the examined life

METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 23, Nos. 1 & 2, JanuaryIApril 1992 0026-1068 $2.00

THE EXAMINED LIFE

PETER DALTON

The initial problem with the unexamined life is not that it is not worth living, but that it is unexamined. Presumably, the initial problem for a philosopher interested in the examined life would be encapsulated in two questions: What is a life? How does one go about examining it? Ironically, these two questions have rarely been examined together.

I Plato’s Apology is the literary origin of the Socratic aphorism “The unexamined life is not worth living [for man].” Readers nearly always assume that Socrates is exhorting us to examine our own lives, yet, if Plato’s dialogues can be trusted, Socrates took a different approach. He traipsed around Athens trying to meet people who were regarded as highly knowledgeable, in the hope that they would teach him what they knew. Once they agreed to talk with him, he used his question-and- answer method to get them to articulate and defend some of their fundamental beliefs. Most of his - and their - efforts were directed to satisfying his requirement that they first define the principal terms used in expressing those beliefs. Unfortunately, these people couldn’t define their terms in the face of his incisive questioning, and couldn’t defend their beliefs against his probing objections. Socrates concluded that they didn’t know what they were talking about and shouldn’t believe what they said they believed. But Socrates didn’t go on to do what they couldn’t do. He didn’t offer any definitions, and he knew so little, he claimed, that he couldn’t confidently hold or assert any beliefs. These other people were ignorant, as his examination of them showed. Yet he couldn’t provide the knowledge they lacked. Rather, he said he was superior to them only in knowing that he didn’t know anything. I guess we might say that he was the least ignorant ignoramus.

Equating wisdom with knowing that you know nothing is peculiar, but this may be the least of Socrates’ problems. For what did his sharp questioning and his interlocuters’ dull answers have to do with the examined life? No one’s life was even mentioned, never mind examined. (An incident or two - such as Euthyphro’s prosecution of his father for murder -was discussed, but an incident is hardly a life.) And no one examined himself about anything; rather, people’s philosophical pretensions were stung, numbed and sometimes temporarily disabled by a man with endless questions and no answers. So where was the examined life in all this? Nowhere, it seems. In retrospect, what

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Socrates should have said is that the unexamined mind is not worth minding.

Admittedly, there may have been an exception to this. Socrates’ life was examined at least once - when Athens put him on trial for impiety and corrupting the young. But other people provided the motive and opportunity for Socrates to examine himself, and his self-examination was a largely a defense of his own philosophizing. This makes Socrates an inappropriate model of the examined life for contemporary philo- sophers. We will never be forced to give such a public accounting of ourselves, I hope. We cannot defend our way of life by appealing to an oracle and a divine voice. Our lives are not consumed by philosophizing, at least not by his kind of philosophizing. And we are not as self- sacrificial as Socrates, whose purpose in philosophizing was to get other people to examine their own lives, and who lived worthily by trying to assure that other people lived worthily. There is a further, more important point. Some of us may think of ourselves as occasional gadflies since we sometimes use his methods to prod our students to examine their own lives. But those methods are for examining others, not ourselves. Can we - or anyone else - use them on ourselves, seeing that they presuppose two adversaries, one of whom is a lot more clever than the other? If not, then is the most important thing - a method of self-examination - missing from the Socratic method? That would be unfortunate, unless Socrates thought that we already know how to examine our own lives and only need some prompting to do so. But do we know how to do this? If we do, why didn’t Socrates move directly to prompting people to examine their lives rather than pestering them about their inability to define their terms or defend their beliefs in a philosophically satisfactory way?

I1

Enough of the criticisms of Socrates’ apparent neglect of the expected approach to examining a life. I now want to turn to that approach, the one readers nearly always think Socrates is recommending. I will outline it by answering my two questions: What is a life? How does one go about examining it?

