#643： Life Lessons From Dead Philosophers
Episode Stats
Summary
Eric Weiner travels thousands of miles around the world to visit the haunts of philosophers as he seeks to better understand their insights and how he might apply them to his own life. He wrote about this philosophical pilgrimage in The Socrates Express, in search of life lessons from dead philosophers.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Studying
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philosophy can be a metaphorical journey into wisdom. My guest today experienced it not only
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as that, but as a very literal journey as well. His name is Eric Weiner and he traveled thousands
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of miles around the world to visit the haunts of numerous philosophers as he sought to better
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understand their insights and how he might apply them to his own life. He wrote about this
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philosophical pilgrimage in the Socrates Express in search of life lessons from dead philosophers.
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Eric and I began our conversations why he chose to take all his trips by train and why rail travel
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is particularly conducive to thoughtful reflection. We then turned to philosophical and physical
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stops he made on his journey, including why Marcus Aurelius wrote so much about getting out of bed
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and what ultimately motivated the emperor to start each day, what Thoreau can teach about scene,
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why Gandhi was very interested in the idea of manliness, how Nietzsche's idea of eternal
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recurrence can change the way we live our daily lives, and the lesson Simone Beauvoir offers us
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on aging well. We end our conversation with Montaigne's insight on how to get comfortable
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with death. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Socrates Express.
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All right, Eric Weiner, welcome back to the show.
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So we had you on a few years ago to talk about your book, The Geography of Genius, where you
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go to explore these clusters of genius around the world that have happened out in human history.
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You got a new book out, similar sort of thing. You go this time to places where philosophers
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lived, walked, worked, thought, but you get there by train. It's called The Socrates Express.
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Well, first of all, I love trains, so let's get that out of the way right off the bat.
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I'm not a train nerd, as some people are who really get excited about tonnage ratings and
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locomotive types. I'm not that kind of train lover. I love the experience of riding trains,
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of just slowing down. I feel like I can think on a train the way I cannot think on an
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airplane or a bus or even drive me a car. So that was my means of transport. In terms
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of the subject matter, you know, I think I got to chalk this one up to middle age, you
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know, which I know sounds a bit cliched, but it's true. You start to wonder, what's it all
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about? What am I doing here? And then I stumbled across this quote from a French philosopher named
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Maurice Reisling, and he said, sooner or later, life makes philosophers of us all. And I thought,
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huh, why wait? You know, why wait until life becomes a problem for me? It wasn't at the time.
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And then that sent me on the journey of exploring philosophy. And after I tucked away the book and
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sent it off to my publisher, the pandemic hit and life surely made philosophers of all of us.
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That's for sure. I want to go back to this idea of trains and this connection to philosophy,
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because you know this in the book, and I've seen this with, and when I've read different
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philosophers, a lot of philosophers didn't like trains because they were too fast.
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But I mean, what is it about, I mean, you said you think better on a train compared to driving. Like,
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what do you think trains for you are conducive to philosophizing?
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Well, you're absolutely right about some philosophers not liking trains. A lot of people
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in the 19th century, when train travel really became widespread, didn't like trains because
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they complained they were too fast, right? They got all nostalgic for the carriage and the
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horse and buggy when you can go more slowly and feel the land. And they felt like the trains
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moving at, oh, 15, 20 miles an hour back then were just, the scenery was a blur and it was all
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too fast. So, I mean, that shows us how relative these things are. But compared to, you know,
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hurtling through space in a tin can at 600 miles per hour, I like the slowness of a train. I find it
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easier to think when I'm moving more slowly. And I like sort of this, especially, you know,
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those European trains where you get your own compartment or compartment you share with some
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strangers and you get this combination of coziness and expansiveness at the same time, which I just
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find wonderful. And I just feel like I could just ride a train forever with a stack of books and cup
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of coffee and I'm good to go. Do you get by train in the United States? I do. I took a train clear
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across the U.S. from my home, Washington, D.C. to Portland, Oregon. I took four days and three nights
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and it's not, okay, the fastest way to cross the country. It's not the cheapest way. In my mind,
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it's the best way. So, whenever I can, I take a train. So, let's talk about the way you organize
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this book. So, it's organized to three parts, dawn, noon, dusk. Am I reading too much of this,
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but is this also fall like the seasons of a person's life, like youth, middle age, elderhood?
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You are absolutely not reading too much into it. That was my intention exactly. It is course of our
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life. And in the dawn section, you know, there are questions that as we're growing up, that skills
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that we need to learn, like how to see and how to listen, how to walk, that we learn at that age.
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And then when we're sort of in mid-stride of our lives, you know, we want to fight, we want to be
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kind, we want to do all these other things. And then there are certain questions that we
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really grapple with in the twilight of our life, you know, how to have no regrets, how to cope with
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setbacks, how to grow old, and even how to die. And it was the type of philosophers that you picked
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in this book, they're not like analytic philosophers or they're trying to... These are philosophers,
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like the original intent of philosophy is like how to live a good life.
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I mean, philosopher means literally from the ancient Greek, a lover of wisdom. Doesn't say
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anything about PhD dissertations or analytical thinking or logic chopping, as it's been called.
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Lovers of wisdom. And I love that because I think that's what we should all aspire to,
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to be lovers of wisdom. You know, I'm holding a device in my hand right now called an iPhone that
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contains, you know, pretty much all of human knowledge and just so much information, but not
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really any wisdom. And there is a difference. You know, we tend to conflate them, you know,
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data, information, knowledge, wisdom. You know, information is readily accessible these days,
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as I said, with the swipe of our finger. But wisdom is something else. You know, wisdom is
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of a different kind. And that's what these philosophers were interested in.
