Socrates and Nietzsche

"An unexamined life is not worth living."
-Socrates

Over two thousand years after Socrates made his famous pronouncement, despair is everywhere.  Gifted with health and luxuries once unimaginable, we modern humans go to therapy and take medications to cope with our despair.  Our despair is not the desperation of poverty or enslavement, but a despair of the soul, which causes us, in the midst of our material comforts, to ask, "Is this life worth living?"  And speaking to us from the distant past, Socrates answers, "An unexamined life is not worth living."




Note that Socrates did not say, "An unhappy life is not worth living," "An unexciting life is not worth living," or "A difficult life is not worth living."  Instead, he insists that the life truly worth living is the examined one.

Though Socrates's pronouncement seems stark and uncompromising, it is also uniquely empowering.  Happiness--a state of good cheer and satisfaction, free of anxiety, pain, or sorrow--is beyond our control.  To find happiness in the first place is difficult, and it can vanish in an instant.  One might fall ill, or lose money, a job, a loved one.  Excitement is more easily attained, but anyone who has fallen under the spell of drink, drugs, sex, or gambling can attest to the unpredictable benefits and heavy price of excitement.  And, as movies like American Beauty, Click, and Weatherman* show, freedom from material worry not only can't protect one from loneliness, but can cause it.  The main character in American Beauty allowed the pursuit of external prosperity to numb his soul.  The protagonist of Click was so consumed with external goals that he disengaged from his life, literally skipping over the moments which truly mattered.  The pursuits of happiness, excitement, and ease cannot create a consistent sense of a life worth living.  The contemplation and inner search for wisdom Socrates advocate, however, can.

We have absolute control over whether we work to discover who we really are and what our purpose in life is.  Barring brain damage or degeneration, nothing can take away our intellect or self-awareness.  Self-examination neither causes hangovers nor empties bank accounts.  Wisdom gives perspective to poverty and enriches wealth.  And the key to all that lies in our hands.

It is only when we make the effort to examine ourselves that we can begin to understand not just who we are and how best to behave towards others, but what our place is in the world.  Only when we understand that can we direct our lives to do our true best for ourselves and our world.  And only then can we satisfy both our inner need for meaning and our surface craving for accomplishment.  Money and success alone cannot buy meaning.  Conscious self-awareness and the sense of purpose that that self-awareness produces form the only road to true self-fulfillment.

We are a thinking species, capable not only of contemplation but of creative action.  Those capabilities set us apart from every other species on the planet and give us, uniquely, the tools not only to live, as even the most primitive of animals can live, but to live with meaning.  Because we are a thinking species, we long to mean something, and feel that life isn't worthwhile unless it has meaning.  The only way to find our personal meaning is through self-examination.  That is why an unexamined life is not worth living, and why an examined life is the only one worth living.

"What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you:  'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more'...Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?  Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him:  'You are a god and never have I heard anything so divine."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Would you be happy to live your life again and again?  Or does the very idea of repeating what you have lived fill you with despair?

It is important to note that Nietzsche, like Socrates, is not interested in happiness.  He makes that clear by specifying that the demon will come in your "loneliest loneliness,” implying that unhappiness is inevitable.  Nietzsche is not asking whether your life has been happy enough for you to want to repeat it.  If that was the case, the question would be pointless, the answer always no.  Who would want to suffer the pains and sorrows of life over again?

What Nietzsche asks is, What makes a life so worth living that one is willing to repeat it to infinity, pain and sorrow included?  The answer, as Socrates knew, is meaning.

Meaning makes any pain endurable and every moment worthwhile.  The artist who truly loves his craft never begrudges the time, effort, frustration, and disappointment inherent in his training.  The mother who adores her children considers even the worry, conflict, and pain inherent in their upbringing worthwhile.  So it is with life.  If a life has meaning, then even its difficult moments are not only worthwhile, but precious and good.

Nietzsche's challenge goes beyond simply finding meaning, however.  He says that the demon comes "some day or night."  That is to say, you will not know when the demon will come.  In that vagueness lies the significance of his challenge.  If you don't know when the demon will come, you must be ready at all times.  Nietzsche's question is, quite simply, a challenge to live meaningfully for as much of your life as you can:  to create, with every moment, the life you would be happy to relive.

*We were required to include discussion of some of the movies we had watched in class.