"The unexamined life is not worth living"

That is, of course, the famous Socratic dictum around which so much of our discipline is organized, and while some, like Nietzsche, have famously rejected it, their reasons need not immediately concern us.  For there is a more mundane question it presents:  most people--meaning the fathers, mothers, siblings, children of most academic philosophers--do not lead "examined" lives in the Socratic sense.  Is it really the case that philosophers who embrace the Socratic dictum think their lives are not worth living?  I'm curious what philosophers think, and whether they've ever had this discussion with their non-philosopher relatives.

Comments

[Michael Rosen]

Ha! It depends what you mean by "examined". Non-philosophers point out that philosophers are, typically, very good at a certain kind of theory-building but very bad at self-understanding. Many, many years of interacting with philosophers makes me believe that they are all too often right.

[Rich Cameron]

It's a so-called "Socratic paradox," isn't it? Absurd on its face (and important to see as absurd on its face to truly appreciate) but (Socrates/Plato believe) expressive of a deeper truth.

What's the deeper truth? Two thoughts.

The whole quote says it's not worth living for a man. That doesn't mean an unexamined life isn't worth living for, say, a dog. Living an unexamined life could be perfectly pleasant and even successful by lots of measures and, as such, be a perfectly good life for an animal with limited rational self-directing capacities (like a dog). Such a life may not be worth living as a human though, if humans are capable of living autonomously directed lives only through examination.

A second suggestion: in the Euthydemus Plato has Socrates argue that only wisdom is unconditionally good and that all other goods (including friends, wealth, and even life itself) are only good conditionally -- good on the condition that they are used properly, with wisdom. That doesn't mean that friends are bad, just that friends as such (i.e., even poorly chosen ones who lead one into tragic error) aren't worth having, only well chosen friends are genuinely worth having. Similarly, an unexamined life needn't be thought to be (in itself) bad, just not something that's not (in itself) good to live. A life is only good to live if it's guided by wisdom. (Further problem: examination doesn't lead to true wisdom for Socrates, so why think an examined life is worth living? The Gorgias's answer seems to be that examination provides protection/insurance against the worst evils even if it can't provide the greatest goods and that examined lives are, to that extent, better than unexamined ones. But good?)

And no, I've never had this conversation with non-philosopher relatives.

[Martin Lin]

The dictum is either hyperbole or the standard for examination must be fairly low. Otherwise, the dictum is obviously nonsense.

[Mehmet M. Erginel]

It should be noted that it is debatable whether Socrates held such a view. 'Biotos', the word translated as 'worth living' can also be translated as 'to be lived'. Richard Kraut, for instance, has argued that the sentence should be understood as making the much less radical claim that we should not live unexamined lives. ('The Examined Life' in A Companion to Socrates (Blackwell, 2006))

[Tom Hurka]

A philosopher philosophizing that the philosopher's life is best ... reminds me of those songs that say their own style of music is best ("It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing," "It's Gotta Be Rock 'n' Roll Music," etc.)

[marcus]

The Socratic dictum is made in a broader Greek context in which (it seems to me) pretty much everybody promoted or gave at least lip service to the claim: a non-excellent life is not worth living. The debate was merely whether self-knowledge, truth knowledge & c is the only form of excellent living, a formative part of that excellent life, integral to forwarding it & c. However you come down on this, you can draw the relevant conclusion. We see how Socrates did.

Your "mundane question" seems to want to challenge the "examined-life/wisdom" aspect of the Socratic dictum. I assume your are asking whether we really believe whether wisdom is paramount for excellent living. You are challenging the second premise above. That seems to miss the fact that the first premise is the bigger issue. People don't go challenge their friends and family about whether there life is worth living, because most people do not accept the first premise: a non-excellent life is not worth living. Lots of people think life itself is intrinsically valuable or that individuals can be conceived of and valued in ways detached from the ends they choose. Some people think this for interesting philosophical reasons, others for reasons religious, others because that's what their mom or dad told them. In any case, many don't attach "being unexcellent" with having a valueless life. Consequently, there are not many people willing to tell mediocre living folks that their life is not worth living, no matter what mediocre living is thought to be. If we did accept this larger ideal, then we would be having a lot of very uncomfortable conversations, even with some of our philosophical friends and relatives.

