Stories from Philosophy

The Buddha asked his students what really separates a trained mind from an untrained one, since both feel pain. When pain comes to the untrained person, he said, they worry, grieve and lament over it, so they feel two pains: one in the body and one in the mind. It is as if a man were struck by an arrow, and then struck again, right away, by a second arrow in the same place.

The trained person feels the first arrow, because pain is pain. They just don't fire the second one into themselves.

The Athenians kept the ship that the hero Theseus sailed home from Crete. As its timbers rotted, they replaced them one at a time, until philosophers argued over whether it was still the same ship. Centuries later, Hobbes added a twist: suppose someone saved every old plank and rebuilt the original. Which one is Theseus's ship now?

Heraclitus had made a similar point long before: you can't step into the same river twice, because new water is always flowing past.

Epictetus was born into slavery, gained his freedom, and became one of the most influential Stoic teachers. His Handbook opens by dividing everything into two groups. Some things are up to us: our judgments, our intentions, what we pursue and what we avoid, and our own actions. Other things are not: our bodies, our possessions, our reputation, our position, and everything other people choose.

Most distress, he taught, comes from treating the second group as if it belonged to the first.

Prisoners have been chained since childhood, facing the wall of a cave. Behind them a fire burns, and people pass in front of it carrying objects, so the prisoners see only shadows on the wall and take them for reality. One prisoner is freed. Turning toward the fire hurts his eyes, and being dragged up into sunlight is worse, but slowly he begins to see real things, and finally the sun itself.

He goes back down to tell the others. His eyes, used to daylight, stumble in the dark, and they laugh at him. They decide the journey ruined his eyes, and they resist anyone who tries to free them.

Hearing that rival teachers were quarreling over whose view was true, the Buddha told a story. A king once gathered men who had been blind from birth and had each one touch a different part of an elephant. The man who touched the head said an elephant is like a water pot. The one who touched the ear said it's like a winnowing basket (a wide, shallow basket for sorting grain). The one who touched the tusk said a plowshare; the leg, a pillar; the tuft of the tail, a broom.

Each one insisted he was right, and they ended up fighting while the king looked on.

Zhuangzi and his friend Huizi were walking on a bridge over the Hao River. "Look how freely the minnows swim," Zhuangzi said. "That's the joy of fish." Huizi replied, "You're not a fish. How do you know what fish enjoy?" Zhuangzi answered, "You're not me. How do you know I don't know?" Huizi pressed on: "I'm not you, so I can't know you. And you're not a fish, so you can't know fish. That settles it."

Zhuangzi asked to go back to the beginning. When Huizi asked "how do you know," he said, Huizi already granted that he knew. And he knew it the way anyone does: standing right there, above the river.

A man is crossing a river when another boat drifts into his. If that boat is empty, even a short-tempered man won't get angry. But if someone is sitting in it, he'll shout at them to steer clear. If they don't respond, he'll shout again, and by the third time he's cursing. The collision is exactly the same. What changed is that now there's someone in the boat.

Zhuangzi's conclusion: if you could move through the world like an empty boat, with no need to prove anything, who could harm you?

On a cold winter day, a group of porcupines huddled together for warmth. Soon they felt each other's quills and pulled apart. The cold drove them back together, the quills drove them apart again, and so on, until they found a middle distance where they could stay reasonably warm without getting stuck.

Schopenhauer meant it a little cynically: he called that middle distance "politeness." Freud later borrowed the image to describe the mixed feelings found in close relationships.

Aristotle noticed that people care for each other for three different reasons. Some bonds are based on usefulness: each person gets something they need. Some are based on pleasure: the company is enjoyable. And some are between people who each wish the other well for the other's own sake, because of who they are.

The first two are real, he said, but fragile: when the usefulness or the fun ends, so does the bond. The third kind is rarer and lasts, and it takes time. He repeats an old saying that you can't truly know someone until you've eaten a lot of salt together.

Hierocles pictured each person at the center of a set of circles. The innermost circle holds your own mind. The next holds parents, siblings, spouse and children. Beyond that come more distant relatives, then neighbors, then fellow citizens, and finally all of humanity.

The work of a good life, he said, is to keep drawing the circles inward, treating people in the outer circles a little more like the people near the center.

Glaucon challenges Socrates with a tale. Gyges, a shepherd serving the king of Lydia, finds a chasm opened by an earthquake. Inside is a bronze horse holding a corpse that wears a gold ring. Gyges takes the ring and discovers that turning it makes him invisible. He uses that power to reach the palace, seduce the queen, kill the king and take the throne.

Glaucon's point is that anyone given such a ring would do the same; people are only just because they're watched. Socrates spends the rest of the Republic arguing the opposite: that justice is good for us in itself, whether anyone sees it or not.

Buber taught that we relate to the world in two basic ways. In "I–It," we experience and use: the other is an object, with features, a function, or a problem to solve. In "I–Thou," we meet: the other is present to us as a whole person, not a list of qualities. We can't live without I–It, he said, but someone who lives only in I–It isn't fully living.

Buber also wrote about a young man who once came to see him. Buber was friendly and attentive, but not fully present; part of his mind was elsewhere. Later he learned that the young man had come not for polite conversation but because he was facing a serious decision, and had hoped to be truly met. Buber said that meeting changed how he understood what it means to be there for someone.