September 14, 2020 • 28 mins
He gave us biology, physics and drama... but Greek philosopher Aristotle also thought deeply about how humans can flourish and live happy lives of virtue.
Yale professor Tamar Gendler tells Dr Laurie Santos about Aristotle's wellbeing insights and how he recommended taking daily "baby steps" towards becoming the sort of happy, moderate person we aspire to be. A kind of ancient "fake it, 'til you make it" ethos.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. We humans were already pretty complicated creatures, but living
in the modern world has added a ton more 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
(00:38):
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
feels like it's still hard to stay on track. It's
a bit like being a charioteer holding the reins of
too powerful but mismatched horses. You know you want to
reach a happy place, but each of the steeds keeps
(00:59):
going off in different directions. It's exhausting, but you'll only
reach your desired destination if you can get the horses
to work in harmony and pull together. Now, I know
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,
(01:19):
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
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
(01:42):
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 too. So welcome to Happiness Lessons of the Ancients
with me, Doctor Laurie Sanders Aristotle. He is absurd, Yeah,
(02:05):
it seems fine. This is to Mark Gendler, Professor of
philosoph in Cognitive Science at Yale University. One two, three, Okay,
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. And thanks to social distancing, we
can't even meet in person right now. So Tomorrow is
(02:27):
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. 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
(02:49):
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. 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
(03:12):
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 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
(03:34):
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 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
(03:55):
their job was think about what does it mean for
human beings to flourish? And the community of individuals talking
to one another about that question meant that they made
more progress on it than other people 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
(04:15):
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. He didn't come from Athens,
and his parents died when he was quite young, so
(04:38):
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. And Aristotle was just
(04:58):
one of the greatest polymath thinkers in the history of
Western civilization. In addition to the work that he did
in philosophy, he's the inventor of physics a field, of
biology as a field. He was a great theorist of poetry,
a great theorist of drama and theater. And one of
(05:18):
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, So you diamonia has as its middle
(05:42):
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
daimonia is roughly spiritual, flourishing, spiritual, well being the thriving
(06:05):
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,
was a little bit different than we often think about
happiness these days, right, Like, it wasn't really happiness in
the moment, It was kind of a bigger, deeper, almost
(06:26):
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 shortlived pleasures, so the pleasures of eating or of sex,
(06:46):
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 shortlived hedonistic pleasure, long lived thriving. And he
(07:12):
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 of a human being is to be able to
(07:33):
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 of your activity in a state where you
(07:55):
are doing things that are good, that are virtuous, that
are pleasurable 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 up with this so long ago, right, because this
(08:17):
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. And so Aristotle was kind of on top
(08:37):
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 to the same insight. And so neuroscience gives
(09:02):
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. And the kind of work that Aristotle did,
(09:23):
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 you need to do that kind of
(09:43):
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 idea that the surface gives you one
(10:07):
kind of information, but at 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 Athens twenty five hundred years ago does is
(10:27):
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 and happiness, which is a kind of different thing
(10:49):
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 translated as
practical wisdom. To understand what that means, think about the
contrast between what we sometimes call the theoretic and what
(11:10):
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 of agitation, you can have a theoretical understanding of it.
(11:33):
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
wisdom doesn't give you the capacity to engage in the
(11:53):
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
Aristotle really thought that you diamonia isn't just kind of
(12:16):
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 that you
Diamonia is the strategy of making ourselves into the kind
(12:40):
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.
You make yourself into the person that you want to be,
and Aristotle is really aware of the way in which
(13:02):
that can be self reinforcing. You want yourself to become
a particular kind of person, and you practice being that
kind of person, and doing that kind of activity thereby
becomes pleasurable to you. And this is something that's also
really nicely borne out in the modern science. In one
(13:23):
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
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
(13:45):
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 harpists by
playing the harp. And then he goes on to say
that just as the way you learn to be a
(14:07):
builder is by building, building us, 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 is the way that we come to have practical
wisdom is by practicing the skill that we want to
(14:30):
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 therefore spiritually happy person. When we get back from
the break, we'll dive into that specific ways the Aristotle
(14:51):
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. So people who listen to the podcast hear
(15:15):
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
(15:38):
in exactly the right ways. And he viewed the virtues
that help us thrive as 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
(15:59):
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
(16:21):
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,
(16:44):
but almost in a moderate sort, 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 moving to
(17:05):
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. He says, abstaining
(17:28):
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
(17:48):
the way a brave person acts, 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 book not
(18:09):
about happiness or eudaimonia, 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
(18:33):
really broad one. 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
(18:54):
to live well morally, 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,
(19:15):
the data really suggests that what you want to do
is to live a moral life. 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
(19:40):
it's possible to become someone in 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
(20:00):
filled with meaning. Who takes 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,
(20:20):
So what were those two chapters about? Yeah, it's a
great question. So this book, 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.
