Christopher Phillips' Socrates Cafe describes the Socratic Method as "a way to seek out truths by your own lights." It is a way of questioning everything, and giving purpose to your life through the process of doing so. But this gave rise to a question that appeared frequently in our book club discussions, when does Socratic questioning become obsessive? At what point does investigative questioning as a form of philosophy turn into over-analyzation?
We (my book club) wrote down examples of questions some people posed at these gatherings that seemed obsessive or over-analytical. One such example was a man who was very dissatisfied with his life. Everyday he asked himself variants of "is my life worthwhile enough to not commit suicide?" (Page 41) This seemed like a dangerous question for someone to be asking. To put faith in your ability to answer this one simple question when constantly analyzing your life seems like a misuse of this philosophy. The point of Socratic questioning is to interrogate from many angles (as said by Philips) but when this intense interrogation can mean the difference between a man's life and death it's clear how dangerous this philosophy can become when taken too far.
Another example is a woman who had been struggling with the decision to switch jobs for a little over a decade. This woman felt that the job she wanted wasn't serious work, and didn't count enough for her to take it. By questioning and re-questioning the benefits and her own self-worth so intensively, she could never bring herself to gather the courage and change. She said that, "community theater was her life." Yet she felt too unsafe making such a big leap due to her questions.
A similar issue is touched upon in the chapter Brother, Can You Spare a Cell? Which shows how Walter Kaufmann 's theory that emotions like fear, jealousy, hate, grief, etc can keep a person trapped is very often true. Phillips tells of a very intelligent and capable friend who was too afraid to change his life, and decided to stay in his safe, if relatively boring life. Phillips likened this to erecting our own prisons, a sort of safe zone that we are too scared to leave until I turns into a sort of prison. I think that obsessive questioning can lead to emotions like the ones that can create a prison around us. Creating fear and hate can draw us back from goals and changes we wish to make.
This isn't to say that Socratic questioning never brought anyone good. This method pulled the author himself out of a rather dark place in 1996 after a divorce. The above examples just illustrate that this method of questioning can be misused and can lead to obsessive questioning. It's terrifying that these people can paralyze themselves by asking too many questions. It is very difficult to draw a line of when this questioning becomes too much. It has helped some people make a big change, and led to others holding themselves back for years. It has saved some people, and brought up large moral dilemmas in others. There are a lot of grey areas in this, and maybe it just depends on the person. Regardless it is important to not obsess over a few questions, and to not let a philosophical method dominate your life.
