“The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates
That’s a quote all of us have heard before, but only a minority of people truly comprehend its immensity. I don’t remember when I first heard it, but I certainly remember when it struck a nerve. I had left my home in New Jersey to come to BC to play football and and receive an education. I went from being the star football player in my school to just another fish in the bucket at BC. More importantly, I left my family and my girlfriend back home and man did I miss them. It was a time of change. I had spent that summer in depression, questioning why I was at BC. It wasn’t uncommon for me to turn off the lights in my room and turn away from my roommate so he couldn’t see or hear the muffled tears I was crying. This was an every-night occurrence. I wasn’t used to being so far away from home. So far away from everything and everyone I held dear to me. I was questioning life and the choices I had made … or maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I was just accepting defeat at my situation and choosing to whine over it.
I was taking a philosophy class my freshman fall and the first philosopher we studied was Socrates. He stood out to me right away because he never passively accepted anything as truth until he knew exactly what he was talking about. Euthyphro was prosecuting his father for a crime he had committed under the justification that it was pious for him to do so. A claim such as that is met with criticism when Socrates demands for an adequate definition of “piety”. When Euthyphro offers his definition of piety as “what all the gods love”, the philosophical war begins. The conversation ends with no adequate definition of piety but both leave the conversation having advanced the dialogue of interest.
I realized then just how important these type of conversations are. Descartes demonstrated pretty convincingly that we can know absolutely nothing for certain except that we exist because we possess the ability to think. We possess the ability to think. We can think about ourselves. We can think about the world. We can think about ourselves within the confines of the world. As simple as that sounds, to me it’s equivalent to having a superpower. Ever since I understood the capacity for knowledge that existed within myself, I have tried my best to examine life closely so that I could form ideas about the world we live in. Whether that means really listening to the music I consume, criticizing and critiquing the ideas presented to me, or applying psychological phenomenons to the real world to see if they hold up, it is safe to say my life is not going unexamined.
The thought of blogging came to me when a friend inspired me to write in a journal as often as I could. After only three journal entries, I knew I wanted other people to hear my thoughts. I simply want to present my ideas about the world. I want to introduce discourses that can be thought about or picked up by others. I want to join current discourses and carefully introduce my own ideas about the world in an attempt to advance that discourse, even if it means being wrong. I want us to make sense of this chaotic world we live in TOGETHER, because that is the only way we know how. Any insight into the human condition, whether it’s poetry, music, literature, experience, or just something I heard from a friend is up for discussion. Together we will move the world one step closer to heaven. It’s time we talk.
