The Examined Life - Thoughts on Plato's Apology

Plato's Apology continues the plot line from Euthyphro in following the trial, conviction, and death of Socrates. In Euthyphro, Socrates was at the court of Athens to receive the formal charges for crimes of "corrupting the young" and "not believing in the gods". In Apology, Socrates presents his defense at the trial itself.

I found this text to be rich with ideas, and one overarching theme stood out to me, which I think is best expressed in the following statement by Socrates:

It is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day, for the unexamined life is not worth living.

To be honest, I am still chewing on this statement since it is much more complex than it seems and begs for further thought. What is virtue? What is an unexamined life - and conversely, what is an examined life? What exactly makes life worth living? I don't pretend to know all of the answers to these questions, but I do want to offer my general interpretation of this statement based my readings of Euthyphro and Apology.

Socrates begins his speech by drawing a distinction between what he calls the "newer accusers" and the "older accusers". The newer accusers are the young men Meletus and Anytus who have brought the criminal charges that directly resulted in the trial. The older accusers are the mass of people with whom Socrates has had interactions with throughout his life who do not like him, speak negatively about him behind his back, and spread rumors about him. Socrates feels it is necessary to defend himself against these accusers even though they are not directly bringing charges since their accusations will affect others' judgement about him.

Socrates then tells a story that explains why he behaves the way that he does, seeking out people of the city and questioning them about their knowledge. His motivation in doing so, he claims, is to find out why the oracle at Delphi said that no one was wiser than Socrates. He says that since he does not think himself very wise, he thought that it would not be difficult to find someone that was clearly more wise than he is. However, once he started questioning people, his outlook began to change. After examining a prominent politician who thought himself to be wise but actually was not, Socrates says

So I withdrew and thought to myself: "I am wiser than than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know."

Apart from this being an amusing thought, Socrates is describing a very important realization: It is not wise to believe oneself to know something when you do not actually know it, but it is wise to recognize the things that you do not know. That is, it is wise to be aware of your own ignorance.

Why might this be the case? If you mistakenly believe that you know something when you really don't, then you will be more likely to lead yourself and others astray. On the other hand, if you are able to recognize the things that you do not know - those areas of knowledge in which you are ignorant - then you will be more likely to be able to fill in those gaps and overcome your ignorance.

In my previous post on Euthyphro, I noted that the dialogue seemed to question whether or not religion helped bring a person knowledge because Euthyphro was a priest who failed to provide a satisfactory definition of piety. In retrospect, I do not think that Socrates was questioning the virtues of religion per se, but more generally the class of people who think they know something when they do not. In his story in the Apology, Socrates identifies other people whom he has met that think they are wise when they are not. This includes politicians, whom many other people see as knowledgeable; poets, whose creative output seems to be similar to seers in that they don't seem to understand what they say; and craftsmen, who do have expert knowledge in one field, but as a result think that they have much knowledge about other fields.

Socrates goes on to make a very interesting statement about death:

To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew it was the greatest of evils.

So Socrates puts "people who fear death" in the class of people who "think that they know something when they do not". He claims that since no one knows what it is like to actually be dead, no one can know whether or not it is good or bad.

Earlier in his defense, Socrates speaks about corruption. By corrupting people you make them wicked, and wicked people tend to do harm to themselves and to others. Later, Socrates makes a comparison between death and wickedness:

It is not difficult to avoid death, gentlemen; it is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death.

I found this statement very profound. To be wicked is to engage in bad or unvirtuous behavior. Despite the fact that every person is going to die at some point, it is virtually impossible to live your entire life without having engaged in bad or unvirtuous behavior. Therefore, in order to avoid becoming wicked, Socrates says that one must "prepare oneself to be as good as possible".

This is where living an "examined life" comes into play. If you don't closely examine your own life and your beliefs and your truth claims, you are living in ignorance of your own faults and weaknesses, and you will likely end up doing harm to yourself and the people about whom you care. However, if you examine yourself and become aware of your own ignorance, you will be better able to avoid harming yourself or others.