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Well, let's pay a visit to some of these philosophers you highlight in the book.
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And the one you start off with is Marcus Aurelius, the famous Roman emperor,
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one of the last good emperors. And he was also a Stoic philosopher. And you noted this,
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and I've never noted this because I've read the meditations, his sort of personal diary that he wrote,
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sort of pumping himself up that we have it today. But I didn't know, but you noticed this,
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is that he always talked about getting out of bed. He talks a lot about getting out of bed.
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Well, I think just because you're a Roman emperor doesn't mean it's easy to get out of bed.
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You know, I mean, and I found this very relatable. I thought, you know, here's this guy who is,
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as you say, one of the last good Roman emperors, you know, controlled like, you know,
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two fifths of the world population. Yet he had trouble falling asleep at night and trouble
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getting out of bed in the morning. And he would sort of wrestle with it on the pages of meditations,
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you know, should I get up? I'm lazy. You're good for nothing. Why should I get up? And it's just
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seemed very modern to me and very relatable. As I said, it's my story too. I have trouble getting
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out of bed in the morning. And, you know, the French philosopher Albert Camus said that the only
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truly serious philosophical question is whether you should commit suicide or not.
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And that's okay. We can talk about that later. But I thought, well, yeah, once you've answered
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that one and you decide not to commit suicide, you still have to get out of bed. And that's the
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one that Marcus wrestles with. And what I find interesting is how he ultimately answers it,
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which is not, you know, I'm going to go achieve something and make my name in the history books.
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It was the sense of duty, the sense of other people that I should get out of bed for others
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because people in this empire are counting on me. And, you know, if you're at home with a wife and
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kids and sometimes, or a dog, you know, this is what gets you out of bed. The dog needs to be fed.
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Kids need to be driven to school. And Marcus had a similar revelation.
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And you also use this question of, should I get out of bed in the morning to explore the idea of
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is an ought? Can you talk a little bit about that?
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Yeah. So this was an idea from a Scottish philosopher named David Hume. And he thought
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that, you know, we can't jump from an is to an ought. In other words, we can't jump from a
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factual observation, empirical observation to an ethical imperative. So with the case of getting
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out of bed, you would say, well, it is a good idea to get out of bed because, you know,
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you get exercise and your earning potential increases. Therefore, you ought to get out
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of bed. He thought that was a mistake. And this is why it's sometimes known as Hume's
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guillotine, because he severs the is from the ought. So, you know, oftentimes you would just
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will make observations about something in the world, anything, you know, that red wine is good
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for you or red wine is bad for you. Therefore, you ought to drink it or you ought not to drink it.
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And he thought that was a mistake. You can't jump from the is to the ought.
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And Marcus Aurelius, I mean, he kind of solved that problem. He's like, well,
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I'm not going to say getting out of bed is good or bad. It's just like, I just got to get out of bed
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because I have to. Like, it's a duty. That's it.
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Yeah. It was a sense of duty to others. And even though, you know, you've read meditation,
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so, you know, it can be a lot of navel gazing going on there, definitely, because, you know,
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it was his diary. So we were actually eavesdropping on him. He didn't mean to publish it. But in
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addition to the navel gazing is this sense of duty, you know, which was a stoic thing and a Roman thing.
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But he got out of his own head, realizing there were others counting on him. And this duty really
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wasn't just as, oh, I'm a Roman emperor. I have to get out of bed and help people.
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So it was his duty as a human being, you know, and this is where his stoicism becomes readily
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apparent. His duty as a human being to help others, because the stoics see us all as connected.
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You know, if you smash your thumb with a hammer, you help the thumb because it's connected to the
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rest of the hand and the rest to you. And that's how he thought, and it's a stoic idea, really,
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that's how we should relate to others, not as separate entities from us, but as extensions of
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So we can't talk about philosophy without talking about Socrates, sort of like we consider him the
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father of philosophy. And what's interesting about Socrates is that he didn't have a Socratic
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doctrine, right? If you read it, even if you read his dialogues, you know, he starts off asking
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these questions like, what is justice? And then you spend pages and pages.
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And at the end, you're like, I still don't know what justice or even what Socrates, but
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Socrates instead, he proposed like a way of engaging with the world. And so how would you describe this
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Yeah, it is. It's not a body of knowledge, as you say. You can't really read what Socrates
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thought. All you can do is experience and observe his method. And it is, as you say, engagement. It is
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a way of just engaging in conversation. I mean, I know that doesn't sound highfalutin and Nobel
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prize worthy, but that's what Socrates did. You know, one contemporary philosopher says he engaged
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in enlightened kibitzing, which is a great term, which I think is what he did. He would
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buttonhole people in Athens, you know, a general, for instance, some fancy general, and ask him what
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courage is. And it soon became readily apparent that the general didn't really know. How could a
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general in an army not know what courage is? How can an artist not know what beauty is?
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And so he would challenge people, but he did in this sneaky way in that he would just
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sort of start to engage them in conversation and ask questions. And every question was followed by
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another. It's sort of like the, you know, the five-year-old who always says, why, you know,
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can we have ice cream now? No. Why? Because it's 10 a.m. Why can't we have ice cream at 10 a.m.?
