Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: Aristotle and Plato ICYMI

The Greek thinker Socrates was put to death for encouraging his students to question everything - from their own beliefs to the laws and customs of Athenian society. But his ideas didn't die with him. 

Here's a chance to hear two episodes from our archive examining the legacy of Socrates, and how he influenced the thinking of Plato and Aristotle. Turns out the Ancient Greeks had a lot to say about how to live a happier life. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. In our last episode, we learned about the ideas
of the great Greek thinker Socrates. My friend and Yale
colleague to Mark Gendler, gave us a glimpse into the
so called Socratic method, which calls on all of us
to question every belief we hold and every assumption we make.

(00:35):
But we also heard that the story of Socrates didn't
have the happiest of endings. His habit of getting us
to regularly challenge everything we know was a bit too
radical for many of his fellow ancient Greeks, and so
he was sentenced to death for the alleged crime of
corrupting the youth. But Socrates's ideas didn't die with him.
Many other famous Greek thinkers picked up where their teacher

(00:56):
Socrates left off, and their work also has much to
teach us about how to live a flourishing life. We
looked at some of this wisdom in a previous season
of Happiness Lessons of the Ancients, again with the help
of my amazing friend Tomar Gendler. So, in case you
missed it last time, I wanted to share those past
episodes once again in a special doubleheader. Today you'll hear
some important insights on how we can realign the parts

(01:18):
of our minds from Socrates's student Plato, and you'll learn
about Aristotle, a real og happiness expert who has some
helpful tips on how we can feel happier with the
right habits. I hope you enjoyed these special back to
back episodes. We humans were already pretty complicated creatures, but
living in the modern world has added a ton more

(01:40):
complication to our lives. In past episodes of the Happiness Lab,
we've looked at the effects of things like jobs, school grades, smartphones,
and even alarm clocks on our wellbeing. These days, we
have so much going on, so many things demanding our attention,
and so many competing desires and emotions, that even if
you know what you're supposed to be doing, it often

(02:00):
feels like it's still hard to stay on track. It's
a bit like being a charioteer holding the reins of
two powerful but mismatched horses. You know you want to
reach a happy place, but each of the steeds keeps
going off in different directions. It's exhausted, but you'll only
reach your desired destination if you can get the horses
to work in harmony and pull together. Now, I know

(02:22):
what you're thinking. Chariots wayward horses. What's that got to
do with me navigating the modern world? Well. Even though
the science of happiness is a relatively new academic field,
most of the ideas underpinning all this research are far
from recent. Thinkers, philosophers, and spiritual leaders stretching back thousands
of years have figured out many important well being lessons

(02:43):
that are not only hugely relevant for all of us today,
but are backed up by the modern science. And that
includes my seemingly weird metaphor about the chariot. And so,
in this many season of the Happiness Lab, I want
to explore some of the well being concepts that the
ancient philosophies and great religions got right, old school tips
that are borne out by the science, and ones that

(03:03):
have personally helped me in my own quest to be
happier too. So welcome to Happiness Lessons of the Ancients
with me, Doctor Laurie Sanders Aristotle. He is absurd, Yeah,
it seems fine. This is tomar Getler, Professor of philosophy
and cognitive Science at Yale University. One two three, Okay,

(03:25):
And the volume still looks okay on and also one
of my oldest and dearest friends, does that work all right? Okay,
Tomorrow and I talk pretty much every day, so it's
a little bit weird to be recording one of our
conversations for you all. Tomorrow is getting a crash course
on how to use one of my spare recorders. Okay,
let me give them another five. And she's taken to
podcasting like a total pro. I am totally ready to go. Hello.

(03:47):
Tomorrow also teaches a super popular class at Yale. It's
called Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature. Her class
looks way back in history to find philosophical solutions to
the problems we all face today. The idea that the
most interesting answer to the question that you're trying to
ask would be given by somebody who happens to be
on earth with you right now is a real mistake.

(04:09):
Sometimes the most interesting answer is something that somebody gave
two thousand years ago, or on a completely different continent,
or in a completely different context. The story of the
Chariot and the uncooperative horses is an analogy I find
really useful when reason tells me I should be shooting
for my happiness goals, but my desires, doubts, and emotions
keep pulling me off course. It's a powerful analogy, and

(04:33):
it comes from the work of ancient Greek philosophers. One
of the areas to our teaches in her course, there
was a period about twenty five hundred years ago in
ancient Greece where a whole bunch of really smart people
directed their attention to a set of really interesting and
important questions, and society structured itself in such a way

(04:54):
that those individuals were given the freedom and the leisure
and the luxury to think about those questions as their profession.
What they did for their job was think about what
does it mean for human beings to and the community
of individuals talking to one another about that question meant
that they made more progress on it than other people

(05:17):
have at other times. And so it's a great luxury
to be able to help ourselves to their wisdom. So
today we're going to focus in on one of the
ancients who in my view is really considered sort of
the father of positive psychology, this field of the science
of well being, and that is Aristotle. So give us
Aristotle one on one. Who was Aristotle and why was
he so important. So Aristotle was a guy from the countryside.

(05:41):
He didn't come from Athens, and his parents died when
he was quite young, so he was an orphan. And
when he was seventeen he was brought to Athens to
study in Plato's academy, and he liked school so much
that he stayed there as a student for another twenty years.