To the first question, I will begin with a brief, simple-minded, and only partially correct answer: A life is a person’s life, and it (if it is my life) consists in everything that I do and everything that happens to me between my birth and death. This answer is too inclusive, for there are countless things (such as changes in hormone levels, the growth of skin cells, the rupture of tiny blood vessels) that happen to me, at least in so far as I am a body, that I will never know or think of in any way. Obviously, such things could never be part of the life I examine. And trying to become more aware of them so that they could become part of

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the life I examine - in so far as this is even possible - would reduce my life to a bizarre quest for personal trivia. (Imagine, for example, checking every five minutes for changes in one’s temperature, blood pressure and pulse.) Both of these points also hold for countless things I do, in an expansive sense of ‘do’; consider each of the steps I take as I walk here and there during the day, or all my hand movements, or each change of expression on my face. I can’t examine them, and it would be foolish to try.

If this is correct, then I must distinguish between my life considered as all that I do and all that happens to me, and my life as I (can) examine it. The latter, which is a subset of the former, will be the only life that concerns me. How I describe this life will obviously depend on the kind of examination I employ. This means, of course, that I won’t be able to consider my two questions separately. I won’t be able to first determine what a life is and then consider how I should examine it.

This last point can be denied. Someone might claim that we can independently determine what a life is by focusing on the ordinary view of life, on life as a reasonable person sees it prior to any philosophical reflection. That means, I think, taking life commonsensically (in terms of what people understand by ‘life’) and pragmatically (in terms of what people think is important in life). This won’t do. The very purpose of the examined life is to challenge how people understand and value their lives. More important, for reasons I have already given, this ordinary view would have to equate life with some subset of all of a person’s deeds and happenings. I don’t see how anyone could specify that subset without engaging in some kind of reflection. (My discussion below is, I think, proof of this.) If this is correct, then this pre-reflective view of life cannot provide an answer to my first question. Such a view might help us test such answers (just as our pre-reflective beliefs about justice can help us test definitions and analyses of justice), but it is not itself the answer.

Nonetheless, someone might persist in claiming that there is an ordinary view of life that would allow us to independently determine what a life is. For example, someone might claim that there is a (if this doesn’t contradict ordinariness) ‘phenomenological’ view of life that gives us life as people actually live it. This view includes a deed or happening in my life only if I was conscious of it, or, more precisely, only in so far as I was conscious of it as it occurred. For a life, it claims, is something I live through, and that requires nothing more than concurrent consciousness. This answer excludes too much, for I can later learn that something was part of my life even though I wasn’t conscious of it when it occurred. This is true, for example, of omissions (‘I left her off the guest list’) and errors (‘I miscalculated my checking balance’), of unintended side-effects (‘I flooded the basement while watering the new dogwood’), of subsequent characterisations of actions

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(‘cruel’), and of losses or evils others tried to hide from me (‘She lied to me.’) In fact, since such deeds and happenings are among the more important ones that turn up when 1 (thoroughly) examine my life, we hardly want to exclude them from my life.

This suggests that something that I do or that happens to me is part of my life only in so far as I am conscious of it as it occurs or I later learn of it. The word ‘learn’ may be too strong, since it seems to imply knowledge, whereas, for the examined life, accurate thought may be sufficient. I might, for example, believe that something traumatic happened to me when I was three, or that there was something amiss in my relation to my father. Yet I might not have enough information to know either of these things or to know them in much detail. Even so, I would surely want to consider them when examining my life, and while the most I may be able to do intellectually is think accurately about them, that might be enough to improve my future life in some way. Consider, in this regard, some techniques of psychoanalytical therapy, which require that I have some understanding of certain incidents in my past if I’m to improve, but require nothing so strong as knowledge.

Hence a deed or happening will be part of my life in so far as I am conscious of it as it occurs, or I later learn of it, or I later think accurately of it. Unfortunately, this still excludes some deeds and happenings that are in my life and are worthy of examination, but are never examined because I don’t think of them. Suppose, for example, that my unconscious fear of strong women hampers my relations with them, or that my overly harsh treatment of students results (in ways I don’t intend and don’t ever understand) in a loss of self-confidence on their part, or that I am blind to how foolish I act whenever I drink. But perhaps their exclusion doesn’t matter, for if I never think of them how could they figure in any examination of my life? Then again, excluding them would leave part of my life unexamined, which goes against the spirit of the examined life. Even if I don’t think of those deeds and happenings, it seems that I should.