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Because we don't. Why? And it drives us nuts. And it drives us nuts just as Socrates drove people in
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ancient Athens nuts, not because the questions are silly, but because we can't really answer them
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fully. Right. Yeah. Like you call these like ultimate questions and we tend to avoid those
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because we don't have any good answers for them. Or we tend not to really sit with questions. You know,
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we see a question as kind of an inconvenience, a little shortcut on the way to an answer,
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right? Questions must lead to answers. And Socrates basically said, whoa, you know, let's
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not, let's hold on here a second. Let's experience this question fully and see where it takes us. And
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we're so results oriented these days as they were back then, to be honest, that we, we always want
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to get to the answer. And Socrates thought you can't get there unless you really sit with the
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question, experience it. And that means questioning your assumptions. What do you mean by courage? What
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do you mean by justice? You know, we just jump ahead to, okay, we need to increase earning potential
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for people. Well, why, why is that good? And it's almost a childlike process. It's childlike
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curiosity and more than curiosity, wonder. All philosophy begins with wonder. We have largely,
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I think, lost this capacity for wonder in our lives. And like you said, Socrates is basically,
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he's just, we call it dialogue, but it's just conversation. And I think we've all experienced those
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late night talks with friends where you're, you're just asking questions and just sort of
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spitballing and you don't ever really come to any conclusions, but you felt, I don't know,
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you felt invigorated, edified by being in that conversation. Yeah. Because you've experienced the
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questions and you've asked them in, in ways that you wouldn't in the classroom or in the corporate
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board meeting, you know, because you would, might be laughed at, but Socrates basically gives us
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permission to be a five-year-old and ask those annoying, silly questions.
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And you apply this to your own life. You talk about it, you were kind of complaining to a friend
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that, you know, I wish I was more successful, sold more books, whatever. And then your friend
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just asks you like, what does success look like to you? Right. And you didn't really have an answer
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for that. No, I didn't. And it's kind of floored me, you know, that I had just always assumed that
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I needed to be more successful. However successful I was, I needed more. And she said,
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she said, what does success look like? And, and the way she, something about the way she phrased it,
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that just stopped me in my tracks. Like, I don't know. I don't know what would be enough. I don't
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know what it would look like. Maybe it looks entirely differently from, from, from what I thought.
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And, you know, a really good question is met not with an answer, but with silence. You know,
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you know, you've asked a good question when the person on the other end is, is quiet. That means
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that you've shaken them out of their stupor as Socrates did. And they're starting to see things
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a little bit differently, not 90 degrees, maybe 10 or 20 degrees, but sometimes that's all it takes.
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Did you ever, have you gotten any closer to answer to what does success look like to you?
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Uh, no, I'm still working on that, but I'm wide open to the possibility that it's not
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what I think it is. And whenever I find myself, you know, thinking, well, I need, need to be on,
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you know, need to be on the Colbert show. I need, you know, I need this, I need that. And
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I stop and, and my friend's question comes back to me, what does success look like?
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And it's helpful. But the problem with these, these great questions is you have to keep asking
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them over and over again. Once, once is, is not enough.
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That's a good advice. I've had that moment where you're, you're doing something. Finally,
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you just stop. You're like, why am I doing this? Right. And then you just like, maybe I don't
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need to be doing this. Exactly. And that's helpful. All right. So the next place you go is you visit
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Rousseau's, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's old tramping grounds. And I, I say tramping because this guy
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apparently was a walker. What'd you take away from visiting where Rousseau walked?
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Well, he, he was a walker. He was a nomad. He was sort of this sort of rootless soul. You know,
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we're talking back in the 18th century when it really wasn't so easy to be, to be a rootless soul,
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but he bopped all over Europe, often kicked out of places. And his favorite way to get around,
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this is pre railroad time was, was by walking. And he would walk sometimes 20 miles a day.
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He walked some two, 300 miles once in the course of two weeks. And he would go off on these walks,
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usually in the countryside, and he'd carry a pack of playing cards with them. And he would jot down
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ideas and thoughts that came to him when he walked. And he, he said that he, he, his mind only works
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when his legs are active. And I thought there was great truth to that.
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And like lots of other philosophers or walkers, like Socrates in his dialogues, typically he goes on
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walks with people when he's engaging with them. Nietzsche was a walker as well.
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Yeah. He's, he's, Socrates is walking around the Agora, the marketplace of ancient Athens.
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Nietzsche is hiking in the Swiss Alps. Immanuel Kant, who is very rigorous and disciplined,
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would go on these constitutions, constitutionals at 12 45 PM exactly every day. So they all had
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different styles, but they all walked. And I think, you know, there is, it's not a coincidence.
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Maybe you've experienced this yourself when you're, you're stuck on a problem or looking
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for some answer and you can't think of it. And you're sitting at your laptop and you're like,
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F it. I'm just going to go for a walk. And you go for a walk, maybe for 10 minutes,
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maybe for an hour, maybe for two hours, but something happens during that walk where the
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idea comes to you and you become unstuck. Psychologists call this defocused attention,
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right? So we have defocused our attention. We're no longer staring at the problem,
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but we've defocused it and moved it back to our subconscious. But then by walking, you know,
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we're still engaging the brain. You know, you're not just vegging out when you're walking. You have
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to think about, you know, not tripping and watch where you're going. So you have just enough of that
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part of the brain engaged, but the rest of it's freed up.
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What was your takeaway from Rousseau? Like walk more? I mean, what was...
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He was a philosopher of the heart. He was a romantic, one of the first really. And it is
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walk more, but it's, God, it sounds corny and cliche to take, to say it, but follow your heart,
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you know, be willing to be a rebel, be willing to walk when everyone else is running and driving
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and, you know, listen to that thing beating in your chest. And, you know, he thought that people,
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I'll sum up his philosophy in four words, nature, good, society, bad. That's essentially it. And
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what's more natural than walking, right? So he thought basically that we are born naturally good
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people and it's only society that corrupts us. So, you know, there is something to be said of that.
