We’ve just seen that Socrates gives us mainly questions and rarely answers. But if there are so few answers, what can Socrates tell us about how to live well? Firstly this: that nothing is more important to us.
Socrates understands there is nothing more important than living an ethically decent life; everything depends upon it. To live well is to live virtuously. The arguments for this are to be found scattered in his various conversations across the Platonic dialogues. We have already seen that a common theme there is that there is no point asking the easier questions until you have made some attempt to answer the harder questions. You need to acknowledge that you don’t really know what ‘courage’ is, e.g., but that you cannot know whether or not ‘fighting in armour’ is good for ‘courage’ if you don’t know what ‘courage’ is. First ask the right questions.
That same common theme can tell us something important about what it is to live well. In particular, it tells us the right kinds of questions to ask.
First Ask the Right Questions
Consider any part of what you might traditionally (or stereotypically) think of as being essential to living a good life: wealth, property, success, family, love, confidence, popularity, freedom, power, status, productivity, etc., etc. You will have your own list. Perhaps there is only one thing that, for you, needs to be on this list: ‘happiness’. Perhaps some of these might seem obvious, barely worth thinking about; it goes without saying that ‘wealth is good’, ‘success is good’, ‘popularity is good’, etc., and therefore that we should aim for them. Surely it goes without saying that ‘happiness is good’, doesn’t it?! Add all these ‘good’ things together and you will get a ‘good’ life, right? Because a life is just the sum of its parts, surely? And if the parts are good, then the life is good, isn’t it? So if I want to live better, I just need to go and get as much of these good things as I can, don’t I?
But it is not so clear. Socrates’ question can be asked of any of these parts: how can we know whether, e.g., ‘wealth’ is a good thing or not if we don’t yet know what it is to live a good life? We need to first ask the right question, the harder question – what is it to live well? – before we can answer the easier questions and come to know whether any of these things are an essential part of a good life.
Once we go down that route, we very quickly (and easily) discover that we were wrong to think that it was so obvious. Consider a straightforward example: wealth. Almost everyone would agree that, on the face of it, wealth is a good thing. It’s better to have money than not! Money enables you to do more things, have more things, have more opportunities; these are all good, surely? And when it comes to good things, more is better, isn’t it? So wealth must be a good thing.
But what if someone puts their wealth to bad use? What if they use their wealth to exploit the vulnerable, or coerce young people into non-consensual sexual acts: is that a good thing? What if someone uses their wealth to buy up a load of property or land that they don’t need or use, depriving people of the chance to live there: is that a good thing? What if having wealth gives someone the opportunity to gamble, or buy recreational drugs, leading to an addiction that ruins their life: is that a good thing? What if wealth makes you lazy? Or insensitive? Or selfish? What if wealth makes you privileged and entitled? What if wealth makes you look down on other people? What if wealth makes you incapable of finding value in the simple things? What if wealth leads to intolerable inequality? What if wealth drives an excessive consumerism that ends up needlessly killing the planet?
Wealth in itself is not a good thing; it is only a good thing when it is used well.
Consider another example: popularity. Almost everyone would agree that, on the face of it, popularity is a good thing. We’d rather be popular and well liked than not! Popularity and being liked makes us feels good, enhances our self-esteem, makes life more fun. Being popular can help you get ahead in the world. These are all nice and good, surely?
But what if you are popular with a bad crowd? What if they only like you for the wrong reasons? What if you have achieved your popularity only by bullying the less popular (like every high-school drama ever)? What if your popularity with that crowd depends on a lifestyle that is slowly killing you?
Popularity is only a good thing when it is amongst the right people and for the right reasons.
Consider another example: power. Almost everyone would agree that, on the face of it, power is a good thing. We’d rather have power than not! Power enables you to do more things, have more opportunities, it enables you to exert your will over the world and get what you want. These are all good and useful, surely?
But what if someone misuses or abuses their power? What if someone’s use of power leaves another powerless? What if power is used to take from the innocent, to protect the guilty, to reinforce injustice? The list of potential misuses of power is too long and obvious to bother writing. Power in itself is not a good thing; it is only a good thing when it is used well.
You will find you can run the same line of reasoning for any example you care to think of – Socrates and I are pretty confident of that. This can even be said of ‘happiness’, as it is commonly understood to mean ‘feeling good’ or ‘content’. Is it good to be an evil and abusive tyrant, but happy? Regardless of how good they might feel, can we call such a person really happy?
Even the seemingly unconditional good of love – Socrates’ ‘divine madness’ – is vulnerable to this line of reasoning, because even love has its corrupt and counterfeit forms like infatuation, lust, or those many forms of ‘love’ that are merely veiled forms of coercion due to power inequalities. Love might be unconditionally good, but only when it is real love, and we only know what real love is when we have made some attempt to ask and answer the harder questions about what it is to love well.