So, yes, philosopher's and many others don't follow the Socractic dictum, but I don't think it has much to do with the valuation of wisdom and self-knowledge but, rather, whether we think the value of a life is solely determined by how that life is lived.

[Dhananjay Jagannathan]

There's a kind of moralizing reading of the dictum that seems to divide philosophers from non-philosophers, but it might help to consider a more general assumption at work that runs right through ancient Greek philosophy from Socrates onward, with the exception of the Cyrenaics and perhaps the Epicureans. This is that rational reflection is needed in order to organize our ends so that they form a coherent whole. So for example Aristotle writes in the Eudemian Ethics that "everyone capable of living by his own choice ought to adopt some target for living well, looking toward which he carries out all his actions, since not to have arranged one's life in relation to some end is a mark of great stupidity" (EE I.2, 1214b6-11). Basic reflection on the goals one is pursuing and at least roughly how they fit together is taken to be the difference between living by choice, as an adult human should, and living according to one's occurrent passions, which is the life of an animal or a child. The reason, then, that the unexamined life is inhuman (folding the ambiguity between the normative and the descriptive readings into this adjective) is that it is haphazard, irrational, and imprudent, not that philosophy is the best way of life, though various of the philosophers under consideration might hold that view in addition.

Socratic scrutiny takes a particular form: a thorough and repeated dialectical examination of one's most important beliefs about what is valuable in the hopes that what survives will be truth. On the other hand, an Aristotelian might rest content with some high-level organization of our aims with regard to some unified conception. The Stoics go further than Socrates and absurdly claim that any life beneath the sage's, all of whose choices accord with divine cosmic reason, is wretched. The common core amongst these views is that examination and reflection, or more prosaically, getting our priorities straight, is an essential part of prudential reasoning, indeed the basis on which our other deliberations make sense. I am inclined to think, therefore, contra Martin Lin, that the dictum in either Socratic or post-Socratic form is neither hyperbolic nor trivial nor nonsense. It embodies a norm of practical rationality, and as it seems to me, an interesting, provocative, and not obviously misguided one, though of course it may be one which we decide to reject anyway.

[Timothy O'Leary]

Whether Socrates (via Plato) was saying that the unexamined life is 'not worth living' or is simply not 'to be lived', the question remains: do we so-called philosophers believe that the unexamined lives of our nearest and dearest are in some way lacking? In short, yes, I hope that we do. But I also hope that we have a broad enough conception of 'the examined life' to recognize that it by no means requires (in fact probably does not require) a familiarity with contemporary professional academic philosophy. Socrates wasn't saying that you need to be a 'philosopher' to live a worthwhile life. He was saying that you need to have a certain level of self-critical awareness, based on rational investigation, discussion and debate — that's one of the things that makes a life worthwhile and admirable. And I suppose that, to some extent, we try to hold our nearest to those standards - at least some of the time.

[Roger Eichorn]

I'm glad to see that the responses here all seem to agree that the dictum is at least prima facie ridiculous. It's long been a pet peeve of mine, esp. when parroted by philosophy students as though it were a kind of new-agey self-affirmation.

My sense has always been that the dictum is both ridiculous on its face _and_ even more ridiculous when understood on the basis of Socratic/Platonic philosophy, where "the examined life" seems to mean nothing less than the life of the philosopher (though I'm no expert on Plato).

I've debated the point with numerous philosophy students over the years, and I've also discussed the dictum with "non-philosopher relatives." My sense is that the dictum is one of those things people are so familiar with that they tend to accept it (more or less) without giving it much thought. Once they ponder it (examine it) for a moment, though, they're likely to see how odd it is -- certainly it's no 'truism,' no bit of 'conventional wisdom' (though it brings that sort of atmosphere with it).

