Question types 1: What if Socrates were free of time and never born?

What if Socrates had died on the battlefield at Delium in 424 BC? Would that have a significant effect on history and on the culture of the West?

Interesting? Tempting? Curious? What makes a question like that worth pursuing when it never happened? What is the appeal of a question like that? How does it motivate someone to respond? What would a logical approach be in responding to that question?

What-if questions can be revealing about the world as we know it and who we are by posing a speculative, counterfactual questions. The what-if question is an invitation to depart from reality through speculation. It is used often in politics, philosophy, history, therapy and journalism. It can lead people to a better understanding of the world and themselves or it can tempt them into a disastrous admission.

What if Hitler had never been born?

What if the steam engine had been invented in China a century earlier than it was?

What if the quota for immigration is increased in a country?

What if animals are given the legal right to life and couldn’t be killed?

What if your spouse dies? Would you remarry and what type of a spouse would you like then?

What might you do differently in your life to get a different result from your situation now?

A what-if question invites speculation that reveals the thinking of the person who is speculating. In theory, it can be very helpful. In politics, it can be either influential or a mental trap. Politicians win the approval of voters by speculating about a future that appeals to the interest of the voters. But, since different voters can have different interests, the speculation that pleases some voters is what other voters don’t want. Just ask Donald Trump what he thinks about anything and you get a deluge of pure, reckless speculation.

One expert interviewer to learn from is 20th century Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. Fallaci made good use of the speculative what-if question and also linked herself to Socrates. In an interview with Fallaci in Rolling Stone magazine, Fallaci said about an interview she did with the president of South Vietnam at the end of the War in Vietnam: “And when I happen to be interviewing a fascist, and if he really ‘counts’ in history and the interview is going well, I get fascinated. I want so much to know why he’s a fascist. And this “fascination” on my part then leads to what Socrates called maieutica – the work of the midwife, whose role becomes especially interesting when I have in front of me someone like Thieu. You see, I think that power itself is in some sense fascist by definition (I’m not speaking here of the Mussolini-type of fascism but am rather referring to it in the philosophical sense of the word). And I almost always end by being captivated by it.” Fallaci was a formidable gadfly and, for what it’s worth, she interviewed and then married a Greek prisoner sentenced for trying to assassinate the leader of a military junta that had seized power in Greece. Fallaci may even have been a more outrageous gadfly with a larger audience than Socrates.

In 1968, the Italian maieutica Fallaci started her interview with the 14th Dalai Lama – named Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso – with a counterfactual what-if question. “Holiness, if by some miracle or some unforeseen political upset you were allowed to return to Tibet and live there, as it is today, would you consent to govern a communist country?” The question gives the Dalai Lama a dilemma, a paradox, a contradiction to solve. The assumption is that the religious leader would want to govern his native country of Tibet which he had fled, but would he want to govern in a political regime that he would apparently oppose? Would that be an acceptable compromise or a betrayal of his spiritual values? Fallaci’s what-if question is a temptation to speculate on an issue that is important to this religious leader. Would a refusal to speculate be cowardly or a betrayal of principles by which he lives? Speculative what-if questions like this are difficult to resist. Facts can be disputed, but it is hard to dispute the context of an ingenious speculative question. Fallaci is surprised by the answer of the Dalai Lama. “I did not expect you to answer that way, Holiness,” she says. The Dalai Lama had responded to the question with a question. “What kind of leader would I be if I wanted to impede the course of things? There are those who like to smoke and those who don’t; the fact that I don’t doesn’t mean that I am against those who do.” After creating his own nuanced context, the Dalai Lama says, “Thus, my job is not to agitate for anti-communism among Tibetans, but to keep a sense of national identity alive; remind them that they can be communists, but that they must not forget that they are Tibetans, above all, Tibetans.” The Dalai Lama avoids the trap of the contradiction or dilemma in the question, revealing the character of his mind in the process. In the remainder of the interview Fallaci’s line of questioning is somewhat tame. She says that she found the Dalai Lama inexplicable, which is a brave admission on the part of someone who believes with conviction that she is a rational judge of people. The Dalai Lama may seem inexplicable to her, a mystery, because of the way she thinks.

