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

by Eric Weiner

Kant: “Dare to think for yourself!”

The Analects

The opening line of The Analects sings the praises of studying. “Isn’t it a pleasure to study and practice what you have learned?”

Kindness honored is kindness multiplied. Kindness is contagious. Witnessing acts of moral beauty triggers a flood of physical and emotional responses. Observing acts of kindness encourages us to act more kindly ourselves, a phenomenon confirmed in several recent studies.

“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty,” wrote Yoshida Kenkō, a fourteenth-century Buddhist monk.

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,

Realizing something is a choice is the first step toward making better choices.

Classic Nietzsche. “Our first question concerning the value of a book, a man, or a piece of music is: Can it walk? Or still better: Can it dance?”

“I would only believe in a God who knows how to dance,”

“Better to dance ponderously than to walk lamely,” he said,

The philosopher conveys the truth not of the scientist but of the artist or novelist. It is an “as if” approach.

Think of Eternal Recurrence as a daily check-in with yourself: Are you living the life you want to live? Are you sure you want to drink that bottle of tequila and endure an infinite hangover? Eternal Recurrence demands we ruthlessly audit our lives and ask: What is worthy of eternity?

“What does success look like?” I know how Nietzsche would answer: It looks like radical acceptance of your fate. It looks like Sisyphus happy.

Typically, we run from uncertainty and toward certainty. But that, says Nietzsche, is not an immutable fact. It is a value, and anything we value we can revalue.

We can choose to find joy not in certainty but in its opposite. Once we do that, life—the same life from an outsider’s perspective—feels quite different to us. Find joy in uncertainty and the tumult at the office becomes cause for celebration, not teeth gnashing and an extra glass of wine at the end of the day. Find joy in uncertainty, and even illness, while still physically painful, no longer terrifies.

Stoicism is an older person’s philosophy. It is a philosophy for those who have weathered a few battles, suffered a few setbacks, known a few losses. It is a philosophy for life’s rough patches, large and small: pain, illness, rejection, annoying bosses, dry skin, traffic jams, credit card debt, public humiliation, delayed trains, death. Asked what he learned from philosophy, Diogenes, a proto-Stoic, replied: “To be prepared for every fortune.”

“Wisdom” is one of those words everyone knows but nobody defines.

The Berlin Wisdom Project identified five criteria that define wisdom: factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, life-span contextualism, relativism of values, and management of uncertainty.

Stoicism shines. The philosophy’s core teaching—change what you can; accept what you can’t—is appealing in our tumultuous times.

Stoics do not jettison all emotions, only the negative ones: anxiety, fear, jealousy, anger, or any of the other “passions” (or pathe, the closest ancient Greek word to “emotion”).

“Joyful Stoic” is not an oxymoron, says William Irvine, a professor of philosophy at Wright State University and a practicing

“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”

Imagine, says Epictetus, you handed over your body to a stranger on the street. Absurd, right? Yet that’s what we do with our mind every day. We cede our sovereignty to others, allowing them to colonize our mind. We need to evict them. Now.

It’s not so difficult. It is far easier to change ourselves than to change the world.

Epictetus’s Handbook.

“What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about things.”

We stub our toe, then scream. We get stuck in traffic, then curse. This is natural. We are human after all. That initial shock is not an emotion but a reflex, like blushing when you’re embarrassed. It becomes an emotion when you “assent” to it, the Stoics say. When you assent, you elevate its status from reflex to passion.

Forgoing pleasure is one of life’s greatest pleasures.

Don’t accept your fate. Love it. Desire it.

When greeted with the news of the death of a child, the proper response, Stoics say, is: “I was already aware that I had begotten a mortal.”

Here the Stoics lose me. By suppressing our grief, aren’t we suppressing our joy, too? Shouldn’t we open ourselves to the full spectrum of our humanity, including grief?

Old age is a large, immovable object, and closer than it appears. Encounters with it are never gentle. You do not brush up against old age. You do not sideswipe old age. You collide with it head-on.

I am not a man of a certain age but an uncertain one. Older yet not old. What to call this awkward interval? “Late middle age” is not ideal, owing to the word “late,” but is far preferable to “early old age,” owing to the word “old.”

Old age does not produce new personality traits so much as it amplifies existing ones. As we age, we become more intensely ourselves. Usually, not in a good way.

Philosophy doesn’t teach us what to think but how to think, and we need a new way of thinking about old age. The truth is we don’t really think about growing old. We think about staying young. We don’t have a culture of aging. We have a youth culture to which an aging cohort desperately clings. Old age is not a disease. It is not a pathology. It is not abnormal. It is not a problem. Old age is a continuum, and everyone is on it. We’re all aging all the time.

Our children are like those rings arborists use to date trees. Empirical evidence of years passing. They grow, and change, and we know we are changing, too, even if it’s less obvious. As an older father, the rings matter more. I sense their concentric accumulation more acutely than most.

Beauvoir warns, our projects are forever bumping into other people’s. Our freedom is intertwined with theirs. We are only as free as they are.

Cicero.

“On Old Age.”

“Everyone hopes to reach old age, but when it comes, most of us...

Beauvoir.

The Coming of Age,

A limited future and a frozen past: such is the situation that the elderly have to face up to. In many instances, it paralyzes them. All their plans have been carried out or abandoned, and their life has closed about itself; nothing requires their presence; they no longer have anything whatsoever to do.

Just because older people might slip into despair doesn’t mean they must. They have choices, something you’d think an existentialist like Beauvoir would recognize.

“I don’t recognize my own experience at all, nor that of my friends of similar age,” Nussbaum writes in her own book on aging.

As we age, the balance shifts, from control to acceptance. Acceptance is not the same as resignation. Resignation is resistance masquerading as acceptance. Pretending to accept something is like pretending to love someone.

1: Own Your Past

2: Make Friends

Friends matter when you’re young. They matter more when you’re old.

3: Stop Caring What Others Think