The Socrates Express | Book by Eric Weiner

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

The Socrates Express Introduction: Departure

What is this hunger that cannot be sated? We don’t want what we think we want. We think we want information and knowledge. We do not. We want wisdom. There’s a difference. Information is a jumble of facts, knowledge a more organized jumble. Wisdom untangles the facts, makes sense of them, and, crucially, suggests how best to use them.

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” Knowledge knows. Wisdom sees.

Knowledge is something you possess. Wisdom is something you do. It is a skill and, like all skills, one you can learn. But it requires effort. Expecting to acquire wisdom by luck is like expecting to learn to play the violin by luck.
We mistake the urgent for the important, the verbose for the thoughtful, the popular for the good. We are, as one contemporary philosopher puts it, “misliving.”

The Socrates Express: Philosophy

“Philosopher,” from the Greek philosophos, means “lover of wisdom.”

Philosophy is different from other subjects. It is not a body of knowledge but a way of thinking—a way of being in the world. Not a “what” or a “why” but a “how.” The author Daniel Klein said of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus what could be said of all the good ones: read them not so much as philosophy but as “life-enhancing poetry.”
It was not the meaning of life that interested them but leading meaningful lives.

The Socrates Express Part One: Dawn

The Socrates Express Chapter 1: How to Get Out of Bed like Marcus Aurelius

Our demons do not haunt us at nighttime. They strike in the morning. We are at our most vulnerable when we wake, for that is when the memory of who we are, and how we got here, returns.
Albert Camus, is the “one truly serious philosophical problem.” Is life worth living or not? The rest was just so much metaphysical claptrap.

Marcus, like all great philosophers, was a wisdom scavenger. What mattered was an idea’s value, not its source.
“It’s the activity that gets you out of bed, not the alarm clock.” “When you wake in the morning, tell yourself: the people you deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, jealous, and surly.”
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.

The Socrates Express Chapter 2: How to Wonder like Socrates

“Our culture has generally tended to solve its problems without experiencing its questions.”

This is true, I think, of all philosophers. They possess an otherness that borders on the alien. Even Marcus, a Roman emperor, felt like a misfit.
Philosophy is all about questioning assumptions, rocking the boat. Captains rarely rock their own boats. They have too much at stake. Not philosophers. They’re outliers. Aliens.
Socrates was a practitioner of “Crazy Wisdom.” Found in traditions as disparate as Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity, Crazy Wisdom operates on the premise that the path to wisdom is crooked. We must zig before we can zag. Crazy Wisdom means casting aside social norms and risking ostracism, or worse, to jolt others into understanding.
Maybe he did possess a kind of wisdom, the wisdom of knowing what he didn’t know. For Socrates, the worst kind of ignorance was the kind that masquerades as knowledge.
“Every question is a cry to understand the world,” said the cosmologist Carl Sagan. Socrates would agree, up to a point. Every question is a cry to understand ourselves. Socrates was interested in “how” questions. How can I lead a happier, more meaningful life? How can I practice justice? How can I know myself?
Athenians, it seemed to Socrates, worked tirelessly to improve everything—except themselves. That needed to change, he thought, and he made it his life’s mission to do so.
Knowledge doesn’t age well. Methods do.
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.
Questions aren’t one-way; they move in (at least) two directions. They seek meaning, and convey it, too. Asking a friend the right question at the right time is an act of compassion, of love. Too often, though, we deploy questions as weapons, firing them at others—Who do you think you are? And at ourselves, Why can’t I do anything right? We use questions as excuses—What difference will it make? and, later, as justification, What more could I have done? 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.
“All philosophy begins with wonder.” Wonder, Socrates thought, isn’t something you’re either born with or not, like blond hair or freckles. Wonder is a skill, one we’re all capable of learning.“Wonder” is a wonderful word. It’s impossible to say it aloud without smiling. It comes from the Old English wundor, meaning “marvelous thing, miracle, object of astonishment.”
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.
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.
These are fine images, Socrates would say, but what do they add up to? You don’t really know what you mean when you say “good father,” do you? And, with a final twist of the philosophical knife, Socrates would suggest that until I knew, really knew, what I mean by “good father,” I couldn’t possibly become one. I was chasing a ghost. For Socrates, all misdeeds, such as bad parenting, are committed not out of malice but ignorance.
A genuine understanding of a particular virtue leads to virtuous behavior. Automatically. To know—truly know—what it means to be a good father is to be one.
“Why do you love something? You feel called.
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.
The goal was not to humiliate but to illuminate, to facilitate a kind of intellectual photosynthesis. Socrates as gardener. He loved nothing more than “planting a puzzle in a mind and watching it grow.” 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.
A good question does that. It grabs hold of you and won’t let go. A good question reframes the problem so that you see it in an entirely new light. A good question prompts not only a search for answers but a reevaluation of the search itself. A good question elicits not a clever reply but no reply.
Socrates aimed to induce: a state of ruthless self-interrogation, questioning not only what we know but who we are, in hopes of eliciting a radical shift in perspective.
“like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction.”
Genuine wisdom isn’t bound by place and time. It’s portable.
Now, whenever I’m striving to achieve something, anything, I stop and ask: What does success look like?
“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates famously said. Corollary Number One: The examined life that doesn’t produce practical results isn’t worth living.
Eudaimonia, the Greeks called it. Often translated as “happiness,” the word signifies something larger: a flourishing, meaningful life.
The unexamined life may not be worth living, but neither is the over examined one. “Ask yourself if you are happy and you cease to be so,” The more we try to seize happiness the more it slips from our grasp. Happiness is a by-product, never an objective. It’s an unexpected windfall from a life lived well.

