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

by Eric Weiner

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” Knowledge knows. Wisdom sees.

The difference between knowledge and wisdom is one of kind, not degree. 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 l...

We mistake the urgent for the important, the verbose for the thoughtful, the popular for the good. We are, as one contemporary philosopher puts it, “misliving.”

“Philosopher,” from the Greek philosophos, means “lover of wisdom.” The definition says nothing about possessing wisdom any more than the Declaration of Independence says anything about obtaining happiness. You can love something you don’t possess, and never will. It is the pursuit that matters.

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.”

Philosophy, unlike science, is proscriptive. It not only describes the world as it is but as it could be, opening our eyes to possibility.

It was not the meaning of life that interested them but leading meaningful lives.

“Sooner or later, life makes philosophers of us all,” said the French thinker Maurice Riseling. I read that and think, “Why wait?” Why wait until life becomes a problem for me? Why not let life make a philosopher of me today, right now, while there is still time?

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?

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.

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

The child’s questions irk us not because they are silly but because we are incapable of answering them adequately. The child, like Socrates, unmasks our ignorance, and while that may be beneficial in the long run, in the short run it’s annoying. “If you do not annoy anyone, you are not a philosopher,” says Peter Kreeft.

Happiness is a by-product, never an objective. It’s an unexpected windfall from a life lived well.

Should you find yourself walking behind me, don’t. I am not an easy man to follow.

There are no disembodied philosophers, or philosophies. “There is more wisdom in your body than in all of your philosophy,” said Nietzsche.

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.

I’ve learned anything from my philosophical investigations, it’s that first impressions are often wrong. Doubt is essential. It is the vehicle that transports us from one certainty to another. Slowly, making all local stops.

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.”

“Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse—until at last the worst of all arrives,” he writes.

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.

The Porcupine’s Dilemma, as it’s now known, is our dilemma, too. We need others to survive, but others can hurt us. Relationships demand constant course corrections, and even the most skilled navigators get pricked now and then.

I love that phrase. The world needs more philosophical enthusiasts. Not students of philosophy, and God knows not experts, but enthusiasts, with all of the unabashed gusto the word implies.

Gardens require tending. So do our thoughts. Someone who thinks is not a philosopher any more than someone who putters about in his backyard is a gardener. Both pursuits—gardening and philosophy—require an adult’s disciplined commitment combined with a child’s easy joy.

Beyond a certain point, Epicurus believed, pleasure cannot be increased—just as a bright sky cannot get any brighter—but only varied. That new pair of shoes or smart watch represents pleasure varied, not increased.

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.

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.

Patience is a virtue. It is also good for you, as the latest research shows. Patient people are happier and healthier than impatient ones, studies find. Patient people are more likely to act rationally. They have better coping skills.

astonishing and presupposes an extraordinary act of will,”

Gandhi firmly believed the means matter more than the ends. Not whether you win or lose but how you fight. Not where you go but how you get there.

It is not enough to reject violence, Gandhi thought. We must find creative ways to convert our adversaries into friends. Most violence stems not from an immoral impulse but a failure of imagination. A violent person is a lazy person. Unwilling to do the hard work of problem solving, he throws a punch, or reaches for a gun.

three tiny porcelain monkeys, signifying “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

How you fight matters more than what you’re fighting about. I fought well. I recognized an injustice and confronted it.

If human nature is inherently good, why does the world seem so cruel?

Kindness is always there, whether we notice it or not.

Is it possible, I wonder, to act kindly quickly, or does kindness demand slowness? Slow cooking tastes better than fast food and, as we’ve seen, good philosophy takes time, too.

I contemplate the relationship between velocity and kindness. Does kindness decrease as you accelerate? Confucius seems to think so. He describes the benevolent person as “simple in manner and slow of speech.”

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

Do we possess free will or are our lives fated?

Imagine you are visited in the dead of night by a demon, who says to you: “This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence—and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again—and you with it, you dust of dust!

Suffering is inevitable—you don’t need a philosopher to tell you that—but how we suffer, and about what, matters more than we think. Do we experience “essential suffering,” as Nietzsche called it, or something else, something less? Do we merely tolerate suffering or do we value it for its own sake?

Nietzsche was no masochist. He saw suffering as an ingredient in the good life, a means of learning. “Only suffering leads to knowledge,”

We’re all Sisyphus, the poor slob from Greek mythology condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, for all eternity.

Can you accept that endless failure? asks Nietzsche. More than that, can you embrace it? Can you love it?

There’s a reason Groundhog Day is a comedy. If we do live the selfsame life over and over again in the selfsame way, forever and ever, then what can we do but laugh?

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,”

Stoics are not pessimists. They believe everything happens for a reason, the result of a thoroughly rational order. Unlike grumpy Schopenhauer, they believe we are living in the best of all possible worlds, the only possible world.

Much of life lies beyond our control, but we command what matters most: our opinions, impulses, desires, and aversions. Our mental and emotional life.

Too often we place our happiness in the hands of others: a tyrannical boss, a mercurial friend, our Instagram followers. Epictetus, the former slave, likens our predicament to self-imposed bondage. Only the man or woman who wants nothing is free.