Speaker 1: Pushkin. In our last episode, we learned about the ideas
Speaker 1: of the great Greek thinker Socrates. My friend and Yale
Speaker 1: colleague to Mark Gendler, gave us a glimpse into the
Speaker 1: so called Socratic method, which calls on all of us
Speaker 1: to question every belief we hold and every assumption we make.
Speaker 1: But we also heard that the story of Socrates didn't
Speaker 1: have the happiest of endings. His habit of getting us
Speaker 1: to regularly challenge everything we know was a bit too
Speaker 1: radical for many of his fellow ancient Greeks, and so
Speaker 1: he was sentenced to death for the alleged crime of
Speaker 1: corrupting the youth. But Socrates's ideas didn't die with him.
Speaker 1: Many other famous Greek thinkers picked up where their teacher
Speaker 1: Socrates left off, and their work also has much to
Speaker 1: teach us about how to live a flourishing life. We
Speaker 1: looked at some of this wisdom in a previous season
Speaker 1: of Happiness Lessons of the Ancients, again with the help
Speaker 1: of my amazing friend Tomar Gendler. So, in case you
Speaker 1: missed it last time, I wanted to share those past
Speaker 1: episodes once again in a special doubleheader. Today you'll hear
Speaker 1: some important insights on how we can realign the parts
Speaker 1: of our minds from Socrates's student Plato, and you'll learn
Speaker 1: about Aristotle, a real og happiness expert who has some
Speaker 1: helpful tips on how we can feel happier with the
Speaker 1: right habits. I hope you enjoyed these special back to
Speaker 1: back episodes. We humans were already pretty complicated creatures, but
Speaker 1: living in the modern world has added a ton more
Speaker 1: complication to our lives. In past episodes of the Happiness Lab,
Speaker 1: we've looked at the effects of things like jobs, school grades, smartphones,
Speaker 1: and even alarm clocks on our wellbeing. These days, we
Speaker 1: have so much going on, so many things demanding our attention,
Speaker 1: and so many competing desires and emotions, that even if
Speaker 1: you know what you're supposed to be doing, it often
Speaker 1: feels like it's still hard to stay on track. It's
Speaker 1: a bit like being a charioteer holding the reins of
Speaker 1: two powerful but mismatched horses. You know you want to
Speaker 1: reach a happy place, but each of the steeds keeps
Speaker 1: going off in different directions. It's exhausted, but you'll only
Speaker 1: reach your desired destination if you can get the horses
Speaker 1: to work in harmony and pull together. Now, I know
Speaker 1: what you're thinking. Chariots wayward horses. What's that got to
Speaker 1: do with me navigating the modern world? Well. Even though
Speaker 1: the science of happiness is a relatively new academic field,
Speaker 1: most of the ideas underpinning all this research are far
Speaker 1: from recent. Thinkers, philosophers, and spiritual leaders stretching back thousands
Speaker 1: of years have figured out many important well being lessons
Speaker 1: that are not only hugely relevant for all of us today,
Speaker 1: but are backed up by the modern science. And that
Speaker 1: includes my seemingly weird metaphor about the chariot. And so,
Speaker 1: in this many season of the Happiness Lab, I want
Speaker 1: to explore some of the well being concepts that the
Speaker 1: ancient philosophies and great religions got right, old school tips
Speaker 1: that are borne out by the science, and ones that
Speaker 1: have personally helped me in my own quest to be
Speaker 1: happier too. So welcome to Happiness Lessons of the Ancients
Speaker 1: with me, Doctor Laurie Sanders Aristotle. He is absurd, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems fine. This is tomar Getler, Professor of philosophy
Speaker 1: and cognitive Science at Yale University. One two three, Okay,
Speaker 1: And the volume still looks okay on and also one
Speaker 1: of my oldest and dearest friends, does that work all right? Okay,
Speaker 1: Tomorrow and I talk pretty much every day, so it's
Speaker 1: a little bit weird to be recording one of our
Speaker 1: conversations for you all. Tomorrow is getting a crash course
Speaker 1: on how to use one of my spare recorders. Okay,
Speaker 1: let me give them another five. And she's taken to
Speaker 1: podcasting like a total pro. I am totally ready to go. Hello.
Speaker 1: Tomorrow also teaches a super popular class at Yale. It's
Speaker 1: called Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature. Her class
Speaker 1: looks way back in history to find philosophical solutions to
Speaker 1: the problems we all face today. The idea that the
Speaker 1: most interesting answer to the question that you're trying to
Speaker 1: ask would be given by somebody who happens to be
Speaker 1: on earth with you right now is a real mistake.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the most interesting answer is something that somebody gave
Speaker 1: two thousand years ago, or on a completely different continent,
Speaker 1: or in a completely different context. The story of the
Speaker 1: Chariot and the uncooperative horses is an analogy I find
Speaker 1: really useful when reason tells me I should be shooting
Speaker 1: for my happiness goals, but my desires, doubts, and emotions
Speaker 1: keep pulling me off course. It's a powerful analogy, and
Speaker 1: it comes from the work of ancient Greek philosophers. One
Speaker 1: of the areas to our teaches in her course, there
Speaker 1: was a period about twenty five hundred years ago in
Speaker 1: ancient Greece where a whole bunch of really smart people
Speaker 1: directed their attention to a set of really interesting and
Speaker 1: important questions, and society structured itself in such a way
Speaker 1: that those individuals were given the freedom and the leisure
Speaker 1: and the luxury to think about those questions as their profession.
Speaker 1: What they did for their job was think about what
Speaker 1: does it mean for human beings to and the community
Speaker 1: of individuals talking to one another about that question meant
Speaker 1: that they made more progress on it than other people
Speaker 1: have at other times. And so it's a great luxury
Speaker 1: to be able to help ourselves to their wisdom. So
Speaker 1: today we're going to focus in on one of the
Speaker 1: ancients who in my view is really considered sort of
Speaker 1: the father of positive psychology, this field of the science
Speaker 1: of well being, and that is Aristotle. So give us
Speaker 1: Aristotle one on one. Who was Aristotle and why was
Speaker 1: he so important. So Aristotle was a guy from the countryside.
Speaker 1: He didn't come from Athens, and his parents died when
Speaker 1: he was quite young, so he was an orphan. And
Speaker 1: when he was seventeen he was brought to Athens to
Speaker 1: study in Plato's academy, and he liked school so much
Speaker 1: that he stayed there as a student for another twenty years.
