can be used for good or ill.

The importance of “dark empathy” to revenge can be made clearer by contrasting vengeful punishment with the kind of punishment of which Socrates approves, beneficent punishment.²⁴ The beneficent punisher dismisses the unrepentant criminal’s point of view on the punishment—“Don’t hurt me!”—as a mistake akin to the sick person’s mistake when they resist medical treatment. The beneficent punisher is able to straightforwardly see themselves as helping the criminal become (psychologically) healthy. When faced with a repentant criminal, who joyfully welcomes punishment because they correctly understand that it is really a benefit, the beneficent punisher’s task only becomes that much more cheerful.

The vengeful punisher, by contrast, is flummoxed by the repentant criminal’s request for punishment. The vengeful punisher only understands the practice of punishment when it is accompanied by a vision of the punishment as being, on net, bad. The vengeful person’s mirage of agreeing with the point of view of the (unrepentant) victim is, once again, structurally analogous to the akratic’s mirage of agreeing with her future self. This mirage leads the vengeful person to say things like, “Yes, I’m harming him, and that’s bad, but sometimes it is good to harm people.” That makes no sense. Doing bad things isn’t good. The fact that something is a bad thing to do can never be what makes it good. No one deserves to be harmed.

The Socratic position on revenge can be summed up as a set of truisms: “No one deserves to be harmed”; “It’s never right to do what’s wrong”; “Being bad can never be what makes something good.” Why would we ever waver from these truisms? The answer is: kinship.

Socrates noticed a simple fact about revenge that we tend to ignore, which is that it is only possible to take revenge against kin. First, because anger is a prerequisite for vengeance and harms only incite anger within the context of the right kinship relation. I might get angry at my husband if he forgets my birthday, or my child if he puts off his homework for too long, or my nurse if I feel her bedside manner is lacking, but I don’t expect birthday recognition from the nurse or a skillful bedside manner from my child. If you are my fellow citizen, and you do not vote, I might get angry at you, but I am unlikely to mind if you are a foreigner, and you don’t vote in the elections of your own country. Notice that even when it comes being violently attacked, I might say I would be angry at anyone who did this, but in fact I am only angered insofar as I see that anyone as a someone, which is to say, a fellow human being. When a boulder or wild beast hurtles toward me, what I feel is fear, not anger. Harms don’t generate indignant concerns about “accountability” unless they strike you as, in some way, disrespectful or offensive, which is to say, as violations of kinship norms.

Second, note that the vengeful person is treating another person in a way that she would ordinarily see as forbidden, were it not for whatever it is she is retaliating for. The constraints on what she would be allowed to do to the person absent the retaliatory justification spell out the relevant kinship relation. She is violating behavioral norms governing how one generally treats one’s spouse, or mother, or neighbor, or fellow human being, on the grounds that the person in some way “deserves it.” So, for instance, you can get revenge on your spouse by just ignoring them, or leaving dirty dishes in the sink, whereas in order to get revenge on a stranger you need to violate those norms that apply to how we treat any human being—physically harm them, insult them, or intentionally impede one of their projects. When you get revenge, you treat someone in precisely the way that you are forbidden to treat precisely that person. The phenomenon of revenge reveals that the kinship command is capable of ordering us around in a self-destructive way.

The conventional view is that enemies deserve revenge. Socrates comes up against this view in Republic, Book I, when his interlocutor describes revenge as justice by insisting that a just person harms their enemies.²⁵ But consider how one becomes an enemy. The status of “enemy” is the product of some event—the person did something wrong, or belongs to a group associated with some wrongdoing—that transformed them from a creature one was prohibited from harming (kin) into someone you can be praised (“justice”) for harming. Socrates insists, against Polemarchus, that you should help your enemies. Why? Because of who your enemies are: your spouse, when he forgot your birthday, your mother, when she makes unreasonable demands, your fellow citizen, when he expresses irritating political views. Your enemies are people who used to be your friends.

This holds for war, too. Each side sees the “rightness” of their attempt to kill people on the other side—who are, after all, fellow human beings—as predicated on the fact that the other side committed some wrong, or, at any rate, is now trying to kill them. We distinguish between the killing of enemy combatants and the killing of innocent civilians on the basis of the idea that violence can be justified if it takes the form of fighting back against someone understood as “the aggressor” or “the enemy.”

It is worth noticing that even outside the context of war, our intuitions about permissible violence track the idea of fighting back much more closely than the idea of self-protection. For example, if too many people board a lifeboat fleeing the Titanic, and you push the weakest ones into the water to drown in order to save your own life, your act would usually not be vindicated as “self-defense.” Our common understanding of self-defense includes a culprit and that means that self-defense, as it is usually understood, hides within it the notion of revenge. The guilt of the party under attack matters more to us than the positive, lifesaving value that the act of violence stands to achieve. Guilt transforms kin—whom you were not permitted to harm—into anti-kin.

