Thursday, March 14, 2013
To be alive
One of the most interesting things I've read in this book is about Socrates " As far as he himself is concerned, there is nothing more to be said than that life deprived of thought would be meaningless, even though though will never make men wise or give them the answers to thought's own questions." (p 178) I find this to be completely true. Later in the same passage it says "To think and to be fully alive are the same." The second I read this it instantly struck me that this statement is scary, yet honest. I looked at it as the mental state many of us consider being a 'vegetable'. When we have no brain activity, yet we are still breathing. Would any of us want to lay there with nothing? Many people even sign papers that won't let them live that way if it happened. Thinking is one of the fundamentals of life. It allows for society and ourselves to function the way we normally do. Without thinking, life is essentially meaningless.
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I agree here to some extent. I do think that I would not want to be kept alive in that condition, but there are some that may. And at the time of Socrates, people would not live in this state long enough to really be considered "alive". They would most likely be considered "dying". On a more complex level, Socrates is addressing those that live without "questioning the system" or being more doubtful of the things that others find certainty in. Socrates was sure to understand that Greece would lose its empire and yet some thought it would last forever. He would say that those attitudes keep us from truly having that freedom of exploration of what could happen if things weren't taken for granted.
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