The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: Aristotle and Plato ICYMI

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

The Greek thinker Socrates was put to death for encouraging his students to question everything - from their own beliefs to the laws and customs of Athenian society. But his ideas didn't die with him.  Here's a chance to hear two episodes from our archive examining the legacy of Socrates, and how he influenced the thinking of Plato and Aristotle. Turns out the Ancient Greeks had a lot to say about how to live a happier life. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Socratic method, which calls on all of us to question every belief we hold and every assumption we make. But we also heard that the story of Socrates didn't have the happiest of endings. His habit of getting us to regularly challenge everything we know was a bit too radical for many of his fellow ancient Greeks. And so he was sentenced to death for the alleged crime of corrupting the youth. But Socrates' ideas didn't die with him. Many other famous Greek thinkers picked up where their teacher Socrates left off. And their work also has much to teach us about how to live a flourishing life.

We looked at some of this wisdom in a previous season of Happiness Lessons of the Ancients, again with the help of my amazing friend, Tamar Gendler. So in case you missed it last time, I wanted to share those past episodes once again in a special doubleheader today. You'll hear some important insights on how we can realign the parts of our minds from Socrates' student Plato. And you'll learn about Aristotle, a real OG happiness expert, who has some helpful tips on how we can feel happier with the right habits.

I hope you enjoy these special back-to-back episodes. hope you enjoy these special back-to-back episodes. 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 well-being. These days, we have so much going on, so many things demanding our attention, and 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 two powerful but mismatched horses. You know you want to reach a happy place, but each of the steeds keeps going off in different directions. It's 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, 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 mini-season of the Happiness Lab, I want to explore some of the well-being concepts that the ancient philosophies and great religions got right. Old school tips that are borne out by the science. And ones that have personally helped me in my own quest to be happier too. So welcome to Happiness Lessons of the Ancients with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

Aristotle, he is absurd. Yeah, it seems fine. This is Tamar Gendler, professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University. One, two, three. Okay. And the volume still looks okay. And also one of my oldest and dearest friends. Does that work all right? Okay. Tamar and I talk pretty much every day. So it's a little bit weird to be recording one of our conversations for you all. Tamar is getting a crash course on how to use one of my spare recorders. Okay, let me do them another five. And she's taken to podcasting like a total pro. I am totally ready to go. Hello. Tamar also teaches a super popular class at Yale. It's called Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature. Her class looks way back in history to find philosophical solutions to the problems we all face today. The idea that the most interesting answer to the question that you're trying to ask would be given by somebody

who happens to be on Earth with you right now is a real mistake. Sometimes the most interesting answer is something that somebody gave 2,000 years ago, or on a completely different continent, or in a completely different context. The story of the chariot and the uncooperative horses is an analogy I find really useful when reason tells me I should be shooting for my happiness goals, but my desires, doubts, and emotions keep pulling me off course. It's a powerful analogy, and it comes from the work of ancient Greek philosophers, one of the areas Tamar teaches in off course. It's a powerful analogy, and it comes from the work of ancient Greek philosophers, one of the areas Tamar teaches in her course. There was a period about 2,500

years ago in ancient Greece where a whole bunch of really smart people directed their attention to a set of really interesting and important questions. And society structured itself in such a way that those individuals were given the freedom and the leisure and the luxury to think about those questions as their profession. What they did for their job was think about what does it mean for human beings to 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 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 101. 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 he was an orphan. And when he was 17, 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 20 years. And Aristotle was just 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 as a field, of biology as a field. He was a great theorist of poetry, a great theorist of drama and theater. And one of the major activities that he undertook was to try to figure out what a well-lived human life might look like. And so he came up with two concepts that I think are super important when we try to think about happiness in the modern day. And so one of these concepts was what he called eudaimonia. Like, what is eudaimonia? Yeah, so eudaimonia has as its middle word the word daimon, or spirit. And if you've read the 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 daimon. So, eudaimonia is roughly spiritual flourishing, spiritual well-being, the thriving of what some traditions call the human soul, what you might call the human mind or human spirit. And so when we think of eudaimonia, we think of sort of spiritual flourishing, but the way Aristotle thought of eudaimonia 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 like moral happiness, right?