[Aaron Smuts]

Fred Feldman expresses a similar worry: "Surely there are plenty of unreflective, philosophically unsophisticated people who have been happy, and whose lives have been morally good, beneficial to others, and good in themselves for those who lived them. To say otherwise, it seems to me, is to suggest that if you are not happy in the peculiar way preferred by some philosophers, then your life is not worth living. This seems to be to be an astonishing view (whether Socrates' or not)." (Pleasure and the Good Life p.15, n.6).

[CharlieH]

When my friends and relations ask me about that claim, I usually answer that examining life amounts to asking yourself if you are focusing your life on what is truly important, or if you are just going with the flow. I'm inclined to say that anyone who doesn't assess and re-assess their priorities, at least periodically, will probably have a lousy life - unless they just happen to luck out, I guess.

By the way, for what it's worth, or bowling-decision-procedure at usuphilosophy.com just raised that question last night, and our oracle agreed with Plato.

[Tad Brennan]

So Socrates doesn't think I should live a life unless it has been examined. Is it clear that he intends us to supply "examined by me myself'?

What if his dictum should be parsed in the same way as we parse "the unapproved drug should not be taken", where the agent that generally approves drugs (sc. the FDA, if you're in the States) is distinct from the agent that will take the drugs (sc. the ailing patient)?

And note that when the FDA approves drugs, they approve drug-types, rather than drug-tokens: since the tests are generally destructive, it will seldom if ever be the case that the very token-pill that I swallow was itself approved by the FDA. That's okay; I just want to make sure that I'm taking a token of a type that was approved by people who know what drugs are safe and efficacious.

So perhaps Socrates thought that we should not live a life of a type that has not been examined by competent authorities, who have pronounced on the livability of that type of life. Which authorities? I dunno--maybe philosopher-rulers or the like.

Or if we are more inclined towards Millian empiricism, we might think: a life of a type that has been examined by "the whole past duration of the human species," during which time we have been "learning by experience the tendencies of actions," and thus of lives made up of actions.

My non-philosophical friends and relations *are* leading examined lives, under that parsing: lives of types that have been examined by others, and for a long time.

The assumption that Socrates is making a radical call to critical self-scrutiny, rather than making a point about the need for expert knowledge, might itself be worth scrutinizing a bit. Maybe it's right; but it doesn't follow merely from the dictum alone, since that dictum is ambiguous between the self-critical parsing and the external-expert parsing.

[Milton Gloaming]

Any worthy argument for the advantages of the examined life would have to mention them. This adage does not. On this basis one is easily led to the view that no life is worth living, but the life-examiners probably know that already.

[Dan]

Of course, it does not follow that the examined life is worth living either.

[s. wallerstein]

I'm not a professional philosopher but...

The examined life seems to require a certain amount of leisure and tranquility, which free Athenians males in the era of Socrates had and which not everyone I know has today.

For example, A works 9 hours a day under pressure and has a two-hour commute through heavy traffic to and fro work.

B is a single mother who works 9 hours a day in a call-center and comes home to deal with a hyperactive 10 year old.

Neither A nor B has much time or energy for the examined life.

So since I enjoy relative leisure, it would be arrogant on my part to expect them to examine their lives. "Arrogant" isn't exactly the right word, but the idea is that it's "weird" for a privileged person to look down on or criticize a less privileged person for not having a privilege, in this case, the privilege of having time and mental space for examining his or her life.

Both of the above people are politically aware enough to understand that they are victims of the economic system, but for reasons I can understand, they prefer to turn on the TV when they get home at night.

[Roger Eichorn]

@ Timothy O'Leary

--> "I also hope that we have a broad enough conception of 'the examined life' to recognize that it by no means requires (in fact probably does not require) a familiarity with contemporary professional academic philosophy."

My God! Can you imagine? The idea is absolutely preposterous.

--> "Socrates wasn't saying that you need to be a 'philosopher' to live a worthwhile life. He was saying that you need to have a certain level of self-critical awareness, based on rational investigation, discussion and debate — that's one of the things that makes a life worthwhile and admirable."

