Episode #003 - Transcript

Hey, guys. It’s me, Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Let me start by asking, when history looks back on today, 2013, will it say that your country was in a golden age at the time? Are you living in a golden age? Try to imagine yourself as a citizen of Athens right around the fifth century BC. The city of Athens at this point is undergoing a massive period of prosperity. And there’s this guy named Pericles in charge. He just assumed the throne. He’s doing a really good job, and this leads to a golden age of culture and philosophy. So, naturally, when things are going really well in one place, people flock to that place from all the surrounding areas. In this case it was mostly other Greek city-states.

Now, as an Athenian, you would live in a democratic society that had a love of its legal system. Athenians loved a good argument. They loved to be entertained. And most of the time you could find both of those things in the courthouse. Athenians would have been huge fans of Judge Judy. Back then it would have been Judge Judicles or something. But it was exciting. If someone took you to court for something, it could affect the entire outcome of your life.

Problem was, language and critical thinking was still in its infancy. So, defending yourself in one of these trials was not only crucial but it was incredibly unlikely that you had the ability to argue or speak well enough to do an effective job of it. On top of all this, people were just as ambitious back then as we are today. And it was possible to work your way up the social ladder and earn a prestigious place in government. But no one was going to vote for you if you weren’t educated and well spoken.

These two things created enough of a market in Athens for self-improvement that an entire industry of philosopher-teachers arose called the sophists. Now, we talked last episode about the word philosophy, the love of wisdom, right? But the second half of that word is “sophia,” which means wisdom. Sophists—they have the word for wisdom right there in their name. They certainly were wise but, as you can see, there was no love involved here.

Sophists were a mixture between ITT Tech and a taco truck. I mean, they were mobile schools. They’d teach you anything you wanted to learn about for the right price: music, rhetoric, mathematics, grammar. It actually does remind me of an ITT Tech commercial. There’s always two people in an elevator talking. One guy goes, “Man, I wish I had the skills to move forward in my career.” And the other guy goes, “You should call ITT Tech. They can help you specialize in—paralegal, dental assistant, scuba instructor”—you know, the marquee that pops up at the bottom of the screen.

ITT Tech provides a very similar service to what the early sophists provided. And this kind of commercial could be compared to how they used to have competitions screaming at each other trying to draw a crowd and show that they knew more than the other sophists. These sorts of screaming matches combined with just the generally sleazy nature of charging a lot of money for something that was held to be sacred—it just made a lot of people dislike them. Not to mention, the actual subject matter they were teaching was pretty shaky in itself.

Like, remember how the demand for sophists only came about because people were being called to court to defend themselves. Well, when all those people told these sophists they wanted to win the argument in court, the sophists just taught them how to win arguments. They didn’t teach them any true knowledge or wisdom. So, as a result, you had hundreds of people that just became masters of rhetoric. There’s even cases where they probably should have been guilty, and they were able to win.

The sophists taught these people little argument tactics like nitpicking insignificant points or discrediting the source of the information. They taught them to win the argument even if they had the worst argument. And this didn’t make people too thrilled with the sophists. But they definitely understood the power of language and its ability to influence people.

One very notable sophist was a guy named Gorgias. And he wrote about language in one of his woks called Encomium of Hellen. It was basically a promotional flyer for his school. He wrote it with the sole intention of attracting new students and getting business and really trying to make a case for why the investment of their money would eventually yield benefits.

He said it like this. “Just as different drugs draw forth different humors from the body—some putting a stop to disease, others to life—so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion.” You can definitely see in this quote that he not only understood the power of language, but in a funny way, he was trying to use the power of language to try to recruit people to learn the power of language from him.

One common thread among all the sophists was that they were skeptics. They didn’t like the idea of accepting something because reason tells us it should be true. They wanted hard evidence. Really, they just wanted a philosophy that made sense through the lens of everyday experience. They didn’t like the ideas of Democritus or Empedocles where they said that our senses show us an artificial world and that the real world exists at the atomic level or at the level of the mixing of the elements. They thought human experience should be paramount. The only question was, if truth is based on a sensory experience, whose sensory experience should be the guide?