As Socrates and Fallaci and others knew, once someone has accepted the precise of the what-if question – and thoughtful people are careful about accepting the premises of a speculative question – then the person will likely feel committed to defending the answer, even if the answer now seems to be a problem. It takes a strong will to avoid the temptation. The what-if question is a strategy that politicians and journalists use. Once someone accepts a what-if question, the unanticipated follow-up questions can be used to reveal how someone thinks and reasons. It is the beginning of a sequential process to examine a position. The same happens in the questioning that lawyers use in court and that police detectives use in an interrogation. A simple, factual, apparently innocuous question leads to a series of follow-up questions that take a witness progressively deeper and deeper into an issue. Once the process is started, it’s difficult for someone to stop responding. Refusing to respond at some point implies a recognition that an admission would be dangerous that people don’t want to make. It’s a dilemma. Keep responding and then person gets deeper into trouble. But refuse to respond and the person is implying what the person doesn’t want to imply.

Socrates used the same technique of the serial question in his elenchus. Like a lawyer or a journalist – there were no lawyers in the time of Socrates, who defended himself at his trial – Socrates starts with a simple, tempting question that appeals to the ego of the other person. Asking a question by itself usually presumes that a person has valuable knowledge and the ego likes to have that kind of value. People want to show how smart they are. Just ask Donald Trump how much he knows about foreign affairs, economics, medicine, tax fraud and exotic dancers. Trump can’t resist answering and the problem for the interviewer is that he doesn’t feel limited by the truth and is trying to appeal to an audience that doesn’t feel limited to the truth as well. The follow-up questions from the initial what-if questions can expose substantial new and unexpected information.

What-if questions can also be used to test a sense of reality by a counterfactual premise that clarifies reality by contrasting what actually happened. In turn, the contrast between the historical or natural reality and a speculative alternative can also be used to analyze how a person thinks. The logic that was used for the counterfactual scenario can be analyzed. Why would an increase in immigration in a country be good or bad? That question invites speculation to reveal if someone has selfish biases against immigrants and people from different cultures or is altruistic in nature. Are the logic and the premises that are being used, reasonable or are there flaws in the logic and the premises? Why is the person who answered the what-if question reasoning that way? Can the reasoning of this person be trusted? Can this person be trusted?

So, what if Socrates had died as a hoplite on the battlefield at Delium in 424 BC? And what happens if Socrates could be free of time and maybe only exist as a potentiality?

If Socrates had died on the battlefield, then Plato would have been too young to be influenced by him personally. In 424 BC, Plato was three years old.[iii] Aristotle was not born yet. Not conceived. Not a conception. If Socrates had died when Plato was three, Plato would never have been inspired by the life and character of Socrates to write the Socratic dialogues. Without the influence of Socrates, the seventh letter of Plato suggests that Plato would have become more active politically. If that is true and the letter is real – and it may not be true in both those senses – then Plato may have had a difference influence than the way that the Socratic dialogues have influenced western thinking. Maybe Plato would have created a different model for governing a country, perhaps with philosopher kings, his failed experiment in his time. We might then not have democracy as we know it and never know of the alternative to philosopher kings. The whole argument that is being made now would vanish from time and you would not be reading this. How does that possibility affect how you think?

Questions like these are intriguing because we believe that there can be an important direct consequence of a single event. We reason that if the event hadn’t happened, then the consequences also wouldn’t have happened. That makes sense to us. We human beings are sensible, at least that is what we want to believe. Without Socrates, we might reason, we don’t have the Plato that we know and then we don’t have the development of rationality that Plato inspired in Western culture. Or, we may believe that our future will change because of a different event that might take place. What if you win the lottery? What if China invades Taiwan? What if we travel through a black hole in space? This thinking appeals to a premise of rationality that time is a linear sequence of events. If we understand the sequence, according to that linear logic, then we know why something happened or we can predict future events. But can we make these predictions?