You might think of two distinct notions of happiness. There are many, but here are two. One is what we might call hedonistic happiness, the indulgence of short-lived pleasures. So the pleasures of eating or of sex. And that's an important part of what it is to be a human being, taking pleasure in the physical world around you. But Aristotle was interested in a richer and more robust and more lasting notion of what happiness would be. Not just short-lived hedonistic pleasure, but long-lived thriving. And he had a picture that there was a certain

function for which human beings were ideally built. So just as the function of a knife is to cut well, and the function of a paperweight is to hold down papers, the function of a human being is to be able to express virtue and reason. That is, to participate in the things that are the highest form of the good in the world. And so eudaimonia is a kind of thriving that involves spending as much of your time and as complete of your activity in a state where you 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, eudaimonia, 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 is what's being

borne 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 could be rich and have the opportunities to engage in all kinds of hedonistic pleasure, but a lot of folks self-report that that leaves them kind of empty, that they're kind of missing something 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 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, 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 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 sex 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 kind of information, but that assembling a lot of surface phenomena and then looking at

what lies more deeply behind them gives you a deeper understanding is an incredibly important insight. And a lot of what the philosophical work that happened in ancient Athens 2,500 years ago does is to say, don't get deluded by this particular momentary sense. Look instead at how these things pattern together, and you will have a deeper understanding of what matters to human beings. 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 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 phronesis. So what was this concept of phronesis? So phronesis is often translated as practical wisdom. To understand what that means, think about the contrast between what we sometimes call the theoretical and what we call the practical, or the difference between

knowing that something is a case and knowing how to do something. So if you're trying to figure out how to do something like throw a baseball or play the piano or respond in a calm and temperate fashion when you're under a situation of agitation. You can have a theoretical understanding of it. You can understand lots of things about the physics of baseballs or about the acoustical properties of a piano. Or you can read a therapy book and understand what it is when people respond calmly. That's theoretical wisdom. But the theoretical wisdom doesn't give you the capacity to engage in the action you want to engage in. In order to do that, you actually need what Aristotle would call practical wisdom, a kind of skill, the skill that comes from practicing the activity

about which you want to make progress. And so Aristotle really thought that eudaimonia isn't just kind of something that we're born with or something we can kind of get to theoretically. He really thought it was something that you get to in a skill-based way, right? So Aristotle thought the strategy by which we gain this kind of deeper thriving, the spiritual well-being, the eudaimonia, is the strategy of making ourselves into the kind of people who are virtuous and who take pleasure in virtue. So, it's a kind of self-education project of building up in yourself the kind of soul you want to have. You make yourself into the person that you want to be. And Aristotle is really aware of the way in which that can be self-reinforcing. You want yourself to become a particular kind of person. You practice being that kind of person. And doing that kind

of activity thereby becomes pleasurable to you. And this is something that's also really nicely borne out in the modern science. In one of our podcast episodes, I interviewed a scientist, Sonja Lubomirsky. 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, kind of like a skill set, like from the ground up. So the quote that you gave from Sonia Lubomirsky 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 builder is by building buildings and the way you learn to play the harp is by playing the harp. So too, says Aristotle, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions. That is the way that we come to have practical wisdom

is by practicing the skill that we want to cultivate so that it becomes natural to us. And Aristotle also had good ideas about which particular kinds of actions we should want to practice, right? Like, what are the kinds of actions that will actually make us a virtuous and therefore spiritually happy person? When we get back from the break, we'll dive into that. Specific ways that Aristotle thought we could achieve happiness. And what we'll see is that he devoted two whole chapters to something you might not think is that important. The Happiness Lab, we'll be right back. The Happiness Lab will be right back. you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want.

And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. So people who listen to the podcast hear a lot about the kinds of things they can do to be happy that are borne out by modern science. When Aristotle thought about spiritual well-being, this idea of eudaimonia, what are the kinds of things he thought we should be paying attention to? What are the sorts of actions he wanted us to engage with? So he was really interested in developing character that was what he called moderate in exactly the right ways. And he viewed the virtues that help us thrive as being cases of behavior that are intermediate between two extremes. So, it's easiest to think about this in the case of something like bravery,

