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

by Eric Weiner

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

We are hungry. We eat and eat and eat some more, yet still we are hungry. Sometimes we experience the hunger as a faint presence; other times, when the world is upended and fear roams unchecked, the hunger swells, and threatens to consume us.

We don’t want what we think we want. We think we want information and knowledge. We do not. We want wisdom. There’s a difference. Information is a jumble of facts, knowledge a more organized jumble. Wisdom untangles the facts, makes sense of them, and, crucially, suggests how best to use them. As the British musician Miles Kington said: “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” Knowledge knows. Wisdom sees.

Greater knowledge does not necessarily translate into greater wisdom, and in fact can make us less wise. We can know too much, and we can mis-know. Knowledge is something you possess. Wisdom is something you do. It is a skill and, like all skills, one you can learn. But it requires effort. Expecting to acquire wisdom by luck is like expecting to learn to play the violin by luck.

My mother-in-law is suffering from late-stage Parkinson’s. It is a cruel disease, robbing her of abilities and memories. She has forgotten much.

Philosophy Now. It

Technology seduces us into believing philosophy no longer matters. Who needs Aristotle when we have algorithms? Digital technology so excels at answering life’s smaller questions—Where

They teach about philosophies. They don’t teach students how to philosophize. Philosophy is different from other subjects. It is not a body of knowledge but a way of thinking—a way of being in the world. Not a “what” or a “why” but a “how.”

Wisdom is portable. It transcends space and time, and is never obsolete.

Did these thinkers love wisdom and is that love contagious?

they were, to a man and woman, practical philosophers. It was not the meaning of life that interested them but leading meaningful lives.

They were not perfect. They had their peccadilloes.

We always need wisdom, but we need different kinds of wisdom at different stages of our lives. The “how to” questions that matter to a fifteen-year-old are not the ones that matter to a thirty-five-year-old—or a seventy-five-year-old. Philosophy has something vital to say about each stage.

“Sooner or later, life makes philosophers of us all,” said the French thinker Maurice Riseling.

For some of us, though, mornings smell of simmering despair. If you don’t like your life, chances are you don’t like your mornings. Mornings are to an unhappy life what the opening scene is to The Hangover Part III. A taste of the awfulness to come. Mornings are a time of transition, and transitions are never easy. We’re leaving one state of consciousness, sleep, and entering another, wakefulness. To put it in geographic terms, mornings are the border town of consciousness. A Tijuana of the mind. Disorienting, with vague hints of danger.

The Great Bed Question, like all great questions, is actually many questions disguised as one. Let’s pull back the comforter and examine it. On one level, we’re asking can I get out of bed. Unless you are disabled, the answer is yes, you can. We are also asking whether it is beneficial to get out of bed, and crucially, should you get out of bed. This is where it gets tricky.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume thought a lot about these sorts of questions, though rarely from bed. He divided any inquiry into two parts: an “is” and an “ought.” The “is” part is observational. We observe, without judgment, the empirical benefits of getting out of bed: increased blood flow, for instance, and earning potential.

we jumped too quickly from “is” to “ought.” A moral “ought” never follows directly from a factual “is.” (That’s why the “is-ought problem” is also known as “Hume’s Guillotine,” since he cleaves “is” from “ought” and insists on a gap between the two.) Embezzling money from your employer is likely to lead to negative outcomes; therefore you ought not to embezzle. Not necessarily, says Hume. You can’t move from a statement of fact to a statement of ethics. Getting out of bed may be healthy and lucrative, but that doesn’t mean we “ought” to do so. Maybe we don’t want better blood flow and increased earning potential. Maybe we like it just fine here, under the covers. It is this pesky “ought” that, I think, explains our predicament. We feel we ought to get out of bed, and if we don’t there must be something wrong with us.

We’re all bodies at rest, waiting for an outside force to act upon us.

