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

by Eric Weiner

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. Marcus was aware of this distinction, but, as usual, needed to remind himself of it. “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being.’ ” Not as a Stoic or an emperor, or even as a Roman, but as a human being.

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.

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. Wonder takes time. Like a good meal or good sex, it can’t be rushed. That’s why Socrates never hurried his conversations. He persevered even when his conversers grew weary and exasperated.

Solving a problem before you experience it is like trying to cook a meal before buying groceries. Yet so often we reach for the quickest solution, or the most expedient pleasure. Anything to avoid sitting with our ignorance.

Arriving at answers of the heart demands not only patience but a willingness to sit with your ignorance. Staying with the doubt, the mystery, rather than rushing to solve the problem, to check off another item on your endless to-do list. This takes time, and courage. Others will mock you. Let them, says Jacob Needleman, and Socrates, too. Ridicule is the price of wisdom.

Rousseau’s Savage Man regularly experiences feelings of self-love, which Rousseau calls amour-de-soi. This healthy emotion differs from the more egoistical variety, which he calls amour-propre. The first stems from human nature, the second from society. Amour-de-soi is the joy you feel when singing in the shower. Amour-propre is the joy you feel while singing at Radio City Music Hall. You may sing poorly in the shower but the delight is yours alone, independent of others’ opinions, and therefore, Rousseau argued, more authentic. So you can see why Rousseau walked. Walking requires none of the trappings of civilization: no domesticated animals, no carriages, no roads. The walker is free, unencumbered. Pure amour-de-soi.

it is the philosopher-emperor Marcus who answers. Respond to adversity, real or imagined, not with self-pity or hand-wringing, but simply by starting over. Viewed this way, life no longer feels like a narrative gone awry, or a botched ending. None of that is real. There are no endings. Only an infinite chain of beginnings.

If Descartes was the modern era’s philosopher of the head, Rousseau was its philosopher of the heart. He elevated the passions and made feelings acceptable, not on par with reason, but close. This wasn’t easy. During Rousseau’s time, the Age of Reason, imaginative thinking was suspect. Two centuries later, no less a rationalist than Albert Einstein declared that “imagination is more important than knowledge.”

“How to see,” she says, without hesitation. “How to see?” Yes, she says. All the rest—the simple living, the solitude, the naturalism—were in service of something larger: vision. Thoreau teaches us how to see. I did not see this coming. I will investigate, I assure her.

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.”

I am a lazy seer. I expect the subject of my gaze to do all the work. Dazzle me, scenery. Be beautiful, damn it! When the subject—be it the Alps or a Monet—inevitably falls short of my unreasonable expectations, I assign blame to it, not me. Thoreau thought otherwise. The person attuned to beauty will find it in a garbage dump while “the fault-finder will find fault even in paradise.”

Thoreau’s stellar vision wasn’t merely technique, a fun-pack of optical tricks. It was a function of character. He considered the perception of beauty “a moral test.” Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. It is in his heart. We can’t improve our vision without improving ourselves. The dynamic works both ways. Not only does who we are determine what we see but what we see determines who we are. As the Vedas say, “What you see, you become.”

I can hear Thoreau scolding me. Look. Observe. See the world with the eye of a child and the mind of a sage. Open your eyes, man!

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.

Schopenhauer enlists another animal—the porcupine—to explain human relations. Imagine a group of porcupines huddled on a cold winter’s day. They stand close to one another, absorbing their neighbor’s body heat, lest they freeze to death. Should they stand too close, though, they’re pricked by a needle. “Tossed between two evils,” says Schopenhauer, the animals approach and retreat, again and again, until they discover “the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another.” The Porcupine’s Dilemma, as it’s now known, is our dilemma, too. We need others to survive, but others can hurt us. Relationships demand constant course corrections, and even the most skilled navigators get pricked now and then.

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. If the only reaction we have to a still-life of a bowl of cherries is hunger, the artist has missed the mark. Schopenhauer devised a hierarchy of aesthetics. Architecture occupies the bottom rung, while theater (tragedy, in particular, of course) the top. Music does not appear on the ladder. It is its own category.

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.”

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.

I share Schopenhauer’s melancholy but not his pessimism. There’s a fundamental problem with his glumness: it presupposes perfect knowledge, something we humans are incapable of possessing. We may suspect we are living in the “worst of all possible worlds,” but do we know for sure? Pessimism requires a certainty I lack, and for that I am grateful.

Every evening, without fail, he read several passages of the Upanishads. It was, he said, “the most profitable and sublime reading that is possible in the world; it has been the consolation of my life and will be that of my death.” Later, he’d study Buddhism, declaring it the greatest of all religions. He kept a statue of the Buddha in his Frankfurt study. Some biographers call Schopenhauer “the Buddha of Frankfurt,” but he was no monk.

