The good life is a correct balance between know-that and know-how. Knowing in an intellectual way is simply not enough for a full understanding and embodiment of wisdom. In fact, a good definition of wisdom is embodied valuable knowledge. Or, in vernacular: (valuable) knowledge in action. On the other hand, wise action is impossible with ignorance in theory.

That doesn’t mean that a man cannot swim in life unless he knows the laws of hydrodynamics. But someone proficient in hydrodynamics can do things no Olympic swimmer ever could. That however, is irrelevant when it comes to the good life, broadly conceived. When it comes to that, it is more important to know how to swim well than to know hydrodynamics. The problem we have today is that people know hydrodynamics and have forgotten how to swim – if they had ever learnt to do so.

You can’t swim in life unless you get in the water. Contemporary philosophers are professors of hydrodynamics. That is why they cannot teach anybody how to swim well in the oceans of life. Poor students of philosophy, they enroll in philosophy hoping they will learn to swim and they are made to believe that hydrodynamics is all one needs to know. That is why contemporary philosophers can even seem incompetent when it comes to everyday life, whereas they should have been its graceful artists.

“Critics are to painters what ornithologists are to birds” Birds fly, painters paint. Critics criticize and ornithologists analyse and observe. Contemporary philosophy is in the same predicament. Instead of living life, they analyse and observe it. They cannot dance like the philosophers of the past. While true philosophy is learning how to fly, contemporary philosophy merely analyses what flight is.

Philosophy is not boring. It talks about the most important issues in life – and it doesn’t tell you which those are. It is not an order, it is a question. You are supposed to find the answer.

Philosophers who are boring are failing in life. A boring life cannot be a good one. “So what if a philosopher is boring? He may still be a good philosopher.” Yes – only if you subtract one of the main aims of philosophy: Living the good life. That contemporary philosophy is filled with boring professors of philosophy only accentuates Thoreau’s remark in Walden:

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men.

Someone who has been a philosopher for years should be discernibly different in the things that matter from most people. He has supposedly made it his life’s task to live the good life. If he isn’t living better than most who haven’t set such a conscious goal for themselves, he is evidently not a good philosopher. Philosophy is not just another profession. It is a calling. You cannot be a philosopher from 9 to 5 and be a layman at night. Being a philosopher means being an example of your own philosophy. Walking the talk and talking the walk.

Of course, being a philosopher is a process, as most things are. If someone has just created the ideal to which he wants to strive, it is unfair to expect that he’s going to match it overnight. The ideals of philosophy entail your whole way of life. Changing your whole way of life overnight is highly improbable if not completely impossible. But being only a shadow of the ideal you still believe yet have sketched 20 years ago, should raise doubts about your sincerity or strength of will. Doubts that you should at least have personally raised and examined. That is why philosophies have been called confessions. They are the sublimated confessions of personal struggles to live out ideals; the triumphs and tragedies of human actualization.

To restrict yourself to offering a little nugget of truth (which seems to be the rule among philosophers these days) while living alone in an ivory tower of inauthenticity can hardly be called noble. Let us not let “noble” remain an honorific term for people who don’t deserve it. Let us not cower from aspirations to greatness. Let us not always equate the will to greatness with arrogance and conceitedness. It is time to believe that there is something more than nihilistic humility. Sapere Aude!