WEBVTT

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When it comes to saving life,

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my guess is that you think
of things like chemotherapy or CPR,

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things far removed from philosophy.

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But the title of my talk today,
"How Philosophy Can Save Your Life,"

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is in earnest.

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I actually think that when
it comes to saving your life,

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you need something like philosophy.

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Think about it.

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CPR, chemotherapy and all the other
marvelous medical techniques,

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as wonderful and precious as they can be,
don't actually save your life.

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They really just put off your death.

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It's said that when Socrates,
the great hero of Western philosophy,

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was sentenced to death
by the Athenian court,

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he replied, "Technically you do not have
the power to sentence me to death.

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Life has sentenced me to death.
All you can do is give me a date."

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Handing down a death sentence
or successfully administering chemotherapy

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is really just making an adjustment
on the date of our inevitable death.

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If you want to save your life,
you need to turn it from a humdrum thing

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into the precious thing
that it's meant to be.

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And I don't think chemotherapy
has a whole lot to offer on that score.

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Now, when I am talking about philosophy,

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I mean it in the ancient
Greek sense of that word:

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The love of wisdom. The pursuit of wisdom.

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Sometimes, I worry that some
of our contemporary practitioners

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can give you the sense that philosophy
is really just for some big brain

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that's going to construct
a perfect theory of the whole universe,

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or maybe even more likely,

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a big brain that's going to criticize
what everyone else has to say.

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And while criticism and theorizing

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are important and even joyful
parts of philosophy -

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I don't want to diminish them -

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really, philosophy is something
much more than that.

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I guess I worry that people often feel
like they don't have permission

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to study philosophy,

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that they feel intimidated by it,

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or they feel social pressures
that steer them away from studying it.

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That's too bad because I think philosophy
is something that we can all engage in,

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and I think it's something
that we often should engage in.

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Philosophy begins
in the wonder that we all feel

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about what's true and really valuable.

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It takes us on a fascinating, sometimes
perilous journey of speculation and doubt.

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But it ends by returning us to our lives

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and helping to know them
for the first time.

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To explain what I am talking about,
let me tell a few stories.

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Sometime toward the end
of the fifth century B.C.,

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a man by the name of Chaerephon
went into the Delphi Oracle and asked,

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"Is my friend Socrates
the wisest person around?"

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The Oracle came back:
"No one is wiser than Socrates."

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Now, when Socrates himself
got wind of this pronouncement,

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he was puzzled.

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He thought, "I can't be the wisest person.

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I actually have no wisdom at all."

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So he set out to disprove the Oracle
with a very simple strategy:

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Just find one person
with a little bit of wisdom,

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which would clearly beat him,
whose wisdom level was at zero.

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So he wandered around Athens,

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critically interviewing
the religious authorities,

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the political authorities,

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the workers, the entertainers.

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And what he found was 
that the Oracle had spoken the truth:

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he was the wisest.

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Not because he possessed any great wisdom,

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but he possessed one little piece
of priceless wisdom.

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Namely, he knew he knew nothing.

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Everyone else claimed to have special
knowledge about their various pursuits

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when in fact they did not,

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putting them in the hole, wisdom-wise.

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Now, I've always been fascinated
by that story of Socrates,

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but I've also always been
a little puzzled by it.

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What does it mean to have wisdom
when you don't possess wisdom?

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How can searching after answers
be a form of wisdom?

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What good is it not to have the answers
but to be looking for them?

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It took a student of mine, actually,

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to really help me understand that story
in a much deeper way.

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She reenacted, unaware
of Plato's writings about Socrates,

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that very story.

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And, I think, she shows both how
philosophy can help save your life,

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but also how we can all move
in the greatness of philosophy.

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Her name was Jillian,

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and she was a nurse's aide
when she took my ethics class,

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I think because it probably helped
to fulfill some requirement.

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She was studying to eventually
become a full-fledged nurse.

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One of the most interesting
conversations was sparked

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when I casually asked the drooping class,

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"What's a hospital for, anyway?"

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I challenged the expected answers
as they came out.

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"To fix people."

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"What about those with a terminal case?"

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"To ease people's pain?"

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"What about those people
whose pain cannot be eased?"

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"To ease people's pain
whose pain can be eased?"

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"Is there no obligation
to healthy people?"

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I was trying to open up
their minds a little bit

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for some articles I was assigning
on the purpose of a hospital.