where you have an extreme of being a coward, you have an 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 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, but almost in a moderate or 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 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 from pleasures makes us become temperate, and once we've become temperate, we're more capable of abstaining from pleasures. It's similar with bravery. Habituation in standing firm in frightening situations makes us brave. And once we've become brave, we're more capable of standing firm. So if you want to be a brave person, act the way a brave person acts, and you will manifest bravery, and you will be reinforced in your experience about how pleasurable and possible it is for you to act bravely. So Aristotle talked a lot about different virtues, and that's one of the reasons his book was really a book not about happiness or eudaimonia,

but it was a book about ethics, right? So talk about this important book and why it was so powerful in Western thought. Sure. This is a book called The Nicomachean Ethics, and it's a book in which Aristotle tries to spell out what is it to live a virtuous life. But his notion of virtue is a really broad one. He means not just a life that is a moral life, but a life that for the individual brings them this eudaimonia, thriving and happiness, and that for the society contributes to a society in which there's thriving and happiness. So this is a book about how to live well morally, 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. Because one thing we know is even if you're just shooting for the happy life, the data really suggests that what you want to do is to live a moral life. 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 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? That's exactly right. Aristotle thinks that human beings are creatures where 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 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? So what were those sort of two chapters about? Yeah, it's a great question. So this book, which has 10 chapters, there were 10 papyrus scrolls on which the book was written, devotes chapters eight and nine to the topic of friendship. And he thinks friendship is incredibly

important throughout our entire lives. He says, the young need friendship to keep them from error. The old need friendship to care for them and to support the actions that fail because of weakness. And those in their prime need friendship to do fine actions, for they are more capable of understanding and acting when two go together. And his idea of friendship was in part for kind of hedonistic pleasure, you get some utility out of it, but he also thought that friends could affect our happiness in a deeper and more meaningful way as well. Actually, he distinguishes among three different kinds of friendship.

There's a kind of friendship, a relatively shallow kind of friendship, which is friendship based on utility. I'm friends with you because I get something out of it and you're friends with me because you get something out of it. There's a second kind of friendship, which is a little bit richer, which is a friendship based on pleasure, where I enjoy your company and you enjoy my company. The kind of friendship that Aristotle is really interested in is a friendship that's based on mutual appreciation of one 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 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. 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 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 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 write 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, Tamar, because you are my exercise buddy, my hiking buddy,

my yoga buddy. So we reinforce each other. That's exactly right. Lori is the person. In fact, when Lori 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 of the ways that you can stick to your commitments is to surround yourself by others who are also committed to those things is part of really every wisdom tradition. So in the Buddhist wisdom tradition, there's a

notion that they call right association. That is, surround yourself by others who are also committed to this path towards spiritual enlightenment. And almost every religious tradition involves communal activity of a kind that says, put yourself in a setting where others are also trying to pursue that kind of spiritual transcendence. And in fact, that was actually the inspiration for one of the rewirements, these sort of happiness practices that I did with my class. One of the things I asked my students to do is to take what I call a strength state, where you hang out with a friend and you both try 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 from Marty Seligman's

group that this act of doing a strength date with somebody can kind of give a nice boost to your well-being. So you've been a scholar of Aristotle for some time now. Have you been following the middle way, using his insights to go after your own eudaimonia? 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 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 had to do was start acting as if I already had those virtues was unbelievably liberating and transformative for me. What about the friend part? And for almost every change that I wanted to make, the realization that I had a second self available to help me do that. Most often

in things at home, that partner was my spouse or one of my children. But for the big changes that I wanted to make in my life, my friendship actually with you, Lori, was one of the factors that really enabled me to make those changes. And I feel like the combination of Aristotle's wisdom from 2,500 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 at you, because I feel like when I think about the people who are pleasurable friends or friends of utility versus the ones that are real friends of meaning, friends that get me towards virtue,

you are right up there too. So thank you. Yeah, thank you. And I just, I mean, I hadn't realized, it really has been 15 years. That's disturbing, but it makes a lot of sense. The things Tamar 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 I hope you'll join me and Tamar again next time when we introduce you to a different Greek thinker, Plato, and his advice for how you can control that horse-drawn chariot I keep talking about. And you'll be able to hear that episode on happiness lessons from Plato right after this short break. You'll be able to hear that episode on happiness lessons from Plato right after this short break. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble.

More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. From the second I open my eyes each morning, I'm locked in a battle with a persistent and persuasive adversary.

