The Socrates Express

INTRODUCTION

Departure

We are hungry. We eat and eat and eat some more, yet still we are hungry.

Sometimes we experience the hunger as a faint presence; other times, when the world is upended and fear roams unchecked, the hunger swells, and threatens to consume us.

We reach for our smartphones. With a swipe of a finger, we can access all human knowledge: from ancient Egypt to quantum physics. We gobble it up, but still we are hungry.

What is this hunger that cannot be sated? We don’t want what we think we want. We think we want information and knowledge. We do not. We want wisdom. There’s a difference. Information is a jumble of facts, knowledge a more organized jumble. Wisdom untangles the facts, makes sense of them, and, crucially, suggests how best to use them. As the British musician Miles Kington said: “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” Knowledge knows. Wisdom sees.

The difference between knowledge and wisdom is one of kind, not degree. Greater knowledge does not necessarily translate into greater wisdom, and in fact can make us less wise. We can know too much, and we can mis-know.

Knowledge is something you possess. Wisdom is something you do. It is a skill and, like all skills, one you can learn. But it requires effort. Expecting to acquire wisdom by luck is like expecting to learn to play the violin by luck.

Yet that is essentially what we do. We stumble through life, hoping to pick up scraps of wisdom here and there. In the meantime, we’re confused. We mistake the urgent for the important, the verbose for the thoughtful, the popular for the good. We are, as one contemporary philosopher puts it, “misliving.”

I am hungry, too—more than most, I suspect, owing to a persistent melancholy that has shadowed me for as long as I can remember. Over the years, I’ve tried various means of satisfying the hunger: religion, psychotherapy, self-help books, travel, and a brief, and ill-fated, experiment with psychedelic mushrooms. Each method slaked the hunger, but never fully nor for long.

Then, one Saturday morning, I ventured to the underworld: my basement. That’s where I quarantine books deemed unfit for the living room. There, amid titles such as The Gas We Pass and Personal Finance for Dummies, I unearthed Will Durant’s 1926 book, The Story of Philosophy. It had real heft and, when I opened the cover, emitted an actual cloud of dust. I wiped it clean and began to read.

Durant’s words elicited no thunderclap of revelation, no road-to-Damascus moment. Something kept me reading, though. It was not so much the ideas embedded in the book as the passion with which they were presented. Durant was clearly a man in love, but with whom? With what?

“Philosopher,” from the Greek philosophos, means “lover of wisdom.” The definition says nothing about possessing wisdom any more than the Declaration of Independence says anything about obtaining happiness. You can love something you don’t possess, and never will. It is the pursuit that matters.

As I write these words, I am on a train. I am somewhere in North Carolina, or maybe South Carolina, I’m not sure. On a train, it’s easy to lose track of place, and of time, too.

I love trains. More precisely, I love riding trains. I am no “foamer”—a rail enthusiast who froths at the sight of, say, an SD45 diesel-electric locomotive. I could not care less about tonnage ratings or track gauges. I love the experience: that rare combination of expansiveness and coziness only travel by train provides.

There is something amniotic about the inside of a train. The toasty temperature, the warm light. Trains transport me to a happier, preconscious state. A time before 1040 forms and college tuition savings and dental plans and traffic. A time before the Kardashians.

My mother-in-law is suffering from late-stage Parkinson’s. It is a cruel disease, robbing her of abilities and memories. She has forgotten much. Yet she retains vivid recollections of childhood train rides in upstate New York. Albany to Corning to Rochester, then back to Albany. The sights and sounds and smells flood back as if they happened yesterday. There’s something about a train that stays with us.

Philosophy and trains pair well. I can think on a train. I cannot think on a bus. Not even a little. I suspect it has something to do with the different sensations, or perhaps it’s associative: buses remind me of childhood trips to school and camp, places I didn’t want to go. Trains take me where I want to go, and do so at the speed of thought.

Yet both philosophy and trains possess a certain mustiness: once-vital parts of our lives reduced to quaint anachronisms. Today few people take the train if they can help it, and no one studies philosophy if their parents can help it. Philosophy, like riding trains, is something people did before they knew better.

I subscribe to a magazine called Philosophy Now. It arrives every other month in a brown manila envelope, like pornography. One recent headline read “Is the World an Illusion?” Another asked: “Is the True the Same as the Truth?” When I read these to my wife, she rolled her eyes. For her, like many people, articles like these epitomize all that is wrong with philosophy. It asks absurd, unknowable questions. Only in a dictionary do the words “philosophy” and “practical” appear in proximity.

Technology seduces us into believing philosophy no longer matters. Who needs Aristotle when we have algorithms? Digital technology so excels at answering life’s smaller questions—Where can I find the best burrito in Boise? What is the fastest route to the office?—we assume it’s good at the big ones, too. It is not. Siri may shine at finding that burrito joint, but ask her how best to enjoy it and she will draw a blank.

Or consider a train journey. Technology, and its overlord, science, can tell you the velocity of the train, its weight and mass, and why the onboard Wi-Fi keeps cutting out. Science cannot tell you whether you should take the train to your high school reunion, or to visit Uncle Carl, who always annoyed you but is now gravely ill. Science cannot tell you whether it’s ethically acceptable to cause bodily harm to the screaming child kicking your seat. Science cannot tell you whether the view outside your window is beautiful or clichéd. Philosophy cannot either, not definitively, but it can help you see the world through a different lens, and there is great value in that.