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There's a reason we like to go for walks in the woods. There's a reason why we feel at peace when
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we're off in the forest or, or on a mountaintop. And that's certainly one of the lessons of Rousseau.
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And I guess this is why you included in that, that dawn section, like for the youth of our life,
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right? You need to, every young person needs to figure out what they really want. Are they doing
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something because your parents told them so to do it? Teachers told them to do it? Or are they
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really following what's inside of them? Right. And children just do this naturally,
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right? They, they tend to just follow their instincts and, and emotions move through them
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quickly. You've, maybe you've seen like a four-year-old or three-year-old though. They'll
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be so angry, you know, and they're just crying. And then a minute later they're okay. It's gone.
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And they're happy, you know, and, and Rousseau who thought a lot about education actually would say
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that they, that's because they have not yet been corrupted by society and they let their emotions
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flow through them unencumbered. They don't get stuck with guilt and remorse and all these other
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adult emotions. So yeah, there was something very childlike about Rousseau. And that's another reason
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I included him in the dawn section. I mean, there's also, you got to balance it because Rousseau,
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he, he kind of let his proclivities get like, he just like show his butt to, he'd moon people
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basically. Yeah, he did. I don't think the term mooning people existed in the 18th century,
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but he was doing it and he, he had a masochistic streak. He liked a good spanking. I mean, and I
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think, you know, Brad, this would be a good place to point this out that these were some weird dudes
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and dudettes here. Okay. And that, that my philosophers were, you know, I liked them because
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they were deeply flawed human beings. You know, I mean, Socrates was weird. Rousseau moon people,
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Nietzsche, don't get me started. I mean, they were all, you know, we think of the philosopher as
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this almost angelic figure who's just sitting by himself thinking deep thoughts and no, these
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people wrestled with how to get out of bed, you know, how to stay out of trouble, have all kinds
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of stuff. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the
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show. So another, an American kindred spirit of Rousseau, I think would be Henry David Thoreau.
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He's a romantic as well. And you go visit Walden Pond where Thoreau did his experiment in self-reliance.
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And it's like, I've always wanted to go to Walden Pond, but I'm afraid that if I'm going to go,
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I'm going to be underwhelmed by it. Did that happen to you?
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Yes, I was. I was underwhelmed before I arrived when I followed the Walden Pond state,
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it's now a state park on Twitter. And, and they would send me alerts, you know, by 10 AM saying,
00:22:42.160
Walden Pond is full today, no more entry, you know, from visitors. And, you know, the irony here that
00:22:48.560
this great exercise in, in isolation, you know, Thoreau goes off to Walden Pond, builds a cabin,
00:22:55.460
lives there for a couple of years, is now overcrowded and a tourist destination. I mean,
00:23:01.020
Henry David would come back and be like, no, that's not what I had in mind. It is underwhelming.
00:23:06.240
It's a pond. It's a nice pond, nothing special about it. You can see the cabin is, is gone. They've
00:23:12.160
reconstructed a sort of a scale model, but the side of the cabin is now just some stones and a
00:23:17.460
marker, but people go there. It's a pilgrimage site. And, you know, I've talked to locals who
00:23:22.640
feel basically like, you don't need to come here, go, go find your own Walt. And that's the whole point.
00:23:29.100
So besides being underwhelmed, what was your big takeaway from, from Henry David?
00:23:34.200
Yeah. So I, I, I go off to Walden Pond thinking for sure, this chapter is going to be called, you know,
00:23:39.680
how to, how to be alone like Thoreau, or maybe how to live simply like Thoreau. But being open-minded
00:23:47.660
like Socrates, I soon realized that that wasn't really what he was about. It was how to see like
00:23:53.140
Thoreau, that all of this, you know, living alone in the woods, this isolation, simplicity stuff was
00:23:59.900
really a means to an end. And that end was better vision. He was, he was very visual. Everyone
00:24:06.080
commented about his eyes, that he had these piercing eyes, very observant eyes, and that he could in
00:24:12.860
this almost uncanny ability to like pick up a dozen pencils out of a giant bushel, exactly a dozen
00:24:18.580
each time by sight alone. So he had this almost supernatural vision, but really he had a whole
00:24:25.020
sensibility that was attuned to seeing more beauty in the everyday than most of us do. He saw beauty
00:24:32.020
everywhere. What I like about Henry David Thoreau is he's, he's a romantic, he's, he's kind of a
00:24:37.740
mystic too. I mean, because there's these stories where, you know, he just, you know, stooped down,
00:24:42.640
pick up an arrowhead that he just happened to find and said, this arrowhead belonged to some great
00:24:46.540
native chief. Right. But then at the same time, you go back to this idea of scene, he was very
00:24:51.020
scientific. I think there was a story of, you know, there's a legend that Walden Pond was endless.
00:24:56.120
There was no bottom. And so Henry David waited till the, the pond froze over and he got a plumb line
00:25:02.480
and then just dropped it down and he went, no, it's actually not, it's not bottomless. And I think
00:25:07.420
that that's, I love that little, that story of just like he, he really spent his life trying to see
00:25:13.120
what the world was really like. Yeah. And, and the thing is he, he had this combination of skill sets,
00:25:20.640
I guess we'd say that we, we rarely see today and that he, he had the mind of a scientist,
00:25:26.000
but the heart of a poet. And we don't see that very often. And you're right. He, he very much
00:25:31.660
believed in, in empirical evidence, the power of observation. He was a naturalist and a scientist
00:25:36.960
and he studied the pond and he made observations, but he was not interested in, in what is known as
00:25:43.780
the view from nowhere, which is the scientist view, you know, this idea of objectivity that we're not
00:25:50.360
we're observing the rainbow. We're not, you know, appreciating it necessarily that somehow
00:25:56.020
seeing the beauty of a rainbow is not a scientific act, but observing the, and measuring the color
00:26:02.380
hues is. Thoreau thought that was a mistake. He thought that we're always seeing things subjectively,
00:26:09.460
even when we're being scientific about it, that we're, you know, we're part of the experiment.