(06:04):
And Aristotle was just one of the greatest math thinkers
in the history of Western civilization. In addition to the
work that he did in philosophy, he's the inventor of
physics as a field, of biology as a field. He
was a great theorist of poetry, a great theorist of

(06:24):
drama and theater. And one of the major activities that
he undertook was to try to figure out what a
well lived human life might look like. And so he
came up with two concepts that I think are super
important when we try to think about happiness in the
modern day. And so one of these concepts was what
he called you diamonia, Like what is you diamonia? Yes,

(06:48):
so you diamonia has as its middle word the word
diamond or spirit. And if you've read his Dark Materials, books,
which are a wonderful series of children's books. You'll notice
that the spirit animal that people have in those books
is called their diamond. So you, diamonia is roughly spiritual flourishing,

(07:11):
spiritual well being, the thriving of what some traditions call
the human soul, what you might call the human mind
or human spirit. And so when we think of you, Diamondia,
we think of sort of spiritual flourishing. But the way
Aristotle thought of you, Diamondia, it was a little bit
different than we often think about happiness these days, right, Like,

(07:31):
it wasn't really happiness in the moment. It was kind
of a bigger, deeper, almost like moral happiness. Right. You
might think of two distinct notions of happiness. There are many,
but here are two. One is what we might call
hedonistic happiness, the indulgence of short lived pleasures, so the

(07:52):
pleasures of eating or of sex, and that's an important
part of what it is to be a human being,
taking pleasure in the physical world around you. But Aristotle
was interested in a richer and more robust, and more
lasting notion of what happiness would be, not just short

(08:16):
lived hedonistic pleasure, but long lived thriving, and he had
a picture that there was a certain function for which
human beings were ideally built. So just as the function
of a knife is to cut well, and the function
of a paperweight is to hold down papers, the function

(08:39):
of a human being is to be able to express
virtue and reason, that is, to participate in the things
that are the highest form of the good in the world.
And so you Diamonia is a kind of thriving that
involves spending as much of your time and as complete

(09:01):
of your activity in a state where you are doing
things that are good, that are virtuous, that are pleasure
urable to you because you have turned yourself into someone
who takes pleasure in virtue, and so you Diamonia, in
contrast to hedonism, is a kind of lasting rather than
short lived pleasure. And it's so cool that Aristotle came

(09:24):
up with this so long ago, right, because this is
what's being born out in a lot of the modern
science of happiness. Right. You know, on this podcast, we
talk a lot about data suggesting that your circumstances don't
necessarily make you happy. You know, you could be rich
and have the opportunities to engage in all kinds of
hedonistic pleasure, but a lot of folks self report that
leaves them kind of empty, that they're kind of missing something.

(09:45):
And so Aristotle was kind of on top of this,
like you know, two thousand years ago. Right, Well, it's
really interesting that each era uses a particular mode of
understanding as its best way of making sense of the world.
And one of the things I try to teach in
my course is that there's lots of methodologies to coming

(10:07):
to the same insight. And so neuroscience gives us one
way of looking at what is it for us to
be in a state of happiness or harmony, and behavioral
psychology gives us another way of testing and measuring that,
and literary representations give us another way of identifying this.

(10:28):
And the kind of work that Aristotle did, a speculative, systematic,
philosophical exploration of what he observed in those around him,
is a methodology that very often brings us to the
same sorts of insights that we might get from literature
or neuroscience or behavioral psychology. I think the fact that

(10:51):
you need to do that kind of philosophical inquiry for
these insights is important, right because another thing that comes
up on this podcast is that we often have incorrect
notions of the kinds of things that make us happy.
Right when we do a super fast introspection, we can think, oh,
I just want all the hedonistic pleasures and some good
food and sects and nice stuff to watch on Netflix.
But in fact, if you really do a deep dive,
that seems to be not what works. I think the

(11:13):
idea that the surface gives you one kind of information,
but that assembling a lot of surface phenomena and then
looking at what lies more deeply behind them gives you
a deeper understanding is an incredibly important insight. And a
lot of what the philosophical work that happened in ancient

(11:33):
Athens twenty five hundred years ago does is to say,
don't get deluded by this particular momentary sense. Look instead
at how these things patterned together, and you will have
a deeper understanding of what matters to human beings. And
so Aristotle, using that same approach, came up with a
different concept that I think is important for modern science

(11:56):
and happiness, which is a kind of different thing that
we get wrong, which is how our knowledge can help
us and how we get to know about happiness. And
this was his idea of phrensus, So what was this
concept of phreness. So, phrenesis is often inflated as practical wisdom.
To understand what that means, think about the contrast between

(12:16):
what we sometimes call the theoretical and what we call
the practical, or the difference between knowing that something is
a case and knowing how to do something. So, if
you're trying to figure out how to do something like
throw a baseball or play the piano, or respond in
a calm and temperate fashion when you're under a situation

(12:38):
of agitation, you can have a theoretical understanding of it.
You can understand lots of things about the physics of baseballs,
or about the acoustical properties of a piano, or you
can read a therapy book and understand what it is
when people respond calmly. That's theoretical wisdom. But the theoretical

(12:59):
wisdom doesn't give you the capacity to engage in the
action you want to engage in. In order to do that,
you actually need what Aristotle would call practical wisdom, a
kind of skill, the skill that comes from practicing the
activity about which you want to make progress. And so

(13:21):
Aristotle really thought that you, Diamonia isn't just kind of
something that we're born with or something we can kind
of get too. Theoretically, he really thought it was something
that you get to in a skill based way. Right,
So Aristotle thought, the strategy by which we gain this
kind of deeper thriving, the spiritual well being the u

(13:42):
diamonia is the strategy of making ourselves into the kind
of people who are virtuous and who take pleasure in virtue.
So it's a kind of self education project of building
up in yourself the kind of soul you want to have.

