Examined Lives_ From Socrates to Nietzsc - By James S. Miller Page 0,4

seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that.”

Moreover, self-examination, even in antiquity, is only one strand in the story of philosophy. From the start—in Plato, and again in Augustine—the problem of the philosophical life evolves in a complicated relationship between what we today would call “science” and “religion”—between mathematical logic and mystical revelation in the case of Plato, between an open-ended quest for wisdom and the transmission of a small number of fixed dogmas in the case of Augustine.

The series of biographies that follows is not comprehensive. It omits Epicurus and Zeno, Spinoza and Hume, and such twentieth-century philosophers as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, and Foucault. But I believe the twelve ancients and moderns I selected are broadly representative. While I include some figures rarely taken seriously by most contemporary philosophers—Diogenes, Montaigne, and Emerson, for example—I also include several canonic figures, notably Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, whose life’s work helped lead philosophy away from its classical emphasis on exemplary conduct toward a stress on rigorous inquiry, and whose biographies therefore raise larger questions about the relation of philosophy as a way of life to the mainstream discipline of philosophy as it currently exists in academic institutions around the world.

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When Emerson wrote a book of essays on Representative Men, he began by declaring it “natural to believe in great men”—yet nearly two hundred years later, such a belief hardly seems natural, and what makes a character “great” is far from self-evident. When Nietzsche a generation later imagined approaching a philosophical life “to see whether one can live in accordance with it,” he presumably had in mind an exemplary—and mythic—character like Socrates. But it is the fate of a modern philosopher like Nietzsche to have left behind notebooks and letters, offering detailed evidence of a host of inconsistencies and singular foibles that make it absurd to ask seriously whether one could live in accordance with them. And it is one consequence of Nietzsche’s own criticism of Christian morality that anyone who takes it seriously finds it hard, if not impossible, to credit any one code of conduct as good for everyone, and therefore worth emulating.

Of course, works of moral edification remain popular, certainly in the United States. Some spiritual and religious manuals promise a contemporary reader invaluable lessons in living well, but the essays that follow can make no such claim. Taken as a whole, these twelve biographical sketches raise many more questions than they can possibly answer:

If, like Plato, we define philosophy as a quest for wisdom that may prove unending, then what is the search for wisdom really good for?

What is the relation of reason to faith, of philosophy to religion, and how does the search for wisdom relate to the most exacting forms of rigorous inquiry and “science”?

Is philosophy best pursued in private or in public? What are its implications, if any, for statecraft, for diplomacy, for the conduct of a citizen in a democratic society?

Above all, what is the “self” that so many of these philosophers have sought to know, and how has our conception of the self changed in the course of history, in part as a result of how successive philosophers have embarked on their quests? Indeed, is self-knowledge even feasible—and, if so, to what degree? Despite years of painful self-examination, Nietzsche famously declared that “we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves.”

If we seek, shall we find?

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Here, then, are brief lives of a handful of philosophers, ancient and modern: Socrates and Plato, Diogenes and Aristotle, Seneca and Augustine, Montaigne and Descartes, Rousseau and Kant, Emerson and Nietzsche. They are all men, because philosophy before the twentieth century was overwhelmingly a vocation reserved for men: a large fact that has limited the kinds of lives—stubbornly independent, often unattached, sometimes solitary and sexless—that philosophers have tended to lead. Within these common limits, however, there has been considerable variation. Some philosophers were influential figures in their day, while others were marginal; some were revered, while others provoked scandal and public outrage.

Despite such differences, each of these men prized the pursuit of wisdom. Each one struggled to live his life according to a deliberately chosen set of precepts and beliefs, discerned in part through a practice of self-examination, and expressed in both word and deed. The life of each one can therefore teach us something about the quest for self-knowledge and its limits. And as a whole, they can tell us a great deal about how the