A couple of additional thoughts:

Is Socrates defining "good" as "to avoid harming oneself and others"? What does it really mean to "harm" someone?

Socrates makes an amusing yet tragic observation that

A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time.

Does this ultimately imply that the vast majority of people are wicked and will avoid justice?

Thoughts on Plato's Euthyphro

Euthyphro is the first of Plato's Dialogues that I read, and hopefully the beginning of a much longer journey into philosophy. In it, Socrates meets a man named Euthyphro outside of a court in Athens. Socrates is there because a man named Menelus has charged him with "corrupting the youth". He inquires as to why Euthyphro has come to the court. The other man answers that he is there to prosecute his father for murder of one of their servants. The servant himself had killed one of the slaves, so the father had left the man bound in a ditch outside while he sought out advice from seers regarding what to do with the man. However, the man died before the messenger returned from the seers.

Euthyphro says that his family is angry with him. They claim that charging your own father with murder is not just, and moreover the man who died was a murderer anyway. Euthyphro claims that he knows much about piety and is certain that charging his father is the pious thing to do. In response, Socrates questions Euthyphro about what piety is, on the grounds that he can use that knowledge to convince the court that he is a pious man. This begins a series of questions and answers whereby Euthyphro attempts to give various definitions of piety, only to have Socrates reject each one.

Euthyphro's first definition of piety is that prosecuting wrongdoers is pious. Socrates counters that this is an example of piety, but not a definition of piety. Socrates gets Euthyphro to agree that there are many pious actions, and he wants to know what is the "form itself that makes all pious actions pious"? In other words, what are the characteristics of piety that are common to all pious actions, so that one can look at any given action and judge whether or not it is pious. I suspect that the word "form" is important here as it probably relates to the idea of Platonic Forms, but I am as of yet ignorant of that concept.

Euthyphro's grants Socrates's request for a more general definition of piety by stating "what is dear to the gods is pious, and what is not is impious". Socrates counters that this definition doesn't help since (as they established earlier in the conversation) the gods disagree over certain subjects such as justice and beauty. Thus, some actions are loved by some gods and hated by other gods.

Through further discussion a third definition of piety arises: that which all the gods love is pious, and that which all the gods hate is impious. Socrates's response to this is quite interesting. He asks Euthyphro if the gods love something because it is pious, or if it is pious because the gods love it? Euthyphro does not quite understand the question at first, so Socrates clarifies it by analogy by asking whether or not a thing being carried is a carried thing because it is carried, or is it being carried because it is a carried thing? He then states the more general principle that

if anything is being changed or is being affected in any way, it is not being changed because it is something changed, but rather it is something changed because it is being changed; nor is it being affected because it is something affected, but it is something affected because it is being affected.

Euthyphro agrees with this principle, and then agrees that this principle also applies to something loved by the gods. That is, something loved is not being loved by those who love it because it is something loved, but rather it is something loved because it is loved by them. However, Euthyphro does not apply this principle to pious things, agreeing that pious things are loved by the gods because they are pious - and not the other way around.

Socrates then points out that "pious" and "god-loved" cannot be the same thing because there would be a contradiction: If something loved by the gods is god-loved because it is loved by them, then that would mean that it would have to be pious because it is loved by them. On the other hand, if something is loved by the gods because it is pious, then that would mean that it is also loved by the gods because it is god-loved.

Apparently this problem is known as Euthyphro's Dilemma and has implications for modern religions. For now I will have to be content with Plato's formulation and lack of resolution, but I anticipate this question arising again in the future.

Socrates then asks Euthyphro how piety relates to justice. That is, he wishes to know whether everything that is pious is also just, and whether or not everything that is just is also pious. For clarity, he uses a mathematical analogy: All odd numbers are numbers, but not all numbers are odd numbers. Euthyphro indicates that all that is pious is also just, but not all that is just is necessarily pious. Socrates then asks what part of justice makes a thing also pious?

