The Heart of Philosophy

"It’s good. It’s more accessible than Hadot, even though he’s also a professor of philosophy with a strong spiritual bent. He has a chapter called “Nondepartmental Offering” in which he attempts to bring philosophy to the masses and hold philosophy jam sessions in San Francisco. This is a nonlinear, visceral book about the philosophical impulse, I would say. It is not about any one philosophy. It is not comprehensive. It is about the impulse that causes us to philosophize and its usefulness to us and, as the title suggests, the heart of philosophy is emotive. I was struck by the title because I didn’t know philosophy had a heart, I thought it was all head. Needleman convinced me otherwise. It’s also again, like my book, somewhat autobiographical. He writes about a friend of his, Elias Barkhordian, and how they would sit in their neighborhood in Philadelphia—this is shortly after World War II —on a stone wall and ask the sort of questions that you probably asked as a kid and that anyone with a philosophical bent asked as a child: why is there something rather than nothing? What happens to you when you go to sleep? These sorts of basic, childlike questions that are filled with wonder. Then, sadly, his friend died at age 14 of leukaemia and that sent Jacob Needleman off on this quest to study philosophy. Being Jewish, his parents wanted him to become a doctor. He did become a doctor, but as his mother said, not the kind that does anyone any good, a PhD. He’s got some self-deprecating humour. “I would say that the heyday for therapeutic philosophy was the Hellenistic age, so roughly 300, 200 BC” There was one sentence in this book that drew me to his house in Oakland, California: I took a train across the country to see him. That sentence is, essentially, that we, as a society, tend to solve problems without experiencing questions or reach for pleasure without experiencing questions. It struck me as incredibly true, incredibly obvious, incredibly profound, incredibly Socratic and I went out to California and met with him and over tea we talked about it, this idea that we need to experience questions and not merely answer them. I think that we are not willing to sit with our own ignorance and doubt for very long. It makes us uncomfortable. We want to solve the problem. Even if it’s an imperfect solution, there’s something about us as human beings that needs to complete the task. There’s something called the Zeigarnik effect, from an early 20th century Soviet psychologist. She noted in restaurants that waiters, from the moment they took the order until they placed it with the kitchen, couldn’t allow anything else to enter their mind. This notion of unfinished business really bugs us. Maybe we’re wired that way, I don’t know, but what Needleman is suggesting, which is what Socrates was suggesting, is that we need to be able to sit with our ignorance for a while and experience the question. It’s a phrase that keeps coming back to me in my life. Am I solving a problem or experiencing a question? If I’m only solving a problem, I am less of a person than if I’m experiencing a question. Ultimately you want to get to answers, I’m not of the belief that philosophy is only about asking questions and not coming up with answers. That’s the rap, that’s why no one wants their child to major in philosophy at university. But you do want to reframe questions, that’s part of the experiencing part. Can I ask you: what does ‘to not solve a problem but experience a question’ mean to you? We spend most of our life trying to reduce perceived risk and perceived uncertainty through science or in various other ways, as opposed to increasing our tolerance for that uncertainty. And I think the Stoics and Needleman and probably every one of the philosophers I write about would say that we need to increase our tolerance for uncertainty. There’s nothing given that uncertainty must make us alcoholics/drug addicts/neurotics. Science, as we see, reduces uncertainty in some areas, but increases it in others. Certainly, the pandemic is complicated by technology as much as it’s solved by it. Airplanes spread the virus, social media spreads disinformation about the virus. That has certainly made our life more complex, not less. Many of my atheist and agnostic friends see religion as a cop-out. That’s a whole other subject. I don’t see it as one, but yes. Some religions though, like Buddhism, provide certainty and uncertainty. In other words, they want you to realize all is flux, everything is changing, everything is impermanent. The Buddhists say—and I write about this a bit in The Socrates Express —that that’s a cause for celebration. The Japanese philosophers write a lot about impermanence. The Japanese celebrate the sakura or the cherry blossom. It only blooms for three days and then it’s gone and they find great beauty in that. They have taken something that we see as bad—it’s fleeting, it’s impermanent, just a form of uncertainty—and said, ‘No, that’s beautiful.’ Nietzsche was a bit like that as well."