'Why Socrates was a Monster' with John Vervaeke

A conversation about 'After Socrates', Neoplatonism, and where to find wisdom

Socrates was a monster. Or at least, he told us he was. He changed the course of Western civilisation, but throughout his life refused to be trapped by categories, and knew the wisdom in making people feel uncomfortable. So much so that he was eventually sentenced to death for ‘corrupting the youth of Athens’. 

Maybe that makes him the perfect sage for the age we live in, when so many of us are tangled and trapped by our culture’s obsession with the truth of its own categories. As we tie ourselves in endless loops warring around whose labels will win - around ideology, around gender, around politics - Socrates may be precisely the figure from our past to help us untangle ourselves.

He is also the subject of John Vervaeke’s new series After Socrates, which you can watch on his YouTube channel. In case you haven’t come across Vervaeke’s work before, he’s a cognitive scientist, a professor at the University of Toronto, and to my mind one of the most brilliant thinkers in the world right now.

His first YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, is a 50 lecture epic that begins twenty thousand years ago and takes you on a journey through Eastern and Western philosophy, cognitive science and wisdom practices to explain why it is that we now find ourselves in a ‘meaning crisis’: a cultural and spiritual stuckness in many secular nations which has left us with no collective story about what we exist for, where we’re going, or why.

I caught up with him to talk about why he’s created After Socrates, what we can expect from the series, and how Socrates can help us make sense of a world in which we’re often overwhelmed by knowledge, but don’t know where to find wisdom. I’ve edited our conversation for clarity, and paying subscribers have access to our full filmed conversation. 

We covered a lot of ground, and I was curious to understand why of all the figures, movements or traditions he could have chosen, John chose to do a series on Socrates. But first, I wanted to know why exactly Socrates used to refer to himself as a monster.  

John Vervaeke: The thing about a monster is the way it's liminal. It's in-between categories. Most of our classic horror monsters are inter-categorical. Frankenstein is a human, but also an artefact. A vampire is undead, a zombie used to be human but isn’t anymore. Monsters startle us because they fall outside our comfortable categories and therefore they challenge us to re-examine the grammar by which we're producing our categories in a fundamental way. 

They open up spaces through which we can see it. And Socrates would do that. He would create aporia in people, which is a sense of “I don't know how to go forward, I can't find my way”. He did it in order to get them into [liminal] spaces. The idea being that you need to be in those spaces to transform your consciousness, your cognition, and your character, in the way that's needed to cultivate virtue, wisdom, and meaning in life.

To be fair, he wasn’t exactly a looker either.

And so Socrates saw himself that way, and he saw himself as a profound lover, because he makes the argument that love is this state of being perpetually metaxú [Greek for in-between]. When I love, I have a sense of a need, but I'm not quite sure what that need is. So I get something drawing beyond myself, but I have to be open to be surprised by that something, or it's not really love. [It’s similar] to Iris Murdoch's point that love is when you first acknowledge that something other than yourself is real. And so there's this deep connection between the monstrous, the metaxú, the in-betweenness, and the ability to to love and to cultivate a better contact with reality, to be more in touch with reality.

Now, all of that is not to put Socrates in a state beyond us. The razor's edge I'm trying to walk in the series, which is a really hard one to walk, is to really give people a figure that they can internalise; a first person perspective so that they can internalise a sage -  because you need that perspective of participatory knowing, without engaging in hero worship. So it's a tricky thing. But towards that point, Socrates wants us to recognise that once we catch, and are caught by, the love of wisdom, we are metaxú. Because we will never be wise: only the gods are wise. But we can move in that state. That gets taken up later in Christian Neoplatonism as the notion that the beautification of God isn't to come to rest, but to find that God is the perpetual, loving, affording field of our continual and ongoing self transcendence, which is a very different idea. 

I go into this in the series, [and it’s related to] Plato's notion that we are ‘perpetually finite transcendents’, which means we are the beings who can self transcend, but we will never leave our humanity behind and become a God. This is Kurtz's great mistake in The Heart of Darkness. He thinks his capacity for self transcendence can lift him out of his humanity. And of course, Marlow practices stoic self restraint and says, ‘I'm never going to give up the fact that I'm human and limited’, because that's the nature of his heroism. Now, the thing is, if you just pursue self-transcendence, you could fall prey like Kurtz to hubris, right? But if you just hold on to your finitude, you can fall prey to tyranny and servitude and despair. What you have to do is hold them in a creative tension, and so metaxú is actually central to our humanity. 

