Self-examination
from 399 BCE Socrates states the principle at his trial in 399 BCE; the daily practice is Stoic and is described in detail from the first century onward
Turn the elenchus on yourself at a fixed hour every day, ask what you actually wanted, and judge it as you would judge a stranger doing the same thing.
- Active
- from 399 BCE
- Where
- Athens, later Rome
- Also
- prosochē
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Classical procedures
What it is
Self-examination is the elenchus performed without an interlocutor. Where Socrates asked another man what he meant and showed him he did not know, the practitioner asks it of himself, on a schedule, and holds himself to the standard he would apply to anyone else.
In the ancient schools this was training rather than self-improvement or confession. The Stoics treated philosophy as a set of exercises to be done rather than doctrines to be held, and the evening review was the central one.
How it works
Fix the time and keep it. The practice depends on repetition rather than intensity, and an examination conducted only after a bad day examines nothing but bad days.
Go through the day's actions in order, asking of each what you were actually after rather than what you told yourself at the time. Then apply the outside standard: name the judgement you would pass on a colleague who had done exactly this. The gap between that and the judgement you were about to pass on yourself is the finding.
End with one thing to do differently, and stop.
The moves, in order
- Fix a time and repeat it regardless of how the day went
- Recall the day's actions in order, without excusing or narrating them
- Ask of each what you actually wanted, not what you claimed to want
- Name the judgement you would pass on another person who had done the same
- Choose one thing to do differently tomorrow, and stop
The procedure
Proposition Snapping at a colleague in the morning meeting was justified because the report was late again.
- Recall the action plainly: the report was three days late, and you said in front of six people that some of us manage to hit deadlines.
- Ask what you were actually after. Not the report, which was already late and arrived no faster. The satisfaction was in the six people hearing it, which is a different want and one you had not stated to yourself.
- Apply the outside standard. A colleague who did this to somebody else in your presence — you would call it a public reprimand delivered by someone who preferred an audience to a conversation, and you would think less of them for it.
- Note the gap. Your own version had been a justified reaction to repeated lateness; the version you would apply to anybody else is not. Both were available the whole time and you reached for the flattering one automatically.
- The one thing to do differently: the lateness is a real problem and still needs raising, so raise it tomorrow with the person alone, which is the version that survives the examination.
Therefore The provocation was real and the reaction was still not what it was claimed to be. What the examination produced was not guilt but an accurate description, and one specific act to perform tomorrow.
The move that does the work is the third step, where the standard comes from outside. Without it the review is rumination, which recalls the same events indefinitely and never applies a criterion to them.
What it is good for
Closing the gap between what a person believes and how they behave, which no amount of argument closes on its own. It is also the only method here that is aimed at the practitioner rather than at a question.
Where it fails
The examiner is the accused. Every finding is produced by the faculty under investigation, and there is no external check anywhere in the procedure — a person practising it diligently for years can become more articulate about their motives without becoming more accurate.
The experimental case against introspection is stronger than the ancient sources could have anticipated. Nisbett and Wilson showed in 1977 that people confidently report reasons for their choices that demonstrably were not the causes, and produce those reports with no sense of guessing, which is precisely the failure mode this method cannot detect.
And it slides. The distance between review and rumination is a matter of stopping, and the person least able to stop is the person the practice most appeals to.
Common misconceptions
That it is therapy, or an early version of it. The aim is not relief and not insight into the past; it is training for tomorrow, and the ancient reviews are brief, dry and entirely concerned with conduct.
Where it came from
Socrates supplies the principle at his trial. The daily technique is Pythagorean in origin and becomes Stoic property: Seneca describes his own nightly review in the Letters, Epictetus prescribes it, and Marcus Aurelius's notebooks are the practice itself rather than a description of it.
What became of it
Absorbed into Christian practice as the examination of conscience, which kept the schedule and changed the standard from a rational one to a divine one. Recovered as philosophy in the twentieth century by Pierre Hadot, whose argument that ancient philosophy was a set of exercises rather than a system changed how the whole period is read.
Lasting influence
It is the reason the ancient schools produced handbooks and notebooks rather than treatises, and it stands behind every later claim that philosophy is something you do rather than something you know.
Why it still matters
It survives intact wherever a practice requires honest review — the debrief, the incident report, the supervision session — and in each case the value comes from the same third step, the outside standard, and collapses without it.
Put another way
A lamp carried into your own house rather than held up at the window.
Texts
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius
Letter 83 describes a day under review in detail. Marcus Aurelius shows the practice rather than describing it, which is more useful once you have seen the shape.
Where to start
Read Seneca's account of his own nightly review, then Marcus Aurelius Book Two. An hour in total, and the second reads differently once you know what it is.
The surprising bit
Marcus Aurelius's Meditations were never written for a reader. They are one man's evening exercises, repetitive on purpose, and the most widely read Stoic text is a record of the method rather than an argument for it.
In their own words
The unexamined life is not worth living
Who held it
Letters to Lucilius; Meditations
Connections
- Relies on
- Socratic elenchus
- Influenced
- Existential analysis
- Parallel to
- Ideology critique
The verdict
The most practical method in the section and the least verifiable, and both facts follow from the same feature.