Perhaps the thing to do is to include as part of my life anything that I do or that happens to me in so far as I am conscious of it as it occurs, or I later learn or think accurately of it, or I should think of it when examining my life. Unfortunately, this may make my characterization of a life circular - unless we can understand ‘examining a life’ without characterizing a life. One way to ward off the threat of circularity is to drop the direct reference to examining a life and simply specify the conditions under which I should think of something. But which conditions? Perhaps the condition should be that the deed or happening is important to me. That would be in keeping with Socrates’ pragmatic purpose for examining a life. But when is it important to me? When it occurs? If not, or if not only then, at what later time? And what should my criteria of importance be? It might be reasonable to let the standards


of worth I use during my examination determine whether a past deed or happening is important to me. However, I should be cautious about this. A deed or happening could have been very important to me when it occurred even if it isn’t important to me when I examine it; it still ought to be examined, if only to see whether I am correct in currently regarding it as unimportant. Examining it can also be a way of examining my current standards of worth, a task that must be performed in any Socratic examination. Furthermore, if I let my current standards overly influence me, I might inaccurately depict my past or alienate myself from it, in which case I wouldn’t be examining my life. (Imagine, for example, that my life has been a minor version of King Lear’s, but that, after examining it, I conclude that I really hadn’t gotten along so badly with my daughters or that being a father hadn’t been that important to me.) Perhaps, then, we should include a deed or happening in my life simply on the condition that I should think of it because it was important to me at one time or another.

There is a problem with this. Suppose there are deeds or happenings of mine which I wasn’t aware of at the time they occurred, which I don’t think of at any later time, and which were never important to me. But suppose also that their not being important to me is itself important. This would be true of any deed or happening of mine that was important to others but not to me (for example, my slights of others, if I am indifferent to such slights.) This would also be true if others thought that something that I didn’t take to be important to me was, or should be, important to me (for example, my total lack of interest in modern dance, or my rejection of the soul and immortality.) Should such deeds and happenings nonetheless be included in my life? They can be only if, when trying to determine which deeds and happenings should be included in my life, I can make use of other people’s knowledge and opinions. Can I do that in a Socratic self-examination, which seems to be something I do by myself, rather than in conjunction with others? I suppose I could, at least as a preliminary step to conducting that solitary examination.

So it seems I must also include as part of my life deeds and happenings of mine that others regard as important though I don’t, but which others could convince me were important or, at least, could point out to me as important to them or possibly important to me. But must others actually do this for these deeds and happenings to be included in my life? Or is it enough that they could do it? Probably the former, for only if others actually point out these deeds and happenings will I examine them. Or perhaps we should also include deeds and happenings that others would have pointed out if, say, I hadn’t negligently avoided learning what they think of my life. For we don’t want to leave unexamined what should have been examined.

If we go along with some version of this last point about the role of

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others, then something that I do or that happens to me will be part of my life in so far as I am conscious of it as it occurs, or I later learn or think accurately of it, or I should think of it since it was important to me at some time, or I should think of it given its importance in the judgment of others. This is a long statement. It obviously begs us to say more about what makes something important and just what kinds of thinking are called for if we are to find that something is important or at least consider whether it might be important. It leaves unanswered any complaints about relying so much on importance to determine which of my deeds and happenings are part of my life. (Why not use some other criterion or criteria? Like focusing only on those deeds and happenings by which I do or do not conform to God’s Way: life as a quest for salvation. Or viewing my deeds and happenings only as types, with a certain frequency of occurrence: life as a matter of statistical regularity, which might interest a behaviorist. Or considering my deeds in terms of how much energy or time they consume: life as measured in terms of Thoreau’s ‘cost.’ Or looking only at those deeds and happenings that reveal ‘who’ I am: Hannah Arendt’s dramatic life.) Despite these problems, for the time being I will accept this statement as a kind of working account of what a life is.

