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

by Eric Weiner

But Thoreau’s eyes made the biggest impression. No two people saw them alike. “Strong serious blue eyes,” said one Concord resident. “Piercing eyes, like an owl’s,” recalls another. “Enormous eyes… [that] frightened me dreadfully at first,” recalls a third. Thoreau’s vision was legendary. At a glance, he could estimate the height of a tree or the weight of a calf. He’d reach into a bushel of pencils and, by sight alone, grab exactly a dozen. He had a knack for finding buried Indian arrowheads. “There is one,” he’d say, kicking it up with his foot.

Thoreau is considered a Transcendentalist, a member of a philosophical movement that can be summed up in four words: faith in things unseen. Thoreau, though, possessed an even stronger faith in things seen. He was less interested in the nature of reality than the reality of nature. Was there more to the world than meets the eye? Probably, but what does meet the eye is plenty miraculous, so let’s start there. Thoreau valued vision even more than knowledge. Knowledge is always tentative, imperfect. Today’s certainty is tomorrow’s nonsense. “Who can say what is? He can only say how he sees.”

We tend to think of Thoreau as—how do I say this diplomatically?—a wuss. Reading his journals set me straight. The pages reveal a virile Thoreau. Philosopher as action hero. He walks, skates, swims, tastes fermented apples, chops wood, sounds ponds, surveys lots, paddles upriver, builds houses, plays the flute, juggles, shoots (he was an expert marksman), and, on at least one occasion, stares down a woodchuck. He did all these activities to see better. “It needs the doing hand to make the seeing eye,” he said. Thoreau wasn’t afraid to get his hands, or any other body part, dirty. In one journal entry, he describes immersing himself in a swamp up to his chin, feeling the

cool mud against his skin, embracing the scum.

We, the reader, just eavesdrop. I hear Socrates, too. They are not obvious doppelgängers, these two. Centuries separate them. Thoreau wrote more than two million words, Socrates not a single one. Yet they are philosophical brothers. Like Socrates, Thoreau led an examined life, one conducted with a “fearless self-inspection.” Like Socrates, Thoreau vacillated between terrific velocity and utter stillness. He walked four miles a day but could also, as one neighbor recalls, “sit motionless for hours, and let the mice crawl over him and eat cheese out of his hand.”

Both Socrates and Thoreau asked a lot of impertinent questions, which annoyed people. Both were pains in their respective eras’ asses. Useful irritants. Both paid

price. Athens put Socrates to death. Concord panned Thoreau’s writing. Like Socrates, Thoreau believed all philosophy begins with wonder. He expresses this idea many times, in many ways, but my favorite is this simple line from Walden: “Reality is fabulous.” I love the way Thoreau sounds less like...

The sort of town where Thoreau, with his shabby clothes and undisciplined mane, would draw searching, albeit discreet, glances.

Every day, usually in the afternoon, Thoreau walked the Concord countryside. Like Rousseau, he couldn’t think clearly unless his legs were moving. While Rousseau embarked on reveries, Thoreau sauntered. (He loved that word.) He sauntered in order to shake the village and return to his senses.

Thoreau was conflicted about this newfangled technology. On the one hand, the raw power of the locomotive awed him. Yet he feared the railroad disrupted familiar rhythms. Farmers who once gauged time by the sun now set their clocks to the 2:00 p.m. train from Boston. Walden Woods was stripped of trees, fuel for the wood-fired engines. “We do not ride on the railroad,” Thoreau concludes. “It rides upon us.”

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.

Schopenhauer was an Idealist. 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. The world is my idea.

The arts accomplish this feat by, in effect, catapulting us free of ourselves. 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.”

Arthur never did learn. He alienated nearly everyone he encountered. He could be charming when he wanted, but he rarely wanted. He remained a bachelor throughout his life and, with the exception of a brief friendship with Goethe, had no real companions—other than his beloved poodle, named Atman, the Sanskrit word for soul. Schopenhauer displayed a

warmth toward Atman he never could muster for people. “You, sir,” he affectionately chided the poodle whenever he misbehaved.

Stephen Roeper reaches into a large rectangular box and retrieves a rusting fork and spoon. Schopenhauer carried them, as well as a drinking cup, whenever he dined out. He didn’t trust restaurant hygiene, nor much of anything else. He avoided barbers, fearful they’d cut his throat. He suffered from anxiety and occasional panic attacks.