00:26:14.360
And so he never separated his mind from his heart, essentially.
00:26:18.720
So related to seeing is the idea of paying attention. And you highlight a philosopher that
00:26:23.380
thought a lot about paying attention. A lot of people don't know about her either. Her name is
00:26:26.720
Simone Weil. For those who aren't familiar with Weil, can you tell us about her and her philosophy?
00:26:31.240
Okay. Also a strange person. And I say that in the best sense of the word. She grew up in France,
00:26:35.940
the early 20th century, born in 1909, I believe. And she born to a very intellectual, very Jewish,
00:26:43.740
but secular family. And she studied like the Dickens when she was young. I mean, she was reading
00:26:50.300
the classics like by age eight and, you know, that sort of genius level. But she had a very
00:26:56.440
spiritual side, which she spent the rest of her too short life exploring. And she was especially
00:27:02.420
interested in attention, the quality of attention. And it really is the thread throughout her writing
00:27:09.580
that she thought that we define attention entirely wrong, and that we don't go about it the right
00:27:16.380
way. That we confuse attention and concentration, and they're not the same thing.
00:27:23.080
Well, if you are, are you sitting at a desk right now?
00:27:27.080
I'm actually standing in my closet, which is my slash recording studio.
00:27:31.140
Okay. See, I didn't see that coming. All right. So, you are maybe concentrating. If you were at
00:27:38.920
your desk and at your laptop, you are concentrating on the emails in front of you. You're concentrating
00:27:44.700
on a problem. And you'll notice when you're concentrating, your body sort of tenses up
00:27:49.120
with this idea of furrowed brow and tensed muscles. And you sort of contract really when you
00:27:54.900
concentrate. But when you pay attention in the Simone Weil way, it is more receptive. It's more of a
00:28:03.200
waiting than a concentrating. You sort of widen your antennae, and you are in a receptive mode, and you're
00:28:12.840
waiting for something to come to you. And that, she thought, was true attention. And it's less muscular.
00:28:19.400
It's, I would say, more yoga, less weightlifting. But she thought it was hugely important. And she
00:28:26.340
thought it was a, I don't want to say skill, but really, it's an orientation to life and to the
00:28:31.540
world that we've largely lost. And the way she described attention, it's a moral act, in a way.
00:28:38.260
It's not just about seeing what's going on in your world. It's actually, there's moral weight to paying
00:28:41.900
attention. Right. And we tend to view things like attention as just transactional, like so many other
00:28:47.920
things, that you should pay attention so that you will get better grades in your school so that you
00:28:52.980
will then earn more money. So pay attention. She thought that paying attention, especially paying
00:28:57.480
attention to the suffering of others, was a moral act. And she thought that that's really, that's all
00:29:04.100
that the suffering person wants. Really what they want is someone to give them full attention. And when
00:29:11.940
you do that, she said, it's not like an act of love. It is an act of love, giving another person
00:29:20.620
I think we've, and it's not just suffering people. It's like everyone, I think everyone wants
00:29:24.140
attention. Like they just want to, they want, everyone wants, has this desire to feel noticed.
00:29:28.280
Right. And you know, these days we've really fractured our attention, you know, more than ever.
00:29:34.020
And, you know, I'm constantly getting into, I guess, fights, we would say with my, with my wife,
00:29:41.300
when she picks up her phone, when we're in mid conversation. And it really pisses me off. Like,
00:29:46.400
why are you checking your phone? You're supposed to be talking to me. And it's not that, you know,
00:29:52.000
the two seconds that it takes her to check her email or whatever it is, she has a real job.
00:29:56.400
Um, it's that she's cheated me of her complete attention. Right. And, and children know this,
00:30:02.000
they can detect counterfeit attention a mile away. Now that chapter made me think about how I pay
00:30:08.120
attention to my kids and sort of, it convicted me. It's like, ah, I probably could do a better job at
00:30:13.860
that. Right. Um, but you probably should not think of it as a job. I know that's, I'm a modern
00:30:20.620
instrumentalist. Then it becomes in, you know, this sort of a concentration thing. I have to do this.
00:30:25.200
And yeah, we're, we are never fully paying attention to something, anything. We're always
00:30:33.100
divided. We're never fully committed. And where she, Simone Weil saw attention as actually more of
00:30:40.320
a passive mode and passive, you know, tends to have negative connotations. I think, especially maybe
00:30:46.820
for a podcast called the art of manliness, we might think of passive as, as negative, but she didn't see
00:30:52.240
it that way. That actually the highest thing you could do was to have this passive attention. And
00:30:56.640
it actually took great courage and great, great devotion to do it.
