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

by Eric Weiner

There’s a name for attention at its most intense and generous: love.

Only when we give someone our attention, fully and with no expectation of reward, are we engaged in this “rarest and purest form of generosity.” This is why the attention denied by a parent or lover stings the most.

In the end, our attention is all we have to give. The rest—money, praise, advice—are poor substitutes. So, too, is time. Giving someone your time but not your attention is the cruelest fraud of all. Children know this instinctively. They can smell bogus attention a mile away.

Genuine attention, she believed, is a kind of waiting. For Weil, the two are virtually the same. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.” The opposite of attention is not distraction but impatience.

A surefire way to increase your fondness for something, anything, is to lose it.

We think the problem rests with the object of our desire when in reality it is the subject—the “I”—that is the problem. It might appear that by craving something you are paying attention to it, but this is an illusion. You are engrossed in your desire for the object, not the object itself. A heroin addict doesn’t crave heroin. He craves the experience of having heroin, and the concomitant relief of not not having heroin. Freedom from mental disturbance, ataraxia, is what he wants.

read these tales of lost manuscripts and recall Simone Weil’s words. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”

All violence represents a failure of imagination. Nonviolence demands creativity. Gandhi was always searching for new, innovative ways to fight.

Another tenet of the Gita is nonattachment to results. As Lord Krishna, an incarnation of God, tells Arjuna: “You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction.” Sever work from outcome, the Gita teaches. Invest 100 percent effort into every endeavor and precisely zero percent into the results. Gandhi summed up this outlook in a single word: “desirelessness.”

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.

Gandhi found such escalation silly. Any victory earned through violent means is illusory; it only postpones the arrival of the next bloody chapter.

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.

Money doesn’t liberate us from disputes, though. It shifts them to pricier arenas.

How you fight matters more than what you’re fighting about.

I am looking for kindness. I concede the New York City subway is an unlikely place to find it. Many consider it a heartless underworld. That’s why I’m here. I figure if you can find kindness on the New York subway, you can find it anywhere.

Politeness is social lubricant, kindness social superglue. Polite cultures are not necessarily kind ones.

Callousness is the result not of cruel intentions but of a failure of imagination. The unkind person can’t imagine the suffering of another, cannot put himself in her shoes. And yet it’s easy if you try, says John Lennon, and Confucius, too.

Gould, a hard-nosed scientist, saw a practical reason for registering goodness. 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.

Kindness comes naturally. Cruelty is learned.

The world, now more than ever, demands not only reflexive kindness but a more assertive variety, too.

Kindness is hard. It includes empathy, but that is not enough. Confucian ritual is needed. There’s a reason we turn to rituals during life’s weightiest moments—a wedding, a graduation, a death. These events evoke such strong feelings we risk coming unglued. Ritual holds us together. Ritual provides the container for our emotional content.

Delight, unlike pleasure, contains an element of surprise, an unexpected frisson. And delight, unlike pleasure, leaves no bitter aftertaste. You never saw the delight coming so you don’t miss it when it’s gone.

The Buddhist concept of mujo, or impermanence, holds clues. Life is ephemeral. Everything we know and love will one day cease to exist, ourselves included. Most cultures fear this fact. A few tolerate it. The Japanese celebrate it.

“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty,” wrote Yoshida Kenkō, a fourteenth-century Buddhist monk. He suggests we pay more attention to branches about to blossom or a garden strewn with faded flowers rather than blossoms in full bloom. The cherry blossom is lovely not despite its short life span but because of it. “Beauty lies in its own vanishing,” says Japan scholar Donald Richie.

if the task of the philosopher is, as one scholar says, “to demonstrate that things can be otherwise,” Shōnagon is clearly a philosopher.

If the task of philosophy is, as Nietzsche said, “to enhance our taste for life,” then Shōnagon is a philosopher.

Hermann Hesse said: “The man who for the first time picks a small flower so that he can have it near him while he works has taken a step toward joy in life.”

I’m tempted to stop and read Nietzsche, but the philosopher dissuades me: “How can anyone become a thinker if he does not spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?”

For Nietzsche, emotions are not a distraction, or a detour on the road to logic. They are the destination.

I’m tempted to snap a photo but fear that might spook the butterfly. Besides, recording the moment seems a poor substitute for experiencing it.

Some philosophers shock. Many argue. A few inspire. Only Nietzsche danced.

Just as dancing has no purpose—the dance is the purpose—so, too, with Nietzsche’s philosophy. For Nietzsche, dancing and thinking move toward similar ends: a celebration of life. He’s not trying to prove anything. He simply wants you to see the world, and yourself, differently.

Viewing the world in a different way—even an “incorrect,” different way, like Thoreau peering between his legs—enriches our lives.

Suffering is inevitable—you don’t need a philosopher to tell you that—but how we suffer, and about what, matters more than we think.

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

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

Stoics are not pessimists. They believe everything happens for a reason, the result of a thoroughly rational order. Unlike grumpy Schopenhauer, they believe we are living in the best of all possible worlds, the only possible world. Not only does the Stoic consider the glass half full; he finds it a miracle he has a glass at all—and isn’t it beautiful?

Stoics are not selfish. They help others—not out of sentimentality or pity but because it is rational to do so, the way fingers help the hand; and they are happy to endure discomfort and even pain while helping others.

If you must assent to these proto-passions, assent in a different direction, suggests Epictetus. Relabel them. If you’re alone, relabel your solitude as tranquility. If you are stuck in a crowd, relabel it a festival, “and so accept all contentedly.” Another mind trick? Sure, but a helpful one. Your mind is always playing tricks with reality anyway. Why not put those tricks to good use?

Forgoing pleasure is one of life’s greatest pleasures.

Voluntary Deprivation cultivates courage. It also inoculates us against future deprivation, which might not be voluntary. We experience a prick of pain now but much less later.

This brings us to another vaccine in the Stoic dispensary: premeditatio malorum, or “premeditation of adversity.” Anticipate the arrows of Fortune, says Seneca. Imagine the worst scenarios and “rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck.” Imagining adversity is not the same as worrying about it, the Stoics say. Worrying is vague, inchoate. Premeditated adversity is specific—the more specific the better. Not “I imagine suffering a financial setback,” but “I imagine losing my house, car, my entire bag collection and am forced to move back in with my mother.”

Adversity anticipated is adversity diminished. Fears articulated are fears lessened.

Epictetus suggests coping with small losses and moving to bigger ones. Have you lost your coat? Well, yes, that’s because you had a coat.

Too often we confuse what is ours and what is not. There’s no need for this confusion, say the Stoics. It’s simple. Nothing is ours, not even our bodies. We always rent, never own. This is liberating. If there is nothing to lose there is nothing to fear losing.

As the Roman philosopher Cicero noted, many of the deficiencies we blame on old age are really failings of character. 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.

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.

Acceptance is not the same as resignation. Resignation is resistance masquerading as acceptance. Pretending to accept something is like pretending to love someone.

Too much recollection isn’t good. We risk remaining shackled to our past selves: forever the heroic soldier or beautiful young woman. This kind of past is frozen, and a frozen past is a dead past.

Something curious and wonderful happens when we age. We no longer care what others think of us. More precisely, we realize they weren’t thinking of us in the first place.