Episode 1: “The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living.”

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. This is episode number one with the topic the Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living. My name is Mark Linsenmayer. I'm currently situated in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:21 Seth: I'm Seth Paskin. I'm currently in Austin, Texas.

0:25 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan from Boston, Massachusetts.

0:28 Mark: Let's do the ground rules to be revised for future episodes contingent upon our whims. So this is a philosophy discussion, and the first rule is we do not assume that our audience knows anything about any of this. So we're going to post links to the readings that we talk about, but we're not going to assume that you have read them before you listen. We're not going to assume that you have any background in philosophy whatsoever. The second rule is there will be no, hopefully no gratuitous name dropping. So if one of us has a point to make, we should just make that point instead of saying, well, you'll understand if you go read E.F. stuckey's essay, the Hyperbaric Chamber and Modern Stoicism. The third and last rule. We shall be rigorous and exact in all that we say, except in cases where not doing so seems like it would be more entertaining.

1:08 Seth: Huzzah.

1:10 Mark: So the reading for today that contains the phrase, the unexamined life is not worth living is, of course, the apology by Plato, supposedly a quote of Socrates. Does one of you folks want to start us off by giving a little rundown of what the thing's about?

1:25 Seth: I vote west does that.

1:27 Wes: So this is Socrates speech to his jury, which is basically about 500 people. I think it's 399 BC when this happens. So he's been accused of corrupting the youth and of making the lesser argument seem better and the better arguments seem worse. And, of course, disbelief in the gods and belief in a new spirituality, which is, to use the exact thing he's accused of, which is an odd accusation, which he makes something out of in his speech. There's actually a series of speeches. One is his defense and, I guess, interrogation of some of his accusers. And then there's the speech after sentencing,

2:09 Mark: before they make the decision, then after they vote against him, and then they're still going to vote on the sentence, and then they vote to kill him.

2:16 Wes: Right.

2:16 Mark: And so he talks a little more about that and how excited he's about that prospect.

2:21 Wes: So in the first speech, which is the longest he responds to those charges. Second speech I think is where he's going to, you know, he can propose an alternative sentence and he basically says he would rather be sentenced to death than exiled. And this is where we get the unexamined life is not worth living. So the idea is that he would rather die than stop hanging around in public squares and irritating people, going up to Athenian generals and destroying their arguments and so on and so forth.

2:52 Mark: For those few individuals that have never read any Socrates, the rest of the Platonic dialogues about Socrates are all Socrates going and asking Rube's questions to prove his various points, trapping them into contradicting themselves and so showing that they're all full of crap. And people eventually got fed up with this.

3:10 Seth: Mark, that's kind of a good point to bring up. So Wes kind of described the outline of the text, but the context around it is that, you know, he's in his setting and he's been harassing Athenians for a long time. And he basically does exactly what you say, which is he goes around and he says, well what do you think you know? And they tell him and he goes, well, you know, the truth is you don't actually know what you think you know, right. And they're like grumble, grumble. Well, I guess you're right. And eventually he's brought up on these trumped up charges and this is really kind of a political show trial to just pro forma accuse him of whatever he needs to be accused of so that he can be put to death by the guys who don't like him.

But he is already in his 70s and this is in some sense a day late and a dollar short on the part of these other folks. So there must be some other motivations that were going on.

3:58 Mark: Now do we historically actually know his birth date, know that he was in his 70s or he just says he's old and this is just some traditional thing that they say.

4:05 Wes: This is pretty well verified. He's 70 years old actually during at

4:08 Mark: this trial and the average lifespan is like 22. What is not that that's so vital,

4:14 Wes: but it's not 22 in Athenian Greece. And Socrates himself mentions this, that he wouldn't have much longer left yet.

4:21 Mark: He has two young kids he brings up somewhere in there three kids, one of whom is an adult now and two that are still children. So he was getting some right up toward the end.

4:29 Seth: He started late actually. Wasn't his sexual prowess supposed to be one of legend? I mean he was supposed to be extremely well endowed and have a lot of stamina. I think that was part of the legend as well.

4:39 Mark: I don't know why he didn't use that in his defense.

4:42 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. He was well known as a soldier during the Peloponnesian War and he was known for his stamina. He could drink a lot without getting drunk. He could march for days without getting tired. That's part of the legend as well. Another part of this context. I think he was sort of celebrated in his youth coming back from the war. But then imagine someone who becomes sort of a bum. He's known to neglect his affairs. His wife is always complaining. I think there's a scene in the subsequent dialogue when he's about to die where she's berating him or something.

So he doesn't make any money, he doesn't provide for his children. And he's going around, he's walking up to the most powerful people in Athenian society and more than even just arguing with them, demolishing their ego in front of a set of groupies, which is the whole corrupting the youth charge. Because there is a pack of young people who are admiring him and imitating him. In fact, Plato, I think is one of them and there are some others mentioned at the trial. The other context here is that he's often thought of as a sophist. Of course, he's highly critical of the sophists in most of his dialogues.

And there's a very anti sophisticated climate at the time.

5:50 Seth: Maybe since we're assuming that people that are listening to this don't know, maybe we should explain what a sophist is.

5:55 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

5:56 Seth: A sophist, I guess at one point had a kind of academic meaning as a teacher of rhetoric, but basically it came to take on a negative meaning, as did rhetoric in general in that same context. Because it was thought that rhetoricians would just use language and tricks of wordplay and reasoning to confuse people and confound them. So that's essentially what he's accused of is being a rhetorician and not whatever the alternative to that would be a speaker of truth or a truth thinker or an improver educator perhaps would be the alternative.

6:28 Wes: I always think of them as like the self help gurus of the ancient world because they went around selling their services. And the interest in sending your kid to a Sophist to study was to make him someone who's going to be successful in politics, for instance, or otherwise successful, someone who is going to become wealthy, which was an idea that was offensive to Socrates, of course. But, you know, very painfully for him, I think he was thought of as one of those hucksters going around selling a sort of spiritual snake.

6:56 Seth: I think another bit of context that's worth mentioning is that he claims to be doing this all at the direction of the God. And I know there was always a lot of controversy and debate about what deity that was intended there. But he's really referring, I think, to the oracle. Right. But one of the things I noticed when I was reading through it again is that he says that he was never told what to do. He was kind of told more what not to do. So kind of getting into the text, I was struck by one in my old man guys. Now, as opposed to my youthful philosophy student guys, I thought, man, this guy's really obnoxious.

I think I thought he was like a champion back in the day. And I was reading this and I was like, God, what an obnoxious guy. And the other thing is just that there's so much about gods and deities and almost heresy and yet divinely motivated action in here that. That just kind of surprised and interested

7:44 Mark: me particularly because, you know, his central claim is that we don't know anything. At least I know I don't know anything except that I know that I'm directed by the gods to do exactly what I'm doing. And so I'm entirely confident that I should be doing this stuff instead of supporting my family and being civil to people.

8:00 Wes: Right. You wonder to what extent he believes that sort of thing. But on the other hand, if he's gonna go to his death for his principles, it's hard to say what he believes because of, in other dialogues, the equation of everything within mythology. I don't think he's opposed to the sort of parable or the.

8:16 Seth: Let's explore that point a little bit more about. Because that's really kind of one of the central pieces about him saying, I know that I don't know anything, except, you know, there seem to be a number of exceptions to that rule. So, Mark, can you reiterate that point? He said, I know that I don't know anything.

8:31 Mark: That's one of the central things we want to discuss. I'm distracted here by. You're talking about him being a sophist. And there's one argument in particular in here that I thought was particularly ridiculous. This is 25c ish or so. But he's talking about the charge that he's been corrupting people intentionally. Unless you just buy that it's just Impossible to corrupt anybody intentionally. Then this argument is a little silly. So he's asking, is it better to live in a good or a bad community? It's better to live in a good community. Is there anybody who prefers being harmed rather than benefited by his associates?