Alexander Beiner: You mentioned the idea of a sage, or presenting people with one individual that embodies a way of being. Why does that matter, and of all the individuals you could have chosen, why Socrates?

John Vervaeke: I thought of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis as very extensive, and many people said to me, ‘you know, it was very extensive. But what now? What do I do?” And so instead of doing just another extensive thing, I wanted to do something more intensive, pick up a thread that really deeply answers that question ‘what do I do?’. 

And why Socrates? I wanted to pick up on a figure. People need a figure, a person in the narrative - and I've been convinced of this by a lot of people - in order to get some sense of how to ‘internalise the sage’ and cultivate wisdom. So I wanted to lay out the whole progression from Socrates through Plato into the Neoplatonists, and then into the Christian Neoplatonists.

But in addition to laying out the philosophical argument, I wanted to give people points to ponder things that they could discuss, hopefully trying to encourage and afford them to get into discussion groups so that they could exemplify what I'm talking about. 

I'm doing a pedagogical program where I teach a practice so you can start to understand from the inside what I'm talking about. The lecture and the practices build towards a culminating ‘ecology of practices’, just like the lecture builds. And then I have other people coming in: Guy Sengstock and Taylor Barrett and Christopher Mastropietro. We do two episodes just taking everybody through all the practices. Chris and I do a ‘series within the series’ on Socrates and Kierkegaard, so we try to move out of the monologue into a dialogue about ‘what's the relationship between these two pivotal things within the West, the Socratic tradition and the Christian tradition?’ 

Smoldering. Kierkegaard was the 19th century Timothée Chalomet

Alexander Beiner: Could you talk a bit more about the link between Socrates and Neoplatonism, and maybe explain what Neoplatonism is for anyone who's not familiar with it.

John Vervaeke: So let me do the historical link and how it cashes out first, and then I'll come back to Neoplatonism. Socrates is a sage. He's not just a philosopher. He has the great good fortune of having at least two extraordinary individuals as his disciples. One, of course, is Plato. Plato creates the dialogues and sets into motion what will become philosophy in the West. And then he also has Antisthenes, who apparently wrote a lot, but we don't have very much of it, it’s lost. But he famously said, when asked ‘what did you learn from Socrates?’, “Well, I learned how to dialogue with myself. I learned how to do with myself what I would do with the man I was with Socrates.” He learned how to internalise Socrates, and then that goes into Stoicism.  Socrates is basically the pivotal figure of Stoicism. You can understand Stoicism as a philosophy, or religion, that's trying to internalise Socrates in a really living way. 

And then, of course, Socrates inspires Aristotle and we get the beginnings of science, and then Neoplatonism takes platonic spirituality, Aristotelian science and Stoic ethical practices and integrates them all together. And especially when that gets taken up into Christianity, you get these two huge things that are central to Socrates [and Neoplatonism], which I start to explore in the second episode. 

On one hand, Socrates is famous for his wisdom: he knew what he did not know. He has a learned ignorance. But Socrates also knew a lot of things, and he knew that the dialogical way was the best way of living. And so you have these two traditions, and they culminate in these two figures. Eriugena, who basically makes an argument that reality is in itself inherently dialectical [in the Platonic sense]. And then you get Nicholas of Cusa who brings to fruition this whole idea of learned ignorance and how transformative it is. 

And so Neoplatonism is basically that…. and I agree with the argument of Thomas Plant that Neoplatonism was the philosophical version of the Silk Road, and it created a courtroom of dialogos whereby many different religions and philosophical positions could find a lingua franca, a lingua philosophica, by which they could really talk transformatively to each other, and that bound the world together in a powerful way. I’m arguing that it’s capable of doing that for us right now, and we sorely need both of those things. 

The Silk Road. Imagine Neoplatonism this, but with fewer (or no) camels, and not as a trade route but a concept, and you’ve got it.

We can't just adopt Neoplatonism anymore, just like we can’t just just sort of adopt shamanism or something like that.  But I think we can recover something, because what Neoplatonism shows is this tremendous capacity to enter into reciprocal reconstruction with Christianity, and it becomes Christian mysticism and you see it especially strong in Eastern orthodoxy. And why is Eastern orthodoxy taking off right now? Because it gives us a way of enacting, deeply enacting a Neoplatonic way; the Christian Neoplatonic way, but nevertheless.