In his essay “On Authorship,” the philosopher foreshadows the mind-numbing clamor that is social media, where the sound of the true is drowned out by the noise of the new. “No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.”

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

The primacy of pleasure, Epicurus said, was self-evident. What does a child respond to? Pleasure and pain. You don’t need to teach her that fire is hot and candy tasty; she knows it. Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is as natural, and automatic, as breathing.

Epicurus defined pleasure differently from the way most of us do. We think of pleasure as a presence, what psychologists call positive affect. Epicurus defined pleasure as a lack, an absence. The Greeks called this state ataraxia, literally “lack of disturbance.” It is the absence of anxiety rather than the presence of anything that leads to contentment. Pleasure is not the opposite of pain but its absence. Epicurus was no hedonist. He was a “tranquillist.”

Avoiding pain is sound advice—I’m all for it—but isn’t it an awfully thin basis for a philosophy? Not if you’re in pain, Epicurus thought. Imagine you’ve fallen from a horse and broken your leg. A doctor is summoned and promptly offers you a bowl of grapes. What’s wrong? The grapes are pleasurable, aren’t they? This absurd situation is the one many of us find ourselves in, Epicurus believed. We scoop trivial pleasures atop a mountain of pain, and wonder why we’re not happy. Some of us suffer the sharp shock of physical pain, others the dull ache of mental pain or the I want-to-die pain of a broken heart, but pain is pain, and we must address it if we hope to achieve contentment.

He didn’t merely celebrate pleasure. He dissected it, developing an entire taxonomy of desire. At the top of the ladder were the “natural and necessary” desires. A glass of water, for instance, after a trek through the desert. Next came “natural but not necessary” desires. A glass of simple table wine after drinking the water after trekking across the desert. Finally, at the bottom of the pyramid, are desires that are neither natural nor necessary, what Epicurus calls “empty” desires. A pricey bottle of champagne after imbibing the table wine after drinking the water after trekking across the desert. These empty desires cause the most suffering, Epicurus thought, since they are difficult to obtain. “It is better for you to lie upon a bed of straw and be free of fear, than to have a golden couch and an opulent table, yet be troubled in mind.”

Not only does the variety of pleasure matter less than we think, so does its duration. A twenty-minute massage isn’t necessarily twice as pleasurable as a ten-minute one. You cannot double tranquility. You’re either at peace or you are not.

Rob’s attitude is pure Epicurus. 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.

Jefferson was less familiar with the teachings of the Buddha, but the similarities with Epicurus are striking. Both men identified desire as the root of all suffering. Both identified tranquility as the ultimate goal of their practice. Both saw the need for a community of like-minded thinkers: the garden for Epicurus, the sangha for the Buddha. And both men apparently liked the number four. The Buddha had the Four Noble Truths, Epicurus the Four-Part Cure. These similarities might be more than coincidental. Two of Epicurus’s early influences, Democritus and Pyrrho, traveled to India and encountered Buddhist schools there. Perhaps Epicurus had learned of the Buddha’s teaching. Or perhaps both men, journeying by different routes, arrived at the same destination.

“Yes. I would say good enough is good enough. It leaves you time for the more important parts of life. Besides, nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little,” says Tom, channeling Epicurus. I stop mid-sip. How much is enough? I’ve rarely stopped to ask that question. I’ve always assumed the answer is “more than I have now.” It turns out that “more” is a moving target. Psychologists call it the “hedonic treadmill.” This quirk of human nature explains why that third crème brûlée never tastes as good as the first or second. It explains why the new car that thrilled us on the test drive bores us after a month on the road. We acclimate to new pleasures, rendering them neither new nor quite as pleasurable. We’re particularly susceptible to what I call Just-a-Bit-More-ism. We don’t need a lot more—money, success, friends—in order to be happy. Just a bit more. When we get that bit more, we recalibrate and calculate we need… just a bit more. We don’t know how much is enough. 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.

Attention is not concentration. Concentration can be coerced—listen up, class!—while attention cannot. Observe what happens to your body when you concentrate. Your jaw tightens, your eyes narrow, your brow furrows. Weil found this sort of muscular effort ridiculous. Concentration constricts. Attention expands. Concentration tires. Attention rejuvenates. Concentration is focused thinking. Attention is thinking suspended. “Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it,” Weil writes. If that statement isn’t perplexing enough, Weil goes further, declaring that “all errors arise from a lack of passivity.”