Is anybody who prefers to be harmed? No. Well, then you summoned me before this court for corrupting the young and making their characters worse. Do you mean that I do so intentionally or unintentionally? Intentionally. You've discovered that bad people always had a bad effect and good people always have a good effect on their nearest neighbors. This is some ridiculous thing that he earlier thinks he's established. Am I so hopelessly ignorant as to not even realize that by spoiling the character of one of my companions, I shall run the risk of getting some harm from him because nothing else would make me commit this grave offense intentionally?

No, I do not believe it, Meletus, and I do not suppose that anyone else does. Either I have not a bad influence or it is unintentional. In either case, your accusation is false. So in other words, if you corrupt someone, you'll be part of a society in which the corrupted are with you. There's a chance that they would hurt you. So therefore, nobody ever corrupts anybody intentionally unless they're just not thinking clearly about it. So you like that?

9:47 Wes: No. And it's not unique to the apology. It's a sort of one of those Platonic themes. No man knowingly does evil.

9:53 Mark: That's a great example of the thing Wes was trying to get me to talk about, which, for instance, he says somewhere that a lesser man can do no harm to a greater man.

10:01 Seth: Okay, so I didn't like that piece at all.

10:06 Mark: That's just a point of faith. Like, it's a definition of this quality of people.

10:10 Seth: I think that kind of brings up the point about what kind of knowing and knowledge and corruption. There's. Virtue is kind of tied to the concept of knowledge in all of this, right. That the key is you can know things. But I think he says, when he talks about the artisans, he says, I talk to poets and then I talk to artisans. And the artisans knew a lot of stuff about their craft, but they didn't know a lot of stuff about higher things, but they supposed that they did. So he basically said, oh, well, if you know how to make a table, that's good.

But making a table isn't a higher order thing. It can't corrupt or influence or improve another person. It's just making a table. But a lot of table makers think they know a lot of stuff about corrupting and improving people because they make tables. And I just showed them that they were wrong. And I'm like, well, at least they can make a table, man. I mean, what can you do? This guy can't do anything but that.

11:01 Wes: I think most of us recoil at the idea that bumming around and not supporting your wife and kids and then as Mark pointed out, that's the highest kind of life to live. That's something to think about. And then Mark's pointing out too that you could find a few thousand throughout the whole dialogues, just bad arguments by Socrates. It might be beside the point. You know, many of the dialogues themselves are unsatisfying. He's talking to people and that he's getting yes or no answers. And then the other thing, just to mention, just on this theme that Mark brought up is in a way, he's a notorious liar because he says things like, I'm not a clever speaker and I'm just going to say things that randomly come into my head.

But of course, he is a very clever speaker. Call that false modesty. So if you are going to bum around and talk to people, you have to bring up the quality of the kinds of arguments he's making, which I don't think it's an open and shut case.

11:52 Mark: But I think he's also an intentional martyr. By the end, it's clear that he could have, by being a little nicer to the audience, you know, had them vote him not guilty or at least give him a sentence less than death, and he charges in full throttle to saying, I mean, he has some arguments of why, well, death is probably not so bad and we don't really know. And it's arrogant to even think that, you know, death is bad. We can talk about that in a minute. But he presents himself as somebody who is with, again with this false modesty that, you know, I'm not doing this for personal aggrandizement.

I don't pursue this kind of life because I enjoy it. I'm doing this all for you. And when clearly he's trying to make himself a martyr. And he even says that if you kill me, then you're gonna have all my students who I've been holding back until this point, bugging you just as much. And I'm just gonna rule the world. Essentially, my philosophy, if you take me out individually, do you think that's his aim there or am I looking too far into it?

12:41 Seth: I guess there's kind of a vein of Threat. Although I imagine the tone of the conversation being more like, well, you know, if you get rid of me, you're just gonna open the floodgates, right? You should keep me around because at least it's keeping all these other people quiet. But I think the thing that's most interesting is not whether or not the arguments are good or bad or correct. It's the point is that he thinks that doing this is the right thing to do. That he's got this divine commitment to the state and to the people or the body politic or the community, the leaders, the youth, whatever, to go around and basically put everybody through these exercises in order to either a get to some point where you finally arrive on a truth that can't be refuted and you get to that higher level of knowledge or.

But because he believes the process itself is how you get to virtue, that that is in itself virtuous. And that's the thing that I just find shocking and interesting. You know, you try to imagine that today somebody said, you know what? In order to make this a better place to live, I think what I'm going to have to do is attend all these city council meetings and just stand up and anytime anybody talks about land development or clean water or light rail or anything like that, I'm just gonna grill em until they're confused six ways to Sunday.

13:56 Mark: Do you know what light rail is really? Why are you even alive?

14:02 Wes: Sit down until you're put into a mental institution, which is probably what would happen today.

14:07 Seth: Maybe things were different back at that time and that type of activity would engender something positive, but it just. I found it amusing rereading it. That's kind of the impression I got.

14:15 Mark: You fellows claim you're on a podcast.

14:18 Wes: What?

14:18 Mark: Do you even know what a podcast is? Give me a goddamn definition of a podcast or else you can't even talk.

14:24 Wes: Well, I think so now that we've reconvicted him of his crimes. First of all, there's this idea that he knows only that he knows nothing, which is awesome. Actually something very foundational to philosophy. So for instance, one of the things he's accused of is delving into everything. What is it under the earth and in the heavens. So he's being accused of being a natural philosopher, say in the spirit of. Well, he mentions, I think, Anaxagoras, you know, saying, I'm Anaxagoras. He says he has nothing to do with those things.

14:58 Mark: Who actually put forward a theory of cosmology. Yes, right.

15:02 Wes: He's not interested in Being a scientist and establishing facts about the external world. So in a way it's very definitive of what it means to be a philosopher, because it's a critical activity. And the idea is that you can do all this stuff reflectively. And it's a pretty radical idea too, because at a time when you're explaining things not just in terms of gods, but air and earth and fire, and sort of an initial attempt at explaining things in terms of natural causes, in one sense it's a very modest claim to say that I know nothing. On the other hand, you can write volumes about what you don't know.

In the sense of there's a very rich, expansive world of the subject and what it means to be a subject and identity and then virtue in a way, even the idea of virtue, that's nothing in the sense of it's not a tangible thing outside of us. So in one sense you have this very modest claim. And in another sense, any philosophical knowledge amounts to knowledge of, let's say, nothing.

16:02 Seth: This is a new activity and it's a novel new way of thinking, new way of approaching things where he's looking for truth someplace different than in the gods, in natural philosophy, in poetry, in rhetoric and so forth. And he's undertaking an activity which is extremely unusual in a sense, kind of creating a space for this type of reflective philosophical thought that heretofore had not existed.

16:28 Wes: Very good, Seth. I'm just going to have you repackage

16:34 Seth: which reminds me of Critique of Practical Reason. No.

16:39 Mark: So taking us then to the central point, the stated topic of the podcast, which is not actually Plato. I wanted us to talk about Socrates a little bit and have the freedom to talk about individual things that annoy us in the reading. But ultimately the philosophical meat here are these couple of key ideas, one of which was the epistemological point, I.e. theory of knowledge that you guys were talking about, of maybe we don't know anything. But the other point is this. The unexamined life is not worth living. So let's maybe first deal with that in the narrow sense that he proposes it.

So he thinks this specific, not just any sort of reflection on yourself and thinking about stuff, but this specific sort of self critique and ripping down your fundamental assumptions in the way that he does is necessary. It's not just a good idea, but is it's not even worth being alive unless you do that. So the hordes of people who have not heard him, doesn't it follow from that are leading useless lives unless they've independently come up with the same thing.

17:35 Wes: Well, Obama's actually building FEMA camps for those people.

17:40 Seth: Let's read the whole sentence that that comes from because I think there's a little bit more meat on that that'll make this a more productive discussion. So go ahead. I say again that daily to discourse about virtue and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others is the greatest good of man and that the unexamined life is not worth living. Sort of one of the first questions is, you know, okay, the daily discourse about virtue and other things. So to undertake this activity itself is the greatest good. But I don't think it's implied in that that it's the only good. Nor is it implied that you do it to the exclusion of all other things like he did.

18:18 Mark: I think it does imply that it's a necessary activity, that unless you know what the good is, you can't be doing the good consistently. You might stumble across it. So it's vaguely possible, but he's certainly never run into anybody that he thinks that's the case.

