The Unexamined Life

When Socrates said “the unexamined life is not worth living,” I believe he meant that if individuals don’t take the time to examine the world around them, their actions, and their thoughts and feelings, then they are wasting their lives. This thought does an excellent job of capturing Socrates’ beliefs on human existence. Since, in Socrates’ eyes, justice, truth, wisdom, and virtue were essential to humanity’s true purpose, then a person who lived an unexamined life would be living a worthless life. The only way to find justice, truth, wisdom, and virtue is through examination and reflection. An individual isn’t born being wise. Wisdom is obtained through observing life’s experiences and understanding the patterns of life that govern existence. Without examination, a person would be fully distracted by his or her body and neglecting his or hers soul’s true purpose of contemplating deep truths. Neglecting the soul’s true purpose would be living a meaningless life because the soul would be unhealthy meaning that an individual couldn’t have success when he or she was finally “freed” from the jail of the body through the process of death.

I agree with Socrates’ thought that an unexamined life is not worth living. I believe that human happiness is determined by one’s thoughts and purpose and not by one’s experiences. If an individual doesn’t have anything to live for, then one can’t ever be truly happy because he or she won’t have accomplished anything. The only way to have a purpose, and therefore meaning and happiness, is through examination. Yes, one can try to argue that basic thoughts are meaningful by themselves. For example, the thought of being hungry and the reaction to this thought (procuring sustenance) is necessary for physical life which is needed for examination to occur. However, if one does define this as a meaningful thought (as opposed to a biological process) then they might as well say that a dog’s life is just as meaningful as a human’s because they too exhibit this behavior. What gives importance to existence is not existence in itself, but reason for it. Imagine, that someone invented a new object that did “nothing” but simply exist. It couldn’t perform any function (including acting as an economic commodity). It’s probably safe to say that no one would by this product because it would be completely useless. Yes, it exists, but there’s no reason for its existence. It is not of any worth.

In the simplest of terms I believe that worth needs meaning, meaning needs purpose, and purpose needs examination. With this laid out I’d like to ask the question, “Is it possible for ‘human’ life to exist without examination?” I believe the answer is no. It seems to me that humans are born with an innate consciousness that inevitably involves examination. In other words, humans are all born with a sense of wonder that leads to questioning and examination. Perhaps what is of true importance is not the process of examination but the results of it. Does the purpose of an individual’s life determine if it is of worth?