One of the very first and most influential of all the sophists was a guy named Protagoras. He was friends with Empedocles, that guy that walked around in bronze shoes, if that tells you anything. Like the other sophists, Protagoras made his money teaching people not what right or wrong was but teaching them how to argue. So it really was conveniently aligned with his job security when he decided that he believes that all arguments have two sides, neither of which is more right than the other. He said he could win an argument with a worse argument if he was just more persuasive than his opponent. Because of this, he concluded it’s the man holding the opinion that’s the measure of the worth of the argument, not the actual argument itself or the facts it’s based on. Or as he put it in the opening line of one of his most famous works, man is the measure of all things.

He took this idea one step further and applied it to everything. What is true for one person may be false for another. What’s hot for one person may be cold for another. But he also applied it to morals. What’s right for one person may not be right for another. He said nothing is inherently good in itself. Something is only right because a person or a society judges it to be right.

This idea, of there being no absolutes or moral principles and that everything is subjective, is known as relativism. Protagoras didn’t think truth was something that only God knew or that you could only attain by thinking and analyzing things for decades. He thought truth was what any one guy makes it. To philosophy, Protagoras is the ultra-accepting, fanny pack-wearing soccer mom that hands out Capri Suns at the end of the games. I mean, I’m sure we all know someone or have known someone who agrees with him. It really is a compassionate and accepting way of looking at things and people. So, you can’t be too mad at them.

But relativism always begs the question, so if everyone is right in whatever truth they arrive at, then what about the people that condemn all other cultures and think everyone else is wrong? Shouldn’t they be right too? And I remember reading something Socrates said one time, and it was like, if relativism is true and everyone is right regardless of what they think, how can any one man be wiser than another? Aren’t they all correct? And also, aren’t sophists in the business of teaching people stuff? So, why is anybody paying to be taught anything if they already know the truth? The sophists would have said that they don’t teach people anything that’s better knowledge; they just teach them more useful knowledge, knowledge that can be used to benefit the person, like in the context of the courts.

So, all this stuff—this relativist view on morals that there isn’t a good or bad, just different, and their specialty to use rhetoric and language to sometimes make the worse argument win—all of this, no doubt, led to the negative outlook on the sophists. People always think about their argument skills and assume they only use them to do nefarious things. They have this view like the sophists are just sitting around teaching one O. J. Simpson after another how to get off scot free. But don’t forget, they could have just as easily used their special ability to argue to fight for justice or to do what the citizens thought was right.

I mean, you can definitely find several examples of how the sophists help advance philosophy. Relativism was a direct assault on the idea of moral principles or there just being one definition of good or one definition of just, or whatever. And this discourse ended up heavily influencing Plato to address the tenants of morality and really to try to base it on something eternal or stronger than one man’s opinion. And if it weren’t for the sophists, Plato may have never taken the time to clarify these things, and it’s some of his most important work.

Personally, I like what they had to say because it was openminded. And if argument was their specialty, then a truly great position at the time would have had to suffer the gauntlet of sophist argument. And if it could survive that, no matter how annoying it must have been at the time, that argument would be a stronger, more well-crafted argument for the experience.

So, real quickly, I’d like to tie up some loose ends and help bring together all the stuff we’ve covered so far in the last two episodes. Now, we aren’t the first people to ever study Presocratic philosophy. There have been several really smart people that have categorized all these thinkers and ideas in detail. And they wanted to find a way to remember it more effectively too. So, as you can probably imagine, they didn’t all use the same method of categorizing them.

If there’s one thing you do outside of this podcast this week, you guys, you need to look at a graph of the Presocratic philosophers that’s really common. It’s really important, guys. Like, you have to see the visual. It’ll really help you put into context all the philosophers we’ve covered so far and the dates that they lived. We’re going to have it up on the website, but it’s probably faster for you to just go to Google Images and type in “Presocratic graph.” It’s going to be the first thing that comes up. So, on the left it shows the years they lived. On the right are the names of them, color coded to a legend that designates the school of thought they came from, and then arrows pointing to all of their students and all the people they influence respectively.

Now, there are different ways people categorize these Presocratics. One example is what we’ve already talked about: the Ionian and the Italian classes. Those are two geographic regions. So, if you wanted to remember them based on where they came from, that would be one method of remembering. But there are other ways. Sometimes these historians of the Presocratics will break them down by their ideas. And this usually ends with them being separated down into six or so different schools of thought.

