Eric Weiner's Reading List

"Epictetus was mainly a teacher. We think of him as a philosopher, but he was mainly a teacher of Stoic philosophy around the first century AD. He was born a slave in what is now Turkey, was eventually liberated, moved to Rome, taught there for a while and was banished to a city in Greece called Nicopolis. It’s hard to tell if he had many original ideas about Stoic philosophy. There were other Stoics—Rufus and Zeno, Chrysippus and others—who came before him, but he was for the most part a popularizer. In that way he was doing what I’m doing. So, he popularized Stoic philosophy and he was admirable: he went from being a slave to becoming a revered teacher. He was lame for most of his life, so he couldn’t walk very well and he was no nonsense. He was tough love. Lots of tough love. ‘Stop crying for your mommy’ was one of his lines. It’s become a t-shirt here in the US. It’s been picked up by Alcoholics Anonymous and all sorts of people. ‘Some things are up to us, and some things aren’t. Focus on the ones that are.’ Yes. The term ‘ethics’ is tricky because today people hear that word and they think of morality and ethical behaviour. In ancient times, ethics was more a question of how to lead a good life. It’s no coincidence that Stoicism is enjoying a revival today and Epictetus’s thought in particular, because it’s helpful in life. It’s the philosophy of hard knocks, the philosophy for people who have lived for a while and suffered for a while. It’s largely about coping with difficult situations. I find it’s been a very helpful philosophy during this time we’re living in, in a pandemic ; that simple first line of The Enchiridion ( The Handbook ): ‘some things are up to us and some things aren’t.’ It’s so incredibly obvious, but good philosophy, like a lot of things, is incredibly obvious and we need to be reminded of it. I don’t think we do recognize it. I think Socrates would jump in here and say, ‘Okay, you say that you know that some things are under your control and some things aren’t, but let’s interrogate that. Do you act that way?’ I go through my life acting like everything is under my control. I go through life acting like I can control whether my books are bestsellers or not, whether I’ll lose those 30 pounds I want to lose or not, whether I’ll be in good health, all those things. “It’s no coincidence that Stoicism is enjoying a revival today and Epictetus’s thought in particular, because it’s helpful in life” When you look at it from a Stoic point of view, you start to realize how little is actually under your control. I could get hit by a bus on the way to the fitness centre to exercise. You start to realize that where we draw that line is not where we thought it was. So that’s the first step, I think, in Stoic ethics. That’s a reason why this is a life-changing philosophy book. Then, once you realise what is under your control, you realize that 90 per cent of it is internal. That’s the starting point. Then you have to do something about controlling the internal aspects, which is hard. Only a philosopher would ask that question! I’ve thought about this a lot and I’ve written about happiness before. I think that we all operate within a range of possibility, and I’m going to say internal possibility. I’m only capable of being so happy. But it’s a range, and whether I’m operating at the top of that range or the bottom of that range I think is under my control. I don’t think I could ever be as happy as the Dalai Lama, but I could be more at peace and have more Stoic contentment than I currently do, if I more rigorously practised the precepts of Stoicism and work, like for example Marcus Aurelius, to control what I can control, which is internal. I don’t know when this pandemic is going to be over. I can’t control whether the vaccine will be coming along or not. All I can control is how I cope internally with a difficult situation. I had not made that connection before, but I think you’re right. I think the existentialists were a little more outwardly oriented: they talked a lot about projects and they thought you were what you did, that there was no love, only acts of love, no charity, only acts of charity. I’m not sure Stoics would agree with that. I think they might say that you are your internal mechanism and your internal equilibrium as much as you are your external. I think the existentialists were busy beavers: in fact Simone de Beauvoir’s nickname was castor. The Stoics were certainly involved in public life, but, you know, ‘Stoic calm’ is a phrase I would use easily; I don’t know if ‘existentialist calm’ falls off the lips. And in this way Stoicism joins hands with Buddhism , I think, in that it is a practice. The Buddhists have meditation, the Stoics have their own meditations or spiritual exercises, as Pierre Hadot calls them. It’s not quite as spelt out as Buddhism, partly I think because in Stoicism our record is not as complete. Buddhism is a whole technology of spirituality, essentially. I think the modern Stoics are trying to put together a Buddhist-style program for Stoicism, this idea of premeditated adversity—think of the worst thing that is going to happen to you, as Seneca suggested, and imagine it. So I see commonalities there. I found throughout writing my book, as I was reading about one philosophy, I would be like, ‘oh, that’s like this one.’ There were overlaps and parallels. Buddhism came up a fair amount actually because one theme in my book is that of acceptance—radical acceptance I’d call it—and that certainly is within Buddhism, Stoicism and Epicureanism."

