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

by Eric Weiner

Expecting to acquire wisdom by luck is like expecting to learn to play the violin by luck.

Most schools today don’t teach philosophy. They teach about philosophies. They don’t teach students how to philosophize. 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.”

Wisdom is portable. It transcends space and time, and is never obsolete.

Feelings, like thoughts, never come out of the blue. There’s always a locomotive pulling them along.

I wonder. Two simple words, yet they contain the seeds of all philosophy, and more. All great discoveries and personal breakthroughs began with those two words: I wonder.

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.

Knowledge doesn’t age well. Methods do.

We often conflate wonder with curiosity. Yes, both provide helpful antidotes to apathy, but in different ways. Wonder is personal in a way curiosity is not. You can be curious dispassionately. You can question dispassionately. You cannot wonder dispassionately. Curiosity is restive, always threatening to chase the next shiny object that pops into view. Not wonder. Wonder lingers. Wonder is curiosity reclined, feet up, drink in hand. Wonder never chased a shiny object. Wonder never killed a cat. Wonder takes time. Like a good meal or good sex, it can’t be rushed.

When something makes us stop and think, we say it “gives us pause.” A pause is not a mistake or a glitch. A pause is not a stutter or an interruption. It is not emptiness but a kind of latent matter. The seed of thought. Every pause is ripe with the possibility of cognition, and of wonder.

Ridicule is the price of wisdom.

The mind thrives at three miles per hour, the speed of a moderately paced walk. Freed of the pettiness of the office, the tyranny of expectations, it roams, and when the mind roams, unexpected and wonderful things happen. Not always, but more often than you’d think. Walking supplies just the right balance of stimulation and repose, exertion and idleness. When we walk, we are simultaneously doing and not-doing. On one level, our minds are engaged: focusing on the terrain ahead, cognizant of the periphery. Yet none of this thinking occupies much cerebral space. There’s plenty left over for meandering, and freak following.

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.

Rousseau, like Socrates, was a kind of antiphilosopher. He had no patience for “empty logic-chopping” or “hair splitting metaphysical subtleties.” He was a thinker but not an overthinker. Rousseau knew that his favorite organ, the heart, possessed its own intelligence, one we access not with furrowed brow and tight jaw but with loose legs and swinging arms.

Postpone defining what you see and you will see more.

Those depths, Idealists like Immanuel Kant believe, lie beyond sensory perception, but are every bit as real as the unseen lake bed. More real, in fact, than the fleeting sensory phenomena we typically experience. Philosophers have given this unseen reality various names. Kant called it the noumenon. Plato called it the world of Ideal Forms. For Indian philosophers, it is Brahman. Different names but the same idea: a plane of existence that remains unknown to us as we rush to work, binge-watch Netflix, and, in general, go about our business in the world of shadows.

Music reaches us when nothing else can. A ray of light in the darkness. William Styron, in his memoir on depression, Darkness Visible, describes how he was contemplating suicide when he heard a soaring passage from Brahms. “The sound, which like all music—indeed, like all pleasure—I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through the rooms, the festivals, the love and work.” Music is therapy. Listening to music speeds cognitive recovery after a stroke, several studies have found. Patients in minimally conscious, or even vegetative states, showed healthier brain activity when listening to a favorite song.

Good enough doesn’t mean settling. Good enough isn’t a cop-out. Good enough represents an attitude of deep gratitude toward whatever happens at you. 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.

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.

You don’t need to sail the Atlantic or climb Everest to experience flow. You just need to pay attention.

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.

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.” We see this dynamic at work in people eager to hook the Big Idea, one they hope will transform them from mere thinker to Thought Leader. More interested in packaging ideas than pondering them, they release their Big Idea into the world before it has ripened.

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). Yes, this was what Gandhi had in mind. There was nothing passive or squishy about it. It was active, “the greatest and most active force in the world.” The satyagrahi, or nonviolent resister, is even more active than an armed soldier—and more courageous. It takes no great bravery, or intelligence, to pull a trigger, Gandhi said. Only the truly courageous suffer voluntarily, to change a human heart. Gandhi’s soldiers, like soldiers everywhere, were willing to die for their cause. Unlike most soldiers, they were not willing to kill for it.

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.

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.

If Lao-Tzu is the surfer dude of Chinese philosophy, Confucius is its substitute teacher.

The family is our ren gym. It is where we learn to love and be loved.

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. This is one problem with trigger warnings, so prevalent on college campuses. They reinforce the presumption that college students are unable to control their reactions to potentially disturbing content. It disempowers them. It is not the Stoic way.

Old age is what her longtime partner, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, called an “unrealizable.” An unrealizable is a state of being we inhabit but never fully internalize; only others do. We may look old, act old, and, by any objective measure, be old, but we never feel old. We never realize our elderliness. Thus, a dozen years after she collided with her age, Beauvoir notes: “I am sixty-three: and this truth remains foreign to me.”

The problem with the elderly is not that they act too young but that they don’t act young enough. They act like twenty-seven-year-olds when they should be emulating seven-year-olds. Old age is a time to reconnect with curiosity or, better yet, wonder.

We need habits. Without them, our lives threaten to splinter into a million meaningless pieces. Habits tether us to this world, to our world. Habits are useful, provided we recall why we formed them and continually question their value to us. We must own the habit, and not the other way around.

Think of a single life as a river. At first, it’s narrowly contained within its banks, rushing past boulders, under bridges, over waterfalls. “Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.” This, I think, is the final task of old age: not a narrowing of our waters but a widening. Not raging against the dying of the light but trusting that the light lives in others. The wisdom of kairos. Everything has its time. Even this.