PROLOGUE: ON THE PHILOSOPHICALLY EXAMINED LIFE

We have highlighted aspects of our nature often overlooked or even denied in secular thought. Given that we are neither apes nor angels, neither mere organisms nor pure spirits temporarily lodged in bodies, how shall we think of ourselves? How shall we live in the light of what we know, or might come to know, of our nature? More to the point, where shall we find meanings sufficiently enduring and profound to withstand knowledge of our own mortality and the certain loss of all that we love or value?

Rejecting religious responses to these questions does not mean that we can ignore the questions themselves. Or, come to that, ignore religion: a humanism that chooses not to think seriously about something that has played such an important role in human history must be impoverished. While we may live outside the interrogative grasp of these questions for much of our lives, we know that they are awaiting us. At times of grief, suffering, and fear we may be engulfed by them. We should therefore engage with them even, or especially, when they are not interrogating us.

Contemporary philosophy rarely aspires to teach us how to live. As a doctor who has cared for many seriously ill patients, I can report that philosophy of the kind that figures in the pages of this book rarely has much to offer people in extremis or in daily life. Even so, I would like to think that a rich sense of the mystery of our nature is an essential basis for secular living.

There is a danger hereabouts of endorsing the claim, ascribed by Plato to Socrates, that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. The Platonic idea that knowledge (of a philosophical nature) increases one’s moral worth should be questioned, not the least because, measured against Socrates’ criteria, most lives (including many that are truly admirable) pass without examination. Kant’s confident assertion that “in all men, as soon as their reason has become ripe for speculation, there has always existed and will continue to exist some kind of metaphysics” does not correspond to any kind of population-based observation.