Speaker 1: And Aristotle was just one of the greatest math thinkers
Speaker 1: in the history of Western civilization. In addition to the
Speaker 1: work that he did in philosophy, he's the inventor of
Speaker 1: physics as a field, of biology as a field. He
Speaker 1: was a great theorist of poetry, a great theorist of
Speaker 1: drama and theater. And one of the major activities that
Speaker 1: he undertook was to try to figure out what a
Speaker 1: well lived human life might look like. And so he
Speaker 1: came up with two concepts that I think are super
Speaker 1: important when we try to think about happiness in the
Speaker 1: modern day. And so one of these concepts was what
Speaker 1: he called you diamonia, Like what is you diamonia? Yes,
Speaker 1: so you diamonia has as its middle word the word
Speaker 1: diamond or spirit. And if you've read his Dark Materials, books,
Speaker 1: which are a wonderful series of children's books. You'll notice
Speaker 1: that the spirit animal that people have in those books
Speaker 1: is called their diamond. So you, diamonia is roughly spiritual flourishing,
Speaker 1: spiritual well being, the thriving of what some traditions call
Speaker 1: the human soul, what you might call the human mind
Speaker 1: or human spirit. And so when we think of you, Diamondia,
Speaker 1: we think of sort of spiritual flourishing. But the way
Speaker 1: Aristotle thought of you, Diamondia, it was a little bit
Speaker 1: different than we often think about happiness these days, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it wasn't really happiness in the moment. It was kind
Speaker 1: of a bigger, deeper, almost like moral happiness. Right. You
Speaker 1: might think of two distinct notions of happiness. There are many,
Speaker 1: but here are two. One is what we might call
Speaker 1: hedonistic happiness, the indulgence of short lived pleasures, so the
Speaker 1: pleasures of eating or of sex, and that's an important
Speaker 1: part of what it is to be a human being,
Speaker 1: taking pleasure in the physical world around you. But Aristotle
Speaker 1: was interested in a richer and more robust, and more
Speaker 1: lasting notion of what happiness would be, not just short
Speaker 1: lived hedonistic pleasure, but long lived thriving, and he had
Speaker 1: a picture that there was a certain function for which
Speaker 1: human beings were ideally built. So just as the function
Speaker 1: of a knife is to cut well, and the function
Speaker 1: of a paperweight is to hold down papers, the function
Speaker 1: of a human being is to be able to express
Speaker 1: virtue and reason, that is, to participate in the things
Speaker 1: that are the highest form of the good in the world.
Speaker 1: And so you Diamonia is a kind of thriving that
Speaker 1: involves spending as much of your time and as complete
Speaker 1: of your activity in a state where you are doing
Speaker 1: things that are good, that are virtuous, that are pleasure
Speaker 1: urable to you because you have turned yourself into someone
Speaker 1: who takes pleasure in virtue, and so you Diamonia, in
Speaker 1: contrast to hedonism, is a kind of lasting rather than
Speaker 1: short lived pleasure. And it's so cool that Aristotle came
Speaker 1: up with this so long ago, right, because this is
Speaker 1: what's being born out in a lot of the modern
Speaker 1: science of happiness. Right. You know, on this podcast, we
Speaker 1: talk a lot about data suggesting that your circumstances don't
Speaker 1: necessarily make you happy. You know, you could be rich
Speaker 1: and have the opportunities to engage in all kinds of
Speaker 1: hedonistic pleasure, but a lot of folks self report that
Speaker 1: leaves them kind of empty, that they're kind of missing something.
Speaker 1: And so Aristotle was kind of on top of this,
Speaker 1: like you know, two thousand years ago. Right, Well, it's
Speaker 1: really interesting that each era uses a particular mode of
Speaker 1: understanding as its best way of making sense of the world.
Speaker 1: And one of the things I try to teach in
Speaker 1: my course is that there's lots of methodologies to coming
Speaker 1: to the same insight. And so neuroscience gives us one
Speaker 1: way of looking at what is it for us to
Speaker 1: be in a state of happiness or harmony, and behavioral
Speaker 1: psychology gives us another way of testing and measuring that,
Speaker 1: and literary representations give us another way of identifying this.
Speaker 1: And the kind of work that Aristotle did, a speculative, systematic,
Speaker 1: philosophical exploration of what he observed in those around him,
Speaker 1: is a methodology that very often brings us to the
Speaker 1: same sorts of insights that we might get from literature
Speaker 1: or neuroscience or behavioral psychology. I think the fact that
Speaker 1: you need to do that kind of philosophical inquiry for
Speaker 1: these insights is important, right because another thing that comes
Speaker 1: up on this podcast is that we often have incorrect
Speaker 1: notions of the kinds of things that make us happy.
Speaker 1: Right when we do a super fast introspection, we can think, oh,
Speaker 1: I just want all the hedonistic pleasures and some good
Speaker 1: food and sects and nice stuff to watch on Netflix.
Speaker 1: But in fact, if you really do a deep dive,
Speaker 1: that seems to be not what works. I think the
Speaker 1: idea that the surface gives you one kind of information,
Speaker 1: but that assembling a lot of surface phenomena and then
Speaker 1: looking at what lies more deeply behind them gives you
Speaker 1: a deeper understanding is an incredibly important insight. And a
Speaker 1: lot of what the philosophical work that happened in ancient
Speaker 1: Athens twenty five hundred years ago does is to say,
Speaker 1: don't get deluded by this particular momentary sense. Look instead
Speaker 1: at how these things patterned together, and you will have
Speaker 1: a deeper understanding of what matters to human beings. And
Speaker 1: so Aristotle, using that same approach, came up with a
Speaker 1: different concept that I think is important for modern science
Speaker 1: and happiness, which is a kind of different thing that
Speaker 1: we get wrong, which is how our knowledge can help
Speaker 1: us and how we get to know about happiness. And
Speaker 1: this was his idea of phrensus, So what was this
Speaker 1: concept of phreness. So, phrenesis is often inflated as practical wisdom.
Speaker 1: To understand what that means, think about the contrast between
Speaker 1: what we sometimes call the theoretical and what we call
Speaker 1: the practical, or the difference between knowing that something is
Speaker 1: a case and knowing how to do something. So, if
Speaker 1: you're trying to figure out how to do something like
Speaker 1: throw a baseball or play the piano, or respond in
Speaker 1: a calm and temperate fashion when you're under a situation
Speaker 1: of agitation, you can have a theoretical understanding of it.
Speaker 1: You can understand lots of things about the physics of baseballs,
Speaker 1: or about the acoustical properties of a piano, or you
Speaker 1: can read a therapy book and understand what it is
Speaker 1: when people respond calmly. That's theoretical wisdom. But the theoretical
Speaker 1: wisdom doesn't give you the capacity to engage in the
Speaker 1: action you want to engage in. In order to do that,
Speaker 1: you actually need what Aristotle would call practical wisdom, a
Speaker 1: kind of skill, the skill that comes from practicing the
Speaker 1: activity about which you want to make progress. And so
Speaker 1: Aristotle really thought that you, Diamonia isn't just kind of
Speaker 1: something that we're born with or something we can kind
Speaker 1: of get too. Theoretically, he really thought it was something
Speaker 1: that you get to in a skill based way. Right,
Speaker 1: So Aristotle thought, the strategy by which we gain this
Speaker 1: kind of deeper thriving, the spiritual well being the u
Speaker 1: diamonia is the strategy of making ourselves into the kind
Speaker 1: of people who are virtuous and who take pleasure in virtue.
Speaker 1: So it's a kind of self education project of building
Speaker 1: up in yourself the kind of soul you want to have.
Speaker 1: You make yourself into the person that you want to be.
