Meditation 7: The Reflective Life

The Greek philosopher, Socrates, famously stated that the unreflective life is not worth living.  To which can be opposed the view that ignorance is bliss.  Suppose that such reflection reveals a life that is not particularly worth living?  Perhaps, since thoughts can multiply discontents, it would be better never to start thinking in the first place.  It is not always pleasant to engage in much critical self‑examination. However, if you do start thinking about the larger contexts of life and ask the big questions, there seems to be no end to it, and it becomes impossible to see where the process of thinking will lead.

Most of the time active people are a million miles from philosophizing.  They turn to religion or a political ideology when they want to rest from the struggle of life, but are unready to go to sleep.  Instead of doing philosophy, they choose to rest in faith or a set of beliefs rather than make the dubious effort of comprehensive thinking.  Here in the West, people become philosophical at the end of long parties, in the early hours when alcohol or drugs have burned through some fears and daily preoccupations. They reflect on their lives from a disengaged perspective.  It takes that special time and consciousness to jerk them from their quotidian (mundane) existence.

The appearance of philosophy in life arises from an act of radical reflection, and that act is purely human and imaginative, not one demanded by nature.  We can live without systematic philosophizing, just as we did for thousands of years.  The busy world of staying alive and propagating the species occupies the other animals when they are not sleeping, whereas philosophy takes up an intermediate position, like the twilight world between sleeping and waking.  The reflective attitude arises by an act of detachment from the world, yet it remains mentally active, critical and questioning.  It is for this reason that philosophers have been pictured as walking around with their heads in the clouds, while they ignore the world around them.  However, we cannot blame them for this, because the founding act of philosophy distances people from the natural world into which they are born.  The reflective life begins in an act of alienation, and whether it can overcome that rift by thought alone is itself a philosophical question.