And “guilt” can be construed broadly: many are eager to join the opposition against whichever of two parties is larger, stronger, wealthier, or more powerful, treating anyone with these traits as likely sources of evil; whereas others are ready to interpret the behavior of those in specific groups—ones to which their own group has long been opposed—as acts of aggression. The full menu of classic revenge, spiteful revenge, and pre-vengeful revenge allows a person to justify almost any attack on anyone else as being in some sense a case of retaliation against an enemy.

Revenge makes the world go round. In so many contexts, both intimate and public, we intentionally inflict harms on those we would otherwise see ourselves as prohibited from harming. We tell ourselves that we are in special circumstances in which something’s being bad makes it good. Socrates predicts that few will be able to stand along him and acknowledge how little sense that makes:

One should never do wrong in return, nor do any person harm, no matter what he may have done to you. And Crito, see that you do not agree to this, contrary to your belief. For I know that only a few people hold this view and will hold it, and there is no common ground between those who hold this view and those who do not, but they inevitably despise each other’s views. So then consider very carefully whether we have this view in common, and whether you agree, and let this be the basis of our deliberation, that neither to do wrong nor to return a wrong is ever correct, nor is doing harm in return for harm done. Or do you disagree and do not share this view as a basis for discussion? I have held it for a long time and still hold it now, but if you think otherwise, tell me now.²⁶

Just as the no-akrasia principle dictates that the body cannot care for the body, the no-revenge principle makes the corresponding point in relation to the kinship command: it cannot provide stable guidance as to how one should treat those around one. Most people will agree that if someone harms you then you are permitted some amount of hostility toward them; most people are adept at clothing harms to others in the language of justice when they need to. Crito had initially described Socrates’ unwillingness to break the law as giving in to his enemies and choosing the easiest path instead of the good and courageous path.²⁷ Crito was ready to reword the injustice of breaking the law as, actually, under the relevant circumstances, a means of achieving justice—until Socrates interferes.

Socrates is prepared to tell his close friend that there might be an unbridgeable gap between them, that they might be people who despise each other, who have no mutual understanding. Socrates is unwilling to hate anyone, but he is only willing to truly love those people who can see that the aims of kinship—benefits to one’s associates—will not be achieved if the kinship command is left to its own devices. He loves Crito only conditionally, where the condition in question is that Crito refuse to yield uncritically to the demands of kinship.

It is worth underlining just how unusual Socrates’ condition is. Imagine: Your two young daughters get into a fight, because the older snatches a dress from the younger, and the younger one responds by pulling her older sister’s hair.²⁸ What do you, the parent, say? You might scold both girls—the older one for dress-snatching, and the younger one for hair-pulling—but would you scold the young one as much as the older one? After all, she was provoked. Do you think: It was understandable that she treated her sister unjustly, given that her sister had treated her unjustly? That is the logic of revenge, and parents tend to accept it. If your kids have ever said to you, “I wasn’t the one who started it,” that’s a sign that you taught them the logic of revenge. Socrates calls this bad parenting; he doesn’t acknowledge such a state as “being provoked.” Pulling your sister’s hair isn’t any better if she did something bad first, because hurting people is never good. On his terms, most of us teach our kids to make a significant mistake.

The Socratic view on revenge is not that it is immoral, but that it is impossible. Socrates, who fought in the Peloponnesian War, objects not to violence as such, but to vengeance as a justification for violence. The pacifist thinks that you shouldn’t kill people whereas Socrates thinks that you can’t do good by doing bad. The Socratic position on vengeance should also be distinguished from the attitude of a martyr who accepts mistreatment placidly, with equanimity, by turning the other cheek. The reason why Socrates tried so hard to persuade the Athenians not to kill him is that he thought they would be committing a terrible injustice.† Socrates was no martyr, and when they made their decision clear he objected to it vehemently. The one thing he did not try to do is hurt them back, because he understood that he could not be just by being unjust. Revenge simply makes no sense.

The vengeful person insists that the wrongness of the wrong thing they are doing—the fact that their victim is suffering, or dead—is what makes it right or fitting or necessary or good. It is this way of speaking that Socrates objects to—though, as in the case of weakness of will, his point is not ultimately about language. Rather, he’s using the way our language wavers to direct us to how our thoughts and actions waver. What we’re trying to do, when we aim to commit revenge, is something that cannot be done.