(14:04):
You make yourself into the person that you want to be.
And aris sat is really aware of the way in
which that can be self reinforcing. You want yourself to
become a particular kind of person, you practice being that
kind of person and doing that kind of activity thereby

(14:25):
becomes pleasurable to you. And this is something that's also
really nicely borne out in the modern science. In one
of our podcast episodes, I interviewed as scientists Sonya Lubermerski.
In her book The How of Happiness, she has this
wonderful quote that you know, just as you learn a
violin by playing it, or just as you kind of
put a lot of work into raising a child. If
you want to bump up your happiness levels, you actually

(14:46):
have to put the work in. And that work isn't
just kind of theoretical work, it's actually engaging with it
in a real way and actually building up your happiness
kind of like a skill set, like from the ground up.
So the quote that you gave from Sonya Lubermersky is
actually a direct reference to Aristotle, who famously says that
we become builders by building, and we become harp by

(15:10):
playing the harp. And then he goes on to say
that just as the way you learn to be a
builder is by building buildings, and the way you learn
to play the harp is by playing the harp, so too,
says Aristotle, we become just by doing just actions, temperate
by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions. That

(15:31):
is the way that we come to have practical wisdom
is by practicing the skill that we want to cultivate
so that it becomes natural to us. And Aristotle also
had good ideas about which particular kinds of actions we
should want to practice, right, like, what are the kinds
of actions that will actually make us a virtuous and

(15:53):
therefore spiritually happy person. When we get back from the break,
we'll dive into that specific ways the Aristotle thought we
could achieve happiness, and what we'll see is that he
devoted two whole chapters to something you might not think
is that important, the happiness lab. We'll be right back.

(16:23):
So people who listen to the podcast hear a lot
about the kinds of things they can do to be
happy that are borne out by modern science. When Aristotle
thought about spiritual well being, this idea of eudaimonia, what
are the kinds of things he thought we should be
paying attention to? What are the sorts of actions he
wanted us to engage with. So he was really interested
in developing character that was what he called moderate in

(16:47):
exactly the right ways. And he viewed the virtues that
help us thrive as being cases of behavior that are
intermediate between two extremes. So it's easiest to think about
this in the case of something like bravery, where you
have an extreme of being a coward, you have an

(17:08):
extreme of being reckless, and in between those two things
is bravery, which Aristotle thinks of as the perfect moderate virtue,
or with regard to your character. You could be somber,
or you could be a buffoon, or you could be

(17:30):
somebody with a good sense of humor. And I love
this idea of the middle way because you know, it
fits with some of the things that we talk about
on the podcast, which is this idea that you know
you got to take baby steps towards the sorts of
actions you want to engage in to become happier. Right,
if I tell you that you know gratitude is really important,
for example, you don't want to so double down on
gratitude that you're stressing yourself out. So it's engaging in virtue,

(17:53):
but almost in a moderate and at baby step sort
of way. And the nice thing about thinking of virtue
as the middle way is that you always know what
the next thing to do is. If you're aiming to
be brave and you're a cowardly person, you don't have
to get all the way over to bravery. You just
have to take a small step towards bravery, and you're

(18:13):
moving to the middle. So by giving us a center
to move towards, we can make progress without being overwhelmed
at the prospect of what it is that we need
to change. We just need to change a little bit
and then the next day a little bit more, and
as Aristotle likes to point out, this becomes self reinforcing.

(18:35):
He says, abstaining from pleasures makes us become temperate, and
once we've become temperate, we're more capable of abstaining from pleasures.
It's similar with bravery. Habituation in standing firm in frightening
situations makes us brave, and once we've become brave, we're
more capable of standing firm. So if you want to
be a brave person, act the way a brave person acts,

(19:00):
and you will manifest bravery, and you will be reinforced
in your experience about how pleasurable and possible it is
for you to act bravely. So Aristotle talked a lot
about different virtues, and that's one of the reasons his
book was really a book not about happiness or eudaimonia,

(19:20):
but it was a book about ethics. Right, So talk
about this important book and why it was so powerful
and Western thought. Sure, this is a book called the
nicomickeon Ethics, and it's a book in which Aristotle tries
to spell out what is it to live a virtuous life.
But his notion of virtue is a really broad one.

(19:43):
He means not just a life that is a moral life,
but a life that for the individual brings them this
eudaimonia thriving and happiness, and that for the society contributes
to a society in which there's thriving and happiness. So
this is a book about how to live well morally,

(20:06):
how to live well happily, and how to live well
in a way that is part of a harmonious society
where all are in a position to thrive. And this
is where I think the science really backs Aristotle up right,
because one thing we know is even if you're just
shooting for the happy life, the data really suggests that
what you want to do is to live a moral life.