What Marcus Aurelius fears most is not death but forgetting. He constantly reminds himself to live fully. Marcus had no intention of publishing his refrigerator notes. They were intended for himself. You don’t so much read Marcus as eavesdrop on him.

Marcus never lost sight of the Stoic precept that all philosophy begins with an awareness of our weakness.

Time and again, Marcus exhorts himself to 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. Marcus’s ideas didn’t simply materialize. No philosopher’s does. He was a Stoic, but not exclusively. He imbibed other sources: Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, the Cynics, and Epicureans. Marcus, like all great philosophers, was a wisdom scavenger. What mattered was an idea’s value, not its source.

“What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do?”

“When you wake in the morning, tell yourself: the people you deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, jealous, and surly.” Little has changed since Marcus’s day.

Marcus suggested dealing with difficult people by disempowering them. Revoke their license over your life. Other people can’t hurt you, for “nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can hurt you.” Of course. Why do I care what others think when thinking, by definition, occurs entirely inside their minds, not mine? I’ve always

“Enough of this wretched whining, monkey life.… You could be good today. But instead you chose tomorrow.”

This realization gets Marcus moving. He has a duty to get out of bed. “Duty” not “obligation.” There is a difference. Duty comes from inside, obligation from outside. When we act out of a sense of duty, we do so voluntarily to lift ourselves, and others, higher. When we act out of obligation, we do so to shield ourselves, and only ourselves, from repercussions.

Each one of our thoughts is connected to the next like boxcars on a freight train. They depend on one another for their forward momentum. Every thought, be it about ice cream sundaes or nuclear fusion, is pushed by the previous thought and pulled by the next.

“Our culture has generally tended to solve its problems without experiencing its questions.”

For Socrates, the worst kind of ignorance was the kind that masquerades as knowledge. Better a wide and honest ignorance than a narrow and suspect knowledge.

By talking to others he learned how to converse with himself. Philosophy may be the art of asking questions, but what is a question? Ah, now there’s a question Socrates would love! Take a word everyone knows, everyone thinks they know, and examine it, probe it, poke it from many angles. Shine a bright and unforgiving light on it.

What is love? Why does evil exist? When we ask these questions, it is not information we desire but something larger: meaning. Questions aren’t one-way; they move in (at least) two directions. They seek meaning, and convey it, too. Asking a friend the right question at the right time is an act of compassion, of love. Too often, though, we deploy questions as weapons, firing them at others—Who do you think you are? and at ourselves, Why can’t I do anything right? We use questions as excuses—What difference will it make? and, later, as justification, What more could I have done? Questions, not the eyes, are the true windows to the

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

Wonder is a skill, one we’re all capable of learning. He was determined to show us how. “Wonder” is a wonderful word. It’s impossible to say it aloud without smiling. It comes from the Old English wundor, meaning “marvelous thing, miracle, object of astonishment.” On one level, to wonder is to seek information, in Siri fashion. I wonder where I can find some dark chocolate? On another level, to wonder is to suspend inquiry, at least momentarily, and simply behold. I wonder what it is about good Belgian chocolate, spiked with sea salt and almonds, that makes my brain dance and my heart sing?

Wondering is open-ended, expansive. Wondering is what makes us human. That’s been true ever since the first caveman wondered what would happen if he rubbed two sticks together, or dropped a large rock on his head.

We often conflate wonder with curiosity. Yes, both provide helpful antidotes to apathy, but in different ways. Wonder is personal in a way curiosity is not. You can be curious dispassionately. You can question dispassionately. You cannot wonder dispassionately. Curiosity is restive, always threatening to chase the next shiny object that pops into view. Not wonder. Wonder lingers. Wonder is curiosity reclined, feet up, drink in hand. Wonder never chased a shiny object. Wonder never killed a cat. Wonder takes time. Like a good meal or good sex, it can’t be rushed. That’s why Socrates never hurried his conversations. He persevered even when his conversers grew weary and exasperated.

Death, especially an unnaturally early one, has a way of focusing the mind. Questions flooded Jacob’s.

