What Would Socrates Do?

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. How should we live? What will make us happy? How can each of us become the person we want to be? In our modern world, there are all kinds of people eager to provide us with answers to these questions: mental health gurus, self-help authors, social media influencers, even the researchers we feature on the show. But there is an important mistake we make when we seek out such counselors. We usually look to sources of wisdom that are around us. We assume the most valuable answers to our questions must come from people who happen to inhabit the planet at the same time that we do. But humans have wrestled with the same questions about relationships, purpose, and identity for thousands of years. Wouldn't the wisest people who lived centuries ago have useful things to say about our modern dilemmas? This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion piece on our subscription feed, Hidden Brain Plus, we explore the insights of 5 great thinkers from ancient Greece. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, This is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Decades of research reveal that our actions don't always match our intentions. We plan to reach out to a friend who's sick, or we resolve to start a new exercise program, and then We don't. Befuddled and surprised, we try again. And fall short again. Psychologists have come up with a number of explanations for this gap between our intentions and our actions, and what we can do to close it. At Yale University, the philosopher Tamar Gendler says questions like this also animated a thinker in ancient Greece. The highest wisdom, and our greatest challenge, he argued, is to know ourselves. Tamar Gendler, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here.

So Tamar, Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Can you set the stage for me by describing who this man was and how he came to wrestle with some of the same questions that we wrestle with today?

Socrates lived about 2,500 years ago. in ancient Athens, and he was kind of like a provocative podcaster. He hung out in what was the most technologically advanced location of the time. That is, he hung out in a place called the Agora, which was the public square. And as people passed him by, he asked them questions that caused them to examine their fundamental beliefs. Eventually, he developed a following of some of the young men of Athens who were associated with the most powerful families. He spoke to those young men and he asked them to think in a very fundamental way about which of the values that they had been taught were values to which they were reflectively committed, And which of them were just coincidental features of their society? That is, really, were the things that they had been taught are just, just? Were the things that they had been taught are pious, pious? Were the things that they had been taught about the gods true?

And were the families of these kids excited that they were learning from this wise man, or were they horrified?

The families of these children, remember, are the individuals who are in the primary power structure of Athens, for whom belief in tradition is crucial for sustaining their regime. So they are, in fact, extraordinarily upset by what Socrates is doing to their kids, so upset that they actually put him on trial with the accusation that he has violated the laws of the city by corrupting the youth. And ultimately, Socrates is actually convicted by an Athenian jury of having corrupted the youth, is given the penalty of death by the drinking of poison, and makes his final lesson for his students by obeying the laws of the city and taking his life in accord with the city's mandate that he be punished by death for corruption of the youth. So he really was committed to the deep truth of what he aimed to teach, so much so that That he was willing to give his life for it.

Did Socrates or any of his students question the justice of the sentence that was handed down to him?

Absolutely. And there's an extraordinarily moving story of Socrates' students trying to persuade him to resist this death sentence and of Socrates responding that he needs to accede to the laws of the city in which he has been nurtured and grown.

So during the trial of Socrates, one of his students visits the Oracle at Delphi, and the student has a question for the Oracle. What is the question, Tamar?

The student visits the Oracle at Delphi, which is a mystical place where truth is available and asks the Oracle, who is the wisest of all men? And the Oracle answers in a very perplexing way. The Oracle says, no man is wiser than Socrates. So the student comes back from the Oracle to bear this news to Socrates, and Socrates says, How could it be that I am considered the wisest of all men? For I know nothing and recognize that I know nothing, whereas others who also know nothing falsely think that they know.

Now, Socrates was a pretty smart guy, and he must have known he was a pretty smart guy. So is he being falsely modest here? I mean, what aspect of the world does Socrates not know about that he says I know nothing. What is he referring to here, Tamar?

Even if Socrates is being falsely modest when he says, I know that I know nothing, he is also saying knowing the limits of your knowledge is essential to understanding the limits of human understanding. One of the really crucial things that Socrates recognizes is that he has neither a full understanding of the world outside of him, nor does he have a full understanding of the world inside of him, a full understanding of his own thoughts and motivations.

So partly what he's describing here is not just a description of his own state of knowledge, but about the difficulty of acquiring that knowledge, the fact that when he looks inside, he in fact is not completely aware of his own motivations and drives?

