The Socrates Express

I have come to Greece, the land of metaphors, to walk where Socrates walked, to breathe the air he breathed. I have come to remind myself that Socrates was not an idea but a man, flesh and bone. Socrates wondered, but he didn’t wonder just anywhere. He wondered here, in Athens, a city he loved like no other.

I disembark at the Agora Station and walk. The agora, or marketplace, was Socrates’s favorite haunt. It was a crowded and smelly place, rife with hawkers and thieves and everyone else. Socrates loved it. The agora was his classroom, and his theater.

Archaeologists began excavating the site relatively late, in 1931, decades after other big digs, including those at Pompeii and Olympia. They’ve made up for lost time, though, as the thousands of artifacts recovered attest: pottery shards, inscriptions, sculptures, coins, and other ancient treasures.

Today the site, spread over two dozen acres, is mostly rubble, but enough remains of the old marketplace that, with a bit of imagination, I can picture the scene. I can see hawkers selling their wares, everything from spices to water clocks; defendants awaiting trial; young men loitering, as young men do. Taking it all in is Socrates, barefoot, those crablike eyes swiveling wildly, on the prowl for philosophical companions. Socrates practiced retail philosophy. He didn’t wait for people to come to him. He went to them.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates famously said. When I first heard that, as a mopey teenager, I sighed. Life is difficult enough. You want me to examine it, too? The examined life. I don’t care for the term. For starters, it contains the root “exam,” which stirs dormant memories of number-two pencils and cold doctor hands. It sounds like too much work. We can do better. So, with all due respect, I offer two corollaries to Socrates’s examined life.

Corollary Number One: The examined life that doesn’t produce practical results isn’t worth living. Contemplating one’s navel has its pleasures but it is far more satisfying to see results, a better navel. Eudaimonia, the Greeks called it. Often translated as “happiness,” the word signifies something larger: a flourishing, meaningful life. Consider, as the contemporary philosopher Robert Solomon suggests, two people. One has an elaborate theory of generosity, while the other does not. “Generosity just flows from him, unthinkingly, as water flows from a fountain.” The second person is clearly leading the exemplary, meaningful life.

Corollary Number Two: The unexamined life may not be worth living, but neither is the overexamined one. “Ask yourself if you are happy and you cease to be so,” said the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, articulating the Pleasure Paradox (also known as Paradox of Hedonism). The more we try to seize happiness the more it slips from our grasp. Happiness is a by-product, never an objective. It’s an unexpected windfall from a life lived well.

So was Socrates wrong about this whole unexamined life nonsense? Or am I missing something?

My instinct is to answer those questions quickly so I can scratch them off my to-do list and move on. I restrain this impulse. Instead, I let the question loiter in the soft Greek air, unanswered but not unexamined. Then I take a metaphor back to my hotel.