Wilde×Socrates

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: Oscar Wilde and Socrates, on On the moment they doubted the entire project of their life.
2. 00:09
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   You know, Socrates, I've read your little trial. Quite the performance, really. All that business about the unexamined life not being worth living. But I wonder—did you ever examine whether the examined life was worth dying for?
3. 00:19
   Socratesshare moment

   An interesting question, Oscar. Though I notice you ask about my doubt while carefully avoiding your own. Should we begin with yours instead? After all, you're the one who called this a conversation about doubt, not martyrdom.
4. 00:34
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   How perfectly Socratic. I offer you the kindness of going first, and you throw it back like a subpoena. Very well. Reading Gaol, 1895. There's your answer. Two years watching my wit curdle in a cell, my body break under oakum and treadmill, all because I insisted that life should be beautiful, that one should live poetically. And for what? To be called a sodomite in open court?
5. 01:00
   Socratesshare moment

   But which part did you doubt—the living poetically, or the insisting upon it publicly?
6. 01:05
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Oh, you are maddening. Both! Neither! I doubted whether beauty was worth the price of beauty, whether the only thing worse than being talked about might actually be going to prison for it.
7. 01:17
   Socratesshare moment

   So you doubted not the principle but the practice. That's quite different from doubting the project itself. Tell me, in Reading Gaol, did you wish you had lived differently, or only that you had been caught less spectacularly?
8. 01:32
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   What a vicious little distinction. As if the two could be separated! Yes, I wished I'd been more careful. Yes, I wished I'd never met Lord Alfred Douglas. Yes, I wished I'd taken that boat to France when I had the chance. But more than anything, I wished the world were not so brutal to those who refuse to be dull.
9. 01:47
   Socratesshare moment

   Then you doubted the world, not yourself.
10. 01:50
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I doubted whether my self was possible in the world as it exists. Which feels rather like doubting everything, wouldn't you say? When one's entire philosophy rests on the supremacy of individual temperament, and one finds oneself in a cell designed to break precisely that—well. The syllogism completes itself rather grimly.
11. 02:08
    Socratesshare moment

    And yet you wrote De Profundis in that very cell. You continued to insist on beauty even there. So perhaps the doubt was not as complete as you suggest?
12. 02:19
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    De Profundis is the work of a man trying to convince himself he hasn't wasted his life. Every gorgeous sentence is a argument against despair, not evidence of its absence. You might as well say that because Chatterton wrote poetry before swallowing arsenic, he cannot have truly despaired.
13. 02:34
    Socratesshare moment

    A fair point. Though I wonder if you're confusing doubt with regret. To doubt the project is to question whether it was ever worthwhile. To regret is merely to wish the cost had been lower.
14. 02:48
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And which did you experience, oh wisest of the Greeks? When they brought you the hemlock, when your friends were weeping and offering you escape, did you doubt? Or did you simply regret that Athens was populated by fools?
15. 02:59
    Socratesshare moment

    I doubted.
16. 02:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Now we arrive somewhere honest. Do go on.
17. 03:02
    Socratesshare moment

    The trial itself I barely remember doubting. By then, the path was clear—either I was right that virtue matters more than life, or I was wrong about everything. But there was a moment years before. My wife Xanthippe was shouting at me. This happened often, you understand. But this time she said something that lodged in my mind like a splinter.
18. 03:25
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    What did she say?
19. 03:26
    Socratesshare moment

    She asked me what I had actually improved. I had spent decades questioning everyone, making the young men doubt their fathers, making the powerful doubt their wisdom. And what had I built? What had I made better? She pointed out that we were poor, that our children barely knew me, that I had made enemies of half of Athens for the sake of clarity about virtue—and Athens was not noticeably more virtuous.
20. 03:55
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The domestic critique. How perfectly devastating. One can weather the attacks of empires, but a wife's accounting is surgical.
21. 04:03
    Socratesshare moment

    For weeks after, I examined my own project with the same method I applied to others. What if questioning was merely my temperament, not my destiny? What if I called it philosophy because that sounded better than admitting I was simply contrary by nature? What if the daemon I claimed spoke to me was just my own stubbornness dressed in divine robes?
22. 04:26
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And what delivered you from this doubt? Some vision? Some proof?
23. 04:29
    Socratesshare moment

    Nothing delivered me from it. I simply continued despite it. I realized that certainty about one's life project is not required to pursue it. One can doubt the entire enterprise and still find that nothing else is worth doing.
24. 04:47
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That's rather bleak, Socrates. You're telling me you went to your death still uncertain whether any of it mattered?
25. 04:52
    Socratesshare moment

    No, I'm telling you I went to my death having accepted that mattering is not something one can know. One can only choose what to do in the absence of that knowledge. And I chose to keep asking questions. What did you choose, Oscar?
26. 05:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    After Reading Gaol? I chose exile, poverty, and decay. I chose to call myself Sebastian Melmoth and drink absinthe in Paris while my talent rotted. Not very heroic.
27. 05:17
    Socratesshare moment

