Making Sense with Sam Harris - #417 — Philosophy for Life

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

Sam Harris speaks with Donald Robertson about Stoicism and the good life. They discuss the relationship between wisdom and virtue, ancient versions of psychotherapy, parallels between Stoicism and Buddhism, practical vs. analytical styles of philosophy, CBT’s origins in Stoicism, the difficulty of self-criticism, techniques for reframing upsetting experiences, the lives of Marcus Aurelius and Socrates, the psychological pitfalls of using social media, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.  

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're

doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Donald Robertson. Donald, thanks for joining me. It's a pleasure to be here, Sam. So how would you summarize your background academically, intellectually, philosophically? Well, my first degree was in philosophy and my master's degree was at an interdisciplinary center. And I wanted to combine philosophy and psychotherapy. That's what I was studying.

So I just what a lot of people do, I had one run at it and then completely changed my mind. So I was trying to combine existential philosophy and psychoanalysis. My dissertation was on Jean-Paul Sartre and existential psychoanalysis. And I decided that just wasn't working out for me. So I started again from scratch and I began looking at stoicism and cognitive behavioral therapy and that's what I've been doing.

I was a psychotherapist. I pursued a clinical career instead of an academic one. And then I started writing books about it and somewhere along the lines, stoicism became what the young people call a thing. Instead of I had a moment and became popular. Yeah, yeah. That was, it's due to people like yourself and Bill Irvin and Ryan Holiday. And I should say you've written a couple of books here.

You have, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, which I think I got it in, maybe it was 2020, 2019. When did that come out? Came out in 2019. Uh-huh. Yeah. And then also you have one, How to Think Like Socrates. How did you get into stoicism specifically? Well, the truth is long story.

Like I grew up in the West coast of Scotland and a place where Freemasonry is popular because our national bard, Robert Burns, was a master Freemason. So my father and most of my friends' fathers were into Freemasonry. And it gave them a kind of philosophy of life. I looked at my father's were into Freemasonry. And it gave them a kind of philosophy of life. I looked at my father's books on Freemasonry when I was about 16 years old. And there was

all these references to Pythagoras and Plato and the four cardinal virtues of Greek philosophy. So that kind of got me interested in reading about Christian mysticism, I suppose, and world religions and Greek philosophy. Then I studied philosophy at university, and I was looking for something like a Weston Buddhism, basically, a guide to life like Freemasonry had provided my father, philosophy of life. Now I couldn't find it in modern academic philosophy. Now, in most undergraduate philosophy curricula, Stoicism isn't covered, although it's one of the major schools of ancient philosophy. So I didn't really read the Stoics until after I graduated. And when I did, I kind of had an epiphany. A light went on and it felt like I was trying to juggle several competing interests. I

was into psychotherapy, I was into meditation, I was into philosophy, and I was trying to juggle several competing interests. I was into psychotherapy, I was into meditation, I was into philosophy, and I was reading loads and loads and loads of different books. And when I started reading the Stoics, somehow all of that seemed to crystallize into one thing. I kind of got my fix for all of those things from reading Seneca, basically. And I soon figured out that Stoicism was the inspiration for cognitive behavioral therapy, that Stoicism contained contemplative practices or meditation techniques, and it provided a kind of workable philosophy of life. So it really all crystallized for me very quickly.

And that was about 25 years ago, or a little bit more than that now. And I'm still into Stoicism. It stuck with me. AC Yeah, this, when you read ancient philosophy, and when you read Eastern philosophy, it's pretty clear that philosophy was always meant to be a way of life, right? And there was the implication that if a person was a real philosopher, certainly one worth respecting, that would translate into, by definition, some mastery of the art of living, I mean, some wisdom.

You couldn't be a florid neurotic and be a great philosopher, presumably, I mean, it would just, or at least you would be living in stark contradiction to your stated insights. Whereas in modern times, and I'm not quite sure when we can date this. I mean, certainly there was a linguistic turn in philosophy in the West, in England, and America in particular.

And you have people like Wittgenstein and others for whom, it really becomes an analysis of language and concepts. And there's really no implication that a person would be wise based on having mastered their area of philosophy. And even with continental philosophy in Europe, and you have the contributions of someone like Nietzsche, who for all his gifts was obviously a profoundly unhappy person and is nevertheless a much celebrated philosopher.