Thus Euthyphro arrives at yet another definition of piety: Piety is the care of the gods. After further questioning by Socrates we find that by "care" here Euthyphro means "service to the Gods" that involves prayer and sacrifice, whereby humans give gifts to the gods and ask favors from them. Socrates asks what gifts are given to the gods, and Euthyphro says that the gifts are "honor" and "reverence" and other such things that please the gods. Socrates then points out that Euthyphro's argument has circled back to "pious things are those things that are dear to the gods" - or in other words, things that the gods love. However, earlier they established that piety and god-loved were not the same thing.

Finally, Euthyphro gives up and indicates that he needs to go, and the dialogue ends without a resolution.

One subtext of this dialogue seems to be "Does religion bring knowledge?" Since priests or seers are presumably some of the most strict adherents of particular faiths - even going so far as to claim direct inspiration from the gods - then it would seem to follow that these men would be among the wisest people. Indeed, Euthyphro claims that he can "foretell the future" and that he has "foretold nothing that did not happen". Euthyphro also suggests that he is "superior to the majority of men" because he has "accurate knowledge" of "the divine, and of piety and impiety". However, since Euthyphro fails to provide Socrates with a satisfactory definition of piety by the end of the dialogue, this suggests that Euthyphro is not as knowledgeable as he claims to be.

Furthermore, the servant who died at the hands of Euthyphro's father in part died because Euthyphro's father was seeking advice from seers and was unable to obtain that advice in a timely manner. One wonders if there would have been a more just outcome if Euthyphro's father had acquired knowledge about justice and piety himself, rather than rely on priests.

To Live Will Be an Awfully Big Adventure

The recent suicide of actor Robin Williams has shocked many people around the world. The man was an accomplished actor in both comedic and dramatic forms, starring in the TV series Mork & Mindy and films such as Good Morning, Vietnam, Dead Poet Society, and Mrs. Doubtfire. He won an Oscar for his role in Good Will Hunting, and provided the voice for the incredibly amusing Genie in Disney's Aladdin.

Williams had a wide appeal in popular culture and a prolific body of work, and his passing got me thinking about one of my favorite Robin Williams movies: Hook. Hook is an unofficial sequel to the story of Peter Pan. The original stage play by J.M. Barrie is called Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up. The Peter Pan of this film—played by Williams, of course—is quite grown up. When the story begins, we find out that a long time ago Peter left Neverland and was taken in by a much older Wendy Darling. He married Wendy's granddaughter and became a corporate lawyer. So much time has passed that Peter has completely forgotten Neverland, and he spends most of his time mired in work, which puts a strain on his family life. He has trouble relating to his children and breaks promises to them, such when he misses his son's baseball game.

This struggle between the responsibilities of an adult life and the freedom of childhood is a central theme to the Peter Pan story, and it is one that definitely hits home for me. Having a full-time job and being a father together consume nearly all of my time. It is easy to become a creature of habit and stick to strict schedules when you are unable to vary your daily activities. When you spend so much time working and raising kids, it is easy to forget what it is like to actually be a kid.

Put another way, the responsibilities of adulthood make it more difficult to really play in a childlike manner. When we play in this sense, we create a virtual space that is separate from reality. We pick and choose rules—for example, in soccer you try to put a ball into a net and cannot touch it with your hands—and apply them to this new space. This make-believe place is largely insulated from reality. We are able to avoid permanent real-world consequences for winning or losing, and we are free to explore without fear. We engage in the activity for the pleasure of the experience and the pleasure of learning how the rules operate. This is why people use phrases such as "I'm just playing" and "it's just a game".