00:31:01.140
So another philosopher you talk about, you go to India and I like this story because I, I've,
00:31:07.020
I've heard stories about the crazy trains, train system in India, but you go to India to explore
00:31:12.640
Gandhi and his philosophy. And you had this quest to get on the yoga, the yoga train. What,
00:31:18.260
what was that? Yoga, yoga express, yoga express. So what's the yoga express? Why were you so gung
00:31:23.740
ho and trying to get on this? Oh, come on. It's called the yoga express. You've got to,
00:31:28.360
I don't do actual yoga, right? I don't bend that way, but I wanted to ride the yoga express because
00:31:34.180
I thought that would be cool. And it was going to where I wanted to go, which was the site of Gandhi's
00:31:40.240
first ashram in India, the city of Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat and, you know, many hundreds
00:31:46.760
of miles from where I was at the moment in New Delhi. And I'm like, I have to get on the yoga
00:31:51.200
express. And I contorted myself in all kinds of positions to get on the yoga express, but
00:31:56.060
well, I won't spoil it, but it, it proved to be more difficult than you would think to get a
00:32:01.680
reservation on the yoga express. And how, how was that experience related to, or maybe,
00:32:07.520
was the relation to Gandhi's philosophy at all? Yes, there is. Because if you've ever dealt with
00:32:14.300
an Indian bureaucracy, could be the train system, could be anything really. Um, you know, that
00:32:20.780
there's a strong impulse toward violence because it is so difficult to get anything done in that
00:32:27.220
country. And they seem to just throw up obstacles every way. And it's a test of patience and a test
00:32:33.340
of resolve. And Gandhi was a big train rider. He loved the train. He took the train all over India
00:32:38.780
and he complained a lot about, he wrote in third class, but he complained a lot just about the
00:32:43.900
service and about Indian railways, and he was infuriated, but never got violent. But it's sort
00:32:50.040
of a test of how do you get what you want, a ticket on the yoga express. You can't just be passive,
00:32:56.940
but how do you get it without resorting to violence?
00:32:58.960
Well, let's talk about Gandhi's philosophy. He has this idea of soul force and he had this idea,
00:33:03.760
it's, it's nonviolent, but it's also, it's not passive. Like it's, it's an aggressive type of
00:33:09.260
It's what, uh, uh, John Lewis was, was talking about when he talked about good trouble,
00:33:13.840
necessary trouble. That's pure Gandhi. And Lewis studied Gandhi and traveled to India as did Martin
00:33:18.680
Luther King Jr. I mean, it is getting in your opponent's face, but getting in their face nonviolently.
00:33:25.980
It's not passive. Gandhi disliked the term passive resistance. He thought there was nothing more
00:33:32.820
active than his form of nonviolent resistance, but it involves confronting your opponent. I won't say
00:33:40.000
enemy because he didn't believe in enemies. He believed in opponents confronting your opponent,
00:33:46.500
And when Gandhi talked about this idea of, I'll call it aggressive nonviolence,
00:33:50.340
he spoke of it in terms of manliness. Like he used that word, like this is, he was obsessed with
00:33:54.360
manliness. The more I I've studied Gandhi for a long time. I've had sort of a weird Gandhi thing.
00:33:59.720
I've long admired him. And as I read him, I discovered that the word manliness just appears
00:34:05.520
a lot. And you're right. A lot, most people don't think of Gandhi as a manly man. He was skinny,
00:34:12.560
but you know, wiry and muscular, and he was assertive. And he wrote a lot about the need for
00:34:20.380
manliness. He felt that the British who were occupying India had emasculated India. And it
00:34:26.740
was his job to remasculate, if that's a word, India, but in a new way, in this nonviolent way.
00:34:34.200
And he, as much as he hated violence, he wrote that the only thing he hated more than violence
00:34:38.820
was cowardice. And he actually said, better to resort to violence than to be a coward.
00:34:44.480
And I guess for, in Gandhi's worldview, like conflict is not bad because conflict is what
00:34:50.840
allows problems to be, brings it to the forefront. Like you finally can see that there's a problem
00:34:56.080
there. And then from there, you can actually find a solution to the problem.
00:34:58.940
Exactly. I mean, maybe, you know, couples who over the years say, we never fight, we never fight.
00:35:04.580
And then when they announced their divorce, you're not really surprised. I mean, you are and you
00:35:08.540
aren't. Because fighting can be healthy. And, you know, Gandhi thought basically, even if you're not
00:35:15.580
fighting, there's kind of veiled violence going on beneath the surface. And that needs to be brought
00:35:21.300
to the surface and dealt with nonviolently. But yes, that was what he thought.
00:35:26.400
All right, let's talk about Nietzsche. You go to the Alps, because Nietzsche had to go there,
00:35:31.020
because he was a sickly guy. This is one of the things about Nietzsche, like, you know,
00:35:34.680
he wrote this very manly, muscular prose about living dangerously. But he was a sickly,
00:35:40.840
I don't know, a nerd, basically. He had to go to the Alps to recuperate. And you go on this hike
00:35:46.840
that Nietzsche went on to where he got this idea of eternal recurrence. For those who aren't familiar
00:35:52.140
with eternal recurrence, can you walk us through it? Okay, so here's the idea. It's a thought
00:35:57.240
experiment, really. One day you're visited by, let me say you get an email. They didn't have email in
00:36:04.240
Nietzsche's day. But you get an email saying, here's the secret to the universe. Your life
00:36:10.000
repeats itself exactly, forever and ever. Everything in Brett's life that's happened up
00:36:18.320
to this point will repeat itself, including a conversation with me saying everything in
00:36:24.540
Brett's life up to this point will repeat itself. That'll repeat also. And it will do this forever
00:36:30.460
and ever for all eternity. And then Nietzsche's question is, how do you respond to this email?
00:36:36.820
Do you say the recipient is just, oh, thank you for telling me this? This is great news.
00:36:42.520
Or do you see it as a curse? This is like, you know, worse than a Nigerian telemarketing scam or
00:36:49.220
whatever. This is just terrible. You know, this is terrible news. And he thought how we answered that
00:36:55.400
question determine our outlook on life and our degree of happiness, really.