Now, these schools of thought will probably never ever come up in a conversation you’re having about philosophy. But I mean, think of it this way, if it ever comes up as a question on Jeopardy, all your friends are going to look at you like you’re the Rain Man for knowing that answer. Then you can just stand up and go, “Oh, is this teen Jeopardy? No? Ah, okay, it’s too easy. I’m leaving.” And you walk out of the room—instant legend, by the way. But another reason is, you’ll see why we learned about the particular philosophers we learned about. Each one of them comes from a different one of these six schools. And I’ve even seen a couple guys break down the six schools into two separate categories further.

They divide them into monists and pluralists. Monists were philosophers who thought the universe is made up of one fundamental substance. The three schools that thought this way are the Milesian school—you know, that’s where Thales and Anaximander came from—the Pythagorean school, the school formed by Pythagoras and his followers; and the Eleatic school, whose most notable member was Parmenides. And it’s called the Eleatic school because Parmenides came from a town in Italy called Elea. So, those were the monist schools.

The pluralist schools were made up of people who believed there wasn’t one fundamental substance but many fundamental substances. The three schools classified as pluralist would be, you guessed it, the pluralist school—that was the one Empedocles was part of with his earth, fire, air, and water—the atomic pluralist school, which had Democritus and Leucippus at the helm; and then the sophists who we just talked about.

But it’s important to note that the sophists weren’t necessarily all pluralists. They just lived at the same time that pluralism was very popular. In fact, they didn’t care at all about what the universe was made of. They just wanted to make money. Maybe if the universe was made out of Coach purses or something they would have cared.

But if you look at the graph, it moves in a pretty deliberate direction towards one guy. Not only was he highly educated from all the conflicting schools of thought that existed at the time, but he took all that he learned from them and created his own completely new way of thinking, a way of thinking that made him one of the biggest names in philosophy—Socrates.

Socrates must have smelled like the dumpster behind Panda Express. I mean, he had famously terrible hygiene. People would say he went everywhere without shoes. He never bathed. He never cut his hair. Not to mention, he wasn’t very easy on the eyes to begin with. There’s a story of him being challenged to a beauty contest as a joke against a guy named Critobulus. Now, in this beauty contest, both sides have to make an argument as to why they’re more beautiful than the other. And they actually went through with everything to entertain themselves. That’s the kind of stuff people did back then.

Socrates starts making his case for why he’s more beautiful than his opponent here: “Do you hold, then, that beauty is to be found only in man or is it also in other objects?

Critobulus: In faith, my opinion is that beauty is to be found quite as well in a horse or an ox or in any number of inanimate things. I know, at any rate, that a shield may be beautiful, or a sword, or a spear.

Socrates: How can it be that all these things are beautiful when they are entirely dissimilar?

Critobulus: Why, they are beautiful and fine, if they are well made for their respective functions for which we obtain them, or if they are naturally well constituted to serve our needs.

Socrates: Do you know the reason why we need eyes?

Critobulus: Well, obviously to see with.

Socrates: In that case, it would appear without further ado that my eyes are finer ones than yours.

Critobulus: How so?

Socrates: Because, while yours only see straight ahead, mine, by bulging out as they do, see also to the sides.

Critobulus: Do you mean to say that a crab is better equipped visually than any other creature?

Socrates: Absolutely; for its eyes are also better set to ensure strength.”

So, I love this story because it encompasses a lot of what Socrates was. He had a great sense of humor. He was famously unkempt. And through asking Critobulus to give his definition of what beauty is, he’s able to use the contradictions in his definition of beauty to make a case for why he’s more beautiful even though it’s obvious to everyone that he isn’t.

He lost the contest, by the way, but it didn’t matter. What he succeeded in doing is, he showed Critobulus that maybe he didn’t know exactly what beauty was. Critobulus said, when things are well made for the respective functions for which we obtain them, they are beautiful. But by asking him a series of questions, Socrates proved that the answer couldn’t be that simple.