In the book The Ambiguity of Play, the author Brian Sutton-Smith proposes that play is an important mechanism in evolution. Under evolutionary theory, natural selection can only take place if a population of individuals exhibits variability - that is, if the characteristics of individual organisms differ from each other. After all, you can only make a selection if you have different options from which to choose. Sutton-Smith suggests that animal and human behavior becomes more rigid as individuals age because they tend to rely more and more on those behaviors that have led to successful adaptation. He further posits that playing might increase the variability of individuals by making their behavior more flexible. It does this because, in play, the organisms are free to experiment with and engage in behavior that they otherwise might not have in the real world.

This rationale provides an explanation for why play and games are often associated with children and not adults. It also underscores the importance of play for adults, since being playful makes one more flexible, surprising, and fun. Ideally, we take some of what we learn from play—for instance, problem solving and teamwork skills—and incorporate it into our real lives.

Going back to Hook, the final battle between the Lost Boys and the pirates is both amusing and interesting because of the interplay between war as a game and war as a real life-threatening ordeal. The Lost Boys employ a variety of whimsical weapons and tricks such as blinding mirrors, egg guns, rolling marbles, and tomato catapults to disable the pirates without causing permanent damage. In contrast, the pirates—along with the older good guys, Peter Pan and Rufio—use traditional swords with an intent to cause real harm.

The antagonist in Neverland is of course the titular Captain Hook, who is immoral and an all-around bad guy. He's a pirate, so that implies stealing. He kidnaps Peter's children, Jack and Maggie, and creepily brainwashes Jack into thinking Hook is a better father figure than Peter. It's important to note that Captain Hook is an adult, with all of the baggage that implies. He is not interested in play - he is only interested in revenge.

Rufio is a interesting character because he is a teenager caught in that awkward stage between childhood and adulthood. He wants leadership power associated with being an adult, but to Peter Pan and Captain Hook he is still a child. Hook actually breaks the wall between "play" and "reality" by killing Rufio, and in doing so he renders permanent consequences to the rest of the participants.

It is ironic that Robin Williams's archenemy in the film contemplates suicide, saying "Death is the only great adventure I have left." This line is adapted from the original play, where it is Peter Pan who at one point says, "To die will be an awfully big adventure." Later, at the very end of the play, the narrator suggests that if only Peter could understand the "riddle of his being", then he would change this cry to "To live would be an awfully big adventure!". Young Peter Pan is, of course, afraid of growing up and taking on the responsibilities of adulthood, and I believe those are the things to which the narrator is referring when he says that Peter does not understand the "riddle of his being". Young Peter is stuck in a limbo of sorts, afraid of moving beyond his child fantasies where he is the center of the universe.

At the beginning of Hook, old Peter has moved to the opposite extreme on the spectrum—that of a rigid, unbending adult. By the end of the story, though, Peter has reclaimed his childhood sense of adventure and can be playful again. He even says having children—one of the greatest, if not the ultimate, example of adult responsibilities—was his happy thought that enabled him to do so. At the very close of the film Peter has come full circle and is finally able to say "To live will be an awfully big adventure."

We can't know everything that was going on in Williams's mind. Perhaps he, like Captain Hook, felt that there were no new experiences left to be had; or perhaps, like Peter Pan, he was afraid of getting older and finding out what that would bring. In any event, Williams was a phenomenal entertainer who helped many, many people recapture their childhood sense of adventure, and he will be sorely missed.
 

Journey Review

Easy to Learn, Easy to Master

After finishing Flower—the previous product from Thatgamecompany—I praised its audio-visual splendor but questioned its lack of meaningful choices. The company's latest venture, Journey, is much like its predecessor, but it is also minimalist to a fault. A certain degree of minimalism is good if it removes bloat and reduces a game to its fundamentals, giving it focus and increasing accessibility. In Journey, though, Thatgamecompany goes too far, stripping the product of the soul of what a game is. I found it exacerbating that a game whose name and imagery evoke exotic locales, epic hardships, and personal enlightenment, offers so little in the way of player agency.

