The Dialectical Method

Plato wrote about Socrates.  Socrates never wrote anything that can be directly attributed to him.  So, it’s a leap of faith, I suppose, for a layman like me to believe that Socrates ever existed at all.  We’ve only got Plato’s word.  You have to decide whether or not that’s good enough for yourself.

Socrates said something that I really like…well, at least Plato said that Socrates said it.  I’ve referenced it before:

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but to Socrates, it meant that you had to question everything because questioning is the only way to come to some semblance of the truth.  Regardless of where one believe truth comes from, truth is not something that someone can right down in a book and hand to you.  That’s not how you come to know it.  Socrates insisted that truth could only be understood within the context of a life of questions and answers.

So, please don’t get pissed off at me when I challenge the direction in which the rest of the sheep in the flock are headed.  I just want to know if the path leads to some succulent pasture or to the slaughterhouse floor.  Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, if you don’t examine where you’re going, you might not have much of a life left to live.