Someone who seems dead set on preventing me from practicing all of the happiness techniques I teach you about in this podcast. I want to plan my day so I don't feel time pressured. And I want to meditate and 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 me is me, or maybe more accurately, a few rogue parts of me, ones that I really want

to control better. And I bet I'm not alone. The temptations that divert us from doing things that will make us happy are everywhere, and they're available 24-7. But the people who first thought deeply about the internal battles we all face lived centuries before smartphones,

movie streaming services, and calendar alerts. The ancient Greeks, and one thinker in particular, Plato, came up with some profoundly important insights about our divided selves more than 2,000 years ago. As in other episodes of this mini-season of the Happiness Lab, I want to explore some of the well-being concepts that the ancient philosophies and great religions got right, old-school tips that are

borne out by the science, and ones that have personally helped me in my own quest to be happier. So welcome to Happiness Lessons of the Ancients with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. One of the things I've realized is that I am inevitably going to be tempted if I work with my phone next to me. I'll be getting texts. This is my friend and Yale colleague, Tamar Gendler. So 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. Tamar and I often trade notes

about how to stay happy and productive as busy academics. But Tamar brings something very special to these conversations. She teaches a class at Yale called Philosophy in the Science of Human Nature. And Plato's ideas are central to her curriculum. So I asked Tamara to give us Plato 101. So Plato was one of the really cool ancient philosophers in Athens who gave rise to the Western philosophical tradition. And he ran basically a university, which was called the Academy, where young men from

Athenian families would come and engage in unbelievably intellectually interesting conversations with one another and with Plato and with Plato's teacher Socrates about the deepest questions of the age. And one of the students at Plato's Academy was a guy named Aristotle. So this was like a pretty legit thing to do if you were like a rich Athenian guy and wanted to get educated. It didn't have the formal structure of degree granting. It wasn't that you would go there for four years, but it was the place where people went

if they wanted to understand fundamental ideas, if they wanted to think about literature or philosophy or 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 the self, which is something he thought about a lot, right?

Yeah. 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 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 they best align themselves

human being to flourish? How can 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. Obviously, he was a writer who created lots of influential books on this. So talk to me about the importance of one of the books that we're going to dig into a little bit today, which is The Republic. So Plato wrote all his books in the form of plays. And they were plays where his teacher, Socrates, was the main character. And then various young men who were students at the university were in conversation with Socrates about questions. And so one of the most famous of the dialogues or books that Plato wrote is a book called The Republic, and it has 10 chapters. And it's kind of a theory of everything. It describes what's the fundamental nature of the universe, how did it come into being.

It talks about how mathematics underpins all of physical reality. Then it talks about physics. It talks about how we understand truth. But it does all of that by telling the story of what the ideal society would look like. What would a society look like in which human beings are best able to flourish? That's the question that Plato asks, and it turns out that in order to answer that, he has to explore 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 Republic, and then I'll give you the moral of it. 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 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 sight.

eyes, take your fill of this beautiful sight. So Plato tells this story at a point in the Republic where he's trying to have his listeners understand that within every human being, 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 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 is just fascinated and curious. And the part of him that's fascinated and curious keeps pulling him towards the wall. And so the story is about the internal tension that Leontius feels, his effort to try to control himself. And then the phenomenology, the experience that he feels of just giving in. I can't control my appetite. I can't control my desire to go look

at these dead bodies. And as many of us do when we're driving past an accident, he turns his head, he looks at the dead bodies, and he slows his walk. But the reason I love this story so much is that, I mean, it's kind of morbid, but the reason I love the story so much is that this isn't a tale just about rubbernecking. 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. And 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 be an email that pops up that sends you down a rabbit hole on the internet. It can 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 control the rational self to figure this out. of our mind. You actually have to 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 Leontes story. He says that a human being is made up of three parts. They're made up of a human being, says that a human being is made up of three parts. 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 one of his books, a book called The Phaedrus, he gives an analogy that I think is even more vivid. And he says a human being

is like a charioteer driving a chariot with two horses. One is a noble horse and one is a wild horse. And the noble horse is the part of a human being, the aspects of ourselves that's interested in honor and social 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 peer pressure because I care what my friends think about me, or I spend a lot of time focused on appearance because I want to impress somebody. That's the horse of spirit. Whereas the wild horse is the part of ourselves that's interested in fundamental desires that