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Well, the conversation
sparked something in Jillian,

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and she asked my permission if she could
write on this for her next paper.

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Well, a couple of weeks later,

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as students were filing out,
turning in their papers,

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I called her aside
to ask how the project had gone.

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Well, our conversation
in class, she told me,

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had really perplexed her,
even kind of disturbed her.

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She worked in a hospital,
she felt she had a good sense of things,

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but after our conversation, she realized

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that she didn't really have any great
wisdom about the point of a hospital.

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To help her formulate
a thesis for her paper,

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she lit on the idea
of going around the hospital

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and questioning various people there -

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the doctors, the administrators,
the nurses, the nurse's' aides.

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She said, "I figured someone
there surely had to have some wisdom

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about what the point of a hospital was."

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But what she found was
that when she critically interviewed them,

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that they often gave the same pat answers
as the students did in class,

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which, with a little criticism,

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she was able to show
to be not really totally adequate.

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She said that the best answer she got
was from some doctor who said to her -

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after having had his first couple
of attempts shot down by a nurse's aide -

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"Well, maybe you're
supposed to do all of the above."

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But she realized that
that too was kind of inadequate.

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Should they always
give people what they want?

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Should they always
give people what they need?

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What should govern the variety
of services that they provide?

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And why were they there?

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The problem, Jillian said to me,
was she thought that too often,

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the hospital subordinated
its whole purpose to fixing broken bodies.

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She said, "Too often pregnant women
are treated like they are sick,

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mourners are dealt with
like psychological cases.

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Folks clearly dying are pointlessly fixed.

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If the hospital is no more
than a mechanical body shop,

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we live in a less than fully human world."

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"Imagine," she said, "Doctors, nurses,

NOTE Paragraph

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people who have devoted decades
to studying and practicing medicine


NOTE Paragraph

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who've never given really serious thought
to why they were doing it."

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Imagine, I thought,

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the people of Athens being unable
to answer Socrates' question successfully.

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Imagine, I also thought, people,
maybe especially people in a hospital,

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forgetting to save their own lives.

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Now, she also said she figured that many
of her coworkers did pretty decent jobs

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going on their feel
for what they ought to be doing,

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but she wondered if they wouldn't be
better off opening their minds

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to the full truth of it.

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She was echoing
a famous claim of Socrates:

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"The unexamined life is not worth living."

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In her paper, Jillian explained
that the philosophers I had assigned

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helped her to see matters
a little more clearly.

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That sickness, pain, can alienate us
from those around us,

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that they threaten to exile us
from the human community.

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The closest she could come
to formulating the purpose of the hospital

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was, "To be there for people."

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"To be there when they're sick,
to be there when they're dying,

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to be there when they're mourning."

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"To help people when you could,
and to aid people when they wanted,

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of course,

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but most of all, to be there
for them, human to human."

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The point of medicine, she said, was care.

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"Doctors are there,"
she marvelously concluded,

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"to help the nurses."

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But doctors, she feared, sometimes
overrate their wisdom

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on the basis of their technical
proficiency and science.

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She also admitted that she
didn't necessarily have all the answers

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and that even what she was saying
she had some doubts about,

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but she said that her pursuit of wisdom
about what she was doing

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had helped her to really understand

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the full meaning and significance
of what she was training to do,

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that philosophy had helped
plug her into her vocation.

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Jillian has been a full-fledged nurse
now for over a decade,

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and I contacted her recently,
and she said to me,

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"You know, I kept
that paper I wrote for you,

NOTE Paragraph

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and I still define my goals
and my purposes in those terms."

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In being there for people,
she's been saving her own life.

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In the wake of Socrates,

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philosophy in the ancient world

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really became focused on the question
of how to live a good life.

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It was all about the pursuit
of what they called "eudaimonia,"

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in ancient Greek,

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which we often translate
as happiness, the pursuit of happiness.

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And happiness is
a pretty good translation,

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but really, eudaimonia
means something more like

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"Flourishing over the course
of your whole life"

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or "Living up to the full
potential of being human."

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Philosophy was not just
some intellectual game,

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it was very much about trying
to understand those principles

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that are going to bring happiness
and practice them in our lives.

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I have to admit that I am guilty
of sometimes asking my students in class,

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"If the doctor gave you
only one year to live,

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how would you spend your remaining days?"

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Generally, I get kind of cliched,
bucket-list sort of answers,

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which show how unexamined
our lives often are.