I11 The second question asks, How does one examine one’s life? To it I will begin with another brief, simple-minded and only partially correct answer: I examine my life by trying to recall what I did and why I did it, as well as what happened to me and why I let it happen or (in case it happened without my letting it happen) why I reacted to it as I did. For my defense of this answer, I fall back on Socrates’ original intent. He was interested in examining a life in order to assess its past worth, an assessment that, in turn, was made in order to enhance that life’s future worth. But if I am to assess my life I must first recall what I did and what happened to me. And if I am to assess the worth of those doings and happenings I must recall, as best I can, why they were done, why I let them happen, or (in the case of mere happenings) why I reacted to them as I did. For the worth of my life from my point of view always comes down to an assessment of whether I lived as I wanted, and what I wanted can be known only if I recall why I acted, why I let certain things happen to me, and why I reacted to mere happenings as I did.

This answer is obviously too restrictive. It is crucial for me to know what I did in the past, what happened to me, and the like. But I can know this by ways other than memory. I can inquire into my past much as a biographer does, by consulting letters, diaries, and personal papers. I can go to more public sources, like newspapers, magazines, and official records. I can call upon what others remember or come up with


through their own inquiries into my life. I can read books about the times and places in which I’ve lived and the events in which I’ve participated. Hence, I should modify this answer by saying that I examine my life by trying to recall or otherwise come to know what I did, what happened to me, and so forth.

Even this is too restrictive. It doesn’t seem necessary that I know each and every one of the deeds and happenings that I examine. In the case of at least some deeds and happenings, accurately thinking of them may suffice for my purpose, which is to improve my future life.

What else must I do if I am to examine my life? This question needn’t be answered, at least at this point. For it assumes that through recollection, other methods of gaining knowledge, and accurate thinking I will have a life (before my mind, as it were) to examine. That is incorrect. I will have something, but whatever it is, it cannot be called a life.

This can easily be seen. Each day I do thousands of things and thousands of things happen to me. Think, for example, of the next few seconds. I sit here typing these words. I think for a moment about what I should type next. I hear the hum of my computer. I lean back to stretch my shoulders. I turn my head and see a light flash on my phone. I type some more words, but then dislike them, and wipe them out by tapping on my delete key. Here are several acts and one happening, all occurring in just a few seconds. Suppose that in each minute of the day I do only three things and only three things happen to me. That is much too low an estimate, but let me use it to prove my point. Six doings or happenings a minute would be 360 in an hour and 6,120 in a 17-hour day. How many can I remember even a few hours after they occur? And how many can I remember a week, month or year later? Obviously, I can remember only a tiny fraction of the original number. Other methods of coming to know these deeds and happenings or merely thinking accurately of them will add only a small number, making the fraction only somewhat less tiny. What I have won’t be a life, but only a few fragments of a life. In this regard, consider one other plain fact: Whenever I examine my life, I will do so for only a short period of time, surely not more than a few hours in any one day. In that short a span, there is no way I can think of more than an infinitesimal portion of my life. (Imagine the following exam topic: ‘Tell us about your life. You will have two hours to do this. Good luck!’) And while I may continue this examination the next day or even for many succeeding days, each day I must begin largely anew. I may know and think of a little more of my life each day, but what I have to examine each day will still only be a fragment of the life I have led.

These huge gaps in my - and anyone else’s - awareness of my past seem fatal to the examined life. For how can I examine something if hardly any of it is around to be examined? Explorers wouldn’t think

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they could reach any reliable conclusions about a land after having seen only a small portion of it (say, only 80 of its 14,000 acres). Classicists could say very little about an ancient text if they had only a few scraps from only seven of its (unbeknownst to them) 500 pages. And no critic could fairly make judgments about a play after getting a glimpse of only a few lines of dialogue from one scene. Why should I, as a life-examiner, be in any better position? It is not as though I am merely looking for types (of acts, of character traits, and so on), for they couldn’t possibly give me a life. (In knowing only them I would be like the little boy who, after watching Hamlet on television, reports that he saw a Queen, some grave diggers and a duel, but who can’t tell us anything about how the play went.) I can’t do much by making inductions, for this works only for something (say, the sound of my voice, the way I walk) that is constant over my life or a long stretch of it. Nor can I make many inferences (for example, ’ retrodictions, explanations) based on my knowledge of humans in general. Such inferences wouldn’t capture what is unique in my life. And in making them I would be assuming that I know in general how a human life goes, which I can’t know without already knowing how some human lives have gone, which is exactly what I presently arguing we can’t know. Consequently, what I can know and accurately think about my past life is too scanty for me to reliably draw any conclusions about that life. Yet the point of examining one’s past life is to reach overall conclusions (for example, that I spend too little time with my wife) one can use to improve one’s future life.

