September 21, 2020 • 27 mins
Plato likened us all to charioteers trying to control two wayward horses. The steeds represent the competing wants and desires that constantly pull us off course and away from a happier life.
Yale professor Tamar Gendler joins Dr Laurie Santos to examine how the ancient Greek philosopher didn't only diagnose the internal tensions we all face, but also offered a cure. The horses can be made to pull in the direction you command... but each must be coaxed in the right way.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin from the second I opened 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
(00:37):
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. 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
(01:00):
me is me, or maybe more accurately, a few rogue
parts of me, once that I really want to control better.
And I bet I'm not alone. The tempt patients 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
(01:23):
calendar alerts the ancient Greeks, and one think are In particular,
Plato came up with some profoundly important insights about our
divided selves more than two thousand years ago. As in
other episodes of this the 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
(01:45):
ones that have personally helped me in my own quest
to be happier. So welcome to 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
(02:07):
colleague to Mark Kendler. When I sit down at my
desk to write, I actually 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
(02:30):
a class at Yale called Philosophy and the Science of
Human Nature, and Plato's ideas 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,
(02:56):
where young men from Athenian families would come and engage
in unbelievably intellectually interesting conversations with one another and with Plato,
and with plato teacher Socrates about the deepest questions of
the age. And one of the students at Plato's academy
(03:17):
was a guy named Aristotle. So this was like a
pretty legit 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,
(03:41):
or 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,
(04:02):
So 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,
(04:23):
and 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
(04:45):
they best 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 or 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
(05:06):
wrote all his books in the form of 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
(05:27):
or books that 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
(05:48):
talks about physics, 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, in order to answer that, he has
(06:10):
to explore everything from mathematics to political theory, and in
those stories, Plato tells one of my favorite stories from
the ancient Greek times, which is 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 Republican. Then I'll give you the moral of it.
(06:32):
So the story 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
(06:54):
by the appetite, 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
(07:17):
every human being, there are multiple 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
(07:38):
the city, 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
(08:01):
phenomenology 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 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 reason I love this story
so much is that, I mean, it's kind of morbid.
(08:22):
But the reason I love the story so much is
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.
(08:42):
In fact, the reason he tells the story is that
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
(09:03):
be an email that pops up that sends you down
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
(09:24):
control the rational self To figure this out and he
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 layont his story, he
says that a human being is made up of three parts.
(09:45):
They're made up of a human being basically 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
(10:08):
one of his books, a book called The 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
(10:29):
of ourselves that's interested in honor and social 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.
(10:51):
That's the horse of spirit, Whereas the 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, to take in nutrition, and
(11:11):
it needs to ensure that there are future generations. Those
are the parts of ourselves that he describes in the
Chariot analogy. But the Chariot 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 and running around. It's not just that
(11:33):
we have to deal with these horses. Basically what moves
us is the fact that we have 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
(11:58):
the key to human flourishing, the 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
(12:18):
figure out how to deal with this chariot system. 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 with
(12:48):
this idea that if we really want to be happier people,
we really need to rein 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
rein in appetite in a productive way. Plato really took
(13:08):
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 ourselves are animals. So Plato basically
recognized that the best way to deal with the parts
of ourselves that are like animals is by dealing with
(13:30):
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 last choice
(13:51):
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 keep yourself
(14:12):
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 to work
(14:34):
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
(14:54):
of me is like a dog that I'm basically trying
to train in the simplest way possible. Right, And idiots
in many ways literally true that is the things that
are attracting you to food that smells tempting are the
exac same features of your brain that a non human
animal has that's attracting it to food that smells excellent.
(15:15):
And in fact, there's a very good reason 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
(15:37):
the cues, and if you can't, only then do you
use the willpower of the charioteer. You don't have enough
strengthen the reins to do it. Always by the reins,
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
(16:00):
to kind of get yourself to control your appetite is
to get rid of the thing that you don't want
to be tempted by, you know, whether that's 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
(16:21):
your gym shoes available. That's right. The easier you make
it for yourself to do it automatically, 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
(16:42):
there's really tempting music, and he knows that if you
hear that music, you're inclined to jump off 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.
(17:04):
And Ulysses, who wants to hear the sound but not
be able to act on it, has his 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 tempted. So if you have a
temptation and you haven't put a mechanism in place, either
(17:26):
to take it out of sight or to control yourself
in the face of it, it's going 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,
(17:48):
don't have chocolate in the house. All of those are
exactly the strategies that the ancient Greeks were using. In
Homer's case, that story is almost eight thousand years old.
All of these strategies, even though they're so ancient, like,
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
(18:11):
part of human nature and human experience that 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
(18:31):
that there's a huge set of desires and passions 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.
(18:54):
You build rules around what kind of food you can
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 science typically is that
people who are good at regulating their appetites they do
that because they use these strategies. Yeah, one of the
(19:15):
things that's really interesting is that people who are best
at 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
(19:36):
them while they're doing homework. What that kid is good
at is setting up their room in such a way
that they aren't tempted by the phone in the first place.
