How philosophy can save your life | Scott Samuelson | TEDxBismarck

Can philosophy really save your life? Well, it might not stop you from dying, but it can make sure you are truly alive. Find out how in this talk.

Scott Samuelson studied philosophy at Grinnell College (BA, 1995, valedictorian) and Emory University (PhD, 2001). Since 2000 he has taught at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa. Inspired by his students, he wrote his first book The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone (University of Chicago Press, 2014). He also writes movie reviews for Little Village and hosts Ethical Perspectives on the News, a Sunday-morning talk show on KCRG, the local ABC affiliate. For a decade he moonlighted as an occasional sous-chef at Simone’s Plain and Simple, a French restaurant on a gravel road. He’s published articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Philosopher’s Magazine, and The Atlantic. On top of his job at Kirkwood, he teaches philosophy at Oakdale Prison. He’s currently working on his second book, Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

When it comes to saving life,

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

things far removed from philosophy.

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

is in earnest.

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

you need something like philosophy.

Think about it.

CPR, chemotherapy and all the other
marvelous medical techniques,

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

They really just put off your death.

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

was sentenced to death
by the Athenian court,

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

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

Handing down a death sentence
or successfully administering chemotherapy

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

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

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

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

Now, when I am talking about philosophy,

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

The love of wisdom. The pursuit of wisdom.

Sometimes, I worry that some
of our contemporary practitioners

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

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

or maybe even more likely,

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

And while criticism and theorizing

are important and even joyful
parts of philosophy -

I don't want to diminish them -

really, philosophy is something
much more than that.

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

to study philosophy,

that they feel intimidated by it,

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

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

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

Philosophy begins
in the wonder that we all feel

about what's true and really valuable.

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

But it ends by returning us to our lives

and helping to know them
for the first time.

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

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

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

"Is my friend Socrates
the wisest person around?"

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

Now, when Socrates himself
got wind of this pronouncement,

he was puzzled.

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

I actually have no wisdom at all."

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

Just find one person
with a little bit of wisdom,

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

So he wandered around Athens,

critically interviewing
the religious authorities,

the political authorities,

the workers, the entertainers.

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

he was the wisest.

Not because he possessed any great wisdom,

but he possessed one little piece
of priceless wisdom.

Namely, he knew he knew nothing.

Everyone else claimed to have special
knowledge about their various pursuits

when in fact they did not,

putting them in the hole, wisdom-wise.

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

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

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

How can searching after answers
be a form of wisdom?

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

It took a student of mine, actually,

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

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

that very story.

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

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

Her name was Jillian,

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

I think because it probably helped
to fulfill some requirement.

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

One of the most interesting
conversations was sparked

when I casually asked the drooping class,

"What's a hospital for, anyway?"

I challenged the expected answers
as they came out.

"To fix people."

"What about those with a terminal case?"

"To ease people's pain?"

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

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

"Is there no obligation
to healthy people?"

I was trying to open up
their minds a little bit

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

Well, the conversation
sparked something in Jillian,

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

Well, a couple of weeks later,

as students were filing out,
turning in their papers,

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

Well, our conversation
in class, she told me,

had really perplexed her,
even kind of disturbed her.

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

but after our conversation, she realized

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

To help her formulate
a thesis for her paper,

she lit on the idea
of going around the hospital

and questioning various people there -

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

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

about what the point of a hospital was."

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

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

which, with a little criticism,

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

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

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

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

But she realized that
that too was kind of inadequate.

Should they always
give people what they want?

Should they always
give people what they need?

What should govern the variety
of services that they provide?

And why were they there?

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

the hospital subordinated
its whole purpose to fixing broken bodies.

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

mourners are dealt with
like psychological cases.

Folks clearly dying are pointlessly fixed.

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

we live in a less than fully human world."

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

people who have devoted decades
to studying and practicing medicine

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

Imagine, I thought,

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

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

forgetting to save their own lives.

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

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

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

to the full truth of it.

She was echoing
a famous claim of Socrates:

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

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

helped her to see matters
a little more clearly.

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

that they threaten to exile us
from the human community.

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

was, "To be there for people."

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

to be there when they're mourning."

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

of course,

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

The point of medicine, she said, was care.

"Doctors are there,"
she marvelously concluded,

"to help the nurses."

But doctors, she feared, sometimes
overrate their wisdom

on the basis of their technical
proficiency and science.

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

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

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

had helped her to really understand

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

that philosophy had helped
plug her into her vocation.

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

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

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

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

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

In the wake of Socrates,

philosophy in the ancient world

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

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

in ancient Greek,

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

And happiness is
a pretty good translation,

but really, eudaimonia
means something more like

"Flourishing over the course
of your whole life"

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

Philosophy was not just
some intellectual game,

it was very much about trying
to understand those principles

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

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

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

how would you spend your remaining days?"

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

which show how unexamined
our lives often are.

For bucket lists make
a really bad assumption

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

One time, as I was fielding answers

about skydiving and visiting the Pyramids,

I noticed a twinkle
in the eye of Kimberly,

one of my great nontraditional students.

After class, I called her up and I said,

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

about how people would spend
their last year of life.

What was on your mind?"

She explained to me

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

She had been diagnosed
with a rare neuromuscular disorder,

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

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

Well, after some dark nights of the soul,

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

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

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

and so, she said to me,

she decided to engage in philosophy
in that ancient sense.

She was going to try to figure out

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

She loved wine,

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

She loved bicycling,

so she threw herself
into the world of cycling.

She loved learning more,
and she never finished college,

so she went back to school

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

including philosophy,

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

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

You come to terms with your death.

You confront the limitations
of bodily existence.

You pursue virtue.

You try to figure out
what's really pleasurable.

You pursue knowledge to deepen yourself

and to use this unique
human brain of ours.

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

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

have shown me that,

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

"The deepest human life is everywhere."

The philosophical odyssey
is open to all of us;

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

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

Now, maybe you happen to be living

according to absolutely brilliant,
beautiful principles and ideals.

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

it can help take you off autopilot

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

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

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

or a doctor,

or a teacher, or a student,

or a citizen, or a parent,

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

are a little out of whack?

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

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

I hate to break it to you today,

but you are going to die.

We all have a death sentence,

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

So why not make up your mind

to devote yourself to philosophy
in that ancient sense?

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

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

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

In fact, I would say,

freedom is the one thing
you should never ask permission for.

About a year ago, I contacted Kimberly
to see how she was doing,

and she explained to me
that she had to take a break

from her dream job with the women's
cycling developing program.

She was having to undergo chemotherapy.

"But," she said, "don't worry.

Things are looking up.
Not that they ever looked down.

I'm still pursuing happiness.

I'm still pursuing philosophy," she said.

"And it's better than last summer;
I was on hospice care for a while.

I think I'm on the fast track
to racing my bike again."

She was still saving her own life.

I haven't heard from her since.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)