(20:41):
He says the young need friendship to keep them from error,
the old need 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
(21:05):
go together. And his idea of friendship was in part
for a kind 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
(21:28):
on utility. I'm friends with you because I get something
out of it, 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
(21:53):
appreciation of one another's deep values. And whereas the first
two kinds of friendship 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
(22:13):
my presence makes you a better person is a kind
of friendship 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,
(22:38):
and he 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. And I reinforce
(23:02):
your bravery, 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
(23:23):
stick to a new virtuous habit, or even just some
habit that will improve 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
(23:44):
hiking buddy, my yoga buddy. So Laurie Laurie is the person.
In fact, 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 your leg got strong enough again for
us to walk together. But yes, this idea that one
(24:05):
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 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.
(24:28):
And almost every religious tradition involves communal activity of a
kind that says, put 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
(24:51):
my students to do is to take what I call
a strength date, where you hang out with a friend
and you both try to pursue some virtue that you
want to get better at, some strength that 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 boot to your
well being. So you've been a scholar of Aristotle for
(25:11):
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 to do is a
part of my own attempt at self improvement. The recognition
that what I needed to do to change a bad
(25:32):
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 by changes that I
want to make, and the idea that in order to
become somebody who had virtues that I wanted, all I
(25:54):
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 for almost every change
that I wanted to make, the realization that I had
(26:15):
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 my life, my friendship
actually with you, Laurie, was one of the factors that
(26:36):
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 me to thrive
and flourish. Well. That is sweet to hear you say,
and right back after you, because I feel like when
(26:57):
I think about the people who are pleasurable friends or
friends of utility versus the ones that are real friends
of meeting, friends that get me towards for two, 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 that it makes sense. The
(27:18):
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. So
(27:38):
I hope you'll join me and 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. If you've enjoyed the show,
I'd be super grateful if you could spread the word
by leaving a rating interview. It really does help other
(27:59):
listeners find us, and don't forget to tell your friends.
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
The show was mastered by Evan Viola, and our original
music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to the
entire Pushkin crew, including mil La Belle, Carl Migliori, Heather Faine,
(28:19):
Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor
Laurie Santos
Pushkin. We humans were already pretty complicated creatures, but living
in the modern world has added a ton more 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
(00:38):
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
feels like it's still hard to stay on track. It's
a bit like being a charioteer holding the reins of
too powerful but mismatched horses. You know you want to
reach a happy place, but each of the steeds keeps
(00:59):
going off in different directions. It's exhausting, but you'll only
reach your desired destination if you can get the horses
to work in harmony and pull together. Now, I know
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,
(01:19):
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
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
(01:42):
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 too. So welcome to Happiness Lessons of the Ancients
with me, Doctor Laurie Sanders Aristotle. He is absurd, Yeah,
(02:05):
it seems fine. This is to Mark Gendler, Professor of
philosoph in Cognitive Science at Yale University. One two, three, Okay,
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. And thanks to social distancing, we
can't even meet in person right now. So Tomorrow is
(02:27):
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. 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
(02:49):
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. 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
(03:12):
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 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
(03:34):
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 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
(03:55):
their job was think about what does it mean for
human beings to flourish? And the community of individuals talking
to one another about that question meant that they made
more progress on it than other people 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
(04:15):
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. He didn't come from Athens,
and his parents died when he was quite young, so
(04:38):
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. And Aristotle was just
(04:58):
one of the greatest polymath thinkers in the history of
Western civilization. In addition to the work that he did
in philosophy, he's the inventor of physics a field, of
biology as a field. He was a great theorist of poetry,
a great theorist of drama and theater. And one of
(05:18):
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, So you diamonia has as its middle
(05:42):
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
daimonia is roughly spiritual, flourishing, spiritual, well being the thriving
(06:05):
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,
was a little bit different than we often think about
happiness these days, right, Like, it wasn't really happiness in
the moment, It was kind of a bigger, deeper, almost
(06:26):
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 shortlived pleasures, so the pleasures of eating or of sex,
(06:46):
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 shortlived hedonistic pleasure, long lived thriving. And he
(07:12):
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 of a human being is to be able to
(07:33):
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 of your activity in a state where you
(07:55):
are doing things that are good, that are virtuous, that
are pleasurable 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 up with this so long ago, right, because this
(08:17):
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. And so Aristotle was kind of on top
(08:37):
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 to the same insight. And so neuroscience gives
(09:02):
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. And the kind of work that Aristotle did,
(09:23):
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 you need to do that kind of
(09:43):
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 idea that the surface gives you one
(10:07):
kind of information, but at 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 Athens twenty five hundred years ago does is
(10:27):
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 and happiness, which is a kind of different thing
(10:49):
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 translated as
practical wisdom. To understand what that means, think about the
contrast between what we sometimes call the theoretic and what
(11:10):
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 of agitation, you can have a theoretical understanding of it.