Anything that you care to list as being an essential part of a good life will only actually be good if it is used well. In themselves, these goods do not have the power to make a good life. And so they are only part of a good life if that life is lived well. Being wealthy is good, but only if you are living well; being popular is good, but only if you are living well; being powerful is good, but only if you are living well; being happy is good, but only if you are living well. The goodness of every seemingly good thing depends on living well.
But what it is to ‘live well’ was what we originally wanted to know about, wasn’t it? So we’ve come full circle! The attempt to answer our question about what it means to live well, by referring to various good things in life, leaves us no better off with regard to our original question.
The conclusion is clear: since ‘living well’ is what makes seemingly good things good, those good things cannot define what it is to live well. It’s the other way around. Good things don’t make for a life lived well; living well is what makes good things good. Living well makes wealth, power, success, property, popularity, freedom, confidence, etc., etc., good. Living badly makes wealth, power, success, property, popularity, freedom, confidence, etc., etc., bad. As such, everything depends on living well.
Because of this, it’s foolish trying to find the answer to the question ‘what is it to live well?’ by looking at supposedly good things like wealth, success, power, etc. Any judgement of those things will depend on the answer to the original question. You’ll end up going round in circles. Instead, you need to start by asking what it is to live well, then ask whether wealth, success, power, etc., are a part of that picture. First ask the right question.
Once you ask that question and face it square on, Socrates thinks you will realise that being virtuous, by which he means being ethical, is the only thing that really matters. Since the value of all things depends on their ethical virtue, this kind of ethical virtue is all we really need in life. Without virtue, everything is made bad; with virtue, everything is made good. And so clearly everything depends on virtue and we need nothing else. In sloganized form: Virtue is sufficient for happiness.
Virtue is Sufficient for Happiness
Socrates’ claim is very challenging. It is often laughed at by his interlocutors, as if it is expressing a kind of simple-minded childlike innocence, not worthy of a grown up. It’s too easy for us to take the same attitude. It’s too easy to dismiss Socrates as a kind of arch moraliser, telling us to ‘be good’ from a place of idle words. This would miss Socrates’ point entirely. Socrates isn’t telling us anything, he’s just asking us questions.
Socrates doesn’t think he can tell you what to do, because he doesn’t think anyone can tell you what to do. The whole point of ethics is that you have to decide for yourself. The only thing he is pointing out is that you do have to decide how to live. And you can decide thinkingly, or unthinkingly. Socrates believes if we follow the conversation where it leads, we too will conclude as he has concluded, that there is nothing more important to us than living an ethically decent life.
He is a midwife, remember; he doesn’t give us ideas, he just helps deliver ideas that are already in us. We already know that the most important thing to us is to live an ethically decent life, we just haven’t thought it through enough to realise it yet. His incessant questioning forces us to think it through for ourselves, and when we do this, he thinks we will realise our own mistakes and come to agree with him that virtue is the only thing that really matters.
Socrates argues for this in various different contexts, against various different targets, so his argument takes on a different form each time depending on who he is talking to and what they are talking about. Whomever Socrates is talking to, he meets them on their terms and moves them one step closer to a better understanding. To someone who thinks there is no reason to be virtuous, because being virtuous holds you back in the great competition of life, Socrates will point out the rewards that being virtuous brings – you are liked, respected, trusted, etc. – and he will encourage us to see the value in these things. But to someone who thinks that the only reason to be virtuous is to be liked, respected, trusted, etc., Socrates will say that anyone who really understands virtue wouldn’t need these rewards because virtue is its own reward. It’s easy to get confused here, because Socrates seems to have said two different things. This difference in Socrates is a product of the particular conversation he was having. To one person, you say this; to another, you say that. The one thing common to all these conversations is the priority of the ethical, but this is argued for in as many different ways as there are different people to talk to.
As such, finding one argument for this claim is difficult. The most I could say is that a general argumentative theme emerges, which is a kind of negative argument: all answers to the question ‘what is it to live well?’ fail, except virtue. For all things in life: when it is virtuous, then it is valuable, but only then. The value of all other things can be shown to be dependent on virtue, but the value of virtue depends only on itself. As a philosopher might put it, virtue is a necessary condition for anything to be of any real value, and virtue is a necessary and sufficient condition for its own value. No other candidates for what is really valuable in life meet this criteria, so virtue wins by default as the last answer standing.
We have already seen one type of argument: consider anything that you think is ‘good’ in life, and you will find it can be made ‘bad’ if it is not used virtuously. Strength, wealth, and intelligence are good when used for good, like a comic-book hero (Batman, Iron Man, Superman, e.g.), but bad when used for bad, like a comic-book villain (Bane, Thanos, Lex Luther, e.g.). Since anything good can be made bad by being bad, and anything bad can be made good by being good, then being good is all that really matters; everything depends on it.