The Socrates Express Chapter 3: How to Walk like Rousseau

Most of all, he was a walker. He walked often and he walked alone. Yes, a stroll with a close friend has its pleasures, as do walking clubs, but at its heart walking is a private act. We walk by ourselves and for ourselves. Freedom is walking’s essence. The freedom to depart and return when we wish, to meander, to, as Robert Louis Stevenson put it, “follow this way or that, as the freak takes you.”
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.
The mind thrives at three miles per hour, the speed of a moderately paced walk.
Nietzsche regularly embarked on spirited two-hour jaunts in the Swiss Alps, convinced “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”
For Rousseau, walking was like breathing. “I can scarcely think when I remain still; my body must be in motion to make my mind active.” As he walked, he’d jot down thoughts, large and small, on playing cards that he always carried with him. Rousseau was not the first philosopher to walk but he was the first to philosophize so extensively about walking.
“There is more wisdom in your body than in all of your philosophy,” said Nietzsche.
It pulses with the moral clarity and leavened wisdom of a man who, having been expelled, stoned, and ridiculed, no longer gives a fuck.
“Everything is in constant flux on this Earth,” Rousseau writes, echoing the Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s dictum: “All is flux.” The river we step in is never the same twice, nor are we.
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.
Walking, the slowest form of travel, is the quickest route to our more authentic selves. Walking is a sanctuary in motion. The peace we experience with each step adheres, and it conveys. Portable serenity.

The Socrates Express Chapter 4: How to See like Thoreau

Thoreau was a wisdom scavenger. “I do not the least care where I get my ideas, or what suggests them,”
Places are special to the extent we make them so.
Descartes famously said Cogito, ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.”
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.”
Led an examined life, one conducted with a “fearless self-inspection.” Thoreau vacillated between terrific velocity and utter stillness.
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 look but I don’t see. “Go not to the object; let it come to you,” The person attuned to beauty will find it in a garbage dump while “the fault-finder will find fault even in paradise.”
Thoreau saw too much. It exhausted him. “I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest, but suffer from a constant strain,”
Change your perspective and you change not only how you see but what you see. “From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow.”
(Thoreau was big on inverting; he even flipped his name, changing it from David Henry to Henry David.) Turn the world upside down, and you see it anew.
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.” Thoreau regularly saw beauty in nature’s imperfections.