All inattention is a form of selfishness. We’ve decided that whatever is happening in our heads is more interesting, more important, than what is happening in the rest of the universe. That’s why narcissists are so inattentive. Their attention is bottled up, stagnant. Attention is our lifeblood. It needs to circulate. To hoard attention is to kill it.

A surefire way to increase your fondness for something, anything, is to lose it. As my search turns up dry, the missing notebook grows not only in aesthetic excellence but editorial brilliance as well. By day two of my search, I’m convinced the thoughts contained within its covers, recorded during my trip to England, are unequaled in astuteness and originality. By day four, I declare the notebook the Most Precious Notebook in the World. Ever. More precious than Da Vinci’s Codex Leicester or Hemingway’s cahiers.

At a loss (that word again), I turn to Simone. Desperate times, I tell myself, opening one of her books. She looks at my predicament and offers a simple diagnosis: I don’t really want to find my notebook. I want to possess it. I am consumed with desire, and desire is incompatible with attention. To desire something is to want something from it, and that clouds our vision. 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.

My problem, says Weil, is that I have yoked action to results. Life doesn’t work that way, nor does attention. An attentive life is a risky one. Results are not guaranteed. We don’t know where our attention will lead, if anywhere. Pure attention, the kind Weil advocated, is untainted by external motives such as impressing your friends or advancing your career. The person who applies his full attention to something—anything—makes progress “even if his effort produces no visible fruit,” says Weil. She’s right, I know, but we live in a world that celebrates visible fruit. The more visible and the fruitier the better.

I 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.” She’s right. I must wait.

Gandhi read it differently. The Gita, he said, is an allegory, one that depicts “what takes place in the heart of every human being today.” The true battlefield lies within. Arjuna’s struggle is not with the enemy but with himself. Does he succumb to his baser instincts or rise to a higher plane? The Gita, Gandhi concluded, is a disguised ode to nonviolence. 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 is not an invitation to indolence. The karma yogi is a person of action. She is doing a lot, except worrying about results. This is not our way. We are results-oriented. Fitness trainers, business consultants, doctors, colleges, dry cleaners, recovery programs, dieticians, financial advisors. They, and many others, promise results. We might question their ability to deliver results, but rarely do we question the underlying assumption that being results-oriented is good. Gandhi was not results-oriented. He was process-oriented. He aimed not for Indian independence but for an India worthy of independence. Once this occurred, her freedom would arrive naturally, lik...

Gandhi eventually settled on a new name for his new type of nonviolent resistance: satyagraha. Satya is Sanskrit for “truth”; agraha means “firmness” or “holding firmly.” Truth Force (or “Soul Force,” as it is sometimes translated). Yes, this was what Gandhi had in mind. There was nothing passive or squishy about it. It was active, “the greatest and most active force in the world.” The satyagrahi, or nonviolent resister, is even more active than an armed soldier—and more courageous. 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.

For Gandhi, the ends never justified the means. The means were the ends. “Impure means result in impure ends. We reap exactly as we sow.” Just as you can’t grow a rosebush on toxic soil, you can’t grow a peaceful nation on bloody ground.

Let’s examine a simple dispute from a Gandhian perspective. You and your partner are going out to dinner to celebrate a milestone. You want Indian food, she wants Italian. You know for certain Indian is the superior cuisine, while your partner is just as certain Italian is the better food. There is a conflict. What to do? The quickest solution is a “forced victory.” You could compel your partner to dine with you at Bombay Dreams by bundling her into a burlap sack. There are downsides to this approach. Alternatively, you could insist on Indian food, period. No further discussion. Let’s say your partner agrees. You’ve won, right? You haven’t. The uneasy calm over dinner is illusory. No one likes being bludgeoned into submission. “What appears to be the end of the dispute may be just the opening in another chapter in the conflict,” says Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution. And by resorting to “veiled violence” you harm not only your partner but yourself, too. Conversely, you could “appease” your partner by agreeing to Italian, yet spend the entire evening seething. This result is simply another form of violence—worse, it is dishonest, “unclean” violence. Better to fight for your principles than pretend you don’t have any. You could suggest a compromise cuisine. Japanese, for instance. But that means neither of you gets what you want, and meanwhile, the underlying conflict festers. Gandhi was wary of such compromises. He was all for gi...

That is, I think, a Gandhian response. Each side in a conflict possesses a slice of the truth, not the whole pie. Rather than trading slices, aim to enlarge the pie.

He was the first philosopher to place kindness, and love, at the top of the pyramid. “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire,” said Confucius, articulating the Golden Rule some five hundred years before Jesus. For Confucius, kindness is not squishy. It is not weak. Kindness is practical. Extend kindness to all, says one Confucian, “and you can turn the whole world in the palm of your hand.”

