Socrates’ Two-Column Method For Clearer Decisions

The oldest self-help tool might also be the best one, and it fits on a single sheet of paper. I asked Stoic author Donald Robertson to walk me through Socrates' two-column method: a simple way to question your own assumptions, pressure-test a belief, and make a clearer decision.

We trace how this approach fed straight into Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, and why it still holds up as something you can actually pick up and use today. Practical, not abstract.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

In the in the book you talk about cognitive flexibility. And whenever I hear you talk about Socrates and I read about him, I feel like he's a master at trying on almost like different lenses or perspectives and flipping between them.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

I think so. I mean, let me explain a little bit about something that was a little bit of an epiphany for me. Like, so one of the reasons that Socrates sometimes people say, What did Socrates say? And it's hard to summarize what Socrates says, because we have these dialogues mainly, and he does imply things, or sometimes he says things explicitly, but for the most part what he bequeaths to us is a method. And I think that's part of his thinking. Some people like the sophists believed that wisdom consisted in knowing a bunch of stuff and or holding correct opinions, and that you can sum it up in a speech, you could sum it up in maxims or slogans that people could buy from you, like buying onions from a greengrocer. They come along and pay you money, and you give them the speech, and now they're wise, they just memorize it. You could write it down for them, and they could memorize the slogans and they repeat it, and now they're gonna be as wise as you are, they just repeat what you said. And so Socrates doesn't think of wisdom in terms of content, he thinks of it more in terms of process. It's a cognitive skill. Like, you know, he thinks there is no rule or maxim that's gonna be true in every situation, there's always gonna be exceptions to it. And wisdom for Socrates appears to consist more in being able to figure out the exceptions to a general maxim or a rule, to be able to think more flexibly and more creatively. You know, I explain it to kids by saying Socrates is like this guy that whenever you say something, he'll kind of it's almost like he wants to say yes but. Right? So how would you define justice? And you go, I think justice is like helping your friends and harming your enemies, it's a classic Greek definition. Socrates kind of response is just to go, yes, but and then he'll come up with some kind of flaw in it or objection to it, right? So he's like kind of acknowledges there's some truth in what you're saying, but there's also a shortcoming to it. There's always more, you know. He's always and he's always very creatively thinking of situations where your idea, your definition, your role kind of breaks down. And so what we get from him more is this method of questioning. So the epiphany I had, I was reading Xenophon, and you know, I was hesitant to write about Socrates. You know, it's a um presumptuous thing because people have been writing about Plato and Socrates for is since they you know they they they lived, you know, and you know, many you know great scholars have written uh over the centuries uh about Socrates and Plato, to a lesser extent about Xenophon. And I thought, I don't, you know, I'm not uh uh an expert. I have a degree in philosophy, but you know, I I'm not a Plato scholar, like I'm not an expert, it's just kind of hobby for me. And then I one of the reasons I decided to write about it was because I was teaching my daughter about this stuff, and I I thought, look, I just want to be able to communicate with people, you know, about the benefit that I derive from it in the way, same way that I would talk to my daughter about it, right? So I'm not you know, I'm not I'm not claiming to have the final word on Plato or to be able to compete with professional scholars, but I think maybe I can express some of the ideas in a way that would be engaging, uh give people an on-ramp, you know, to go and read the dialogues and so on. And one of the reasons for that, I think, is that I um have an unusual background. My background is interdisciplinary. So my master's degrees was in an interdisciplinary centre in Sheffield, where we studied sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychiatry, like psychotherapy. Um and I've always been my I came from a background of philosophy and then I trained in lots of different types of psychotherapy, and then I got into kind of studying classics and history, so I combined these different disciplines to some extent. And reading Plato and particularly Xenophon actually, as a psychotherapist, I think I noticed stuff. It seemed to me I was noticing stuff that classicists and philosophers just never mentioned. And when I I, you know, I'm lucky enough to, over the years, having written books and speak at conferences, I I'm friends with and know lots of classicists and philosophers. And I'd say to them, like, have you noticed this thing that Plato says or this thing that Xenophon says? And yeah, they'd often noticed it, but hadn't thought it was significant, or they just hadn't noticed it at all. The stuff that leaps out at me is because sometimes it's just weirdly similar to stuff that we would do in cognitive therapy. But one of them is in one of Xenophon's dialogues, Socrates is talking to yet another adolescent boy, and he's in the agora in a saddlery, like uh sell saddles for horses. Um, so just like we described before, and he gets talking to this young guy called Euthydemus. There are two Euthydemus, one in Xenophon and one in Plato. There's a Xenophon's Euthydemus. And Socrates says to this guy, Listen, I've heard all about you. You've got a reputation for having this amazing library private collection of books on self-improvement. He's a self-help junkie, like