Socrates’ famous quip that “the unexamined life is not worth living” referred not to navel-gazing examinations of one’s personal life, but rather to deep inquiry into the nature of life in general—in other words, to doing philosophy.

Embarrassing as this predicament might appear, Nagarjuna is far from being the only one stuck in it. The great lodestar of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experience (noumena), and that we cannot talk about such things. He also explained why this is so: our concepts apply only to things we can

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