examined lives excerpt intro -...

in troduction

Of all those who start out on philosophy— not those who take it up for

the sake of getting educated when they are young and then

drop it, but those who linger in it for a longer time— most

become quite queer, not to say completely vicious; while the

ones who seem perfectly decent . . . become useless.

—plato, Republic (487c– d)

Q

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Excerpted from EXAMINED LIVES: From Socrates to Nietzsche by James Miller. Published in January 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Copyright © 2011 by James Miller. All rights reserved.

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once upon a time, phi los o phers were ! gures of wonder. " ey

were sometimes objects of derision and the butt of jokes, but

they were more o# en a source of shared inspiration, o$ ering,

through words and deeds, models of wisdom, patterns of conduct, and,

for those who took them seriously, examples to be emulated. Stories about

the great phi los o phers long played a formative role in the culture of the

W est. For Roman writers such as C icero, Seneca, and M arcus A urelius,

one way to mea sure spiritual progress was to compare one’s conduct

with that of Socrates, whom they all considered a paragon of perfect

virtue. Sixteen hundred years later, John Stuart M ill (1806– 1873) simi-

larly learned classical G reek at a tender age in order to read the Socratic

“M emorabilia” of X enophon (fourth century b.c.) and selected Lives of

the Em inent Phi los o phers, as retold by D iogenes Laertius, a G reek fol-

lower of Epicurus who is thought to have lived in the third century a.d.

A part from the absurdly young age at which M ill was forced to de-

vour it, there was nothing unusual about his reading list. U ntil quite re-

cently, those able to read the G reek and Roman classics were routinely

nourished, not just by X enophon and Plato but also by the moral essays

of Seneca and Plutarch, which were ! lled with edifying stories about

the bene! ts and consolations of philosophy. A n educated person was

likely to know something about Socrates, but also about the “Epicurean,”

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6 e x a m ine d l iv e s

the “Stoic,” and the “Skeptic”— philosophical types still of interest to

D avid H ume (1711– 1776), who wrote about each one in his Essays, M oral

and Po liti cal (1741– 1742).

For H ume, as for D iogenes Laertius, each philosophical type was

expressed not only in a doctrine but also in a way of life— a pattern of

conduct exempli! ed in the biographical details recounted by D iogenes

Laertius about such ! gures as Epicurus, the found er of Epicureanism;

Z eno, traditionally regarded as the ! rst Stoic; and Pyrrho, who inaugu-

rated one branch of ancient Skepticism. Besides H ume and M ill, both

K arl M arx (1818– 1883) and Friedrich N ietz sche (1844– 1900)—to take

two equally modern examples— also studied ! e Lives of the Em inent

Phi los o phers. Indeed, both M arx and N ietz sche, while still in their

twenties, wrote scholarly treatises based, in part, on close study of just

this work.

Today, by contrast, most highly educated people, even professional

phi los o phers, know nothing about either D iogenes Laertius or the vast

majority of the ancient phi los o phers whose lives he recounted. In many

schools in many countries, especially the U nited States, the classical

curriculum has been largely abandoned. M odern textbooks generally

scant the lives of phi los o phers, reinforcing the contemporary percep-

tion that philosophy is best understood as a purely technical discipline,

revolving around specialized issues in semantics and logic.

" e typical modern philosopher— the K ant of the Critique of Pure

Reason (1781), say, or the John R awls of A ! eory of Justice (1971)— is

largely identi! ed with his books. It is generally assumed that “philoso-

phy” refers to “the study of the most general and abstract features of

the world and the categories with which we think: mind, matter, rea-

son, proof, truth etc.,” to quote the de! nition o$ ered by the outstand-

ing recent O xford D ictionary of Philosophy. M oreover, in the modern

university, where both K ant and R awls practiced their calling, aspiring

phi los o phers are routinely taught, among other things, that the truth

of a proposition should be evaluated in de pen dently of anything we

may know about the person holding that proposition. A s the phi los o-

pher Seyla Benhabib puts it, “Philosophical theories make claims to

truth that transcend historical and social context. From inside the dis-

cipline, the details of personal lives seem quite irrelevant to under-

standing or evaluating a thinker’s views.”

