The Socrates Express
- Автор: Вейнер Эрик
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
- Жанр: География, путевые заметки
Электронная книга - «The Socrates Express». Краткое содержание книги:
We contemplate for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a different perspective, to unearth hidden beauty and find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope.
Eric Weiner, *New York Times* bestselling author of *The Geography of Bliss* , combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pilgrimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from philosophers around the world, from Marcus Aurelius to Arthur Schopenhauer, Confucius to Montaigne. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport) he traversed thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi,...
Schopenhauer’s pessimism didn’t temper with age. If anything, it grew, congealing into a black hole of despair. “Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse—until at last the worst of all arrives,” he writes. All of us are careening headlong toward a “total, inevitable, irremediable shipwreck.” I put the book down and sigh. It’s going to be a long day. I order another cup of Sumatran and soldier on.
We are living in the “worst of all possible worlds,” the philosopher of pessimism informs me. Any worse, and it wouldn’t exist. Which wouldn’t be so bad. “Life is happiest when we perceive it least,” he writes.
I pause for air, and light. There is none. I swear I can feel Schopenhauer’s dark shadow hovering over me. I focus my eyes and see an older woman wearing baggy, wrinkled pants and missing more teeth than she has. She is clearly homeless, or nearly so. She gestures to the other chair at my table and says something in German. Whatever she says does not contain any of the four German words I know. Thinking on my feet, I conclude she has asked to borrow the chair. “Ja, bitte,” I say, deploying—with aplomb, I might add—two of my four German words.
Making assumptions in your native tongue is ill-advised. Making assumptions in a foreign language you do not speak is just stupid. She did not ask to borrow the chair. She has asked if she can sit in the chair and speak with me, speak at me. For a long time. She talks and talks, and I nod and nod, tossing out the occasional “ja, ja.”
It’s a one-sided conversation. I pick up dribs (no drabs). She is an oma, or grandmother (my third German word). The rest is static.
I’m hoping she’ll exhaust herself but she’s not even slowing down. What would Socrates do? He would converse, of course, but how?
A waiter brings her a coffee—clearly, on the house. She expresses gratitude effusively. Gratitude is a universal language, one expressed with the eyes, the entire body, more than with words.
Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, didn’t dismiss the possibility of gratitude—and compassion. We experience the world as separateness but, Schopenhauer believed, echoing Eastern mystics, this perception is an illusion. 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.
My visitor is still talking, even as she drinks her coffee. I decide to listen. I can’t understand, but I can listen.
Listening mattered to Schopenhauer. Listening to music, that “universal language of the heart,” as he called it. Other kinds of listening, too. Listening to your intuition, above the din and noise of the world. Listening to other voices, speaking foreign tongues, for you never know where wisdom lurks. And, yes, listening to those who suffer. Despite his misanthropy and chronic grumpiness, Schopenhauer valued compassion, even if he demonstrated it more to animals than to his fellow humans.
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 woman seems to appreciate my attentiveness, judging by the smile fanning across her toothless mouth. Eventually she gets up to leave. We say good-bye, tschüss. German word number four.
Schopenhauer wasn’t the first, or last, pessimistic philosopher, but he was in a league of his own. What distinguishes Schopenhauer is not his broodiness but the philosophical edifice, the metaphysics of misery, he constructed to explain it. There have been many pessimistic philosophers, but only one true philosopher of pessimism.
It’s all laid out in his opus, The World as Will and Representation, a title only a philosopher could love. Completed while still in his twenties, it was, he said, “the product of a single thought.” That thought required 1,156 pages to explicate. I cut Arthur some slack. It is a very big thought. The opening sentence is a doozy: “The world is my idea.”
This is not, for once, Schopenhauer’s arrogance speaking. It’s his philosophy. He’s not suggesting he is author of the world but, rather, that we all construct reality in our minds. His world is his idea, and your world yours.
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.
I realize this concept sounds odd, possibly delusional, but it is not so far-fetched, I think. Nigel Warburton, a contemporary philosopher, uses the analogy of a giant movie hall, with everyone in separate screening rooms, watching the same film. “We cannot leave because there is nothing outside,” he says. “The films are our reality. When no one is watching the screen, the projector light is switched off but the films keep running through the projector.”
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.
Every day, as we go about our lives, we experience this mentally constructed, or phenomenal, world. It is real—the way the surface of a lake is real. But just as the glassy surface isn’t the whole lake, the phenomenal world represents only a fraction of reality. It fails to account for the depths.
Those depths, Idealists like Immanuel Kant believe, lie beyond sensory perception, but are every bit as real as the unseen lake bed. More real, in fact, than the fleeting sensory phenomena we typically experience. Philosophers have given this unseen reality various names. Kant called it the noumenon. Plato called it the world of Ideal Forms. For Indian philosophers, it is Brahman. Different names but the same idea: a plane of existence that remains unknown to us as we rush to work, binge-watch Netflix, and, in general, go about our business in the world of shadows.
Schopenhauer subscribed to this world-beyond-this-world notion but added his own intriguing and, naturally, dark twist. Schopenhauer, unlike Kant, believed the noumenon was a single, unified entity, and one we can access, albeit indirectly. It suffuses all humans and animals, and even inanimate objects. It is purposeless and striving, and it is unrelentingly, unapologetically evil.
Schopenhauer called this force the “Will.” It’s an unfortunate name, I think. By Will, Schopenhauer doesn’t mean willpower, but, rather, a kind of force or energy. Something like gravity, only not as benign. He writes:
Its desires are unlimited, its claims inexhaustible, and every desire gives birth to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its craving, set a final goal to its demands, and fill the bottomless pit of its heart.
Two observations. One, the Will sounds an awful lot like my college girlfriend. Two, those shafts of light are looking more remote.
Will is endless striving. Will is desire without satisfaction. The preview but never the movie. Sex but never climax. Will is what makes you order a third Scotch when two was enough. Will is that grinding sound in your head that, while occasionally muffled, is never silenced, even after the fourth Scotch.
It gets worse. The Will is destined to harm itself. “At bottom,” says Schopenhauer, “the Will must live on itself, since nothing exists besides it, and it is a hungry will.” When a lion sinks its teeth into a gazelle it is sinking its teeth into its own hide.
One day, Schopenhauer, an amateur zoologist, caught wind of a newly discovered genus of ant discovered in Australia. Myrmecia, or the Australian bulldog ant, has a much-deserved reputation for viciousness. It grips its prey in its powerful jaws, then repeatedly stings it with a deadly venom. When the bulldog ant is cut in two, its biting head engages in a fierce battle with its stinging tail. “The battle may last a half hour until they die or are taken away by other ants,” notes Schopenhauer.