The more effective somebody is at what we think of
as self control and self regulation, the more likely it
is that they seldom put themselves into situations where they
(19:57):
even feel tempted. And that's why I love the charioteer
metaphor and why I keep telling my podcast listeners about
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
(20:17):
have to worry about like holding onto these reins super hard,
because the horse is just going to be behaving correctly anyway.
It's exactly right, set yourself up in situations where you
don't have to expend all your chariot to 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 know, like food and like all the kind
(20:38):
of physical pleasures. But Plato also worried about a different horse,
which is this horse of spirit, right, which is kind
of like, 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
(21:00):
of honor, is by cultivating habits that are going to
become the 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
(21:22):
is that he says the horse of appetite cannot be
controlled except through punishment, whereas the horse of spirit can
be controlled 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
(21:43):
is to make it natural and pleasurable for the spirit
horse to do the thing that we want it reflectively
to do. 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
(22:06):
in your gratitude journal every day and you just cover
Actually writing in this makes 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,
(22:28):
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 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.
(22:50):
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 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
(23:13):
create this academy where people came together and then once
they were with each other, 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
(23:34):
all the stuff, and then it realizes that this was
in fact attacked it that played off its spiritual So,
as someone who teaches Plato, 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
(23:59):
the quarantine, my family made 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
(24:20):
should we go downstairs at seven thirty. We just made
it part of our 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,
(24:40):
and we wanted to spend time with one another. It
seemed like the Greeks were of fantastic at recognizing not
just that we have these worrying 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 played
(25:04):
an Aristotle about how to control drives in ourselves but
you don't get in Plato and Aristotle explicitly the thought
that actually the charioteer can do the same sort of
tricks on itself. And one of the things that you
start getting in a tradition that starts just a couple
(25:26):
hundred years later, 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
(25:47):
bother you or not letting it bother you, and that
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
(26:09):
get to this subsequent tradition. I love hearing Tamarro explaining
the ideas of the ancient Greeks. Their stories are so
vivid and a tiny bit gory too. But as well
as being entertaining, Plato's work brings me great comfort. I'm
constantly beating myself up about not sticking to my goals
and giving into temptation. Plato helps me understand that my
(26:32):
horses are just doing what comes naturally. Once I realized
all this, driving my chariot became far less exhausting and
a lot more fun. In the next episode of Happiness
Lessons of the Ancients, we're going to take Tamar's suggestion
and explore a school of philosophy that was built on
the foundation of Plato and Aristotle. So I hope you'll
join me next time in Ancient Rome. The Happiness Lab
(27:01):
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 Mia LaBelle, Carlie Migliori, Heather Faine, Sophie Crane, mc gibbon,
Merik Sandler, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The
Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me,
(27:24):
Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin from the second I opened 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
(00:37):
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. 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
(01:00):
me is me, or maybe more accurately, a few rogue
parts of me, once that I really want to control better.
And I bet I'm not alone. The tempt patients 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
(01:23):
calendar alerts the ancient Greeks, and one think are In particular,
Plato came up with some profoundly important insights about our
divided selves more than two thousand years ago. As in
other episodes of this the 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
(01:45):
ones that have personally helped me in my own quest
to be happier. So welcome to 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
(02:07):
colleague to Mark Kendler. When I sit down at my
desk to write, I actually 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
(02:30):
a class at Yale called Philosophy and the Science of
Human Nature, and Plato's ideas 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,
(02:56):
where young men from Athenian families would come and engage
in unbelievably intellectually interesting conversations with one another and with Plato,
and with plato teacher Socrates about the deepest questions of
the age. And one of the students at Plato's academy
(03:17):
was a guy named Aristotle. So this was like a
pretty legit 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,
(03:41):
or 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,
(04:02):
So 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,
(04:23):
and 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
(04:45):
they best 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 or 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
(05:06):
wrote all his books in the form of 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
(05:27):
or books that 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
(05:48):
talks about physics, 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, in order to answer that, he has
(06:10):
to explore everything from mathematics to political theory, and in
those stories, Plato tells one of my favorite stories from
the ancient Greek times, which is 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 Republican. Then I'll give you the moral of it.
(06:32):
So the story 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
(06:54):
by the appetite, 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
(07:17):
every human being, there are multiple 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
(07:38):
the city, 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
(08:01):
phenomenology 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 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 reason I love this story
so much is that, I mean, it's kind of morbid.
(08:22):
But the reason I love the story so much is
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.
(08:42):
In fact, the reason he tells the story is that
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
(09:03):
be an email that pops up that sends you down
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
(09:24):
control the rational self To figure this out and he
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 layont his story, he
says that a human being is made up of three parts.
(09:45):
They're made up of a human being basically 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
(10:08):
one of his books, a book called The 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
(10:29):
of ourselves that's interested in honor and social 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.
