#44: SOCRATIC QUESTIONING: THE KEY TO MENTAL CLARITY

How can we assess and analyze our thoughts to the best of our ability?

How can we think better?

Using the words of Socrates, one of the intellectual giants in philosophy, I'd say, “to find yourself, you need to think for yourself.”

But to understand how we think, there's need to trickle down to even a more pressing question. And that is, “what makes up our thoughts?”

As humans, we are always deciding, choosing, or selecting one thing over another.

And since that's the cycle, equipping oneself with the required skills needed to deconstruct one's thoughts, look into it, find loopholes, make amends, is as important as, well, whatever it is, that you value a lot.

You see, philosophers have spent years looking at this problem. And they've done quite a lot about it. Interestingly, they've figured out ways in which they can get better at thinking. As weird or dry as it may sound, that's what they are really good at. And we, the regular folks out here, really suck at it.

Yes, we might think a lot, so to speak. But thinking without a systematic and defined approach is not really a way to think.

That's why we have to learn it. And to do that, we'll be doing it the philosophers style.

For if we don't learn how to peruse our thoughts, we'll end up thinking like everyone out there. Oh, and yes, we'll be at the mercy of our thoughts instead of our thoughts being at our mercy.

And since philosophers are so good at it. It'll be unwise not to tap from their knowledge. Since we are this smart—borrowing from the philosophers toolkit, we'll look at Socratic questioning.

ELEMENTS OF THOUGHTS

When we think of something, that thought doesn't comes out of the blue. There are causative agents or underpinnings which make up each thought we have; some by nature and others by nurture.

To understand how we can attain mental clarity, that is, to think better, it then becomes a matter of great significance to strive to understand from a fundamental level.

In the book The Art of Socratic Questioning, Richard Paul and Linda Elder pointed out these elements. The interesting thing about it all is how questioning our thoughts from the distinct lens of these elements enables us to think from the basics.

This gives us an ability to build up an understanding of that particular subject or issue we want to understand from where it all intitally started.

Here's chart showing all the elements as a coherent piece:

This chart is from the book The Art of Socratic Questioning by Richard Paul and Linda Elder

You see, Socratic questioning is an art of carefully uncovering the loopholes in one's thoughts. A process of filtering out the noise in a signal. A way of finding order and meaning in such a world we live in. Given this tool which, is part of a philospher's toolkit, we can also start philosophizing, so to speak (in our own little way).

With Socratic questioning, we can uncover the assumptions underlying our views, understand the implications of our actions, analyze our experiences, uncover concepts and the underpinnings behind our drives.

You see, it's just a powerful weapon that should be in your arsenal. Armed with it, you'll start to connect the dots in between your thoughts.

You'll even begin to say things like “Oh, no, I was an absolute dickhead when I did XYZ: I should have done otherwise instead.”

Isn't that amazing? Like, this is something you should be happy about. I don't know for you but to me being able to probe my thoughts by myself is something worth being happy about.

Once you get so good at it, you then become a master of your thoughts (in some sort of way though). Added to that, you'll start to make better decisions in your life.

To sum it all, it's a disicplined process of moving from a point of not knowing to a point of knowing. A process of thinking about your thinking, understanding your understanding and creating a general awareness of your own cognitive abilities by asking analytic questions.

APPLYING SOCRATIC QUESTIONING

Exposing you to all this without relating it with an example so you can understand it better is nothing but arrant bullshit. So, let's imagine a certain thought we want to look into.

Are you ready? I guess you are.

Because this is where the shit gets real.

Let's assume you had a tense misunderstanding with a certain person while having a political-based discussion. Let's call that person C350.

In order to probe your thinking and understand the situation better, you can start by asking yourself these series of questions in this systematic order:

1. Why am I having a misunderstanding with C350? Here, we're questioning the issue (or thought) at hand.

2. What have I said that's making C350 react in this manner?

3. Could it be he didn't understand my point or I didn't understand the point C350 made? Here, we're trying to look into the issue from a lens that has to do with understanding each others perspective.

4. Okay, I've observed that C350 wasn't happy because I said X, Y and Z. Here, we're trying to analyze the information we've gathered so far from the questions above.

5. But why did C350 become unhappy because of what I said? Perhaps I assumed he was the one who was wrong (because I was biased) without listening to him well enough. Here we're trying to look into the problem from the lens of cognitive biases and assumptions.

6. If that should be the case, then I deviated from the objective of our discussion. That said, instead of engaging with him, I was an asshole with a potty mouth.  Here, we're looking into the issue from the lens of purpose—that is, from the main goal or objective of the argument.

7. Okay, now that I've understood the root cause of the problem, what are implications of my actions? Here, we're looking into the issue at hand from a point of understanding how deeply I've fucked up.

8. Having probed my thinking, I now know that I should go to C350 to apologize for being such a dickhead.

And that's it. I just applied Socratic questioning to the problem. You don't have to follow this exact order though. All you have to do is to follow through the thought you want to dissect in a logical order—bit by bit—all through the elements that make up your thoughts.

It might look stressful. And you might say “I don't have time for this waste of time”. But before you say that, just try it out first. It's very effective. Besides, there's no harm in trying.