Neoplatonism also goes into Islam, especially in Persia, and becomes Sufism. It interacts with Judaism, and becomes Kabbalah. It also enters into reciprocal reconstruction with science, [contributing to] the first scientific revolution and also the Einsteinian and quantum scientific revolution. Neoplatonism is this geometrical space of thought and conception and perspective-taking that really affords a powerful integration. 

In a recent talk I released on Neoplatonism, I basically make the argument that the fundamental grammar of cognition is very Neoplatonic in nature: emergence up, emanation down, and interpenetrating so that the self is fundamentally dialogical, vertically and horizontally. And then I argue that reality actually has the same grammar, and therefore there's a possibility that Neoplatonism can give us an intellectually, scientifically respectable way of coming into very, very deep, connected, in-depth contact with reality in a reciprocally opening manner. And that, of course, is to fall in love with reality again, which is what is needed right now. 

Alexander Beiner: What a lovely phrase, ‘to fall in love with reality again’. I keep seeing this repeated, in your work certainly but elsewhere, this idea that flexibility (and cognitive flexibility in particular) are so important for human flourishing. It’s what allows things to survive. The reciprocal flow you’re talking about in relation to Neoplatonism seems to make it anti-fragile. It’s able to go to new places, it's able to adapt to different stimuli, different thoughts, different religious orders and keep surviving. And we're talking about it now hundreds of years later, right? 

John Vervaeke: And the interesting thing is, and I go into this at length in the series, there's two kinds of that reciprocal flow. There's this way [gestures between us] the horizontal link between you and I. But there's also this way [gestures up and down] between the levels of cognition and the levels of reality, the levels of the self. And then, of course, you can get those two in sort of a diagonal, if you'll allow me the spatial metaphor, of flowing relationship with each other. And that's what the whole Socratic path, and the Neoplatonic path, is offering. 

Alexander Beiner: It seems like we can bring that into our own lives in quite a practical way too. I just put out a fairly lengthy feature about trauma, and one of the people I interviewed, George Bonanno, argues that what helps us to get over traumatic experiences and to thrive is taking a fluid, flexible approach to your healing, saying “That didn't work. I'm going to try this. This didn't work. I'll try this,” in a kind of dialectic process with your own experience.

John Vervaeke: To pick up on that: a Socratic, Neoplatonic path can help people like myself who were traumatised by religion to gracefully move to something else. But it's a two way bridge! It can also help people who want to return and rediscover the depths of a religion that they feel still feel called to. And so it has that capacity to do both of those jobs. I try to articulate that as well in the series.

Alexander Beiner: The last thing I wanted to touch on is your hope for the series. What are you hoping that people go away with, and what are you hoping emerges from it? 

John Vervaeke: I hope people will enter into discussion groups. I hope they will not just discuss, that they will take up the practices. I also hope the series provides them with the lingua philosophica so that the various groups can talk to each other, commune in the sense of creating community with each other. That's what I hope. I hope that Socrates helps people effectively steal the culture. That's the hope. And again, walking a razor's edge here, trying to say this doesn't necessarily challenge or want to challenge existing religious and philosophical frameworks. It wants to enter into reciprocal reconstruction with them. 

And like I say, maybe it is needed for those people who need to leave because they have found that their religious home or their secular ideological home, harmful, traumatic, as I did, and they need a way to leave that is not just healing, but hopeful, that puts them on a trajectory. I also want it to be a bridge that affords people who feel called to return and they're given the tools by which they can find the depths of wisdom traditions; Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Vedanta, especially Daoism.

So that's my hope. I try to take very seriously the good-faith criticisms that are made of me, from people who want to enter into a reciprocal reconstructive process. I've taken those criticisms from Paul VanderKlay, Jonathan Pageau and others. I’ve had a lot of really good comments around Awakening from the Meaning Crisis to the effect of, well, what do I do now? And what do we do now? I want After Socrates, in the way I've just described a few minutes ago, to answer those questions. Not in the sense of ‘here's what John says the answer is’, but in the sense of ‘here's a way of life, you can take it up. And from within the depths of that living logos, you will find the way you want and need. 

You can find After Socrates on John Vervaeke’s YouTube channel here, and sign up as a paid subscriber to view our full conversation.