Music is personal in a way the other arts are not. You may not have a favorite painting, but you probably have a favorite song. My thirteen-year-old daughter is experimenting with different musical genres, discovering what she likes and what she doesn’t. She isn’t forming her “musical identity.” She is forming her identity. Period. 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. 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. I recognize the benefits of music intellectually, but can’t seem to make the leap to a more intimate knowledge. I suffer from a kind of musical apathy. As a teenager, I never collected albums or compiled mixtapes. I attended concerts rarely, only when coerced by friends. To this day, entire genres of music remain foreign to me. I am not opposed to music. If played, I enjoy it, though not as much as I enjoy a good Scotch or a good bag. This lack of musical appreciation has always struck me as odd, given my love of sound and the spoken word.

Working for NPR as a foreign correspondent, I learned to appreciate the rich and varied texture of sound. The singsong call of a Delhi street hawker, the cacophony of a Tokyo pachinko parlor. What intrigued me most, though, was the sound of the spoken word. The human voice is nature’s greatest lie detector, and I soon learned to gauge a speaker’s sincerity

within seconds. Politicians are the least sincere not only because of their gutless vocabulary but also their tone of voice. Cautious and falsetto. Even a child can recognize the voice of someone selling something. Especially a child.

Knowledge of music, he says, enhances your enjoyment of it. “It may give you specific insights into the music that you might not otherwise have and it might prevent you from becoming so captivated by the tonal beauty that you see music as only an aesthetic experience.” Music doesn’t have a single home. It “hovers between two worlds.” (I can practically hear Schopenhauer murmuring his assent.) Different types of music, John continues, require different kinds of listening. Wagner is easy. “The music is sensuous to the point of being like a drug rush.” Beethoven and Mahler and Brahms are trickier. “You feel that you are trying to understand what another person is trying to communicate directly to you. Wagner talks to you about something. Beethoven,

Mahler, and Brahms talk to you. That is the difference.” There’s another, more practical, reason to know something about musical structure, John explains. It disciplines the ear. You know what to listen for, so the mind is less likely to wander. Schopenhauer thought a lot about the wandering mind. We view the world in a calculating, mercenary way, he said. The Amsterdam stockbroker intent on closing a deal is oblivious to the world around him; the chess player does not see the elegant Chinese chess pieces; the general doesn’t see the beautiful landscape as he makes his battle plan. We must have a different, less transactional, relationship with music. We must experience it from a disinterested perspective. Disinterested but not uninterested. There is a difference. To be uninterested in a piece of music is to be apathetic toward it. To be disinterested is to harbor no expectations, make no demands of the music, yet remain open to

the possibility of aesthetic delight. A Buddhist would say we are not attached to the music but nor are we detached from it. A Christian mystic would say we maintain a “holy indifference” toward it. The idea is the same. True listening demands we postpone judgment. When we listen like this, hearing without judging, says Schopenhauer, we “feel positively happy.” I read that and am stunned. This is the first time I’ve seen Schopenhauer use the word “happy.” A glint of light. Music is not what I think it is, Schopenhauer tells me. It does not convey emotion. It conveys the essence, the container, of emotions without the content. When we listen to music, we perceive not a particular sadness or a particular joy but sadness itself and joy itself—“the extracted quintessence of these feelings,” says Schop...

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 ...

While other philosophers attempted to explain the world out there, Schopenhauer was more concerned with our inner world. We can’t know the world if we don’t know ourselves.

The encyclopedia was the Internet in Schopenhauer’s day, and nearly as seductive. Why puzzle over a problem when the solution is readily available in a book? Because, answers Schopenhauer, “it’s a hundred times more valuable if you have arrived at it by thinking for yourself.” Too often, he said, people jump to the book rather than stay with their thoughts. “You should read only when your own thoughts dry up.”

Fill your head with the ideas of others and they’ll displace your own. I make a mental note to evict these uninvited voices.

Like the Will, the Internet is omnipresent, and purposeless. It is always striving, never sated. It devours everything, including our most precious resource: time. It offers the illusion of happiness but delivers only suffering. As with the Will, the Internet offers two ways to escape its clutch: the path of the ascetic and that of the aesthete. Meditation or music.

Epicurus was no hedonist. He was a “tranquillist.” Some psychologists take exception with Epicurus’s focus almost exclusively on pain relief. “Happiness is definitely something other than the mere absence of all pain,” sniffs the Journal of Happiness Studies. Before reading Epicurus, I would have agreed. Now I’m not so sure. If I’m honest with myself, I recognize that what I crave most is not fame or wealth but peace of mind, the “pure pleasure of existing.” It’s nearly impossible to describe such a state in terms other than that of absence.

He didn’t merely celebrate pleasure. He dissected it, developing an entire taxonomy of desire.

but because of the discomforts that follow them.” What exactly are the discomforts that follow, say, a five-course meal at the French Laundry? Epicurus is speaking of physical sensations—indigestion, a hangover—but mostly about another, insidious kind of pain: the pain of not-having. You enjoyed the Pacific Wild King Salmon Terrine—the pleasure was real—but now it is gone and you crave it again. You have outsourced your happiness to the Salmon Terrine—and to the fisherman who caught it, the restaurant that serves it, the boss who cuts your paycheck so you can afford it. You are now a Salmon Terrine junkie, your happiness dependent on regular hits of the stuff. All because you have mistaken an unnecessary desire for a necessary one.

