That's a damn good point!! Review of Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche. By James Miller. Farrar, Straus and Giroux - here:
"At the end of his life, Rousseau acknowledged that it was not nearly so easy as he had assumed to follow the Delphic oracle’s injunction to “Know thyself.” He concluded ruefully that it was “arrogant and rash” to profess virtues that you cannot live up to, and retreated into indolent seclusion.
If Mr Miller had included the sunny and admirable David Hume and some other less troubled souls in his portraits, his gallery of philosophers could have been brighter overall. But on balance, the summation in his epilogue is probably correct: philosophical self-examination is not a reliable source of happiness or political nous. Still, there are many philosophers, including Aristotle, who regarded the quest for understanding as an end in itself, not as a path to joy or success. After all, as most of those who have been bitten by the philosophy bug will know, philosophers philosophise mainly because they cannot help it."
"At the end of his life, Rousseau acknowledged that it was not nearly so easy as he had assumed to follow the Delphic oracle’s injunction to “Know thyself.” He concluded ruefully that it was “arrogant and rash” to profess virtues that you cannot live up to, and retreated into indolent seclusion.
If Mr Miller had included the sunny and admirable David Hume and some other less troubled souls in his portraits, his gallery of philosophers could have been brighter overall. But on balance, the summation in his epilogue is probably correct: philosophical self-examination is not a reliable source of happiness or political nous. Still, there are many philosophers, including Aristotle, who regarded the quest for understanding as an end in itself, not as a path to joy or success. After all, as most of those who have been bitten by the philosophy bug will know, philosophers philosophise mainly because they cannot help it."
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