Philosophy And The Unexamined Life
By DONALD DeMARCO
The prospect of undergoing a medical examination can be a source of acute anxiety. Who knows what fearful things the doctor might find! Nonetheless, ignorance is not bliss and medicine provides great potential benefits for everyone. We should look upon the medical profession with benevolence, not anxiety.
Socrates was not a medical doctor. He did, however, strongly advocate examinations. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” is perhaps his most celebrated phrase as well as his most important directive. Putting one’s life on the examination table, however, may be a more fearful thing than submitting to one that is purely physical.
As a philosophy teacher, I assume the role of Socrates. I operate without stethoscope or scalpel. My approach, therefore, seems relatively harmless. I am confined to a world of words, those airy vessels that are intimately bound up with thoughts. I am not like the medical doctor. I do not diagnose, administer anesthesia, operate, or seek to provide a cure. I merely invite my students to undertake their examinations on their own. And yet, I am met with strong opposition.
I recall introducing to my Philosophy of Discontent students one Louis Marinoff, who, in the tradition of Socrates, seeks to help his clients examine their own lives and utilize the benefits of philosophical thinking. What a wonderful thing it is to be able to think! What would we be without the power of thought?
“Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature,” Pascal famously stated, “but a thinking reed.”
“By space,” he added, “the universe embraces me and swallows me up like an atom, by thought I embrace the universe.”
Thinking can be liberating, enjoyable, beneficial, and uplifting. Dr. Marinoff, a professor of philosophy at the City College of New York, is one of a dozen or so philosophers in the United States who try to help people — one on one — to clarify their thoughts and utilize philosophical thinking with the goal of living a better and happier life. I am helping people “through dialogue,” he writes, “to lead a more examined life.” He has incorporated his thoughts in Plato Not Prozac: Applying Philosophy to Everyday Problems (2000).
And yet, like the Gadfly of Athens and many other philosophers before him, he, too, is persecuted. The president of the American Psychiatric Association, for example, has expressed his outrage over what he believes to be Marinoff’s invasion into medicine. “This guy,” he claims, “is practicing medicine without a license and is approaching a major medical violation.”
In my naiveté, I assumed that my students, especially since they were studying philosophy, would be supportive of Marinoff. To my surprise, they were not. Most of them sided with the medical hegemony. I suddenly became a student in my own classroom. Why is it, I thought to myself, that they would support the powerful medical establishment against an isolated philosopher who merely wants to help people by engaging them in dialogue?
The answer seems apparent. We live in a “Therapeutic Society.” According to Philip Rieff, the author of The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased. The difference was established long ago, when ‘I believe,’ the cry of the ascetic, lost precedence to ‘one feels,’ the caveat of the therapeutic.”
The therapeutic society is a culture which systematically encourages people to expect from life a sense of total well-being achieved at little cost, and based on a complete rejection of any moral demands that society places on the individual self. Thinking can be hard. Moreover, it takes time and therefore does not fit into the expectations of a push button or quick fix culture.
Although the sales of the antidepressant, Prozac, have deceased in recent years, the name retains its metaphorical significance as characterizing a society that places more faith in pills than in philosophy. In addition to the title of Marinoff’s book, we find Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel; Better Living: In Pursuit of Happiness from Plato to Prozac by Mark Kingwell; Potatoes Not Prozac by Kathleen DesMaisons, et al.; and Prozac: Panacea or Pandora?
While anti-depressants have their legitimate role to play within medicine, one wonders to what extent they are crowding out what clear philosophical thinking can do for people whose real needs are nothing more than an honest examination of their own lives. Socrates is still relevant, though like the Maytag repairman of TV commercial fame, rarely called upon. People persist in believing that they get only what they pay for. The Socratic Method comes without cost.
Malcolm Muggeridge once envisioned a modern and trendy St. Paul who was looking for advice in how to promote the Gospel more effectively from a public relations expert. “Well, you’ve got to have some sort of symbol,” the expert would say. “Well, I have one,” St. Paul would reply. “I’ve got the Cross.” Then, according to Muggeridge, “the public relations expert would have laughed his head off. You can’t have anything like that. . . . It’s absolutely mad.”
“Men have the power of thinking that they may avoid sin,” wrote St. John Chrysostom. What can be more discomforting to people than to examine their lives and recognize their need for Confession? Yet, Confession is reconciliation and a return to a fuller and happier life. I owe a great deal to my former students who have taught me so much, though I would prefer that they were the chief beneficiaries of our classroom activities.
(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad; Poetry that Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; How to Flourish in a Fallen World; and Footprints on the Sands of Time: Personal Reflections on Life and Death are available through Amazon.com. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