First of all, it's not clear that your gloss on 'examined life' doesn't amount to 'being a philosopher,' or rather 'philosophizing' (broadly construed). For what kind of 'examination' does the dictum recommend? We can engage in "rational investigation, discussion and debate" on the subject of fly-fishing, but I don't think that's what Socrates has in mind: rather, he seems to have in mind the examination of _our lives_ (which may involve activities such as fly-fishing, but is presumably something over and above those activities). I suspect that any 'examination of life' that would satisfy Socrates would end up as philosophizing.

Secondly -- as you're of course aware, but it's worth mentioning -- there's quite a gap between saying that 'examination' is "one of the things that makes a life worthwhile and admirable" and saying that the failure to 'examine one's life' makes that life _not worth living_.

[Josh Paul]

While this sentence often seems to be interpreted as a double negative implying a positive claim (that an examined life is, (or may be), worth living) Socrates doesn't seem (to me) to be saying any such thing. The formal reason for this is that an unexamined life is not just the negation of an examined life, but a positive entity with its own sorts of properties.

It's entirely consistent with this dictum that the examined life is not worth living either. Anyway, I don't talk about the line with non-philosopher relatives. I suppose the big reason is that it's impolite to tell someone that you think they're an ignorant yokel whose life isn't worth living.

[Joel Walmsley]

People often skirt dangerously close to the fallacious assumption that the Socratic dictum entails its inverse (i.e., "The examined life _is_ worth living"). But as Kurt Vonnegut writes in _Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons_, "Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?"

[AC]

While I am not surprised to see that most of us are unwilling to offer the dictum a full-fledged embrace, I am a bit surprised to see the dictum getting so beat up. This raises a question for us philosophers: if we really think that the dictum is a piece of nonsense, then what do we really think about the value of the philosopher's way of life? Is there anything to recommend it, other than the subjective satisfaction it offers to those who already enjoy it?

I guess what I am wondering is: Can Roger Eichorn accept anything of what Timothy O'Leary says? That is, can we accept that the dictum is in a certain sense false, but that nonetheless: "...you need to have a certain level of self-critical awareness, based on rational investigation, discussion and debate" in order to have a worthwhile and admirable life?

[Ted Parent]

Right, so the dictum is hyperbole. But taking a cue from marcus and others, do philosophers think that the examined life is the *best* sort of life?

There is such a thing as an over-examined life. But Michael Rosen's initial comment is still pertinent: In practice, it seems philosophers are largely unconcerned with self-understanding. So we apparently think self-understanding is largely unimportant. But should we think that?

[Y]

If the criteria is leading a life that has been examined to the extent that Socrates would be happy, I think few people -- including philosophers -- would meet the criteria.

That being said:

(I) philosophical concepts like "justice", "fairness" and "truth" play an important role in most of the relationships people look to as giving their lives meaning. People look to concepts like "truth", "fairness", "friendship" and "justice" in their daily lives. I think few people have not asked whether they are being true to themselves or whether something was fair or just. Certainly anyone who has taught a child right or wrong, has encountered these concepts. Frankly, we wouldn't spend time reading books and watching movies that engaged in these questions, if we didn't think them important.

(II) These abstract philosophical ideas, think "truth", "justice", "fairness" and life's meaning, also serve an evaluative function. That is, when we prepare eulogies and contemplate over the lives of our friends and family, we often look to these concepts in explaining the value of the recently passed person's life. We explain how that person attempted to achieve these ideals in their life, how they succeeded and why they did not.

(III) I also think the slogan has a political component. That is, a society where one cannot engage in these questions, is one not worth living in.

So, while I agree that many lead worthwhile lives without arriving at well reasoned answers to philosophical questions, I think someone would be hard pressed to say they've led a worthwhile life without ever dealing with these questions.

It is because we use these tools to measure life and to structure our relationships that dealing with these questions in the abstract is valuable. Isn't the assumption of a humanistic education that by encountering these questions in the abstract and learning to better reason with these questions in the abstract, that we may be better able to deal with these questions in the concrete?

[Richard Baron]

I wonder about the word anexetastos (x = xi, vowels epsilon and omicron: I won't risk Greek characters in case they do not show up properly).

