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

by Eric Weiner

That’s unfair, I know. They have as much a right to be here as I do. It’s like traffic. When we’re stuck in it, we gripe about “all this traffic,” ignoring the fact that we’re part of the traffic, part of the problem.

The Quotable Thoreau). “If I am not I, who will be?” I want to be I, really I do, but a better, less melancholy I. A Thoreauvian I, with Thoreauvian eyes. I want to learn how to see and where. For me, a place person, the two are inseparable. How is where. Where is how.

Henry David Thoreau. Seeing requires not only time but distance, he tells me. “You cannot see anything until you are clear of it.”

What if all of life is like this? What if the world is an illusion? Some 2,400 years ago Plato posed just such a question.

The other arts speak of mere shadows, says Schopenhauer. Music speaks of the essence, the thing-in-itself, and so “expresses the innermost nature of all life and existence.” An image of heaven, even a secularized version, may or may not include paintings and statues. We take it as granted that there will be music. While language is man-made, music exists independent of human thought, like gravity or thunderstorms. If a trumpet blares in a forest and there is no one to hear it, it still blares. Music, Schopenhauer once said, would exist even if the world did not. Music is personal in a way the other arts are not. You may not have a favorite painting, but you probably have a favorite song. My thirteen-year-old daughter is experimenting with different musical genres, discovering what she likes and what she doesn’t. She isn’t forming her “musical identity.” She is forming her identity. Period. 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 reaches us when nothing else can. A ray of light in the darkness. William Styron, in his memoir on depression, Darkness Visible, describes how he was contemplating suicide when he heard a soaring passage from Brahms. “The sound, which like all music—indeed, like all pleasure—I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed th...

Christian mystic would say we maintain a “holy indifference” toward it. The idea is the same. True listening demands we postpone judgment. When we listen like this, hearing without judging, says Schopenhauer, we “feel positively happy.”

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

While other philosophers attempted to explain the world out there, Schopenhauer was more concerned with our inner world. We can’t know the world if we don’t know ourselves. This fact strikes me as incredibly obvious. Why do so many philosophers—otherwise intelligent folk—miss it? Partly, I think, it’s because it’s easier to examine the external. We’re like the proverbial drunk looking for his keys in a lighted alleyway.

In his essay “On Authorship,” the philosopher foreshadows the mind-numbing clamor that is social media, where the sound of the true is drowned out by the noise of the new. “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 make this mistake every time we click mindlessly, like a lab rat pulling a lever, hoping for a reward. What form this reward will take we don’t know, but that is beside the point. Like Schopenhauer’s hungry readers, we confuse the new with the good, the novel with the valuable.

Some psychologists take exception with Epicurus’s focus almost exclusively on pain relief. “Happiness is definitely something other than the mere absence of all pain,” sniffs the Journal of Happiness Studies. Before reading Epicurus, I would have agreed. Now I’m not so sure. If I’m honest with myself, I recognize that what I crave most is not fame or wealth but peace of mind, the “pure pleasure of existing.” It’s nearly impossible to describe such a state in terms other than that of absence.

They knew that luxury is best enjoyed intermittently, and welcomed whatever goodness came their way. Epicureanism is a philosophy of acceptance, and its close cousin, gratitude. When we accept something, truly accept it, we can’t help but feel gratitude.

Rob’s attitude is pure Epicurus. If goodness comes your way, enjoy it. Don’t seek it. Good things come to those who don’t expect good things to come to them. Rob doesn’t expend energy hunting for these baubles. They simply happen at him. When they do, he is grateful.

All pleasures are good, and all pain bad, explains Tom, but that doesn’t mean we should always choose pleasure over pain. Certain pleasures might lead to future pain and thus should be avoided. The pain of lung cancer outweighs the pleasure of smoking. Likewise, certain pains lead to future pleasure and thus should be endured. The pain of the gym, for instance.

we can reason our way to pleasure, Epicurus taught. If we are unhappy, it is not because we are lazy or flawed. We have simply miscalculated. We have failed to deploy prudence, “sober reasoning,” when appraising pleasure and pain. Tom is constantly doing the math, “checking his pleasure,” as he puts it. Does the benefit of a given pleasure outweigh the pain exacted?

Yet something continues to nag: ataraxia, the lack of mental disturbance that Epicurus considered the highest good. It seems like such a passive form of pleasure. What is wrong with actively satisfying desires? I ask Tom.

“Yes. I would say good enough is good enough. It leaves you time for the more important parts of life. Besides, nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little,” says Tom, channeling Epicurus. I stop mid-sip. How much is enough? I’ve rarely stopped to ask that question. I’ve always assumed the answer is “more than I have now.” It turns out that “more” is a moving target. Psychologists call it the “hedonic treadmill.” This quirk of human nature explains why that third crème brûlée never tastes as good as the first or second. It explains why the new car that thrilled us on the test drive bores us after a month on the road. We acclimate to new pleasures, rendering them neither new nor quite as pleasurable.

While she excelled at school, she never valued knowledge for its own sake. “The only serious aim of schoolwork is to train the attention,” she said. That single word—attention—would come to possess her. It was the thread that held her sprawling philosophy, and her life, together.

