The Examined Life

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Jacques-Louis David, "The Death of Socrates"

The unexamined life is not worth living.

—Socrates

And then raising the cup to his lips, quite readily and cheerfully he drank off the poison. Until this indicate virtually of u.s. had been able to command our sorrow; but now when nosotros saw him drinking, and saw also that he had finished the draught, we could no longer agree off, and in spite of myself my ain tears were flowing fast, so that I covered my face and wept, not for him, but at the idea of my own calamity in having to office from such a friend.2

This is Plato'due south version of an eyewitness' account of the last living moments of their instructor Socrates. Socrates was executed in 399 BCE in his hometown of Athens, Greece in the customary way of being given a cup of poison hemlock extract to potable, for the crimes of "corrupting the youth" and "preaching false gods." What he really did was spend his days engaging his fellow citizens in dialogue about anything and everything, but especially focused on questions concerning how we all should live our lives, also equally challenging everyone he met to business relationship for and defend their assumptions nearly how to alive. But his relentless questioning earned him many enemies who preferred that the youth, and everybody else, rest content in the assumption that the best way to live is to seek fame and fortune and endeavor to live the "adept life" that these seem to make possible. Socrates was not convinced and advocated the life of the philosopher, turning away from worldly pursuits and instead reflecting on and critically examining our deepest assumptions and ultimately being willing to admit how fiddling we really know.

Socrates was famous for his maxim that "the unexamined life is not worth living." What he meant by this is that all of us take a responsibility to examine our own behavior and try to effigy out whether or not they are really true. Not doing this is like sleepwalking through life. This might be pleasant but information technology runs the risk of the states devoting our lives to things that don't truly thing, and even worse it leads us to neglect developing our unique capacity equally human beings. Unlike other animals, we can mentally accept a footstep back from what we run across in front of the states and ask, "Should I trust what I see or not?" Likewise with everything we exercise: nosotros tin can examine our own desires, intentions and plans and enquire ourselves, "Should I human action on these or not?" In both cases we are capable of distancing ourselves from the immediate demands of our state of affairs and seeking orientation from some other source – we seek reasons to believe or dubiety what we run into and reasons to follow or resist our urges. This reflective capacity is the source of our strength since it has enabled united states of america to sympathize and manipulate the world around united states of america like no other creature on the planet. Simply, as we can at present run into more clearly than perhaps Socrates could, it also puts us in the uniquely bad-mannered position of having to justify ourselves to our own worst critics, ourselves.

Some other famous, although fictional effigy, who shows the difficulties that our ability to reflect tin can pose is Shakespeare'due south Hamlet. Writing at the dawn of the modernistic era, which saw the expansion of human populations to the current seven and a half billion of us in the span of a few short centuries, and the resulting crowding out of many other life forms, Shakespeare sums up the human being predicament when he has Hamlet say,

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how similar a god! the dazzler of the globe, the paragon of animals! And all the same to me what is this quintessence of dust?

The capacity to reflect is the source of both our godlike "apprehension" and the difficulties we inevitably encounter in figuring out what we should practise with ourselves; our ability to dominate the world nosotros live in and the difficulties we sometimes face in finding a solid sense of purpose and direction. What should nosotros actually practise with our short time here on this planet and why? Should we live our lives co-ordinate to the standard routine, and accumulate more and more stuff, seeking one "peak experience" after another to file abroad in our memories? Or should we look for a higher purpose, whatsoever that might exist? Even though, thankfully, most of the states practice not feel the tension between these two aspects of our ability to reflect on ourselves and our circumstances quite as dramatically every bit Hamlet did, all of us face up this substantially human predicament – being masters of the universe and yet feeling lost at the same time. Every bit we volition be seeing in this text, philosophical ethics is another, much less bloody, way of exploring it. To set the stage for what we will exist up to here I want to offset say a chip more than about our unique reflective capacity and our ability to pay attention to reasons. This was what Socrates had in view when he questioned his fellow Athenians about what they thought was the best style to live. Then I'll plow to a more detailed account of what is distinctive about philosophy in general and philosophical ideals in item.