In quoting Socrates' prescription, it is standardly translated as "unexamined", with the implication that it is one's own life that needs examining. Liddell and Scott (the big one) gives two meanings, (a) not searched out, not inquired into or examined, (b) without inquiry or investigation, and refers to the line from Apology 38a5 in giving the latter meaning. An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (the Middle Liddell) reinforces the point by giving (a) not inquired into or examined, (b) uninquiring, and again links Plato (without a reference to the Apology) to the latter meaning. On the scope for a verbal adjective to have both active and passive meanings, see Smyth's Greek Grammar, page 157, paragraph 472.

Liddell and Scott's decision to link Plato to (b) and not (a) does not in itself prove anything. I assume that they simply followed the opinion of Plato scholars as to the translation. But if that is a good way to read the text, the prescription looks quite different, and less easily dismissed. It would amount to saying that you should enquire into things and strive to find out the truth about the world. You might yourself be a main object of your enquiry, or you might turn your gaze outwards. Many who do not pursue an academic career might agree that the intellectually slothful life was inappropriate for human beings, even though they would probably not accept Aristotle's view that it is in the life of contemplation that perfect eudaimonia is to be found (Nicomachean Ethics, book 10, section 7).

[Roger Eichorn]

As for whether Socrates meant to imply that the examined life _is_ worth living -- I can't imagine, if the dictum is read in context, there being any question on the matter. Socrates says, essentially: "I'd rather die than stop pestering people with my philosophical questions." Why? "Because the unexamined life is not worth living." Only if he can keep pestering people with his philosophical questions would he want to continue living. The examined life, then, is (it would seem) worth living -- it is, at least for Socrates, the _only_ life worth living.

I think AC asks a good question. Part of my response would involve elaborating on a suggestion of Y's. There's a perfectly reasonable way to interpret 'examination' such that _everyone_ (or near enough) leads an examined life, where 'examined life' seems more or less synonymous with 'human life.' Indeed, some people want to understand the dictum as suggesting nothing more than that "a non-human (presumably: 'merely animal') life is not worth living -- for a human." That may or may not be the case, but it certainly can't be what Socrates meant.

So, to AC, I'd say: Sure, I'd agree that "'you need to have a certain level of self-critical awareness, based on rational investigation, discussion and debate' in order to have a worthwhile and admirable life" -- but I'd read that as amounting to little more than what inevitably transpires in the course of leading a human life. It has little or nothing to do with philosophizing (construed less-than-fully-broadly), and certainly nothing to do with the activities engaged in by professional philosophers today.

[Y. Blum]

But over-analysis of one's own existence can have a debilitating effect on the actual business of getting on with life --working, achieving,interacting with others -- to the point that that existence will lack the flavor and color that would render it of any interest to oneself or to anyone else. Or in other words "the unlived life is not worth examining."

[Kris Kemtrup]

Isn't Socrates saying -in the crudest possible terms- that a.) you can't act morally if you aren't thinking about what you're doing, i.e. living an examimed, contemplative life, and b.) it's always wrong to act immorally, even if moral action leads to your own death.

I don't think it's charitable to interpret Socrates as implying that the lives of animals or the severely mentally handicapped and other beings that can't engage in rigorous contemplation are worthless. Rather, he's saying it's better to die than to not live a moral, contemplative life, when you have the ability to do so.

Imagine that he had said the immoral life is not worth living. Wouldn't we interpret him as saying that acting immorally is worse than dying instead of as saying that beings who can't act morally have worthless lives? To say that the immoral life is not worth living is to say that actively turning away from moral action -when it was possible for you to do so- is worse than death. And so, to say that the unexamined life is not worth living -I would argue- is to say that actively turning away from contemplative life -when it was possible for to live contemplatively- is worse than death.

So I don'tthink Socrates is committed to claiming that those who are too busy or too oppressed or not cognitively gifted in the right way are living worthless lives. Rather, he is claiming that choosing to not aim at living up to your potential of living an examined life is always wrong.

I apologize if I'm rambling, but that is how I see this issue.

[Mark Silcox]

Once suggestion I haven't seen here yet is that the sentence should be understood to apply only to those who truly comprehend it. So if you're clever enough to figure out what criteria of examination would make the Socratic claim plausible, then fail to live up to them in the scrutiny your own life, you really have made a rather hash of it. But if you can't figure this out, then you get a free pass.

