Socrates was not only, arguably, the most important philosopher in history but also a man renowned for courage and emotional resilience in the face of great adversity. He lived through the 27-year-long Peloponnesian War, and served as a hoplite, or heavy infantryman, in at least three key battles. Socrates showed in court that he was no mere pen-and-paper philosopher. On trial for the trumped-up charges of “impiety” and “corrupting the youth,” he faced execution and did not blink. Plato portrays this momentous event in the Apology but Socrates’ speech was markedly unapologetic. Recalling his military service, he says that having faced death multiple times in order to protect the city of Athens, he would be ashamed to now show fear when facing the death sentence in court. His death sent shockwaves throughout the ancient world, and his courage and dedication to the truth became an inspiration to generations of philosophy students for centuries to come.
Most people today have heard of Socrates but often they know little about him. To know him, however, is to know ourselves because his influence on Western culture ran so deep for so long. He posed the questions that shaped our values and defined concepts we now take for granted. We need to rediscover Socrates today, perhaps more than ever. In the ancient world, it was common knowledge that he taught his students a philosophical method that resembled a therapy for the mind or what we call today psychotherapy.
In many ways, Socrates was the godfather of Stoicism. Stoicism has experienced a renaissance in popularity today, partly because it is the philosophical inspiration for cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), the leading evidence-based form of modern psychotherapy. CBT, in turn, is the basis of emotional resilience training, which aims to teach individuals psychological skills that help them to reduce the risk of developing mental health problems. Ancient philosophy shares this preventative orientation. Whenever we use self-help, psychotherapy, or resilience training, we’re benefitting indirectly from the wisdom of Socrates and the Stoics. When young philosophy students in ancient Greece and Rome read the Socratic dialogues, they not only learned about logical puzzles and ethical dilemmas, but they also learned psychological coping strategies for dealing with stress. Socratic wisdom would give them the emotional resilience to endure the many challenges they faced later in life. This crucial knowledge has become a forgotten part of our cultural heritage – nobody talks about it today.
We find many fragments of Socratic advice concerning emotional resilience scattered throughout our surviving sources: the dialogues of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the anecdotes about Socrates found in other ancient texts. I want to draw your attention to one very striking example found in Plato’s magnum opus, the Republic. In the third book, Socrates is speaking to Glaucon, Plato’s older brother, about Greek tragedy. The heroes depicted in tragic plays set a horrible example of how to cope with adversity, according to Socrates, because they give such pitiful speeches, complaining excessively about their misfortunes. We love a good tragedy but these plays wouldn’t be very entertaining if the lead characters were to respond wisely and rationally to their predicaments. Socrates does not, of course, say that the wise should never grieve at all, merely that we would expect them to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from tragic heroes, like Achilles or Oedipus, who wallow in their grief for dramatic effect.
Socrates returns to this topic in the final book of the Republic. There he claims that training in philosophy can help us to endure our misfortunes with patience, exhibiting the mental endurance we now call psychological resilience. He lists four key reasons why the wise are guided by reason and do not give way to excessive grief or impatience in the face of misfortune. Today, we might describe these as cognitive strategies for coping with stress.
Socrates’s Four Resilience Strategies
1. Suspend judgment about events. There is no way to know whether the events that befall us will turn out to be good or bad for us in the long run. We should keep an open mind because many of our greatest setbacks in life turn out eventually to be for the best – they’re often opportunities or blessings in disguise. What matters most is whether we respond to them wisely or foolishly.
2. Don’t compound your suffering. We gain nothing by taking misfortunes badly. Complaining excessively, or ruminating morbidly about problems, simply adds another layer, unnecessarily, to our suffering.
3. Focus on the big picture. No individual human misfortunes are of great importance in the grand scheme of things, so they’re seldom worth taking seriously enough to get extremely upset about. We should remember to keep things in perspective.
4. Deal with your problems rationally. Dwelling on the negative and indulging in morbid worry or rumination can prevent us from approaching the problem rationally and finding a solution, the very thing that would help us most of all when faced with a crisis.
Socrates adds that the most important thing when facing misfortune is to think about the problem rationally rather than merely complaining about it. We mustn’t behave like children who have taken a fall, wasting our time wailing. Instead, we should train our minds to apply the psychological remedies above as quickly as possible, setting our cries of sorrow aside, and getting to work on fixing the problem. That is how we can meet the attacks of fortune with wisdom instead of giving way to extreme emotions, agrees Glaucon.
It comes as a revelation to many people today to discover that the Socratic dialogues contain practical psychological advice of this kind. This is the tip of the Socratic iceberg, though. The philosopher often discusses ways of dealing with our emotions, which would not seem out of place in a modern self-help book based on cognitive-behavioral therapy. I wrote How to Think Like Socrates because I wanted to make it easier for modern readers to reconnect with that tradition and benefit from the sound advice that was once familiar, for many centuries, to educated people in the ancient world.
Donald J. Robertson is a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, trainer, and writer. He was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, and after living in England and working in London for many years, he emigrated to Canada, and now resides in Quebec. Robertson has been researching Stoicism and applying it in his work for over twenty years. He is one of the founding members of the non-profit organization Modern Stoicism. He is also the founder and president of the Plato’s Academy Centre non-profit in Greece. Robertson is the author of Verissimus and How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.