we share with other non-human animals, like the desire for food or the desire to sleep or take physical pleasure in things like sex. It needs to take in nutrition and it needs to ensure that there are future generations. Those are the parts of ourselves that he describes in the chariot analogy. But the chariot idea is 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 we have to deal with these horses. Basically, what moves us is the fact that

we have fundamental passions and desires. The metaphor is really a powerful one because it says it's not like, oh, if we could just have the person part of ourselves, we'd be done with things. The story says human beings are the kinds of creatures who are propelled forward by physical desires and by social desires. And the key to human flourishing, the way to move fast on the path through life is to make sure that you're in control of those horses, that the parts of you that are passion and energy are pulling you in the direction that you want to go instead of in some wild other direction

that they're being pulled. And so if we want to become happier people, we need to figure out how to deal with this chariot system. 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. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes.

More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. So Plato was obsessed with 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 jive 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 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 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 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 is going to be to try to train up your dog 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 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 to try to control our appetite just through reflective processes alone, right? Like just repeatedly telling myself, like, you know, I'm a happiness expert. Like I should get up in the morning and like, you know, go work out. Like that doesn't work as well, right? Like I need cues to remind me to work out. I need to have my shoes out. I need to have my gratitude journal where I can see it. I need to pretend like this appetite part of me is like a dog that I'm basically trying to train in the simplest way possible. Right. And it is in many ways literally true. That is, the things that are attracting you to food that smells tempting are the exact same

features of your brain that a non-human animal has that's attracting it to food that smells excellent. And in fact, there's a very good reason for it. We've evolved to be responsive to food that provides nutrition to us. And so Plato's point is, in many ways, there's nothing you can do about the fact that you will feel tempted. So your job is to figure out, to the extent that you can, reduce the temptations, use the cues. And if you can't, only then do you use the willpower of the charioteer. You don't have enough strength in the reins to do it always by the reins. You've got to get the horse to cooperate. And what's amazing is that this is like thousands of years ago, but basically Plato is foreshadowing everything that we know about the modern science of habit formation,

right? Like the easiest way to kind of get yourself to like control your appetite 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, you know, fattening food or whatever it happens to be. It's just to get that out of there. And by the same token,

if there's something you want your brain to do, make it really obvious in the situation, right? You know, put your gratitude journal out there, like make your gym shoes available. That's right. The easier you make it really obvious in the situation, right? You know, put your gratitude journal out there, like make your gym shoes available. That's right. The easier you make it for yourself to do it automatically, the better off you're going to be. In fact, there's a famous Greek story

that's in a book by Homer called The Odyssey. And it's the story of this guy, Ulysses, he's trying to get home and he's going past an island where there's really tempting music. And he knows that if you hear that music, you're inclined to jump off the ship and join the singers because the music is so beautiful. And in the story, Homer tells two ways of getting past that temptation. The oarsmen who are rowing the boat block their ears so that they can't hear the sound. And Ulysses, who wants to hear the sound but not be able to act on it, has his 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 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 Ziploc bag so you can't touch it. Turn off the Wi-Fi on your internet. Don't have chocolate in the house.

All of those are exactly the strategies that the ancient Greeks were using in Homer's case. That story is almost 8,000 years old. All of these strategies, even though they're so ancient, what science is finding is that if you use them, you're going to actually be successful at regulating your appetite. It is a recognition of something that is so deeply part of human nature and human experience that basically every world wisdom tradition tries to describe it in some way. The Buddhist tradition has an analogy of a rider and an elephant. And it's the same idea. It's the idea that part of you is pulled in one direction and that there's a huge set of desires and passions which pull in other directions. And many world religions are about building structures that help you regulate those forces

and energies. And a lot of the things that modern science shows to be effective mechanisms are actually there in religious traditions. You build rules around what kind of food you can eat when in a religion, and it's exactly the same insight that you see in the modern science. In addition to the modern science saying that these are really good strategies, the other thing that we know scientifically is that people who are good at regulating their appetites, they do that because they use these strategies. Yeah. One of the things that's really

interesting is that people who are best at self-control are actually best at setting up situations in which they don't have to exercise self-control. So a kid who's good at doing homework isn't good at not looking at the phone that's right in front of them while they're doing homework. What that kid is good at is setting up their room in such a way that 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 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 have to worry about like holding onto these reins super hard