This is what he is known for. Socrates never started a university. He never lived in a castle. He never even wrote any of his thoughts down. He didn’t believe written text was the way to do philosophy anyway. To Socrates, the only thing philosophy was, was discussion, questioning, and argument. His particular brand of it was called the Socratic method.

Now, the best guess historians can make as to how he developed this intense questioning style is in a famous story about a friend of his going to the Oracle at Delphi. The Oracle at Delphi was a rotating older peasant woman that lived in the area that was on drugs, who apparently channeled the god Apollo. And people would go to her and ask her for advice. And Socrates’ friend asked the woman who the wisest man in the world was. She said Socrates. His friend came back and said, “Hey, Socrates, the Oracle said you’re the wisest man in the world.”

And Socrates was absolutely shocked by this. He went instantly to work to get to the bottom of it. By the way, no victory dance or anything; he just started. He just went around to all the wisest people he knew and started interrogating them. He realized that these people only thought they knew a lot. When you ask the right questions, it turns out their knowledge is false.

Here's a quote from the Apology. “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.”

This method he used to question people and ultimately point out how little they actually knew was his greatest contribution to philosophy. There’s a quote from a guy named Cicero who was writing about this Socrates when he said, “Socrates, however, was the first who called philosophy down from heaven and placed it in cities and introduced it even in homes and drove it to inquire about life and customs and things good and evil.”

This quote about Socrates is amazingly insightful for someone who lived almost a half a millennium later. Before Socrates, philosophy was done only by men, and only by men who were born into or were clever enough to attain a lot of money. So they didn’t have to spend their days working; they could spend them thinking.

Once Socrates realized that the reason he was wiser than everyone is because he can admit that he knows nothing, he set out to correct the citizens of Athens and fix their assumptions and pre-conceptions. He hit the streets like those Mormons that come to your house on their 10-speed bicycles. In the marketplace, in the public square, in the front of the courthouse, anywhere—he just started accosting anyone unfortunate enough to not look busy when he was walking around.

He’d walk up to them with a very self-effacing manner about him, saying things like, “Oh, please help me. I’m an ignorant person. I’m wondering if you can help me get to the bottom of something. What is justice?” or “What is virtue?” one of these questions. People would give their obviously flawed response, and he would just lay into them, questioning them, pointing out contradictions or exceptions, and eventually getting to the place where the person was either angry at him because he made them feel stupid or angry at him because he wouldn’t leave him alone. Either way, they were angry.

And this didn’t make him a lot of friends around town. He even did it to judges or prestigious generals or government officials. It didn’t take long before he had so many people mad at him for doing this that they started labeling him a sophist. But he didn’t care if people liked him or not. His main goal wasn’t to make friends; it was to help others discover how little they knew and get them on the path to truth. He compared himself to a midwife. But instead of helping deliver babies, he questioned everyone and helped deliver new ideas into the world.

But his midwifery didn’t stop in his lifetime by any means. The Socratic method is also known as inductive argument. This is where a set of premises based on experience is first established, and then those premises are then shown to lead to a universal truth. Inductive argument was used extensively by Aristotle and even Francis Bacon who used it as a major influence in the scientific method. I mean, I guess that had a little bit of an impact, right?

Socrates eventually humiliated enough people in public that they banded together, and he was put on trial at the ripe age of 70. The entire story of his trial, his defense, his conviction, and his reactions are catalogued by Plato in one of his most famous works, the Apology. And because Socrates didn’t write anything down, the only thing we have to go off of are other people’s perspectives. In the case of Socrates, it comes down to four people: Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, and Aristotle.

Now, Xenophon was an old friend of Socrates, but he doesn’t go into much detail, and he often put his own theories in the mouth of Socrates as if to give them merit by association. So we can’t really trust him. Aristophanes was a playwright who made a ridiculous caricature of Socrates as a character in a comedic play. So he’s not a good source. And Aristotle wasn’t even born until after Socrates was dead. So that brings us to the last guy, Plato.

Plato was Socrates’ student, and he deeply respected Socrates. So he probably isn’t the best testimony if we want to know the absolute truth, but he really is all we have. And of the four of them, Plato’s testimony is usually held in the highest regard, especially because he was the closest to Socrates of the four of them. But one thing is for sure. Although these four sources vary considerably about who Socrates was, it’s a pretty good chance that the similarities that we find in all four of them are accurate.

