Live the Examined Life: Live the Questions, Not the Answers
We all know that Socrates urged us to live “the examined life” and added that the alternative was not worth living. What is the examined life, and what is wrong with the unexamined life? What’s wrong with hanging out, watching the telly, talking to friends online, getting stoned, and maybe getting laid from time to time? After all, we’re all headed to the same place. Isn’t the idea to pass the time as pleasantly as possible, especially since the world is always going to hell anyway, and there is nothing we can do about it?
As pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding animals, we are also animals with the capacity for self-reflection, including being divided against ourselves and neurotic, as most of us are. But we can bring issues to consciousness and alter their course. The truth is, the unexamined life means that one is living not only unconsciously but also probably living someone else’s life as well. Why? Because we are making choices every second, and if the choices are not the products of some differentiated consciousness, they will be driven by the complexes, by the archaic agendas of the past, remaining subject to the pressures of the moment. Either way, such a life is derivative, not generative, secondary, and not really ours.
We are the animal that suffers disconnection from meaning. We drift into avoidant patterns, we fall sway to the loudest voice in the crowd around us, or we slavishly serve the inner tapes that we inherit from family of origin, religious and cultural inculcation, and the persuasive powers of popular culture. In short, it is a derivative life, driven by invisible winds and subject to missed appointments with the soul, lost opportunities to explore the mystery we are in during this short time we have.
As children we all asked the elemental questions: Who am I, who are you, why are we here, what are we to do, and whither do we go? These questions are mostly forgotten, pushed into the suburbs of the busy metropolis of modern life. But they rumble on in the unconscious of us all. We look for them unconsciously in each other, in novels, in television shows, movies, and so on, or we anesthetize their loss in the thousand forms of busyness and distraction our culture provides.
This human animal is a creature of desire, and what it most desires is meaning, and what it most suffers is the loss of meaning. The autonomous judgment going on within each of us is a function of our psychospiritual reality. We can and often must mobilize ego energy and intentionality to address needful tasks, and the maintenance of society often requires us to do so. But mobilization that does not attend the needs of the soul inevitably leads to burnout, ennui, depression, and finally a deadening life. Such a life is sadly more the norm than we wish to acknowledge. Such a life is generally filling time until the guy with the scythe shows up at the door, as he invariably does.
When young, we believed the big folks knew what was going on, that there was a collection of knowledge that we could access to help us understand life, that explained what we were about, how we were to live, and how life could make sense to us. Little did we imagine in those hours of yearning that we grew more through the questions than any answers we might have received. Oh, the world had answers enough — there was no shortage of answers — but none of them fit anymore. After a while, one begins to suspect what is so obvious now: there are only answers to small questions. There are only answers that make sense to you at this moment in your life, and they will fail you later in your journey. What is seemingly true today will be outgrown tomorrow, when life or our own soul brings us a larger frame through which to view them.
One of the problems with complexes is that they have no imagination; they can only repeat the image latent in their formation and the epiphenomenal message that rose to account for that moment. But those moments are surpassed by other moments, other experiences, and other narratives that reposition our sense of self, our sense of world, and our relationship with each other. The plans, models, and expectations of yesterday are the prisons of today. And as Shakespeare noted, no prisons are more confining than those we know not we inhabit. Thus, good souls continue to assiduously apply old understandings to the new terrain of their lives with increasingly diminishing results. And the symptoms intensify. What the new terrain requires, the new stage of the journey demands, is as yet unknown, and thus sometimes we suffer the terrible interim between.
A substantial gift of the therapeutic arrangement is to construct a holding place whereby the deconstruction of the old may take place, exigencies of the moment be attended, and watchful attendance upon the emergent be supported. When approached in good faith, this process normally works because there is always a new plan that emerges from the depths of the soul, when we grow humble enough to wait upon it. Most of the people we admire most throughout history had difficult lives, but they share a common trait — namely, that they hung on until the new purpose of their lives emerged for them, and they found the courage to live those new challenges. That is why we admire them and also why we are called to do the same in our lives. What matters is that you live this life by the best lights you have, by what really matters to you, whether or not anyone around you understands or supports that.
What was most troubling to me as a child and as a young adult — namely, the presence of ambiguity and uncertainty — is today almost comfortable. This is because I have learned whatever makes sense today will be insufficient tomorrow when I have larger questions, larger contexts, and more consciousness to bring to the table. I also know, wherever there is “certainty,” there either is naiveté, unconsciousness, or defense against doubt. Wherever there is a hysterical certainty, and there is much in our land, it is because doubt has already planted its black flag inside the soul and the ego is running away like a child.
In childhood, simple questions led to simple answers. Because the large questions led to ever-larger uncertainty, many of us shut down, stopped asking, and thereby stopped growing. But the same questions are still being asked in the unconscious: Who am I? Who are you? What is all this about? Whither are we bound, and how am I to live my life? When they percolate to the surface, they bring each of us a summons. The only question is, Will we keep the appointment? Many, perhaps the great majority, never keep the appointment, never show up, and thus lead lives of quiet desperation, suffer anesthetized souls, and have to continuously palliate distracted consciousness. Others show up because they have to. Keeping that appointment is where our lives find their purpose — not in answers but in living large questions that are worthy of the soul’s magnitude.
And that is why the examined life matters.