[Ralph Wedgwood]

Mehmet Erginel is right. The Greek phrase "ou biôtos" does not have to be translated as "not worth living": it could just as well be translated "not to be lived" or "not as it should be lived".

So the claim that Plato is putting into Socrates' mouth here clearly is every human being ought to lead an examined life -- because if someone's life is unexamined, that life is bound to be suboptimal. But it obviously does not follow that if one's life is unexamined, it would have been better if one had never existed.

It also does not follow that leading an examined life is sufficient for living as one ought to live. Indeed, I am tempted to interpret Socrates as holding that in order to live as one really ought to live, one's self-examination would have to lead one to achieve genuine knowledge of the most fundamental truths of ethics.

Socrates, of course, denies that he has achieved any knowledge of this sort. On my interpretation, then, even Socrates himself is committed to accepting that he has not led the kind of life that is fully "biôtos anthrôpôi" -- fully worth living for a human being; indeed, perhaps no human being ever has lived such a life.

I am not at all sure what the objection to the claims that Socrates makes here is supposed to be. Isn't it highly plausible that no one has ever lived quite how a human life ought to be lived? And isn't it also plausible that such an ideal life would involve knowledge of these ultimate truths?

[Scott Hagaman]

I thought philosophers were supposed to be in the business of interpreting people reasonably and charitably, whenever possible? How facile would it be to accuse Hume of believing that a counterexample to a rule doesn't show that the rule is false? (I'm thinking of the missing shade of blue, here.) How facile would it be to accuse someone who opens the fridge and utters "there's no beer" of expressing a falsehood? (If you have a well-developed semantic theory on which what they'd be expressing is false, I'd probably find that theory absurd, but I'd grant that in such a case this accusation might be asinine but not facile.) I'd think that if anyone deserves to be interpreted with some charity, Socrates and/or Plato are excellent candidates.

Charitably, then, this discussion must be intended to focus upon the question of the truth or falsity of something like a literal (and context-free interpretation, to the extent that's possible) of the English sentence "The unexamined life is not worth living." To answer that question, we'd need to know what the literal interpretation (and context-free interpretation?) of "the examined life" and "the life not worth living" are supposed to be.

The Socratic claim in question can not be read off a sentence or an utterance. If someone wants to claim that what Socrates' expressed was false (or that the Socratic dictum is false), they're welcome to try to defend the claim that the proposition expressed (in Socrates' mouth) by an utterance of the relevant analog of the English sentence "The unexamined life is not worth living" is false. I suppose if they succeeded (and I'm not optimistic), this would be of some mild historical interest at best.

Of course, on the assumption that the best interpretation of a "life not worth living" is something like "a life the world would have been better without", then on no plausible interpretation of "the unexamined life" is "the unexamined life is not worth living" obviously true. (It is not plausible to interpret "the unexamined life" as "a life the world would have been better without".) Of course, I understand David Benatar might have some arguments that are supposed to show that it would be true (though not obviously true), but that's another topic.

[Bennett Gilbert]

Socrates's dictum about the examined life is not well understood if read apart from his use of the Delphic dictum, "Know yourself" ("thyself"). The Delphic sentence Under such joint reading, we'd read the Socratic dictum less literally than many of the commenters here have done. Instead, we'd say the object of Socrates's recommended examination is not "life" or the value of living, but rather an agent's self; and we'd say that the issue is what makes for his and her good life. At Philebus 48d (leaving aside the other 4 or 5 citations of the Delphic dictum in Plato mostly because I've been working on the Philebus and also leaving aside the many, many, many problems in making sense of the Philebus), Socrates commends knowing one's self as the opposite (and presumably therefore the antidote) to not knowing one's self "at all" (medame). This condition of self-ignorance is closely associated with the ridiculous, ludicrous, or absurd (to geloion)(48c).
Socrates says that this condition is a vice of which the paramount instance is falsely thinking one's self to be virtuous (or to excel in virtue) (49a). This leads to wicked actions that we reasonably think will make one's life awful by virtue of the effects of these actions on one's self and others and according to their intrinsic nature. Socrates continues to categorize these results in what follows.
A great deal of the Philebus is devoted to explaining what an examined life is and why and in what senses it is necessary or desirable. Socrates gives a very strong statement of what the examined life consists in at 58c-d ff: it is the employment of the capability within us of living for the sake of the truth itself---a.k.a., honesty.
The larger Platonic claim is that there is something literally unreal and un-life-like about not pursuing the truth as far as one is (ideally) capable of doing. To the degree an agent is not in contact with reality, the agent is a fortiori less alive as a conscious person. Something like this would be a more literal reading of "not 'biotos.'" In 58d and elsewhere in Philebus, Plato uses verbs derived from "ereunao"---to hunt or chase (from which we get "heuristic") to elaborate the notion of the examined life.

