Socrates, Plato, St. Augustine, Kant

Socrates, Plato, St. Augustine, kant and Living a Good Life Socrates, Plato St. Augustine, Immanuel Kant and Living a Good Life Four important philosophers in world history, Plato, Socrates, St. Augustine, and Immanuel Kant all had good but different ideas about living a good life, all of which I agree with myself when it comes to living a good life. Socrates was Plato's teacher, St. Augustine came centuries later and Kant was from the 18th century.

In this essay I will describe what they all suggest about living a good life and how it applies to me. Socrates believed strongly in truth, as I do. He would go around Athens questioning important people about their knowledge and often pointed out to them and his students through his questions, what these people didn't know they didn't know. Like Socrates, I dislike hypocrites and hypocrisy when I see it, and one of my ideas about living a good life is that one must be genuine and truthful.

For his insistence on truth though, Socrates was eventually tried and convicted of blasphemy and corrupting the youth of Athens. But Socrates was only trying to show how people should be honest about what they know and do not know (which I agree with and try to practice myself), and not pretend to know something they do not know. To me, this is a key part of living a good life, although it also requires certain risks and sacrifices, as Socrates illustrated with his own life.

Socrates showed by example that this is the best way to be in order to live an honest life, which is a good life and in fact the only way to live life.

Socrates believed it was so important to be truthful that he was willing to die for that belief even if he could have instead escaped from prison, and in the end Socrates was executed by the state of Athens for living a truthful life and trying to bring out the truthfulness of others, including Athenian leaders who felt offended and threatened by this. But to Socrates the unexamined life (the life not truthfully reflected upon) was not worth living.

So, for Socrates, to live a good life is to have the courage to examine oneself and one's life with truthfulness, and I personally agree with him, even when being truthful is risky and difficult. Plato was Socrates' student who wrote about Socrates' trial, conviction, and execution. Plato was obviously very influenced by his teacher Socrates, and Plato expressed this in his Dialogues. Another of Plato's own concerns about the importance of truth had to do with leadership.

For instance Plato believed that rulers should only rule based on truth and reason and that the way to best live life itself was also based on truth and reason. This is something I agree with very strongly. When it comes to the Iraq war, for example, I feel that America's current leaders decided to start the war based not on truthfulness and reason, but for baser motives, such as coercion and a desire to expand their geographical and financial power.

I strongly disagree with the war and neither Socrates nor Plato would have felt the war was justified, based on their ideas of truth, reason, and (for Plato) virtue. Plato believed that truth and reason led to virtue, and that therefore people who lived good lives were truthful, reasonable and virtuous. Like Plato, I agree that living a good life must be based on a foundation of truthfulness, about oneself, others, and the world, and that truth and reasonableness are the best ways to be a good (virtuous) person, also.

Plato, like Socrates, valued education (as I also do) and felt that youth should be educated to value truth and reason in order to become knowledgeable and virtuous individuals. Virtue would come to people as a result of being both truthful and reasonable. Plato also felt that the material world was much less important than knowledge, so that to live a good life a person should seek knowledge, not material well-being. Therefore to Plato, living a good life has to do with being truthful,.