As its name suggests, the goal of Journey is to travel from one location to another. At its mechanical core, then, the game is a level-based platformer. The player uses the left analog stick to guide a red-robed avatar across a seemingly vast expanse of desert and through the ruins of an ancient civilization. The ultimate goal, glimpsed throughout the game, is a shining light that beckons from the top of a mountain.

From the outset, I felt an invisible hand guiding me along a preset path. If I attempted to walk in any direction other than toward the next landmark on the horizon, the wind pushed me roughly back from whence I came. If I tried to fall off a side ledge or down a water shaft, there was always a safety net that funneled me back to the main path with no resistance.

The player has the ability to fly for a limited time by storing energy in her scarf, which acts as a power meter. By finding glowing runes scattered around different areas, she can increase the scarf's length, and hence the amount of air time possible. At certain points she will encounter enemies that can rip the end off of the scarf with a successful attack, thereby reducing total air time. If online, the player may join with a fellow traveler. One companion can tap a button to sing a short note that fills up the other's scarf when she is near, and the other can return the favor.

On paper these mechanics sound intriguing, but in practice they are extremely bare bones and have little to no effect on Journey's difficulty. At one point I intentionally allowed my scarf to be reduced to a stub, but I never felt as though that inhibited me in any way. I realized that my actions did not matter much to the outcome of the game, and as a result I was not compelled to seek out power-ups or to bother waiting around for other players.

If the depth of a game is measured by the distance between its best and worst players, then Journey is one of the shallowest games ever made. Every player can make steady progress and complete the game in roughly the same amount of time. There is precious little skill involved and virtually no strategy to employ. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that you can complete the game by simply holding forward on the left analog stick. This is the exact opposite of how the game is advertised on its web site ("your passage will not be an easy one"). Games, by definition, must have a goal or win condition. If a game is so easy that it is impossible to lose, then winning quickly loses its meaning.

Journey has received much praise and acclaim, but I failed to see anything innovative about it. It is a linear, scripted cinematic experience that costs $15 and lasts about 2 hours. If that sounds more like a movie than a game to you, I don't think you'll find much consolation in the fact that you have to hold down the play button to make it proceed. The best that I can say is that—like Flower—it is visually pleasing and the narrative is abstract enough for each player to impart her own personal interpretation. However, there are far more engaging and interesting platformers out there with substantially more content (starting with the original Super Mario Brothers), and there are far better opportunities for online camaraderie, where one can build stronger and longer-lasting relationships with real people (for example, World of Warcraft).

Some may think that I am being overly harsh; that Journey is "an experience, not a game"; that I am "missing the point"; or that I am "not judging it by its own merits" (whatever that means). My response is the following: How can an experience emotionally affect me if I can cruise through it on auto-pilot? How do my actions matter when I know they are being guided by the invisible strings of a puppeteer? How can I feel any sense of purpose with so little demanded of me? How can I form meaningful bonds with other people if we do not actually need each other to progress? These are serious and legitimate questions that need to be answered if one expects to find significant merit in Journey.

Rating: 3 out of 10.

Disclosures: This game was obtained via paid download and reviewed on the PS3. Approximately 2 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode (completed 1 time).

Monster Tale Review

Needs to Go Back in the Oven


Monster Tale's big hook is that it is a mash-up of adventure platforming and pet-raising simulation—in other words, it's Metroid meets Pokémon (as Richard Naik fittingly noted in his review on Gamecritics). Genre blends are a funny breed. I imagine their inception usually begins with a thought like "Wouldn't it be cool if we mixed X with Y?", and the variables are filled by a Mad Libs style brainstorm or by drawing randomly out of a hat. It sounds like a fun way of creating new ideas. Wouldn't it be cool if we mixed pinball with real-time strategy (Odama), or how about arcade action with role-playing elements (The Legend of Zelda)? The hybrid offspring could be a bastard mutt or a completely fresh pedigree. Which one depends not only on how well each individual component is executed, but on how those components interact with each other to create new gameplay. While it may seem easy to generate novel concepts by using this approach, it is also a risk because the developer has to follow through on multiple gameplay mechanics and make them work together. Unfortunately, this task proved to be too much for DreamRift.