"This is one of the first books I read that got me rolling on board The Socrates Express and started me off on the project: I just found it a great introduction to this idea that philosophy can be useful. As I like to say, only in the dictionary do the words ‘philosophy’ and ‘practical’ appear in any proximity, but this book changed my mind. Hadot was a French academic focused on ancient and Hellenistic philosophies. Looking at the chapters now, there’s one on “Ancient Spiritual Exercises” and one called “Only the Present is our Happiness.” There’s “The View from Above.” These are the chapter headings that draw you in and don’t repel you. He was my inspiration for someone who wrote about mainly ancient philosophy, but in a way that made it useful and practical without oversimplifying it. He was a serious academic and I admire people, like you, to be honest, who are grounded in the academic work but are able to convey it to others. That’s what Pierre Hadot does. The ancient part is not a coincidence. I think philosophy is one of the few fields where the further back you go, the easier it gets. The further back you go, the more accessible it gets. I would say that the heyday for therapeutic philosophy was the Hellenistic age, so roughly 300, 200 BC, when you’ve got the Stoics and the Epicureans in particular thriving in Athens, and then around the Greek world. The writing is clear and accessible and practical. Then I feel like philosophy took a millennia-long detour into scholasticism and analytical philosophy and became sort of unrecognizable from the way it started. So, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that a book called Philosophy as a Way of Life focuses almost exclusively on an ancient philosophy. I would. It is accessible. You’re going to learn about Socrates, you’re going to learn about Marcus Aurelius and you’re going to want to read more about both after this book. It’s a little more rigorous than some of the purely pop philosophy books out there, but I would definitely recommend it."

"You’ve put that in an awfully interesting way. Do you want to expound? I think I know what you mean, but it’s not how I thought of her. I went to her cemetery, the Bybrook Cemetery in Ashford, Kent. There’s a little tombstone for her and it’s nothing special. It’s the way she would have wanted it. One prevailing theory about how Simone Weil died is that she starved herself to death, that she suffered from anorexia throughout her life, and that that is what killed her. Others say it was the tuberculosis that she contracted that killed her. I’m not too hung up on that. Throughout her life she had what I would call extreme empathy for sufferers. When she was young and World War I had broken out, she refused to eat sugar because the French troops at the front didn’t have sugar. She slept on unheated, hard floors. She had what some might call a masochistic streak or others would look at as just a very, very empathetic tendency. She probably also had some psychological issues that explain so much of anorexia. “I think we’re all born philosophers, but we have it beaten out of us as we grow older” She grew up in a hyper intellectual, very secularized Jewish family in France. She had an older brother whose shadow she spent most of her childhood in, André Weil, who went on to be one of the great mathematicians of 20th century Europe. As someone who also grew up in a hyper intellectual, very secular Jewish family I can relate to her but, you know, she was reading Blaise Pascal by the time she was 10 and speaking Assyro-Babylonian—which she called a ridiculously easy language—and Sanskrit. She bested Simone de Beauvoir on the exams to get into the elite French universities. So she was really learned and highly intellectual, but it was not her head, but her heart that interested me. It’s an anthology of her writing called Waiting for God . It is the most accessible of her anthologies. It’s a slim book and it is, I think, the best of her writing, the most accessible of her writing, in particular what she writes about patience and about waiting, which are twin themes that run throughout her philosophy. Yes, it’s the essay with an unwieldy title “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” I don’t know what it is about philosophers and titles, but they have a tendency to give their books just terrible titles. The World as Will and Representation – don’t get me started on that terrible title. But in this awkwardly titled—and if you’re not a religious person you might find it off-putting—essay; I’m looking at my copy now and it’s just highlighted and underscored everywhere, because it’s really not about school studies and it’s not about God, it’s about paying attention, but in a very different way than the way most of us conceive of it. Yes. When we think of paying attention, we think it is synonymous with concentration. So if I were to say, ‘Nigel, I want you to pay attention to what I’m saying’ you’ll probably just instinctively furrow your brow, you might tense up your jaw, you would contract, in a way, and think, ‘Oh, I’ve got to pay attention, I wasn’t paying attention.’ She thought this sort of concentration is ridiculous, that when you tense your body like that, when you tense your mind like that, when you narrow your focus to that pinpoint prick of whatever it is, you are not paying attention the way she envisions, which is a more expansive way of being, where you’re relaxed and you’re receptive. It’s a kind of active passivity, which sounds like a contradiction, but philosophers are known for making contradictory statements like that. You are alert and you are receptive to what might enter into your mind, but you have no expectations of what that might be and you’ve enlarged yourself. You’ve not shrunk yourself. She says it better than I can: “Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive, in its naked truth, the object that is to penetrate it.” Too often, she says, “thought has seized upon some idea too hastily, and being thus prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth. The cause is always that we have wanted to be too active, we have wanted to carry out a search.” Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This blew me away because it’s the opposite to the way I’ve lived my life. I’ve wanted to be active. I’ve been seeking all my life. What she’s suggesting is a kind of radical, active passivity where you are not seeking but waiting. It’s called “Waiting for God,” but you could call it ‘Waiting for the Truth. You could just call it ‘Waiting’. I would have preferred the title simply ‘Waiting’, which is really what it’s about. Her spiritual religious life gets very complicated, we don’t have time to get into it, but she had Catholic leanings. She never became a Catholic, she was not baptized. It’s complicated, but I think of her as a spiritual more than a religious figure, and a philosopher by any account. I am pretty good at titles. You’re speaking of confirmation bias, as psychologists call it? Absolutely, and this is why we get stuck. I write about it a bit in the Thoreau chapter, about seeing and the different theories of seeing and how we see. We tend to think of vision as like a photograph, your eyes are taking a photograph of me. In fact, you’re not. It’s more like a conversation that you’re having with your brain. Like I see a person and I think it’s Eric and this gets us through probably 90 per cent of the day and totally fucks us over for the other 10 per cent. Seriously. I agree. I would condense that to the following: we only see what we expect to see. Otherwise, we literally do not see it. We only see what we’ve seen before in a large way, which is why, I think, all innovation has to be incremental—because if you take too big of a leap and you were to invent a theory or a device that had no connection to what people had seen or experienced before, they’d be like, ‘I don’t know what do with it.’ I’ve given that a lot of thought."

