One of the things Socrates was really good at was investigating and critiquing culture by publicly investigating and critiquing the ways individuals understood their actions in terms of value concepts: piety, justice, virtue, self-control, courage, and others. Further reflection revealed connections between those concepts and a complex taxonomy of other terms-being down, game, chill, wack, a blowhard, braggart, killjoy, and others-which I systematically detail in the book. Now I notice people using them that way lot, but it’s one those conceptual connections you might not notice without some good old a priori reflection. It wasn’t long before I noticed, even in my own idiolect, that “awesome” and “sucks” were related as antonyms. My sense was that standard moral theories don’t capture suckiness-that it also had a kind of social import that was worth investigating. It seemed to be a distinctive critique of someone to say that they, or something they did, “sucked”. I started to notice that “awesome” is often being used in a distinctive social sense to talk about people and actions that bring people together in a certain way.Īround the same time I was also wondering about the contemporary significance of “sucks”. In a Socratic spirit I started wondering what was going on with “awesome” and whether there was anything to gain from a philosophical inquiry into its contemporary significance. I’m all for tasty sandwiches but I’d rather have an awesome one. How did you become interested in awesomeness, and what is it, exactly?Ī good person is great but an awesome person-they’re on another level.

On Being Awesome by Nick Riggle