The game begins when a young girl named Ellie finds a magic wristband that teleports her to a mysterious land of monsters. On arrival she stumbles upon an egg that hatches into a cute and cuddly monster whom she names "Chomp". Soon she discovers that the land has been taken over by the Kid Kings, a group of children who rule over various regions by enslaving the monsters. It's up to Ellie and her new pal Chomp to free the monsters and find a way for her to return home.

The player controls Ellie on the DS's top screen, where the main action takes place. On the bottom screen is Chomp's home base: the Pet Sanctuary. At any time Ellie can summon Chomp up to the top screen to help out in combat or occasionally remove obstacles. Ellie can let Chomp wander and fight enemies freely, or command him to perform various special moves. Chomp has a stamina bar that depletes when he uses a special ability or when he takes damage. Ellie can send Chomp back to the Pet Sanctuary to recover stamina, eat food, and use items. This seamless pet help is a genuinely intriguing and innovative idea. However, great ideas need equally great execution, and DreamRift fell short on this effort.

As a point of reference, consider the original Metroid. It was a game where the number of power-ups was fairly limited, but each one significantly changed how the player approached the gameplay. For example, it was easier to kill enemies with the wave beam since it penetrated walls, but the ice beam let the player freeze baddies and use them as platforms, making previously difficult traversal sections easier. Furthermore, the player was not required to get many of the power-ups in order complete the game—not even the ice beam! This made for interesting gameplay choices.

In contrast, Monster Tale offers a smorgasbord of power-ups, but most of them are completely superfluous. As Chomp battles and eats food, he earns experience points and can evolve into different forms, each with its own unique skill. Disappointingly, I found many of these abilities to be pointless or redundant in combat. For example, there are at least three forms that allow Chomp to shoot a spread of projectiles, each with slight variations such as bouncing off walls or homing in on enemies. While these differences sound legitimate, in practice the forms are all more or less equally effective. For the most part I used the same two abilities throughout the entire game because almost nothing I obtained afterward seemed as useful.


Ellie herself gets a regular dose of upgrades, but the only real purpose the vast majority of them serve is to give access to new areas. For example, I never found good cause to use the "Super Wave" ability, which lets Ellie fire a continuous stream of shots—much less the "Air Super Wave", which lets her do the Super Wave while in the air. It doesn't help that there are doors secured by very contrived locking mechanisms that can only be opened by a specific ability. I got the clear impression that her upgrades were designed more for unlocking these doors than for actual combat.

This obvious gating highlighted the fact that the game's level design is far too linear. Fans of Metroid may recall that the player could defeat the two main bosses, Kraid and Ridley, in any order before completing the game. There were also countless side paths and loops, almost every one of which gave some sort of useful reward such as a precious missile expansion. These design characteristics provided a lot of replay value and motivation to explore.

Unfortunately, there is never any opportunity in Monster Tale to deviate from the current goal. The game requires the player to defeat all of the Kid Kings and acquire the power-ups in one and only one order. There is not much motivation to seek alternate routes, either, as there are very few side paths and the hidden rewards are sparse. These issues are exacerbated by the large amount of backtracking that is required.

Despite all of the problems I had with Monster Tale, it might have been much more successful if it wasn't so incredibly easy. As it stands, the game is a straightforward, bland affair with a lot of meaningless complexities that aren't justified by the challenges presented. The original idea of combining adventure platforming with a pet-raising simulation had tons of promise, as it seemed like those two genres could mix very well together. It is too bad that DreamRift never capitalized on that potential.

Rating: 4 out of 10.

Disclosures: This game was obtained via retail store and reviewed on the 3DS. Approximately 11 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode (completed 1 time).

Update: July 17, 2011 - This review was published on Gamecritics.com through their community user review process.