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Socrates’s rules of engagement
Seven best practices to follow if you are interested in truth rather than winning
“Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in being able to be serious cheerfully and in possessing that wisdom full of roguishness that constitutes the finest state of the human soul.” (F. Nietzsche, Human All Too Human)
There is a fundamental difference between debate and dialogue. You debate an opponent, you dialogue with a fellow inquirer. Debates are inherently antagonistic, while dialogues are collaborative endeavors. I used to do a lot more debates early on in my life, now I strive as much as possible to engage in dialogue.
Don’t get me wrong, there are appropriate times and places for a debate. For instance, I’m often invited as a panelist to the wonderful How the Light Gets In festival, held annually in both Hay-on-Wye (Wales) and London. Sometimes one of the panelists is a proponent of pseudoscience, like Rupert Sheldrake. On such occasions, my goal is not to convince my (properly so-called) opponent, who is likely beyond redemption. Rather, the objective is to reach those people in the audience who have not yet set their mind and may be open to a different perspective.
But as I was saying, apart from such increasingly rare public performances, I prefer constructive…
