In terms of how to live well, what useful lessons can we learn from this brief scamper through the earliest years of philosophy? Well, for a start, thank goodness we started thinking for ourselves, trying to find good reasons for our beliefs. If not for that, we would have spent the past 2,600 years being led around by whatever charismatic mystic or powerful warlord ruled the day, constantly trying to appease the gods to affect any change in the world, and citing only the infallible authority of those who came before as sufficient reason to keep things as they are.
Perhaps that is not so far from the truth as we would like to think… But the point remains that we should not trust our beliefs to the power of religious or political authority, or to the power of the group, but only to the power of reason. Any fool knows we shouldn’t blindly follow tradition. Just because a religious leader says it, doesn’t make it true; just because a charismatic political leader says it, doesn’t make it true; just because a lot of people say it, and maybe even have a website where they collect their sayings and check each other’s sayings, doesn’t make it true. If it actually is true, then there will be good reasons that show it to be true. You can find those reasons; you don’t have to take someone’s word for it.
It can be easy to lose sight of this because most of our knowledge nowadays comes from science, and in that context we are very used to taking someone’s word for it. A scientist reports their findings, telling us something new about the world, and we take their word for it. But the whole point of science is that we don’t just have to take their word for it. If it is good science, we can go and check their working for ourselves. We can repeat the experiment and find the same result for ourselves. We can check their theory against the data and see for ourselves whether it is a good theory or not. Nothing is hidden. Only bad science would hide behind the authority of the ‘expert’.
The same is true of philosophy, by the way. And it applies to this book as it does any other. I am saying that philosophy gives us good reasons and useful ideas in our pursuit of trying to live well. But don’t take my word for it. Think it through and decide for yourself.
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