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For bucket lists make
a really bad assumption

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that the good life is just a parade
of splashy, disconnected experiences.

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One time, as I was fielding answers

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about skydiving and visiting the Pyramids,

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I noticed a twinkle
in the eye of Kimberly,

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one of my great nontraditional students.

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After class, I called her up and I said,

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"I noticed you were
kind of smiling when we were talking

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about how people would spend
their last year of life.

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What was on your mind?"

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She explained to me

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that fairly recently
she'd been in exactly that situation.

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She had been diagnosed
with a rare neuromuscular disorder,

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"The most aggressive case seen,"
the doctor said,

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and they told her that she
did not have long to live.

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Well, after some dark nights of the soul,

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Kimberly made up her mind
to take matters into her own hands,

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seeking out some additional therapies
to the ones the doctors prescribed.

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But she realized she did not have
all the time in the world,

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and so, she said to me,

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she decided to engage in philosophy
in that ancient sense.

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She was going to try to figure out

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what, really, happiness was
and how to practice it.

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She loved wine,

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so she got in the habit of really savoring
a couple of glasses every night.

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She loved bicycling,

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so she threw herself
into the world of cycling.

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She loved learning more,
and she never finished college,

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so she went back to school

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to study the kinds of subjects
she was most interested in,

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including philosophy,

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where she studied, with me, thinkers
like Plato and Epicurus and Epictetus.

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She said these thinkers helped to sharpen
her sense of the logic of living.

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You come to terms with your death.

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You confront the limitations
of bodily existence.

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You pursue virtue.

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You try to figure out
what's really pleasurable.

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You pursue knowledge to deepen yourself

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and to use this unique
human brain of ours.

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I find a life like Kimberly's utterly
marvelous and also utterly philosophical.

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Students that I have had,
like Kimberly and Jillian and many others,

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have shown me that,

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in the words of one of my heroes,
William James, an American philosopher,

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"The deepest human life is everywhere."

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The philosophical odyssey
is open to all of us;

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the books of the great philosophers
are there to help us,

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but of course, ultimately it's a journey
that we have to go on for ourselves.

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Now, maybe you happen to be living

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according to absolutely brilliant,
beautiful principles and ideals.

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If that's true, philosophy
can still be a help;

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it can help take you off autopilot

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and put your hands on the wheel
of your beautiful life.

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But what if some of the ideas
structuring your life are less than ideal?

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What if some of the ideas
you have about how to be a nurse,

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or a doctor,

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or a teacher, or a student,

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or a citizen, or a parent,

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or a man, or a woman, or a human being

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are a little out of whack?

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Well then, philosophy has the power
to cut through the crap

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and help bring us closer to what really
is meaningful and valuable.

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I hate to break it to you today,

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but you are going to die.

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We all have a death sentence,

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and there is no cosmic contract that says
it can't happen in the upcoming year.

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So why not make up your mind

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to devote yourself to philosophy
in that ancient sense?

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Like Kimberly, like Jillian,
like all the other great philosophers.

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The books of the great philosophers
are there to help us,

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and you don't need my permission
for you to study them.

00:14:29.011 --> 00:14:30.100
In fact, I would say,

00:14:30.100 --> 00:14:34.200
freedom is the one thing
you should never ask permission for.

00:14:35.920 --> 00:14:40.974
About a year ago, I contacted Kimberly
to see how she was doing,

00:14:40.974 --> 00:14:44.859
and she explained to me
that she had to take a break

00:14:44.859 --> 00:14:49.383
from her dream job with the women's
cycling developing program.

00:14:50.505 --> 00:14:53.168
She was having to undergo chemotherapy.

00:14:54.153 --> 00:14:55.588
"But," she said, "don't worry.

00:14:55.598 --> 00:14:58.188
Things are looking up.
Not that they ever looked down.

00:14:58.188 --> 00:14:59.577
I'm still pursuing happiness.

00:14:59.577 --> 00:15:02.357
I'm still pursuing philosophy," she said.

00:15:02.357 --> 00:15:05.650
"And it's better than last summer;
I was on hospice care for a while.

00:15:05.650 --> 00:15:09.190
I think I'm on the fast track
to racing my bike again."

00:15:09.923 --> 00:15:12.702
She was still saving her own life.

00:15:13.679 --> 00:15:15.496
I haven't heard from her since.

00:15:15.992 --> 00:15:17.602
Thank you very much.

00:15:17.602 --> 00:15:20.125
(Applause)