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

by Eric Weiner

Schopenhauer.

“On Authorship,”

“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.”

This, I realize, is what Schopenhauer saw in music: not a respite from the world but an immersion in another, richer one.

We travel to escape the tyranny of habit. We humans, though, are lost without structure and, after two days on board Amtrak, I’m craving just that.

Nothing says structure like food. Meals are the girders that hold the day upright. Without them, time collapses onto itself and gravity increases exponentially, like in a black hole. This is a scientific fact.

Political bonds, Epicurus thought, reduced your self-sufficiency, and amounted to outsourcing your happiness. His motto was Lathe Biosas. “Live in obscurity.” Such reclusiveness was as controversial then as it is today. Those who withdraw from the world are always suspect. We mock the recluse to the extent we feel threatened by him.

“Let nothing be done in your life, which will cause you fear if it becomes known to your neighbor,” said Epicurus.

Epicurus,

“I do not know how I shall conceive of the good if I take away the pleasure of taste, if I take away sexual pleasure, if I take away the pleasure of hearing, and if I take away the sweet emotions that are caused by the sight of a beautiful form.”

Epicurus defined pleasure as a lack, an absence. The Greeks called this state ataraxia, literally “lack of disturbance.” It is the absence of anxiety rather than the presence of anything that leads to contentment. Pleasure is not the opposite of pain but its absence. Epicurus was no hedonist. He was a “tranquillist.”

Epicurus.

“Not what we have but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance,”

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. Yet our entire consumer culture is predicated on the assumption that pleasure varied equals pleasure increased. This faulty equation causes needless suffering.

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.

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.

Epicureanism, with its ethos of principled pleasure, threatened other schools of philosophy, and especially a popular new religion: Christianity. Eventually, the Church prevailed. For many centuries, Epicureanism all but disappeared.

We acclimate to new pleasures, rendering them neither new nor quite as pleasurable.

Not only is the perfect the enemy of the good but the good is the enemy of the good enough. Follow the creed of good enough for long enough and something remarkable happens. The “enough” drops away, like a snake sloughing its skin, and what remains is simply the Good.

the Pleasure Paradox. Happiness contemplated is happiness lost.

Ferris Bueller, on his day off, echoed Seneca: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Speed breeds impatience. Our capacity for waiting diminishes in inverse proportion to the velocity of life. Why is the Internet connection so slow? Where is my pizza already? Impatience is a greediness for the future. Patience is a generous attitude toward time.

“For the moment, what we attend to is reality,” said the American philosopher William James.

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.

It doesn’t take much, says Weil. A simple five-word question can soften a heart, and change a life: “What are you going through?” These words are so powerful, says Weil, because they recognize the sufferer, “not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.”

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

Wittgenstein said the only place where one can tackle philosophical problems is the railway station.

Concentration constricts. Attention expands. Concentration tires. Attention rejuvenates. Concentration is focused thinking. Attention is thinking suspended.

Weil,

“We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”

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.

Patience, though, doesn’t strike us as a lot of fun. The English “patience” comes from the Latin patiens, for suffering, endurance, forbearance. The Hebrew savlanut is a bit cheerier. It means both patience and tolerance. Tolerance for what? For suffering, yes, but also tolerance for the rejected parts of our selves. People impatient with others are rarely patient with themselves.

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.”

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.

Simone Weil’s words. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”

Gandhi

“Is the world any the better for quick instruments of locomotion?” he asked. “How do these instruments advance man’s spiritual progress? Do they not in the last resort hamper it?”

“Real beauty,” he said, “is doing good against evil.” All violence represents a failure of imagination. Nonviolence demands creativity.

Gandhi was not results-oriented. He was process-oriented. He aimed not for Indian independence but for an India worthy of independence. Once this occurred, her freedom would arrive naturally, like a ripe mango falling from a tree.

Gandhi eventually settled on a new name for his new type of nonviolent resistance: satyagraha. Satya is Sanskrit for “truth”; agraha means “firmness” or “holding firmly.” Truth Force (or “Soul Force,” as it is sometimes translated).

Any victory earned through violent means is illusory; it only postpones the arrival of the next bloody chapter.

Gandhi never saw nonviolence as a tactic, “a garment to be put on and off at will.” It is a principle, a law as inviolable as the law of gravity.

Maybe Gandhi’s law of love is less like gravity and more like a rainbow: a natural phenomenon that only manifests sometimes, under certain circumstance, but when it does, there’s nothing more beautiful.

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. Clichéd responses all.

Gandhi was not passive-aggressive. He was aggressive-passive. His actions appeared aggressive, or at least assertive, yet scratch beneath the surface and you found no animus. Only love.

In his autobiography, Gandhi recalls the time he wrote a note to his father, confessing to stealing and cigarette smoking and meat eating. Hand trembling, Gandhi handed his father the slip of paper. The elder Gandhi sat up to read the note and, as he did, “pearl-drops trickled down his cheeks, wetting the paper,” recalls Gandhi. “Those pearl-drops of love cleansed my heart, and washed my sin away. Only he who has experienced such love can know what it is.”

“Do not lose your temper with anybody, not even with yourself.”

Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution.

What did Epicurus say? Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

Words mattered to Confucius, but no word mattered more than ren. It appears 105 times in The Analects, far more than any other word. There’s no direct translation (Confucius himself never explicitly defines it), but ren has been variously rendered as compassion, altruism, love, benevolence, true goodness, consummate action. My favorite is “human-heartedness.” A person of ren regularly practices five cardinal virtues: respect, magnanimity, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.