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Everything is Standing Under
by Monolycus on Mar 13, 2006 - 07:41 PM
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I guess someone else should be didactic, then, and mention that it was not really Socrates, but rather Plato, who wrote that "The unexamined life is not worth living". But, yeah, it's a good point to make here.
I've got some really mixed feelings about a lot of what is being said here. "I learn from life, not books." Well...
We are certainly conditioned from life. That's a kind of learning, but it would be sad to think that each of us in the course of a lifetime would need to keep re-inventing the wheel for ourselves. I guess the applicable philosophical quote for this conversation would have something to do with how much farther we can see while standing on the shoulders of giants.
I'm interested lately in pretentiousness, probably because I get accused of it as often as I do. It is certainly pretentious to read a book and crow about how much it has taught you... but isn't it also pretentious to crow on about how "everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten"...?
It makes me sad to think that people stunt their own intellectual development in the ways they do. It's like a starving man who avoids the free banquet laid out for them on the grounds that they just don't approve of banquet halls.
But it is not my place to tell anyone else how to live their unexamined lives.
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