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introduction 7

Such a principled disregard of ad hominem evidence is a character-

istically modern prejudice of professional phi los o phers. For most G reek

and Roman thinkers from Plato to A ugustine, theorizing was but one

mode of living life philosophically. To Socrates and the countless

classical phi los o phers who tried to follow in his footsteps, the primary

point was not to ratify a certain set of propositions (even when the abil-

ity to de! ne terms and analyze arguments was a constitutive compo-

nent of a school’s teaching), but rather to explore “the kind of person,

the sort of self” that one could elaborate as a result of taking the quest

for wisdom seriously. For G reek and Roman phi los o phers, “philosoph-

ical discourse . . . originates in a choice of life and an existential option—

not vice versa.”

Or, as Socrates puts it in the pages of X enophon’s M em orabilia, “If I

don’t reveal my views in a formal account, I do so by my conduct. D on’t

you think that actions are more reliable evidence than words?”

In ancient G reece and Rome, it was widely assumed that the life of

a phi los o pher would exemplify in practice a speci! c code of conduct

and form of life. A s a result, biographical details were routinely cited in

appraisals of a philosophy’s value. " at Socrates faced death with dig-

nity, for example, was widely regarded as an argument in favor of his

declared views on the conduct of life.

But did Socrates really face death with dignity? H ow can we be con-

! dent that we know the truth about how Socrates actually behaved?

Faced with such questions, the distrust of modern phi los o phers for ad

hominem argument tends to be reinforced by a similarly modern skep-

ticism about the kinds of stories traditionally told about phi los o phers.

C onsider the largest extant compilation of philosophical biogra-

phies, the anthology of D iogenes Laertius. " is work starts with " ales

of M iletus (c. 624– 546 b.c.): “To him belongs the proverb ‘K now thy-

self,’ ” D iogenes Laertius writes with typically nonchalant imprecision,

“which A ntisthenes in his Successions of Phi los o phers attributes to Phe-

monoe, though admitting that it was appropriated by C hilon.” H e de-

scribes " ales as the ! rst absentminded professor: “It is said that once,

when he was taken out of doors by an old woman in order that he might

observe the stars, he fell into a ditch, and his cry for help drew from the

old woman the retort, ‘H ow can you expect to know all about the heav-

ens, " ales, when you cannot even see what is just before your feet?’ ”

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8 e x a m ine d l iv e s

" e work of D iogenes Laertius has long vexed modern scholars. H is

compilation represents an evidently indiscriminate collection of material

from a wide array of sources. D espite its uneven quality, his collection

of maxims, excerpts from poems, and extracts from theoretical treatises

remains a primary source for what little we know today about the doc-

trines held by a great many ancient G reek phi los o phers, from " ales

and H eraclitus (c. 540– 480 b.c.) to Epicurus (341– 270 b.c.). D iogenes’

anecdotes, on the other hand, have o# en been discounted, in part

because he makes no e$ ort to evaluate the quality of his sources, in

part because his biographies are riddled with contradictions, and

in part because some of the stories he recounts simply beggar belief.

" e stories preserved by D iogenes Laertius occupy a twilight zone

between truth and ! ction. From the start— in the Socratic dialogues of

Plato— the life of the phi los o pher was turned into a kind of myth and

treated as a species of poetry, entering into the collective imagination

as a mnemonic condensation, in an exemplary narrative, of what a con-

sidered way of life might mean in practice. Joining a school of philoso-

phy in antiquity o# en involved an e$ ort, in the company of others, to

follow in the footsteps of a consecrated pre de ces sor, hallowed in a set

of consecrated tales. Long before C hristians undertook an “imitation

of C hrist,” Socratics struggled to imitate Socrates; C ynics aimed to live

as austerely as the ! rst C ynic, D iogenes; and Epicureans tried to emu-

late the life led by their eponymous master, Epicurus.

" e telling of tales about spiritual heroes thus played a formative

role in the philosophic schools of antiquity. " e need for such narra-

tives led to the cra# ing of idealized accounts that might enlighten and

edify. In such dramatic dialogues as the A pology, Crito, and Phaedo,

Plato’s picture of Socrates facing death is meant to stir the imagination

and to fortify the resolve of a student setting out on the uncertain path

toward wisdom. A s the classicist A rnaldo M omigliano has put it, Plato

and his peers “experimented in biography, and the experiments were

directed towards capturing the potentialities rather than the realities

of individual lives . . . [Socrates] was not a dead man whose life could

be recounted. H e was the guide to territories as yet unexplored.”

