Examined Lives_ From Socrates to Nietzsc - By James S. Miller Page 0,2

Letters. To separate what is fact from what is fiction in such portraits would be (to borrow a simile from Nietzsche) like rearranging Beethoven’s Eroica symphony for an ensemble consisting of two flutes.

But if the quest for wisdom about the self begins with heroic anecdotes, it quickly evolves into a search for abstract essences. For numerous Greek and Roman philosophers from Plato to Augustine, 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 infinite labyrinth of inner experience. First in Augustine (A.D. 354–430) and then, even more strikingly, in Montaigne (1532–1592), there emerges a new picture of the human being as a creature in flux, a pure potentiality for being, uncertainly oriented toward what had previously been held to be the good, the true, and the beautiful.

The transition from ancient to modern modes of living life philosophically was neither sudden nor abrupt. Writing a generation after Montaigne, Descartes (1596–1650) could still imagine commissioning a kind of mythic biography of himself, whereas, less than two hundred years later, Rousseau (1712–1778) can only imagine composing an autobiography that is abjectly honest as well as verifiably true in its most damning particulars. It should come as no surprise, then, that so many modern philosophers, though still inspired by an older ideal of philosophy as a way of life, have sought refuge, like Kant, in impersonal modes of theorizing and teaching.

This sort of academic philosophizing notoriously left Friedrich Nietzsche cold. “I for one prefer reading Diogenes Laertius,” he wrote in 1874. “The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something, 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, Michel 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 Collège de France to the topic of parrhesia, or frank speech, in classical antiquity. Contemplating, as Nietzsche had a century before, possible antecedents for his own peculiar approach to truthfulness, Foucault examined the life of Socrates and—using evidence gathered by Diogenes Laertius—the far odder life of Diogenes of Sinope (d. c. 320 B.C.), the archetypal Cynic, who was storied in antiquity for living in a tub, carrying a lit lamp in broad daylight, and telling anybody who asked that “I am looking for a man.”

Foucault of course knew that the lore surrounding a philosopher like Diogenes was no longer taken seriously. But he, like Nietzsche, decried our modern “negligence” of what he called the “problem” of the philosophical life. This problem, he speculated, had gone into eclipse for two reasons: first, because religious institutions, above all Christian monasticism, had absorbed, or (in his words) “confiscated,” the “theme of the practice of the true life.” And, second, “because the relationship to truth can now be made valid and manifest only in the form of scientific 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 system [of thought], and the place which has been given in this system to the problem of the philosophical life.”

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Foucault was not the only twentieth-century figure 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 example, a conception of authenticity informed Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), just as a horror of bad faith inspired Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1944). Toward the end of that work, Sartre went even further, and imagined creating a comprehensive biographical and historical account that might demonstrate how all the apparently haphazard particulars of a single human being’s life came together to form a “totality”—a singular and unified character.

As a graduate student in the history of ideas, and as an activist in the sixties, I aspired to understand and describe how the broader currents of social and political existence informed lived experience, and hence