"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."

"Did you know him? My favourite episode of Philosophy Bites was a compilation, when you asked people, ‘What is philosophy?’ I think at the end of each interview you were asking people that, and you put it all together. And I was like, ‘oh my God, they can’t agree!’ Yes, and I thought, ‘No wonder philosophy is not taken seriously.’ You know, I think if you asked physicists or psychologists they wouldn’t be so all over the place. I thought it was brilliant. I don’t think he needed to reread Schopenhauer. Bryan Magee was a 20th century philosopher, scholar and Member of Parliament, an unusual combination. I first ran across him in his book, Confessions of a Philosopher , which I thought was a wonderful combination of the personal and the philosophical, the academic and the accessible. I realize it’s not any one thing he wrote, but the way he wrote it and who he was. My editor says—and I like this—that the reader will follow a good writer anywhere and that’s the way it is with Bryan Magee: I would follow him anywhere. I always found him thoughtful and even writing as an elderly man, he retained the curiosity of a child. It’s been said that a philosopher is a seven-year old with a bigger brain, and I think there’s something to that. I think Magee was a seven-year old with a very large brain. He never lost that sense of wonder, even as he rose the ranks of academia at Oxford, if I have that right? Maybe that’s why, then. He’s another feral philosopher. He was extremely learned but extremely accessible. Ultimate Questions was, I believe, his last book before he passed away and it’s very slim, 127 pages. Again, it’s not at all methodical. I realize that my favourite philosophy books are the ones that are not methodical. It’s like Schopenhauer’s collection of essays. So here I found one of my favourite contemporary philosophers joining hands with one of my favourite 19th century philosophers, Schopenhauer. I liked that Magee loved this grumpy Schopenhauer and saw the bright side of Schopenhauer—the man who is often referred to as the philosopher of pessimism, including by Magee. Magee also had this love of music that I’ve been trying to come around to, because I tend to have a tin ear and not be a musical person, even though, oddly, I love sounds because I worked in radio. I love ambient sounds and acoustic noises, but not music. There’s one line from Bryan’s Ultimate Questions where he’s describing listening to music, “when I listened to music I was the music.” That is philosophical. That’s spiritual, that’s religious. That’s personal. An academic philosopher would never write a line like that, even if they experienced it. I felt that especially toward the end of his life, Magee was like, ‘Screw it, I can write whatever I want.’ Ultimate Questions is a good title too. Yes, and he acknowledged that he was scared, which I thought was courageous. He acknowledged that despite all his learnedness, he didn’t know what happens when you die. It’s his final attempt to grapple with these big questions. And that’s another thing I love about Magee and about philosophy in general, that when it’s done well it has no time for the trivial and the silly. It’s all about big questions and it can be conveyed in a fun way, but that doesn’t make the questions any smaller. He was passionate. Getting back to Socrates, all philosophy begins with wonder—he allegedly said—and that, to me, is important, that sense of wonder. I make a distinction in my book between wonder and curiosity, because we often conflate them, and I think they’re slightly different. Curiosity has a kind of restlessness to it and impatience. Your curiosity is always kind of moving along, ‘I’m curious about that, but wait, what’s that over there, that shiny object I’m curious about that.’ Wonder is more like curiosity with its feet up, with a drink in its hand, saying, ‘I’m going to wonder about this.’ It has a sense of expansiveness to it and it also has this childlike quality, to wonder like a child. I think all of the philosophers I write about and all these books I recommend as life-changing books of philosophy contain the childlike sense of wonder that real philosophers, as I see them, never lose. Which is not to say they should write like five-year olds. You use more complex sentences, but you don’t lose that sense of wonder that we all have as children. I think we’re all born philosophers, but we have it beaten out of us as we grow older. But a few of us—like you and like Brian Magee—don’t lose it. It isn’t fully beaten out of them. Like all jargon, it’s meant to exclude others from your club. But why one would exclude people from the club of philosophy is beyond me. Einstein said that if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t really know it well enough and I think that’s true. If you really understand something, you can explain it simply. It’s when you’re a little unsure in your understanding that you have to prop it up with a lot of fancy language."