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

by Eric Weiner

the emotion itself, unmoored, and can appreciate the beauty in sadness. For Schopenhauer, slow melodies are the most beautifully sad. “A convulsive wail,” he calls them. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is a good example. I listen to it whenever I’m feeling sad. It is not an act of self-indulgence, a wallowing in my misery, but, I think, something more noble. The music matches my mood, validates it, yet also enables me to distance myself from the source of my sadness. I can taste sadness without swallowing it, or being swallowed by it. I can savor the bitterness. Schopenhauer, I suspect, invited misfortune to validate his pessimism. A tributary of masochism runs through his life. In Berlin, during a brief stint as a professor, he insisted on scheduling his lectures at the same time as his bête noire, Friedrich Hegel, that “repulsive and dull charlatan and unparalleled scribbler of nonsense.” Hegel was a philosophy rock star, Schopenhauer an unknown. Predictably, Schopenhauer attracted fewer than five students. He would never teach again. Schopenhauer would be surprised—outraged, really—to see his worldly possessions housed in an institution. He despised academia, with its rigid rules and “petticoat philosophers.” He preferred the life of a feral philosopher and, thanks to his father’s inheritance, could afford to lead one. No need to grind lenses at an optician’s shop like Spinoza, or teach undergrads like Kant.