Speaker 1: And aris sat is really aware of the way in
Speaker 1: which that can be self reinforcing. You want yourself to
Speaker 1: become a particular kind of person, you practice being that
Speaker 1: kind of person and doing that kind of activity thereby
Speaker 1: becomes pleasurable to you. And this is something that's also
Speaker 1: really nicely borne out in the modern science. In one
Speaker 1: of our podcast episodes, I interviewed as scientists Sonya Lubermerski.
Speaker 1: In her book The How of Happiness, she has this
Speaker 1: wonderful quote that you know, just as you learn a
Speaker 1: violin by playing it, or just as you kind of
Speaker 1: put a lot of work into raising a child. If
Speaker 1: you want to bump up your happiness levels, you actually
Speaker 1: have to put the work in. And that work isn't
Speaker 1: just kind of theoretical work, it's actually engaging with it
Speaker 1: in a real way and actually building up your happiness
Speaker 1: kind of like a skill set, like from the ground up.
Speaker 1: So the quote that you gave from Sonya Lubermersky is
Speaker 1: actually a direct reference to Aristotle, who famously says that
Speaker 1: we become builders by building, and we become harp by
Speaker 1: playing the harp. And then he goes on to say
Speaker 1: that just as the way you learn to be a
Speaker 1: builder is by building buildings, and the way you learn
Speaker 1: to play the harp is by playing the harp, so too,
Speaker 1: says Aristotle, we become just by doing just actions, temperate
Speaker 1: by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions. That
Speaker 1: is the way that we come to have practical wisdom
Speaker 1: is by practicing the skill that we want to cultivate
Speaker 1: so that it becomes natural to us. And Aristotle also
Speaker 1: had good ideas about which particular kinds of actions we
Speaker 1: should want to practice, right, like, what are the kinds
Speaker 1: of actions that will actually make us a virtuous and
Speaker 1: therefore spiritually happy person. When we get back from the break,
Speaker 1: we'll dive into that specific ways the Aristotle thought we
Speaker 1: could achieve happiness, and what we'll see is that he
Speaker 1: devoted two whole chapters to something you might not think
Speaker 1: is that important, the happiness lab. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: So people who listen to the podcast hear a lot
Speaker 1: about the kinds of things they can do to be
Speaker 1: happy that are borne out by modern science. When Aristotle
Speaker 1: thought about spiritual well being, this idea of eudaimonia, what
Speaker 1: are the kinds of things he thought we should be
Speaker 1: paying attention to? What are the sorts of actions he
Speaker 1: wanted us to engage with. So he was really interested
Speaker 1: in developing character that was what he called moderate in
Speaker 1: exactly the right ways. And he viewed the virtues that
Speaker 1: help us thrive as being cases of behavior that are
Speaker 1: intermediate between two extremes. So it's easiest to think about
Speaker 1: this in the case of something like bravery, where you
Speaker 1: have an extreme of being a coward, you have an
Speaker 1: extreme of being reckless, and in between those two things
Speaker 1: is bravery, which Aristotle thinks of as the perfect moderate virtue,
Speaker 1: or with regard to your character. You could be somber,
Speaker 1: or you could be a buffoon, or you could be
Speaker 1: somebody with a good sense of humor. And I love
Speaker 1: this idea of the middle way because you know, it
Speaker 1: fits with some of the things that we talk about
Speaker 1: on the podcast, which is this idea that you know
Speaker 1: you got to take baby steps towards the sorts of
Speaker 1: actions you want to engage in to become happier. Right,
Speaker 1: if I tell you that you know gratitude is really important,
Speaker 1: for example, you don't want to so double down on
Speaker 1: gratitude that you're stressing yourself out. So it's engaging in virtue,
Speaker 1: but almost in a moderate and at baby step sort
Speaker 1: of way. And the nice thing about thinking of virtue
Speaker 1: as the middle way is that you always know what
Speaker 1: the next thing to do is. If you're aiming to
Speaker 1: be brave and you're a cowardly person, you don't have
Speaker 1: to get all the way over to bravery. You just
Speaker 1: have to take a small step towards bravery, and you're
Speaker 1: moving to the middle. So by giving us a center
Speaker 1: to move towards, we can make progress without being overwhelmed
Speaker 1: at the prospect of what it is that we need
Speaker 1: to change. We just need to change a little bit
Speaker 1: and then the next day a little bit more, and
Speaker 1: as Aristotle likes to point out, this becomes self reinforcing.
Speaker 1: He says, abstaining from pleasures makes us become temperate, and
Speaker 1: once we've become temperate, we're more capable of abstaining from pleasures.
Speaker 1: It's similar with bravery. Habituation in standing firm in frightening
Speaker 1: situations makes us brave, and once we've become brave, we're
Speaker 1: more capable of standing firm. So if you want to
Speaker 1: be a brave person, act the way a brave person acts,
Speaker 1: and you will manifest bravery, and you will be reinforced
Speaker 1: in your experience about how pleasurable and possible it is
Speaker 1: for you to act bravely. So Aristotle talked a lot
Speaker 1: about different virtues, and that's one of the reasons his
Speaker 1: book was really a book not about happiness or eudaimonia,
Speaker 1: but it was a book about ethics. Right, So talk
Speaker 1: about this important book and why it was so powerful
Speaker 1: and Western thought. Sure, this is a book called the
Speaker 1: nicomickeon Ethics, and it's a book in which Aristotle tries
Speaker 1: to spell out what is it to live a virtuous life.
Speaker 1: But his notion of virtue is a really broad one.
Speaker 1: He means not just a life that is a moral life,
Speaker 1: but a life that for the individual brings them this
Speaker 1: eudaimonia thriving and happiness, and that for the society contributes
Speaker 1: to a society in which there's thriving and happiness. So
Speaker 1: this is a book about how to live well morally,
Speaker 1: how to live well happily, and how to live well
Speaker 1: in a way that is part of a harmonious society
Speaker 1: where all are in a position to thrive. And this
Speaker 1: is where I think the science really backs Aristotle up right,
Speaker 1: because one thing we know is even if you're just
Speaker 1: shooting for the happy life, the data really suggests that
Speaker 1: what you want to do is to live a moral life.
Speaker 1: You want to live a life where you're doing nice
Speaker 1: things for others. You want to live a life where
Speaker 1: you're really feeling connected to other people, where you're doing
Speaker 1: something that is a job that gives you a meaning.
