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

by Eric Weiner

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

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.

It is the introduction of this innocent ignorance, this “marvelous new naiveté,” as the philosopher Karl Jaspers puts it, that is Socrates’s greatest contribution to human inquiry, one that still drives the philosophical impulse today.

“Socrates was the first to call Philosophy down from the heavens, and establish it in the towns, and introduce her into people’s homes.”

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.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,”

John Stuart Mill,

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.