Am I kind? I wonder. Yes, I did display Confucian ren, human-heartedness, when I helped Kailash in India. But I didn’t seek out Kailash. He found me. He was the child in the well. I deserve no more credit for my reflexive reaction than I would for sneezing in a dusty room. The world, now more than ever, demands not only reflexive kindness but a more assertive variety, too.

Each country on the list taught me something important, even if inadvertently. India taught me how to find stillness in chaos. Israel taught me the importance of savlanut, patience. Valuable lessons all, but nothing compared to Japan. Japan taught me, a person of the book, a head-heavy aficionado of words and the people who use words, how to shut the fuck up for five minutes and experience a different way of being. Japan opened my eyes to a philosophy of things. Beautiful small things.

Shōnagon refuses to stay in a single lane. She swerves from “Refined and elegant things” to “Worthless things” then back to “Things that are truly splendid.” It’s tempting to conclude she is lost. She is not. She is engaging in zuihitsu, or “following the brush.” It’s a Japanese literary technique that is not a technique, which strikes me as the perfect way to write a book that is not a book. A writer practicing zuihitsu isn’t afraid to follow a hunch, scratch an intellectual itch, then circle back, or not. The writer doesn’t impose structure but, rather, allows one to emerge. All of us, I think, could use a bit more zuihitsu, and not only when it comes to writing. Set clear goals and channel all your energies into reaching them, the self-help books advise. This approach assumes we’ve identified our destination before beginning our journey. Life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you don’t know where you’re going until you start moving. So move. Start where you are. Make a single brushstroke and see where it leads. Shōnagon doesn’t describe the world. She describes her world. No observation is neutral. She knows what she likes and what she doesn’t. She subscribes to perspectivism, the philosophical theory advanced by Nietzsche centuries later. There is not one truth but many. Choose one, says Shōnagon. Make it your own.

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. Appreciating life’s small, fleeting pleasures demands a loose grip. Hold them too tightly and they break. What has been said of Thoreau applies equally to Shōnagon. “He is paying attention to things, but he is not grasping them, manipulating them, trying to figure them out.” This skill does not come naturally to me. My grip is too tight. I am always trying to figure things out, unearthing hidden meanings that may or may not exist. As for impermanence, it terrifies me.

I feel Shōnagon’s paper love. Whenever I’m in Tokyo, I make a point to visit Itoya in the Ginza district. Itoya is a stationery store, but that’s like saying Yo-Yo Ma is a cellist: technically correct but woefully inadequate. Spread across two buildings and eighteen floors, it is a vertical ode to the analog: Italian-leather planners, sublime notebooks, exquisite pens. Everyone, shoppers and staff alike, shares this love of the tactile. No one rushes you. Fondling is encouraged. I could spend hours—days!—in Itoya, and I’m sure Shōnagon could, too.

It wasn’t enough to write a beautiful poem. You had to package it beautifully, too. Imagine you’re living in Kyoto of AD 970 and you want to send a message to someone. What do you do? First, you must choose the paper. Not any paper will do. It must be the “proper thickness, size, design and color to suit the emotional mood that one wished to suggest, as well as the season of the year and even the weather of the particular day.” Then you produce several drafts, experimenting with different compositions and brushes. Once satisfied with the words and the calligraphy, you fold the paper in one of several accepted styles, then attach an appropriate branch or spray of blossom. Finally, you summon “a smart, good-looking messenger,” dispatch him to the proper address, and wait for a reply. Your poem might be met with approval or derision or, worst of all, silence. Ghosting is not a twenty-first-century invention.

Implicit in Shōnagon’s philosophy is this: Who we are is largely shaped by what we choose to surround ourselves with. And it is a choice. Philosophy reveals the hidden choices we make. Realizing something is a choice is the first step toward making better choices. As the German writer 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 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. Then there is the desk itself, solid and serious. Embedded in the wood is the intention of the designer, his or her guiding hand suggesting the desk be used for a certain purpose and in a certain way. There is the history of the desk, its biography, for objects have stories to tell, too. There is the lingering presence of the craftsman who made it, the people who owned it before, the movers who lugged it here, the nice woman who cleans it on Sundays. It’s only a desk, yes, but it contains multitudes.

No one knew this better than Sei Shōnagon. One day, Empress Teishi, watching the joy Shōnagon derived from a finely woven tatami mat, remarked, “The simplest trifles console you, don’t they?” Shōnagon doesn’t record her reply, but I can imagine what she was thinking. Yes, they do, Your Majesty, only they are not so trifling as you think. 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.