Speaker 1: So in some sense, even if you were just shooting
Speaker 1: for the eudaimonia part, you'd get these other two parts
Speaker 1: as well. Right, It's exactly right. Aristotle thinks that human
Speaker 1: beings are creatures where it's possible to become someone in
Speaker 1: whom what gives you pleasure is causing other people to
Speaker 1: thrive and do well. So for Aristotle, a healthy, thriving,
Speaker 1: virtuous individual is a person who takes pleasure in others
Speaker 1: also having lives that are filled with meaning, who takes
Speaker 1: pleasure in being a situation where those around them are
Speaker 1: also doing well. And that's one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: Aristotle devoted two whole chapters in this important book to
Speaker 1: something that we might not think about when we think
Speaker 1: about virtue and ethics necessarily right, So what were those
Speaker 1: two chapters about, Yeah, it's a great question. So this book,
Speaker 1: which has ten chapters there were ten papyrus scrolls on
Speaker 1: which the book was written, devotes chapters eight and nine
Speaker 1: to the topic of friendship, and he thinks friendship is
Speaker 1: incredibly important throughout our entire lives. He says, the young
Speaker 1: need friendship to keep them from error, the old need
Speaker 1: friendship to care for them and to support the actions
Speaker 1: that fail because of weakness, and those in their prime
Speaker 1: need friendship to do fine actions, for they are more
Speaker 1: capable of understanding and acting when two go together. And
Speaker 1: his idea of friendship was in part for a kind
Speaker 1: of you know, hedonistic pleasure. You know, you get some
Speaker 1: utility out of it. But he also thought that friends
Speaker 1: could affect our happiness in a deeper and more meaningful
Speaker 1: way as well. Actually, he distinguishes among three different kinds
Speaker 1: of friendship. There's a kind of friendship, a relatively shallow
Speaker 1: kind of friendship, which is friendship based on utility. I'm
Speaker 1: friends with you because I get something out of it,
Speaker 1: and your friends with me because you get something out
Speaker 1: of it. There's a second kind of friendship, which is
Speaker 1: a little bit richer, which is a friendship based on pleasure,
Speaker 1: where I enjoy your company and you enjoy my company.
Speaker 1: The kind of friendship that Aristotle is really interested in
Speaker 1: is a friendship that's based on mutual appreciation of one
Speaker 1: another's deep values. And whereas the first two kinds of
Speaker 1: friend ship are accidental, they're limited in depth, they don't
Speaker 1: last a long time. A friendship that's based on a
Speaker 1: deep appreciation of how my being in your presence makes
Speaker 1: me a better person, and your being in my presence
Speaker 1: makes you a better person is a kind of friendship
Speaker 1: that's lasting, and it fits with Aristotle's general picture that
Speaker 1: what we want to do is to get ourselves into
Speaker 1: self reinforcing cycles where we're doing something that works, and
Speaker 1: because we're doing it and it works, we keep doing it.
Speaker 1: So Aristotle calls a friend a second self, and he
Speaker 1: thinks that one of the ways in which we can
Speaker 1: help ourselves cultivate practical wisdom is by finding friends who
Speaker 1: support us in that activity. So if I want to
Speaker 1: be brave, I say to you, my virtuous, deep friend,
Speaker 1: let's work on bravery together there, and I reinforce your bravery,
Speaker 1: you reinforce my bravery. I get an extra self to
Speaker 1: help me remain committed to what I want to do,
Speaker 1: not just theoretically but practically, not just in my head,
Speaker 1: but also in my actions. And this too fits with
Speaker 1: a lot of what we know about the science of habits. Right.
Speaker 1: You know, when you're trying to stick to a new
Speaker 1: virtuous habit, or even just some habit that will improve
Speaker 1: your happiness, say you want to exercise more, you want
Speaker 1: to meditate, or right in your gratitude journal, one of
Speaker 1: the things you can do from the habit literature is
Speaker 1: to find social support. Right, you find a friend who's
Speaker 1: good at that, who you can kind of say hey,
Speaker 1: I'm going to do this with you, and then you
Speaker 1: do that together, which is funny to tell you, Tomar,
Speaker 1: because you are my exercise buddy, my hiking buddy, my
Speaker 1: yoga buddy. So Laurie, Laurie is the person. In fact,
Speaker 1: when Laurie had a broken leg, I discovered that my
Speaker 1: second self had stopped hiking, and so my first self
Speaker 1: stopped hiking. So it was a great relief to me
Speaker 1: when you're got strong enough again for us to walk together.
Speaker 1: But yes, this idea that one of the ways that
Speaker 1: you can stick to your commitments is to surround yourself
Speaker 1: by others who are also committed to those things. It's
Speaker 1: part of really every wisdom traditions. So in the Buddhist
Speaker 1: wisdom tradition, there's a notion that they call right association,
Speaker 1: that is, surround yourself by others who are also committed
Speaker 1: to this path towards spiritual enlightenment. And almost every religious
Speaker 1: tradition involves communal activity of a kind that says, put
Speaker 1: yourself in a setting where others are also trying to
Speaker 1: pursue that kind of spiritual transcendence. And in fact, that
Speaker 1: was actually the inspiration for one of the rewirements, these
Speaker 1: sort of happiness practices that I did with my class.
Speaker 1: One of the things I asked my students to do
Speaker 1: is to take what I call a strength state, where
Speaker 1: you hang out with a friend and you both try
Speaker 1: to pursue some virtue that you want to get better at,
Speaker 1: some strength you want to enhance, but the idea is
Speaker 1: to do it with somebody else. And in fact, there's
Speaker 1: evidence for Marty Seliman's group that this act of doing
Speaker 1: a strength date with somebody can kind of give a
Speaker 1: nice boost to your well being. So you've been a
Speaker 1: scholar of Aristotle for some time now, have you been
Speaker 1: following the middle way using his insights to go after
Speaker 1: your own udaimonia? Pretty Much everything that Aristotle instructs us
Speaker 1: to do is a part of my own attempt at
Speaker 1: self improvement. The recognition that what I needed to do
Speaker 1: to change a bad habit was just to move a
Speaker 1: little bit towards a better version of it was an
Speaker 1: incredible relief to me, as I found myself feeling overwhelmed
Speaker 1: by changes that I want to make, and the idea
Speaker 1: that in order to become somebody who had virtues that
Speaker 1: I wanted, all I had to do was start acting
Speaker 1: as if I already had those virtues was unbelievably liberating
Speaker 1: and transformative for me. We're about the friend part and
Speaker 1: for almost every change that I wanted to make, the
Speaker 1: realization that I had a second self available to help
Speaker 1: me do that. Most often in things at home, that
Speaker 1: partner was my spouse or one of my children. But
Speaker 1: for the big changes that I wanted to make in
Speaker 1: my life, my friendship actually with you, Laurie, was one
Speaker 1: of the factors that really enabled me to make those changes.
Speaker 1: And I feel like the combination of Aristotle's wisdom from
Speaker 1: twenty five hundred years ago and your friendship from one
Speaker 1: and a half decades has been the key to allowing
Speaker 1: me to thrive and flourish. Well. That is sweet to
Speaker 1: hear you say, and right back after, because I feel
Speaker 1: like when I think about the people who are pleasure
Speaker 1: friends or friends of utility versus the ones that are
Speaker 1: real friends of meeting, friends that get me towards virtue,
Speaker 1: you are right up there too. So yeah, thank you,
Speaker 1: And I just I mean, I hadn't realized it really
Speaker 1: has been fifteen years. That's disturbing, but it makes sense.
Speaker 1: The things tomorrow has taught me about Aristotle have helped
Speaker 1: me a ton in my own quest to be happier
Speaker 1: and more virtuous, things like the need to take action
Speaker 1: to become the person you want to be and the
Speaker 1: fact that all those tiny baby steps matter a lot.
Speaker 1: But of course, one episode isn't going to be enough
Speaker 1: to explore everything the ancient Greeks thought about achieving happiness.
