The claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living" is one of
the more famous from the Western philosophical tradition.
You probably have heard it before.
But if you think about it, getting beyond the familiarity and taking a closer look at it,
I think you might notice that it's pretty controversial.
Notice first of all, that when Socrates says "the unexamined life is not worth living for men",
he's restricting it to the case of men and we might
point out that that seems like a sexist remark,
as in fact it is.
As a matter of fact, Greek society,
at that time, was incredibly sexist.
Women, for the most part,
had a status only slightly higher than that of slaves.
But let's set that aside,
that's an important problem but not a problem that we want to focus on here,
in this course so much.
Let's set that aside for now.
We'll come back to issues of bias and prejudice later on.
For now, let's reformulate
that as just the claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living",
and see whether that's really plausible.
First of all, we want to get clear on what an "examined life" actually would
be for Socrates and his milieu.
As far as I can see,
the "examined life" for Socrates and his friends
was primarily a matter of spending as much time as you could,
engaged in discourse and inquiry about life's most important concepts like justice,
virtue, piety, truth, wisdom, knowledge, and the like.
That is to say, living an "examined life" involves
primarily spending time with yourself or even better with others,
engaging in dialogue, trying to get a better sense of what these concepts come to,
and likewise how we should apply them in our lives.
But if that's right, then "living a life that does not engage in
self-examination" seems like is going to apply to a great,
many people whose lives seem unproblematic in various ways.
For example, we can imagine in
contemporary thought what it would be to live a life that's not worth living.
That life would be one that would involve a lot of suffering,
but that doesn't necessarily mean that all that's missing
is living an "examined life" in Socrates's sense.
What I mean is this, bioethicists,
who study ethics especially as it applies to healthcare,
medical intervention, quality of life issues,
and so on, bioethicists talk about the zero line.
You can imagine cases in which somebody might plausibly
fall below or just spend their entire life below the zero line.
Think about a little baby.
She's born and she has a congenital disease that doctors don't know how to cure.
She never seems to be able to enjoy
any moment of time that she spends by herself or with others.
She always seems to be uncomfortable.
She never seems to engage in social interaction with their parents.
She just seems unhappy.
By no fault of her own, she's just very sick.
Then, perhaps after six months, she passes away.
This life of six months of uninterrupted suffering,
we might feel, is below the zero line in the sense that,
some of us might feel (and I don't need to say that all of us would
feel this way) but you can understand why somebody would feel that,
it would be better if she had never been born.
Suppose that that is a reasonable point of view.
That's an example of somebody,
if that's correct, who lives below the zero line.
Not engaging in self-examination or living an "examined
life" in Socrates's sense seems like a very different kind of thing.
We can imagine many people who don't engage in
self-examination but who live lives that seem perfectly worthwhile.
For example, consider Neera,
who's a campaigner working to protect women from being tricked into human trafficking.
Maybe, she goes around poor villages and tries to let
adolescent girls become aware of the fact that they're in danger
of being tricked by men in slick clothes and slick cars
who make them promises of fancy jobs in the big city.
She tells them, "Look that's a trick.
They'll take your passport. You'll never get it back.
You will essentially become a slave.
Watch out for these guys. Don't be tricked by them.
Stay at home and let's not get
those guys into our town in the first place, if at all possible."
Neera spends all day and all of her energy trying to
help these adolescent girls be protected against this kind of human trafficking.
It seems like a very worthwhile activity,
but she doesn't have time for
examination during the daytime or even after she gets home from work.
She's too tired, she just collapses.
So the idea is that: here's a person who's life seems awfully worthwhile, after all,
she's helping save maybe hundreds of
young women from being tricked into the human trafficking system,
and yet, she does not have time for examining the nature of truth,
justice, knowledge, wisdom as the case maybe.
It seems awfully high-handed for
Socrates to say that Neera does not live a life worth living.
Or imagine someone else who wants to spend all of his effort on trying
to save animals that had been put in so-called kill shelters,
that is, if they're not taken out soon enough,
they will be euthanized.
Suppose this other person spends all of his time,
as much time as he possibly can,
trying to convince potential pet owners to take
these animals out of kill shelters and bring them home so they're not put to death.
It seems like a worthwhile activity,
seems like a viable and noble enterprise, and yet,
he doesn't have time for living an "examined life" in Socrates's sense either.
So it seems awfully high-handed to say that these two individuals are like
the little baby who died after six months of pretty much uninterrupted suffering,
you might understand why she's below the zero line.
But these other two, that they're below the zero line,
seems awfully perhaps elitist,
high-handed, very narrow as a conception of what makes life worthwhile,
what kind of life is worth living.
So we want to see whether we can find an interpretation of what Socrates has to say,
that might be a little bit more expansive,
rather than find that just as an extreme and perhaps very implausible point of view.
