The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: Plato
Episode Date: September 21, 2020Plato 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 prof...essor 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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Pushkin. 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.
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.
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. 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.
Tamara and I often trade notes about how to stay happy and productive as busy academics.
But Tamara 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 Tamar 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.
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
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 plates. 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.
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 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, 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.
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. 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, 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 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.
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.
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 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 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, 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 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 going to 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, 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 them 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 a tactic that played off its spirit.
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 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.
Kind of 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? 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,
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. I love hearing Tamar 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 in to temptation. Plato helps me understand that my 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 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,
Carly Migliore,
Heather Fane, Sophie Crane-McKibben, Eric Sandler, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.