The Socrates Express Chapter 5: How to Listen like Schopenhauer

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.
“The world is my idea.”
Idealists don’t believe only our minds exist (that is known as solipsism). The world exists, they say, but as a mental construct, and only when we perceive it. To use a different analogy, think of your refrigerator light. Whenever you open the door, it’s on. You might conclude that it is always on, but that would be a mistake. You don’t know what happens when the door closes. Likewise, we don’t know what exists beyond our mind’s capacities of perception.
Consider the parable of the Chinese farmer. One day, the farmer’s horse ran away. That evening, the neighbors stopped by to offer their sympathies. “So sorry to hear your horse ran away,” they said. “That’s too bad.” “Maybe,” the farmer said. “Maybe not.” The next day the horse returned, bringing seven wild horses with it. “Oh, isn’t that lucky,” said the neighbors. “Now you have eight horses. What a great turn of events.” “Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.” The next day the farmer’s son was training one of these horses when he was thrown and broke his leg. “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” said the neighbors. “Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.” The following day, conscription officers came to the village to recruit young men for the army, but they rejected the farmer’s son because he had a broken leg. And all the neighbors said, “Isn’t that great!” “Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.” We lead telephoto lives in a wide-angle world. We never see the big picture. The only sane response is, like the Chinese farmer, to adopt a philosophy of maybe-ism.
For Schopenhauer, noise was more than an annoyance. It was a barometer of character. One’s tolerance for noise, he believed, is inversely proportional to his intelligence. “Therefore, when I hear dogs barking unchecked for hours in the courtyard of a house, I know what to think of the inhabitants.” My wife’s hair dryer, an evil little fucker called the Bio Ionic PowerLight, has been known to sabotage an entire day. And don’t get me started on leaf blowers.
Recent research reveals the insidious effect noise pollution has on our physical and mental well-being. According to one study published in the Southern Medical Journal, noise pollution can lead to “anxiety, stress, nervousness, nausea, headache, emotional instability, argumentativeness, sexual impotence, changes in mood, increase in social conflicts, neurosis, hysteria, and psychosis.” Another study found that the roar of planes taking off and landing causes our blood pressure to spike, heartbeat to race, and stress hormones to release—even while sound asleep. Mental noise does more than disturb. It masks. In a noisy environment, we lose the signal, and our way.
“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.”
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.”
We confuse data with information, information with knowledge, and knowledge with wisdom. This tendency worried Schopenhauer.

The Socrates Express Part Two: Noon

How to Enjoy like Epicurus

Like Socrates, Epicurus was a practitioner of Crazy Wisdom. People needed to be shaken out of their trance, and by any means necessary.
Gardens require tending. So do our thoughts. Someone who thinks is not a philosopher any more than someone who putters about in his backyard is a gardener. Both pursuits—gardening and philosophy—require an adult’s disciplined commitment combined with a child’s easy joy.
You needn’t know what you’re looking for in order to find it. Gumption is the best navigator.
“Let nothing be done in your life, which will cause you fear if it becomes known to your neighbor,” said Epicurus.
Epicurus was a philosopher of the body as well as the mind. The body, he believed, contains the greatest wisdom.
Epicurus posited a simple diagnosis: we fear what is not harmful and desire what is not necessary.
Pleasure is the only thing we desire for its own sake. Everything else, even philosophy, is a means to that one end.
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.” recognize that what I crave most is not fame or wealth but peace of mind, the “pure pleasure of existing.”
I devote energy—too much, I know—chasing mirages. Stop aiming at decoys, counsels Epicurus. Better yet, stop shooting altogether. “Not what we have but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance,”
You cannot double tranquility. You’re either at peace or you are not.
The Epicureans, ensconced behind the garden walls, lived a simple life but one punctuated by lavish feasts. They knew that luxury is best enjoyed intermittently, and welcomed whatever goodness came their way. Epicureanism is a philosophy of acceptance, and its close cousin, gratitude. 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.
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.
Never trust a place without grit.
What is wrong with actively satisfying desires? I ask Tom. “Consider this french fry,” he says, waving one in the air as if it were a wand. “Okay,” I say, not sure where he is going with this. “If you have a desire for french fries, it starts with a pain. An absence of the item. A craving. A seeking. An itch.” “So the pleasure is the scratching of the itch?” “Right, but it is not something you ever reach because there will always be other pains, others itches that you have to scratch.” This sounds awful, this endless cycle of itching and scratching. What began as a pleasure ends as pain. The only solution is to minimize those desires.
Epicurus considered friendship one of life’s great pleasures. “Of all the things which contribute to a blessed life, none is more important, more fruitful, than friendship,”