The ability to pay attention is, along with the ability to walk upright and open pickle jars, what makes us human. Every brilliant scientific discovery, every great work of art, every kind gesture, traces its source to a moment of pure, selfless attention. Attention matters. More than anything else, it shapes our lives. “For the moment, what we attend to is reality,” said the American philosopher William James. Something only exists for us if we attend to it. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact. As many studies reveal, we do not see that to which we don’t pay attention. The quality of our attention determines the quality of our lives. You are what you choose to pay attention to and, crucially, how you pay attention. Looking back at your life, which memories bubble to the surface? Maybe it’s something big, like your wedding day, or maybe something small, that unexpectedly kind exchange with the person standing behind you on the ridiculously long post office line. Chances are, though, it’s moments when you were most attentive. Our lives are no less and no more than the sum of our most rapt moments. “The highest ecstasy,” said Weil, “is the attention at its fullest.”

During these rare moments, we enter a state of mind—a state of being—that Weil calls “extreme attention” and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” When in a state of flow, you shed any semblance of self-consciousness, and experience an altered perception of time and a heightened sense of reality. Everything seems more real than real. Unlike so much in life, flow is “a condition so rewarding as to be sought out for its own sake,” says Csikszentmihalyi. People immersed in flow are not self-absorbed, for there is no self to be absorbed. No musician, only music. No dancer, only dancing. Here is how an avid sailor describes being in flow. “One forgets oneself, one forgets everything, seeing only the play of the boat with the sea, the...

Nonsense, said William James, wading into the chaos. “Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” James, predicting the hazards of multitasking, warned that attention demands not only focusing on some aspects of reality but ignoring others.

Our current conception of attention dates to 1958. That’s when a British psychologist named Donald Broadbent posited the “filter model” of attention (also known as the “bottleneck model”). The world floods our senses with data, like a fire hose. Our brain’s ability to process this data is limited, so it deploys attention as a means to prioritize all that information, to control the fire hose. It’s a compelling theory, one that intuitively seems to make sense. Attention, we assume, is like a bank account we draw down, or a hard drive with limited capacity. We’ve all experienced that sensation of being overwhelmed by too much information. So much bombards us that nothing sticks. Several studies have found we routinely overestimate our ability to multitask.

Weil’s radical empathy helps explain her radical views on attention. She didn’t see it as a mechanism, or a technique. For her, attention was a moral virtue, no different from, say, courage or justice, and demanding the same selfless motivation. Don’t pay attention to be more productive, a better worker or parent. Pay attention because it is the morally correct course of action, the right thing to do. There’s a name for attention at its most intense and generous: love. Attention is love. Love is attention. They are one and the same. “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention,” writes Weil. Only when we give someone our attention, fully and with no expectation of reward, are we engaged in this “rarest and purest form of generosity.” This is why the attention denied by a parent or lover stings the most. We recognize the withdrawal of attention for what it is: a withdrawal of love. In the end, our attention is all we have to give. The rest—money, praise, advice—are poor substitutes. So, too, is time. Giving someone your time but not your attention is the cruelest fraud of all. Children know this instinctively. They can smell bogus attention a mile away. Pure attention is not easy, Weil concedes: “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” Our first impulse when confronted with suffering is to turn away. We make excuses. We...

True attention entails not merely noticing the Other but acknowledging him, honoring him.

An intellectual impatience, born from insecurity, that grasps at ideas, even bad ones, the way a drowning man will grasp even a sword. All our mistakes, says Weil, “are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily, and being prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth.”

We see this dynamic at work in people eager to hook the Big Idea, one they hope will transform them from mere thinker to Thought Leader. More interested in packaging ideas than pondering them, they release their Big Idea into the world before it has ripened. These aspiring Thought Leaders don’t want to do the hard work attention demands. Attention is hard not the way judo or archery is hard. It’s hard the way meditation,

Attention is not a skill we acquire, like knitting or fencing. It is a state of mind, an orientation. We don’t so much learn attention as turn toward it. This pivot only happens when we pause, like Socrates, and get out of our own head. “Decreation,” Weil calls it. I prefer Iris Murdoch’s term: “unselfing.” The British novelist and philosopher describes one such moment of unselfing.

All inattention is a form of selfishness. We’ve decided that whatever is happening in our heads is more interesting, more important, than what is happening in the rest of the universe. That’s why narcissists are so inattentive. Their attention is bottled up, stagnant. Attention is our lifeblood. It needs to circulate. To hoard attention is to kill it.

Gandhi’s paintbrush was his resolve, his canvas the human heart. “Real beauty,” he said, “is doing good against evil.” All violence represents a failure of imagination. Nonviolence demands creativity. Gandhi was always searching for new, innovative ways to fight.

How you fight matters more than what you’re fighting about. I fought well. I recognized an injustice and confronted it. I battled creatively and cleanly against a recalcitrant adversary: Indian Railways. I did not resort to violence, however much tempted to do so. True, the results were not what I wanted, but it is the wanting not the results that lies at the root of my suffering. Besides, there will be other fights. There always are.

said. Words mattered to Confucius, but no word mattered more than ren.