To understand why Socrates was put on trial in the first place and the kind of biased jury that he faced, it’s good to know about the political climate that existed in Greece at the time. Five years before the trial of Socrates, Athens and Sparta ended the Peloponnesian War. Sparta won, by the way. So, Athens was turned into an oligarchy, taken over by a nice group of gentlemen known as the Thirty Tyrants in the year 404 BC. They committed such gruesome genocide that they were overthrown only a year later. Now, it took a couple years to sort things out, and democracy was finally restored.

Socrates was being tried only two years after democracy had been restored in Athens. And back then, two years was nothing. So, they were really uneasy and really testy towards anyone who was questioning government or trying to evoke change in any way. The charges that they eventually placed against him were corrupting the young and denying the gods of the state and introducing new gods.

See, there was no separation of church and state back then. In fact, quite the contrary, only the state had the power to choose what was a suitable god to worship or not worship. And it didn’t look very good for Socrates being a guy that used to walk around claiming he was getting advice from this thing that followed him around called Daimonion or his personal guardian angel or something like that. People started to ask him about it, and he was like, “What, this guy? Daimonion? No, it’s just flying around giving me advice all the time. It’s not a god or anything.” He was treading on thin ice.

Take all the personality traits we’ve discussed thus far, and now imagine what you would think of Socrates when an extremely popular play is released with him as a central character. The play was by Aristophanes, and it was called Clouds. Socrates was depicted as a complete moron, and it was a ridiculous, cartoonish version of Socrates. But it was supposed to be that way. It was a comedy. The goal was to make people laugh. And it worked. The Socrates in the play would just ramble on about silly things.

Like, there’s this one scene where he just puts his arms out and spins around in a circle screaming, “I’m walking on air! I’m walking on air!” And everybody would just die laughing in the audience, apparently; that was a hilarious part. But seeing how many people in modern times get their perception of the world through media or entertainment, and then they take no time to educate themselves about whether it’s true or not—it’s not hard to imagine this immensely popular play shaping the public’s collective view on Socrates.

I mean, this kind of stuff happens all the time. Like, how many movies have you seen where a drug deal is going down or some two-timing street hustlers are taking people to the cleaners, and for some reason it’s accepted as the gospel truth that if you ask a cop if he’s a cop, he has to tell you yes? Turns out, that’s not actually the case. But I mean, you ask somebody that watches those movies, and they’re like, “It’s in the Constitution, man! He has to tell you!” Sometimes people just accept what they see in movies, and it doesn’t seem like it was much different back in the time of Socrates.

The play also painted him as a sophist, and people hated the sophists. The reason it was a common rumor that he was a sophist is because of his lifestyle. Although he didn’t take any money as payment, the guy didn’t shower let alone work or know where his next meal was going to come from. He was broke. So he would trade sitting around having good conversation with people for meals and shelter. This is how he made his living. He just didn’t take money like the sophists did. But people still saw that as taking payment for teaching people. It’s kind of an unfair parallel to draw. I mean, the intentions of Socrates’ actions and the intentions of the sophists were completely different.

So, all of this—it was what people of the jury had in their heads as “what they knew” about Socrates when they first started the trial. Plato chronicles everything that happened during Socrates’ trial in his work the Apology. Although it was called the Apology, Socrates didn’t apologize for anything. He refused to grovel. He refused to beg for his life. It was common at the time to bring up your family in front of the jury and try to appeal to the sympathy of them. But he refused to do that too. See, Socrates was about doing the right thing, not about trying to get acquitted.

In the first part of his trial when he needs to address the charges leveled against him, they were like, to the charge of corrupting the young, what say you? He says, “Is that a truth which your superior wisdom has recognized thus early in life, and am I, at my age, in such darkness and ignorance as not to know that if a man with whom I have to live is corrupted by me, I am very likely to be harmed by him; and yet I corrupt him, and intentionally, too.” Basically what he’s saying is, to corrupt someone is to harm them. And it makes no sense to say that I’d harm someone because he’s younger and stronger than I am. I’m 70 years old, and he could beat me up. So why would I ever do this? That just doesn’t make any sense.