The Socrates Express Chapter 7: How to Pay Attention like Simone Weil

Speed breeds impatience.
The quality of our attention determines the quality of our lives. You are what you choose to pay attention to and, crucially, how you pay attention.
Chances are, though, it’s moments when you were most attentive. Our lives are no less and no more than the sum of our most rapt moments. “The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.”
People immersed in flow are not self-absorbed, for there is no self to be absorbed. No musician, only music. No dancer, only dancing. Here is how an avid sailor describes being in flow. “One forgets oneself, one forgets everything, seeing only the play of the boat with the sea, the play of the sea around the boat, leaving aside everything not essential to that game.” You don’t need to sail the Atlantic or climb Everest to experience flow. You just need to pay attention.
The philosopher who famously said “I think, therefore I am” also said, in so many words, I pay attention; therefore I am able to transcend doubt.
It doesn’t take much, says Weil. A simple five-word question can soften a heart, and change a life: “What are you going through?” These words are so powerful, because they recognize the sufferer, “not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.”
Each reading produces a different shade of meaning, like a crystal that appears as different colors, depending on how the light strikes it.
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.”
“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.
Don’t seek solutions. Wait for them. The more you scan your brain for the “right” word, the more it eludes you. Wait for it, though, and it will come. Eventually.
Speed is the enemy of attention. Patience is a virtue. It is also good for you, as the latest research shows. Patient people are happier and healthier than impatient ones, studies find. Patient people are more likely to act rationally. They have better coping skills.
I was concentrating but not paying attention. I knew what I was looking for before I found it. I was caught up in my own desire. That’s always dangerous.
We see this dynamic at work in people eager to hook the Big Idea, one they hope will transform them from mere thinker to Thought Leader. More interested in packaging ideas than pondering them, they release their Big Idea into the world before it has ripened. These aspiring Thought Leaders don’t want to do the hard work attention demands. Attention is hard, not the way judo or archery is hard. It’s hard the way meditation, or parenting, is hard. It’s hard the way waiting for a train is hard. Attention is not a skill we acquire, like knitting or fencing. It is a state of mind, an orientation. We don’t so much learn attention as turn toward it. This pivot only happens when we pause, like Socrates, and get out of our own head. “Decreation,” Weil calls it.
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.
Sometimes endings reveal more than beginnings.
“Loss” is a short but menacing word. The Napoleon of nouns. Unless preceded by “weight,” it is almost always negative. That’s why we don’t just experience a loss. We suffer a loss. Someone struggling, in work or love, is said to be “lost.” When retracing the arc of a nation, or a life, historians demarcate a specific point in time beyond which “all was lost.”
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.

