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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Eric Weiner
Read between
April 27 - May 30, 2022
British musician Miles Kington said: “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”
The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called philosophy “radical reflection.”
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.
great ideas don’t dusk on us. They dawn on us.
Should I get out of bed? This question, I believe, is the one truly serious philosophical problem.
Marcus never lost sight of the Stoic precept that all philosophy begins with an awareness of our weakness.
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.
The Heart of Philosophy, by Jacob Needleman. I say odd because at the time I didn’t know philosophy had a heart. I thought it was all head. Here is the sentence: “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.
Athenians, it seemed to Socrates, worked tirelessly to improve everything—except themselves. That needed to change, he thought, and he made it his life’s mission to do so.
Cicero said, “Socrates was the first to call Philosophy down from the heavens, and establish it in the towns, and introduce her into people’s homes.”
Knowledge doesn’t age well. Methods do.
What is love? Why does evil exist? When we ask these questions, it is not information we desire but something larger: meaning.
As Voltaire said, the best judge of a person is not the answers they give but the questions they ask.
Good philosophy is slow philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein called his profession the “slow cure” and suggested all philosophers greet one another with “Take your time!” I think that’s a fine idea, not only for philosophers but all of us.
Now, whenever I’m striving to achieve something, anything, I stop and ask: What does success look like? To be honest, I haven’t answered that question, and may never do so.
Socrates;
“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,” he said.
They were not the philosopher’s last words. Plato, in a dialogue called Phaedo, tells us what transpired during Socrates’s final minutes.
John Ruskin,
“All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.”
Leo Damrosch in his excellent biography of Rousseau.
“There is more wisdom in your body than in all of your philosophy,” said Nietzsche.
The Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel described the Sabbath as a “sanctuary in time.” Walking is a sanctuary in motion.
Doubt is essential. It is the vehicle that transports us from one certainty to another.
I tell Leslie about my practical approach to philosophy, and ask what “how-to” question she thinks Thoreau addresses. I’m expecting the usual “How to live alone” or “How to live simply.” “How to see,” she says, without hesitation. “How to see?”
“We must look for a long time before we can see,” he said.
Walden: “Reality is fabulous.”
Indian text, the Vedas: “All intelligences awake with the morning.”
“I begin to see objects only when I leave off understanding them,” says Thoreau.
Better to see beauty than understand it.
from Walden, are perhaps Thoreau’s most famous: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
We can’t improve our vision without improving ourselves.
Vedas say, “What you see, you become.”
French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote of the need to make ourselves “susceptible to knowing.”
“If I am not I, who will be?”
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.
In the philosophical sense, an Idealist is not someone with high ideals. It is someone who believes that everything we experience is a mental representation of the world, not the world itself. Physical objects only exist when we perceive them. The world is my idea.
Idealists don’t believe only our minds exist (that is known as solipsism). The world exists, they say, but as a mental construct, and only when we perceive it. To use a different analogy, think of your refrigerator light. Whenever you open the door, it’s on. You might conclude that it is always on, but that would be a mistake. You don’t know what happens when the door closes. Likewise, we don’t know what exists beyond our mind’s capacities of perception.
It’s difficult to distinguish a sullen German from a happy German. There are, I’m sure, subtle changes in facial muscles and ocular motion, but these lie beyond the ken of an outsider like me.
the only fate worse than being criticized is being ignored.
Schopenhauer enlists another animal—the porcupine—to explain human relations. Imagine a group of porcupines huddled on a cold winter’s day. They stand close to one another, absorbing their neighbor’s body heat, lest they freeze to death. Should they stand too close, though, they’re pricked by a needle. “Tossed between two evils,” says Schopenhauer, the animals approach and retreat, again and again, until they discover “the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another.” The Porcupine’s Dilemma, as it’s now known, is our dilemma, too. We need others to survive, but others can
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Music, Schopenhauer once said, would exist even if the world did not.
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.
joy
Good philosophers are good listeners. They listen to many voices, no matter how strange, for you never know where wisdom might be hiding.
Schopenhauer
“the sexual organs are the true center of the world.”
We all have a little Schopenhauer inside us. We’re all wounded. Only the size and shape of the wounds differ.