It went down in history as one of the worse arguments ever crafted. But he didn’t give a bad argument because he was incapable of defending himself. He could have done a lot better. He just wasn’t making decisions for the sake of staying alive or avoiding punishment. He was just trying to do what he saw as the right thing to do, which wasn’t begging the jury for mercy and manipulating people. And his main focus wasn’t even on defending the actual charges.

He spent most of his time defending the terrible reputation that followed him into the trial. And that really boiled down to him defending the way he carried himself: like not bathing, not caring about the typical things Athenians cared about like money or status. He had to explain why he questioned people about their beliefs and embarrassed them in public. And in the process of explaining all this, he didn’t just defend the way he lived his life; he didn’t just claim he shouldn’t be punished for what he does. He actually went so far as to tell the Athenians they should be thanking him for all this questioning he has bestowed upon them.

Just to clarify real quick, in Athenian trials there are a few different votes that the jury does in any given trial. The first one is to determine if you’re guilty or not guilty. He obviously failed miserably there. He didn’t argue very well. The second vote was, the person accused offers what they think a suitable punishment would be.

You’d think he would start changing the unapologetic tone after being voted guilty. But instead, he decides the best course of action is to insult them a bit more. He went on to say other things in the trial like this. “Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul?”

When he was asked what the proper punishment would be in the second part of the trial, he says that he’s been doing the Athenians a favor with all this questioning he’s been throwing at them for years. So, he suggests his “punishment” for this “crime” should be free meals for life at the expense of the state. I mean, usually this kind of thing was done only for people who were victorious at the Olympic games that were from Athens.

And after he said this, during the second vote, people voted for the death penalty by a larger margin than they voted him guilty in the first place. He actually turned people from thinking he’s not guilty to wanting him dead. He didn’t care though. He saw death as just another one of these things that people think they are wise about but really know nothing about. Nobody knows whether death is a bad thing or whether it’s the best thing that could ever happen to you. And when he said that, he wasn’t talking about going to an amusement park in the sky or something; he was talking about a release from all the things that trouble humans on a daily basis.

This is a quote from the Apology. “To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of all evils. And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know.”

Like I said before, Socrates wasn’t saying this stuff to try to get the charges dropped. He was saying this stuff with the same motives he had for doing everything else in life: to live a good and virtuous life. He was one of the first philosophers to ask “What is a good life?” In his opinion, a good life was getting a sort of peace of mind as a result of doing the right thing as opposed to doing things simply because society tells you it’s a good idea.

He didn’t agree with Protagoras and most of the sophists who believed morals were relative. He believed morals were absolutes, and they apply to everyone in the world the same way regardless of what country or time period they are from. And I think this is very insightful. The morals and laws of then are not the same as now. But which one of them is more right? Socrates would have argued that neither of them are right and that we are in no place to be even labeling what is good or bad because we don’t even know what good or bad is. How can you philosophize about what is good if you don’t even know what the word “good” truly means?

He thought that life, when you’re on this earth, is not just some preparation for what happens after death. He thought there was a whole set of tasks and problems to tackle when you’re on the planet: like thought, self-reflection, and striving to live a virtuous life, among others. But the catch was, Socrates thought that the only way to live a virtuous life is to know what the true definitions of these virtues were. And the only way to find that was through extensive thought.

He believed that the key to living a good life was understanding these virtues. Virtue was the best and most important trait to have. He thought that when people don’t act virtuously and commit evil acts, that no one actually desires to do evil. If only they knew enough, they would never commit acts of evil because that knowledge would then make them uncomfortable. And humans all strive by their nature to be as comfortable as possible. So they would never do it.

Now, it doesn’t take a genius to realize several counterexamples to this. Like, people addicted to cigarettes want to stop, but they can’t, or various other examples where we know what the correct decision is but choose to act otherwise out of convenience. But at the time, people must have not argued with Socrates that much about it and just thought they had not reached the level of wisdom he was at. He appeared to be walking proof of this life. He was definitely seen as wise, and he seemed to never make an immoral decision.

In retrospect, his self-mastery was probably just the byproduct of countless hours of self-reflection. And it was through these countless hours of thinking about things that you arrive at knowledge. He famously said, “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.” Like we just said, if people knew enough, they would never make a wrong decision or commit an evil act.