The battle of Delium was a disaster for Athens. The middle-aged Socrates fought there with Alcibiades and Laches, who appear in the dialogues and mention the courage of Socrates at that time. The lone person who knew Socrates before Delium and who wrote publicly about him was the comic playwright Aristophanes in a play put on the stage the year after Delium. The play ridiculed Socrates as a sophist. If Socrates had died at Delium, then maybe the only trace of him would be the satirical impressions of Aristophanes. Books might then be written about the sophists that included Socrates. Maybe that image of the sophists comes from the material of the Socratic dialogues and the the sophists would be remembered in a different way. A possible implication is that the tradition of the sophists might also be stronger – although it seems that sophistry may be so easy for human beings that it doesn’t require a tradition to make it happen. Even if you purge all ancient Greek sophists from time, human beings might still be sophists. Sophistry is very human. How much did Socrates and Plato alter history by defining the sophists the way that they did in the dialogues? How does it change our sense of reality to see a historic event or a historic person as only one possibility among many options to be achieved? And what are the consequences of an error in why it is believed that something happened?

The professor of classics and military history Victor Davis Hanson has some answers.[vi] Hanson analyses the counterfactual idea of the death of Socrates at Delium and says that the ripple effect it would have in time would produce “radically different” results in our heritage. Hanson argues that since Plato was a young child Delium and since Aristotle was not a conception yet, then the strong personal influence of the character of Socrates would disappear from time. Hanson reflects that Plato, as Plato says in his seventh letter, was considering a career in politics until Socrates and his death in the treachery of democratic Athens changed the path of Plato’s life, which produced the influential dialogues with Socrates as the principle character. So, the life and career of Plato is changed, and the Socratic dialogues disappear from time. Hanson then reasons that the most likely influences of Socrates on Plato would disappear. The disappearance of the Socrates of Plato, says Hanson, would include the Socrates influence of Socrates through the technique of dialectical inquiry and the idea of rational inquiry leading to an ethical person.[viii] Hanson also reasons that the death of a middle-aged Socrates at Delium would have erased the more mature development of the Socrates which Plato and others would otherwise have known.

So, the loss of Socrates as an influence on Plato is an intriguing argument that seems to work well in a cause-and-effect analysis, but what of the loss of that influence on later Western rationality? That is an even steeper counterfactual mountain to climb. What are the chances that Socratic thought would have developed without Socrates? How dependent is western rationality on individuals like Socrates, Descartes, Einstein? How accurate is the assumption that individuals play an essential role in history? If Socrates hadn’t existed, would another Socrates be likely to emerge later or is that a singular miraculous event? It seems like asking whether intelligent species could emerge somewhere else in the universe or only on our planet or speculation on how the universe began, if it did begin according to our sense of time. These are intriguing speculative questions that western rationality pressures us to answer conclusively, otherwise, the implication is, what good is this kind of rationality? We feel that we must know if extraterrestrials exist or how the universe began, unless we listen to Buddha, who says to the contrary that we don’t need to be preoccupied answering questions like that. It just diverts us from the real mental and spiritual activity that we should be doing. But the advice of Buddha would also change the nature of our curiosity, for good or ill. How would we be affected if the initial Buddha had never lived? How could we even formulate that question about the Buddha if the Buddha never existed? What other questions never get asked because there is not the historical basis to ask them?

Whatever we believe about a counterfactual history of Socrates and Plato, it seems to fit nicely with some rational premises. For this rationality to work, Socrates and Plato must be unique individuals and original thinkers who arose in somewhat unique, unrepeatable historical circumstances and who would be impossible to replace. It sems that Plato must be less of a thinker and more conventional without the inspiration of Socrates, instead of a Plato who is more liberated to follow his own original thinking without being preoccupied with Socrates. As well, their heritage must be linear in time, and that requires the circumstances of many individuals who participate in the linear transmission and development of the original thought of Socrates and Plato. The development of that heritage may be even more complex and also dependent on a series of unpredictable chances and unique historical circumstances. The counterfactual analysis of Hanson reassures and confirms our sense of rationality and of the coherence of our reality. If we can reason this way, then our rationality and our reality are safe. How could we reason otherwise? It would take an appreciation of the originality of the thinking of Plato to free us from the allure of Socrates that Plato creates in us. Does it take only a Socrates to disrupt that thinking? Can another Socrates emerge in time? How many different versions of Socrates could emerge or did emerge?