Speaker 1: So I hope you'll join me in tomorrow again, next
Speaker 1: time when we introduce you to a different Greek thinker,
Speaker 1: Plato and his advice for how you can control that
Speaker 1: horse drawn chariot I keep talking about, and you'll be
Speaker 1: able to hear that episode on happiness lessons from Plato
Speaker 1: right after the short break from the second I opened
Speaker 1: my eyes. Each morning, I'm locked in a battle with
Speaker 1: a persistent and persuasive adversary, someone who seems dead set
Speaker 1: on preventing me from practicing all of the happiness techniques
Speaker 1: I teach you about in this podcast. I want to
Speaker 1: plan my day so I don't feel time pressured, and
Speaker 1: I want to meditate an exercise every morning, and I
Speaker 1: want to do random acts of kindness throughout the day.
Speaker 1: But my nemesis is right there encouraging me to do
Speaker 1: the exact opposite, arguing that I should sleep in, or
Speaker 1: I should buy something nice for myself, or I should
Speaker 1: add yet one more event to my already packed schedule,
Speaker 1: just to prove to people that I'm a hard worker.
Speaker 1: Of course, the person sabotaging me is me, or maybe
Speaker 1: more accurately, a few rogue parts of me, once that
Speaker 1: I really want to control better, and I bet I'm
Speaker 1: not alone. The temptations that divert us from doing things
Speaker 1: that will make us happy are everywhere, and they're available
Speaker 1: twenty four seven. But the people who first thought deeply
Speaker 1: about the internal battles we all face lived centuries before smartphones,
Speaker 1: movie streaming services, and calendar alerts. The ancient Greeks and
Speaker 1: one thinker in particular, Plato, came up with some profoundly
Speaker 1: important insights about our divided selves more than two thousand
Speaker 1: years ago. As in other episodes of this mini season
Speaker 1: of The Happiness Lab, I want to explore some of
Speaker 1: the well being concepts that the ancient philosophies and great
Speaker 1: religions got right, old school tips that are borne out
Speaker 1: by the science, and ones that have personally helped me
Speaker 1: in my own quest to be happier. So welcome to
Speaker 1: happiness Lessons of the Ancients with me, Doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 1: One of the things I've realized is that I am
Speaker 1: inevitably going to be tempted if I work with my
Speaker 1: phone next to me, I'll be getting texts. This is
Speaker 1: my friend and Yale colleague to Mark Keendler. So when
Speaker 1: I sit down at my desk to write, I actually
Speaker 1: turn off the Wi Fi receiver on my computer so
Speaker 1: that I won't even be tempted to look at the
Speaker 1: other things while I'm getting the work done. Tomorrow and
Speaker 1: I often trade notes about how to stay happy and
Speaker 1: productive as busy academics. But Tomorrow brings something very special
Speaker 1: to these conversations. She teaches a class at Yale called
Speaker 1: Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature, and Plato's ideas
Speaker 1: are central to her curriculum. So I asked Tomorrow to
Speaker 1: give us Plato one oh one. So Plato was one
Speaker 1: of the really cool ancient philosophers in Athens who gave
Speaker 1: rise to the Western philosophical tradition, and he ran basically
Speaker 1: a university which was called the Academy, where young men
Speaker 1: from Athenian families would come and engage in unbelievably intellectually
Speaker 1: interesting conversations with one another and with Plato, and with
Speaker 1: Plato's teacher Socrates about the deepest questions of the age.
Speaker 1: And one of the students at Plato's academy was a
Speaker 1: guy named Aristotle. So this was like a pretty legit
Speaker 1: thing to do if you were like a rich Athenian
Speaker 1: guy and wanted to get educated. It didn't have the
Speaker 1: formal structure of degree granting. It wasn't that you would
Speaker 1: go there for four years, but it was the place
Speaker 1: where people went if they wanted to understand fundamental ideas,
Speaker 1: if they wanted to think about literature or philosophy, or
Speaker 1: politics or mathematics. Those were the kinds of topics that
Speaker 1: you could explore at Plato's academy. And Plato was kind
Speaker 1: of the guy to learn from, in part because he
Speaker 1: thought so deeply about so many different topics. But today
Speaker 1: we're going to kind of focus in on Plato's ideas
Speaker 1: for happiness and how we can control this self, which
Speaker 1: was something he thought about a lot, right. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: one of the things that's really interesting about ancient Greek
Speaker 1: philosophy is that they connected all sorts of topics that
Speaker 1: we think of as distinct from one another. So the
Speaker 1: question of how can you be happy was a fundamental
Speaker 1: question in ancient philosophy, because they were thinking about what's
Speaker 1: the appropriate relation between the individual and their society, and
Speaker 1: what's the nature of beauty and what's the nature of truth?
Speaker 1: And so Plato would be teaching all of those things,
Speaker 1: everything from mathematics to metaphysics to political theory. But part
Speaker 1: of the reason for exploring that set of topics was
Speaker 1: so that you could understand how is it possible for
Speaker 1: an individual human being to flourish? How can they best
Speaker 1: align themselves so that they understand the nature of the
Speaker 1: world and are most receptive to the world's excellence. And
Speaker 1: so Plato didn't just think about this obviously. He was
Speaker 1: a writer who created lots of influential books on this.
Speaker 1: So talk to me about the importance of one of
Speaker 1: the books that we're going to dig into a little
Speaker 1: bit today, which is The Republic. So Plato wrote all
Speaker 1: his books in the form of plays, and they were
Speaker 1: plays where his teacher, Socrates was the main character. And
Speaker 1: then various young men who were students at the university
Speaker 1: were in conversation with Socrates about questions. And so one
Speaker 1: of the most famous of the dialogues or books that
Speaker 1: Plato wrote is a book called The Republic, and it
Speaker 1: has ten chapters, and it's kind of a theory of everything.
Speaker 1: It describes what's the fundamental nature of the universe, how
Speaker 1: did it come into being? It talks about how mathematics
Speaker 1: underpins all of physical reality. Then it talks about physics,
Speaker 1: it talks about how we understand truth. But it does
Speaker 1: all of that by telling the story of what the
Speaker 1: ideal society would look like. What would a society look
Speaker 1: like in which human beings are best able to flourish.
Speaker 1: That's the question that Plato asks, and it turns out
Speaker 1: that in order to answer that he has to explore
Speaker 1: everything from mathematics to political theory. And in those stories,
Speaker 1: Plato tells one of my favorite stories from the ancient
Speaker 1: Greek times, the story of Leontius. What was the story
Speaker 1: of Leontius and why was it so important for thinking
Speaker 1: about human nature? So let me just start by telling
Speaker 1: the story using Plato's words from the Republic, and then
Speaker 1: I'll give you the moral of it. So the story
Speaker 1: goes like this, Leontius was walking along the north wall
Speaker 1: of the city. He saw some corpses lying at the
Speaker 1: foot of the wall. He had an appetite to look
Speaker 1: at them, but at the same time he was disgusted
Speaker 1: and turned away. For a time, he struggled with himself
Speaker 1: and covered his face, but finally, overpowered by the appetite,
Speaker 1: he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed towards the
Speaker 1: dead bodies, saying, look for yourselves, you evil eyes, take
Speaker 1: your fill of this beautiful site. So Plato tells this
Speaker 1: story at a point in the Republic where he's trying
Speaker 1: to have his listeners understand that within every human being
Speaker 1: there are multi parts pulling the person in multiple directions.