(11:33):
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
wisdom doesn't give you the capacity to engage in the
(11:53):
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
Aristotle really thought that you diamonia isn't just kind of
(12:16):
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 that you
Diamonia is the strategy of making ourselves into the kind
(12:40):
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.
You make yourself into the person that you want to be,
and Aristotle is really aware of the way in which
(13:02):
that can be self reinforcing. You want yourself to become
a particular kind of person, and you practice being that
kind of person, and doing that kind of activity thereby
becomes pleasurable to you. And this is something that's also
really nicely borne out in the modern science. In one
(13:23):
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
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
(13:45):
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 harpists by
playing the harp. And then he goes on to say
that just as the way you learn to be a
(14:07):
builder is by building, building us, 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 is the way that we come to have practical
wisdom is by practicing the skill that we want to
(14:30):
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 therefore spiritually happy person. When we get back from
the break, we'll dive into that specific ways the Aristotle
(14:51):
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. So people who listen to the podcast hear
(15:15):
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
(15:38):
in exactly the right ways. And he viewed the virtues
that help us thrive as 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
(15:59):
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
(16:21):
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,
(16:44):
but almost in a moderate sort, 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 moving to
(17:05):
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. He says, abstaining
(17:28):
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
(17:48):
the way a brave person acts, 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 book not
(18:09):
about happiness or eudaimonia, 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
(18:33):
really broad one. 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
(18:54):
to live well morally, 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,
(19:15):
the data really suggests that what you want to do
is to live a moral life. 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
(19:40):
it's possible to become someone in 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
(20:00):
filled with meaning. Who takes 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,
(20:20):
So what were those two chapters about? Yeah, it's a
great question. So this book, 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.
(20:41):
He says the young need friendship to keep them from error,
the old need 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
(21:05):
go together. And his idea of friendship was in part
for a kind 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
(21:28):
on utility. I'm friends with you because I get something
out of it, 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
(21:53):
appreciation of one another's deep values. And whereas the first
two kinds of friendship 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
(22:13):
my presence makes you a better person is a kind
of friendship 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,
(22:38):
and he 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. And I reinforce
(23:02):
your bravery, 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
(23:23):
stick to a new virtuous habit, or even just some
habit that will improve 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
(23:44):
hiking buddy, my yoga buddy. So Laurie Laurie is the person.
In fact, 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 your leg got strong enough again for
us to walk together. But yes, this idea that one
(24:05):
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 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.
(24:28):
And almost every religious tradition involves communal activity of a
kind that says, put 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
(24:51):
my students to do is to take what I call
a strength date, where you hang out with a friend
and you both try to pursue some virtue that you
want to get better at, some strength that 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 boot to your
well being. So you've been a scholar of Aristotle for
(25:11):
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 to do is a
part of my own attempt at self improvement. The recognition
that what I needed to do to change a bad
(25:32):
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 by changes that I
want to make, and the idea that in order to
become somebody who had virtues that I wanted, all I
(25:54):
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 for almost every change
that I wanted to make, the realization that I had
(26:15):
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 my life, my friendship
actually with you, Laurie, was one of the factors that
(26:36):
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 me to thrive
and flourish. Well. That is sweet to hear you say,
and right back after you, because I feel like when
(26:57):
I think about the people who are pleasurable friends or
friends of utility versus the ones that are real friends
of meeting, friends that get me towards for two, 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 that it makes sense. The
(27:18):
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. So
(27:38):
I hope you'll join me and 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. If you've enjoyed the show,
I'd be super grateful if you could spread the word
by leaving a rating interview. It really does help other
(27:59):
listeners find us, and don't forget to tell your friends.
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
The show was mastered by Evan Viola, and our original
music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to the
entire Pushkin crew, including mil La Belle, Carl Migliori, Heather Faine,
(28:19):
Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor
Laurie Santos
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