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,...
This seemed like the right time for a father-daughter journey. My daughter no longer finds my jokes funny (she insists she never did) and no longer hugs me, but we’re still on speaking terms. In an uncertain universe, who knows how much longer that will last?
Our children are like those rings arborists use to date trees. Empirical evidence of years passing. They grow, and change, and we know we are changing, too, even if it’s less obvious. As an older father, the rings matter more. I sense their concentric accumulation more acutely than most. I resist the temptation to postpone joy. Why not Paris? Why not now—before the rapids of adolescence sweep her away? The cincher was that Sonya, unlike me, speaks French. If this wasn’t kairos, I didn’t know what was.
I had it all figured out beforehand and, as Socrates warned, that’s always dangerous. In my mind, it would be a touching father-daughter journey to Paris. I pictured us exploring Beauvoir’s haunts. I pictured us discussing the precepts of existentialism while sipping chardonnay and Sprite at a Left Bank café. I pictured me and my thirteen-year-old daughter getting to know each other better.
This trip was my “project,” a favorite existentialist term. Projects enable us to transcend the circumstances of our lives and go beyond ourselves. But, Beauvoir warns, our projects are forever bumping into other people’s. Our freedom is intertwined with theirs. We are only as free as they are. My project—tender father-daughter trip to France—collided head-on with Sonya’s project: eat at McDonald’s and text friends back home.
I’m having trouble operating the ticket machine at the subway station. It’s not a linguistic issue but a digital one. I can’t seem to press the right buttons in the right sequence.
“Let me do it, Old Man,” she says. Sonya has begun calling me Old Man. As in, “Let’s get some nugs, Old Man.” She’s joking. I’m not old. Her fingers fly across the keypad and, boom-boom, our tickets are dispensed and we’re through the turnstiles in a flash.
We arrive at our destination: the Sorbonne. Existentialism is a fuzzy philosophy, more than most. I need something solid to grab on to, so I, a creature of place, zeroed in on the elite university where Simone de Beauvoir studied.
Sonya takes one look and declares herself unimpressed with “the big beige building.” Worse, we discover casual visitors are not allowed. We stand for a few minutes in the cold drizzle, gazing inside like children waiting for a candy store to open. At least I am gazing. Sonya is eye-rolling.
I reach into my satchel and retrieve a sheath of paper. A guide to Simone de Beauvoir’s Paris. It is a slim sheath. Beauvoir receives far less attention than Sartre, France’s philosopher-hero. There is, though, a pedestrian bridge across the Seine named after her. This sounds promising. Bridges, in my experience, refresh the body and stir the intellect. Also, they make excellent metaphors.
“We are going to the Simone de Beauvoir Bridge!” I announce, as if I were de Gaulle declaring Paris liberated. Sonya’s reply is nonverbal, a roll of the eyes as cutting as it is subtle.
We walk along the Seine, bundling ourselves against the unseasonable chill in the spring air.
“Dad,” says Sonya. “I have a question.”
A question! The seed of all philosophy. The root of wonder. Perhaps she’s wondering whether the world is an illusion, or how we can lead authentic lives in an inauthentic age. Or maybe it’s Kant’s Categorical Imperative—the notion that the upstanding person acts ethically regardless of circumstances or motive—that intrigues her. In any event, I am delighted, and poised to impart parental wisdom.
“Yes, Sonya. What is your question?”
“When did your hairline start to recede?”
“Uh, when I was about twenty-four years old, I think.”
“Why didn’t you just shave it off entirely?”
“I guess I was holding out hope.”
“That’s not how it works, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
Okay, not exactly a Platonic dialogue. But a start, I suppose.
As we walk, I take the initiative and dadsplain about existentialism. I dadsplain how it is a philosophy, as the name implies, focused on existence, and thus represents a return to the original, therapeutic mission of philosophy. Not a what but a how. How can we lead more authentic, meaningful lives?
The good news, existentialists say, is that the answer is entirely up to us. Not God or human nature. There is no human nature, only possible natures. Or, as Beauvoir said: “Man’s nature is to have no nature.”
This is incredibly empowering—and terrifying. We are, in the famous words of Sartre, “condemned to be free.” We yearn for freedom but also fear it, for if we are truly free we have no one but ourselves to blame for our unhappiness.
For the existentialists, we are what we do. Period. We are no more and no less than our projects fully realized. There is no such thing as love in the abstract, only acts of love; no genius, only acts of genius. In our deeds, we draw our self-portrait, one brushstroke at a time. We are that portrait “and nothing but that portrait,” Sartre said. Stop trying to find yourself. Start painting yourself.
We can become anything we want, I dadsplain. Just because you’re a waiter in a café, to use one of Sartre’s best-known examples, doesn’t mean you must remain a waiter. You have choices, and it is through these choices, consciously made and rigorously pursued, that we create our essence.
When I finish dadsplaining, I turn to Sonya. She had been listening quietly. I take this as a good sign—dadsplaining works!—but the look in her eye tells me she’s not buying it.
“So I can be anything, just by choosing?”
“That’s right.”
“What if I want to be a chicken? I can’t be a chicken just because I choose to be one. I can sit on eggs all day and I can cluck like a chicken, but I can’t be a chicken. Do you see me growing feathers?”
“Ah, no, but that’s because it’s not in your facticity to be a chicken.”
“Facticity?”
Facticity is another existentialist term. It refers to elements of our life we did not choose. You didn’t choose to be born in this country at this time to these parents. You have no control over your facticity. The good news, I dadsplain, is you can transcend it and go beyond your facticity, and beyond yourself, too.
“Facticity? Really, man? This Simone de Beauvoir is overrated. What about Shakespeare?”
“What about him?”
“He invented a crap-ton of words. Like ‘eyeball’ and ‘awesome.’ You couldn’t say, ‘Awesome eyeball, dude,’ if it wasn’t for Shakespeare. Think about it.”
“You have a point.”
“See, I could be the next Simone de Beauvoir.”
“You could. You’ll need some philosophical terms, though. All real philosophers have them. Let’s see. How about ‘awesome-icity’?”
“What does it mean?”
“Well, uh, it is the state of being awesome. It is the notion that everyone has a little awesomeness in them.”
“Do some people have more awesomeness than others?”
“No. Some people, though, are more attuned to their awesomeness than others. When you tap into your reservoir of awesomeness, it’s known as awesome-icity.”
Sonya says nothing, nor does she roll her eyes. High praise.
As we walk, sunlight breaking through the clouds, it dawns on me that we were just doing philosophy. Not reading philosophy or studying philosophy but doing it. We wrestled aloud with an important aspect of our shared humanity—experiencing awesomeness—and invented a terminology designed to illuminate it. I realize awesome-icity isn’t on par with Plato’s Theory of Forms or Kant’s Categorical Imperative, but it’s a start. Who knows where it might lead?
At last, we reach the Simone de Beauvoir Bridge. It is, I think, an extremely philosophical bridge. You enter the bridge from one of three ramps, then, after crossing the Seine, exit the bridge from one of three additional ramps. You needn’t enter and exit on the same level; you can switch levels at any time.