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. Rob doesn’t expend energy hunting for these baubles. They simply happen at him. When they do, he is grateful.

Christianity.

Thomas Jefferson declared, “I too am an Epicurean.” In a letter to a friend, he expands. “I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy

which Greece & Rome have left us.”

Friends, he added, are essential during meals, like the one Tom and I are enjoying. To eat and drink without a friend is “to devour like the lion and the wolf.” Epicurus’s emphasis on friendship seems to contradict his pleasure-first principle. Genuine friendship, after all, means sometimes placing a friend’s pleasure above your own. Doesn’t that throw off the hedonic calculus? No, says Epicurus. Friendship, taken as a whole, alleviates pain and promotes pleasure. Whatever pain is associated with friendship is more than offset by its pleasures.

Philosophy doesn’t coddle. It challenges. It makes demands. The best philosophers are the most demanding. Socrates demands we question assumptions, especially our own. Marcus Aurelius demands we honor our duties.

Simone Weil’s entreaty is simpler but no less difficult. She demands we pay attention. Not any sort of attention, either. Weil’s notion of attention is unlike any I’ve encountered.

The philosopher of attention didn’t want any directed at her. She wanted to see but not be seen. Whether riding a train or working on a factory floor, her goal was anonymity—“merging into the crowd and disappearing among them, so that they show themselves as they are,” she said. Yet she always stood out. How could she not? Intellectual. Awkward. Jewish.

Nonviolence demands creativity. Gandhi was always searching for new, innovative ways to fight.

In his autobiography, Gandhi recalls the time he wrote a note to his father, confessing to stealing and cigarette smoking and meat eating. Hand trembling, Gandhi handed his father the slip of paper. The elder Gandhi sat up to read the note and, as he did, “pearl-drops trickled down his cheeks, wetting the paper,” recalls Gandhi. “Those pearl-drops of love cleansed my heart, and washed my sin away. Only he who has experienced such love can know what it is.” Such love is rare, and not often directed inward. As someone who is often brutal to himself, I found it heartening to learn Gandhi also wrestled with bouts of self-loathing. During outbursts of anger, he’d sometimes punch himself on the chest, hard. He outgrew this self-harming and, toward the end of his life, advised a friend, “Do not lose your temper with anybody, not even with yourself.”

Confucius had a difficult life, even for a philosopher. He was born into a fairly affluent family, but when he was only three years old, his father, a military officer, died. Confucius was raised by his mother, who struggled to make ends meet. Confucius helped by holding a

number of menial jobs. All the while, he studied Chinese classics such as I Ching, or “Book of Changes.” When he looked around he saw a people splintered into warring factions and governed by rulers more interested in personal gain than public good. This wasn’t only immoral, he thought, but impractical. Confucius sensed there was a better way, says journalist Michael Schuman in his excellent biography. “Swords and shields would not win an empire; burdensome taxes and military servitude would not woo loyal subjects. Benevolence was the correct and only route to power and prestige.” We’ve strayed from the Way, Confucius proclaimed. We need to get back on course. His message landed with a deafening silence. If anything, the corruption and misrule grew worse. The final straw for Confucius came in the form of dancing girls. Hundreds of them were dispatched from a neighboring state. The local ruler,

clearly distracted, failed to show up at the royal court for three days. “I have yet to meet a man who loves Virtue as much as he loves sex,” Confucius said, before departing on what would be a thirteen-year exile. He traveled from state to state, offering his services as wise counsel to any ruler who would listen. None did. Confucius returned home, weary but not defeated. He decided to teach, and thank goodness. Had he succeeded in obtaining a position as royal advisor, we might not know him today. He refused no student, regardless of background or ability to pay. Tuition was a small bundle of silk or a bit of cured meat, the beef jerky of its day. Confucius was an intimidating presence in the classroom. The Master, as he was known, c...

alone. When he saw a young man sitting “with his legs spread wide,” in an early display of manspreading, Confucius scolded him, calling him a “pest” and rapping him on the shin with his cane. Yet the Master could also be gentle, lighthearted even. He sang and played the lute. He laughed and joked with friends, and found pleasur...

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.

“Think of how miserable that would be. You’re stuck in an infinite loop. Everyone has made one huge mistake in their life—I haven’t yet, but I know it’s going to happen—so imagine reliving that over and over again. Like imagine, you’re murdered by an ax murderer. Do you want to relive that over and over? What if you had cancer? Would you want to relive that?”