The Socrates Express Chapter 8: How to Fight like Gandhi

“It would be cowardice to run back to India without fulfilling my obligation. The hardship to which I was subjected was superficial—only a symptom of the deep disease of color prejudice. I should try, if possible, to root out the disease and suffer hardships in the process.” In that moment, he chose a path, one that, despite bumps and swerves and occasional collisions, he remained on for the rest of his days.
Gandhi saw fighting not as a necessary evil but as a necessary good. Provided we fight well. Gandhi abhorred violence, but there was something he hated even more: cowardice. Given a choice between the two, he preferred violence. “A coward is less than a man.” Thus Gandhi’s true objective: reclaiming his nation’s lost virility, and on its own terms. Do that, he believed, and freedom would follow.
We don’t admire the gods. We might revere them or fear them, but we don’t admire them. We admire mortals, better versions of ourselves. Gandhi was no god. No saint, either. At age twelve, he stole money from his parents and brother to buy cigarettes. He’d sneak off to eat meat (forbidden among his caste), chewing on goat flesh along the river with a friend who, like Gandhi, was convinced it was the Englishman’s carnivorous diet that made him strong. At the young age of thirteen, Gandhi was married. He was not a good husband. He’d lash out in jealous rages against his wife, Kasturba. Once, he threatened to expel her from the house unless she did certain household chores. “Have you no shame?” she sobbed. “Where am I to go?” The father of the nation was a lousy father to his children. In the political arena, too, he made mistakes. “My Himalayan blunder,” he called one such bungled campaign. As for his experiments, some went too far. At age seventy-five, he decided to test his vow of celibacy by sleeping naked with young women, including his grandniece Manu.
“When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to the Bhagavad Gita, and find a verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow.” 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.
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.
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.
It takes time to soften hearts. Progress isn’t always visible to the naked eye.
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. Gandhi would take one look at my Parker predicament and urge me to think creatively. Experiment.
Gandhi once said, must “be the leader in clean action based on clean thought.”

The Socrates Express Chapter 9: How to Be Kind like Confucius

The two philosophers had a lot in common. They were nearly contemporaries. Socrates was born less than a decade after Confucius died, in 479 BC. Both men occupied precarious positions, admired by their disciples, mistrusted by the elites. Both had an informal, conversational teaching style. Both questioned assumptions. Both valued knowledge a lot and ignorance more. Neither cared for metaphysical speculation. (When a student asked Confucius about the afterlife, the Master replied, “If you cannot understand life, how can you understand death?”) Both were sticklers for definitions. “If words are not right, judgments are not clear,” Confucius said.
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. Confucius didn’t invent kindness, of course, but he did elevate it: from an indulgence to a philosophical linchpin, and the basis for good governance. 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.”
Confucius’s goal was character development: the acquisition of moral skills. And no skill was more important than filial devotion.
Confucius demands unswerving but not unthinking devotion. If an elderly parent veers off course, by all means redirect him, but do so judiciously, respectfully. Filial piety is a means, not an end. Just as we go to the gym not to sweat but to get in shape, we practice filial piety not for its own sake (only) but to develop our kindness muscles. Caring for an elderly parent is heavy lifting. Confucius adds a few pounds by insisting we do so cheerfully, with a genuine smile. The family is our ren gym. It is where we learn to love and be loved. Proximity matters. Start by treating those closest to you kindly, and go from there. Like a stone tossed into a pond, kindness ripples outward in ever-widening circles, as we expand our sphere of concern from ourselves to our family to our neighborhood to our nation to all sentient beings. If we can feel compassion for one creature, we can feel it for all of them.
“Since you desire status, then help others achieve it, since you desire success then help others attain it.”
By “study” Confucius doesn’t mean rote memorization or even learning, per se. He has something deeper in mind: moral self-cultivation. What we are taught, we learn. What we cultivate, we absorb. There are no small acts of kindness. Each compassionate deed is like watering a redwood seed. You never know what heights it might reach.
It is our duty, almost a holy responsibility, says Gould, “to record and honor the victorious weight of these innumerable little kindnesses.” 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. Does kindness decrease as you accelerate? Confucius seems to think so. He describes the benevolent person as “simple in manner and slow of speech.”