(20:28):
You want to live a life where you're doing nice
things for others. You want to live a life where
you're really feeling connected to other people, where you're doing
something that is a job that gives you a meaning.
So in some sense, even if you were just shooting
for the eudaimonia part, you'd get these other two parts
as well. Right, It's exactly right. Aristotle thinks that human
beings are creatures where it's possible to become someone in

(20:51):
whom what gives you pleasure is causing other people to
thrive and do well. So for Aristotle, a healthy, thriving,
virtuous individual is a person who takes pleasure in others
also having lives that are filled with meaning, who takes

(21:11):
pleasure in being a situation where those around them are
also doing well. And that's one of the reasons that
Aristotle devoted two whole chapters in this important book to
something that we might not think about when we think
about virtue and ethics necessarily right, So what were those
two chapters about, Yeah, it's a great question. So this book,

(21:34):
which has ten chapters there were ten papyrus scrolls on
which the book was written, devotes chapters eight and nine
to the topic of friendship, and he thinks friendship is
incredibly important throughout our entire lives. He says, the young
need friendship to keep them from error, the old need

(21:56):
friendship to care for them and to support the actions
that fail because of weakness, and those in their prime
need friendship to do fine actions, for they are more
capable of understanding and acting when two go together. And
his idea of friendship was in part for a kind

(22:18):
of you know, hedonistic pleasure. You know, you get some
utility out of it. But he also thought that friends
could affect our happiness in a deeper and more meaningful
way as well. Actually, he distinguishes among three different kinds
of friendship. There's a kind of friendship, a relatively shallow
kind of friendship, which is friendship based on utility. I'm
friends with you because I get something out of it,

(22:40):
and your friends with me because you get something out
of it. There's a second kind of friendship, which is
a little bit richer, which is a friendship based on pleasure,
where I enjoy your company and you enjoy my company.
The kind of friendship that Aristotle is really interested in
is a friendship that's based on mutual appreciation of one

(23:04):
another's deep values. And whereas the first two kinds of
friend ship are accidental, they're limited in depth, they don't
last a long time. A friendship that's based on a
deep appreciation of how my being in your presence makes
me a better person, and your being in my presence
makes you a better person is a kind of friendship

(23:26):
that's lasting, and it fits with Aristotle's general picture that
what we want to do is to get ourselves into
self reinforcing cycles where we're doing something that works, and
because we're doing it and it works, we keep doing it.
So Aristotle calls a friend a second self, and he

(23:47):
thinks that one of the ways in which we can
help ourselves cultivate practical wisdom is by finding friends who
support us in that activity. So if I want to
be brave, I say to you, my virtuous, deep friend,
let's work on bravery together there, and I reinforce your bravery,

(24:13):
you reinforce my bravery. I get an extra self to
help me remain committed to what I want to do,
not just theoretically but practically, not just in my head,
but also in my actions. And this too fits with
a lot of what we know about the science of habits. Right.
You know, when you're trying to stick to a new
virtuous habit, or even just some habit that will improve

(24:35):
your happiness, say you want to exercise more, you want
to meditate, or right in your gratitude journal, one of
the things you can do from the habit literature is
to find social support. Right, you find a friend who's
good at that, who you can kind of say hey,
I'm going to do this with you, and then you
do that together, which is funny to tell you, Tomar,
because you are my exercise buddy, my hiking buddy, my
yoga buddy. So Laurie, Laurie is the person. In fact,

(24:59):
when Laurie had a broken leg, I discovered that my
second self had stopped hiking, and so my first self
stopped hiking. So it was a great relief to me
when you're got strong enough again for us to walk together.
But yes, this idea that one of the ways that
you can stick to your commitments is to surround yourself
by others who are also committed to those things. It's

(25:21):
part of really every wisdom traditions. So in the Buddhist
wisdom tradition, there's a notion that they call right association,
that is, surround yourself by others who are also committed
to this path towards spiritual enlightenment. And almost every religious
tradition involves communal activity of a kind that says, put

(25:44):
yourself in a setting where others are also trying to
pursue that kind of spiritual transcendence. And in fact, that
was actually the inspiration for one of the rewirements, these
sort of happiness practices that I did with my class.
One of the things I asked my students to do
is to take what I call a strength state, where
you hang out with a friend and you both try

(26:05):
to pursue some virtue that you want to get better at,
some strength you want to enhance, but the idea is
to do it with somebody else. And in fact, there's
evidence for Marty Seliman's group that this act of doing
a strength date with somebody can kind of give a
nice boost to your well being. So you've been a
scholar of Aristotle for some time now, have you been
following the middle way using his insights to go after
your own udaimonia? Pretty Much everything that Aristotle instructs us

(26:31):
to do is a part of my own attempt at
self improvement. The recognition that what I needed to do
to change a bad habit was just to move a
little bit towards a better version of it was an
incredible relief to me, as I found myself feeling overwhelmed

(26:54):
by changes that I want to make, and the idea
that in order to become somebody who had virtues that
I wanted, all I had to do was start acting
as if I already had those virtues was unbelievably liberating
and transformative for me. We're about the friend part and

(27:18):
for almost every change that I wanted to make, the
realization that I had a second self available to help
me do that. Most often in things at home, that
partner was my spouse or one of my children. But
for the big changes that I wanted to make in

(27:38):
my life, my friendship actually with you, Laurie, was one
of the factors that really enabled me to make those changes.
And I feel like the combination of Aristotle's wisdom from
twenty five hundred years ago and your friendship from one
and a half decades has been the key to allowing

(28:01):
me to thrive and flourish. Well. That is sweet to
hear you say, and right back after, because I feel
like when I think about the people who are pleasure
friends or friends of utility versus the ones that are
real friends of meeting, friends that get me towards virtue,
you are right up there too. So yeah, thank you,
And I just I mean, I hadn't realized it really
has been fifteen years. That's disturbing, but it makes sense.

