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

by Eric Weiner

We don’t want what we think we want. We think we want information and knowledge. We do not. We want wisdom. There’s a difference. Information is a jumble of facts, knowledge a more organized jumble. Wisdom untangles the facts, makes sense of them, and, crucially, suggests how best to use them.

the British musician Miles Kington said: “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” Knowledge knows. Wisdom sees.

Knowledge is something you possess. Wisdom is something you do. It is a skill and, like all skills, one you can learn. But it requires effort. Expecting to acquire wisdom by luck is like expecting to learn to play the violin by luck.

We mistake the urgent for the important, the verbose for the thoughtful, the popular for the good. We are, as one contemporary philosopher puts it, “misliving.”

You can love something you don’t possess, and never will. It is the pursuit that matters.

It was not the meaning of life that interested them but leading meaningful lives.

We always need wisdom, but we need different kinds of wisdom at different stages of our lives. The “how to” questions that matter to a fifteen-year-old are not the ones that matter to a thirty-five-year-old—or a seventy-five-year-old. Philosophy has something vital to say about each stage.

Our demons do not haunt us at nighttime. They strike in the morning. We are at our most vulnerable when we wake, for that is when the memory of who we are, and how we got here, returns.

“Duty” not “obligation.” There is a difference. 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.

Socrates was all means, no ends. We remember the gadfly of Athens today not for what he knew but how he went about knowing it. He cared more about method than knowledge. Knowledge doesn’t age well. Methods do.

Questions aren’t one-way; they move in (at least) two directions. They seek meaning, and convey it, too.

Questions, not the eyes, are the true windows to the soul. As Voltaire said, the best judge of a person is not the answers they give but the questions they ask.

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.

On some level, I think, we already recognize the cognitive benefits of slowing down. 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.

serious questions are uttered not confidently but clumsily, hesitantly, with all the gangly awkwardness of a teenager.

Solving a problem before you experience it is like trying to cook a meal before buying groceries.

Ridicule is the price of wisdom.

just sat there, stunned, as if a torpedo fish had stung my brain. A good question does that. It grabs hold of you and won’t let go. A good question reframes the problem so that you see it in an entirely new light. A good question prompts not only a search for answers but a reevaluation of the search itself. A good question elicits not a clever reply but no reply at all.

Happiness is a by-product, never an objective. It’s an unexpected windfall from a life lived well.

Walking supplies just the right balance of stimulation and repose, exertion and idleness.

Walking is not a sport. The phrase “competitive walking” makes about as much sense as “competitive meditation.”

Places are special to the extent we make them so.

For Thoreau, seeing and feeling were intertwined. He couldn’t see something if he didn’t feel it. How he felt determined not only how he saw but what he saw. For him, seeing was not only emotive but also interactive.

“I begin to see objects only when I leave off understanding them,” says Thoreau.

Not only does who we are determine what we see but what we see determines who we are.

Glancing is our natural state. Our eyes are rarely still, even when we think they are. They make rapid jumps, called saccades, pausing briefly in between. Our eyes typically move at least three times per second: roughly 100,000 times per day.

Making assumptions in your native tongue is ill-advised. Making assumptions in a foreign language you do not speak is just stupid.

A waiter brings her a coffee—clearly, on the house. She expresses gratitude effusively. Gratitude is a universal language, one expressed with the eyes, the entire body, more than with words.

We experience the world as separateness but, Schopenhauer believed, echoing Eastern mystics, this perception is an illusion. The world is one. When we help another person, we help ourselves. We feel the pain of others the way we feel the pain in our finger. Not as something foreign, but as part of us.

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.

When creating, or appreciating, a work of art, we lose the sense of separateness that Schopenhauer, as well as the Buddha, says lies at the root of all suffering. Art, says Schopenhauer, “takes away the mist.” The illusion of individuality dissolves and “thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception.”

Art—good art—is not an expression of emotion, Schopenhauer believed. The artist is not conveying a sentiment but, rather, a form of knowledge. A window into the true nature of reality. It is a knowledge beyond “mere concepts,” and therefore beyond words.

Good art also transcends the passions. Anything that increases desire increases suffering. Anything that reduces desire—reduces willing, as Schopenhauer puts it—alleviates suffering. When we behold a work of art, we are not craving anything. This is why pornography is not art. It is the exact opposite of art. Pornography’s sole purpose is to stir desire. If it fails to do so, it’s considered a failure. Art aims for something higher.

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.

Sadness by itself isn’t painful. It is sadness about something that hurts. This is why we enjoy watching a tearjerker or listening to a Leonard Cohen song. Less invested in the drama, we experience the emotion itself, unmoored, and can appreciate the beauty in sadness.

Every fetish suggests an equal and opposite revulsion, and every passion a complementary annoyance.

For Schopenhauer, noise was more than an annoyance. It was a barometer of character. One’s tolerance for noise, he believed, is inversely proportional to his intelligence. “Therefore, when I hear dogs barking unchecked for hours in the courtyard of a house, I know what to think of the inhabitants.”

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

Examining the sickly body politic of Athens, Epicurus posited a simple diagnosis: we fear what is not harmful and desire what is not necessary.

“Not what we have but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance,” he says, noting that, with the right mind-set, even a small pot of cheese can convert a simple meal into a lavish feast.

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.

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.

As odd as it may sound, we can reason our way to pleasure, Epicurus taught. If we are unhappy, it is not because we are lazy or flawed. We have simply miscalculated. We have failed to deploy prudence, “sober reasoning,” when appraising pleasure and pain.

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

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.

Impatience is a greediness for the future. Patience is a generous attitude toward time.

“The highest ecstasy,” said Weil, “is the attention at its fullest.”

Weil’s radical empathy helps explain her radical views on attention. She didn’t see it as a mechanism, or a technique. For her, attention was a moral virtue, no different from, say, courage or justice, and demanding the same selfless motivation. Don’t pay attention to be more productive, a better worker or parent. Pay attention because it is the morally correct course of action, the right thing to do.