This is no problem, it might be said. I can know or accurately think of, if not all, then nearly all of the important deeds and happenings in my life, be they good or bad; and they are all I need to have in order to assess my life’s worth. I am not so sure about this. I can’t prove this merely by citing all the important deeds and happenings I do have for examination, as that doesn’t answer questions about the importance of what I don’t have. And the farther I go back in time, the fewer deeds and happenings - important or not - I have. Suppose I take any year in my life, say, one twenty years ago, and try to reconstruct how it went. At most I will have a sketch of deeds and happenings, something that might fill a five-page paper. Such a sketch is no more a life than a Cliff‘s Note’s version of Moby Dick is the great novel Melville wrote. Admittedly, such a sketch from memory will mention a number of important deeds and happenings. But I still don’t see how anyone could establish that these are all, or most, or even the most important of that year’s important deeds and happenings.

Against this, someone might argue that it is these important deeds and happenings that affect me now, and precisely because I can still think of them; so they are all I need to examine. This is doubtful. If they are all I can reconstruct of my past, I may not understand why or how they affect me now, if they do. For it may be only by knowing the


forgotten important deeds and happenings that I can explain the effects of these reconstructed deeds and happenings. Further, this objection assumes that because I can now think of these important deeds and happenings, they are what makes me the person I am. This is sometimes plausible (for example, suppose I am terribly shy around women, and I think of my mother as stronger than my father, and I can recall having close relations with only domineering women). Nonetheless, there may not be explanations of this sort for all of the characteristics that make me what I am. Even if there are, the related thoughts and memories may be manifestations or effects of these characteristics, rather than their causes. The only way to settle their relationship to those revelations of these characteristics is to learn what has made me the person I am, and that requires considerable knowledge of my life, the very knowledge I doubt I can have.

There is a further problem. Such a sketch from memory will include almost on unimportant deeds and happenings. If there were many unimportant deeds and happenings in my life, that would detract from its overall worth. Perhaps not: perhaps there are reasons, even conceptual reasons, why only a few deeds and happenings can be important. Even if this is so, it may be that only by examining the unimportant and less important acts and happenings that I (or anyone else) could discover why I performed the more important acts and why the more important things happen to me. The many unimportant acts and happenings could have a cumulative effect, like the cumulative effect of acts and omissions that are so crucial to forming habits. Or they may be the tedious, annoying, strength-sapping necessary conditions of doing something important, which won’t be done unless one has the virtues to endure them. Or they might constitute most of the complex sequences of deeds and happenings that culminate in important deeds and happenings, so that knowing only them would be like seeing only the highlights of a football game. In any of these cases, if I don’t know them, I won’t know why those important acts and happenings occurred.

I might try another approach. I might try to fill - or, rather, prevent - these gaps in the life I have to examine. But I don’t know how this could be done. Keeping a very detailed diary would take up a lot of time: and who wants to live, say, a quarter of one’s life writing about the other three-quarters? Even the most detailed of diaries - like Anais Nin’s - are constructions, not reconstructions; while true, or mostly true, they are very different from the life someone lived (for example, offering an author’s ruminations on how well she has lived and what it is to live well, rather than an account of her deeds and happenings as they occurred). A diarist may even begin to fear that she is not so much writing about a life as living a life in a peculiar way (for example, expressing her emotions on paper instead of to other people, writing out what is important to herself rather than finding this out by doing something.) Of

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course, there are simpler methods of recording one’s life. But any such time-saving methods (like the jottings Nietzsche made on his walks) would be subject to all the questions I have already raised about the fragmented lives we have to examine. I suppose Puritan stocktaking at the end of a day would be a reasonable compromise. But that wouldn’t handle the problems of longer-term memory failure. And it would force us to modify Socrates’ saying to “The unexamined day is not worth living,” which drastically alters what Socrates had in mind, for he wasn’t recommending that we live life one day at a time or, worse, that we live each day as if it were our last.