Following in Plato’s footsteps, and experimenting with some of

the earliest known forms in the W est of biography and autobiography, a

number of H ellenistic phi los o phers, including Seneca and Plutarch,

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introduction 9

similarly supposed that a part of their job was to convey precepts by

presenting, in writing, an enchanting portrait of a preceptor: hence,

Plutarch’s lives of the noble G reek and Roman statesmen, and Seneca’s

account of himself in his M oral Letters. To separate what is fact from

what is ! ction in such portraits would be (to borrow a simile from

N ietz sche) like rearranging Beethoven’s Eroica symphony for an en-

semble consisting of two / utes.

But if the quest for wisdom about the self begins with heroic anec-

dotes, it quickly evolves into a search for abstract essences. For numer-

ous G reek and Roman phi los o phers from Plato to A ugustine, one’s true

self is immaterial, immortal, and unchanging. But that is not the end of

the story, since inquiry into the self eventually encounters, and is forced

to acknowledge, the apparently in! nite labyrinth of inner experience.

First in A ugustine (a.d. 354– 430) and then, even more strikingly, in

M ontaigne (1532– 1592), there emerges a new picture of the human being

as a creature in / ux, a pure potentiality for being, uncertainly oriented

toward what had previously been held to be the good, the true, and the

beautiful.

" e transition from ancient to modern modes of living life philo-

sophically was neither sudden nor abrupt. W riting a generation a# er

M ontaigne, D escartes (1596– 1650) could still imagine commissioning

a kind of mythic biography of himself, whereas, less than two hun-

dred years later, Rousseau (1712– 1778) can only imagine composing an

autobiography that is abjectly honest as well as veri! ably true in its

most damning particulars. It should come as no surprise, then, that so

many modern phi los o phers, though still inspired by an older ideal of

philosophy as a way of life, have sought refuge, like K ant, in imper-

sonal modes of theorizing and teaching.

" is sort of academic philosophizing notoriously le# Friedrich N ietz-

sche cold. “I for one prefer reading D iogenes Laertius,” he wrote in 1874.

“" e only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves some-

thing, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it,

has never been taught at universities; all that has ever been taught is a

critique of words by means of other words.”

A century later, M ichel Foucault (1926– 1984) expressed a similar

view. In the winter of 1984, several months before his death, Foucault

devoted his last series of lectures at the C ollège de France to the topic of

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1 0 e x a m ine d l iv e s

parrhesia, or frank speech, in classical antiquity. C ontemplating, as N ietz-

sche had a century before, possible antecedents for his own peculiar

approach to truthfulness, Foucault examined the life of Socrates and—

using evidence gathered by D iogenes Laertius— the far odder life of

D iogenes of Sinope (d. c. 320 b.c.), the archetypal C ynic, who was sto-

ried in antiquity for living in a tub, carry ing a lit lamp in broad day-

light, and telling anybody who asked that “I am looking for a man.”

Foucault of course knew that the lore surrounding a phi los o pher

like D iogenes was no longer taken seriously. But he, like N ietz sche,

decried our modern “negligence” of what he called the “problem” of

the philosophical life. " is problem, he speculated, had gone into

eclipse for two reasons: ! rst, because religious institutions, above all

C hristian monasticism, had absorbed, or (in his words) “con! scated,”

the “theme of the practice of the true life.” A nd, second, “because the

relationship to truth can now be made valid and manifest only in the

form of scienti! c knowledge.”

In passing, Foucault then suggested the potential fruitfulness of

further research on this topic. “It seems to me,” he remarked, “that it

would be interesting to write a history starting from the problem of the

philosophical life, a problem . . . envisaged as a choice which can be

detected both through the events and decisions of a biography, and

through [the elaboration of] the same problem in the interior of a sys-

tem [of thought], and the place which has been given in this system to

the problem of the philosophical life.”

Foucault was not the only twentieth- century ! gure who appreciated

that philosophy could be a way of life and not just a study of the most

general features of the world and the categories in which we think. For ex-

ample, a conception of authenticity informed H eidegger’s Being and Tim e

(1927), just as a horror of bad faith inspired Sartre’s Being and N othing-

ness (1944). Toward the end of that work, Sartre went even further, and

imagined creating a comprehensive biographical and historical ac-

count that might demonstrate how all the apparently haphazard par-

ticulars of a single human being’s life came together to form a

“totality”— a singular and uni! ed character.