When it is virtuous, then it is valuable, but only then.
There are other arguments along similar lines. Pleasure, for instance, cannot be what determines things being ‘good’ in life, since both pleasures and pains can be experienced in equal measure by the wise or the foolish, the courageous or the cowardly, and we would still say that the wise and courageous are better off than the foolish and cowardly. It follows that there must be something more than pleasure (or the avoidance of pain) that determines the value of things in life. And that means that pleasure is not what determines things being good in life.
Even if you were to believe that pleasure was the only good (and pain the only evil), and that the pursuit of happiness via the maximisation of pleasure and minimisation of pain is the only real aim in life, Socrates will still point out that knowledge is the only way to ensure you will get the best out of life, because you need to know what you’re doing in order to find pleasure and avoid pain – you need to choose the best food and wine, the best entertainments, etc. There’s a certain know-how to enjoying life. And therefore, if you want to experience the greatest pleasure, pursuing knowledge is more important than pursuing pleasure. But once you pursue that knowledge, you will find that being ‘temperate’ and exerting self-restraint is better for you than not: if you are not temperate in your pleasure-seeking, you will tend to overdo things and end up making yourself sick, causing yourself pain; whereas if you are temperate, you can get the most pleasure out of life without making yourself sick. Once again we have found something more important than the pursuit of pleasure: temperance. And this is a kind of virtue, a kind of ‘being good’. Once again, being good makes good things good, but being bad makes good things bad, so everything depends on being good.
However you come at it, if you persevere with your investigations you will find that being good is all that really matters. Everything depends on it. And, therefore, virtue is sufficient for happiness.
Philosophy as a Way of Life
Socrates shows us that everything depends on living well, that it’s living well that makes things in life good, not the other way around. It would be pointless trying to live better simply by trying to achieve more wealth, or success, or power, or popularity, etc., etc., because those things, we know, cannot necessarily entail a good life. Those things are the answers to the wrong questions. The task is now to make some progress towards asking and answering the right questions in the right way.
So if, instead of trying to find answers to what we know are the wrong questions, we set about trying to find and ask the right questions, what should we do? The answer is obvious: we should do philosophy! We should put our thoughts to the test.
Once we go down that path we quickly realise that without the knowledge of what it is to live well, we cannot know if we are living a good life or not; and since the value of everything in our lives depends on living a good life, we can’t know if anything in our lives is really good (or bad) until we settle that question. This knowledge is essential to living a good life because everything depends on it. And we need to do philosophy in order to get this knowledge about what it is to live well. Therefore, everything depends on philosophy.
Thus begins a long tradition of seeing philosophy as being essential to what it is to live well as a human being. Without philosophy, you are always blundering around in darkness, asking the wrong questions in the wrong way, whistling in the dark and going in ever decreasing circles. With philosophy, you at least have a chance of asking the right questions in the right way.
This is what Socrates meant when he said that ‘the unexamined life is not worthy of a human being’, or in other translations ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. Without the examined life of philosophy, you are committing yourself to a life of ignorance, depriving yourself of any real value in life. At best you will live in a world of illusory value because you won’t know what really matters; at worst you will live in a world with negative value, because your false beliefs about what really matters will lead you astray. The only way to live well, to live in a world with positive value, is to develop true beliefs about what really matters. And the only way to do that is through philosophy.
Once you do that, and do it well, you will then come to knowledge about what really matters. Socrates says that being virtuous is the only sensible answer here. And once you have that knowledge, it’s relatively easy to be virtuous, because once you know that virtue is all that matters, and you see that clearly, it’s all you really want; and that’s just what being virtuous is, really; so in wanting it, you are it. Another much-debated slogan follows from this: Knowledge is sufficient for virtue.
Knowledge is sufficient for virtue, and virtue is sufficient for happiness. Therefore, knowledge is sufficient for happiness. And since philosophy is necessary for knowledge, then philosophy is a necessary step on this path to happiness. As such, the unexamined life is not worth living.
So we need philosophy to understand what it is to live well. But what is philosophy? Ah ha! Another Socratic question! It’s hard to define, of course, but it should be clear by now what philosophy is not: philosophy is not insincere wordplay, however clever; philosophy is not about winning arguments for the sake of it; philosophy is not a combat sport.
There are many pictures of what philosophy is, but one of the most compelling ones is that of Socrates himself. Philosophy is what it does; and what philosophy does, exemplified in the figure of Socrates, is go about asking questions, exposing errors and bad reasoning, and trying to find the truth about what it is to live well. For Socrates, this is what it is to live well.
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