At my local bookstore, I notice two sections: “Philosophy” and, adjacent to it, “Self Transformation.” In the Barnes & Noble of ancient Athens, these two sections would be one. Philosophy was self-transformation. Philosophy was practical. Philosophy was therapy. Medicine for the soul.

Philosophy is therapeutic but not the way a hot-stone massage is therapeutic. Philosophy is not easy. It is not nice. It is not palliative. Less spa than gym.

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called philosophy “radical reflection.” I like how he imbues philosophy with the edginess and whiff of danger it deserves. Philosophers once captured the world’s imagination. They were heroic. They were willing to die for their philosophy, and some, like Socrates, did. Now all that is heroic about philosophy is the epic struggle for academic tenure.

Most schools today don’t teach philosophy. They teach about philosophies. They don’t teach students how to philosophize. Philosophy is different from other subjects. It is not a body of knowledge but a way of thinking—a way of being in the world. Not a “what” or a “why” but a “how.”

How. The word doesn’t get much respect these days. In the literary world, how-to books are an embarrassment, the successful but uncouth cousin. Serious writers don’t write how-to books, and serious readers don’t read them. (At least they don’t admit reading them.) Yet most of us don’t stay up at night wondering “what is the nature of reality?” or “why is there something rather than nothing?” It is a how question—how to live?—that grabs hold of us and won’t let go.

Philosophy, unlike science, is proscriptive. It not only describes the world as it is but as it could be, opening our eyes to possibility. The author Daniel Klein said of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus what could be said of all the good ones: read them not so much as philosophy but as “life-enhancing poetry.”

I’ve spent the past few years imbibing that poetry, slowly, at the speed of thought, cocooned in a window seat on a train. I have taken trains wherever and whenever possible. I traveled to where some of history’s greatest thinkers thought. I braved Stoic Camp in Wyoming and the Indian Railways bureaucracy in Delhi. I rode New York City’s F train for longer than anyone should. These journeys were my intermission, a chance to stretch my legs, and mind, between philosophical acts. They gave me pause, in the best sense of the word.

Google “philosophers” and you will find hundreds, perhaps thousands. I’ve chosen fourteen. How? Carefully. They are all wise, though in different ways. Different flavors of wisdom. They cover a vast span of time—Socrates lived in the fifth century BC, Simone de Beauvoir in the twentieth century—and of space, too: from Greece to China, Germany to India. All fourteen are dead, but good philosophers never really die; they live on in the minds of others. Wisdom is portable. It transcends space and time, and is never obsolete.

My list includes many Europeans but not exclusively. The West has no monopoly on wisdom. Some of my philosophers, such as Nietzsche, were remarkably prolific. Others, such as Socrates and Epictetus, didn’t pen a single word. (Fortunately, their students did.) Some achieved great fame in their lifetimes. Others died unknown. Some you will recognize as philosophers; others, such as Gandhi, you probably don’t think of as a philosopher. (He was.) A few names, like that of the Japanese courtier and author Sei Shōnagon, may be new to you. That’s okay. In the end, my criteria boiled down to this: Did these thinkers love wisdom and is that love contagious?

We usually think of philosophers as disembodied minds. Not this bunch. They were corporeal, active beings. They trekked and rode horses. They fought wars and drank wine and made love. And they were, to a man and woman, practical philosophers. It was not the meaning of life that interested them but leading meaningful lives.

They were not perfect. They had their peccadilloes. Socrates lapsed into trances that sometimes lasted hours. Rousseau exposed his buttocks in public on more than one occasion. Schopenhauer talked to his poodle. (Don’t even get me started on Nietzsche.) So be it. Wisdom rarely wears a Brooks Brothers suit, though you never know.

We always need wisdom, but we need different kinds of wisdom at different stages of our lives. The “how to” questions that matter to a fifteen-year-old are not the ones that matter to a thirty-five-year-old—or a seventy-five-year-old. Philosophy has something vital to say about each stage.

The stages, I’m learning, fly by. Too many of us hum along, cluttering our minds with the trivial and the silly, as if we have all the time in the world. We don’t. I don’t. I like to think of myself as middle-aged. My teenage daughter, a math whiz, recently pointed out that unless I live to the age of 110, I am technically not middle age.

So, despite the slowpoke train I’m riding as I write these words, a sense of urgency propels my pen. It is the urgency of someone who does not want to die having not lived. I can’t point to any singular crisis: no health scare or financial comeuppance. No Hollywood crescendo, only the usual melody of annoyances, disappointments, and a nagging suspicion that I am misliving. Life is not a problem for me, not yet, but I feel the hot breath of time on my neck, and a little stronger every day. I want—no, need—to know what matters and what doesn’t, and before it’s too late.

“Sooner or later, life makes philosophers of us all,” said the French thinker Maurice Riseling.

I read that and think, “Why wait?” Why wait until life becomes a problem for me? Why not let life make a philosopher of me today, right now, while there is still time?