[varol akman]

I don't know whether this came up in the earlier comments but what if the examined life turns out to be not worth living either?
This obviously brings to mind the second sentence of Camus in _The Myth of Sisyphus_:
"Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."

[mark lovas]

Socrates (relying upon Plato's account) spent a lot of time talking to people about what was important, what they thought was important, and putting challenging questions to them. His style of conversation was personal and could be confrontational. Often when we read Plato we get the idea that those talking to Socrates really didn't think too much about what they were saying or how they were living. And in that they resemble our public figures and many bosses I have known (while working outside of academia, I hasten to add--oh, well sometimes even within academia....) Moreover, we know that Socrates' style of conversation (again relying on Plato) did not make him popular. But I can't see that two good friends who are conversing without bullshit--- which means the rules of the game allow disagreement and counter-argument or even provoking one another, and allows various conversational styles as well as digressions, but always aiming at getting further understanding, and not having an axe to grind or intending to do damage--- can't be said to be having a Socratic conversation. I suspect that such personal conversation usually only takes place between the very best friends or partners. And I don't see why such conversations should not count as Socratic, even if ordinary folks just don't have as much leisure as Plato or Socrates did--or as much leisure time as professional philosophers. (It is also true, however, that I've been convinced by Terry Penner's rejection of a popular way of understanding Socratic method. (The Death of the so-called “Socratic Elenchus”) As far as the truth of the claim that life is worth nothing without such conversations, well, what do you talk about with those you care most about? What style of conversations does one have with them? And how important are your conversations to the quality of your relationships? In the broad way I am understanding Socratic conversations, they seem to me to fit very well with the contemporary idea that the quality of one's relationships is the most important component of personal happiness. To tell you the truth, I am actually inclined to think one could broaden the idea of a conversation here to allow that when I read certain novels or watch certain movies, I am having a sort of conversation which challenges me the way Socrates might. But, I can't defend that here, and I am sure many will think that is going too far beyond the original question.

[Mark J. Lovas]

As an after- thought, I cannot resist the following--- even if only you, Brian Leiter, will read it: twenty years ago or so when "Belle du jour" was re-released, Catherine Deneuve was interviewed by a popular American presenter. At one point the interviewer asked something like the following: " But aren' t French films boring, slow- moving with too much talking and not enough action?". And C.Deneuve responded something like this: Well, in France we like to talk about what we are doing, and think before we act.... ". So, maybe conversation--- let alone conversations in Socratic style -- are not universally valued.

[Dan Kaufman]

This has always been one of those questions that reveals philosophy's tendency towards the sort of arrogance that is born in impotence.

If you think your life is worth living, what exactly is the force of someone telling you that it isn't? Especially, someone who has no power or authority over you?

Pointless point is, well, pointless.

--Dan Kaufman

[Michael Conboy]

Dan Kaufman:

I think we should remember that in the story Socrates said this not in the first place to tell others what to do, but to explain his life to his accusers -- why he chose to pursue the sort of philosophical life he did (why he could not otherwise) although he knew it opened him to the charge of impiety and eventually death.