So I'm not sure if you can date when this broke down, but it is remarkable that if you go in through the front door of a philosophy department in a university, you really can't expect to encounter much wisdom. Well, there's always been this connect. There is a connection still in 20th century philosophy, 21st century philosophy with therapy, even Wittgenstein compared philosophy, his philosophy to a type of therapy, but not in the way the ancient philosophers did. I mean, you know, in the ancient world, people thought that you could often recognize a philosopher if you passed one in the street

by the way that they were clothed, where they wore their beard, from their conduct. They were kind of like Western yogis. Even though in the ancient world there was kind of always a contrast between Dajonis the Cynic and Plato and the two views of philosophy as an activity that they represented. Plato definitely had a therapeutic idea of philosophy, but his that they represented. Plato definitely had a therapeutic idea of philosophy, but his philosophy was more academic. It was more scholarly. Whereas the cynics were seen as rejecting logic and rejecting this kind of academic discourse and being much more focused on developing strength of character. So in the ancient world, there was this

dichotomy about these two opposing ways of interpreting it. The Stoics kind of tried to reconcile that a little bit, but the cynics in particular couldn't be more different from what we think of as philosophy today. So what is the essence of Stoicism in your view? I think Stoicism fundamentally is an ethic, an ethical worldview. It's a big philosophy. It flourished for five centuries in the ancient world. It was around for a long time and it evolved

a lot. But essentially it's based on the doctrine that virtue is the only true good. That's how Cicero for example characterises the cornerstone of Stoicism. That in a sense, a kind of moral wisdom is the only true good. And that therefore, the things that the majority of people deem to be important in life, like wealth and reputation, are indifferent. They're not really intrinsically good. They're at most a kind of practical advantage in life. And what follows on from that is what stoicism is perhaps most famous for, which is that if somebody really embraced that ethical worldview, they would be less attached to external possessions and reputation. And so they would develop a kind of emotional resilience in the face of adversity. And stoicism today has kind of become a synonym, I guess

we could say, for emotional resilience as a consequence of that, but it stems from their ethic, their virtue ethic. Yeah. In reading the Stoics and what we'll get into some of the specific thinkers here, what I've gotten is that it really amounts to a way of thinking that allows for the regulation of negative emotion. There's kind of a master value. thinking that allows for the regulation of negative emotion. There's kind of a master value.

I certainly got this from Marcus Aurelius, that what you don't want above all is to suffer unnecessarily, right? And the lack of necessity is in how one reacts to the world, reacts to the behavior of other people and kind of hallucinates the cause of one's suffering as being out there in the world, overlooking the fact that there's a reaction that is actually the felt presence of the injustice

or the annoyance. And it's in surrendering that reaction, you're reframing it, thinking so as to see the non-necessity of it, that you become free of these collisions with annoying people, annoying circumstances, inevitable bad luck, et cetera. Well, I think we can say that probably the most famous quote from Stoicism is from the Enchiridion,

or Handbook of Epictetus, and it says, people are distressed not by events, but by their opinions about events. And the reason that it became so famous is that that quote is cited extensively in cognitive behavioral therapy. So it became a kind of cliche in a way, but this is a fundamental insight of stoicism. And something that might surprise your listeners is that we think of psychotherapy as being a modern thing, a modern invention in a sense. I think many people believe that psychotherapy began with Sigmund Freud, which is categorically

false. Freud trained in psychotherapy. There were modern psychotherapists around before Freud. But psychotherapy existed in the ancient world. In fact, at the beginning of the meditations, Marcus Aurelius says that one of the most important things that he gained from Junius Rusticus, who was his main Stoic mentor, was Therapeia, psychotherapy based on Stoicism basically. Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoic school, the most prolific writer in ancient Stoicism wrote what was once a famous book on therapeutics, on Stoic psychotherapy, which is lost today. But we have an entire book by Seneca

that still survives called On Anger, which is all about Stoic psychotherapy for the passion of anger. So you're right, it has this kind of therapeutic angle. It's about overcoming the passions or irrational and unhealthy emotions. And the Stoics call that goal apathia, which is kind of mistranslated as meaning apathy, but a better translation, a more literal translation would be freedom from pathological desires and emotions. So what are the primary negative emotions that Stoicism is an antidote for? Well, desire in the sense of a kind of greed or attachment to external things, but anger also is one of the main emotions that they were particularly concerned with and also irrational fear or sadness.