Speaker 1: He wants to show you that you, like everyone else,
Speaker 1: are filled with internal strife, and so the story that
Speaker 1: he tells is basically the story of a rubber necker
Speaker 1: on a highway. Leontius is walking home, right, He's supposed
Speaker 1: to go efficiently into the north gate of the city,
Speaker 1: and instead there's a dead body on the side of
Speaker 1: the city wall, and he thinks, like, that's disgusting, don't
Speaker 1: look at that. But part of him, it's just fascinated
Speaker 1: and curious. And the part of him that's fascinated and
Speaker 1: curious keeps pulling him towards the wall. And so the
Speaker 1: story is about the internal tension that Leontius feels, his
Speaker 1: effort to try to control himself, and then the phenomenology,
Speaker 1: the experience that he feels of just giving in. I
Speaker 1: can't control my appetite. I can't control my desire to
Speaker 1: go look at these dead bodies, And as many of
Speaker 1: us do, when we're driving past an accident, he turns
Speaker 1: his head, he looks at the dead bodies, and he
Speaker 1: slows his walk. But the one reason I love this
Speaker 1: story so much is that, I mean, it's kind of morbid.
Speaker 1: But the reason I love the story so much is
Speaker 1: that this isn't a tale just about rubber necking. That
Speaker 1: same internal strife that Plato is talking about is what
Speaker 1: I experience in the morning when my alarm goes off
Speaker 1: and I know I want to be committed to getting
Speaker 1: up and hopping on the elliptical or getting up for
Speaker 1: my morning meditation, but my appetite wants me to sleep in.
Speaker 1: That's what he's talking about, right, That's what he's talking about.
Speaker 1: In fact, the reason he tells the story is that
Speaker 1: he wants to set himself up to make the general
Speaker 1: point that human beings are set up inside in such
Speaker 1: a way that even if their best self wants to
Speaker 1: do something, they are always going to feel tensions. They're
Speaker 1: always going to feel pulled in many directions. It can
Speaker 1: be an email that pops up that sends you down
Speaker 1: a rabbit hole on the Internet. And Plato's point is
Speaker 1: that human beings inevitably find themselves in situations that they
Speaker 1: feel pulled in multiple directions. One of the reasons Plato
Speaker 1: was really obsessed with this is that he realized that
Speaker 1: you can't just be a rational self because we have
Speaker 1: these other parts of our mind. You actually have to
Speaker 1: control a rational self to figure this out. And he
Speaker 1: had this awesome metaphor that I've actually been telling my
Speaker 1: podcast listeners throughout this whole season about this, that involved
Speaker 1: a charioteer, right. Yeah. In fact, he uses different metaphors
Speaker 1: to describe it in different books. In The Republic, which
Speaker 1: is the book that has the layon to his story,
Speaker 1: he says that a human being is made up of
Speaker 1: three parts. They're made up of a human being basically
Speaker 1: their head. They're made up of a lion, and they're
Speaker 1: made up of a many headed monster, and the idea
Speaker 1: is that the human being is reason, and the lion
Speaker 1: is the part of you that's kind of proud, and
Speaker 1: that the many headed beast is the part of you
Speaker 1: that's interested in base passions like food and sex. But
Speaker 1: in another one of his books, a book called The
Speaker 1: Feed Risk, he gives an analogy that I think is
Speaker 1: even more vivid, and he says a human being is
Speaker 1: like a charioteer driving a chariot with two horses. One
Speaker 1: is a noble horse and one is a wild horse.
Speaker 1: And the noble horse is the part of a human being,
Speaker 1: the aspects of ourselves that's interested in honor and social
Speaker 1: interaction and what other people think of us. If I'm
Speaker 1: supposed to sit home and do my podcast, but I
Speaker 1: go out because I give into pure pressure because I
Speaker 1: care what my friends think about me, or I spend
Speaker 1: a lot of time focused on appearance because I want
Speaker 1: to impress somebody. That's the horse of spirit. Whereas the
Speaker 1: wild horse is the part of ourselves that's interested in
Speaker 1: fundamental desires that we share with other non human animals,
Speaker 1: like the desire for food or the desire to sleep
Speaker 1: or take physical pleasure in things like sex, it needs
Speaker 1: to take in nutrition, and it needs to ensure that
Speaker 1: there are future generations. Those are the parts of ourselves
Speaker 1: that he describes in the chariot analogy. But the Cherry ideas,
Speaker 1: like any journey we're on towards better flourishing, any journey
Speaker 1: we're on towards becoming happier people. One thing we have
Speaker 1: to do is we have to deal with these horses
Speaker 1: that are kind of out of control in running around.
Speaker 1: It's not just that we have to deal with these horses.
Speaker 1: Basically what moves us is the fact that we have
Speaker 1: fundamental passions and desires. The metaphors really a powerful one
Speaker 1: because it says it's not like, oh, if we could
Speaker 1: just have the person part of ourselves, we'd be done
Speaker 1: with things. The story says human beings are the kinds
Speaker 1: of creatures who are propelled forward by physical desires and
Speaker 1: by social desires, and the key to human flourishing. The
Speaker 1: way to move fast on the path through life is
Speaker 1: to make sure that you're in control of those horses,
Speaker 1: that the parts of you that are passion and energy
Speaker 1: are pulling you in the direction that you want to go,
Speaker 1: instead of in some wild other direction that they're being pulled,
Speaker 1: and so if we want to become happier people, we
Speaker 1: need to figure out how to deal with this chariot system.
Speaker 1: We need to get our charioteer to rein in these
Speaker 1: horses and to let them bring us on our journey
Speaker 1: in a really productive way. And we'll deal with that
Speaker 1: question of how we actually do that well when the
Speaker 1: happiness lab returns in a moment. So Plato was obsessed
Speaker 1: with this idea that if we really want to be
Speaker 1: happier people, we really need to reign in our desires
Speaker 1: and our passions and really use them in the right ways.
Speaker 1: But how do we do that? What did Plato figure
Speaker 1: out and how does that drive with modern science. Let's
Speaker 1: start by talking about the first horse, the horse of appetite.
