Socrates · Philosophy
Socrates’s conviction that the unexamined life is not worth living - that the care of the soul, through relentless self-examination, is the most important task of a human being.
Carved over the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi was the famous command: Know thyself. Socrates made this ancient injunction the very centre of his philosophy. Where earlier thinkers had turned their attention outward, to the nature of the cosmos, the stars, the elements, Socrates turned philosophy inward and downward, to the human soul and the human life - to the questions of how we should live, what we should value, what makes a person good. He was less interested in the composition of the heavens than in the composition of a good character; less concerned with what the world is made of than with how a human being ought to live. This was a revolution in the focus of philosophy - the ‘Socratic turn’ from cosmology to ethics, from the study of nature to the examination of the self and the question of how to live well - and it placed self-knowledge at the heart of the philosophical life.
At the heart of Socrates’s ethics is the conviction that the most important thing in human life is the care of the soul - the cultivation of one’s character, the pursuit of virtue and wisdom, the becoming of a good person. Compared to this, the things people usually chase - wealth, power, reputation, bodily pleasure, even health and life itself - are of far lesser importance. Socrates relentlessly urged his fellow Athenians to redirect their concern: to care less for their possessions and reputations and more for the state of their souls, less for having and more for being, less for the externals of life and more for its inner quality and goodness. The soul, for Socrates, is the true self, the seat of our character and our capacity for virtue and wisdom, and its good - being just, wise, and good - is the true good of a human being, beside which all external goods are secondary. To neglect the soul while pursuing wealth and fame is to have one’s priorities exactly backwards, to care for the lesser and neglect the greater.
Socrates held his conviction about the examined life so deeply that he chose death rather than abandon it. At his trial, offered the chance to save his life by giving up philosophy - by agreeing to stop questioning, examining, and pursuing wisdom - he refused absolutely, declaring that he could not stop, that he would obey the god rather than the court, and that a life without examination would not, for him, be worth living. He valued the examined life, the care of the soul, the pursuit of wisdom, more than life itself; faced with the choice between living unexamined and dying examined, he chose to die. This is the ultimate measure of how seriously Socrates took his conviction: not as a fine sentiment but as the very meaning and worth of human existence, more precious than life. He would rather die as a philosopher, having lived the examined life to the end, than live on having betrayed it - and in choosing so, he gave the examined life its most powerful possible endorsement.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Socrates’s conviction that the examined life - the relentless care of the soul - is the only life worth living. Two thousand years later, Montaigne made self-examination the whole subject of his writing. State how Montaigne carried the project forward.
Leads to Michel de Montaigne.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.