The Stoics think that any emotion that places too much intrinsic value on external events beyond our direct control, any emotion like that is inherently unhealthy. There's something not quite right about it, they believe, and that's the core of their philosophy essentially. You said that there's a direct connection between cognitive behavioral therapy and stoicism. Is that historically in the field or is that merely in your practice? No, that's for real.

Albert Ellis, who is the original pioneer of cognitive therapy, he developed a thing called rational emotive behavior therapy, which is the earliest form of CBT in the 1950s in New York. Ellis was originally a psychoanalytic therapist, and he got disillusioned with it and gave up and decided he was going to start again from scratch. And he'd read Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius when he was a teenager. And so he began drawing on Stoicism for inspiration. And he describes the Stoics as the main philosophical

inspiration for his approach to cognitive therapy. Then the next major pioneer of that approach is Aaron T. Beck, Tim Beck in the sixties and seventies. He developed cognitive therapy for depression and made cognitive therapy much more mainstream. And Beck also says that the philosophical origins, he says this repeatedly, of cognitive therapy lie in ancient Stoicism. So can you give me an example of the technique of Stoicism? How does one put these insights into practice?

Well, first of all, there's a repertoire of techniques. There are many, many techniques. The first book that I wrote on Stoicism, I tried to list as many as I could, and there were about 18 broad strategies and those can take different forms. So we can pick several out but actually I'm going to pick one in particular because I think it might be especially of interest to you, given your interest in mindfulness meditation and Buddhism. The Stoics have a practice that they call prosochae and this term is used by other ancient Greek writers as well. Epictetus has an entire discourse on it. Prosoké is a word that you'll see in modern Greece on signs. So you'll see

signs that say prosoké skelos, which means beware of the dog. So prosoké means be mindful, be aware, watch out. It can be translated as pay attention. The Stoics describe this as a kind of practice of continual attention to the way that we're using our mind. So you could see it as a kind of Stoic mindfulness practice. They think that we should constantly observe the use we make of impressions, for example, or the automatic thoughts that pop into our mind. Marcus Aurelius, for instance, says we should continually ask ourselves what use are you making right now of your psyche, of your mind, and what character does your psyche have right now? So constantly reflecting on the type of judgments we're making

and in particular the value judgments that we're making from moment to moment and how those might be affecting our emotions. So there's this kind of sort of mindfulness practice that we find in Stoicism pretty explicitly. And then there's the use of the Socratic method or Socratic questioning, which is integral to cognitive therapy. I'll take a step back and say the reason for that is, you know, this idea that it's not things that upset us, but our opinions about them. The Stoics had a cognitive model of emotion. So it's very similar, surprisingly similar to the premise of modern cognitive therapy.

And if you believe that your cognitions shape your emotions to a greater extent than we normally assume, then you're going to arrive at broadly similar conclusions perhaps about what you would do about that. So you might try to identify what the beliefs are that cause your anger, for example, and then challenge those beliefs, question them, whether they're contradictory or whether they contain certain logical errors, for example. So Stoics use questioning techniques to root out and challenge rationally or philosophically in a similar way that we do in modern cognitive therapy to help deal with these irrational beliefs. But they also have a variety of other meditation or contemplative

practices. And I think you'll find parallels to those in Eastern traditions like Buddhism. So I know in the Buddhist tradition, there are meditations that involve contemplating the character of the Buddha and the qualities that he possessed. In Stoicism, they have a practice called contemplating the sage or the Sophos in Greek. So the Stoics didn't believe that any perfect person had ever existed, but they thought that we're able to imagine what a wise person might look like and how they might act. It's an imaginative contemplative exercise. They think we should contemplate our own death, which is also a practice that we find in Buddhism. And they thought we should also try to

