A few moments from “The Examined Life,” on Plato’s Apology, and the practice of tested conviction.
Pick one of your strongest opinions. The kind you would state confidently at a dinner, the kind that signals which side you are on. Now ask yourself, honestly: when did you last examine it? Not defend it. Not repeat it. Examine it. For most of us, with most of our opinions, the honest answer is the uncomfortable one: we did not arrive at them. We absorbed them.
Then we read the words of a man who was tried for his life rather than stop asking that question.
“Perhaps someone will say: but Socrates, can you not go away from us and live quietly, without talking? This is the hardest thing of all to make you understand. For if I say that to do so would be to disobey the god, and that therefore I cannot keep quiet, you will think I am not being serious. And if I say that the greatest good of a man is to talk every day about goodness, examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me even less. Yet what I say is true.”
Plato, Apology
Socrates is not defending a belief. He is defending a practice: the refusal to hold an opinion he has not tested. He would rather die than perform a conviction that was never his.
And here is the uncomfortable part. We perform convictions that are not ours every day, for stakes infinitely smaller than his: a nod, a like, the warmth of being agreed with.