(28:26):
The things tomorrow has taught me about Aristotle have helped
me a ton in my own quest to be happier
and more virtuous, things like the need to take action
to become the person you want to be and the
fact that all those tiny baby steps matter a lot.
But of course, one episode isn't going to be enough
to explore everything the ancient Greeks thought about achieving happiness.

(28:47):
So I hope you'll join me in tomorrow again, next
time when we introduce you to a different Greek thinker,
Plato and his advice for how you can control that
horse drawn chariot I keep talking about, and you'll be
able to hear that episode on happiness lessons from Plato
right after the short break from the second I opened

(29:13):
my eyes. Each morning, I'm locked in a battle with
a persistent and persuasive adversary, someone who seems dead set
on preventing me from practicing all of the happiness techniques
I teach you about in this podcast. I want to
plan my day so I don't feel time pressured, and
I want to meditate an exercise every morning, and I
want to do random acts of kindness throughout the day.

(29:33):
But my nemesis is right there encouraging me to do
the exact opposite, arguing that I should sleep in, or
I should buy something nice for myself, or I should
add yet one more event to my already packed schedule,
just to prove to people that I'm a hard worker.
Of course, the person sabotaging me is me, or maybe
more accurately, a few rogue parts of me, once that

(29:55):
I really want to control better, and I bet I'm
not alone. The temptations that divert us from doing things
that will make us happy are everywhere, and they're available
twenty four seven. But the people who first thought deeply
about the internal battles we all face lived centuries before smartphones,
movie streaming services, and calendar alerts. The ancient Greeks and
one thinker in particular, Plato, came up with some profoundly

(30:18):
important insights about our divided selves more than two thousand
years ago. As in other episodes of this mini season
of The Happiness Lab, I want to explore some of
the well being concepts that the ancient philosophies and great
religions got right, old school tips that are borne out
by the science, and ones that have personally helped me
in my own quest to be happier. So welcome to

(30:39):
happiness Lessons of the Ancients with me, Doctor Laurie Santos.
One of the things I've realized is that I am
inevitably going to be tempted if I work with my
phone next to me, I'll be getting texts. This is
my friend and Yale colleague to Mark Keendler. So when
I sit down at my desk to write, I actually

(31:01):
turn off the Wi Fi receiver on my computer so
that I won't even be tempted to look at the
other things while I'm getting the work done. Tomorrow and
I often trade notes about how to stay happy and
productive as busy academics. But Tomorrow brings something very special
to these conversations. She teaches a class at Yale called
Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature, and Plato's ideas

(31:24):
are central to her curriculum. So I asked Tomorrow to
give us Plato one oh one. So Plato was one
of the really cool ancient philosophers in Athens who gave
rise to the Western philosophical tradition, and he ran basically
a university which was called the Academy, where young men

(31:47):
from Athenian families would come and engage in unbelievably intellectually
interesting conversations with one another and with Plato, and with
Plato's teacher Socrates about the deepest questions of the age.
And one of the students at Plato's academy was a
guy named Aristotle. So this was like a pretty legit

(32:10):
thing to do if you were like a rich Athenian
guy and wanted to get educated. It didn't have the
formal structure of degree granting. It wasn't that you would
go there for four years, but it was the place
where people went if they wanted to understand fundamental ideas,
if they wanted to think about literature or philosophy, or

(32:31):
politics or mathematics. Those were the kinds of topics that
you could explore at Plato's academy. And Plato was kind
of the guy to learn from, in part because he
thought so deeply about so many different topics. But today
we're going to kind of focus in on Plato's ideas
for happiness and how we can control this self, which
was something he thought about a lot, right. Yeah. So

(32:52):
one of the things that's really interesting about ancient Greek
philosophy is that they connected all sorts of topics that
we think of as distinct from one another. So the
question of how can you be happy was a fundamental
question in ancient philosophy, because they were thinking about what's
the appropriate relation between the individual and their society, and

(33:14):
what's the nature of beauty and what's the nature of truth?
And so Plato would be teaching all of those things,
everything from mathematics to metaphysics to political theory. But part
of the reason for exploring that set of topics was
so that you could understand how is it possible for
an individual human being to flourish? How can they best

(33:36):
align themselves so that they understand the nature of the
world and are most receptive to the world's excellence. And
so Plato didn't just think about this obviously. He was
a writer who created lots of influential books on this.
So talk to me about the importance of one of
the books that we're going to dig into a little
bit today, which is The Republic. So Plato wrote all

(33:57):
his books in the form of plays, and they were
plays where his teacher, Socrates was the main character. And
then various young men who were students at the university
were in conversation with Socrates about questions. And so one
of the most famous of the dialogues or books that

(34:18):
Plato wrote is a book called The Republic, and it
has ten chapters, and it's kind of a theory of everything.
It describes what's the fundamental nature of the universe, how
did it come into being? It talks about how mathematics
underpins all of physical reality. Then it talks about physics,

(34:40):
it talks about how we understand truth. But it does
all of that by telling the story of what the
ideal society would look like. What would a society look
like in which human beings are best able to flourish.
That's the question that Plato asks, and it turns out
that in order to answer that he has to explore

(35:01):
everything from mathematics to political theory. And in those stories,
Plato tells one of my favorite stories from the ancient
Greek times, the story of Leontius. What was the story
of Leontius and why was it so important for thinking
about human nature? So let me just start by telling
the story using Plato's words from the Republic, and then
I'll give you the moral of it. So the story

(35:23):
goes like this, Leontius was walking along the north wall
of the city. He saw some corpses lying at the
foot of the wall. He had an appetite to look
at them, but at the same time he was disgusted
and turned away. For a time, he struggled with himself
and covered his face, but finally, overpowered by the appetite,