really familiar in modern psychotherapy. Half the clients that we see in therapy have got libraries of self-help books, you know, they're self-help junkies, right? And this is exactly what this young guy is like. And he says, Yeah, I collect the maxims of the wise for my own improvement, right? He's a self-help junkie. Like he's got the all the books, he's got all the best-selling books of the time and stuff. And Socrates gets in a conversation with him about that, and he basically questions him. He says, Well, he wants more than anything else is to be a great statesman and to demonstrate that he really understands the nature of justice. And so Socrates questions him about the nature of justice and within a few minutes shows that he's contradicting himself and he doesn't really he's confused and he doesn't really understand it. So again, he's been passively just kind of parroting stuff from books, but he hasn't got the cognitive skill like of being able to do critical thinking. Like, you know, he's he can't employ these concepts, like he's just repeating stuff that he's read um without really understanding it. Um and so Socrates is trying to show him like to really understand the nature of justice, we you need to you know be willing to debate it and to kind of explore it from different perspectives and turn it over in your mind and so on. It's gonna take work, like you know, like practicing playing the guitar or something like that. Um it's a skill, it's a practical skill, like that we're we're learning. But then this is the bit that jumps out at me. Socrates says, let me let me show you, and he draws a diagram. So it's like no one told me Socrates drew a diagram. Like, I mean he draws he does draw other diagrams, but no one told me he drew this diagram, and he he draws two columns, probably in a wax tablet, I'm guessing, like um and we do two column diagrams all the time in cognitive behavioral therapy, every there's probably someone doing it right now as we speak, somewhere in the world, right, with a a flipboard with a CBT client, and we use it for different things. But what Socrates uses it for, so we'll do typically we'll get a negative belief that a client has, like nobody likes me, everybody hates me, or something, right? And the the cognitive therapist will say, Where's the evidence for that? Let's draw two columns and we'll have the evidence for that belief on one side and the evidence against it on the other side, right? Um, and then we'll go through it and the evidence that you think is for it, then maybe we'll do a second round and we'll go, is this evidence real? Or could it be possibly interpreted differently or challenged, right? So we'll kind of like start to question the placement of things in the column. We'll also do two columns and weigh up the pros and cons of holding a belief or using a particular strategy, right? And then again, someone might say these are some of the pros of avoidance. Like, oh, when at least when I avoid situations that make me feel anxious, it makes me like feel temporarily better. And so the therapist might say, might then go back and question that and say, but is that an illusion, right? Is that really a pro or is it is there really a disadvantage there? Because maybe it alleviates your anxiety temporarily, but makes you more sensitive in the long term, more vulnerable over the long term. So but maybe that's that's not really an advantage, maybe it just seems like one, right? And so we we start to question the evaluation of the pros and cons in that way. There's you know there's a couple of other variations, but those are the ways that we typically use the two color two-column diagram. So Socrates draws two columns, and he says, Okay, so you're you want to be a statesman and understand the nature of justice. Let's put justice at the top of one column and injustice at the top of the other. He says, you know, give me some examples of injustice. And Euthydemus says that's easy. Lying and stealing and stuff like that, right? And Socrates says, okay, and this is where the Socratic method proper begins, the next step. So he says, uh, lying. So now Socrates isn't just following a formula, he's actually thinking creatively, he's coming up with creative examples, right? Not not just follow not following some standard formula, he has to think on the fly. So he says, um, okay, lying and stealing. Um what if an elected general in a war lies to the enemy? Is that injustice or is that potentially just? And Euthydemus says, like, well that's different, right? Like that's an exception to the rule of the different that would be just. Socrates says, you said stealing was unjust, but what if he captures an enemy camp and steals their weapons? Is that unjust? Or would we consider that to be just in the in the rules of war? And Euthydemus says, Okay, like, you know, that that's just, that's an exception. Socrates says, okay, what about in civilian life if a parent is trying to give medicine to this a small child and they they won't take it, but they know it's they they need to uh like to help them, so that the parent hides it inside the food and deceives the child. Like, is that unjust or is that a justified form of deception? Euphodemus is like, okay, well that's different as well, right? Let's have an exception. So then Socrates uses an example that's like a famous one throughout the centuries that philosophers love. So what if your friend he says, what if your friend is suicidal? Like, and they and they and they ask you, you know, where like where did you put my dagger? Like, so would it would you consider it uh unjust to tell them a white lie and say, I don't know, I can't remember where your dagger is, like, in order to save their life, you know, or you know, and he's Euphemis is like, okay, well, yeah, that's that's different, man. It's a white lie, you're doing it to save somebody's life, to help them. So what Socrates is basically teaching is a cognitive skill here. It's a form of cognitive flexibility where you're able to you know think