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,...
Another interlocutor complained that Socrates reduced him to a “mass of helplessness” and compares the philosopher to a “torpedo fish” (also known as an electric ray) that numbs people’s minds.
Conversing with Socrates was frustrating the way conversing with an inquisitive five-year-old is frustrating.
Can we have ice cream for dinner?
No.
Why?
Because ice cream isn’t good for you.
Why?
Because it contains sugar.
Why is sugar bad for you?
Because it is stored in the fat cells of your body.
Why?
Because it just is! Now go to your room.
The child’s questions irk us not because they are silly but because we are incapable of answering them adequately. The child, like Socrates, unmasks our ignorance, and while that may be beneficial in the long run, in the short run it’s annoying. “If you do not annoy anyone, you are not a philosopher,” says Peter Kreeft.
I read that and perk up, hopeful. I have it on good word, and from multiple sources, that I am indeed annoying. World-class. I see other similarities with Socrates. The outlier status. The paunch. The wandering, wondering mind. The love of talk.
Where we part ways, though, is persistence. I tend to walk away from a fight, real or imagined. Not Socrates. He displayed great courage. Fighting in the siege of Potidaea, in 432 BC, he demonstrated remarkable strength and stamina, saving the life of his friend Alcibiades.
In the philosophical arena, too, Socrates was unrelenting. He was an unsparing auditor, demanding people account not only for their beliefs but for their lives. You couldn’t wiggle out of a debate with Socrates. He saw through the smoke screen of obfuscation favored by intellectual posers, then and now. Look at you, a general, who doesn’t know what courage is. A priest who can’t tell me what piety is. A parent who doesn’t know what love is.
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.”
This puzzle planting was tricky business. Nobody likes having their ignorance exposed, especially so publicly, and many of the dialogues grew heated. “I don’t understand you, Socrates, so I wish you’d ask someone who did,” said one of his annoyed companions in a dialogue called Gorgias. “You are a tyrant, Socrates. I wish you’d either bring an end to this argument or get someone else to argue with you.” Sometimes more than strong words were exchanged. “Men pummeled [Socrates] with their fists and tore his hair out,” reports the third-century-AD biographer Diogenes Laertius.
Socrates annoyed others for a good cause: better vision. Socrates as optometrist. People walk around with faulty eyeglass prescriptions. Naturally, this lapse affects how they see, and what they see. They have mistaken their distorted view of reality as the only view. Worse, they don’t even know they’re wearing glasses. They stumble through the day, bumping into furniture, tripping over people, all the while blaming the furniture and the people. Socrates thought this was silly, and unnecessary.
The sun has turned a glowing crimson, and a slight chill has crept into the air. Jacob Needleman and I have been talking for hours but neither of us has tired of this enlightened kibitzing. We turn to the subject of false beliefs.
The philosopher, Needleman suggests, is like a burly bouncer at the Nightclub of Ideas.
“A philosopher says to his opinions, ‘You are my opinions. How did you get in here? You didn’t ask me. I didn’t examine you. Yet I believe you. You’re taking over my life.’ ”
I think of my opinions and how they colonize my mind. Like all wily colonizers, they trick me into believing I invited them. Did I? Or did they show up unannounced, these ideas of others, and dress themselves in my clothing?
I circle back to that intriguing, beguiling notion of “experiencing questions.” What does he mean?
Jacob explains that he distinguishes ordinary questioning from “deep questioning.” Ordinary questioning skates along the surface, like Siri. Deep questioning is slow and immersive.
“If I really live a question, let it haunt me, then this state of deep questioning is transformative in itself.”
“Live the question?”
“Yes, live the question. Have it in the back of your mind a lot of the time. Living a question. Not just trying to fix it. Too often we jump to the solution.”
This sounds good, makes me want to spend the rest of my days living questions, but what about answers? Where do they fit in? This is the rap on philosophy: that it’s all talk, endless questions and no answers. The train that is always departing, never arriving.
Not true, says Needleman. Philosophy is definitely interested in the destination, but the journey can’t be rushed. That is the only way to ensure you arrive not merely at clever answers but “answers of the heart.” The other kind, answers of the head, are not only less satisfying but, in the deepest sense, less true.
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 while ago, I was speaking with my friend Jennifer. To clarify: I was speaking; she was listening, as I relayed my usual catalog of worries.
I suffer from a distribution problem, I told her. I have enough of any given attribute, but it’s distributed unevenly. Hair, for instance. I’ve got plenty on my chest, and in my nostrils, but not nearly enough on my head.
Success, though, is more problematic. That is not a distribution problem, I explained, but a genuine shortage. “I am not,” I told her, “successful enough.”
Jennifer paused the way people do when they are either about to say something profound or are plotting an escape strategy. Fortunately, Jennifer’s pause was the former.
“What does success look like?” she said.
“What does success look like?” I said.
“Yes, what does success look like?”
Normally, when you parrot a question back to someone they feel obliged to elaborate, to connect the dots for you. Not Jennifer. My question boomeranged and hit me upside the head. What does success look like? This had never occurred to me. I had always thought of success in terms of quantity, not aesthetics.
How we frame a question matters. Jennifer could have asked, “Why do you want to be successful?” or “How much success is enough?” I would have dismissed those queries, swatted them like the mosquitoes circling as we sat on her deck in New Jersey. Why do I want to be successful? I just do—doesn’t everybody? How much success is enough? More than I currently have.
Jennifer didn’t ask me those questions, though. She asked me what success looked like. Implied in her question was the personal. What does it look like to me? Would I recognize it if I saw it?
I just sat there, stunned, as if a torpedo fish had stung my brain. 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 at all. From ancient times, long before Socrates, Indian sages have practiced brahmodya, a competition where contestants aim to articulate absolute truth. The contest always ends in silence. As author Karen Armstrong explains, “The moment of insight came when they realized the inadequacy of their words, and thus intuited the ineffable.”