00:36:59.780
And so the idea of eternal recurrence is to make you live each day, like, well, if I have to repeat
00:37:08.740
What is worthy of eternity? And I should say briefly that he tried to sketch it out mathematically,
00:37:15.100
and he did a bunch of research, which he never actually published, looking into, you know,
00:37:19.660
the idea that, you know, like if you take two people playing chess, maybe eventually they'll
00:37:25.320
repeat every game exactly. So there is some scientific basis for it, but it's essentially
00:37:29.600
a thought experiment. And it forces you to ask the question, what is worthy of eternity? And if
00:37:35.900
you're not living the life you want to live, not only this time around, but forever and ever,
00:37:42.720
But then also it helps you, I mean, it kind of forces you to confront, like, what do you do with
00:37:46.280
the suffering? Because Nietzsche would say, well, you just got to learn to love it, or
00:37:49.340
else you'll just be miserable. So he'd say embrace suffering.
00:37:53.260
Yeah, but he didn't say it with such a resigned tone of voice, to be honest. He said it with lots
00:37:58.520
of exclamation points. He loved the exclamation point. He talked about the need to dance, you know.
00:38:05.260
He was not a good dancer, but he just, he sort of dances across the page, and he thought we need to
00:38:10.820
dance. And dancing, if you think about it, is this kind of nonsensical thing we do where we
00:38:16.260
move around, sort of to the beat of music, kind of, kind of not, it's not productive. And there are
00:38:22.420
all kinds of dances, there are funeral dances in many cultures, when there's great grief and sadness.
00:38:28.200
And that's essentially Nietzsche's philosophy. It's the dance of grief. It's the dance of suffering.
00:38:35.000
It's even, you know, it's easy to dance when the music's good and everything's going well. But
00:38:41.360
what Nietzsche asks is, can you dance even when things are lousy? Can you find a way to dance?
00:38:49.160
And a sort of variation of eternal recurrence is what's been called the marriage test. And
00:38:53.820
let's say you're recently divorced after a long marriage, ended poorly, obviously, in divorce.
00:39:00.800
Would you do it again? Would you, knowing what you know, would you do it again? Would you marry that
00:39:04.740
person and go through that marriage and go through the divorce? And then that's essentially what
00:39:09.120
eternal recurrence is. You know, when you're talking about dancing to suffering, when bad
00:39:13.360
things happen, that made me think of Zorba the Greek, the end. Right. The movie where the whole,
00:39:18.240
the timber operation just crashes, and then they dance at the end. Exactly. And that's sort of,
00:39:24.580
it's not resignation, actually. It's something else. And I'm not quite there myself, but I definitely
00:39:30.920
think Nietzsche was onto something because he suffered. He, as you said, he was sickly, had terrible
00:39:34.740
headaches and stomach upset and terrible vision. And yet he accepted it all and made it, he accepted
00:39:43.280
his life, not despite the suffering, but in a way because of it.
00:39:47.980
So you go and visit where a 20th century existential philosopher hung out, Simone Beauvoir. And her
00:39:53.400
seminal work is The Second Sex, which is about the female experience. But she also wrote about the
00:39:58.500
universal experience of aging, getting old. And this section hit home for me because I'm starting to
00:40:03.960
approach 40. And, you know, I don't feel old, but every now and then I look in the mirror and think,
00:40:09.160
man, I'm getting really old. Yeah. She had that experience. She was 51 and she looked in the
00:40:15.060
mirror and she saw this stranger staring back at her. And she's like, oh my God, when did I become
00:40:20.340
old? And then she went for a walk in the street and some woman came up to her and said, you know,
00:40:25.180
you remind me of my mother. And that was it. So that's when she had her, I call it the collision
00:40:31.260
with old age that we don't, we don't brush up against old age or sideswipe it. We collide
00:40:35.380
head on with it. And like, how did she manage it? What did she suggest we do to deal with that?
00:40:40.540
Well, I should say that anyone who knows anything about Simone de Beauvoir will say, really?
00:40:44.800
You chose her for aging because she, she was on the page, very pessimistic about it. She wrote this
00:40:50.820
long tome, 500 page tome called The Coming of Age, which basically most of it was old age sucks,
00:40:57.400
you know, and there's no redeeming, nothing redeeming to it. But if you read it carefully
00:41:02.300
and you look at her life, you realize that she actually did age well. She, she was aged reluctantly,
00:41:09.980
you know, at first she, she fought it every step of the way, but she, she sort of came up with,
00:41:18.160
she didn't come up with the list, but I, I inferred the list from her writing of things you can do
00:41:24.460
to age well. And I should say that we don't have a culture of aging in our country. We have a youth
00:41:31.240
culture and an aging population desperately clinging to the youth culture. And she thought
00:41:37.020
this was a mistake. You know, if you're going to be old, act your age, essentially. In other words,
00:41:42.080
don't try to imitate a 20 year old. That's just silly and absurd. And she thought it was hugely
00:41:47.760
important to stay busy and continue with your projects. That was her favorite word
00:41:51.600
to make friends late into life. She made one of her best friends ever. Sylvie Labon was her name.
00:41:59.440
30 years separated them, but they were the best of friends and really in a way stopped caring what
00:42:04.700
other people think. Simone de Beauvoir observes that some of the greatest artists really had a
00:42:10.720
breakthrough late in life. After they'd achieved some success, they were able to go off in a completely
00:42:16.200
different direction because they didn't care what others thought. So she actually ended up aging
00:42:22.240
quite well and came to embrace it late in life.