It strikes me as a serious mistake to interpret the 'dictum' (a) divorced from that context, including the question of how to reconcile the idea that we are bound by reasons stemming from both morality per se and (on the Athenian conception) morally imperfect gods -- cf. Euthyphro -- and (b) wholly unironically.

On the latter point, I think Kierkegaard had a good one: the whole raison d'être of Socratic irony qua ethical existence seems to be that the question of what life I should lead is, for each person, so personal the idea that you could simply tell someone the answer or order them to live it is manifestly absurd -- one can be questioned, teased, conversed with, whatever, but only as a means to allow one to look and decide oneself. (Which is not of course to say one's decision will necessarily be right.) In brief, rather the opposite of your picture on which the philosopher is gripped by self-satisfied authoritarian delusions.

Now if some people are under such delusions that is of course silly and not in a particularly fun way. But to paint it that way generally, and to put it on Socrates, is also dubious and I think quite unfair.

[Dan Kaufman]

Michael Conboy: Sorry, but I think you're just wrong about this, both historically and in terms of the way that this dictum is commonly understood today.

In context, it is clearly the expression of a variety of Eudaimonism, and implicit in that is a criticism of those who fail to live up to it. Aristotle, in the Ethics, when trying to identify the "purpose" of a human being, dismisses the life of sensibility as "common to beasts of the field," reserving life lived under the jurisdiction of reason as the human ideal. We see a modern variation on this in Mill's argument that the happiness consisting of "higher" pleasures (i.e. pleasures refined by the application of intelligence) is superior to that consisting of "lower" ones: indeed, Mill goes so far as to suggest that an unhappy person who is nonetheless seeking the higher pleasures is of a superior order than a happy person, who pursues the lower ones ("It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied" and all that.) Unsurprisingly--and tellingly--it is this passage and others like that have led many to identify Mill as a Eudaimonist, in the ancient mold, rather than a Utilitarian.

But regardless, I am of the view that the question of what Socrates meant, in the sense of his "speaker meaning," at the time, is far *less* interesting than the way that the question is commonly understood, and there it is even *more* Eudaimonist and hence, implicitly critical, than in its historical context. Read a Peter Singer or Unger, who spend a good amount of time morally browbeating people for acting on their instinctive, emotional, "unexamined" connections to friends, family, and loved ones, rather than on the disinterested Utilitarian calculus that they advocate, and you see the same kind of attitude in yet another form.

To deny that mainline philosophy has historically and consistently held a pretty strict, rationalistic ideal over human beings and human life is simply unsustainable, given the record. Whether Plato, or Descartes, or Kant, or whomever you like, there is a consistent elevation and promotion of the life disciplined by reason and either an implicit or explicit devaluation of the life of spontaneity, instinct, and emotion. To find anyone arguing the other side of the coin, one must look either to the various counter-cultural strands in the history of philosophy or to literature and the fine arts.

--Dan K.

[Michael Conboy]

Hi Dan,

I don't dispute that to put forward a non-trivial view about how one should live is in a sense to criticize those who fail to live that way. Similarly, to put forward a view about how one should believe is to criticize those who fail to believe that way. And yes philosophy obviously does things like that.

In light of your previous comment though, I thought the question was whether such criticisms are arrogant and authoritarian to the point of rubbish. My point for the purposes of that question was that if we think about context, it seems rather salient that here Socrates was very conspicuously on the receiving rather than the giving end of the authoritarian bludgeon. And this might cause us to reflect on just what sort of speech act this really (fictionally) was.

So I think there are tricky interpretive issues here, and honestly I don't have enough time or even adequately settled views to get into it in a lot more detail here. But no, I don't think it will do simply to say, well, Socrates was obviously waxing eudaimonistic there, and in that vein Aristotle had some clearly suspect things to say, to say nothing of Peter Singer etc., therefore... ?

Nor to be honest do I feel the knockdown rhetorical force of "if you think your life is worth living etc.", any more than (to return to the analogy) "if you think you're rational, what exactly is the force of someone telling you that you aren't?" Interesting issues here no doubt; what I fail(ed) to understand is (what I perceived as) your dismissive cum condemnatory tone. But beyond these autobiographical remarks I've nothing else to say.

Michael