Socrates 'Ignorance Is Not Worth Living'

Attention Gainer: Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is frightening. There is something much worse than being ignorant and that not knowing the unknown.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” states socrates. Socrates means that people who do not examine their lives, who don’t think about what they want to do with their lives, don’t live a happy life. Jimmy Santiago Baca and Frederick Douglas relate to socrates because they also lived their lives like him. Socrates educated people on the need to examine life and decide how to live it.

Through several dialogues Plato gives readers accounts of Socrates’ interactions with other Athenians. While some may think of him as a teacher of sorts, Socrates is adamant in rejecting any such claim (Plato, Apology 33a-b). He insists that he is not a teacher because he is not transferring any knowledge from himself to others, but rather assisting those he interacts with in reaching the truth. This assistance is the reason Socrates walks around Athens, engaging in conversation with anyone that he can convince to converse with him. An assertion he makes at his trial in Plato’s Apology is at the center of what drives Socrates in his abnormal ways, “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (38a). Socrates, through aporia, looks to lead an examined life to perfect his soul and live as the best person he can be. This paper looks to examine the ‘unexamined life’ and the implications rooted in living a life like Socrates’.

The first thing to register when considering the concept of irony in connection to Socrates is that, contrarily to what one might expect, in no passage of Plato's work does Socrates or any of his associates refer to him as an ironist. Rather, it was his opponents who accused him to be an eiron, that is, someone who practices irony. This is because up to Socrates' times, the standard understanding of the Greek word eironeia was exclusively that of deception or dissembling. More precisely, as David Wolfsdorf shows discussing a passage from Oppian's On Hunting, erioneia 'is the use of deception to profit at the expense of another by presenting oneself as benign in an effort to disarm the intended victim.' Accordingly, eironeia and its derivatives were originally meant as 'terms of abuse,' and Plato reserves them more properly for the sophists.

He finally says that “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Plato, 20). What exactly does this statement mean? It means if a person is living a life without truly striving for wisdom and understand and making sure they realize what life is really about, their life is without meaning. Socrates flips the accusations. He essentially attacks his accusers about not having enough knowledge and not being willing enough to understand what real knowledge is. He claims that without self-examination, life is without purpose. He claims that these men do self-examine. This statement seals his

Everyone obtains their knowledge in different ways and each person has their beliefs of what is right. Socrates was a wise philosopher from Athens who was known for delineating arguments in which a dedicated student of his named Plato wrote down. Pre-Socratic concepts explored the nature of things through inquiry exposing that much of what we know are just simply dogmas with no definite answer. Through Socrates’ use of the Socratic Method and Socratic Irony he pretends to be ignorant to reveal the ignorance in others using a series of questions resulting in them learning they know nothing; therefore, Socrates inspires us to do the same, regardless of the fact that there is always something we don’t know.

Socrates makes it quite evident through the severity of the language in this claim, the extent to which he will live and die for this ideal. He did not merely say that the unexamined life was not a noble existence or that it was the path of the less righteous, rather the unexamined life is just not worth living at all. Theoretically, according to his

Everyone has ignorance and it will always be present. It is a matter of how knowledge intervenes that judges the outcome. James Madison describes a similar aspect. He mentions knowledge as the power that relieves ignorance and allows people to be their own governors. In Fahrenheit 451, the character of Montag is a great example. He is once an ideal, ignorant citizen, but it all changes once he meets Clarisse, who unlocks a vault full of knowledge to him. Moreover, the crave for knowledge grows and Montag meets Faber who helps reveal the meaning of knowledge, allowing Montag to

A philosophical attitude toward life should play a major part in our lives. It is crucial for us as humans to learn and accept lessons learned through the experience of life. If you do not “examine your life” then what do you learn and what do you gain? Socrates’ in “The Trial and Death of Socrates” he details this in many ways. We can pull all the evidence and ideas we need from this text written by Plato. In the 3 parts Euthyphro, Apology and Crito many conclusions are made and there is much to learn from this text. Some of the most important parts allude to this idea of living life with a philosophical attitude. The book begins with the search for the definition of piety. In the apology Socrates’ details his side of the argument showing everyone the power of his own ideas and that is proved by his execution and finally in the Crito his commitment to his way of life is the last point that Socrates’ made. This text is chalked full of life lessons but the most important is the one that urges people to live their lives while never stopping to learn and think.

Socrates is eventually found guilty and is to fight no longer for his innocence, but against a penalty of death. As Socrates speaks to the jury he begins to speak more of the meanings of life opposed to the need for life. He claims, “it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men.. (Cahn pg. Apology39 38a1-4).” Although Socrates never explicitly states why he feels this way, but upon reading this statement and analyzing its context one can grasp a sense of this argument. Socrates is arguing that life is unlived if it is not questioned and our thoughts are not examined. He understands that his wisdom is far greater than that of the jury, and he feels that all other punishments would leave him unhappy and dissatisfied. He would rather suffer death than to go against the laws of the state, although he is being wrongly convicted. He feels he has lived a good life and a true life because he was able to examine himself and others true

As a perfectionist, I grew up ignoring my imperfections, mistakes, and failures. I didn’t just want perfection: I needed it. A red slash on a test or a mistake marked an absolute failure. Because I hid from past mistakes, I never learned from them, making me incapable of growth. I excused my mistakes and “humbly” boasted my overall score. I convinced myself that I never actually made a mistake, so I never learned the information that I had previously missed, thus leading to more errors to hide.

In The Apology, Socrates famously asserted that, “the unexamined life is not worth living” and was afterward sentence to death. I agree with Socrates declaration because, of some fine points and details that was stated. Socrates believed in the love of wisdom and that it should be pursued above all the other claims in philosophy. Socrates decided that he is wise because he consider that he does not think he know what he does not know. Socrates is known for questioning others and that it is the duty of the God to continue with what Socrates is good at; questioning people to show people who believe they are wise that they are really not.

Everyone has a life to live; however, there are quite different between the unexamined life and the examined life. In the word of Socrates,” The unexamined life, for a human, is not worth living”, “the unexamined life” means people have no question, they never question the life, and they don’t want to know about the truth, and they don’t know who they are. Those people just get up every day, go to work and go to sleep, keep repeating these and never wonder what is the meaning of their life. On the other hand, the examined life is that people always searching for reasons, they know who they are, and they know who they want to be and keep working hard, try to improve themselves. Therefore, the unexamined life is not worth living because they

With the notion of philosophy and the studying of philosophy it is well known that it is powerful and dangerous. Philosophy has many reasons for its importance such as how to understand your ideas, the origin of your ideas, how to contrast arguments. Philosophy can also help you defend arguments, read it, build your position and understand it. Philosophy is used for the betterment of the world, gender, race, civilization, town, state, country, etc. But in order to practice philosophy you need parrhesia and you need philosophy to practice parrhesia, they come hand in hand with each other. There have been many imperative philosophers that gave us the knowledge and foundation for our study of

This quote explains to us Socrates wisdom or so - called Socratic paradox. He means by this phrase, that we must question all what we taught, understand or already know, the doubts is the background of wisdom and for one hundred percent we can know only that we know nothing, so we need to question everything. Furthermore, Socrates as philosopher is famous for his work on logic and epistemology. Epistemology is a part of philosophy about the nature of knowledge and explains what knowledge exactly is. In addition in today's world people deviate from the norms of morality and forget about kindness, honesty, tolerance, all are just trying to survive in cruelty and all think only about themselves. If we will have the teacher as Socrates we can avoid this way of living and became again more virtuous and kind as it used to be. According to Plato ,‘Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.' But we can