18:31 Seth: True, But I think what I'm hearing him say is you need to undertake the activity of examining what you believe or examining what other people tell you. And you need to do that regularly. And if you don't do that, then I think actually it gets to your central point, which is people who don't do that, it's not worth them living, which I'm not 100% sure I agree with at this point.

18:51 Mark: That could be one of the things Wes was talking about in terms of the exaggerations for dramatic effect.

18:56 Wes: No, there are lots of people who really believe that. Not for the unexamined, just the right wingers. Have you heard that rumor? This is something my dad believes and it's one of these right wing things floating around that fema, Obama's having FEMA build camps, concentration camps, to put conservatives

19:12 Mark: to help them reflect upon their lives.

19:14 Seth: Let's operate on the assumption, let's modernize this just a bit. Right. In the sense that let's try to abstract from the context that didn't the Athenians still have slaves at this time?

19:24 Mark: Sure.

19:25 Seth: Right. So there were probably people who could afford to spend all day examining their lives if they wanted to, including Plato. But in today's day and age, obviously people are preoccupied. You have much more of a, well, we have a different kind of society, let's just put it that way. So if he just says hey, every day, or at least every other day. Right. Some sort of regular basis, you should meet with like minded people and discuss virtue, good action, politics, art and so on. Hopefully with the goal of getting to some sort of truth, whatever that may mean. And when we finally, 16 episodes down, get to Heidegger, you and I can, we can talk about that. If you don't take the time to do that, or if you don't do that, then you need to re examine whether or not you're actually alive or that your life is worth living.

20:18 Mark: That's interesting because even someone like myself who was into this enough to be in grad school for way too long when I started going out with my wife, as is the case with most new relationships, you talk about things a lot and you talk about philosophical things a lot. And I noticed the amount of philosophy involved in the talking has gone down a great deal. And it's not just because I'm not reading it as much or at all on my own. It's because when they do come up, like, well, we've kind of covered that ground before. Like we've, we've thought it through enough to have reached whatever conclusions we're going to reach. So unless we're talking about, you know, specifically, like what do you think about parents who lock their kids in their car? Like what? You know, unless there's a specific practical problem for us to deal with, then there seems to be no point. Is that just me?

21:03 Seth: I don't know. I mean, there's no point if you're trying to get to a point, right?

21:08 Mark: Yeah, but that's what he's trying to get. Say, unless what he's saying is just you have to examine it at some point in your life, which what you were just saying is, no, this has to be a regular thing where you sort of renew yourself. I can certainly see the value of thinking about some stuff and thinking about the state of your life on a regular basis, but sort of exploring, I wouldn't call it a search for virtue.

21:29 Wes: You know, maybe we should also talk about in that context, what would motivate us to do this podcast and have this type of conversation. I think you're talking about, on the one hand, the pragmatic decisions that we have to make in life. And we, you know, unlike Socrates, we've made that choice to tend to our own affairs, let's say, or waste our

21:48 Mark: free time on other things.

21:49 Wes: Right, exactly. Tend to the Internet and to the web, surfing.

21:53 Mark: Pretty much anybody that does not Twitter or Facebook every day, their life is not worth living.

22:00 Wes: Exactly.

22:00 Seth: Then you need to drive. You need to drive down here and kill me right now. LinkedIn is about as connected as I'm able to be at this point. But no, I think so. Wes, you're making a point about practical peace. And then something else also.

22:11 Wes: One thing that occurs to me is that, interestingly enough, the youth that he's accused of corrupting haven't really gone down. Plato, who I count as one of them and a few other people, are actually men of means, and they actually supported him. They were his underwriters, let's say. So someone has to tend to the affairs of state, at least at the political level. But again, Plato, of course, was interested in all this stuff, but he never became apolitical, let's say, like Socrates, he didn't just give up all his money and decide to live in poverty. So that's another interesting dynamic.

22:43 Mark: Let's just make another clarification for the completely uninitiated. The author of our reading is Plato, of course, but he writes, you don't think this is necessary.

22:53 Seth: Somebody needs this. Absolutely necessary.

22:56 Mark: Somebody needs this. But he's writing about his teacher, Socrates. So these are supposedly things he overheard Socrates talk about. But it's clear with Plato's later writings, which this is not one of them that he's not. Even though he uses the character of Socrates, he's not giving Socrates philosophy anymore. So in Plato's scholarship, there's this whole division between the early dialogues and, you know, what Socrates actually said, and there are even other ones of his students that wrote other Socratic dialogues that are not nearly as famous versus the later Plato things, which are probably just more Plato talking about himself.

23:25 Wes: There's obviously a conflict between. The political version of this is pacifism. So you have the contemplative life versus tending to all one's affairs. And then there's the question of the political version, which is pacifism versus defending oneself and one's family. The question is how far you go. And isn't it crazy for someone to say that the mere act of being contemplative is the best thing in life? You know, Conan the Barbarian would say it's Br. Genghis Khan crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, and so on and so on.

23:59 Mark: Well, in the Platonic dialogue of Conan,

24:01 Wes: is that name dropping too? We can't do any popular culture.

24:04 Seth: No, absolutely. You can drop popular culture reference. Believe me, there will definitely be name dropping at that point.

24:10 Mark: The more obscure popular culture reference, the better.

24:13 Wes: Oh, come on.

24:14 Seth: So, Wes, I think you're, you know, I'm trying to follow up on that point a little bit. That, you know, I guess whether you believe there's an ideal form of a horse or just a bunch of specific horses that don't participate in that form. And this, by the way, is a very abstruse reference to those of you who don't get it. But the point being that, you know, you still have to cook dinner every night, that there's a certain amount of practical action that's necessary every day to move the world forward for people to continue to live. And I guess the kind of tension that I feel in this particular dialogue, and you don't see it as much in some of the other works, right, where they're sitting around drinking and talking, and it's kind of like, oh, you know, they're kind of doing life and chatting at the same time.

But this thing really sets up an opposition. It draws kind of a stark line between the extreme of Socrates saying, I'm just going to wander around, neglect everything, and spend all my time thinking about how I can't come to a definitive truth about anything. And kind of the people who might be interested in doing that for like a half an hour and then have to get back to work. I guess what I'm saying is that I think the activity has value. And I think the extreme of saying the unexamined life is not worth living, I think is maybe a bit extreme.

But I found that in my life I've been able to take the process itself that comes from examination and discourse and so forth, and apply it to all kinds of topics. The problem is that at the end, what I'm going for is not absolute truth, but instead some kind of what I would call pragmatic state where you can impel action or move forward. Right? What I mean by that is it doesn't really matter whether ultimately you're right or wrong about the thing you're discussing, as long as you get to a point where you can make an acceptable decision about what correct action to do or what action to move forward with.

And that's where it all separates for me.

26:05 Wes: I said this to someone recently. I really only want to do things that are useless. Which seems like an odd thing to say. Whereas when I was in grad school, when we were together at the University of Texas, studying this stuff, I was tormented by the idea that this was all bullshit and it was totally impractical and it was completely pointless. I knew I was attracted to it, but I knew also that there was no prestige to be gained from it, no money. And that in some sense it was pointless that you weren't going to answer any of these questions. And of course, Socrates himself doesn't seem to think that in this lifetime you're going to answer any of these questions.

You're just going to go about confirming your own ignorance. On the other hand, we could talk about all sorts of pragmatic consequences. And that's the kinds of things that they try to use to lure undergraduates into liberal arts program.

26:58 Mark: You'll be able to write clearly, you'll

27:00 Wes: be able to simply go into business. A business program. Yeah. You'll gain analytical skills and you'll.

27:05 Mark: Law schools love you if you do this.

27:07 Wes: Yeah. Logical critical thinking skills and writing and all that. One component, we could talk about the pure pleasure of, let's say, the contemplative life. Although I don't think that would be enough for Socrates. It's not a matter of. I think, Seth, your idea of the pragmatic and the practical is actually quite relevant. Or it's more relevant to Socrates thinking because he's thinking about what it means to lead a good life. Although again, there's that tension between, you know, whether it leads you to make practical decisions or whether just being contemplative, the activity of thinking about what the good life is, is the good life in a sort of weird, paradoxical way.