I t might now be claimed that these gaps in my awareness of my past life don’t matter since the point of examining my past life is to improve my future life, and what that requires is a change in my (current) self. Further, it may well be that the awareness I have of my past life will be enough for me to understand my self and how it should be changed. Or rather, that awareness plus what I can currently know of my self may be enough for me to understand and change my self. I concede that this is possible. But it shifts the focus from one’s life to one’s self, and from one’s past to one’s future. In a way, it is saying that it doesn’t matter what one knows or thinks about one’s past, as long as through examining that past one can eventually make changes in one’s self that lead to a better future life. (I suppose even false beliefs about one’s past could help in accomplishing this.) If I take this approach, most of my focus will be on my (current) self. I am skeptical about how much I can know about this self apart from what I know and think of its past. For much that I claim about this self may, as Sartre and others have argued, be only summations about its past life. Admittedly, I sometimes think I can know my self in another way. I think I can conform to the exhortation “Know thyself” by carrying on a kind of interview with my self about my self: Am I really in love with her? What do I think of deconstruction? Am I afraid of getting old? This is a dubious source of knowledge. Its claims are not (no pun intended) self-certifying. For, with the exception of claims about my current thoughts, feelings and the like, its claims can be borne out only by what occurs later (for example, if I am afraid of getting old, I will show it in a number of ways). There is an even more serious objection. This approach claims that changing my future life may not take a great deal of knowledge and accurate thought about my past life. But this claim is incoherent. For how am I to know that I have improved my future life except by examining it, at some point in the future, as the latest part of my past life? Admittedly, if improvement is merely a matter of such things as a higher income, or a literary prize, or a loss of weight, then knowing it won’t be a problem. But if I am talking about improvement in a life - more precisely, in part of a life -then this improvement can be confirmed only retrospectively, and all the old problems about reconstructing a life will reappear.


It might now be objected that if my claims about our extremely limited ability to reconstruct a past life are correct, then similar claims would show that no one could ever write a reliably accurate autobiography or biography. But since such works are written, there must be something wrong with my claims. I am not claiming that it is impossible to write a reliably accurate autobiography or biography. It all depends on the work’s content. If the content provides a map of a city (for example, ‘Joyce’s Dublin’), the outcome of an election, or a summation of someone’s school record, then it can be very accurate. That is, if the content rests on evidence that survives from the past into the present (on what Michael Oakshott calls the present-past) then it can be very accurate. On the other hand, if the content depends heavily on anyone’s memory of his life, and if those memories must be detailed and thorough, I am very skeptical. I remain highly skeptical even if we bring in other people’s memories, as they can add only fragments to fragments. Of course it depends a lot on what is remembered. If the memories have to do with something that is hard to miss (like Thoreau’s height) or frequently repeated (like Thoreau’s daily treks in the woods) then they can be trusted. But if they deal with something precise (just what did Thoreau say to his jailkeeper) or private (why did Thoreau write at least one impassioned letter to Mrs. Emerson) or inductive (why did Thoreau’s friendship with Emerson wain in the 1850’s), I am skeptical. Other sources can give us a lot more information, but when joined to memories they don’t constitute anything like a life. This is borne out by the sketchy, fragmentary nature of even the best biographies and autobiographies (like Peter Gay’s recent 700-page study of Freud). Few individual deeds and happenings are described or analysed. Instead, we get descriptions of what we might call general deeds and happenings (for example, Freud’s courtship, his research on neurology, his use of cocaine, his writing of The Interpretation of Dreams). Accordingly, we are offered only a few explanations of individual deeds and happenings, and the ones we get are almost always speculative. In lieu of them, the focus is on something much more general - on summations of motives for general deeds or happenings (for example, why did Freud go into psychotherapy, what was his attitude toward his wife, how did he react to hostile criticism of his writings). There are many other things in these books: portrayals of a person’s physical appearance; sketches of someone’s personality and character; lists of positions, possessions and achievements; descriptions of homes, buildings, streets, and towns; accounts of social, political and economic life; chronologies of relevant historical events; summaries and interpretations of influential ideas, thinkers and books. They are, or can be, highly accurate and they may teach us important things about a person, but what do they tell us of a person’s life?