One really notable thing that makes him stand out from other philosophers around the time is that he thought everyone could be a philosopher—not just could be but should be or must be. His most famous saying was when he was defending himself at his trial saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. So, really, he thought if you were a person who just walked around aimlessly, not questioning anything or why you believe what you believe—he doesn’t think that life is worth living.

To Socrates, pursuing knowledge was the ultimate goal of life. It isn’t because it’s entertaining to us that’s the reason why we pursue it. It is the reason why we exist. And this makes sense to me, but maybe I’m a little biased. From the time we are babies, we’re just information sponges, constantly trying to learn more and gather skills that will make surviving later in life easier. But for some reason, at a certain age some people just stop. They’re perfectly content with the knowledge they’ve gained thus far, and they just call it a life—you know, Honey Boo Boo and yelling at 12-year-olds on Call of Duty all day.

But Socrates takes it one step further. Knowledge is also supposed to help your soul. He thought the unexamined life makes the soul dizzy and confused, where the wise soul is stable. And eventually, through wisdom, all the straying that makes the soul dizzy and confused can be brought to an end. By not seeking truth, you’re harming your soul. And by pursuing it, you’re nurturing your soul.

So, in this case, doing good things, acting morally, is in your own self-interest, which is a pretty cool way of looking at it. He said in the Apology, “I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and that examining both myself and others is really the very best thing a man can do.”

Socrates was convicted to death. And with all of his friends around him, crying, he was forced to drink hemlock, or a poisonous broth made from a plant indigenous to Europe that actually is found in the parsley family of plants. Or, if you want a modern version of hemlock, just go buy a zero-calorie energy drink. But Socrates died a martyr for the cause of philosophy. And his dialectical method and the questions he asked would change the way philosophy was done forever.

It's really sad. Socrates had so many enemies just for asking questions. He really was kind of like an annoyingly inquisitive child. That’s actually how I think about him sometimes. I mean, I’m sure we’ve all had that curious little kid asking us a bunch of questions at a family reunion or something like that at some point in our lives. You know, you say something, and then the kid just keeps asking, “Why? Why? Why?” Because I said so! Right? I mean, adults that get angry at that either react with the “because I said so” or they tell the kid, “You know who knows a lot about that? Your mother. You should go and ask her.”

It’s funny how similar these two reactions are to the reactions Socrates would get in the public square of Athens. The “because I said so” would be his victims getting angry because he embarrassed them. And the “go ask your mother” would be his victims getting angry because he wouldn’t leave them alone. These enemies of his would label him as a sophist. And it’s that label and the reputation that went along with his name that eventually landed him a guilty conviction to a crime he didn’t commit.

But Socrates wasn’t a sophist. I mean, every source of history agrees that Socrates could have easily avoided execution. He could have easily defended himself, manipulated the jury with his superior intellect, and been deemed not guilty. So, if a sophist was someone people despised for their ability to use rhetoric to win an argument even when they should have lost the argument, then Socrates was the furthest thing I can imagine from a sophist. He lost an argument he could have easily won because of how much he cherished his moral principles.

And just think about this for a second, guys. He faced death. He knew he could easily avoid it. But to him, living life wasn’t good enough in itself. Living a noble life was the bare minimum. To go against his basic survival instincts was to go against hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. And I can’t think of anything more admirable than what he did.

In modern times, most of the characteristics of people that we admire as humans are characteristics that are gained from going against our evolutionary instincts. Like, to see the delicious, calorie-dense cupcake full of fat and sugar that our brains are telling us we need to jump on in case we don’t catch an antelope next week, it’s an admirable person that never succumbs to that desire. Or to be a selfless person removed from your own ego—that ego that’s put here by evolution in the interest of self-preservation, to make me the most important thing. Make no mistake, what Socrates did went against the most deeply engrained of all animal instincts. And forget philosophy for a second. He’s an incredible human being for that.

Last week I asked you if there’s anything you care about so deeply that you would do it for free indefinitely because it’s not about the return you get for it. Think about that thing that’s really important to you. And philosophize this: is there anything you believe in so deeply that you would picket on its behalf in the streets? Is there anything you believe in so deeply that you would die for it?

Thanks for listening.