Translator: Hana Colucci Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
When it comes to saving life,
my guess is that you think of things like chemotherapy or CPR,
things far removed from philosophy.
But the title of my talk today, "How Philosophy Can Save Your Life,"
is in earnest.
I actually think that when it comes to saving your life,
you need something like philosophy.
Think about it.
CPR, chemotherapy and all the other marvelous medical techniques,
as wonderful and precious as they can be, don't actually save your life.
They really just put off your death.
It's said that when Socrates, the great hero of Western philosophy,
was sentenced to death by the Athenian court,
he replied, "Technically you do not have the power to sentence me to death.
Life has sentenced me to death. All you can do is give me a date."
Handing down a death sentence or successfully administering chemotherapy
is really just making an adjustment on the date of our inevitable death.
If you want to save your life, you need to turn it from a humdrum thing
into the precious thing that it's meant to be.
And I don't think chemotherapy has a whole lot to offer on that score.
Now, when I am talking about philosophy,
I mean it in the ancient Greek sense of that word:
The love of wisdom. The pursuit of wisdom.
Sometimes, I worry that some of our contemporary practitioners
can give you the sense that philosophy is really just for some big brain
that's going to construct a perfect theory of the whole universe,
or maybe even more likely,
a big brain that's going to criticize what everyone else has to say.
And while criticism and theorizing
are important and even joyful parts of philosophy -
I don't want to diminish them -
really, philosophy is something much more than that.
I guess I worry that people often feel like they don't have permission
to study philosophy,
that they feel intimidated by it,
or they feel social pressures that steer them away from studying it.
That's too bad because I think philosophy is something that we can all engage in,
and I think it's something that we often should engage in.
Philosophy begins in the wonder that we all feel
about what's true and really valuable.
It takes us on a fascinating, sometimes perilous journey of speculation and doubt.
But it ends by returning us to our lives
and helping to know them for the first time.
To explain what I am talking about, let me tell a few stories.
Sometime toward the end of the fifth century B.C.,
a man by the name of Chaerephon went into the Delphi Oracle and asked,
"Is my friend Socrates the wisest person around?"
The Oracle came back: "No one is wiser than Socrates."
Now, when Socrates himself got wind of this pronouncement,
he was puzzled.
He thought, "I can't be the wisest person.
I actually have no wisdom at all."
So he set out to disprove the Oracle with a very simple strategy:
Just find one person with a little bit of wisdom,
which would clearly beat him, whose wisdom level was at zero.
So he wandered around Athens,
critically interviewing the religious authorities,
the political authorities,
the workers, the entertainers.
And what he found was that the Oracle had spoken the truth:
he was the wisest.
Not because he possessed any great wisdom,
but he possessed one little piece of priceless wisdom.
Namely, he knew he knew nothing.
Everyone else claimed to have special knowledge about their various pursuits
when in fact they did not,
putting them in the hole, wisdom-wise.
Now, I've always been fascinated by that story of Socrates,
but I've also always been a little puzzled by it.
What does it mean to have wisdom when you don't possess wisdom?
How can searching after answers be a form of wisdom?
What good is it not to have the answers but to be looking for them?
It took a student of mine, actually,
to really help me understand that story in a much deeper way.
She reenacted, unaware of Plato's writings about Socrates,
that very story.
And, I think, she shows both how philosophy can help save your life,
but also how we can all move in the greatness of philosophy.
Her name was Jillian,
and she was a nurse's aide when she took my ethics class,
I think because it probably helped to fulfill some requirement.
She was studying to eventually become a full-fledged nurse.
One of the most interesting conversations was sparked
when I casually asked the drooping class,
"What's a hospital for, anyway?"
I challenged the expected answers as they came out.
"To fix people."
"What about those with a terminal case?"
"To ease people's pain?"
"What about those people whose pain cannot be eased?"
"To ease people's pain whose pain can be eased?"
"Is there no obligation to healthy people?"
I was trying to open up their minds a little bit
for some articles I was assigning on the purpose of a hospital.
Well, the conversation sparked something in Jillian,
and she asked my permission if she could write on this for her next paper.
Well, a couple of weeks later,
as students were filing out, turning in their papers,
I called her aside to ask how the project had gone.
Well, our conversation in class, she told me,
had really perplexed her, even kind of disturbed her.
She worked in a hospital, she felt she had a good sense of things,
but after our conversation, she realized
that she didn't really have any great wisdom about the point of a hospital.
To help her formulate a thesis for her paper,
she lit on the idea of going around the hospital
and questioning various people there -
the doctors, the administrators, the nurses, the nurse's' aides.
She said, "I figured someone there surely had to have some wisdom
about what the point of a hospital was."
But what she found was that when she critically interviewed them,
that they often gave the same pat answers as the students did in class,
which, with a little criticism,
she was able to show to be not really totally adequate.
She said that the best answer she got was from some doctor who said to her -
after having had his first couple of attempts shot down by a nurse's aide -
"Well, maybe you're supposed to do all of the above."
But she realized that that too was kind of inadequate.
Should they always give people what they want?
Should they always give people what they need?
What should govern the variety of services that they provide?
And why were they there?
The problem, Jillian said to me, was she thought that too often,
the hospital subordinated its whole purpose to fixing broken bodies.
She said, "Too often pregnant women are treated like they are sick,
mourners are dealt with like psychological cases.
Folks clearly dying are pointlessly fixed.
If the hospital is no more than a mechanical body shop,
we live in a less than fully human world."
"Imagine," she said, "Doctors, nurses,
people who have devoted decades to studying and practicing medicine
who've never given really serious thought to why they were doing it."