One other thing we might mention is, if anything, the more modern version of attempts at the examine life, which is something that a lot of people do, which is going to therapy, where the idea is that there's going to be some sort of. I guess it's reframed in terms of the idea of health, which is our sort of modern idea of what it means to be virtuous.

28:02 Seth: I think that's really interesting, Wes, I didn't realize you were sort of tortured and so challenged.

28:08 Wes: I'm glad it wasn't obvious.

28:09 Mark: Well, did you think this was useful while you were doing it?

28:12 Seth: Actually, I mean, I always wanted to do this. I mean, I never had any desires to do anything else. Although when I was an undergraduate, I'll admit I had transferred from one school to another, and philosophy had the fewest number of required hours in order for me to get my degree. So for me to graduate in four years, it was like one of the few majors I could have picked. But I also at the time thought I was kind of an arrogant, obnoxious prick. And it seemed like it was well suited for that kind of temperament, which turned out to be true. But I always thought that the activity of studying philosophy in the process was valuable.

And I guess to some sense, I held the bias. I mean, I was very much sympathetic to this Socratic character back in the day because I thought, well, you can talk to somebody. I always had this idea that philosophy kind of started off as everything, and they kept carving off small pieces of it and turned them into sciences. Right. So you start here, you see natural sciences and then the other kinds of sciences and psychiatry and linguistics in the 19th and 20th century. And I felt like philosophy was somehow the original. Well, that still asked the really critical, fundamental questions.

But the problem was that it seemed to me you kept getting to points where there was no way to resolve the decision about was it A or was it B? If you get down to a certain level when you're talking about, all you can do is refer to the argument and the assumptions. And to some extent, some people will agree with one, some people will agree with another, and you get stuck at an impasse. And that what I found is that the judicious application of that process and reasoning to what you might call more practical matters has made me extremely effective in my life and in my professional role.

And it's the reason that I tell everybody to not go to business school and to get a liberal arts education.

29:53 Wes: Yeah, absolutely.

29:54 Seth: Is Precisely because you learn how to discriminate arguments and facts from opinions and beliefs and poor inference and all that. And as long as you're able to apply that to a wide variety of things, you'll be very successful. But to get back to Wes's point about sort of therapy being the current version of the examined life, the difference is that two things. One is it's true in the sense that it's discourse. And this has been kind of a recent revelation for me about the importance of discourse and dialogue in terms of creating identity and relationships between people and so forth.

But the thing about therapy is that it's very centered on the individual. You don't go into therapy to talk about the nature of truth or objects or the characteristics of objects and what you can know and can't know and so on. So I still think there's that gap. There isn't a public forum or a kind of standardized one on one kind of forum to have the examined life in this day and age.

30:50 Mark: So how can we get people to pay us a hundred dollars an hour to come in and engage in the examined life? That is, as qualified philosophical therapists, actually, there are.

31:01 Wes: Did you know that there is an association? And all you need is a master's degree in Philosophy, huh? I'm serious.

31:07 Seth: Yeah, I remember exploring that a little bit when I was away back when.

31:10 Wes: Yeah, me too. And then I fel dirty and ashamed of myself.

31:13 Mark: You can get rid of your engrams

31:14 Seth: and become a clear.

31:15 Mark: If you do this, that is a Dianetics reference for those.

31:20 Wes: You know, I had a dream about Dianetics last night.

31:23 Seth: But anyway, one way that people could do it is, you know, there are a lot of very educated and intelligent and interesting people who are, say, teaching at community colleges nearby. The opportunity is there. The question is, how do you motivate people to find a forum to do this activity? Right, right.

31:43 Wes: I wanted to address both of those threads, Seth. The idea that it's helped me professionally, I've definitely felt that. But also not just in the sense of being able to be a clear thinker, let's say. But also there's a certain. You're bombarded with a tremendous amount of bullshit these days with management speak and all those sorts of things. And people take very seriously a lot of stupid ideas. You know, they'll read marketing books and the dao of marketing and this and that. And I feel like I at least have been able to see through some of that in a way that not everyone does.

32:16 Mark: It is likely that most philosophy people are happily immune to that kind of stuff, but that doesn't mean it's in any way necessary. I feel like most of the bullshit that comes our way, for instance, politically, like, come on, if you've got half a brain and you read a little bit, you can figure out what's going on. Not in depth in terms of what should we do to fix the economy right now? And crap like, in terms of just when you're blatantly being told a pack of lies.

32:41 Wes: Right. The other thing is the whole therapy issue, I think it is very different. The sort of classes I've taken at this psychoanalytic institute, some of them are, quote, unquote, process oriented, which means students. It's like group therapy to some extent. And it's also like a class. And it becomes a big excuse for people not doing readings and not ever discussing readings. And some of the readings are very, very abstract. And you want to focus on, let's say, the emotional, which is what you're trying to get to in the analytic situation or when you're in therapy.

So it's a different kind of. Yeah, I didn't want to conflate those two. It's a different idea of the kind of truth that you're getting to because it's more about the emotional experience and the relationship and the analyst than it is about. They're related in the sense, again, of this idea of what it means to be virtuous and what it means to live a good life.

33:35 Mark: You guys both gave your kind of origin story. So let me do the equivalent, which is I started in philosophy out of sort of a religious quest for knowledge of the idea, very much like Plato has, that you can't do the right thing unless you know what the right thing is. And you can't know what the right thing is until you have a conception of what the right thing means, right? You have to do metaethics before you could do ethics. And before you do that, you have to know metaphysics, right? So that you have to know whether there's a God or not who's going to be telling you to do stuff, or if there is no God that is not telling you to do stuff, then is there any sense in which you should do anything or not?

I really, you know, had this very like, we have to answer the basic metaphysical questions about the structure of the universe and stuff before we can even figure out what job to pick. And I. And so I was very firmly convinced, for instance, that every adult that I had any contact with was fundamentally clueless, because surely they had not discovered these profound things and so chosen their shitty job at being a cafeteria lunch lady or whatever, or being a business person with the requisite reflection. And so I pursued this, and I did enough philosophy.

I know that certainly in religious matters and other matters, you get to a point where you can't convince other people. I think that's what Seth was saying in terms of you can't establish things past a certain point in a lot of these purely philosophical, as opposed to scientific disciplines. But I got to a point where I could convince myself. I figured out how likely I thought the various things were. And so by the middle of college or so I'd figured out, done my spiritual journey far enough, reached my end point. It's refined a little bit over the years, but, you know, I had gotten most of what I wanted to get out of that for that.

Well, at that point, it just. Well, doing philosophy and reading more about these things and arguing these things is kind of fun. And I like learning about science without having to learn too many of the details of science. Actually having to, like, learn anatomy at the level of a physician would be painful and awful to me. But, you know, learning to the extent that I was in my biopsychology class, where you Learn, you know, roughly what the areas of the brain are and what they're supposed to do. But I don't have to do any experiments on this, you know, so it was a nice way in a lot of different sciences, to be a dilettante.

Eventually, through grad school, you know, I came to appreciate this. Even the scholarship, the fetishizing of these dead people, as I was talking about it before, of becoming a fan of Kant in the same way you'd become a fan of a band or an author or something, which is where it gets really weird and strange to those not in the profession, but then leaving the profession, you know, okay, I have some good perspective on how weird it was, but I also see that it's probably a much more pleasant way to spend your time than most things other people have to do with their day.

And of course, there are all these byproducts that you were talking about of being able to write and communicate clearly and use all these things for other jobs that I've been able to do since then. But I don't know that that's translated into making more mature decisions about my life or. I certainly find, as I was kind of alluding to before, like, philosophical discussions not that useful in resolving most of the everyday arguments, say, in figuring out what to do from day to day with my wife, with my family. You know, in fact, it's more engaging in this kind of being too into this.

