A Philosopher’s Guide To The Good Life - Meghan Sullivan & Paul Blaschko

Marcus Aurelius is constantly writing to himself. He's like, "Look, don't think about how you might lose the things you love in the future. Return to the present and realize they're here right now. And in worrying about them, you're missing out on what's so good about them."

So I want to start with a quote, "Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care nor give thought to wisdom or truth or the best possible state of your soul?" What's that mean to you?

I can start. So that's a very famous passage from Socrates' Apology. Uh, 2,400 years ago, Socrates, the kind of founder of philosophy, was put on trial by the Athenian government for, among other things, corrupting the youth of Athens for asking too many hard questions and being a, a bit too aggressive and pushy about whether Athens was pursuing the things that were really valuable in life versus just kind of inflating their own egos. And one of the things I love about that quote, we, uh, we shout that and read it to, to undergraduates here at Notre Dame quite a bit. You can imagine somebody saying to their enemy or, like, their opposition, "You guys don't care about the right things. All you care about is money," or, "All you care about is fame. You don't care about what's really good." But Socrates, uh, is not saying that to his enemies. He's saying it to his friends and students. That's one of the quotes that got him into trouble, is he's going around to people he really cares about and saying, like, "Paul, I think you're getting too addicted to these, like, cultural lies about money and honor, and I really think you need to work harder on, like, going after things that are really worth having." And that was a threatening idea in Athens.

Why was it so threatening?

Yeah. Well, I mean, so for one thing, uh, Athens is a direct democracy, right? Uh, and so the ability to argue and the ability to persuade people could be literally a life or death matter, right? If somebody got up and accused you of something, uh, in front of, uh, uh, the assembly, you just had to stand up and you had to argue. You had to say like, "This is, you know, why this isn't true," uh, or, "This is why somebody else owes me a bunch of money," or whatever it might be. And so the ability to just win arguments at all costs is something that was a really valuable skill. And there were actually professional, you know, we call them argument or debate coaches, they're, they're called the Sophists, right? Uh, who would be hired, uh, often by sort of the wealthy, uh, uh, i- in Athens to train Athenian citizens on how to argue, right? Uh, and it's easy to see how you might lose, uh, the truth in all of that, right? Uh, or lose the desire for the truth, lose the love for the truth, uh, because if it doesn't matter, you know, whether your argument's true or not, if it just matters like whether you're persuading people, um, there's not really, uh, as much incentive, right, to, to focus on, uh, you know, whether your reasons that you're giving are good. Um, so this is one of the reasons why I think Socrates is such a revolutionary figure, both in his own time and also ours. I mean, like, a- as we sort of did the research and we're wri- looking at ancient Athens, I was just struck by how many parallels there are between, you know, the (laughs) complaints that Socrates has about his own time and the complaints that, you know, a lot of us have when we sort of look at the, the state of, of political debate or the state of, uh, debate on Twitter and, you know, people trying to sort of own each other on Twitter or, you know, just, uh, you know, exert some sort of power without any sort of respect for or love, uh, of the truth. And that's, you know, it's an over, uh, generalization. It's not always the case. It's not what's always going on. Um, but it certainly resonates, right? Uh, the message sort of resonates, and as I read, you know, Socrates' critique, I just, like, constantly found myself nodding along and thinking like, "Yeah, I recognize this."