David Egan Philosophy

On more than one occasion, it’s struck me that this thing I do is kind of weird. There aren’t a lot of people running online philosophy courses for the public. From a marketing perspective, that’s both encouraging—less competition!—and concerning—there isn’t an established demand for what I’m offering.

The marketing aspect has been neither my favourite part of the job nor my forte. Over five billion people have an internet connection. If just one percent of one percent of one percent of that total wanted to learn philosophy online and came across my website, I’d have to radically change my business model to accommodate the huge demand. But how do you get the word out?

More important, how do you persuade people that this is something that they need? How does a course in online philosophy make someone better off? Will it boost their career prospects? Resolve personal or interpersonal issues they struggle with? Make them happier?

In short, what is philosophy good for?

Like psychology, philosophy has an ambiguous place in the modern world. Both are subjects you can study in a university setting, where you would read often dry scholarship built according to rigorous research methodologies. On the other hand, both hold open a loosely defined promise to improve your life.

In psychology that promise is clearer. A range of therapeutic contexts, from the psychoanalyst’s couch to the psychiatrist’s pharmacopeia, offer concrete and practical help to people in psychological distress.

Is there anything equivalent in philosophy? Actually, there is a contemporary field of philosophical counselling but it has nothing like the widespread mainstream acceptance that its psychological cousins have.

Psychological therapy offers an often much-needed support that helps people live a good life. That good life isn’t to be found in the therapist’s office, but regular visits to the therapist might help the life outside that office to flourish. By contrast, philosophy, at least on some construals, isn’t just a support to a good life. Discussing philosophy is what it is to live a good life.  

Probably the most famous line in Plato’s Apology, if not in all of Plato, is Socrates’ claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” (Socrates was Plato’s teacher and almost all of Plato’s writings are dialogues in which Socrates is the main speaker.) Less well known is the longer sentence in which this claim is situated. I’m still excerpting a bit but consider how Socrates frames his famous remark: “[I]t is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men.”

This longer passage introduces an unexpected twist. Socrates doesn’t say that the greatest good is a life lived in accordance with virtue—half a century later, Plato’s student Aristotle would say this. Instead, he says the greatest good is a life spent discussing virtue.

It would be natural to suppose that discussing virtue is a means to an end. We discuss virtue in order to sharpen our sense of what living virtuously entails so that we can go about living well. But in this passage, Socrates speaks of discussing virtue as an end in itself. The good life isn’t something that we can achieve as a result of discussing virtue, according to Socrates. Discussing virtue is itself the central activity of that good life.

Not all philosophers would share Socrates’ view, of course, but I think his remark reveals an important difference between the philosopher’s pursuit of wisdom and the therapist’s pursuit of healing. I’m not sure anyone would say that there’s nothing better in life than talking with a therapist. A therapist who said that the purpose of therapy was the perpetuation of the therapeutic relationship would be guilty of malpractice. But if Socrates is to be believed, talking philosophy isn’t something that helps us live well. Talking philosophy is living well.

Consider some of the other things we do for their own sakes: listening to music, playing sports, going for walks, eating pastries. If Socrates had said that “it is the greatest good for a man to eat pastries every day,” he probably wouldn’t be remembered as a paragon of wisdom. (Or would he??). What is it about discussing virtue that makes Socrates regard it as the greatest good?

The answer, I think, is that discussing virtue doesn’t provide the content of a good life so much as its form. Eating pastries is a fun thing to do but it doesn’t have much bearing on the non-pastry-eating parts of life. By contrast, Socrates’ examined life colours everything that we do, including the pastry-eating.

As a matter of fact, Socrates has something to say about pastries in Plato’s Gorgias. He contrasts pastry baking with medicine: the former aims at giving pleasure to the body while the latter aims at the good of the body. If you were to say, “this croissant is good!” Socrates might want to clarify: no, the croissant tastes good, but it isn’t good for you. (Self-plug: the Gorgias and its pastries figure in my self-guided online course, An Introduction to Philosophy in Ten Dangerous Ideas).

Now Socrates takes a pretty hard line on pleasure—he doesn’t think it has any essential place in a good life. Aristotle is more ambivalent. And Epicurus is resolutely pro-pleasure—although he advocates the kind of moderate pleasure that finds satisfaction in barley cakes rather than croissants. So it’s at least an open question where the pleasures of pastry eating fit into a good life. But Socrates, Aristotle, and Epicurus agree that it’s a question worth pursuing.

You might say that Socrates’ examined life is more adverb than verb. It’s not that the examining is the sole or dominant activity in a good life. It’s rather that all activities in a good life are undertaken examinedly. Even a visit to a pastry shop can be an occasion for reflection on the place of pleasure in a life well lived.

Or you might say that the examined life is one lived as a question, not as an answer. Socrates doesn’t dispense actionable life guidance—and nor, in any concrete detail, does Aristotle or Epicurus or any other major philosopher. The primary payoff in philosophy isn’t a set of answers but a more carefully considered appreciation of the question. “This is how philosophers should salute each other,” said Wittgenstein: “‘Take your time!’”

Which brings me back to my marketing problem. A standard feature of marketing materials is a “call to action”: click here, buy now, learn more. “Take your time” is not an ideal call to action. But it’s what philosophy asks us to do.

And if you’ve got to the end of this email, thanks for taking the time! Essays like this one aren’t the standard marketing materials in an age of social media. But I take consolation from the thought that I could be a less successful pitchman for philosophy. Socrates’ fellow citizens were so keen to get him to shut up that they sentenced him to death. 

1. In the United States, tap water is subject to monitoring by the Environmental Protection Agency while bottled water is monitored by the Food and Drug Administration. The EPA’s standards are more rigorous than the FDA’s, so publicly available tap water has a higher baseline of safety and quality than commercially sold bottled water. (source)
2. 36% of all global CD sales are in just one country: Japan. (source)
3. The colour of chicken eggs, white or brown, is determined by the colour of the hen’s feathers. (source)
4. The medical name for the shin bone is the tibia, which means “flute” in Latin. The name comes from the fact that ancient flutes were made with the tibial bones of (what I’m guessing must have been pretty big) birds. (source)
5. Of the more than one hundred actors in the film Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart was the lone American. Most of the smaller roles were played by European refugees—the film was shot in Hollywood in 1942—and most of the Nazis were played by German Jews who’d fled those same Nazis. (source)
6. In a recent poll of Canadian hockey fans asking which of the seven Canadian teams in the NHL will be the next to win the Stanley Cup, 4% of respondents opted for “No Canadian team will ever win the Cup again.” Both Calgary and Ottawa got only 2% of the vote. (A bit of background for those of you who aren’t familiar: nearly a quarter of the league’s teams are Canadian but no Canadian team has won the Stanley Cup since 1993.) (source)
7. The expression “whipping boy” derives from a (possibly apocryphal) early modern practice of educating princes alongside less royal boys, who would be whipped when the prince misbehaved or did poorly in his lessons. Because the prince outranked his tutor, it would be inappropriate for the tutor to whip the prince. Instead the “whipping boy” was whipped as a proxy for the prince and the prince was supposed to shape up out of compassion for his companion. (source)
8. About 75% of all gym memberships are taken out in the month of January. (source)