Recently I enrolled in a Coursera course called Søren Kierkegaard – Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity. I have always had an interest in Philosophy and read bits and pieces over the years. I read Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy back in college but I don’t recall much from it.
The course is about Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosophy, who was heavily influenced by Socrates. For the first week of the course, I read Plato’s Euthyphro and Apology. Plato was surprisingly delightful to read. I think in part it was because both works are heavily conversational. In Euthyphro, at times, Socrates sounds irritating. He kept questioning Euthyphro about the definition of justice and piety. In the end he proved Euthyphro didn’t know what piety really was. It’s a fun conversation and I highly recommend reading it yourself.
I’m sure Socrates was annoying to many in his own times but he’d probably prove to be annoying to even more people in our time. People just seem to be so certain about things. I think part of the reason is due to the internet, where it’s easy to find one’s echo chamber and get affirmed. Questioning people’s assumptions and their understanding of things, however politely, is almost a sure way to make enemies.
Socrates said, I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think. He did that by questioning. I think we should all question ourselves more. Why? I think a lot of my opinions, some of them deeply held, have never been closely examined. Some of them might’ve come from a book, or even a tweet — it made sense to me at the moment. Some of them were formed a long time ago by myself, albeit with a shaky foundation (when I was a lot more ignorant at that time). Both need to be questioned. As the irritating Socrates put it so nicely, An unexamined life is not worth living.