Welcome to the Daily Quote, the podcast designed to kickstart your day in a positive way. I'm your host, Andrew McGivern and this episode is brought to you by the Great News podcast and the link is in the show notes.
Today's quote comes from René Descartes, 17th century French philosopher, mathematician, and the man whose single most famous sentence… ”I think, therefore I am”, became the foundation of modern Western philosophy. From the preface of his Principles of Philosophy, he wrote:
”To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.”
Before you decide this quote isn't for you because you're not a philosopher, hear what Descartes is actually saying. He's not asking you to read Kant. He's not asking you to write a dissertation or resolve the mind-body problem over breakfast.
When he says philosophizing, he means something far more immediate and personal: the deliberate, honest act of examining your life. Questioning your assumptions. Asking why you believe what you believe, want what you want, and live the way you live. Looking, with genuine curiosity, at the things most people walk past without ever really seeing.
Descartes makes the contrast explicit in the same passage, it is better to use your own eyes to direct your steps than to blindly follow the guidance of another, though even that is better than keeping the eyes closed with no guide except one's self. The closed eyes aren't a neutral position.
They are a choice, the choice to move through life on autopilot, accepting the inherited assumptions, the default settings, the unexamined beliefs handed to you by circumstance and never questioned.Socrates said it 2,000 years earlier: ”the unexamined life is not worth living.”
Descartes says the same thing through a different lens, the life lived without examination is the life lived with eyes closed. Not blind by accident. Blind by habit.Descartes also said: ”doubt is the origin of wisdom.” The open eye doesn't just accept what it sees, it questions it. It looks twice. It asks whether what appeared to be true actually is. That willingness to look honestly, to doubt, to examine, that is philosophizing. And it requires nothing more than the decision to stop sleepwalking through your own existence.
So here's the question: Where in your life are you currently moving with your eyes closed, accepting without examining, living without questioning, following without looking? Because Descartes isn't asking you to have the answers. He's asking you to open your eyes to the questions. That's the whole practice. That's the examined life. Open your eyes. Look at what's actually there. That's it for today. I'm Andrew McGivern — I'll see you in the next one with another Daily Quote.