Seems like you're being selfish, like you're doing what Socrates was doing. Which I gotta say, if the dude is again choosing death over giving a damn that his two children are going to grow up without a dad or whatever. And clearly it's been the case that he's been neglecting them on a daily basis forever, as great men think they have the right to do for their entire lives. Just seems entirely confused.

37:17 Wes: You could ask whether the withdrawal is really pathological, because in one sense, it's like, I don't want to have anything to do with the real world. And again, Socrates says, I have nothing to do with these things. Meaning, like you said, science and politics mark the natural sciences. It reminds me of a professor once said of philosophy professor who said, you know, how did I end up in philosophy? Well, I tried other things. You know, I tried the scientists, but I had to go into a laboratory and titrate and do, you know, pour stuff in the beakers and tried other things. He was a boxer, and he said, finally I got to philosophy and all I needed was a pen and paper. And then he said, and that's when I knew. So he called it a form of laziness, which I thought was an interesting description.

37:57 Mark: One of the excuses, at least I was making to myself at the time when I was not working on my dissertation, when I was supposed to be, was that, you know, if only it were 20 years from now and everything was on the Internet because I could not stand like just hanging out at the philosophy library so much, looking at all these things.

38:13 Seth: You got to the point where the examining was now fun instead of necessary, and that you had family and a life and those things were more important. And that you see Socrates as this 70 year old guy saying, I'd rather die than see my kids grow up again.

38:29 Wes: Back to this interesting question of whether obviously living the examined life in the philosophical sense, it's not going to make you saner, it's not going to get rid of your alcoholism. Sometimes I felt, wandering around the halls of the philosophy department there, I thought I was in an insane asylum sometimes. Then at the political level, obviously it's not going to get rid of evil. Germany had a great philosophical tradition. It was at its cultural heights right before the Nazis took over. I mean, that's sort of the preeminent example of that kind of disappointing relationship between intellectual life, let's say, and virtue or the political. And then personally I had this experience with St. John's which was sort of, now I call it a Heideggerian cult.

39:13 Mark: St. John's is where Wes went to school and when I was in grad school with him, he was talking about his undergrad experience with St. John's with reverence, like every five minutes and how awesome it is.

39:22 Wes: Exactly.

39:22 Mark: Now actually my brother in law works there and also says it's awesome.

39:25 Wes: So it is awesome. And maybe this is my attempt to get over not being able to become a professor there, but there are disappointing elements in the sense that it's wonderful, the idea of being sort of insulated from the world in the way that you are at St. John's even more so than the ordinary ivory tower experience,

39:43 Mark: St. John's features small classes. So everybody knows each other, everybody takes everything together. It's a great book centered program and it's all based on discussion. So the professors, what are they actually called?

39:55 Wes: Tutors.

39:55 Mark: Tutors stay out of the way and, you know, guide things when necessary, but really expect the participants to come up with discussion on the various readings and musical scores and other things that they go into on their own. And Wes thought this was far superior to anything that we were involved in when at the University of Texas as teaching assistants and such.

40:15 Wes: That's a long time ago, man. So, yeah, that kind of environment at St. John's but the other element of it, the reason why I call it a Heideggerian cult, is because you treated every text with this mystical reverence. It was not good in some ways. It was hard to be productive. It was hard to write about these things or, you know, when you had this sort of fear and trembling induced by awe about all of it.

40:39 Seth: Okay, I'm just gonna say that I count that as a name drop, by the way. Fear and trembling.

40:44 Mark: Don't talk about Marty Heidegger that way.

40:47 Wes: The disappointment comes when I go back and I talk to professors there now, and I feel the sort of. They say, what are you doing? Oh, communications consultant. And you feel. You see this sort of look of disappointment and feel the disdain.

41:01 Seth: You know what? Fuck them. I saw our former chair of the philosophy department in, like, Lowe's not too long ago. That guy had to buy paneling to fix his house, just like everybody.

41:11 Wes: Yeah. And I think the other part of it is the political part, which is St. John's is sort of the darling of the conservative educational movement. And even though it's not like the people there are. It's not like right wingers are attracted to the school, but there's enough association. And I saw some of my younger siblings went to St. John's as well. When one of them was graduating. They had this right winger give this ridiculous speech. And I thought, you know, these people here are really clueless. This disengagement from the political is dangerous. So far from. This is my point. Far from leading to better decisions, whether personally or politically, this idea of retreating can actually make it worse. So that's the overall point.

41:51 Seth: I feel strongly that I need to say something here about this. Right. The first thing is let's take note of the fact that Socrates was not working from any texts. And I totally agree with you. Like, there's a certain kind of guilty pleasure in revering a text that way. And that's something that's not Heideggerian in me. But it's Jewish, right? That there's this Jewish reverence for the text and hermeneutics and kind of the rabbinical pouring over of the same words over and over again to kind of extract meaning out of it.

42:17 Wes: You really want to say maimonidean, don't you?

42:22 Seth: I feel bad enough that I use the word rabbinic.

42:25 Mark: It's almost Tolkienesque.

42:28 Seth: But his Point is, right, it's about discourse. So there's a certain level at which what he's saying is the examined life is an interaction. It's an active dialogue with another person or with multiple people. And so, in essence, this is a very strong political statement about a democratic engagement of people and individuals and ideas and so forth, and kind of a healthy, open debate and dialogue. Right? So I think that's part of it. And I agree with you that reverence for the text. It's a fetish that can be fun, right? There are fetishes that are okay, but when it becomes imbued with a certain amount of value, that then turns the people that do it into arrogant pricks. That's a problem. That's a big problem.

43:12 Mark: Why is that a problem? I like arrogant pricks. Arrogant pricks make the world go round.

43:17 Seth: It's a problem when Wes goes back to campus and gets treated poorly, let's put it that way.

43:21 Wes: Or when I show up at UT and I'm an arrogant prick.

43:26 Mark: You know, I should say, in defense of St. John's at least in my brother in law who works there, that he is taking a sabbatical and in his time off, he is a communication consultant with us at the same job that we have that Wes has. So not all St. John's profs think that way.

43:39 Seth: And this is the thing. So what happened to the fact that, you know, Socrates was a soldier, right? You have later on, like, the concept of, like, say, a Renaissance man, somebody who can do a little bit of everything, who's able to engage in this kind of activity, but can also milk a cow and run a business and, I don't know, fortify a castle. There's something about positioning this kind of activity against other kinds of activity or to the exclusion of other kinds of activity that I just find inherently problematic and that I can buy into an idea that this is an essential part of a fulfilling, full life and that people who never take the time to engage another human being in order to have a dialogue about things, and then you can have the discussion about what sorts of things should you be dialoguing about?

That's a whole nother level. But people who don't do that, I can say, yes, if you have no productive, active engagement about meaningful subject matter with other people, then there is something severely missing in your life. I would never say something as dramatic as it's not worth living because that's. I don't think that's fair.

44:36 Mark: I will go farther than that to say that I Do like the idea of trying to fundamentally evaluate your basic assumptions about everything. I taught philosophy at a community college a few times over the past few years, and then before that was a teaching assistant. And a lot of the people there. So, okay, so they're for one class, even if it's a required class. They are engaging in this reflective behavior. But it's so clear that even if they're going through the motions and trying to argue some of this stuff, which was rare enough but, you know, did happen, that the amount of people who would check their assumptions at the door, even if you can't ultimately do that, but just try to make some kind of fundamental.

And this was an ethics class that I was teaching at the community college. For the most part, it was a matter of, okay, maybe I'll jump through some of these hoops and read some of these guys that you're asking me and maybe learn some new arguments for particular points, maybe even change my mind about some particular issue, though that was again, very rare. The idea of fundamentally questioning any of your assumptions is just foreign to most folks. And I think it makes you. I'll say it makes you a better person to have done that at some point, even if it's just pretend.

And we really can't fundamentally question a lot of, you know, the very basic stuff that goes on in any meaningful way. And as soon as you leave the classroom, then the reality of the assumptions that you have in you about what is reality and what is the good and all that kind of stuff just seeps back in. At least going through that pretend experience is hugely valuable, I would say, and makes you a much more interesting person to be around.

46:02 Wes: And yet, just to play devil's advocate here, we all know lots of clever people or brilliant people who could we say they're better people for being brilliant. Sometimes they're worse people.