A person of ren regularly practices five cardinal virtues: respect, magnanimity, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness. Confucius didn’t invent kindness, of course, but he did elevate it: from an indulgence to a philosophical linchpin, and the basis for good governance. He was the first philosopher to place kindness, and love, at the top of the pyramid. “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire,” said Confucius, articulating the Golden Rule some five hundred years before Jesus. For Confucius, kindness is not squishy. It is not weak. Kindness is practical. Extend kindness to all, says one Confucian, “and you can turn the whole world in the palm of your hand.”

The family is our ren gym. It is where we learn to love and be loved. Proximity matters. Start by treating those closest to you kindly, and go from there. Like a stone tossed into a pond, kindness ripples outward in ever-widening circles, as we expand our sphere of concern from ourselves to our family to our neighborhood to our nation to all sentient beings. If we can feel compassion for one creature, we can feel it for all of them. Too often, though, we fail to make the leap from familial kindness to a broader benevolence. Too often parenting remains “an island of kindness in a sea of cruelty,” as two contemporary authors put it. We need to escape the island or, better yet, enlarge it and invite others to join us.

“The burden is heavy and the road is long,” Confucius said. Kindness is hard. Everything worthwhile is.

They would find our soulless, scent-free missives not only aesthetically wanting but ethically suspect. Immoral. In Japan beauty was—and to an extent still is—considered a moral virtue. A morally upstanding person is an aesthetically attuned one. Beauty is an essential ingredient not only for the good life but the good person, too. Making the world a bit more beautiful is a generous, selfless act. It is ethical behavior, no different from the courage of a brave soldier or the compassion of a wise judge or, as Simone Weil believed, the loving heart of an attentive person.

Implicit in Shōnagon’s philosophy is this: Who we are is largely shaped by what we choose to surround ourselves with. And it is a choice. Philosophy reveals the hidden choices we make. Realizing something is a choice is the first step toward making better choices. As the German writer Hermann Hesse said: “The man who for the first time picks a small flower so that he can have it near him while he works has taken a step toward joy in life.” I am sitting at a desk in Vermont,

“I met everyone I needed to meet when I needed to meet them.” That is a wise observation, one accessible only to someone who has lived awhile.

Medical technology comforts us by numbing us and numbs us by distracting us. As long as the machines beep and the screens flash, all is well. Montaigne would not approve. It’s not the palliative care that would distress him but the denial. Technology distances us from the reality of death, which is nothing more and nothing less than nature. Since we are part of nature, we are only distancing ourselves from ourselves. Fleeing ourselves. One beep at a time. He’d look at the flashing monitors and the pinging cardiograph and the metered IV drips and see clear as day what was missing from the room: acceptance. The remedy for death is not more life—any more than the remedy for despair is hope. Both states call for the same medicine: acceptance. That is where Montaigne, like Beauvoir, ends up. Not a half-hearted acceptance but a full and generous one. Acceptance of death, yes, but of life, too, and of himself. Acceptance of his positive traits (“To say less of yourself than is true is stupidity, not modesty”) and acceptance of his flaws as well. Like idleness. Montaigne often chastised himself for wasting time. Eventually he realized how silly that was. “We are great fools, ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say; ‘I have done nothing today.’ What, have you not lived?”

Illness is nature’s way of preparing us for death, easing us into it. Just as a tooth falls out, painlessly, so, too, do we slip away from ourselves. To go from healthy to dead is too much for us to bear, but “the leap is not so cruel from a painful life to no life,” he says. Montaigne is suggesting a radically different version of the “good death.” We consider a good death one that follows a brief illness, or no illness at all. No, says Montaigne. Too big a leap. Better to slip away gradually than fall suddenly.

Simone de Beauvoir plays with that question in her novel All Men Are Mortal. The protagonist is an Italian nobleman named Raymond Fosca. He is immortal, thanks to a potion he drank back in the fourteenth century. At first he considers immortality an incredible blessing, and strives to put it to good use. He wants to improve the lives of his people. Yet he comes to view his immortality as a curse. Everyone he loves dies. He is bored. (Even his dreams are boring.) He lacks generosity since, as an immortal, he has nothing to sacrifice. His life lacks urgency, and vitality. We may fear death, but the alternative, immortality, is far worse.

An awareness of death enables us to live more fully. The ancient Egyptians knew this. In the midst of feasts, they carted in skeletons to remind guests of their fate. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew this. “Persuade yourself that each new day that dawns will be your last,” says the poet Horace, “then you will receive each unexpected hour with gratitude.”

Driving our dread of death is not only fear but greed. We want more days, more years, and when, against all odds, we receive those, we want more still. Why? wondered Montaigne. If you have lived one day, you have lived them all. “There is no other light, no other night. This sun, this moon, these stars, the way they are arranged, all of these are the very same your ancestors enjoyed and will entertain your grandchildren.” When my time comes, I hope I can hold on to Montaigne’s words.