(10:51):
That's the horse of spirit, Whereas the 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, to take in nutrition, and
(11:11):
it needs to ensure that there are future generations. Those
are the parts of ourselves that he describes in the
Chariot analogy. But the Chariot 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 and running around. It's not just that
(11:33):
we have to deal with these horses. Basically what moves
us is the fact that we have 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
(11:58):
the key to human flourishing, the 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
(12:18):
figure out how to deal with this chariot system. 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 with
(12:48):
this idea that if we really want to be happier people,
we really need to rein 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
rein in appetite in a productive way. Plato really took
(13:08):
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 ourselves are animals. So Plato basically
recognized that the best way to deal with the parts
of ourselves that are like animals is by dealing with
(13:30):
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 last choice
(13:51):
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 keep yourself
(14:12):
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 to work
(14:34):
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
(14:54):
of me is like a dog that I'm basically trying
to train in the simplest way possible. Right, And idiots
in many ways literally true that is the things that
are attracting you to food that smells tempting are the
exac same features of your brain that a non human
animal has that's attracting it to food that smells excellent.
(15:15):
And in fact, there's a very good reason 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
(15:37):
the cues, and if you can't, only then do you
use the willpower of the charioteer. You don't have enough
strengthen the reins to do it. Always by the reins,
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
(16:00):
to kind of get yourself to control your appetite is
to get rid of the thing that you don't want
to be tempted by, you know, whether that's 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
(16:21):
your gym shoes available. That's right. The easier you make
it for yourself to do it automatically, 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
(16:42):
there's really tempting music, and he knows that if you
hear that music, you're inclined to jump off 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.
(17:04):
And Ulysses, who wants to hear the sound but not
be able to act on it, has his 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 tempted. So if you have a
temptation and you haven't put a mechanism in place, either
(17:26):
to take it out of sight or to control yourself
in the face of it, it's going 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,
(17:48):
don't have chocolate in the house. All of those are
exactly the strategies that the ancient Greeks were using. In
Homer's case, that story is almost eight thousand years old.
All of these strategies, even though they're so ancient, like,
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
(18:11):
part of human nature and human experience that 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
(18:31):
that there's a huge set of desires and passions 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.
(18:54):
You build rules around what kind of food you can
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 science typically is that
people who are good at regulating their appetites they do
that because they use these strategies. Yeah, one of the
(19:15):
things that's really interesting is that people who are best
at 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
(19:36):
them while they're doing homework. What that kid is good
at is setting up their room in such a way
that they aren't tempted by the phone in the first place.
The more effective somebody is at what we think of
as self control and self regulation, the more likely it
is that they seldom put themselves into situations where they
(19:57):
even feel tempted. And that's why I love the charioteer
metaphor and why I keep telling my podcast listeners about
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
(20:17):
have to worry about like holding onto these reins super hard,
because the horse is just going to be behaving correctly anyway.
It's exactly right, set yourself up in situations where you
don't have to expend all your chariot to 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 know, like food and like all the kind
(20:38):
of physical pleasures. But Plato also worried about a different horse,
which is this horse of spirit, right, which is kind
of like, 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
(21:00):
of honor, is by cultivating habits that are going to
become the 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
(21:22):
is that he says the horse of appetite cannot be
controlled except through punishment, whereas the horse of spirit can
be controlled 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
(21:43):
is to make it natural and pleasurable for the spirit
horse to do the thing that we want it reflectively
to do. 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
(22:06):
in your gratitude journal every day and you just cover
Actually writing in this makes 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,
(22:28):
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 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.
(22:50):
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 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
(23:13):
create this academy where people came together and then once
they were with each other, 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
(23:34):
all the stuff, and then it realizes that this was
in fact attacked it that played off its spiritual So,
as someone who teaches Plato, 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
(23:59):
the quarantine, my family made 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
(24:20):
should we go downstairs at seven thirty. We just made
it part of our 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,
(24:40):
and we wanted to spend time with one another. It
seemed like the Greeks were of fantastic at recognizing not
just that we have these worrying 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 played
(25:04):
an Aristotle about how to control drives in ourselves but
you don't get in Plato and Aristotle explicitly the thought
that actually the charioteer can do the same sort of
tricks on itself. And one of the things that you
start getting in a tradition that starts just a couple
(25:26):
hundred years later, 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
(25:47):
bother you or not letting it bother you, and that
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
(26:09):
get to this subsequent tradition. I love hearing Tamarro explaining
the ideas of the ancient Greeks. Their stories are so
vivid and a tiny bit gory too. But as well
as being entertaining, Plato's work brings me great comfort. I'm
constantly beating myself up about not sticking to my goals
and giving into temptation. Plato helps me understand that my
(26:32):
horses are just doing what comes naturally. Once I realized
all this, driving my chariot became far less exhausting and
a lot more fun. In the next episode of Happiness
Lessons of the Ancients, we're going to take Tamar's suggestion
and explore a school of philosophy that was built on
the foundation of Plato and Aristotle. So I hope you'll
join me next time in Ancient Rome. The Happiness Lab
(27:01):
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 Mia LaBelle, Carlie Migliori, Heather Faine, Sophie Crane, mc gibbon,
Merik Sandler, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The
Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me,
(27:24):
Doctor Laurie Santos
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