A vengeful person might, in response to Socrates’ argument, make the following move: “I don’t want to do good by doing bad, I just want to do bad. My motive is purely to hurt.” Socrates’ reply is that this person has mischaracterized his motivation, and he offers an argument to that effect in the Gorgias, when he explains how you would actually treat someone if you really wanted to hurt them as much as possible. In a remarkable passage, Socrates lays out a recipe for ruining someone’s life. Take a person who is poised to become the next Stalin or Hitler, and clear all of the obstacles out of the way of their path toward the most complete injustice. If they steal money, make sure they get to keep it and spend it as unjustly as possible, on themselves and on others. Insulate them from any possible feedback that would allow them to come to understand how evil they really are, make sure they are never punished, and ideally make them immortal, “never to die at all but to live forever in corruption.”²⁹ That, says Socrates, is how you would treat someone if you wanted to do maximal harm to them: you would ensure that they live the worst possible life forever, with no way out. That is what pure hate looks like. When you are enacting revenge, you don’t treat people that way. Revenge is animated by the desire to teach people lessons and set them straight. (Recall Creon: “That will teach you. . . . And you will learn.”) Revenge is not pure hate, it is loving hate.

Many people disavow revenge, but allow it into their lives under a different name. The distance between theory and practice is a result of the rephrasings our kin groups normalize—we learn to talk around the incoherent wavering of kinship-induced revenge, just as we talk around the incoherent wavering of body-induced akrasia. Revenge is a passion that tells you that the bit of cruelty you are thinking of enacting will be righteous and glorious. When you feel this passion, what you are feeling is the kinship command malfunctioning. This corresponds to the akratic experience of the bodily command malfunctioning: “I know I’m going to regret this later.” Revenge and akrasia teach us that our default systems for managing our lives are defective: they make us waver.

IV. The Socratic Proposal

I’ve called the commands of our body and our kinship group “savage commands,” borrowing that phrase from the Crito. In that same passage, Socrates both uses the term and identifies another path. He says that the laws, as he understands them, don’t make such commands. Rather, they “only propose things.”

We [i.e., the laws of Athens] say that the one who disobeys does wrong . . . [when] he neither obeys us nor, if we do something wrong, does he try to persuade us to do better. Yet we only propose things, we do not issue savage commands to do whatever we order; we give two alternatives, either to persuade us or to do what we say.³⁰

The modus operandi Socrates attributes to the laws when he personifies them—“persuade or be persuaded”—bears a striking resembles Socrates’ own.³¹ Socrates has projected the Socratic method onto the laws. For example, look at what he said to Crito a little earlier in their conversation:

Let us examine the question together, my dear friend, and if you can make any objection while I am speaking, make it and I will listen to you, but if you have no objection to make, my dear Crito, then stop now from saying the same thing so often, that I must leave here against the will of the Athenians. I think it important to persuade you before I act, and not to act against your wishes. See whether the start of our inquiry is adequately stated, and try to answer what I ask you in the way you think best.³²

The Socratic method is an alternative to savage commands. It takes the form of a proposal: either you are going to be convinced by me, to go along with what I think, or you are going to convince me to go along with what you think. Socrates is not going to tell Crito what to do, nor does he permit Crito to tell him what to do (“Stop saying I must leave”). Instead, they are to jointly organize themselves into two distinct roles. These roles are sometimes translated to mean “persuade or obey” but it’s worth emphasizing that in Greek it’s the same word in the active and passive voice: “obey” is another way of translating the word we can also translate as “be persuaded.”³³ These roles can also be put in terms of refuting and being refuted, since Socratic persuasion works by way of refutation; or of asking and answering questions, since Socrates refutes people by questioning their answers. Both refutation and inquiry are suggested, if not foregrounded, in the passage just above: “if you can make any objection” and “try to answer what I ask.” Persuade or be persuaded, refute or be refuted, ask questions or answer them: exactly why these formulations are equivalent will become clearer in part two, in which we will examine the Socratic method in depth. For the moment I want to speak to how they might, collectively, represent a genuine alternative to the savage commands of body and kin.

Consider Socrates’ complaint that Crito has been “saying the same thing so often, that I must leave here against the will of the Athenians.” Is this fair? Crito has not simply repeated that command; he has given Socrates a slew of reasons to escape. For instance, Crito points to the fact that Socrates’ children need him: if Socrates dies “they will probably have the usual fate of orphans.”³⁴ Crito also worries that he himself will look bad: “Many people who do not know you or me very well will think that I could have saved you if I were willing to spend money, but that I did not care to do so. Surely there can be no worse reputation than to be thought to value money more highly than one’s friends.”³⁵ In addition, Crito hopes to entice Socrates with the prospect of a warm welcome in Thessaly: “I have friends there who will greatly appreciate you and keep you safe.”³⁶ Why does Socrates discount these arguments?

