{"id":517,"date":"2011-02-01T12:15:39","date_gmt":"2011-02-01T16:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/?p=517"},"modified":"2011-02-01T12:15:39","modified_gmt":"2011-02-01T16:15:39","slug":"the-examined-life-is-rarely-worth-living","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/2011\/02\/01\/the-examined-life-is-rarely-worth-living\/","title":{"rendered":"The Examined Life is Rarely Worth Living?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Economist<\/a><\/em> summarizes a new book by James Miller,\u00a0 Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche<\/a><\/em>, wherein he explores the troubled lives of some of the world’s most famous philosophers.\u00a0 He proposes that the pursuit of philosophical questions, wrought with uncertainty and self-questioning, has led to similarly unfortunately troubled lives:<\/p>\n

If one wanted to compile a charge-sheet against the great philosophers, to show that they were unfit to lead their own lives, let alone inspire others, this book could provide some useful evidence. There are Plato\u2019s disastrous dealings with Dionysius the Younger, the tyrannical ruler of Syracuse, and Seneca\u2019s hypocritical fawning over Nero. We hear of Aristotle\u2019s support for Alexander the Great\u2019s cruel imperialism, which sits uneasily with the philosopher\u2019s professed political ideas. Rousseau, who preached on education, abandoned his five children by his long-term mistress, and made pathetic excuses for doing so (he was too ill and poor to be a good father, and a foundlings\u2019 home is not such a bad place to grow up, anyway).<\/p>\n

St Augustine turned against the spirit of intellectual inquiry once he had found salvation, and his dogmatic invective laid the foundations for centuries of intellectual tyranny by the Catholic church. Montaigne was a master of the suggestive non sequitur and the self-contradiction. The thinking of one orator-mystic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, an admirer of Montaigne\u2019s, was \u201cuntethered\u201d, as Mr Miller puts it, from empirical evidence or logical argument. Kant\u2019s conception of morality as a matter of rigid adherence to strict principles emerges as partly an intended remedy for his own hypochondria. Nietzsche confessed in 1880 that his existence was \u201ca fearful burden\u201d, though he was at least happier than before, because of progress in his work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We at the Core tend to thrive on philosophical debauchery, and Miller is certainly not without his contenders<\/a>. So, do you think philosophizing leads to unhappiness and general dissonance, or is it rather a key to understanding ourselves and being more genuinely content with our lives?\u00a0 Or is it worth it simply as an end in and of itself, irrespective of consequence?\u00a0 Feel free to share your thoughts below or on the EnCore Facebook page<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Economist summarizes a new book by James Miller,\u00a0 Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche, wherein he explores the troubled lives of some of the world’s most famous philosophers.\u00a0 He proposes that the pursuit of philosophical questions, wrought with uncertainty and self-questioning, has led to similarly unfortunately troubled lives: If one wanted to compile a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1284,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3715],"tags":[428,4686,437],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1284"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":556,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions\/556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}