An Idealistic Dialogues

" Life is "worst of only when you are the slave driver of yourself" (110). Thoreau's solitary experiment in self-sufficiency in terms of physical labor is not to be taken as coarse labor simply only a joy in enacting the idea of simplicity.

By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever assay to do with come stunned it (114).

In his description of the basics of food, shelter, clothing, and fuel, Thoreau apparently seeks to sign the whole of essential human experience by minify material existence drastically, "not to travel cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private line of reasoning with the fewest obstacles" (119). For example, he reports throwing out decorative pieces of limestone on his desk because "they require to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still" (132).

Thoreau's opening is highly individual, idiosyncratic. In any consequence in the participation of greater Concord he was hardly isolated, though he evidently did not want to engage in a lot of social fuss but rather pass away its necessity. That is different from Socrates' approach to achieving knowledge and wisdom, which always involves social intercourse. That, indeed, leads to his prosecution. In the Euthyphro, Socrates is being prosecuted by Meletus for

Krutch, Joseph Wood. Introduction. Walden and new(prenominal) Writings. Ed. Joseph Wood Krutch. sensitive York: Bantam, 1962. 1-23.

Socrates questions Euthyphro about his knowledge of divine constabulary and the difference between what is holy and over-the-top (14), start out as declarations of absolute knowledge but end up exposed as contradictions. First Euthyphro says that what is holy is what is "agreeable to the gods" (16); Socrates points out that the gods don't agree about what is agreeable.

Thus how can man by chance decide that? Euthyphro then divides the holy, saying that it partly lies where there is stage business to "look[] after the gods," and partly lies with "looking after men" (24). even to suggest that gods need man's care or service is confounding and possibly impious. In either case it also points in the direction of conceptual ambiguity:

Plato. Apology. The Last Days of Socrates. Trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant. New York: Penguin, 2003. 39-70.

atheism and corruption of Athenian youth. The fellow Euthyphro is prosecuting his own sky pilot for murder of a slave, based on his father's "badly misapprehension the position of divine law on what's holy and what's unholy" (Euth. 12).

The simple fact is that Euthyphro has not examined his opinions about the divine. When it becomes clear that his case is superficial, self-serving, and contradictory, Euthyphro hastily escapes (30). In the Apology, Socrates does not escape, though he in like manner exposes Meletus. Socrates chooses death because he insists that "examining both myself and others is really the very outmatch
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