Speaker 1: What did Plato think about how we could kind of
Speaker 1: reign in appetite in a productive way. Plato really took
Speaker 1: this metaphor seriously. He saw it as illuminating because he
Speaker 1: recognized what contemporary science has recognized, which is a big
Speaker 1: part of human beings is non human beings. That is
Speaker 1: a big part of our selves are animals. So Plato
Speaker 1: basically recognized that the best way to deal with the
Speaker 1: parts of ourselves that are like animals is by dealing
Speaker 1: with them in the way that we deal with things
Speaker 1: that are animals. So imagine you have a dog and
Speaker 1: you don't want the dog to eat some delicious kind
Speaker 1: of food. The best way to keep the dog from
Speaker 1: eating that food is not to put the food in
Speaker 1: front of the dog. The second best way might be
Speaker 1: to put a muzzle on the dog. And your very
Speaker 1: last choice is going to be to try to train
Speaker 1: up your dogs so that it doesn't give in to
Speaker 1: that temptation. So Plato had the same insight with regard
Speaker 1: to human beings themselves. If you want to keep the
Speaker 1: horse of appetite, the part of yourself that's tempted, the
Speaker 1: best idea is to avoid temptations. If you can't do that,
Speaker 1: then when you're in the presence of temptations, you should
Speaker 1: keep yourself from looking at them. And only in the
Speaker 1: most difficult situations where you can't keep the temptations away
Speaker 1: and you can't keep your attention away from the temptations,
Speaker 1: only then should you try to do it through certain
Speaker 1: kinds of self control. And this is super important, right
Speaker 1: because I think you know one of the things that
Speaker 1: Plato is saying to us is that it's not going
Speaker 1: to work to try to control our appetite just through
Speaker 1: reflective processes alone. Right, Like just repeatedly telling myself, like
Speaker 1: you know, I'm an happiness expert, like I should get
Speaker 1: up in the morning and like, you know, go work out.
Speaker 1: Like that doesn't work as well, Right, Like I need
Speaker 1: cues to remind me to work out. I need to
Speaker 1: have my shoes out, I need to have my gratitude
Speaker 1: journal where I can see it. I need to pretend
Speaker 1: like this appetite part of me is like a dog
Speaker 1: that I'm basically trying to train in the simplest way possible. Right,
Speaker 1: and idiocy in many ways literally true. That is, the
Speaker 1: things that are attracting you to food that smells tempting
Speaker 1: are the exact same features of your brain that a
Speaker 1: non human animal has that's attracting it to food that
Speaker 1: smells excellent. And in fact, there's a very good reason
Speaker 1: for it. We've evolved to be responsive to food that
Speaker 1: provides nutrition to us, and so Plato's point is, in
Speaker 1: many ways, there's nothing you can do about the fact
Speaker 1: that you will feel tempted. So your job is to
Speaker 1: figure out to the extent that you can reduce the temptations,
Speaker 1: use the cues, and if you can't, only then do
Speaker 1: you use the willpower of the charioteer. You don't have
Speaker 1: enough strengthen the reins to do it always by the rains.
Speaker 1: You've got to get the horse to cooperate. And what's
Speaker 1: amazing is that there's like thousands of years ago, but
Speaker 1: basically Plato is foreshadowing everything that we know about the
Speaker 1: modern science of habit formation. Right, Like, the easiest way
Speaker 1: to kind of get yourself to like control your appetite
Speaker 1: is to get rid of the thing that you don't
Speaker 1: want to be tempted by, you know, whether that's the
Speaker 1: your phone or the internet, or fattening food or whatever
Speaker 1: it happens to be. Is just to get that out
Speaker 1: of there. And by the same token, if there's something
Speaker 1: you want your brain to do, make it really obvious
Speaker 1: in the situation, right, you know, put your gratitude journal
Speaker 1: out there, like make your gym shoes available. That's right.
Speaker 1: The easier you make it for yourself to do it automatically,
Speaker 1: the better off you're going to be. In fact, there's
Speaker 1: a famous Greek story that's in a book by Homer
Speaker 1: called the Odyssey, and it's the story of this guy Ulysses.
Speaker 1: He's trying to get home and he's going past an
Speaker 1: island where there's really tempting music, and he knows that
Speaker 1: if you hear that music, you're inclined to jump off
Speaker 1: the ship and join the singers because the music is
Speaker 1: so beautiful. And in the story, Homer tells two ways
Speaker 1: of getting past that temptation. The oarsmen who are rowing
Speaker 1: the boat block their ears so that they can't hear
Speaker 1: the sound. And Ulysses, who wants to hear the sound
Speaker 1: but not be able to act on it, has his
Speaker 1: soldiers tie him to the mast of the ship. So
Speaker 1: that story is like Plato's story of the Horse. The
Speaker 1: horse is always going to be ten did So if
Speaker 1: you have a temptation and you haven't put a mechanism
Speaker 1: in place either to take it out of sight or
Speaker 1: to control yourself in the face of it, it's going
Speaker 1: to be really, really hard to avoid it. But all
Speaker 1: of the strategies that you're describing make the alternate activity
Speaker 1: salient rather than the one you want to avoid or
Speaker 1: take away access. Put your phone in a ziplock bag
Speaker 1: so you can't touch it, turn off the Wi Fi
Speaker 1: on your internet, don't have chocolate in the house. All
Speaker 1: of those are exactly the strategies that the ancient Greeks
Speaker 1: were using. In Homer's case, that story is almost eight
Speaker 1: thousand years old. All of these strategies, even though they're
Speaker 1: so ancient, what science is finding is that if you
Speaker 1: use them, you're going to actually be successful at regulating
Speaker 1: your appetite. It is a recognition of something that is
Speaker 1: so deeply part of human nature and human experience that
Speaker 1: basically every world wisdom tradition tries to describe it in
Speaker 1: some way. The Buddhist tradition has an analogy of a
Speaker 1: rider and an elephant, and it's the same idea. It's
Speaker 1: the idea that part of you is pulled in one direction,
Speaker 1: and that there's a huge set of desires and passions
Speaker 1: which pull in other directions. And many world religions are
Speaker 1: about building structures that help you regulate those forces and energies,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the things that modern science shows
Speaker 1: to be effective mechanisms are actually there. In religious traditions.
Speaker 1: You build rules around what kind of food you can
Speaker 1: eat when in a religion, and it's exactly the same
Speaker 1: insight that you see in the modern science. In addition
Speaker 1: to the modern science saying that these are really good strategies,
Speaker 1: the other thing that we know scientifically is that people
Speaker 1: who are good at regulating their appetites they do that
Speaker 1: because they use these strategies. Yeah, one of the things
Speaker 1: that's really interesting is that people who are best at
Speaker 1: self control are actually best at setting up situations in
Speaker 1: which they don't have to exercise self control. So a
Speaker 1: kid who's good at doing homework isn't good at not
Speaker 1: looking at the phone that's right in front of them
Speaker 1: while they're doing homework. What that kid is good at
Speaker 1: is setting up their room in such a way that
Speaker 1: they aren't tempted by the phone in the first place.
Speaker 1: The more effective somebody is at what we think of
Speaker 1: at self control and self regulation, the more likely it
Speaker 1: is that they seldom put themselves into situations where they
Speaker 1: even feel tempted. And that's why I love the charioteer
Speaker 1: metaphor and why I keep telling my podcast listeners about
Speaker 1: it in this mini season, is that I get that
Speaker 1: intuition so much from the metaphor, right, Like, it's a
Speaker 1: pain to be holding onto these reins, as this appetite
Speaker 1: horse is going crazy like that requires a lot of work.
Speaker 1: But if you just put blinders on the horse, you know,
Speaker 1: if you can just help the horse, then you don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about like holding onto these reins super hard,
Speaker 1: because the horse is just going to be behaving correctly anyway.