46:14 Seth: Let me make the argument in favor of my theory about engagement with other people too. Right? I mean, I've had this experience, so I don't have kids. And Mark, you do. And Wes, I think you said you don't. So there's a sense in which a lot of times you find people who have families or who have kids who are able to. Let me back up for a second. The big deal management speak kind of cliches in the business world is it used to be called work life balance. They changed it to work life effectiveness because you don't want to balance work and life because you spend more time at work than you do in life. If you subtract Sleeping. So they didn't want to suggest that you just only spent four hours a day at work or whatever it was,

46:55 Mark: which is the correct response, frankly.

46:57 Seth: But I used to kill myself for my job and had no sense of perspective, right? And then I'd see people who had kids and it was like, eh, you know, this is a paycheck, blah, blah, blah. I've got these other things. And I always kind of sort of envied them and said, geez, you know, people that really have a sense of what's important and perspective and all that. And you can kind of imagine the circumstance of, like, when you have a family, to some extent, you're kind of forced into this dialogic relationship with this other human being that forces you to examine things.

And then what I mean by that is you may think that your children are going to turn out a certain way and you may try to shape and educate and train them, but they're going to teach you things and make you see the world in a way you didn't think you would. And then more importantly, when they get older, they're going to challenge a lot of the things that every parent of a standard heterosexual monogamous relationship that has a child who's gay has to ask themselves some tough questions, right? It's not about the nature of matter or being or essence or identity, but, you know, it comes up, right?

And then you have people like me, you know, I'm involved in community activities, and one of them is an organization here in Austin that helps offenders reintegrate into the community, right? And so it's this constant when I'm telling the mission of my organization to other people or I'm trying to get them to spend money on us or whatever. I have to convince people that individuals can change and that societal influences and I have to challenge their assumptions, if they have any at all. A lot of people don't. This came up in a subject recently.

I had a conversation with a very good friend of mine about the death penalty. And he was like, well, I guess I'm kind of for it, but I don't really think about it every day. It doesn't affect my life. It's not something that's present in my life, but in my context now, this is a really central theme like virtue and that sort of thing. And so it's important for me to get people to examine their assumptions about that particular thing. What I kind of learned was he was open to the idea. He's somebody who I consider to be very reflective. But it's not something that came up every day.

He wasn't devoting energy every day to kind of examining that particular thing. So I think there are ways in which you can do this and there are contexts and experiences and so forth in which this happens. And a lot of them seem to have to do with just being around and exposed to a diversity of people that have different sorts of experiences. And if I take anything away from the text, you know, bring it back to that, it's. Unfortunately, it was a very small, enclosed community and he was kind of focused on. He had a very rhetorical style that was very aggressive and confrontational.

But I mean, that's essentially what he's doing, right? It's like, how much more interesting would this Socratic dialogues be if you did get to see some of these other types of people talk about their positions and work through their assumptions and so forth.

49:36 Wes: I was just thinking how great you are, how much you've been improved by self examination. Yeah, go ahead, Mark.

49:43 Mark: I guess my assumption was for a long time, you know, this is where the challenge that academics are liberally biased and all that stuff. Some of it, I think, comes from the idea that if you're doing any sort of contemplation, then of course you're willing to question cultural traditions and so that makes you a liberal right then and there. So if you're thinking, I don't want to go into a political rant here, I'm sure we'll do that in other podcasts, but. But I think one of our aims here should not be to completely alienate folks of the conservative persuasion.

But it at least was my experience to a certain point that anybody who I considered a thinker at all would be fundamentally liberal in some basic ways. That doesn't mean on every issue or anything. But then, hey, you run across somebody who's like, you know, a guy in the undergrad philosophy department who's an orthodox Jew and he's extremely reflective and does all the same sorts of self reflection and aggressive social evaluating of fundamental assumptions, but yet seems to have, I guess, to put it unkindly, the way I put it when I was thinking of this particular case, that he had the answers already spelled out in advance to a lot of stuff I feel charitable of now to say that I think there are some very conservative people or people who end up going with the traditional mores.

Maybe not for the same reasons, or maybe that's because the traditional folks don't often give reasons that most people buy them but end up in a Very conservative position, yet are very thoughtful and at least try to the same extent that I do to question these fundamental assumptions. They just find that logically it leads them back to where they were.

51:16 Wes: Just to give the flip side of that. See, I wonder how many people even of my political persuasion are really that reflective about it. For those people who, for instance, you know, say, agree that gay marriage should

51:28 Mark: be legal or sure, go with that,

51:31 Wes: or share other political views that I have, I think, you know, I doubt that many of them have really thought about it. That's its own dogma. And then here's another story. When I went to some protests against the Iraq war right before it happened in 2003, and I honestly felt uncomfortable because I felt uncomfortable with the simplistic slogans on signs. I think there was a feeling of holier than thou ness among people. So my general experience is that even for liberals, I don't think often there's a lot of dogma and positions aren't necessarily thought through.

52:04 Seth: What I'm hearing you saying is kind of a combination of the two of you is that whatever your political persuasion, our kind of feeling as a group here is that you have to be willing to ask the question of anything. Like if there are certain areas that are off limits, that that's problematic. Even if you end up coming back to those positions, that's okay. But at some point in time, you have to at least be willing to call those into question. If you're going to go through the process.

52:27 Mark: Just to throw out an example that we're not going to talk about in the concept of human rights, philosophically is actually a really shaky, you know, where do these rights come from? How are they written in the universe? It's something that begs to be discussed philosophically. You know, I'm not saying that we shouldn't pursue a political course that agrees with a lot of what people make as human rights claims, but to really find out whether human rights are going to apply in a specific case or not, you'd have to be much more self reflective about the fundamental concept of what they are.

52:54 Wes: Yeah. And I think you may not find any real foundation there. So at bottom it may just be, I think especially with regard to political and moral values, you have basic foundational premises there that you believe and you can't justify. But I think in the case of more complex decisions. So for instance, when I was in Maine building wooden boats and it was kind of a hippie commune that I was living at, and despite being very liberal, I felt this instinct to be devil's advocate, because I felt people were very unreflective. And I also felt like you would get in big trouble if you questioned the dogma.

And I felt very conflicted about the Iraq war because that was actually, it was something. I had kept track of Iraq since the 1992 war, and I knew that sanctions had a terrible effect. And I thought, well, maybe it is better to get rid of Hussein. In the end, I ended up opposing it and going to protests. But when I brought up that point, of course it was taboo and it was something that people, I was quickly associated with. Oh, you're all about the Iraq war now.

53:56 Mark: At the rally, when west jumped on stage and started screaming to the 4,000

54:00 Wes: people support our troops,

54:05 Mark: started trying to have a Socratic dialogue with them. Didn't go over well.

54:09 Wes: Just to bring it back to the psychological side of this is, you know, one might say, well, people are really driven by something more fundamental than anything that can be tackled by reasoning about things. So whether you want to talk about unconscious wishes or basic instincts and those sorts of things. So the question is, how much does being able to engage in those dialogues help with that?

54:35 Mark: But anyway, how much does self reflection actually get you?

54:37 Seth: No, I think there's a bunch of really interesting points in there. And one is, is the topic key? Like, in other words, is examining and being reflective and having dialogue, does it really depend on what the thing's about? And then the other question is in terms of individual human capacity for doing this. To talk about your example, the Iraq war, right. What if I just said, look, I'm not smart enough and I don't have enough time and I don't have access to enough information to come up with a strong reasoned position. But 20 people I know are on this side who I respect and who I know do the research and think through it.

And so if they say it's okay, that's good enough for me, right? Sort of. It's almost like proxy, you've sort of said, well, by default I'm doing the reasoning because I'm trusting somebody who I know does the reasoning. Right. And I think part of the assertion here is that that's not okay. Like, you need to go through the process yourself, right? That's kind of part of the assumption. But the other thing is it's got to be about something that's important. Whether or not there are primary or secondary attributes doesn't matter that much of things, Right.

You know, like taste, feel, are those primary or secondary? Sorry, that's a Reference that I apologize

55:47 Wes: for that, but I'm all for it.

