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

by Eric Weiner

The examined life demands distance. We must step back from ourselves to see ourselves more clearly. The best way to achieve this perspective is through conversation. For Socrates, philosophy and conversation were virtually synonymous. Socrates talked to all sorts of people: politicians, generals, craftsmen, as well as women, slaves, and children. He talked about all sorts of subjects, too, but only important ones. Socrates wasn’t much for chitchat. He knew life was short and he wasn’t about to waste one second of his allotted time on trivialities. “We are considering how to live the best possible life,” he said, exasperated, to a sophist named Callicles. “What question can be more serious than this to a person who has any sense at all?” As much as he loved conversation, Socrates, I think, saw it as simply another tool in his kit. All this enlightened kibitzing had a goal: to know himself. By talking to others he learned how to converse with himself.

As Voltaire said, the best judge of a person is not the answers they give but the questions they ask.

“Wonder” is a wonderful word. It’s impossible to say it aloud without smiling.

Getting a little childish here.

We rarely question the obvious. Socrates thought this oversight was a mistake. The more obvious something seems, the more urgent the need to question it.

If, in the heat of an argument, you’ve actually uttered the words “I don’t care if it makes no sense, it’s how I feel,” Rousseau is your man.

Ew.

I walk alone. I walk with intention. I let my mind wander, but not too far. I’m getting good at this. No, that is pride speaking. Silence that voice. Connect with the earth. That’s better.

I find something about this both childish and pretentious.

Postpone defining what you see and you will see more.

I’m loading my backpack, a sleek urban model that Thoreau would never own, when I decide to do something out of character. I tuck my smartphone into the desk drawer and step outside without it. It takes only a few minutes for the withdrawal symptoms to manifest: clammy skin, increased heart rate. It’s not that I feel naked without my phone. Naked I could handle. I feel as if I’ve departed on my walk without my liver or some other vital organ. Yet I soldier on.

Stuff like this makes this all feel like a silly proto-sermon.

What I see first is a blur, approaching rapidly. The blur is wearing a denim bandanna and white earbuds. Arms pistoning, muscular legs pumping, she is the picture of efficiency. She is not sauntering.

A blur, eh? This jogger must be going 50, 55 mph.

The phantom vibrations in my pocket, emanating from where my phone should be, have dissipated. I become aware of a stillness. I experience a moment of what I believe is commonly called “peace.”

I believe this book might be a little too cutsey for me.

We see more by scanning than staring.

Yeah, but we don't NOTICE more.

I order a simple coffee, plop down in a big leather chair, and crack open Henry. “Beauty is where it is perceived,” he tells me. Even here, in Starbucks? I look around but find no beauty. My reflex is to blame my surroundings, my Walden.

Face palm. This is so goofy.

Hours later, the man who was reading Montaigne returns. He spots me in the same chair, with the same books, and says, “You’ve been here entirely too long.” “Actually,” I say, looking up, with fresh eyes, “not nearly long enough.”

Certainly this hokey encounter really happened and isn't totally fabricated.

I push a buzzer, and a few seconds later, a slight, pleasant, and shy man materializes. Stephen Roeper is mustached with a receding hairline, clear blue eyes, and a rosy complexion that reminds me of a tipsy cherub.

Our author's descriptive prose is so twee. It sounds like he used to work for Hallmark Films.

Everywhere he saw people scrambling for information, mistaking it for insight. “It does not occur to them,” he wrote, “that information is merely a means toward insight and possesses little or no value in itself.” I’d go a step further. This excess of data—noise, really—has negative value and diminishes the possibility of insight. Distracted by the noise, we don’t hear the music.

Nothing says structure like food. Meals are the girders that hold the day upright.

See? This right here is terrible writing. Like Middle School bad.

Places matter.

Me: *in awe*

nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little,”

Attention matters.

Ooh! Just like place! I wonder if anything else matters!

There’s a name for attention at its most intense and generous: love. Attention is love. Love is attention. They are one and the same. “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention,” writes Weil. 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. We recognize the withdrawal of attention for what it is: a withdrawal of love.

Transitioning from subterranean to terrestrial life is always tricky. There’s that moment of disorientation, of not knowing where you are and, oddly, who you are, either: respectable terrestrial being or sketchy denizen of the underworld? Strangers look at you, or so you imagine, sizing you up, unsure whether you belong here, in the light.

Padding thinks it's insightful. This isn't even true. I've never felt this way, and I'm guessing I could interview everyone I know who's ever taken a subway and ask if they feel this way after resurfacing and get nothing but confused looks in return. Point being: this is more precious, pseudo-intellectual fluff that continues to make this book feel like it was written for teenagers.