Speaker 1: It's exactly right. Set yourself up in situations where you
Speaker 1: don't have to expend all your chariot, your energy controlling
Speaker 1: these horses. So that was what Plato thought about the
Speaker 1: appetite horse, right, this horse that's kind of going for
Speaker 1: you like food and like all the kind of physical pleasures.
Speaker 1: But Plato also worried about a different horse, which is
Speaker 1: this horse of spirit, right, which is kind of like,
Speaker 1: you know, that's the horse that leads me astray every
Speaker 1: time I'm trying to like ease myself off of social
Speaker 1: media or not react to some dumb fomo instinct or
Speaker 1: so on. Did Plato also give us some insight about
Speaker 1: how we could control of that horse. The best way
Speaker 1: to control the horse of spirit, the horse of honor,
Speaker 1: is by cultivating habits that are going to become the
Speaker 1: natural way that that horse behaves. So if you think
Speaker 1: about it. The horse of appetite is never going to
Speaker 1: change what it's attracted to. The horse of spirit is
Speaker 1: a trainable horse. And in fact, one of the distinctions
Speaker 1: that Plato makes when he presents the metaphor is that
Speaker 1: he says, the horse of appetite cannot be controlled except
Speaker 1: through punishment, whereas the horse of spirit can be controlled
Speaker 1: through argument and explanation. And so how does the sort
Speaker 1: of training work, right, Like, how do we actually train
Speaker 1: up our spirit horse over time? Yeah, So one of
Speaker 1: the interesting things about how we train up our spirit
Speaker 1: horse is that what we try to do is to
Speaker 1: make it natural and pleasurable for the spirit horse to
Speaker 1: do the thing that we want it reflectively to do.
Speaker 1: And one of the nice things about human beings is
Speaker 1: that we enjoy a certain sort of familiarity that when
Speaker 1: we get good at something, we take pleasure in doing it.
Speaker 1: So if you train your spirit horse actually to take pleasure,
Speaker 1: you sit down and you write in your gratitude journal
Speaker 1: every day, and you discover actually writing in this makes
Speaker 1: me feel connected to people. That's a way of co
Speaker 1: opting the energy of the spirit horse so that it
Speaker 1: takes you along your pathway without you having to steer
Speaker 1: it using the reins, and so Plato really thought that
Speaker 1: this was something that we could do with the right
Speaker 1: sorts of strategies. Right, Like, did you get a sense
Speaker 1: that Plato himself did it or that his students did it.
Speaker 1: So Plato had this incredible university, right, I mean, it
Speaker 1: was the first place people came together. And it is
Speaker 1: true that the academy it was just this enclosure outside
Speaker 1: of Athens. I think what drew people there originally was
Speaker 1: the possibility of social interaction. It was a kind of
Speaker 1: high prestige space to be in. All the cool kids
Speaker 1: were hanging out there, and then all the cool kids
Speaker 1: were hanging out there. And then Plato taught him some math,
Speaker 1: and then he taught him some metaphysics, and then he
Speaker 1: taught him some political theory. And so there's a way
Speaker 1: in which the fact that human beings are social beings
Speaker 1: is what allowed Plato to create this academy where people
Speaker 1: came together and then once they were with each other,
Speaker 1: they could take pleasure in interacting with each other and
Speaker 1: thinking about ideas. That's cool. So Plato was basically using
Speaker 1: the spirit horse of their students to like, you know,
Speaker 1: drag their charioteer to the academy, and then they could
Speaker 1: learn all this good stuff exactly. And then the chariotier
Speaker 1: gets to the academy, it learns all the stuff, and
Speaker 1: then it realizes that this was in fact attacked it
Speaker 1: that played off its spirit. So as someone who teaches Plato,
Speaker 1: are there ways that you've used his insight to train
Speaker 1: your own horses? Oh? I would say just about everything
Speaker 1: in my life comes from the insights that I've gotten
Speaker 1: from thinking about the ways in which these habits can
Speaker 1: structure our lives. So during the quarantine, my family made
Speaker 1: a habit. I had unexpectedly two kids home from school
Speaker 1: who had been living away, and we just made it
Speaker 1: a routine that every night at seven thirty, we would
Speaker 1: eat dinner together as a family, and it just came
Speaker 1: to feel like a fact about the world. It wasn't
Speaker 1: like we had to think about should we go downstairs
Speaker 1: at seven thirty. We just made it part of our
Speaker 1: family's routine, and as a consequence, we spent time with
Speaker 1: each other, and then we remembered we like being with
Speaker 1: one another, and then it stopped seeming like something governed
Speaker 1: by the watch and just started seeming like what it
Speaker 1: is that we wanted to do naturally. We wanted to
Speaker 1: go down, we wanted to eat together, and we wanted
Speaker 1: to spend time with one another. It seemed like the
Speaker 1: Greeks are fantastic at recognizing not just that we have
Speaker 1: these warring parts of ourselves, but they also gave us
Speaker 1: some insight into how we could control those different parts
Speaker 1: over time to flourish a little bit better. Kind of
Speaker 1: what was the next steps, like what did the Greeks
Speaker 1: kind of leave in terms of their legacy for the
Speaker 1: next thinkers to come around and sort out. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: there's real insight if we'd Plato an Aristotle about how
Speaker 1: to control drives in ourselves. But you don't get in
Speaker 1: Plato an Aristotle explicitly the thought that actually the charioteer
Speaker 1: can do the same sort of tricks on it self.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that you start getting in
Speaker 1: a tradition that starts just a couple hundred years later
Speaker 1: in writers like Epictitis is the idea that in fact,
Speaker 1: you can control how it is that you represent the
Speaker 1: world to yourself, and that you can think about things
Speaker 1: as being in your control or out of your control.
Speaker 1: You can frame something as letting it bother you or
Speaker 1: not letting it bother you, and that frame can be
Speaker 1: self fulfilling. If you decide that somebody else's disapproval doesn't
Speaker 1: matter to you, you actually make it the case that
Speaker 1: somebody else's disapproval doesn't matter to you, and you don't
Speaker 1: find that thought explicitly articulated until you get to this
Speaker 1: subsequent tradition. If these two episodes from our throwback archive
Speaker 1: are new to you, then I hope they'll inspire you
Speaker 1: to check out our back catalog to find more of
Speaker 1: the wisdom hiding in there. If you'd already heard Tamar
Speaker 1: talk about Aristotle and Plato, I hope this has been
Speaker 1: a useful refresher about the culture of ancient Greece. You'll
Speaker 1: need it since we'll be continuing our journey into Greek wisdom.
Speaker 1: In the next episode. We'll be diving into one of
Speaker 1: the most famous Greek myths out there to hear what
Speaker 1: the fictional heroes of the ancient world can tell us
Speaker 1: about happiness. I hope to see you back for the
Speaker 1: next episode of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab is co written by Ryan Dilley and
Speaker 1: is produced by Ryan Dilley, Courtney Grano and Britney Brown.
Speaker 1: The show was mastered by Evan Viola and our original
Speaker 1: music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Greta Kone,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Carl Migliori, Nicole Morano, Morgan Ratner, Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: my agent, Van Davis, and the rest of the Pushkin team.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
Speaker 1: and by me, doctor Laurie Santos.