Such an alternative interpretation of Socrates dictum is available. Professor Richard Kraut has written an article called 'The Examined Life' in which he suggests that there is an alternative reading of what Socrates has to say in this dialogue, the Apology, that might make that dictum out to be a little more plausible. Professor Kraut goes to the original Greek and finds the sentence that formulates the unexamined life is not worth living to contain the word, biotos, which can be interpreted as "to be lived" in such a way that allows us to interpret the entire dictum differently. Instead of the unexamined life is not worth living, instead, the unexamined life is not to be lived, and notice how that has a different meaning from the original. Not to be lived means something like it's something you should avoid. But saying that there is something you should avoid does not mean that if you don't avoid it, your life is not worthwhile. So, take an example such as the following. I was once listening to the radio late one night, I think I was studying back in my college days, maybe listening to some jazz, and the DJ came on and said, "Man, if you don't dig that music, you've got a hole in your soul." I thought to myself, "That's an interesting claim. What would it mean to have a hole in my soul?" While the idea seems to be something like this; that I'm missing something of value if I'm not able to appreciate the music of, I don't know, maybe it was Charles Mingus, for instance. If I'm not able to appreciate that, then there's something that's worthwhile that I'm missing which if I were to live a fuller more complete life, I would have available as a source of appreciation. It doesn't mean that if I don't have it, my life is not worth living, but it does mean that to live a full life, that's something I'd want to have. So, likewise, we can interpret Socrates as saying that if you don't engage in self-examination, then you're missing something of value. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be alive, that just means that just like you should be able to appreciate jazz, there are certain foods you should be able to enjoy, there are certain kinds of interpersonal relationships you should be able to enjoy. One thing that makes it worth living is going to be the engagement and the examination of life's most important questions. We can give examples of characters from Platonic dialogues who provide nice cases of lives that are insufficiently examined by the owners of those lives, by the people in question. That is, they are doing things that seem unwise precisely because they are lacking in self-examination of the appropriate kind. So, for example, Euthyphro. In the famous dialogue, Socrates runs into an old friend, Euthyphro, in the law courts and Socrates says, "Hey, Euthyphro. What brings you here? I've been charged by my fellow Athenians with doing bad things, but what brings you to the law courts?" Euthyphro's answer is, "Why, I'm here to prosecute my father." Socrates answers, "Well, that's an unusual thing to do. Why would you prosecute your father?" Euthyphro answers, "Well, because he killed one of our employees and I consider that to be murder and so I want to prosecute him." Socrates replies, "Well, you must have a lot of confidence about your own knowledge of right and wrong and you must be very sure of your knowledge of right and wrong to be able to do something so striking and unconventional as to prosecute your own father for murder." Euthyphro says, "Yes, I certainly do know the difference between right and wrong and that's why I'm confident I have got the courage of my convictions here." Socrates proceeds to question Euthyphro about the nature of his confidence, about the basis, about his account of what makes right acts right and wrong acts wrong. It doesn't take too long before Socrates is able to show Euthyphro that he is not really clear about what he's talking about, that his understanding of right and wrong is based on a confusion. So, Euthyphro's an example of someone who was launching into a potentially disastrous line of activity, namely prosecuting his own father for murder, because of his tenuous grasp of ethical truth. Another example is Crito. After Socrates has been sentenced to death, he's in prison. The day is coming when he's going to have to be drinking some hemlock and taking his own life. His friend, Crito, sneaks into his cell one morning and says, "Good morning, Socrates. Let's get up. Let's get moving. I think I'm in a position to bribe the jailers and I've got a disguise for you. Why don't you let me help you? We can sneak you out of Athens, take you to another city-state, and you'll be safe there for the rest of your life." Socrates says, "Nothing doing. I'm going to stay here and just accept my sentence". Crito says, "But that would be terrible. First of all, we'll lose one of our closest friends, namely you, if you die. Secondly, I will be subject to potential embarrassment because everybody will say, 'Crito, we know you had the money to bribe the jurors to help Socrates out of prison. Why didn't you do that? Were you just being cheap?''' So, Crito is worried that his reputation will be hurt if Socrates is in fact put to death. Socrates replies to this in the following way, "Look. Your standing in the opinion of others shouldn't matter to you. What matters is the opinion of wise people, not just people generally, and if you're worried about losing some face because people think that you're being cheap, then let them think what they want. Insofar as that's something that you think matters, you're mistaken." So, here's another example, in which Socrates would say and I think also our contemporary philosopher Richard Kraut would say, would be an example of an insufficiently examined life. Crito was not thinking carefully about why it matters to him what other people think. A third example is Glaucon, Plato's