Examined Lives_ From Socrates to Nietzsc - By James S. Miller Page 0,3

to show how the political became personal, and vice versa. My interest in these themes was doubtless shaped by my own religious upbringing 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 specific acts: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Later, when I wrote an account of the American New Left of the sixties, I focused in part on how other young radicals sought to achieve personal integrity through political activism. And when I wrote about Michel Foucault, I produced a biographical and historical account of his Nietzschean 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 Renaissance and Reformation 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. Hence the problem of the philosophical life: Given the obvious 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 effort to elaborate “our own pondered thoughts,” in response to such large questions as “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?”

The twelve biographical sketches of selected philosophers from Socrates to Nietzsche 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. Anecdotes and human incident flesh out the philosopher under discussion. Distinctive theories are summarized concisely, even though their nuances and complexities often puzzle philosophers to this day. And following the example of such ancient biographers as Plutarch in his Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, I am highly selective, in an effort to epitomize the crux of a character. My aim throughout is to convey the arc of a life rather than a digest of doctrines and moral maxims.

Modern standards of evidence are acknowledged—I am a historian by training, and facts matter to me. But for the ancient philosophers especially, the myths must be acknowledged, too, for such legends long formed a constitutive part of the Western philosophical tradition. That the lives of many ancient philosophers have beggared belief is a cultural 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 Christian saints) have so often seemed beyond the pale of possible experience.

This history properly begins with Socrates and Plato, for it was Plato in his Socratic dialogues who first gave currency to the word philosophy. In the century after the death of Socrates, a distinct, identifiable group of “philosophers” flourished for the first time. Monuments to their memory—busts, statues—were erected in Athens and elsewhere in the Greek-speaking world. And in retrospect, ancient scholars extended the word philosopher to earlier Greek sages.

Some now said that the first philosopher had been Pythagoras (c. 580–500 B.C.), on the Socratic grounds that he regarded no man as wise, but god alone. Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, went even further, applying the term to a broad range of pre-Socratic theorists, from Thales to Anaxagoras (c. 500–429 B.C.), on the Socratic grounds that these thinkers, filled with wonder as they were at the first principles behind all things, “philosophized in order to escape from ignorance.”

How 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 sometimes neglected tradition. For the purposes of this study, I generally picked figures who sought to follow in Socrates’ footsteps by struggling to measure up to his declared ambition “to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and others.”

For Socrates, as for many (though not all) of those who tried to measure up to his example, this ambition has in some way revolved around an effort to answer to the gnomic injunction “Know thyself.” (Aristotle, for one, assumed that this injunction was a key motive for Socrates’ lifework.)

Of course, what, precisely, the Delphic injunction means—and what it enjoins—is hardly self-evident, as we learn in Plato: “I am still unable,” confides Socrates in the Phaedrus, “to know myself; and it really