The Socrates Express

Suicide, said the French existentialist Albert Camus, is the “one truly serious philosophical problem.” Is life worth living or not? The rest was just so much metaphysical claptrap. Simply put, if there is no philosopher, there is no philosophy.

Camus’s proposition is logically sound but, in my mind, incomplete. Once you’ve wrestled with his suicide question, and concluded that, yes, life is worth living (for now; existential conclusions are always contingent), you confront another, even more vexing question: Should I get out of bed? This question, I believe, is the one truly serious philosophical problem. If a philosophy can’t extract us from under the covers, what good is it?

The Great Bed Question, like all great questions, is actually many questions disguised as one. Let’s pull back the comforter and examine it. On one level, we’re asking can I get out of bed. Unless you are disabled, the answer is yes, you can. We are also asking whether it is beneficial to get out of bed, and crucially, should you get out of bed. This is where it gets tricky.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume thought a lot about these sorts of questions, though rarely from bed. He divided any inquiry into two parts: an “is” and an “ought.” The “is” part is observational. We observe, without judgment, the empirical benefits of getting out of bed: increased blood flow, for instance, and earning potential.

The “ought” part contains a moral judgment. Not what are the benefits of getting out of bed but why we ought to do so. Hume thought we jumped too quickly from “is” to “ought.” A moral “ought” never follows directly from a factual “is.” (That’s why the “is-ought problem” is also known as “Hume’s Guillotine,” since he cleaves “is” from “ought” and insists on a gap between the two.) Embezzling money from your employer is likely to lead to negative outcomes; therefore you ought not to embezzle.

Not necessarily, says Hume. You can’t move from a statement of fact to a statement of ethics. Getting out of bed may be healthy and lucrative, but that doesn’t mean we “ought” to do so. Maybe we don’t want better blood flow and increased earning potential. Maybe we like it just fine here, under the covers. It is this pesky “ought” that, I think, explains our predicament. We feel we ought to get out of bed, and if we don’t there must be something wrong with us.

To rise or not to rise? Under the covers, warm and coddled, competing impulses duke it out with the vigor of a Socratic dialogue, or a cable news show. The stay-in-bed camp makes a strong case. It is warm and safe in bed, not womblike but close. Life is good, and no less a philosopher than Aristotle said the good life was all that mattered. Conversely, it is cold out there. Bad things happen out there. Wars. Pandemics. Easy-listening music.

It seems like a slam dunk for the stay-in-bed camp. Yet nothing in philosophy is ever clear-cut. There is always a “yet.” Entire philosophical systems, cognitive superstructures, towering edifices of thought, have been built upon that one monosyllabic word: yet.

Yet life out there beckons. We have precious little time on this planet. Do we really want to spend it horizontally? No, we don’t. Surely the life force, pulsing through our weary veins, is powerful enough to wrest a middle-aged man, slightly overweight but not obese, from bed. Isn’t it?

This conversation, in some form, has been taking place under the covers for as long as there have been covers and people to hide under them. We’ve made significant advances since Roman times, but the Great Bed Question remains essentially unchanged. No one is immune. President or peasant, celebrity chef or Starbucks barista, Roman emperor or neurotic writer, we’re all subject to the same laws of inertia. We’re all bodies at rest, waiting for an outside force to act upon us.