55:49 Seth: But talking about virtue and right and wrong action is worth it. There's a certain extent to which we have to kind of take that into account. When you talk about this in terms of things like certain kinds of economic plans and certain other things where I have authoritative sources that I trust and I go and I read what they have to say and I don't research the issues myself and I have to kind of take a stand there.

56:12 Wes: I was just about to bring that up because it's with the whole bank bailout thing, for instance, there's simply no way to know. And even if I think we were very educated economists, there's no way to say for sure what the right thing to do. For instance, in this recently with the economic downturn, whether or not to give AIG billions of dollars and so on and so forth. I can say that reading people who I respected, writers, the New York Times, let's say, or economists that I heard of before, the fact that they opposed it influenced me. So all I could say was, well, I really don't know.

But based on this little information, I can say that I didn't think it was necessarily a good idea to give all the banks this money and then I'm pro nationalizing the banks and so on and so forth. Now, of course, some people, you'll see, will act like it's a sure thing, right? Oh, it's a disgrace to have given all that money and it's big rip off. So maybe that's one value, the ability to say, I think, Seth, this is your point, that be able to say really fundamentally, I don't know.

57:11 Mark: So you let the politicians make the decisions for you and you're a passive sheep because you say, I don't really know.

57:16 Seth: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm talking about aligning yourself with people who theoretically have the characteristics and the access to information that you wish you had. But it begs the question, right, that maybe part of the process requires that you have somebody who can articulate all the issues that are involved and all the complex things that are involved. Because this is one of the things, right? When Socrates is having these conversations just to get back to this kind of concept of dialogue and all that, he's always able to come up with a perfect analogy.

It's like, well, if you were a horse trainer, would you shoe the horse or would you let the horse run without shoes? And you're like, oh, right, I see how that explains the AIG Bailout. There's always this way of kind of relating things and. But somebody has to understand the thing in the first place in order to be able to make the analogy.

58:00 Mark: Don't you have to understand it to see whether it's a good analogy or not?

58:03 Seth: I suppose that's probably true, yeah. I still feel like maybe there's a subset of topics that somehow relate to this concept of good and right action and virtue and all that, that really are a candidate for the examination. And like, all right, if you don't examine what the bailout is, that's not part of the unexamined life. That doesn't put you in that category. But if you never ask yourself what the right way is to treat another human being, then you definitely have issues. I feel like there's gotta be some criteria there.

58:30 Wes: I was just about to say something similar, Seth. It's interesting because, yeah, we're talking about political decisions, for instance, when Socrates himself said, well, I don't have anything to do with politics and I don't have anything to do with the natural sciences, let's say. And those are areas where the data has to come from outside oneself. And it's always the question of the reliability, whether it's of the people you trust or, in a way, and it's something we can never be certain about. Whereas again, for Socrates, it's the armchair element.

It's this idea that you have immediate access to one's own psyche and you can be reflective and that there's information there that purely by reflecting, you can figure out, or at least not figure out, but at least address the question of what it means to be a good human being. It seems natural, though, to ask about political questions and questions of personal virtue, because if we don't get to the point of action, then what does it mean to talk about being a good human being? Do you see what I'm saying? On the one hand, Socrates seems to have cordoned himself off from the idea of action, and on the other hand, it's hard to say what it means to be a good human being unless you figure out a way for knowledge to be applied.

59:43 Mark: He seems to have no problem translating, in his personal case, in the excuses he gives for conduct, his principles of virtue, however unstated they may be. He just describes them as sort of a tinge on his conscience. It's the gods telling him, stopping him from doing inappropriate things. He doesn't seem to have any problem translating those things to action. Whether you can say that stems out of his philosophy, I Think that's the implication is that, you know, it's not just that he's this special, touched by an angel, touched by the oracle into doing the right thing, that it's because of his contemplation that he has this conscience that is pulling at him and telling him what to not do.

So it's like you were saying that politics, you have to know particulars, but as an armchair philosophy, you can figure out he thinks the general. And I'm pulling on Plato makes this much more explicit. Plato, he thinks he's maybe giving conclusions that Socrates might agree with. But Socrates definitely didn't seem to, as far as the scholars are concerned, go into in the things he actually said. So Plato has much broader cosmological ideas and theories about politics and ethics in general. It's not just that we have access to our own thoughts and our, you know, to reflect upon our own emotions, that we have access to these universals, that we can figure out the ideal of something.

So the ideal for action is something we can all sit back and contemplate. And if we contemplate closely enough, and in this, the dialogue element doesn't even seem to have to be present in this sort of view. This is where Plato is compared to mystics and things that if you kind of get back far enough, this is why Plato's writing survived through the Middle Ages, when everybody in Europe was Christian, is that they could see that, you know, if you just sort of shut up and let society stop telling you what to do, then we can all sit back and see God's perfection and reflect upon that as a way of getting principles and deriving action from that mark.

1:01:30 Seth: That's a really good point. I mean, I think we're going to end up, you know, assuming this perpetuates itself and we end up doing this more often, is that this kind of theme between this kind of reflective thought and kind of principled action, the connection, if any, and what is just going to come up over and over again? It's like this actually might be one of the key issues about the examined or unexamined life is what's the point of doing it? Can you actually get to the point where you can infer or accept or realize or believe or trust some kind of virtuous action by going through this process. And yet at the same time, you have to go through it, because you can't simply assume that what other people tell you or what you learn or what you read in a book or what society tells you is right action that you should go do either.

1:02:18 Wes: Yeah. And Mark, I actually have a different reading of this. You know, when he talks about being told what not to do by the God, which in fact is one of the charges against him, he's impious because he talks about this daimon that tells him what to do elsewhere. He compares that to be, you know, the poets being inspired. And he calls it a form of madness. And so I think oddly, and you know, like a very typical irony, here he is talking about the importance of self examination. When he is driven in his own behavior, he claims to be driven in his own behavior by something ultimately this voice in his head. So I think there is, to go back to Seth's point, this question that's going to come up over and over again about contemplation versus action.

1:03:06 Mark: The voice in his tells him he should obey his principles instead of selling them out to get himself off the hook. I don't know that it gives him what the principles are.

1:03:16 Wes: When he's about to do something, it just says no. And he talks about, you know, he got through the whole speech without the voice telling him no. That's the only way he knows it's not because he's thought about some principle

1:03:26 Mark: and applied it in the dialogue. He says, should you be willing to die or do the right thing? If it's a question of doing the right thing or dying, what should you do? Of course you should do the right thing. So right there, you know what, I take this is going along with some principle he's come up with, which I guess I don't see if he's come across this abstract principle, for instance, that the unexamined life is not worth living, right? So that he needs to do philosophy. It's not just a personal urge that he should. He definitely thinks everybody else should be doing this.

I would say he holds this as a principle. Even if he says he doesn't know anything. This is one of the principles he holds. This is where I think, I'm sure I will make this point in many a discussion where ethics goes astray really in being ethics at all. Like, do you need principles in order to do the right thing at all? I mean, you might want to not call it the right thing. But it seems pretty clearly the arrogance that people have that philosophers have that like, well, unless you've gone through the philosophical of getting in the philosopher's voice sounds like Comic Book Guy's voice.

Unless you've done the philosophical life, then you don't know your ass from the hole in the ground. And so you're not going to be doing the right thing. There's a conceit there when actually being too contemplative maybe gets you attracted to these abstract principles that make you do very stupid things. So I would say from the modern perspective, what he is doing here and choosing to make himself a martyr is really stupid. What he's doing here in neglecting his family is really obviously wrong. If I'm a good family man, that is not because I have the principles of family.

I believe in the principles of family. No, it's just because I am not an asshole. Why do you need a principle there at all?

1:05:04 Seth: I'm trying to decide between just laughing hysterically and trying to, like, put some sort of, like, contact sort of grasp around this.

1:05:11 Wes: But you're about to do a defense.

1:05:12 Mark: You can call me full of shit. That's okay.