00:42:27.160
And have you been able to, I don't know, live some of the stuff that she recommended?
00:42:31.540
So-so, I would say. You know, I'm sort of, I'm a little bit older than you and I'm at the
00:42:38.840
stage where it's, I'm engaged in what I call the great summing up, which is essentially you start
00:42:46.500
to look back at your life and you look for a narrative. You look for a thread to sort of make
00:42:52.140
sense of it. And this can be an act that can make you depressed or it can actually be uplifting.
00:42:59.260
And I think for most of us, it's more uplifting because we start to see this narrative arc. I mean,
00:43:04.760
really we're creating the arc in our mind, but nevermind, it's, it's there. I once met a composer
00:43:11.300
of classical music in Iceland who was older than me. And looking back, he said, well, I met everyone
00:43:18.200
I needed to meet when I needed to meet them. And I think Simone de Beauvoir would agree that with that
00:43:23.980
too. You start to see that things happened for a reason. I'm not saying that everything is faded,
00:43:30.580
but all the pieces start to fit together. So the last philosopher you visit is Montaigne.
00:43:38.400
And he famously wrote these essays just about everything could be about food, sex, but then
00:43:44.860
he also wrote a lot about dying. And he famously said, philosophy is learning how to die.
00:43:50.180
Yeah. He changed that by the end of the essays to philosophy is learning how to live and dying is
00:43:54.560
just part of it. But he, he, he wrestled with death and dying throughout his life and on the page.
00:44:02.000
I should say that he lived in a time, even though it was the 16th century in France, that it's not
00:44:07.800
that different from ours and that there was a plague, bubonic plague in Bordeaux where he was actually
00:44:13.040
mayor. And he did what a lot of people did. He escaped. His family owned a vineyard out in the
00:44:19.080
countryside. And he went there, went up to his tower, wrote his essays, in fact, invented the form of
00:44:24.080
essays and thought a lot about death and dying. And he thought about it mostly intellectually until
00:44:30.280
one day he was out riding. He was a real equestrian. He loved riding and some jerk and a big horse
00:44:36.740
knocked him down and just, you know, flattened him. And he thought he was dying. I mean, he was
00:44:42.000
coughing up globs of blood and he thought that was it. He had what today we'd call a near death
00:44:47.520
experience and changed his attitude toward death and dying. And he realized
00:44:53.300
how, well, he said it wasn't death that he was afraid of, but dying in the process. And that's
00:44:58.520
probably true for most of us. He realized that it's just, it is part of a natural process.
00:45:04.420
You know, the Greek philosopher Epicurus says, well, you didn't think about that you were nothing
00:45:09.160
before you were born. That never bothers you. So why should it bother you that you'll be nothing
00:45:13.020
after you die? And Montaigne wrestles with that. And ultimately he concludes that, you know,
00:45:20.320
we just don't know, but nature knows best that nature has your back. He says, don't, don't,
00:45:27.040
you're afraid of dying. Don't worry. Nature's got you covered.
00:45:30.420
Yeah. He says, you already know, you'll, you'll know what to do when it's time, when it's time to
00:45:34.540
You'll know what to do. And you think about childbirth. I mean, we didn't people, women
00:45:40.920
gave birth successfully, not always successfully, but you know, obviously we've propagated the
00:45:46.640
species for many centuries before modern medicine came along. And, you know, there's a healing process
00:45:53.300
in nature. If you break your bone, it will heal. And he just thought that, that we should not look
00:45:58.760
at death as something out there. There's me. And then there's death where part, you know,
00:46:04.300
you start to die the day you're born. And that's not something that necessarily needs to make you
00:46:11.800
Has that helped you at all? Or I mean, does thinking about dying.
00:46:14.380
Again, I have, I have to give the so-so answer. You know, a lot of this is, is easier in theory
00:46:21.060
than in practice, but I liked Montaigne. I liked how he, you know, he was sort of like me in that he,
00:46:28.760
he took a little bit from here and there. He read all the philosophers and ultimately his saying was,
00:46:35.000
what do I know? You know, he had that sort of questioning what he really knew and he was just
00:46:39.960
very relatable. Um, I thought, and yeah, I mean, I keep going back to what he wrote about death and
00:46:46.580
dying and, you know, it still freaks me out. I, the idea of nothingness, I have to be honest,
00:46:52.480
but I do find not just comfort in his words, but wisdom.
00:46:56.340
And for those who want to dabble in philosophy, Montaigne's a lot, it's a fun read. I would
00:47:00.960
consider like, he was like the first blogger because you just, he wrote about whatever.
00:47:05.280
There you go. He wrote, he wrote, he wrote about thumbs. He wrote about cannibals. He wrote about
00:47:10.220
his penis. He wrote about food. And then he wrote about death and dying and religion and all these
00:47:16.060
serious topics too. And they were very personal and they, as you read them, they become increasingly
00:47:21.740
personal and you find that he's hitting his stride. Well, Eric, where can people go to learn
00:47:26.800
more about the book and your work? Well, I have a website, ericweinerbooks.com,
00:47:31.760
Weiner, W-E-I-N-E-R, all one word, or on Twitter, eric underscore Weiner, again, W-E-I-N-E-R.
00:47:40.080
Well, Eric, this has been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:47:45.540
My guest is Eric Weiner. He's the author of the book,
00:47:47.860
Socrates Express. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more
00:47:51.860
information about his book and his work at his website, ericweinerbooks.com. Also check out
00:47:55.880
our show notes at aom.is slash Socrates Express, where you can find links to resources and we delve
00:48:00.220
deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website
00:48:11.760
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