“The unexamined life is not worth
living.” This quote from Socrates has a
lot of meaning for me. First and
foremost, the quote itself is quite enlightening and has deep meaning within
it. Without examination, life is only
full of trivialities, a banal sequence of events that leads inexorably towards
death. Socrates is saying that only by examining
life does one make the life they live of any worth. Even if no one else reads it, this gives my journal purpose.
Secondly,
I had heard this quote before, but the way I came across it this month was
another one of those times I have to define as being a “God Moment”, an
instance in which God shows me of His existence through yet another event that
unbelievers can easily dismiss as just another crazy coincidence, but it amazes
me how it all ties together like a big, fascinating, undeniable jigsaw puzzle!
I recently bought a special issue of Time magazine that looked fascinating
to me: “100 Ideas That Changed the World:
History’s Greatest Breakthroughs, Inventions, and Theories”. The magazine listed and then wrote about these historical ideas and events in a concise way I had never experienced before.
When I was in school studying history, it
always seemed so dry. Only in movies did
history seem interesting to me, even though at the same time I realized that
fictionalized accounts always used dramatic license to some degree, and that
there was always the question of historical accuracy, a critique that could, at
the same time, even be leveled against textbooks and what was being
taught. Like news, history was open to
subjective interpretation, not only in the material itself, but in the way, or
the order, in which it was presented.
Not that it mattered to me anyway, for as I look back upon my school
years learning about history, I always found it as dry as a segment on Sixty Minutes would be to any kid
obsessed with cartoons and fantasy.
Having recently watched Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off again, I can equate my experiences with learning history
with the teachers presented in that movie, droning on about ancient times and
documents and terms the kids had no interest in, and not doing very much to
make it exciting for them either. But
after reading some new historical interpretations of past events by the likes
of Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, they’ve helped make history come
alive for me in a way my grade school teachers never did, and it all started to
connect and make more sense. A book like
this one from Time magazine was irresistible to someone like me; here was a
short and snappy presentation, not an endless parade of names and dates, but a
quick, chronological rundown of the 100 ideas that changed the world, and even
if a person might quibble with a few of
them, just flipping through this quick read shows that at least 80% would
probably be universal ideas that would show up on everyone’s list of the
biggest ideas, from the ideas of such major religions as Buddhism,
Confucianism, Islam, and yes, Christianity, to all the major ideas in the
fields of philosophy, political theory, and mathematics, covering the ancient
world, the middle ages, the renaissance, the age of enlightenment, and modern
times concisely like I had never seen before, and helping it all to make more
sense.
And
so, while reading this book, there was one section on the philosophy of
Socrates that I found interesting enough to share with Mom, even if Mom didn’t
quite understand the reason I might have wanted to share it with her. This book was making the past come alive for
me, and I found a new appreciation for the thoughts and ideas of Socrates, and
many others. But it was the brief
article on Socrates I felt the need the share with Mom, reading to her about
his life and death, and the Socratic method of finding Truth with a capital
“T”. Through what came to be known as
the Socratic method, a series of questions are asked to arrive at ultimate
truth about them, and although it was through this questioning that Socrates
was arrested and sentenced to death (setting an example among the people of the
day of questioning those in power), it was also because of this that Socrates
said the quote above in his own defense, “The unexamined life is not worth
living.”
 |
The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David
(1787)
|
And
honestly, how many times in a normal person’s lifetime does a he or she make a
special point of studying Socrates?
Before sharing that quote with Mom, I believe the last time I gave this
historical figure any thought was years and years ago, the last time I saw the
movie Bill & Ted’s Excellent
Adventure, a dumb yet charming throw-away comedy in which the famous Greek
philosopher was used for laughs, such as the way Bill and Ted both pronounced
his name as “so-crates” instead of “sock-rat-ees”.
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| Socrates, or "So-crates", rocks out with Bill & Ted! |
But the very same weekend I read this little
article to Mom about Socrates, one of the pastors at our church used this exact same quote from Socrates as one of the messages
that week! Now some people who may hear
this little story of mine may yawn and say it’s just a coincidence, but not
me. For me, it was affirmation. For me, it was like God’s confirmation of His
own existence, and his affirmation for the road I was on, and the fact that it was from this particular
quote, and this particular historical figure, and this particular book, all spoke volumes to
that same affirmation!
And
it continues… Because of this book, and
the way it brilliantly took all these ideas from the whole of human history and
presented them so succinctly in a neat little, easy to understand package, it
left me thirsty for more. The liberals,
who are basically now the ones in charge of the entire curriculum from
Kindergarten through college, have taken it upon themselves to rewrite history,
demonizing America every chance they get and downplaying the conservative
Christian basis of the entire American culture.
For this reason, I downloaded a book on iTunes called A Patriot’s History of the United States
that reexamines the whole of American history from the perspective of the
conservative Christian camp… because we get enough of the other kind in school. I am very interested in reading the rest of
this book. It will give me a basis I
never had before, and hopefully, some of it will stick with me. Hopefully, all these years later, I can
better understand what I didn’t before, and become not only a true fan of
history, but be able to understand what all of it might mean.
Images from:
I like how Socrates never charged for his teaching. He just did it for fun. I think he was employed as a stonecutter if I remember correctly.
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