    But did you stop being Oscar Wilde? Did you recant your philosophy?
28. 05:22
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I couldn't have if I'd wanted to. That's the terrible thing about making yourself into a work of art—you can't simply revise yourself like a manuscript. Even diminished, even broken, I was still the same absurd creature who believed that beauty trumps morality. I simply had less energy for the performance.
29. 05:36
    Socratesshare moment

    So perhaps what you doubted was not the project but your own stamina for it. The vision remained; only the vessel weakened.
30. 05:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How conveniently you separate the dancer from the dance! I am not a Platonic form named Oscar Wilde that temporarily inhabited a body. The body's breaking is the project's failure. When I could no longer be brilliant at dinner parties, could no longer charm or dazzle or seduce with language, what was left of my philosophy of beautiful living?
31. 06:03
    Socratesshare moment

    Yet here you are, still speaking beautifully. Still insisting on the primacy of art even while claiming its defeat. Do you not see the contradiction?
32. 06:13
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Of course I see it! I live inside it! That's precisely the doubt—whether one's philosophy can survive one's life. Whether the artist matters more than the art, or whether we're all just making elaborate excuses for our temperaments, as you said.
33. 06:25
    Socratesshare moment

    And have you answered that question? Does the artist matter more than the art?
34. 06:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The artist is the art, you impossible man. That's the entire point. I don't write about beauty, I enact it. Or I did, until I couldn't anymore. And then the question becomes: was Oscar Wilde a prophet of aestheticism, or merely a talented man who happened to be constitutionally incapable of boredom?
35. 06:46
    Socratesshare moment

    Why not both? Why must you choose between truth and temperament? Perhaps the greatest truths are those that perfectly match certain temperaments. Your error is assuming that if something serves your nature, it cannot also be true.
36. 07:02
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That's remarkably sophisticated coming from a man who spent his life pretending to be simple. You're saying my doubt was needless?
37. 07:08
    Socratesshare moment

    I'm saying your doubt was valuable but not conclusive. The fact that you wondered whether beauty justified your suffering does not mean it didn't. It only means you were human enough to wish for less suffering. This seems obvious.
38. 07:24
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    You're being deliberately obtuse now. The doubt is whether the beauty was worth creating in the first place, not merely whether I wish I'd suffered less in creating it. Should I have been a country solicitor? Should you have been a stonecutter and left Athens alone?
39. 07:35
    Socratesshare moment

    I was a stonecutter, Oscar. I cut stone and asked questions. Both felt equally necessary at different times. But to answer your real question—no, I don't believe we should have been other than we were. Not because what we did was certainly right, but because the alternative would have been a kind of death anyway.
40. 07:57
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    A death without persecution, though. A death in comfort.
41. 08:00
    Socratesshare moment

    Is that really what you wanted? Comfort?
42. 08:03
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    In Reading Gaol, I wanted it desperately. But you're right, of course. Even wanting it felt like a betrayal of everything I'd claimed to believe. The doubt isn't which life would have been better—it's whether having beliefs about life at all is anything more than elaborate self-deception.
43. 08:17
    Socratesshare moment

    And now we've arrived where I always try to lead. That doubt—the doubt beneath all doubts—is not a failure of your project. It is the project. To question whether our questioning matters is simply to take the examined life seriously.
44. 08:35
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How tidy. How perfectly circular. We doubt, therefore our doubting was worthwhile.
45. 08:40
    Socratesshare moment

    Mock if you like. But would you truly prefer certainty? Would you want to have lived your entire life without once questioning whether beauty justified the cost? That seems far more dangerous than the doubt itself.
46. 08:54
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    No, I wouldn't prefer it. But I notice you've done what you always do—you've turned my confession of doubt into evidence for your philosophy. The unexamined doubt is not worth having, is that it?
47. 09:03
    Socratesshare moment

    Something like that, yes. Though I would put it differently. The doubt is not a bug in our system. It's proof the system is working. You doubted whether beauty was worth the suffering. I doubted whether questioning improved anything. These are not signs we were wrong. They are signs we were paying attention.
48. 09:25
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet you drank the hemlock. And yet I died in exile and poverty. Attention is a cold comfort when one is dying.
49. 09:31
    Socratesshare moment

    Perhaps. But tell me honestly, Oscar—if you could return to that moment before you met Lord Alfred, before the trial, before everything, and choose a different path, would you?
50. 09:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That's a monstrous question.
51. 09:45
    Socratesshare moment

    But would you?
52. 09:46
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    No. God help me, no. I would do it all again, suffer it all again, because the alternative would be to have never lived at all, only existed. Which I suppose means the doubt was genuine but not decisive. How perfectly unsatisfying.
53. 10:01
    Socratesshare moment

    The truth usually is. We doubt, we suffer, we continue, we die. And if we're fortunate, someone remembers that we took it all seriously enough to question it.
54. 10:12
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That's your idea of fortune? Being remembered for our doubts?
55. 10:15
    Socratesshare moment

    Better than being remembered for our certainties. Those age poorly.
56. 10:21
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Well. I suppose if one must be dead, one might as well be dead and still arguing. Though I maintain that my doubts were more elegantly phrased than yours.
57. 10:29
    Socratesshare moment

    Of course you do. And I maintain that elegance is no substitute for clarity. Shall we continue this disagreement indefinitely?
58. 10:37
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I can't think of a better use of eternity.