1:05:14 Seth: No, no, quite the opposite. It's almost like you could say, look, Plato does not have the capacity for love, and you do. And that's really kind of the fatal flaw. But I think what I realized is, in your experience with people who were not in academia or not in philosophical academia or what have you, they have no concept of the arrogance of philosophers and the arrogance of sort of academic philosophers like we do. I feel like we're all carrying around this, like, rage, and we're just spewing against Socrates in this time because he represents every department chair or professor who gave us a B or whatever, because he exhibits the arrogance of the intellectual that you might say nowadays.

But the truth is, everybody who knows me that I came in contact with in kind of a standard business sense, when I tell them I study philosophy, they're all like, ooh, yeah, I took a philosophy class when I was a freshman. It was really hard. They have this kind of reverence for the activity, but they feel like they aren't up to it. Or I had to learn a trade. I had to learn something practical because I had to make money. In essence, you almost feel like what they're saying is, man, I wish that I was in a situation where I could have spent time thinking about things and just thinking about things.

I really envy you, that luxury. But I had to go take accounting or I had to be a business major. And that's kind of what gets back to this whole thing about, oh, well, gee, it's lucky that the Athenians had slaves and there was this privileged class and all that was that you had the luxury to do that. And so there's kind of the sense in which you say, like, can we abstract this concept and generalize it to say that it is good for everybody to go through this process at least a little bit sometime here and there and doses and what have you, or

1:06:56 Mark: devote ourselves to creating robot slaves so we can be in that position.

1:07:01 Seth: I was going to say something about Facebook and Twitter and all those things. Technology making our lives worse and taking up more of our time. Instead of making it easier, you make robots.

1:07:08 Mark: Send out your Twitters for you.

1:07:10 Wes: My confession is that I actually, despite having played devil's advocate and despite all my bitterness towards academia, I admire Socrates and I admire the position and his arrogance. Although it definitely came across when I read the dialogue. And again, I didn't think it. I felt that way when I had read it in graduate school. Despite all that, I admire him and I really empathize with the desire to retreat from the world and do things of no practical value whatsoever. And again, with this very pure idea that the contemplative life is for its own sake, is the best sort of life.

It's not because it's going to lead to better decisions about anything, but it's because when you're doing it at that moment, you're most human. Let's say, as arrogant as all of this sounds, and I felt that way, especially at St. John's it's a quasi. And here we get to the mysticism. It can be a quasi religious experience. So there, I said it.

1:08:11 Seth: I totally get what you're saying, but I think the key that I keep coming back to is he is not talking about the contemplative life. I mean, he didn't retreat from the world. He retreated from things. He did not retreat from people.

1:08:24 Wes: True. That's a good point.

1:08:26 Seth: When you talk about that, I think of. Who was it? Diogenes, the guy who lived in a jar buried in the ground, you know, and had the beggar's bowl and like that. And I used to. Really. Speaking of admiring, I mean, I used to think that I always wanted to run through the streets holding a lantern looking for, you know, an honest man.

1:08:42 Wes: Well, I'm still talking about talking to other people, but of course, I would never go around talking to military people. Yeah, you know, it's funny because Mark, your depiction of him, and that's the way he was depicted. Ironically, he talks about Aristophanes depiction of him in The Clouds. He's completely. I don't know if you guys have. This isn't name dropping because it's mentioned in the dialogue, but if you read that you know, it depicts him as the stereotype of the philosopher who's looking up at the stars and so steps in the pothole. This absent minded professor who's thinking about absurd things like how many angels can fit on the head of a needle and so on and so forth. It's that, I mean, I think we all have that. This sort of visceral reaction against the impracticality of it.

1:09:26 Mark: I like those people. That's all right.

1:09:28 Wes: And also interesting, you know, and then Aristophanes was actually a friend of Socrates and they would have dinner together and shoot the shit. So I don't know.

1:09:36 Mark: Orgies. Was he in the orgies together?

1:09:38 Seth: He was probably too old.

1:09:40 Wes: Yeah. Socrates taste for younger, younger men.

1:09:44 Seth: And I think it's telling though that he contrasts himself against that. I mean, I really think he's trying to create something here that's radically different. I'll make that point. I'm done talking about how the importance of interaction with people.

1:09:56 Mark: All right. When we start to repeat ourselves, then I think that means that we've pretty much wrapped it up. Closing statements. Mine. Socrates good. In the abstract, but probably a bastard.

1:10:09 Wes: Wes, is this like the McLaughlin Group? Sum, sum up.

1:10:14 Mark: Wes, sum up.

1:10:17 Wes: Socrates good. I don't know. The sum up for me is I. I'm torn. I think the best life is just thinking about being conflicted about what the best life is. So I'm torn about, I think this question of the. Again, I think of it as the contemplative life or the life of. Even if it means walking around the streets of Athens talking to people versus supporting one's wife and kids or, well, supporting one's kids and being practical, that I'm continued to be torn by the relative value of those things.

1:10:53 Mark: Seth, closing thoughts.

1:10:55 Seth: Closing thoughts.

1:10:56 Wes: Sorry, cut most of that out.

1:10:57 Mark: I'm just gonna. I'm gonna change it so it just says Socrates good. And then I'm gonna cut out everything out of that.

1:11:03 Seth: I feel very strongly that the exercise that he's advocating in this dialogue is critical. But I also feel very strongly that the ability to function effectively in the world and not be wholly unbalanced on the side of that is also important. You know, it's kind of unfortunate that the reason we looked at this particular text was because of that phrase, the unexamined life is not worth living, which lots of people know. But there's so many other dialogues where they're actually treating a specific subject that I think are so much more thought provoking for the reader. And you know, Maybe we can talk

1:11:37 Mark: about those on another.

1:11:39 Seth: No, no, I agree, I agree. I think what I'm saying is that the context in this particular dialogue is that, you know, it assumes a lot and it does fire up all of these emotions in us because it's a trial and there's, there's all these other things going on. So I'm going to say if Mark says bastard and Wes says good, I'm going to shrug my shoulders like an Italian, wave my hands and go, eh, little bit of both.

1:12:05 Mark: I think that means I could care less.

1:12:07 Seth: No, no, no, no, no. I a somewhat ambivalent position and say I think there's good, I think there's bad and be the great mediator.

1:12:16 Wes: The real question is, did you cry at the end?

1:12:20 Seth: No,

1:12:22 Wes: I got a little teary eye.

1:12:24 Mark: I cried because it was over and I wanted to read more of it.

1:12:26 Seth: He's not a sympathetic character under any circumstances. I don't think even Wes, you would agree with that, wouldn't you?

1:12:32 Wes: Yeah, you know, I felt that. I didn't think he was very sympathetic. But there's something sad about. And Plato took this to heart and took it as evidence of some of the deficiencies of democracy. But there's something sad about putting to death of the gadfly because in a way it's symbolic of the putting to death of one's own doubts and clinging to the gods, the state sanctioned gods. There was definitely a feeling of melancholy as well.

1:13:01 Mark: I have a quote here that I think is the best quote in here that you should use this really before you say anything in a group. Group and by dog. Gentlemen, for I must be frank with you, my honest impression was this. That's all. It's actually just always say that it's

1:13:16 Wes: often translated as by dog.

1:13:17 Seth: Yeah, that's what I remember it as.

1:13:19 Wes: Common phrase.

1:13:20 Mark: The translation I'm looking at says by dog.

1:13:24 Wes: No, that's the publicly available translation.

1:13:28 Mark: All right.

1:13:29 Wes: I think it's great because the talk of gods and then that's the oath to swear by by the dog.

1:13:34 Mark: So we're gonna have a website listed in the podcast description because I have not paid for the URL yet, but I will start a Facebook group for the partially Examined life. So that will be a place that people can go and actually, you know, have discussions with us if we deign to look at it or with each other if we do not, and tell us how full of crap we are. Next podcasts topic. If folks want to right now, start reading something to be prepared for our next discussion are we going to go with? Descartes? Meditations?

1:14:04 Seth: Yes, Descartes.

1:14:06 Mark: First and Second Meditations.

1:14:08 Wes: Great.

1:14:09 Mark: Okay, here's the closing music,

1:14:25 Seth: Sam.