(35:45):
he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed towards the
dead bodies, saying, look for yourselves, you evil eyes, take
your fill of this beautiful site. So Plato tells this
story at a point in the Republic where he's trying
to have his listeners understand that within every human being

(36:08):
there are multi parts pulling the person in multiple directions.
He wants to show you that you, like everyone else,
are filled with internal strife, and so the story that
he tells is basically the story of a rubber necker
on a highway. Leontius is walking home, right, He's supposed
to go efficiently into the north gate of the city,

(36:29):
and instead there's a dead body on the side of
the city wall, and he thinks, like, that's disgusting, don't
look at that. But part of him, it's just fascinated
and curious. And the part of him that's fascinated and
curious keeps pulling him towards the wall. And so the
story is about the internal tension that Leontius feels, his
effort to try to control himself, and then the phenomenology,

(36:52):
the experience that he feels of just giving in. I
can't control my appetite. I can't control my desire to
go look at these dead bodies, And as many of
us do, when we're driving past an accident, he turns
his head, he looks at the dead bodies, and he
slows his walk. But the one reason I love this
story so much is that, I mean, it's kind of morbid.
But the reason I love the story so much is

(37:13):
that this isn't a tale just about rubber necking. That
same internal strife that Plato is talking about is what
I experience in the morning when my alarm goes off
and I know I want to be committed to getting
up and hopping on the elliptical or getting up for
my morning meditation, but my appetite wants me to sleep in.
That's what he's talking about, right, That's what he's talking about.
In fact, the reason he tells the story is that

(37:35):
he wants to set himself up to make the general
point that human beings are set up inside in such
a way that even if their best self wants to
do something, they are always going to feel tensions. They're
always going to feel pulled in many directions. It can
be an email that pops up that sends you down

(37:56):
a rabbit hole on the Internet. And Plato's point is
that human beings inevitably find themselves in situations that they
feel pulled in multiple directions. One of the reasons Plato
was really obsessed with this is that he realized that
you can't just be a rational self because we have
these other parts of our mind. You actually have to
control a rational self to figure this out. And he

(38:17):
had this awesome metaphor that I've actually been telling my
podcast listeners throughout this whole season about this, that involved
a charioteer, right. Yeah. In fact, he uses different metaphors
to describe it in different books. In The Republic, which
is the book that has the layon to his story,
he says that a human being is made up of
three parts. They're made up of a human being basically

(38:37):
their head. They're made up of a lion, and they're
made up of a many headed monster, and the idea
is that the human being is reason, and the lion
is the part of you that's kind of proud, and
that the many headed beast is the part of you
that's interested in base passions like food and sex. But
in another one of his books, a book called The

(38:59):
Feed Risk, he gives an analogy that I think is
even more vivid, and he says a human being is
like a charioteer driving a chariot with two horses. One
is a noble horse and one is a wild horse.
And the noble horse is the part of a human being,
the aspects of ourselves that's interested in honor and social

(39:23):
interaction and what other people think of us. If I'm
supposed to sit home and do my podcast, but I
go out because I give into pure pressure because I
care what my friends think about me, or I spend
a lot of time focused on appearance because I want
to impress somebody. That's the horse of spirit. Whereas the

(39:43):
wild horse is the part of ourselves that's interested in
fundamental desires that we share with other non human animals,
like the desire for food or the desire to sleep
or take physical pleasure in things like sex, it needs
to take in nutrition, and it needs to ensure that
there are future generations. Those are the parts of ourselves

(40:06):
that he describes in the chariot analogy. But the Cherry ideas,
like any journey we're on towards better flourishing, any journey
we're on towards becoming happier people. One thing we have
to do is we have to deal with these horses
that are kind of out of control in running around.
It's not just that we have to deal with these horses.
Basically what moves us is the fact that we have

(40:28):
fundamental passions and desires. The metaphors really a powerful one
because it says it's not like, oh, if we could
just have the person part of ourselves, we'd be done
with things. The story says human beings are the kinds
of creatures who are propelled forward by physical desires and
by social desires, and the key to human flourishing. The

(40:49):
way to move fast on the path through life is
to make sure that you're in control of those horses,
that the parts of you that are passion and energy
are pulling you in the direction that you want to go,
instead of in some wild other direction that they're being pulled,
and so if we want to become happier people, we
need to figure out how to deal with this chariot system.

(41:10):
We need to get our charioteer to rein in these
horses and to let them bring us on our journey
in a really productive way. And we'll deal with that
question of how we actually do that well when the
happiness lab returns in a moment. So Plato was obsessed

(41:36):
with this idea that if we really want to be
happier people, we really need to reign in our desires
and our passions and really use them in the right ways.
But how do we do that? What did Plato figure
out and how does that drive with modern science. Let's
start by talking about the first horse, the horse of appetite.
What did Plato think about how we could kind of
reign in appetite in a productive way. Plato really took

(41:56):
this metaphor seriously. He saw it as illuminating because he
recognized what contemporary science has recognized, which is a big
part of human beings is non human beings. That is
a big part of our selves are animals. So Plato
basically recognized that the best way to deal with the
parts of ourselves that are like animals is by dealing

(42:18):
with them in the way that we deal with things
that are animals. So imagine you have a dog and
you don't want the dog to eat some delicious kind
of food. The best way to keep the dog from
eating that food is not to put the food in
front of the dog. The second best way might be
to put a muzzle on the dog. And your very

