The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

by Eric Weiner

“Sooner or later, life makes philosophers of us all.”

stop thinking and act. Stop describing a good man. Be one. The difference between philosophy and talking about philosophy is the difference between drinking wine and talking

about wine. A single sip of a good pinot noir tells you more about a vintage than years of rigorous oenology.

hell is other people,”

“Every question is a cry to understand the world,” said the cosmologist Carl Sagan. Socrates would agree, up to a point. Every question is a cry to understand ourselves. Socrates was interested in “how” questions. How can I lead a happier, more meaningful life? How can I practice justice? How can I know myself?

Knowledge doesn’t age well. Methods do.

For Socrates, philosophy and conversation were virtually synonymous.

As Voltaire said, the best judge of a person is not the answers they give but the questions they ask.

You never know until you try and you never try until you wonder.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,”

Eudaimonia, the Greeks called it. Often translated as “happiness,” the word signifies something larger: a flourishing, meaningful life.

Corollary Number Two: The unexamined life may not be worth living, but neither is the overexamined one. “Ask yourself if you are happy and you cease to be so,” said the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, articulating the Pleasure Paradox (also known as Paradox of Hedonism). The more we try to seize happiness the more it slips from our grasp. Happiness is a by-product, never an objective. It’s an unexpected windfall from a life lived well.

“And now it is time to go, I to die, and you to live, but which of us goes to a better thing is unknown to all but God,”

Rousseau’s philosophy can be summed up in four words: nature good, society bad. He believed in the “natural goodness of man.” In his Discourse on Inequality, he paints a picture of man in his natural state, “wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without domicile, without want and without liaisons, with no need of his fellow-men, likewise with no desire to harm them.” Nobody is born mean-spirited, petty, vindictive, paranoid. Society makes them that way. Rousseau’s “savage man” lives in each moment with no regrets about the past or worries about the future.

Amour-de-soi is the joy you feel when singing in the shower. Amour-propre is the joy you feel while singing at Radio City Music Hall. You may sing poorly in the shower but the delight is yours alone, independent of others’ opinions, and therefore, Rousseau argued, more authentic. So you can see why Rousseau walked. Walking requires none of the trappings of civilization: no domesticated animals, no carriages, no roads. The walker is free, unencumbered. Pure amour-de-soi.

Respond to adversity, real or imagined, not with self-pity or hand-wringing, but simply by starting over. Viewed this way, life no longer feels like a narrative gone awry, or a botched ending. None of that is real. There are no endings. Only an infinite chain of beginnings.

We walk to forget.

“imagination is more important than knowledge.”

That’s the thing about lives of quiet desperation. They’re only quiet on the outside.

“I think, therefore I am.”

“fearless self-inspection.”

Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. It is in his heart. We can’t improve our vision without improving ourselves. The dynamic works both ways. Not only does who we are determine what we see but what we see determines who we are. As the Vedas say, “What you see, you become.”

“Beauty is where it is perceived,”

If you don’t see beauty, create some. Use your imagination. Heighten your senses.

See the world with the eye of a child and the mind of a sage.

“Life is a wretched business. I have decided to spend it trying to understand it.”

“Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse—until at last the worst of all arrives,” he writes. All of us are careening headlong toward a “total, inevitable, irremediable shipwreck.” I put the book down and sigh. It’s going to be a long day. I order another cup of Sumatran and soldier on.

“Life is happiest when we perceive it least,”

When we help another person, we help ourselves.

Listening is an act of compassion, of love. When we lend an ear, we lend a heart, too. Good listening, like good seeing, is a skill, and like all skills, it can be learned.

Its desires are unlimited, its claims inexhaustible, and every desire gives birth to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its craving, set a final goal to its demands, and fill the bottomless pit of its heart.

We can escape the black hole that is the Will by “shaking off the world.” There are two ways to do so. Option one: lead an ascetic life, fasting for days at a time, meditating for hours, and remaining celibate. I skip ahead to option two: art. That’s better. Art is not only pleasurable, he says. It is liberating. It offers a reprieve from the ceaseless striving and suffering that is the Will.

he was living proof that the only fate worse than being criticized is being ignored.

Good art also transcends the passions. Anything that increases desire increases suffering. Anything that reduces desire—reduces willing, as Schopenhauer puts it—alleviates suffering. When we behold a work of art, we are not craving anything.

Schopenhauer devised a hierarchy of aesthetics. Architecture occupies the bottom rung, while theater (tragedy, in particular, of course) the top. Music does not appear on the ladder. It is its own category.

The music we choose to listen to says more about us than the clothes we wear or the cars we drive or the wine we drink.

Music is therapy. Listening to music speeds cognitive recovery after a stroke, several studies have found. Patients in minimally conscious, or even

vegetative states, showed healthier brain activity when listening to a favorite song.

There’s an old joke we like to tell at NPR. “Why is radio better than television?” “Because the pictures are better.”

Good philosophers are good listeners. They listen to many voices, no matter how strange, for you never know where wisdom might be hiding.

We’re all wounded. Only the size and shape of the wounds differ.

Comedians love Schopenhauer, confirming suspicions about the darkness that lurks behind humor.

We can’t know the world if we don’t know ourselves.

Recent research reveals the insidious effect noise pollution has on our physical and mental well-being. According to one study published in the Southern Medical Journal, noise pollution can lead to “anxiety, stress, nervousness, nausea, headache, emotional instability, argumentativeness,

sexual impotence, changes in mood, increase in social conflicts, neurosis, hysteria, and psychosis.” Another study found that the roar of planes taking off and landing causes our blood pressure to spike, heartbeat to race, and stress hormones to release—even while sound asleep.

“No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.”

We confuse data with information, information with knowledge, and knowledge with wisdom. This tendency worried Schopenhauer. Everywhere he saw people scrambling for information, mistaking it for insight. “It does not occur to them,” he wrote, “that information is merely a means toward insight and possesses little or no value in itself.” I’d go a step further. This excess of data—noise, really—has negative value and diminishes the possibility of insight. Distracted by the noise, we don’t hear the music.

the Internet is omnipresent, and purposeless. It is always striving, never sated. It devours everything, including our most precious resource: time. It offers the illusion of happiness but delivers only suffering. As with the Will, the Internet offers two ways to escape its clutch: the path of the ascetic and that of the aesthete. Meditation or music.

“Let nothing be done in your life, which will cause you fear if it becomes known to your neighbor,”

“It is better for you to lie upon a bed of straw and be free of fear, than to have a golden couch and an opulent table, yet be troubled in mind.”