Dying Every Day (Stoic Meditations)27 Touko

Day 148: In Defense of the Examined Life | Dying Every Day

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Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 148.

In 399 BC, a jury of five hundred Athenian citizens voted to convict Socrates of impiety and corrupting the youth. They were now deciding his penalty. The implicit offer was simple: stop asking questions, go into exile, live quietly, and stop examining people and calling into question the beliefs they had never thought to question.

He refused. He stood before the jury and said that daily conversation about virtue and the examined life was the greatest good available to a human being—and that he would not stop, regardless of what it cost him. It cost him his life. He drank the hemlock. And the phrase he used in that courtroom, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” has been echoing for more than two thousand years.

Here’s Socrates in Plato’s Apology,

“To talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and the unexamined life is not worth living.”

What Socrates was not doing, standing before that jury, was making a grand gesture for posterity. He genuinely believed that a life of unexamined ease was not worth having. [...]

#stoicism, #philosophy, #meditation

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