Imagine, I thought,
the people of Athens being unable to answer Socrates' question successfully.
Imagine, I also thought, people, maybe especially people in a hospital,
forgetting to save their own lives.
Now, she also said she figured that many of her coworkers did pretty decent jobs
going on their feel for what they ought to be doing,
but she wondered if they wouldn't be better off opening their minds
to the full truth of it.
She was echoing a famous claim of Socrates:
"The unexamined life is not worth living."
In her paper, Jillian explained that the philosophers I had assigned
helped her to see matters a little more clearly.
That sickness, pain, can alienate us from those around us,
that they threaten to exile us from the human community.
The closest she could come to formulating the purpose of the hospital
was, "To be there for people."
"To be there when they're sick, to be there when they're dying,
to be there when they're mourning."
"To help people when you could, and to aid people when they wanted,
of course,
but most of all, to be there for them, human to human."
The point of medicine, she said, was care.
"Doctors are there," she marvelously concluded,
"to help the nurses."
But doctors, she feared, sometimes overrate their wisdom
on the basis of their technical proficiency and science.
She also admitted that she didn't necessarily have all the answers
and that even what she was saying she had some doubts about,
but she said that her pursuit of wisdom about what she was doing
had helped her to really understand
the full meaning and significance of what she was training to do,
that philosophy had helped plug her into her vocation.
Jillian has been a full-fledged nurse now for over a decade,
and I contacted her recently, and she said to me,
"You know, I kept that paper I wrote for you,
and I still define my goals and my purposes in those terms."
In being there for people, she's been saving her own life.
In the wake of Socrates,
philosophy in the ancient world
really became focused on the question of how to live a good life.
It was all about the pursuit of what they called "eudaimonia,"
in ancient Greek,
which we often translate as happiness, the pursuit of happiness.
And happiness is a pretty good translation,
but really, eudaimonia means something more like
"Flourishing over the course of your whole life"
or "Living up to the full potential of being human."
Philosophy was not just some intellectual game,
it was very much about trying to understand those principles
that are going to bring happiness and practice them in our lives.
I have to admit that I am guilty of sometimes asking my students in class,
"If the doctor gave you only one year to live,
how would you spend your remaining days?"
Generally, I get kind of cliched, bucket-list sort of answers,
which show how unexamined our lives often are.
For bucket lists make a really bad assumption
that the good life is just a parade of splashy, disconnected experiences.
One time, as I was fielding answers
about skydiving and visiting the Pyramids,
I noticed a twinkle in the eye of Kimberly,
one of my great nontraditional students.
After class, I called her up and I said,
"I noticed you were kind of smiling when we were talking
about how people would spend their last year of life.
What was on your mind?"
She explained to me
that fairly recently she'd been in exactly that situation.
She had been diagnosed with a rare neuromuscular disorder,
"The most aggressive case seen," the doctor said,
and they told her that she did not have long to live.
Well, after some dark nights of the soul,
Kimberly made up her mind to take matters into her own hands,
seeking out some additional therapies to the ones the doctors prescribed.
But she realized she did not have all the time in the world,
and so, she said to me,
she decided to engage in philosophy in that ancient sense.
She was going to try to figure out
what, really, happiness was and how to practice it.
She loved wine,
so she got in the habit of really savoring a couple of glasses every night.
She loved bicycling,
so she threw herself into the world of cycling.
She loved learning more, and she never finished college,
so she went back to school
to study the kinds of subjects she was most interested in,
including philosophy,
where she studied, with me, thinkers like Plato and Epicurus and Epictetus.
She said these thinkers helped to sharpen her sense of the logic of living.
You come to terms with your death.
You confront the limitations of bodily existence.
You pursue virtue.
You try to figure out what's really pleasurable.
You pursue knowledge to deepen yourself
and to use this unique human brain of ours.
I find a life like Kimberly's utterly marvelous and also utterly philosophical.
Students that I have had, like Kimberly and Jillian and many others,
have shown me that,
in the words of one of my heroes, William James, an American philosopher,
"The deepest human life is everywhere."
The philosophical odyssey is open to all of us;
the books of the great philosophers are there to help us,
but of course, ultimately it's a journey that we have to go on for ourselves.
Now, maybe you happen to be living
according to absolutely brilliant, beautiful principles and ideals.
If that's true, philosophy can still be a help;
it can help take you off autopilot
and put your hands on the wheel of your beautiful life.
But what if some of the ideas structuring your life are less than ideal?
What if some of the ideas you have about how to be a nurse,
or a doctor,
or a teacher, or a student,
or a citizen, or a parent,
or a man, or a woman, or a human being
are a little out of whack?
Well then, philosophy has the power to cut through the crap
and help bring us closer to what really is meaningful and valuable.
I hate to break it to you today,
but you are going to die.
We all have a death sentence,
and there is no cosmic contract that says it can't happen in the upcoming year.
So why not make up your mind
to devote yourself to philosophy in that ancient sense?
Like Kimberly, like Jillian, like all the other great philosophers.
The books of the great philosophers are there to help us,
and you don't need my permission for you to study them.
In fact, I would say,
freedom is the one thing you should never ask permission for.
About a year ago, I contacted Kimberly to see how she was doing,
and she explained to me that she had to take a break
from her dream job with the women's cycling developing program.
She was having to undergo chemotherapy.
"But," she said, "don't worry.
Things are looking up. Not that they ever looked down.
I'm still pursuing happiness.
I'm still pursuing philosophy," she said.
"And it's better than last summer; I was on hospice care for a while.
I think I'm on the fast track to racing my bike again."
She was still saving her own life.
I haven't heard from her since.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)