(42:38):
last choice is going to be to try to train
up your dogs so that it doesn't give in to
that temptation. So Plato had the same insight with regard
to human beings themselves. If you want to keep the
horse of appetite, the part of yourself that's tempted, the
best idea is to avoid temptations. If you can't do that,
then when you're in the presence of temptations, you should

(42:59):
keep yourself from looking at them. And only in the
most difficult situations where you can't keep the temptations away
and you can't keep your attention away from the temptations,
only then should you try to do it through certain
kinds of self control. And this is super important, right
because I think you know one of the things that
Plato is saying to us is that it's not going

(43:21):
to work to try to control our appetite just through
reflective processes alone. Right, Like just repeatedly telling myself, like
you know, I'm an happiness expert, like I should get
up in the morning and like, you know, go work out.
Like that doesn't work as well, Right, Like I need
cues to remind me to work out. I need to
have my shoes out, I need to have my gratitude
journal where I can see it. I need to pretend
like this appetite part of me is like a dog

(43:44):
that I'm basically trying to train in the simplest way possible. Right,
and idiocy in many ways literally true. That is, the
things that are attracting you to food that smells tempting
are the exact same features of your brain that a
non human animal has that's attracting it to food that
smells excellent. And in fact, there's a very good reason

(44:05):
for it. We've evolved to be responsive to food that
provides nutrition to us, and so Plato's point is, in
many ways, there's nothing you can do about the fact
that you will feel tempted. So your job is to
figure out to the extent that you can reduce the temptations,
use the cues, and if you can't, only then do

(44:29):
you use the willpower of the charioteer. You don't have
enough strengthen the reins to do it always by the rains.
You've got to get the horse to cooperate. And what's
amazing is that there's like thousands of years ago, but
basically Plato is foreshadowing everything that we know about the
modern science of habit formation. Right, Like, the easiest way
to kind of get yourself to like control your appetite

(44:51):
is to get rid of the thing that you don't
want to be tempted by, you know, whether that's the
your phone or the internet, or fattening food or whatever
it happens to be. Is just to get that out
of there. And by the same token, if there's something
you want your brain to do, make it really obvious
in the situation, right, you know, put your gratitude journal
out there, like make your gym shoes available. That's right.
The easier you make it for yourself to do it automatically,

(45:15):
the better off you're going to be. In fact, there's
a famous Greek story that's in a book by Homer
called the Odyssey, and it's the story of this guy Ulysses.
He's trying to get home and he's going past an
island where there's really tempting music, and he knows that
if you hear that music, you're inclined to jump off

(45:36):
the ship and join the singers because the music is
so beautiful. And in the story, Homer tells two ways
of getting past that temptation. The oarsmen who are rowing
the boat block their ears so that they can't hear
the sound. And Ulysses, who wants to hear the sound
but not be able to act on it, has his

(45:59):
soldiers tie him to the mast of the ship. So
that story is like Plato's story of the Horse. The
horse is always going to be ten did So if
you have a temptation and you haven't put a mechanism
in place either to take it out of sight or
to control yourself in the face of it, it's going

(46:19):
to be really, really hard to avoid it. But all
of the strategies that you're describing make the alternate activity
salient rather than the one you want to avoid or
take away access. Put your phone in a ziplock bag
so you can't touch it, turn off the Wi Fi
on your internet, don't have chocolate in the house. All
of those are exactly the strategies that the ancient Greeks

(46:42):
were using. In Homer's case, that story is almost eight
thousand years old. All of these strategies, even though they're
so ancient, what science is finding is that if you
use them, you're going to actually be successful at regulating
your appetite. It is a recognition of something that is
so deeply part of human nature and human experience that

(47:02):
basically every world wisdom tradition tries to describe it in
some way. The Buddhist tradition has an analogy of a
rider and an elephant, and it's the same idea. It's
the idea that part of you is pulled in one direction,
and that there's a huge set of desires and passions

(47:23):
which pull in other directions. And many world religions are
about building structures that help you regulate those forces and energies,
and a lot of the things that modern science shows
to be effective mechanisms are actually there. In religious traditions.
You build rules around what kind of food you can

(47:45):
eat when in a religion, and it's exactly the same
insight that you see in the modern science. In addition
to the modern science saying that these are really good strategies,
the other thing that we know scientifically is that people
who are good at regulating their appetites they do that
because they use these strategies. Yeah, one of the things
that's really interesting is that people who are best at

(48:07):
self control are actually best at setting up situations in
which they don't have to exercise self control. So a
kid who's good at doing homework isn't good at not
looking at the phone that's right in front of them
while they're doing homework. What that kid is good at
is setting up their room in such a way that

(48:30):
they aren't tempted by the phone in the first place.
The more effective somebody is at what we think of
at self control and self regulation, the more likely it
is that they seldom put themselves into situations where they
even feel tempted. And that's why I love the charioteer
metaphor and why I keep telling my podcast listeners about

(48:50):
it in this mini season, is that I get that
intuition so much from the metaphor, right, Like, it's a
pain to be holding onto these reins, as this appetite
horse is going crazy like that requires a lot of work.
But if you just put blinders on the horse, you know,
if you can just help the horse, then you don't
have to worry about like holding onto these reins super hard,
because the horse is just going to be behaving correctly anyway.

