Switching Gears

It's June! Hooray June! The month in which my sister got borned!

But enough about that, for this month, or for maybe just this solitary post, I'm gonna talk about "thinkers."

People who have thinked and the thoughts they thunked.

We'll start with Socrates. Because I got this book from the library called the Examined Lives by James Miller. It gives little biographies about some philosophers and I thought I'd read it because I never took philosophy in college boo hoo.

the only picture in the entire post yet also applies to every single sentence if you think about it hard enough

Socrates. He liked to question people about everything. That's about all he cared about. He didn't uphold anything other than questioning everything and the things he didn't do were because a voice in his head told him not to.

Socrates's big thing was that after he was sentenced to death by drinking hemlock, he remained calm right up to the end.

Which is probably the earliest origins of people being bored and unimpressed by everything to look cool. Little do they know that that is only really cool when you're dead or about to be dead. There should be a state that brings back dinosaurs and makes them in charge of the Sincerity Police.  

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What to learn from Socrates?

"Know thyself" Socrates was all the time trying to know his self. His psyche. His soul or his breath. And he never gave a real answer. But he died in a way that seemed to confirm his knowledge of his self.

So either he discovered the secret and didn't tell anyone, or he faked it, or he put some serious weight behind the idea that you can only know your self through the pursuit of trying to know your self. 

It's the process that counts and any final product is an illusion or just outright false. Conclusions are just more fuel for the fire of inquiry. You have to live in a state of constant revaluation and criticism.  

And then you'll die happy. After being ordered to kill yourself by a group of 501 people.

Socrates was also super idiosyncratic and weird. He would stand around sometimes for hours and hours while thinking about something important like who owed him money or where a good chicken restaurant might be. Something like that.

"Know thy idiosyncrasies"