I would say it is both a factual descriptive claim and a more profound claim about the nature of knowledge. So an important thing to understand about the picture of the world that Socrates holds is that human beings themselves are subject not only to the general constraint that as imperfect, concrete, earthly beings, we can't know anything fully true and fully good, but in addition, human beings are particularly complicated objects for human beings to understand. So the suggestion is not just that he discovers that he doesn't know his motivations and he doesn't know all the internal features of himself. It's that in addition, he has a proof, a reason to think that that is impossible.

You know, I feel that there are literally hundreds of modern psychological experiments that back up this idea, Tamar. Political partisans seem to have no awareness that their loyalties shape what they hear and how they think. Biases pervade how we think about race or gender, but we are not always aware that we have these biases. And in our relationships, people fall into unconscious patterns of behavior in ways that are really damaging to those relationships. I mean, all of these examples and the context might be very different from ancient Greece, but Socrates was interested in some of the same underlying questions here.

In my classes, I often juxtapose this Socratic tradition with the big question of social psychology of the 20th century and in many ways of the 21st century as well, which is a scientific demonstration of the dissociation between apparent motivation and actual explanation of a particular kind of behavior. Over and over and over again, The lesson of contemporary social psychology is that we are opaque to ourselves with regard to why it is we are doing or experiencing what we are doing or experiencing.

In her work, Tamar draws connections not only between ancient philosophers and modern social scientists, but themes that have animated writers for many centuries. For example, she cites the novel Anna Karenina by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy.

Which is a book about the ways in which characters don't realize that their perception of the world is shaped through their individual mood. There's a beautiful moment where a character named Levin has fallen in love with a young woman named Kitty, and he walks around the world and he can only recognize how beautiful the world is. And he takes it to be a fact about the world that the world is beautiful. There's a subsequent scene where the main character, Anna, is dismayed about a fact in her life, and she walks around the world and she perceives the world as being filled with individuals who are ugly. This is not unique to Anna Karenina. Every single novel is about the ways in which characters fail to recognize their own motivations. And so I would say those are 3 examples: the Socratic example, the example of literature, and the social psychological example of 20th century empirical psychology, all of which are exploring an incredibly important Incredibly rich ways, the fact that human beings do not know themselves.

So you suggest that we can try and derive self-knowledge by engaging in the kind of Socratic dialogue that Socrates himself engaged in with his students. How would that work, Tamar?

Socrates basically is willing to ask Why repeatedly. So an inner Socratic dialogue involves being ready to reflect at any moment. Why do I think that? On what evidence is my judgment based? For what reason am I pursuing this action? So in many ways, what Socrates is asking us to do is to engage in a process of inner reflection. At any moment, being ready with fully open mind to ask ourselves why we think what we think or why we are doing what we are doing.

So in other words, am I really in love with this person? Am I really happier when I make lots of money? Am I just absorbing what the culture is telling me, or do I really believe this?

So those are big questions, and you could certainly apply the Socratic technique to that, but you could use it— why did I open the fridge? Am I bored? Am I hungry? Am I low on electrolytes? You could ask the question, why did I pick up my phone? You could ask the question, why am I feeling irritated right now? Are my socks wet? Or is the world full of injustice to which I am appropriately sensitive? So yes, you want to ask questions. Do I really want to make money? And you also want to ask questions like, why did I open the fridge?

Socrates taught us that self-knowledge is the foundation for human flourishing. But one of his students pointed out a complication. We don't just have one self inside ourselves. We have many. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on. The versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy. And that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, Or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Philosopher Tamar Gendler has spent decades studying ancient philosophers like Socrates, who emphasized the importance of knowing oneself. Socrates had a very smart student named Plato. He pointed out there isn't one singular self for us to get to know. In fact, we have many selves inside us. Tamar, I understand that you have personally experienced the reality of a divided self when it comes to the subject of shoes. Tell me more.

I am somebody who is a great appreciator of the capacity to bring joy and beauty to one's life through self-ornamentation, particularly with regard to the adornment of one's feet. That is a fancy way of saying I love buying used designer shoes On the internet. I am, however, not always able to tell whether a shoe will fit me. And consequently, a certain portion of the time, I need to return those shoes. One of the things that stuns me is right now, in the back of my car, is a box of shoes. to be returned, which have been there with the label taped to them for the last 2 weeks. I have been unable to bring myself to mail these shoes back.

