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,...
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 Schopenhauer. Sadness by itself isn’t painful. It is sadness about something that hurts. This is why we enjoy watching a tearjerker or listening to a Leonard Cohen song. Less invested in the drama, we experience 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 an institution. He despised academia, with its rigid rules and “petticoat philosophers.” He preferred the life of a feral philosopher and, thanks to his father’s inheritance, could afford to lead one. No need to grind lenses at an optician’s shop like Spinoza, or teach undergrads like Kant.
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.
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.
Good philosophers are good listeners. They listen to many voices, no matter how strange, for you never know where wisdom might be hiding. Arthur Schopenhauer found it concealed in an ancient, alien text.
The year was 1813. Still on speaking terms with his mother, Schopenhauer joined one of her regular salons. Among the attendees was a scholar named Friedrich Majer. His specialty, new and suspect at the time, was Eastern philosophy. He showed Schopenhauer an obscure magazine, the Asiatic, and told him of an Indian text called the Upanishads. Schopenhauer was instantly fascinated.
Today we take it for granted that Eastern philosophies and religions are a source of great wisdom, as any visit to a bookstore attests, but that was not the case in Schopenhauer’s time. Buddhism and Hinduism were virtually unknown in the West. It would be another three decades before a copy of the Bhagavad Gita made it to Thoreau’s cabin at Walden. Academics knew little about Eastern philosophy, and denigrated what they did know. All the literature of India and Arabia, the British politician Thomas Macaulay infamously said, “equaled a single shelf of a good European library.”
Schopenhauer was different. He devoured these teachings, mesmerized by their “superhuman conceptions.” He was hungry. 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. While he developed a deep and, at the time, rare understanding of Buddhism, he did not practice what he knew. He did not meditate. He did not renounce worldly pleasures. He enjoyed gourmet cuisine and expensive clothes and remained sexually active throughout his life, once remarking that “the sexual organs are the true center of the world.”
Western philosophy, some say, is myopic, blind to the wisdom of others. A rigidly exclusive club of dead white, and only white, men. There’s some truth to this charge, but look more closely at the fabric of Western philosophy and you see Eastern threads running throughout. As far back as Epicurus’s time, in 350 BC, East and West were conversing, even if they didn’t always listen to one another. Centuries later, the conversation resumed. Not only Thoreau and Schopenhauer, but others, too. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and William James were intimately familiar with the wisdom of India and China. This wisdom seeped into their philosophy.
I’m warming to Schopenhauer. The prince of darkness, the philosopher of pessimism, is a master stylist, a joy to read. His writing is crisp and lively, almost poetic. He is the most readable of the German philosophers (admittedly, a low bar, but Schopenhauer clears it easily). No philosopher, says Schopenhauer scholar Bryan Magee, is “more with you, almost tangibly and audibly present when you read them.”
True, he was a wounded soul, perhaps more than most, but that is a difference of degree, not kind. We all have a little Schopenhauer inside us. We’re all wounded. Only the size and shape of the wounds differ.
Schopenhauer is not an easy man to like—“a nasty piece of work,” says one biographer—but he is an easy man to admire. A lover of art and music, he developed one of philosophy’s most profound, and beautiful, theories of aesthetics, and influenced generations of artists and writers. Tolstoy and Wagner kept portraits of the philosopher in their studies. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges learned German so he could read Schopenhauer in the original. Comedians love Schopenhauer, confirming suspicions about the darkness that lurks behind humor.