For him, a philosophical life required both the quest for precision and the intense personal experience that drove one to it. Yet Descartes himself would barely have understood this separation. The other led to the impersonal discipline now prevalent in universities, which in theory can be practiced by anyone. One was the old tradition, in which one seeks a better life and recounts the search in a personal narrative. And Nietzsche wrote some of his most incisive works while in the early stages of the syphilitic dementia that really did kill him.Īs Miller notes, Descartes opened up two divergent paths in philosophy. Immanuel Kant, most rational of thinkers, ended his life in an obsessive-compulsive hell, endlessly consulting thermometers and barometers, and stopping dead in his tracks whenever he felt warm on a walk because he was afraid that breaking into a sweat would kill him. His sanity sounds shaky at best, yet there is no doubting his importance: he inspired the early Skeptics and thus influenced the whole of Western thought. Diogenes the Cynic lived in a clay jar, masturbated on the street and embraced snow-covered statues. Other philosophers suffered even more self-division, particularly those who succumbed to mental illness. shall I ever be.” Yet he also advised his favorite correspondent, Lucilius, to “harmonize talk with life.” As Miller remarks, Seneca was “in conflict” with himself. He even helped Nero plot the murder of Agrippina, the emperor’s own mother. For, while his writings promoted wisdom, balance, restraint and detachment, Seneca himself was forced into numerous compromises in the service of his protégé and employer, the murderous emperor Nero. The messiness of his death reflected a morally messy life. He slit his wrists before begging for a cup of hemlock and retiring to a hot bath to expire. He accepted his fate with Socratic courage, but his death itself was difficult. Living half a millennium after Socrates, he too was condemned to death by suicide. One of Miller’s great transitional figures is the Roman court-philosopher Seneca. The rest of “Examined Lives”can be read as a history of other philosophers’ failures to measure up to this ideal, either in their deaths or their lives. The “Lives” offers its readers a vicarious opportunity to try this with a number of philosophers, and see whose way works best. Diogenes Laertius represents an older tradition, which sees philosophy not as a set of precepts but as something one learns by following a wise man - sometimes literally following him wherever he goes, listening, and observing how he handles situations.
As for texts, he wrote, “I for one prefer reading Diogenes Laertius” - the popular third-century Epicurean author of a biographical compilation called “Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.” If the proof of philosophy lies in life, then what could be more useful than reading about how the great philosophers have lived?Īs James Miller shows in his fascinating “Examined Lives,” choosing Diogenes Laertius over more rigorous treatises was provocative because it challenged an idea already predominant in Nietzsche’s time: that a philosophy should be objectively valid, without the need to refer to particular quirks or life experiences on the part of its originator. Nietzsche therefore dismissed the professional discipline as irrelevant, a “critique of words by means of other words,” and devoted himself to pursuing an idiosyncratic philosophical quest outside the academy. It’s also the form of critique that is generally overlooked in the philosophy faculties of universities. This is “the only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something,” he wrote in 1874. If the proof of a pudding is in the eating, and the proof of a rule is in the exceptions, where should we look for the proof of a philosophy?įor Friedrich Nietzsche, the answer was obvious: to test a philosophy, find out if you can live by it.
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