In attempting to motivate Socrates with the stick of fear for his loved ones and the carrot of safe haven in Thessaly, Crito is throwing Socrates back on the savage commands of kinship (“Protect your family and friends!”) and body (“Preserve your safety!”). If “Do jumping jacks, I won’t say why!” is a savage command, so is “Do jumping jacks or your kids get hurt!” or “Do jumping jacks and you get a prize!” A penalty or reward might suffice to change your mind, but Socrates is not in the business of changing minds. He’s in the business of either changing minds or having his own mind be changed, which is to say, the business of figuring out which of those two things should happen. This requires looking into why a person was inclined to do whatever they were going to do, and checking to see whether it makes sense: on examination, does their speech waver, or not? Crito’s arguments are attempts to tip the scales in favor of the outcome that Socrates is resisting, while leaving shrouded in darkness Socrates’ grounds for resisting it. Crito is giving Socrates incentives, without engaging Socrates’ reasons for believing that escaping would be unjust.

That is why Socrates dismisses “those questions you raise about money, reputation, the upbringing of children,” and insists that “the only valid consideration . . . is whether we should be acting rightly in giving money and gratitude to those who will lead me out of here, and ourselves helping with the escape, or whether in truth we shall do wrong in doing all this.”³⁷ Socrates wants Crito to help him ask the question, “Should I escape from jail?” even though both Socrates and Crito already think that they have answers to that question. An untimely question is a closed question: already answered. Nonetheless, Socrates thinks that he and Crito can open it, together. How? By way of the Socratic method: persuade or be persuaded.

If, when you try to articulate what you are doing to someone else, you find yourself babbling, contradicting yourself, unable to make sense of the words coming out of your own mouth, then even you will become aware that you can’t expect to persuade anyone. This happens to teachers all the time: you learn what you really understand, and what you only appeared to yourself to understand, when you put your supposed knowledge to the test by trying to explain it to someone.

It’s one thing to be motivationally driven to engage in akrasia or take revenge; it’s another to try to explain to someone else why those would be the right course of action. The pressure of objection, refutation, and explanatory clarity exposes the savageness of the command driving you, to the point where you would not be able to demand that anyone else act the way you are acting. This wouldn’t stop you from acting on the basis of a savage command—but in doing so, you would be turning your back on having Socrates as a friend. “Persuade or be persuaded” means refusing to live on the basis of the kinds of answers that only sound like good answers before you’ve explicitly posed the relevant question.

Everything we do, every choice we make, every action we take, is underwritten by some answer to the question “What should I do?” Socrates’ alternative to savage commands allows us to transform our default answers into something different: inquisitive answers. These inquisitive answers will, in the end, either correspond to what an interlocutor such as Crito had (before asking the question) thought they should do, or not. The first case would be the one where Crito persuades Socrates to flee, the second where Crito is persuaded that Socrates should not flee. Either way, Crito will have asked the question to which his decision is an answer, and the sign of this will be the ability to explain himself.

For any given command, we have the idea of setting it aside in favor of something more important. Many people would pride themselves on being able to rise above hunger, or exhaustion, or conformity pressures, if the stakes are high enough. Socrates asks us to imagine becoming people who, instead of setting one command aside in favor of another, discover something better to do with our lives than follow commands. What if you lived, not off of commands, but off of an understanding of what you were doing? Liberation from commands begins with questions.

A question may be lingering with the reader from our discussion of revenge: Does Socrates really think that the worst thing you can do to someone is make them evil? What about making them suffer terrible physical pain, or forcing them to see their loved ones slaughtered? Aren’t there two very different states we might refer to with the phrase “a bad life,” namely, unhappiness and immorality? In the next chapter, we will examine why Socrates denied that we can draw this distinction in the way in which we are accustomed to. And not only Socrates: the varying philosophical traditions that emerged in Socrates’ wake had sharply differing views on most core ethical questions, but they agreed with one another, and with Socrates, on this point.

1. * There are a few counterexamples to this principle, where we are inclined to give our kids “the talk.” The talk might be about sex, or drugs, but the thing to notice about parenting is that on most topics there is no talk. We wait to correct, instead.
2. † If Socrates denies that revenge is possible, why does he object to it? Socrates denies that it is possible to act against one’s better judgment, or to do good by doing bad, so in this sense he denies both weakness of will and revenge, but he does not deny the destructive character of the phenomena that are (he thinks, wrongly) described in those ways. That is, he thinks it is perfectly possible, and lamentable, to waver catastrophically at the behest of the bodily or the kinship command.