because the horse is just gonna be behaving correctly anyway. It's exactly right. Set yourself up in situations where you don't have to expend all your charioteer 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 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, like food and like all the kind of physical pleasures. But Plato also worried about a different horse, which is this horse of spirit, right? Which is kind of like, 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 that horse? The best way to control the horse of spirit, the horse of honor, is by cultivating habits that are going to become the natural way that that horse behaves. So if you think about it, the horse of appetite is never going to change what it's attracted to. The horse of spirit is a trainable horse. And in fact, one of the distinctions that Plato makes when he presents the metaphor is that he says the horse of appetite cannot be controlled except through punishment, whereas the horse of spirit can be controlled through argument and explanation. And so how does this sort of training work, right? Like how do we actually train up our

spirit horse over time? Yeah. So one of the interesting things about how we train up our spirit horse is that what we try to do is to make it natural and pleasurable for the spirit horse to do the thing that we want it reflectively to do. And one of the nice things about human beings is that we enjoy a certain sort of familiarity, that when we get good at something, we take pleasure in doing it. So if you train your spirit horse actually to take pleasure, you sit down and you write in your gratitude journal every day, and you discover, actually writing in this makes me feel connected to people. That's a way of co-opting the energy of the spirit horse so that it takes you along your pathway without you having to steer it using the

reins. And so Plato really thought that this was something that we could do with the right sorts of strategies, right? Like, did you get a sense that Plato himself did it or that his students did it? So Plato had this incredible university, right? I mean, it was the first place people came together. And it is true that the academy, it was just this enclosure outside of Athens. I think what drew people there originally was the possibility of social interaction. It was a kind of high prestige space to be in. All the cool kids were hanging out there. And then all the cool kids were hanging out there.

And then Plato taught them some math. And then he taught them some metaphysics. And then he taught him some metaphysics. And then he taught him some political theory. And so there's a way in which the fact that human beings are social beings is what allowed Plato to create this academy where people came together. And then once they were with each other, 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 charioteer gets to the academy, it learns all the stuff. And then it realizes that this was in fact the tactic that played off its spirit. So as someone who teaches Play-Doh, are there ways that you've used his insight to train your own horses? Oh, I would say just about everything in my life comes from the insights that I've gotten from thinking about the ways in which these habits can structure our lives. So during the quarantine, my family made 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 7.30, we would eat dinner together as a family. And it just came to feel like a fact about the world. It wasn't like we had to think about, should we go downstairs at 7.30? 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. We wanted to spend time with one another. It seemed like the Greeks were fantastic at recognizing not just that we have

these warring parts of ourselves, but they also gave us some insight into how we could control those different parts over time to flourish a little bit better. What was the next steps? What did the Greeks leave in terms of their legacy for the next thinkers to come around and sort out? leave in terms of their legacy for the next thinkers to come around and sort out. Yeah. So there's real insight if you read Plato and 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 hundred years later in writers like Epictetus is the idea that in fact, you can control how it is that you represent the world to yourself

and that you can think about things as being in your control or out of your control. You can frame something as letting it bother you or not letting it bother you. And that frame can be self-fulfilling. If you decide that somebody else's disapproval doesn't matter to you, you actually make it the case that somebody else's disapproval doesn't matter to you. And you don't find that thought explicitly articulated until you get to this subsequent tradition. If these two episodes from our throwback archive were new to you, then I hope they'll inspire you to check out our back catalog to find more of the wisdom hiding in there. And if you'd already heard Tamar talk about Aristotle and Plato, I hope this has been a useful refresher about the culture of ancient Greece.

You'll need it, since we'll be continuing our journey into Greek wisdom in the next episode. We'll be diving into one of the most famous Greek myths out there to hear what the fictional heroes of the ancient world can tell us about happiness. I hope to see you back for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co-written by Ryan Dilley and is produced by Ryan Dilley, Courtney Guarano, and Brittany Brown. The show is mastered by Evan Viola

and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carly Migliori, Nicole Murano, Morgan Ratner, Jacob Weisberg, my agent Ben Davis, and the rest of the Pushkin team. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by me, Dr. Laurie Santos.