That depends, obviously enough, on what we think a person’s life is.

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If we had an acceptable account of a life, we would be in a better position to judge the great variety of claims that can be made about a person’s life. But now we have come full circle, in a way that (if the word hadn’t been abused by being used in so many different ways) we could call dialectical. When considering what a life is, we found that we couldn’t avoid considering how a life is to be examined. Now, when considering how a life is to be examined, we find that we have to consider what a life is. One wishes that one or the other of the questions could be settled independently of the other, but that doesn’t seem possible.

It may now be objected that my position has become incoherent. Earlier in this paper I concluded that we do have a working account of what a life is, yet when criticizing various claims about how we should examine a life I have concluded that we never have more than fragments of a life. But what if those fragments are exactly what - no more and no less than what - that working account requires? Then we do have a life to examine. Or if we don’t, then there is something wrong with my working account. But if there is something wrong with my working account, I have no account of what a life is and I can’t criticize claims about what it is to examine a life on the grounds that they are only fragments of a life. Hence, it seems either that I have a working account of a life, in which case it must be possible to examine a life; or that I have no such account and, then, there is no way for me to criticize any purported method of examining a life. I think there is a third alternative and, hence, an escape from this dilemma: I don’t think I or anyone else has an adequate working account of a life, and I think that is exactly what my criticisms of various ways of examining a life have revealed. The criticisms point out that all such ways give us something that couldn’t be a life and thus couldn’t be examined as a life. I can make these criticisms, not because I have an adequate working account of a life, but because I do know something about my doings and happenings, because I know a life must be a subset of them, because I know (or believe) a few other things about what a life should be, and because I find, upon looking at various ways of examining a life, that they don’t give us a life. (Compare: I can’t define ‘justice,’ but I know enough about justice to know that what Plato offers us in the Republic is not an adequate definition of justice.)

Therefore, the conclusion that forces itself on us is that a person can’t examine a life, but only fragments of a life tied tenuously together in a sketch that may tell us more about the person drawing it than the life from which it was drawn. A person who became aware that it is only a life-sketch might give up the project of examining a life, just as Roquentin, in Sartre’s novel Nausea, gave up writing his biography of Rollebon once he realized how inadequate his knowledge of Rollebon really was. Or out of curiosity a person might try to examine this life-


sketch, such as it was, but later conclude that it couldn’t form a basis for any reliable recommendations for the future - which is another way of giving up the project of examining one’s life since the point of examining one’s past is to improve one’s future. If, instead, a person went on to use this life-sketch as a basis for recommendations for the future, it would be a gamble, perhaps more of a gamble than using the Daily Racing Form as one’s basis for wagers at the track. In none of these three cases, it seems, is Socrates’ original hope for the examined life realized in practice.

IV Back to Socrates: Could it be that Socrates was aware of these obstacles to reconstructing a life, and that that was why he took such a different approach to the examined life? I doubt it, or at least my amateurish readings of Plato provide little evidence that he was aware of them. Even so, his approach serves a closely related purpose. This is because stripping away philosophical pretension removes the false cover lying over a person’s past life. Opaque courage, piety, knowledge and love - of the kind offered by Socrates’ interlocuters - hide the unworthiness of one’s past. (‘Of course I’m doing the right thing in prosecuting my father,’ thinks Euthyphro, ‘for don’t I know what piety is?’) Tearing away the false cover opens up a person’s past for a new, or more likely a first examination. That self-examination may reveal only fragments of the past, and it may not assure a worthier future, but it is better than a blindly complacent present. Knowing you know nothing (or very little) may not be wisdom, but at least it is knowledge.

Department of Philosophy Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida 32306 USA

the examined life

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