The counterfactual death of Socrates on the battlefield could be extended farther into the effect on the influence of Socrates on essential Western thinkers like Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, creating different branches of more ripple effects in time. Pursuing that idea could be an academic industry in itself. As the literary critic Harold Bloom argued in a series of books, writers and thinkers define themselves and create themselves by their opposition to the influence of a powerful figure who unfortunately for them precedes them. Nobody has the good fortune of coming first as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, although, according to the story, what that pair did, with the help of a talking serpent, is the origin of our great existential misfortune. Bloom called the psychology of his literary theory “the anxiety of influence.” Those who come afterwards need to free themselves mentally and spiritually by defying those who preceded them and perhaps distorting that influence to free themselves and be unique. If Socrates had died at Delium, would Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche develop their thinking in different ways without knowing it? Who then would they need to defy? Would whoever they defy be great enough as Socrates and Plato to arouse them to even greater heights? If we reason this way, we may be again reassuring and confirm our sense of rationality and of the coherence of our reality. And that may be perfectly justified. Or maybe not. It’s how we think. Or, as Socrates said, do you think otherwise?

But we don’t need to accept the premise that the death of Socrates that eliminates particular consequences in a cause-and-effect logic is necessarily what would happen. For example, Was Plato predisposed to be be receptive to the example of Socrates because of a potential for that in himself? Might Plato find another trigger for his intellect? Would Plato find another Socrates? Was that his destiny? If that other Socrates was not as proficient as the historical Socrates, would Plato nevertheless see the Socratic potential and fulfill it anyway? Can a greater potential be projected onto a memory of the past that then has greater force? We come to a fork in the road whether to accept the premise of the influence of Socrates or argue against the premise.

What if had a time machine and we can travel back in time, stop the mother of Hitler from meeting the father of Hitler, and erase the destruction of the Second World War? H.G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine captures the fascination with this kind of speculation and Wells develops the premise of the novel according to his concept of reality. If we had a time machine, then we could travel into the past and instigate the invention of the stream engine a century earlier in China. We could travel into the future, see the consequences of a future event, and return to our present to stop the event that leads to the consequences. We are familiar with the variations in this kind of speculation through a series of Science Fiction novels and films that help us speculate. That familiarity with that kind of speculation might also increase our sense of what is possible. What if Wells hadn’t written The Time Machine or Einstein had never read the book as a child that started him thinking about other possibilities? What if Science Fiction didn’t exist? How do possibilities affect our reasoning? How does our sense of possibility affect us in positive and negative ways?

What if Socrates has a time machine to set him free? Where will he go and what will he do? What if Socrates vanishes through time from his prison cave in Athens, just before he drinks the hemlock? Will he tamper with our reality? Will these words blur and then vanish?

What will you do if you have a time machine? What does your answer say about you? What would cause you to change your thinking in your answer to this question?

Counterfactuals like this are a pure form of rational speculation. They can help us study not only possible alternatives but the nature of how we reason and the nature of the character of an individual. Sometimes counterfactuals reveal more about rationality and the thinking of the person who is speculating than the nature of reality itself. For that reason, what-if questions are useful for journalists and for therapists to provoke an original and unexpected revelation of the mind of an individual.

A contrary form of reasoning to linear counterfactuals might be counter-intuitive thinking. It would try to avoid the limitations of a linear rational logic that appeals to those doing counterfactual analysis. What if eliminating Hitler before the Second World War leads to a worse war or some other worse catastrophe? What if eliminating a disease that causes a plague leads to a worse plague or some other catastrophe? We see that happening in economics when the solution to correct one economic problem causes another economic problem. Or we see it happening in global conflicts where eliminating a tyrant plunges a country into another type of crisis. Just ask the United States about tampering with Iraq and Afghanistan. Even good intentions – and the apparent intensions aren’t always good – can produce bad results. But, does being logically counterintuitive only replace one rationality from another rationality? And what would an illogical counterintuitive thinking be? Could there be such a thing as an illogical logic? We have dreams that seem illogical to us, until a psychoanalyst formulates a theory to make the apparent illogic comprehensible. But then is even that a form of rationality? Does even Zen Buddhism have a temptation to rationalize a paradox or a contradiction? Could we ever be free of rationality and if we could, would it benefit us?

What if Christ or Buddha had never been conceived? And why is “Christ” a swear word, but not “Buddha?” What sense would it make to swear, “For Buddha’s sake?” Do you have an answer or a further question? It’s your turn. Will you accept the challenge?

email: socraticzen 88@gmail.com

What if Socrates were free of time? Image from an idea by Shawn Thompson