A s a graduate student in the history of ideas, and as an activist in

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introduction 1 1

the sixties, I aspired to understand and describe how the broader cur-

rents of social and po liti cal existence informed lived experience, and

hence to show how the po liti cal became personal, and vice versa. M y

interest in these themes was doubtless shaped by my own religious up-

bringing in a Protestant community that claimed to prize telling the

truth about one’s deepest beliefs and inward convictions. Perhaps as a

result, “authenticity” for me has meant an ongoing examination of my

core commitments that would inevitably entail speci! c acts: “H ere I

stand. I can do no other.” Later, when I wrote an account of the A meri-

can N ew Le# of the sixties, I focused in part on how other young radi-

cals sought to achieve personal integrity through po liti cal activism. A nd

when I wrote about M ichel Foucault, I produced a biographical and

historical account of his N ietz schean quest to “become what one is.”

Still, as Foucault himself reminds us, the theme of the philosophical

life, despite its durability, has been challenged since the R e nais sance

and R eformation by the practical achievements of modern physics,

chemistry, and biology, as well as by the rival claims of a growing array

of religious and spiritual traditions that, like Protestantism, stress self-

examination. H ence the problem of the philosophical life: G iven the ob-

vious pragmatic power of applied science, and the equally evident power

of faith- based communities to give meaning to life, why should we

make a special e$ ort to elaborate “our own pondered thoughts,” in re-

sponse to such large questions as “W hat can I know? W hat ought I to

do? W hat may I hope?”

" e twelve biographical sketches of selected phi los o phers from

Socrates to N ietz sche that follow are meant to explore these issues by

writing, as Foucault suggested, a “history starting from the problem of

the philosophical life.” Instead of recounting one life in detail, I recount

a number of lives in brief. A necdotes and human incident / esh out the

phi los o pher under discussion. D istinctive theories are summarized

concisely, even though their nuances and complexities o# en puzzle phi-

los o phers to this day. A nd following the example of such ancient biog-

raphers as Plutarch in his Lives of the N oble G reeks and Rom ans, I am

highly selective, in an e$ ort to epitomize the crux of a character. M y

aim throughout is to convey the arc of a life rather than a digest of doc-

trines and moral maxims.

M odern standards of evidence are acknowledged— I am a historian

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by training, and facts matter to me. But for the ancient phi los o phers

especially, the myths must be acknowledged, too, for such legends long

formed a constitutive part of the W estern philosophical tradition. " at

the lives of many ancient phi los o phers have beggared belief is a cul-

tural fact in its own right: it helps to explain the enduring fascination—

and sometimes the resentment— aroused by spiritual athletes whose

feats (like those of the early C hristian saints) have so o# en seemed be-

yond the pale of possible experience.

" is history properly begins with Socrates and Plato, for it was

Plato in his Socratic dialogues who ! rst gave currency to the word phi-

losophy. In the century a# er the death of Socrates, a distinct, identi! -

able group of “phi los o phers” / ourished for the ! rst time. M onuments

to their memory— busts, statues— were erected in A thens and elsewhere

in the G reek- speaking world. A nd in retrospect, ancient scholars ex-

tended the word phi los o pher to earlier G reek sages.

Some now said that the ! rst phi los o pher had been Pythagoras

(c. 580– 500 b.c.), on the Socratic grounds that he regarded no man as

wise, but god alone. A ristotle, in his M etaphysics, went even further,

applying the term to a broad range of pre- Socratic theorists, from " a-

les to A naxagoras (c. 500– 429 b.c.), on the Socratic grounds that these

thinkers, ! lled with wonder as they were at the ! rst principles behind

all things, “philosophized in order to escape from ignorance.”

H ow a history of the problem of the philosophical life is written

depends in key part on what one takes to be the ambitions of this some-

times neglected tradition. For the purposes of this study, I generally

picked ! gures who sought to follow in Socrates’ footsteps by struggling

to mea sure up to his declared ambition “to live the life of a phi los o pher,

to examine myself and others.”

For Socrates, as for many (though not all) of those who tried to mea-

sure up to his example, this ambition has in some way revolved around

an e$ ort to answer to the gnomic injunction “K now thyself.” (A ristotle,

for one, assumed that this injunction was a key motive for Socrates’ life-

work.)

Of course, what, precisely, the D elphic injunction means— and

what it enjoins— is hardly self- evident, as we learn in Plato: “I am still

unable,” con! des Socrates in the Phaedrus, “to know myself; and it really

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introduction 1 3

seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have under-

stood that.”