(49:11):
It's exactly right. Set yourself up in situations where you
don't have to expend all your chariot, your energy controlling
these horses. So that was what Plato thought about the
appetite horse, right, this horse that's kind of going for
you like food and like all the kind of physical pleasures.
But Plato also worried about a different horse, which is
this horse of spirit, right, which is kind of like,

(49:33):
you know, that's the horse that leads me astray every
time I'm trying to like ease myself off of social
media or not react to some dumb fomo instinct or
so on. Did Plato also give us some insight about
how we could control of that horse. The best way
to control the horse of spirit, the horse of honor,
is by cultivating habits that are going to become the

(49:53):
natural way that that horse behaves. So if you think
about it. The horse of appetite is never going to
change what it's attracted to. The horse of spirit is
a trainable horse. And in fact, one of the distinctions
that Plato makes when he presents the metaphor is that
he says, the horse of appetite cannot be controlled except
through punishment, whereas the horse of spirit can be controlled

(50:18):
through argument and explanation. And so how does the sort
of training work, right, Like, how do we actually train
up our spirit horse over time? Yeah, So one of
the interesting things about how we train up our spirit
horse is that what we try to do is to
make it natural and pleasurable for the spirit horse to
do the thing that we want it reflectively to do.

(50:38):
And one of the nice things about human beings is
that we enjoy a certain sort of familiarity that when
we get good at something, we take pleasure in doing it.
So if you train your spirit horse actually to take pleasure,
you sit down and you write in your gratitude journal
every day, and you discover actually writing in this makes

(50:59):
me feel connected to people. That's a way of co
opting the energy of the spirit horse so that it
takes you along your pathway without you having to steer
it using the reins, and so Plato really thought that
this was something that we could do with the right
sorts of strategies. Right, Like, did you get a sense
that Plato himself did it or that his students did it.
So Plato had this incredible university, right, I mean, it

(51:24):
was the first place people came together. And it is
true that the academy it was just this enclosure outside
of Athens. I think what drew people there originally was
the possibility of social interaction. It was a kind of
high prestige space to be in. All the cool kids
were hanging out there, and then all the cool kids

(51:46):
were hanging out there. And then Plato taught him some math,
and then he taught him some metaphysics, and then he
taught him some political theory. And so there's a way
in which the fact that human beings are social beings
is what allowed Plato to create this academy where people
came together and then once they were with each other,

(52:07):
they could take pleasure in interacting with each other and
thinking about ideas. That's cool. So Plato was basically using
the spirit horse of their students to like, you know,
drag their charioteer to the academy, and then they could
learn all this good stuff exactly. And then the chariotier
gets to the academy, it learns all the stuff, and
then it realizes that this was in fact attacked it
that played off its spirit. So as someone who teaches Plato,

(52:30):
are there ways that you've used his insight to train
your own horses? Oh? I would say just about everything
in my life comes from the insights that I've gotten
from thinking about the ways in which these habits can
structure our lives. So during the quarantine, my family made

(52:51):
a habit. I had unexpectedly two kids home from school
who had been living away, and we just made it
a routine that every night at seven thirty, we would
eat dinner together as a family, and it just came
to feel like a fact about the world. It wasn't
like we had to think about should we go downstairs
at seven thirty. We just made it part of our

(53:11):
family's routine, and as a consequence, we spent time with
each other, and then we remembered we like being with
one another, and then it stopped seeming like something governed
by the watch and just started seeming like what it
is that we wanted to do naturally. We wanted to
go down, we wanted to eat together, and we wanted
to spend time with one another. It seemed like the
Greeks are fantastic at recognizing not just that we have

(53:34):
these warring parts of ourselves, but they also gave us
some insight into how we could control those different parts
over time to flourish a little bit better. Kind of
what was the next steps, like what did the Greeks
kind of leave in terms of their legacy for the
next thinkers to come around and sort out. Yeah, so
there's real insight if we'd Plato an Aristotle about how

(53:54):
to control drives in ourselves. But you don't get in
Plato an Aristotle explicitly the thought that actually the charioteer
can do the same sort of tricks on it self.
And one of the things that you start getting in
a tradition that starts just a couple hundred years later

(54:16):
in writers like Epictitis is the idea that in fact,
you can control how it is that you represent the
world to yourself, and that you can think about things
as being in your control or out of your control.
You can frame something as letting it bother you or

(54:36):
not letting it bother you, and that frame can be
self fulfilling. If you decide that somebody else's disapproval doesn't
matter to you, you actually make it the case that
somebody else's disapproval doesn't matter to you, and you don't
find that thought explicitly articulated until you get to this

(54:58):
subsequent tradition. If these two episodes from our throwback archive
are new to you, then I hope they'll inspire you
to check out our back catalog to find more of
the wisdom hiding in there. If you'd already heard Tamar
talk about Aristotle and Plato, I hope this has been
a useful refresher about the culture of ancient Greece. You'll
need it since we'll be continuing our journey into Greek wisdom.

(55:18):
In the next episode. We'll be diving into one of
the most famous Greek myths out there to hear what
the fictional heroes of the ancient world can tell us
about happiness. I hope to see you back for the
next episode of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos.

(55:39):
The Happiness Lab is co written by Ryan Dilley and
is produced by Ryan Dilley, Courtney Grano and Britney Brown.
The show was mastered by Evan Viola and our original
music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Greta Kone,
Eric Sandler, Carl Migliori, Nicole Morano, Morgan Ratner, Jacob Weisberg,
my agent, Van Davis, and the rest of the Pushkin team.

(56:00):
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
and by me, doctor Laurie Santos.