The Socrates Express

Notes

In the interest of keeping the endnotes relatively brief, I’ve cited only secondary sources here, as well as clarified points of controversy. Primary sources—the words of the philosophers themselves—can be found in the bibliography.

INTRODUCTION: DEPARTURE

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato”: Cited in Gyles Brandreth, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 84.

“misliving”: William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13.

“radical reflection”: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), xxxv.

“life-enhancing poetry”: Daniel Klein, Foreword to Epicurus: The Art of Happiness (New York: Penguin, 2012), viii–ix.

“Sooner or later”: Quoted in Robert Solomon, The Joy of Philosophy: Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 10.

1: HOW TO GET OUT OF BED LIKE MARCUS AURELIUS

We have a common enemy: Marcus and I both follow the path of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. “The essence of my desire is simply this: to sleep away life,” he said. The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2002), 428.

Suicide, said the French: Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1983), 3.

The Scottish philosopher: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 1985), Book III, Part I.

Later, enamored of the Greek: Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009), 21.

“his constant strivings”: Ibid. 251.

possibly laced with opium: A good deal of controversy surrounds the question of whether Marcus was ingesting, and possibly addicted to, opium. See Thomas Africa, “The Opium Addiction of Marcus Aurelius,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22, no. 1 (1961): 97–102.

Marcus had no intention: “To Myself” is a more faithful translation of the title than Meditations.

“a self-help book”: Gregory Hays, Introduction to Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (New York: Penguin, 2002), xxxvii.

“someone in the process”: Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford, UK: Blackwell), 251.

2: HOW TO WONDER LIKE SOCRATES

Train of thought: I had assumed that, like “off the rails,” the expression “train of thought(s)” was born of the railroad age. It was not. The phrase was coined by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in 1651—more than a century before the first railroad.

“Our culture has generally tended to solve”: Jacob Needleman, The Heart of Philosophy (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 7.

“He seems to have entered”: Peter Kreeft, Philosophy 101 by Socrates (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002), 25.

Socrates was a practitioner of: Drukpa Kunley, a fifteenth-century Buddhist monk, was perhaps the most famous practitioner of Crazy Wisdom. He called his penis “The Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom” and is credited with initiating the practice in Bhutan (still in vogue today) of painting phalluses on buildings to ward off evil spirits.

“with a big, round”: Needleman, The Heart of Philosophy, 153.

“great, smooth forehead”: Ibid, 153.

“marvelous new naiveté”: Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957), 31.

“Every question is a cry”: Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Cradle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine, 1996), 323.

“Socrates was the first”: Quoted in Paul Johnson, Socrates: A Man for Our Times (New York: Penguin, 2002), 81–82.

“Enlightened kibitzing”: Solomon, The Joy of Philosophy, 14.

“All philosophy begins with”: Centuries later, Ralph Waldo Emerson added, correctly, that “[w]onder is the seed of science.”

“One time at dawn he”: Quoted in James Miller, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011), 42.