The Socrates Express Chapter 10: How to Appreciate the Small Things like Sei Shōnagon

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. 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.
There is not one truth but many. Choose one, says Shōnagon. Make it your own.
Like Epicurus, Shōnagon invents a taxonomy of pleasure. She distinguishes the merely pleasurable from the truly okashii, or delightful. 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.
As Thoreau taught me, we only see what we’re prepared to see. Most of us are ill-prepared to see the small. Not Shōnagon. She knew our lives are nothing more, or less, than the sum of a million tiny joys.
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.
No other civilization, with the possible exception of Renaissance Italy, held beauty in such high regard and went to such lengths to cultivate it as Heian Japan. They wrote poetry. They played music. They created exquisite gardens. They mixed incenses with a fierce single-mindedness today reserved for Kona coffee and fantasy football.
The Heian Japanese internalized the artistic impulse, rendering it invisible the way rafters and beams and other supporting structures of a well-designed building are rendered invisible. Life was art and art was life, so closely linked as to be inseparable. The Japanese of the time prized the aesthetic experience more than abstract speculation. More important than what you knew was how you saw, how you listened, and, yes, how you smelled.
convenience is never free. It always carries a hidden cost, a “convenience tax,” one exacted in intimacy lost and beauty forfeited. Consciously or not, we gladly pay this tax.
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.”

The Socrates Express Part Three: Dusk

How to Have No Regrets like Nietzsche

“We want to be the poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters,”

Nietzsche craved routine. He woke early, took a cold bath, and then sat down for a monkish breakfast: raw eggs, tea, an aniseed biscuit. During the day, he wrote and walked. In the evening, between seven and nine, he sat still in the dark.
Imagine you are visited in the dead of night by a demon, who says to you: “This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence—and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again—and you with it, you dust of dust! Nietzsche is not speaking of reincarnation. You do not return as the same soul in a different body. It is the “self-same you” that returns, again and again. You do not, like Phil Connors of Groundhog Day, recall your previous iterations. You cannot, like Phil, edit your recurring life. Everything has happened before, and it will happen again, exactly the same way, forever. All of it.
“How can anyone become a thinker if he does not spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?”
“All truth is crooked,” All lives, too. Only in retrospect do we straighten the narrative, assign patterns and meaning. At the time, it’s all zigs and zags. And white space: breaks in the text that cleave our former selves from some incipient future self. These white spaces look like omissions. They are not. They are wordless transitions, points where the currents of our life shift course.
Like Rousseau, Nietzsche wandered. Unlike Rousseau, his wandering had a pattern, a cadence: Switzerland in the summer, Italy or southern France in the winter. His only property was the clothes he wore, the paper he wrote on, and the large trunk where he kept them.
“We have to learn to think differently… to feel differently,” he said. He suffered from a kind of affective synesthesia. He thought the way most of us feel: instinctively, and with a ferocity not entirely under his control. Nietzsche didn’t formulate ideas. He birthed them.
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.
Like an artist, a philosopher like Nietzsche hands us a pair of glasses and says, “Look at the world through these. Do you see what I see? Isn’t it miraculous?”
Warm air dulls the mind. Cold air sharpens.
No wonder Nietzsche calls Eternal Recurrence “the heaviest burden.” Nothing is weightier than eternity. If everything recurs infinitely, then there are no light moments, no trivial ones. Every moment, no matter how inconsequential, possesses the same weight and mass as others. “All actions are equally great and small.”
Think of Eternal Recurrence as a daily check-in with yourself: Are you living the life you want to live? Are you sure you want to drink that bottle of tequila and endure an infinite hangover? Eternal Recurrence demands we ruthlessly audit our lives and ask: What is worthy of eternity?
Nietzsche was no masochist. He saw suffering as an ingredient in the good life, a means of learning. “Only suffering leads to knowledge,” he said. Suffering is the call we didn’t solicit but must answer anyway.
“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful,”
We can choose to find joy not in certainty but in its opposite. Once we do that, life—the same life from an outsider’s perspective—feels quite different to us. Find joy in uncertainty and the tumult at the office becomes cause for celebration, not teeth gnashing and an extra glass of wine at the end of the day.
Better yet: dance. Don’t wait for a reason to dance. Just dance. Dance feverishly and with abandon, as if no one is watching. When life is good, dance. When it hurts, dance. And when your time is up and the dance is over, say—no, shout—Da capo! Again, again.

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