The Most Important Question You Will Ever Ask Yourself jlavarnway Free Inquiry

A. C. Grayling’s Philosophy and Life is a pitch perfect book any inquisitive reader wondering how to understand their life should read. Although rigorously written by a distinguished scholar, it easily fits into any general reader’s repertoire. In this magisterial book, Grayling has nailed the most important question a person can ever ask themselves. It is a single question raised by Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher. Grayling calls this “The Socratic Question” because it is recorded in history that Socrates was the first thinker who asked it and prompted a search for “reasoned” answers, responses formulated independent of any tradition or religion. It is a crucial question, Grayling writes, “everyone has to ask and answer—in fact, has to keep on answering.” The question is “How should I live my life?” Variations include: “What sort of person should I be?” “What values shall I live by?” “What shall I aim for?” Grayling boldly queries his reader: “What would your answer be?”

Grayling is the world-renowned British philosopher with a doctorate from Oxford University, professor of philosophy for twenty years at Birkbeck College at the University of London, as well as teaching at Oxford, plus author of more than forty books for academics and the general reader. In addition to this extraordinary resume, he recently founded the distinguished New College of the Humanities in London (now a division of Northeastern University London). This experience and talent certainly well-positioned him to answer the Socratic Question. Here, Grayling is also utterly transparent about himself: his background, the development of his thinking, and the basis of all his philosophical concepts. This book is a fascinating exploration of a great mind, a mind firm in the belief the fundamental challenge of philosophy is to think, especially to engage in critical thinking. He explains how he came to borrow ideas from Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and “from the teachings of history to lived experience in the present, all of them component parts of philosophy.” For Grayling, the two great connected tasks of philosophy are making sense of things and finding and furthering the good. He boils it all down to critical thinking and choosing. 

This extensive and compelling book is hard to put down. Philosophy and Life reaches a new summit of Grayling’s writing gifts so far, for it asks the critical question about our lives and how we live them. It is core philosophy, erected on the foundation of ancient Greek thinkers but encompassing  the writings of Confucius, William Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, George Eliot, and others more recent.

As usual, Grayling writes with great compassion, care, and passion for his subject, yet he is not averse to throwing a few punches along the way, such as in his treatment of religion, especially Christianity in several “no holds barred” body blows. This reviewer was impressed by the logic in his quite total demolition of religion, especially Christianity and Islam. Grayling has a long history as an avowed atheist/secular humanist, and his convictions certainly color much of his writing.

Discussing the philosophy of how to live one’s life, Grayling argues most people answer the Socratic Question by merely adopting conventional views of life and what matters in it, and then moving along in the direction the crowds of the world take them. He dismisses this widespread social sentiment as “normativity.” That word refers to a lifestance almost devoid of critical thinking; it is just living by going along with the proverbial flow.

This splendid book is divided into three sections: Part I clarifies the Socratic Question and injects two preliminaries where he considers human nature and provides a survey of the principal schools of ethical thought since the time of Socrates: Cynic, Peripatetic, Stoic, Epicurean, and others. Part II “considers the great matters of death and love, happiness, grief, success and failure, courage, compassion, altruism, good and bad, right and wrong, the challenge of life’s inevitabilities, and the ultimate question of meaning.” Grayling argues all lives are marked by these things. “They are what a philosophy of life is a philosophy of.” The Socratic Question strongly encourages us to reflect on our life, pause, and consider what really matters. We should then live according to the answers. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus said that a person might be struck by the Socratic Question even in the last days of old age and then begin “to be wise. It is never too late.” This idea of never being too late in life to think, consider, and act are primary considerations for Grayling. Part III surveys the way philosophies have been and are now lived. At the conclusion of the book, Grayling sketches a life in philosophy, his own life of personal choices, and the reasons for those choices. They are valuable examples to follow and are most helpful to assist the reader in answering the Socratic Question.

Among many intriguing chapters, this reviewer was particularly struck by Grayling’s descriptions of love, friendship, aging, and death. These passages firmly resonated as I believe they also will for readers of Free Inquiry. In most cultures, the highest place among the values of good and worthwhile lives is assigned to love. Love is of great value in life, but for the ancient Greeks, there were several varieties of love: the bond among comrades, erotic love, the love of friends, family love, playful love, and the love of humanity. The bond of friendship, however, was prized above all other kinds of love.

According to Grayling, “romance” is different from love. Infatuation, or romance, is merely the first step of erotic love. It is basically the place where evolution’s mechanism creates new generations through the birth of children. Romantic love does not necessarily endure in human relationships, for to be truly loving the relationship usually devolves into strong friendship. The amount of time that romantic love takes place in most human lives is very short relative to the person’s lifespan. Grayling, therefore, argues the primary  key to a long-lasting relationship is friendship. “Friendship is the last kind of mature human relationship,” a relationship based on “reciprocity and equality.” For the ancients, these were the pillars of a worthwhile life. Again, Grayling leans on the teachings of Epicurus in thinking of answers to the Socratic Question: thinking of friendship is a “germane consideration.”

In his focus on aging and death, Grayling writes not only to those of us who are older adults but also to those younger and trying to answer the Socratic Question. Grayling’s discussion of death is on point. It is one of the best sections of the book, of which there are many great sections. He contextualizes death within life as he writes “one cannot fully make sense of death until one has some clear idea about life and the purposes it can serve. More precisely: one cannot fully make sense of the unavoidable and inevitable fact that one is going to die until this is factored into the question of living, essentially answering Socrates’ question.” Thus, Socrates’s maxim “to philosophize is to learn how to die” means “to philosophize is to learn how to live.”

Through Grayling’s repeated focus on the teachings of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who taught three centuries before Christianity appeared, he identifies the source of the fear of death as understanding the “nature of things.” This was an understanding of the fact there was “not a ghostly other world, no after life; if there are gods, they are material too and have no interest in or power over the world of human beings. The question of how to live is answered within this framework, and the nature of things is directly relevant to our attitudes and practices within them.” Bottom line: there is no empirical evidence of any heaven or hell afterlife, and the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers knew that!

For Grayling, a person’s unwillingness to answer the Socratic Question is simply “to be lazy.” Above all, it is “to waste one’s life, it is to live asleep, to miss opportunities.” But how do we begin to answer the Socratic Question? “First we have to think, and for ourselves.” The answer to the Socratic Question resides within each person who seeks an answer to it. He asserts: “There is no one size fits all answer. This is what the ideologies (again religions mainly) offer.” Basically, the call to answer the Socratic Question is to borrow from the ideas of Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and writers throughout history, to think, choose, and act thereby engaging philosophy as a way of life. That provides the grounds for the answer to the critical historical question for all of us to ask. In response, this reviewer could think of no better phrase addressed to us living now but the long-standing adage learned years ago: “Act and be, create, and do it now!”

A. C. Grayling’s Philosophy and Life is a pitch perfect book any inquisitive reader wondering how to understand their life should read. Although rigorously written by a distinguished scholar, it easily fits into any general reader’s repertoire. In this magisterial book, Grayling has nailed the most important question a person can ever ask themselves. It is …