imagine potential misfortunes that could befall us and prepare ourselves in advance for them. Imagine, for example, poverty or illness as if it's happening right now, and then rehearse responding to it with a philosophical attitude, which is kind of similar to practices that we find in modern cognitive behavioral therapy as well, what we call mental rehearsal or imaginal exposure exercises in CBT. Okay. So I'm going to ask you to help me untangle a very familiar pattern of reaction that I have to one of the misfortunes in life. So you mentioned reputation and how one should not put too much stock in it. I find as a writer, a podcaster, a speaker, I find that the thing I find most annoying on this front is the all too frequent experience of seeing my views misrepresented. So it's not criticism per se or even just any kind of defamatory attack on me that I care about.

What I care about is to see somebody lying or otherwise consciously or unconsciously misrepresenting my views and to see that at scale become effective. So the truly crazy making experience from my point of view is to see vast numbers of people believe that I think things that I have never thought in my life, much less said out loud.

And so how would you, if you're gonna be my stoic therapist, how would you ask me to interact with that phenomenon? Well, first of all, I sympathize. And it's gonna get worse because AI is gonna start misrepresenting your views as well. I think that happens or you will get misquoted by AI. No, AI has me.

Someone sent me an ad where an AI generated version of me or an AI voice overlaid on an actual version of me has me selling some cognitive enhancement that I've never heard of. So I'm pushing pills out there that you shouldn't buy. Yeah, that's welcome to the future. This was a common problem in the past as well. So Marcus Aurelius had to deal with his views being misrepresented and parodied and satirized. That's something that we know that he had to deal with. And so did other influential people in the Roman Empire that were into Stoicism. So it's kind of a familiar problem in a way.

And one of the first things you might do is to ask yourself, well, how would somebody else cope with that problem? How would someone that we admire for their wisdom and patience and temperance deal with a similar problem? And it could be someone you admire personally, it could be like a colleague or something like that, or it could even be a fictional character. It could be the hypothetical sage, It could be Buddha. Like, Buddhist views are misrepresented all the time. How would Buddha respond to that, deal with it? How would Socrates deal with his views being misrepresented? So that's what we call modeling, it's cognitive modeling and modern therapy. How would someone else cope well with the same

challenge? Another way of dealing with it in Stoicism is- Before you move on, what I find interesting about that is that it's a method of seeing yourself from the outside. I mean, you're kind of triangulating on yourself and it's a funny feature or really bug of human psychology that there are many things that we recognize to be unflattering or otherwise not admirable in others, but in ourselves when we're in the grip of them,

we don't have the perspective on it. I mean, this takes us kind of far afield, but to be boastful or to be name dropping, from the outside, we always notice what is wrong with it, but from the inside, people tend not to notice what is wrong with it. And so I think that move of triangulation is quite useful. This idea is integral to Greek philosophy, actually. It's in Plato's dialogues, it's integral to stoicism.

The Galen, Marcus Aurelius' physician has a book called On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul's Passions. So a cure on psychopathology and psychotherapy, where he talks precisely about the problem of this blind spot. And he describes it using one of Aesop's fables. Aesop said, we're all born with two sacks hanging around our neck. There's a big one that hangs in front of our chest and we can see it everywhere we go and it contains everybody else's flaws. And then there's a little one that hangs behind the back of our neck that we can never see because it's in our blind spot, but everyone else can see it really clearly and it contains our own flaws. So they have a really neat

little kind of illustration of this problem. And you're right that these kind of perspective shifting exercises are one way of trying to kind of get outside of that blind spot. But the Stoics also thought that it was important to have a mentor or a teacher and engage in dialogue with another living human being. And they seem to think that was one of Galen's pretty clear about that. He says, find an older, wiser mentor, someone that you can be completely transparent with. And that's one way of learning to transcend this blind spot because they'll give you an outside perspective.

I guess like a counselor or a psychotherapist might help people gain perspective today. Yeah. Yeah. So I cut you off. You were onto a next method to deal with all that ails me. Yeah, we're looking Buddhism with this bunch of solutions, like, you know, that's a good thing. We've got a whole box of tracks. So another one, I mean, one might just be to repeat what Epic Data says, which is, you know, it's not these other people and their behavior.

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