M oreover, self- examination, even in antiquity, is only one strand

in the story of philosophy. From the start— in Plato, and again in

A ugustine— the problem of the philosophical life evolves in a compli-

cated relationship between what we today would call “science” and

“religion”— between mathematical logic and mystical revelation in the

case of Plato, between an open- ended quest for wisdom and the trans-

mission of a small number of ! xed dogmas in the case of A ugustine.

" e series of biographies that follows is not comprehensive. It omits

Epicurus and Z eno, Spinoza and H ume, and such twentieth- century

phi los o phers as W ittgenstein, H eidegger, Sartre, and Foucault. But I

believe the twelve ancients and moderns I selected are broadly repre-

sentative. W hile I include some ! gures rarely taken seriously by most

contemporary philosophers— D iogenes, M ontaigne, and Emerson, for

example— I also include several canonic ! gures, notably A ristotle, D es-

cartes, and K ant, whose life’s work helped lead philosophy away from

its classical emphasis on exemplary conduct toward a stress on rigorous

inquiry, and whose biographies therefore raise larger questions about

the relation of philosophy as a way of life to the mainstream discipline

of philosophy as it currently exists in academic institutions around the

world.

W hen Emerson wrote a book of essays on Representative M en, he

began by declaring it “natural to believe in great men”— yet nearly two

hundred years later, such a belief hardly seems natural, and what makes

a character “great” is far from self- evident. W hen N ietz sche a genera-

tion later imagined approaching a philosophical life “to see whether

one can live in accordance with it,” he presumably had in mind an

exemplary— and mythic— character like Socrates. But it is the fate of a

modern phi los o pher like N ietz sche to have le# behind notebooks and

letters, o$ ering detailed evidence of a host of inconsistencies and sin-

gular foibles that make it absurd to ask seriously whether one could

live in accordance with them. A nd it is one consequence of N ietz sche’s

own criticism of C hristian morality that anyone who takes it seriously

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! nds it hard, if not impossible, to credit any one code of conduct as

good for everyone, and therefore worth emulating.

Of course, works of moral edi! cation remain pop u lar, certainly in

the U nited States. Some spiritual and religious manuals promise a con-

temporary reader invaluable lessons in living well, but the essays that

follow can make no such claim. Taken as a whole, these twelve biograph-

ical sketches raise many more questions than they can possibly answer:

If, like Plato, we de! ne philosophy as a quest for wisdom that may

prove unending, then what is the search for wisdom really good for?

W hat is the relation of reason to faith, of philosophy to religion, and

how does the search for wisdom relate to the most exacting forms of

rigorous inquiry and “science”?

Is philosophy best pursued in private or in public? W hat are its im-

plications, if any, for statecra# , for diplomacy, for the conduct of a citi-

zen in a demo cratic society?

A bove all, what is the “self” that so many of these phi los o phers have

sought to know, and how has our conception of the self changed in the

course of history, in part as a result of how successive phi los o phers have

embarked on their quests? Indeed, is self- knowledge even feasible— and,

if so, to what degree? D espite years of painful self- examination, N ietz-

sche famously declared that “we are necessarily strangers to ourselves,

we have to misunderstand ourselves.”

If we seek, shall we ! nd?

H ere, then, are brief lives of a handful of phi los o phers, ancient and

modern: Socrates and Plato, D iogenes and A ristotle, Seneca and A u-

gustine, M ontaigne and D escartes, R ousseau and K ant, Emerson and

N ietz sche. " ey are all men, because philosophy before the twentieth

century was overwhelmingly a vocation reserved for men: a large fact

that has limited the kinds of lives— stubbornly in de pen dent, o# en

unattached, sometimes solitary and sexless— that phi los o phers have

tended to lead. W ithin these common limits, however, there has been

considerable variation. Some phi los o phers were in/ uential ! gures in

their day, while others were marginal; some were revered, while others

provoked scandal and public outrage.

D espite such di$ erences, each of these men prized the pursuit of

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introduction 1 5

wisdom. Each one struggled to live his life according to a deliberately

chosen set of precepts and beliefs, discerned in part through a practice

of self- examination, and expressed in both word and deed. " e life of

each one can therefore teach us something about the quest for self-

knowledge and its limits. A nd as a whole, they can tell us a great deal

about how the nature of philosophy— and the nature of philosophy as a

way of life— has changed over time.

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