I had mistaken it for a sentient canine.

Sentient was the best word for that?

All violence represents a failure of imagination.

Think of the married couple that boasts how they “never fight.” When you hear of their divorce, you’re not surprised. Fighting, done properly, is productive. Both sides can arrive not only at a win-win solution but something more: a solution that neither would have found had they not fought in the first place.

“What do you think? Wherein is courage required—in blowing others to pieces from behind a cannon, or with a smiling face to approach a cannon and be blown to pieces? Believe me, that a man devoid of courage and manhood can never be a passive resister.”

Words mattered to Confucius, but no word mattered more than ren. It appears 105 times in The Analects, far more than any other word. There’s no direct translation (Confucius himself never explicitly defines it), but ren has been variously rendered as compassion, altruism, love, benevolence, true goodness, consummate action. My favorite is “human-heartedness.” A person of ren regularly practices five cardinal virtues: respect, magnanimity, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.

Callousness is the result not of cruel intentions but of a failure of imagination.

The author just plagiarized himself within the same book. First, "Place matters," then, pages later, "Attention matters." Then "All violence represents a failure of imagination," and then, pages later, this statement. Is this intentional? If so, it's not terribly effective or impressive.

I am sitting at a desk in Vermont, writing. I come here every summer. Always the same house, surrounded by the same objects. There’s my laptop, with the soft, almost ethereal glow of its backlit keys, and the satisfying click they make as I type. There’s my cup of coffee. I savor the pleasant weightiness of the mug, and the way it warms my hands on this, an unseasonably chilly summer day. I sense the gentle swoosh of liquid as I raise cup to mouth, touching its lip to mine and tasting the coffee, warm and pleasantly bitter.

This is like the first draft of a beginning creative writing course. "The gentle swoosh of liquid as I raise cup to mouth..."? Eesh.

Sadness feels like a great weight, but maybe that is an illusion. Maybe it is lighter than we think. Maybe no heroic maneuvers are necessary. Maybe life’s so-called trifles—the great beauty of small things—can save us. Maybe salvation is closer than it appears. All we need to do is reach out—and close the door.

An eyeroller that doesn't connect to the previous paragraph and also only THINKS it's insightful. Focus on the small things and sadness goes away? Is that the point? If so, I have quite a few rebuttals.

Groundhog Day is my favorite movie. By a mile. I must have watched it dozens of times. Groundhog Day is my favorite movie. By a mile. I must have watched it dozens of times. Groundhog Day is my favorite movie. By a…

This joke encapsulates my overall problem with this book. It's obvious, hammy, pointless and not even a little clever.

Rob is as paradoxical as the philosophy he loves. He reads ancient Greek and fly-fishes. He leads a healthy, outdoorsy life, yet also confesses to a “Panda Express problem.” He possesses a deep understanding of philosophy, yet isn’t afraid to confess ignorance, too.

None of these examples are paradoxical. Author is trying way too hard.

“Wisdom” is one of those words everyone knows but nobody defines. Psychologists have struggled for decades to nail down a working definition. In the 1980s, a group of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin sat down to hammer one out once and for all. The Berlin Wisdom Project identified five criteria that define wisdom: factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, life-span contextualism, relativism of values, and management of uncertainty.

Says nobody defines wisdom then lists people who have defined wisdom.

Much of life lies beyond our control, but we command what matters most: our opinions, impulses, desires, and aversions. Our mental and emotional life. We all possess Herculean strength, superhero powers, but it is the power to master our interior world. Do this, the Stoics say, and you will be “invincible.”

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.

Then we come across this line: “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about things.” We sit there in silence, absorbing this two-thousand-year-old nugget, as obvious as it is profound.

And also deeply flawed reasoning unless you believe there is no action or event that could be considered objectively bad, or that all responses to negativity first pass through one's judgment. Someone stabs your face, you respond with instant upsetting pain without first "judging" the incident as upsetting. Or someone, just for instance, starts slowly and violently torturing a newborn baby in front of you. That's not inherently upsetting, eh? Bold claim.

The Stoic aims not to feel nothing but to feel correctly. I realize that sounds odd. We don’t think of our emotions as either correct or incorrect. They just are. We have no control over them.

Ha ha. Speak for yourself. Maybe the current cultural noise wants to position feelings as the Be-All-End-All arbiters of reality, but I think most people know the truth. I hope so.

We stub our toe, then scream. We get stuck in traffic, then curse.

False dichotomy. These examples are vastly different from each other. Vastly. One is an incident where you experience sudden unexpected physical harm to your body. The other is a nuisance you can literally see coming.