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.

For centuries, scholars have pondered that question. Some interpret Socrates’s last words darkly. At the time, roosters were offered to the god of healing, Asclepius, so perhaps Socrates was saying life is like a disease we must cure. Or maybe it was Socrates’s way of calling us back down to earth, even as he ascended to heaven. Maybe he was reminding us, as we grapple with life’s big questions, not to forget the small stuff. Don’t overlook your obligations as a citizen and a friend. Be a person of honor. If you owe someone a rooster, give him a rooster. There’s a simpler and less profound possibility: the hemlock had begun to take effect, and an addled Socrates was mumbling gibberish. No one knows for certain, and probably no one ever will.

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.

Much of what we take to be human nature is social habit, Rousseau believes. We’re convinced our love of smoked Brie or Instagram is natural when it is cultural.

Rousseau: his final and unfinished work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker. It is an odd yet endearing volume, “a book that is and is not about walking,” as Rebecca Solnit points out in her history of walking.

The book is arranged in a series of ten walks, or reveries. In each, Rousseau embarks on an outing, but that is merely the vehicle, so to speak, for the real subject of the book: memory. How do we retrieve life’s sweet moments, and do they taste as sweet, or sweeter even, on the second bite?

We humans come from the sea, a fact reflected in the etymology of the word “walk.” In the eleventh century, it meant “to roll about, toss” like the sea. It wasn’t until the thirteenth century that “walking” came ashore, toweled off, and acquired its contemporary meaning. Words evolve.

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.

Rousseau’s legacy is vast. It includes Hallmark cards, Hollywood tearjerkers, heart-shaped emojis, and tell-all memoirs. If you’ve ever said, “I need a good cry,” you can thank Rousseau. If you’ve ever said, “Use your imagination,” you’re being Rousseauvian. If, in the heat of an argument, you’ve actually uttered the words “I don’t care if it makes no sense, it’s how I feel,” Rousseau is your man. If you’ve ever answered heartbreak with a long and angry walk, Rousseau. If your spouse has ever dragged you on a ten-mile trek on a damp, cold day, because “it will be good for you,” you can thank, or curse, Rousseau. Because of him, we think and feel differently, and we think about our feelings differently. If Descartes was the modern era’s philosopher of the head, Rousseau was its philosopher of the heart. He elevated the passions and made feelings acceptable, not on par with reason, but close. This wasn’t easy. During Rousseau’s time, the Age of Reason, imaginative thinking was suspect. Two centuries later, no less a rationalist than Albert Einstein declared that “imagination is more important than knowledge.”

The Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel described the Sabbath as a “sanctuary in time.” Walking is a sanctuary in motion. The peace we experience with each step adheres, and it conveys. Portable serenity. The pain evaporates. With each step, I feel less burdened, more buoyant, as if someone had inflated my shoes. I sense the seriousness of the earth, and its lightness, too. Step. Step.

When it comes to the senses, philosophers are, as usual, divided. One school, known as the Rationalists, mistrusts the senses. Only our intellect, and the innate knowledge it contains, can lead us out of the cave and into the light. The Rationalist Descartes famously said Cogito, ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.” Another school, the Empiricists, believe our senses can indeed be trusted, and it is only through them that we come to know the world. Thoreau refused to get twisted in such epistemological knots. Trustworthy or not, our senses are all we’ve got, he argued, so why not use them as best as we can? His was an outside-in philosophy.

Thoreau is considered a Transcendentalist, a member of a philosophical movement that can be summed up in four words: faith in things unseen. Thoreau, though, possessed an even stronger faith in things seen. He was less interested in the nature of reality than the reality of nature. Was there more to the world than meets the eye? Probably, but what does meet the eye is plenty miraculous, so let’s start there. Thoreau valued vision even more than knowledge. Knowledge is always tentative, imperfect. Today’s certainty is tomorrow’s nonsense. “Who can say what is? He can only say how he sees.”

“Reality is fabulous.”