older brother. In another famous Platonic dialogue called the Republic, Glaucon considers the following possibilities heard about the myth of the ring of Gyges, the ring which if you come to own will make you invisible. Glaucon says,"I'd be awfully tempted to put on that ring. I could steal a lot of things, have my way, in all kinds of matters. What's to keep me from grabbing that ring if I could and advancing in life in various ways that seem very tempting to me. I'm not sure that that's the right thing but Socrates, tell me why it wouldn't be the right thing?" Likewise, you can imagine a contemporary version of that. Suppose you had a kind of technological analogue of that ring that allowed you to sneak into various databases and change the number of zeros in your checking account or change your test scores, your credit rating, whatever other numbers matter to your life without anybody finding out. You can be sure that you wouldn't suffer the consequences of being caught. You might be tempted to do one of those things. Socrates says to Glaucon however that, "Look. If you were to get such gains, acquire things in these illegitimate ways, even if you don't get caught, the things that you would gain would not be worth very much to you because you didn't earn them." So, the idea that these things would be attractive, that you can get them by, so to speak, cheating with this ring of Gyges shows that you're not living an examined life sufficiently because these things would probably not make you happy. In the end, they probably wouldn't be worth very much. A final example that we can think of is the person named Ion, who is a rhapsode, somebody who goes around ancient Greece to the different city-states and makes a living out of reciting Homeric poetry. But he doesn't understand what the lines of poetry means. He doesn't understand what the stories are about, he just recites the lines. So, that's a fairly extreme case of an unexamined life in which Ion just utters the words but does so without understanding. I'm guessing that you could probably think of characters, either people in your own life or fictional characters that you've come across in novels, plays, movies, etc., that run into or at least are in danger of running into some kind of trouble because they live insufficiently unexamined lives. You can also think about, for example, slogans that we commonly hear nowadays that are attractive, they're popular. We hear them often enough that we've become inured to them, but we might also wonder whether or not they could do with some more examination. So, for example, there's a line from a Sheryl Crow song that runs, "If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad." But think about that. If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad? Well, what if it's something that makes you happy that requires the suffering of other people? Some people get a great deal of pleasure out of watching other people suffer. One German word that refers to this is "schadenfreude" and if that's the source of your happiness, some people will consider you to be cruel if you're caused to be happy through somebody else's downfall. So, the familiar comfortable slogan of, "If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad", is one that could do with some more examination perhaps. Likewise, in many countries, we see people say things like, "My country right or wrong." That's a slogan that becomes comfortable with repetition but it should also be subject to further examination. Does that mean a country couldn't possibly do something immoral and couldn't possibly justify us in a certain amount of civil disobedience? That's a question that many people would be tempted to answer in the affirmative. Likewise, you hear people say things like, "Everything happens for a reason", and while that might be true in the sense that everything, except for the decay of the electrons from something radioactive, everything else seems to happen for a reason in the sense that there's a physical cause for it, that may be true. But if you want to suppose that everything that happens, there's a reason that somehow justifies it, makes it okay, makes it admissible or acceptable, that's a further thing entirely and something that's much more questionable. When someone has a terrible tragedy happen to them, they might learn from it, they might acquire some wisdom from that experience, but that doesn't mean that that was a justified or reasonable or appropriate thing to have happen in their lives. It may be, but just the fact that it happened doesn't mean that there was a reason for it in the sense we're talking about now. Thinking more about what it means to live an examined life, we can also consider how if we go back to our own selves and in our own ways of being, think about the ways in which we accept slogans such as these without very much thought and sometimes, that makes us a little bit dogmatic. So, when Oscar Wilde, for example, was in prison, he wrote a collection of letters called De Profundis. In one passage in one of his letters, he says the following: "It's tragic how few people ever possess their souls before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson," he's quoting Emerson now, "'that an act of his own.' It's quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, there lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." The idea that my passions, my emotions are a quotation suggests that so much of what I'm doing is just reiterating something that's come before and if that's right, then I might also be living an insufficiently examined life for the reason that I'm just following the footsteps of others, not coming up with anything authentic that is uniquely my own, and there's a respect in which also I'm going with the flow, running with the herd, and not examining my own existence in such a way as to ask, "Is this the one that I want to have?"