outside the box to use a horrible modern cliche. You know, like you've got this kind of rigid definition like of justice, it consists, you know, in telling the truth and not stealing and stuff like that, you know. But is there more nuance to it? Like, you know, actually, if you really understand justice and injustice, then you know, are there possible possibly exceptions to it? And in different situations might you interpret the meaning of of the word somewhat differently. And you know, you can't teach that by just getting someone to memorize a formula. You have to get them to think through lots of examples, right? And at the end of it, they might be, they might even say, I'm not sure that I could necessarily, you know, they they revise their definition of what justice means, but they might never get to a perfect definition, but they still it still seems like they've got a better understanding by the end of it, because they've gone on this journey of thinking through all the exceptions. You know, it takes time to do that, it's a skill, you can't just get that from someone giving you a lecture and you going away and memorizing what they've said. So Socrates says, we draw these two columns. Are there any circumstances under which we would move something from one column into the other column? So that you know, you said that lying is unjust. Would you ever move it across into the column marked justice? You know, in some situations, you know, and he says the same thing. Then Euthydemus uh eventually says to him, Listen, I want to study philosophy and learn this skill. Where should I begin? And Socrates then says to him, This is how you should begin, right? And he says, Where you should begin is by asking yourself what eudaimonia consists in, or fulfillment. This would seem logical from an ancient Greek point of view. He says, It's your definition of what is good and bad, basically, because that's what how you know an ancient Greek would define eudaimonia, right? It's having everything that's good and avoiding everything that's bad, basically. So he says, list all the things that you think are good for us in life, you know, like wealth and reputation and having a big house and all this kind of superficial stuff he would come up with initially. And Socrates says, Can you think of any situations in which you know the things that you listed as good might potentially be bad? So he says health is the most obvious example of something that's intrinsically good. And Socrates says, Well, you know, what if you live in a dictatorship and the tyrant that rules it is recruiting people to engage in an unjust war where everybody's going to get killed? Like then hip being healthy might be a disadvantage, right? Socrates' favourite example as well was the of reversal of fortune, is that under the dictatorship of the thirty tyrants in Athens, the oligarchy, um, towards the end of his life, they went round and executed of like lots of people that had money and status. Because if you had status, you were a threat to them, and you have and if you had a lot of money, they wanted to seize it for themselves. So people before had complained that they were poor, like and they had no status in Athenian society. And Socrates after the the oligarchy, probably annoyingly, would go up to them and say, Don't you think you're better off now? Because the the 30 tyrants rounded up anybody that had status and money and garotted them and threw them in a pit, like in order to steal their wealth. You're lucky, you're poor. Like, you know, it didn't work out so well for the the rich and famous of Athenian society. Like, so sometimes it can be surprising how things work out, right? Losing your job might be the best thing that ever happens to you, right? I mean getting sick might be one of the best things that ever happens to you. You might really learn something from it, it might cause you to view things from a different perspective. You know, it's difficult to predict like how things are gonna often when you look it's easier in retrospect as you go older, you look back over your life. It sounds crazy at first to say this, but when you're older and you look back on your own life and you think, what are the things that benefited you the most over the course of your life? And you might look back and think, some of the things that actually benefited me the most were like a relationship that that went like didn't work out, or uh getting failing an exam, or you know, like some of the the things that that made me who I am today were like setbacks, like and misfortune, like so it seems you know, like we again we have to have a more nuanced perspective, you know, uh we have to be more cognitive flexibility and being able to to look at things from multiple alternative points of view to see the possibilities that are intrinsic in them. But also in modern psychology, we know that this kind of cognitive flexibility that that is Socrates is training people to develop through using this two-column technique, you know, thinking of exceptions to the rules, always generating alternative ways of looking at things, is associated with um emotional resilience, uh better relationships with other people, better psychological well-being, yeah, whereas rigidity in our thinking tends to be associated with depression and anxiety and other mental health problems. So it's it's the skill of the Socratic method, like or that we obtain from Socrates that maybe is the mo one of the most valuable things. Maybe flourishing actually consists in this ability to ask questions and think about things in a more flexible and and creative way. But one of the reasons I'm emphasizing that is I don't think this is acknowledged in modern self-help literature, generally speaking. I think when you read modern self-help books and you watch videos, they self help books give self help advice. They give answers, they recommend maxims and strategies and techniques. Um but like with the ancient sophists, that risks encouraging a kind of passivity and rigidity in our thinking.