Yeah. So is this divided self the divided self that says, I need to do something, but I don't have the time or willingness or motivation to do it? Or is this divided self an example of, I think I should return these shoes, but there's another part of me that says, I want to keep these shoes.

In this particular case, it is all of me rationally that thinks I want to return these shoes. Then part of me that engages in what my friend Laurie Santos has taught me to understand as obliger rebellion. That is, it is fun not to do a thing that I am supposed to be doing. The shoes don't fit. I need to return them by a certain deadline. If I return them, the money that I spent on them will be refunded to me in such a way that I can buy shoes or use it in some much more useful way. But within me, in addition to the fully endorsed desire to return those shoes, there is a certain amount of pleasure that attaches to simply not—

Wear them.

doing what I reflectively know is the right thing for me to do.

I'm wondering if there are other dimensions of your life, Tamar, where you again feel like you have these 2 selves inside you that are at war with each other.

At almost every moment, all of us have multiple sides of ourselves that are at war with each other. When I am exercising in the gym, There's a part of me that thinks, keep going forward, and a part of me that thinks, I'm exhausted. I'm just going to sit down. I don't feel like working any harder. When I need to get somewhere at a particular time, there's a part of me that knows if I need to be somewhere by 1 o'clock, then presumably I need to leave where I am sometime before 1. 1 o'clock. But there's also a part of me that has this incoherent fantasy that I can leave the place where I am at 1 and be at the place where I'm going at 1.

Uh-huh.

You know, Freud has this wonderful description that all of us have a part of ourselves that is infantile and inconsistent, where we want things that are mutually inconsistent or we believe things that are mutually inconsistent. That is just deeply true of all of us, and that part of ourselves just never goes away. And that's the part of you that thinks you can have your cake and eat it too, that things that are actually reflectively impossible could just happen.

So Plato was one of the ancients who started to think about the phenomenon of the divided self. What was his story, Tamar?

Plato was a philosopher who lived in ancient Greece, also about 2,500 years ago. He was a student of Socrates. And Plato was responsible for writing down a large set of philosophical dialogues that explored almost any question that was available at the time when he lived. What's the nature of justice? What's the nature of truth? What is the nature of the divine? How should a society be structured? What should education look like? What is it to wage war? For any of the big questions about the individual or society, Plato wrote what is basically a play.

Mm-hmm.

Where the main character was his teacher, Socrates. And Socrates would engage in conversations about these questions with various imaginary and real young men.

So Plato observes that we not only have multiple selves, but that these selves are often set against each other, that we are a house divided?

Plato tells a story that's basically my story of not returning the shoes. Or the story of somebody who is rubbernecking on the highway when they pass an accident. So the story that Plato tells is that there's a man, his name happens to be Leontius, and he's walking back to the city of Athens. And he notices along the wall of the city a dead man lying on the ground in a really gross way. And Leontius struggles with himself in the way that you might if you were driving past a car accident. Leontius says to himself, don't look at that. That's disgusting. What are you doing? And then Leontius turns his face towards the dead body, holds his eyes open, and says, take a look at that beautiful sight, you loathsome creatures. That is, he gives in to his temptation. And you might imagine a similar story, which is opening the refrigerator and saying to yourself, I'm not going to eat the cake, I'm not going to eat the cake, and then just giving in to your temptation. So Plato tells this story of Leontius, which is the story of eating the cake in the fridge, which is the story of rubbernecking, which is the story of me not returning the shoes, in order to establish a picture that he has of what human beings are like. And the picture that he ends up introducing is that he says, The human soul is, and by soul, he just means the human mind. So the human soul, says Plato in the translation that's most common, is composed of 3 parts. There's a part that he calls reason. There's a part that he calls spirit. And there's a part that he calls appetite.

And how do these 3 relate to one another, Tamar?

So the part of the soul that he calls reason, Plato likens to the driver of a chariot. And that's the part of you that's rational and easily available to introspection. Reason is the stories that you tell yourself and the parts of yourself that are in keeping with your reflective. Commitments. But, says Plato, reason is only a small part of the human being. Reason is driving a chariot that is pulled by 2 horses. And he calls those horses spirit and appetite. The horse that he calls spirit is responsive to social Norms and social approval. That is, the spirited part of yourself is worried about things like FOMO and what people think of you and what it's like to be in love and admired and all of the things that we care about in our social interactions. And the third part of yourself, what Plato calls the appetitive horse, is basically concerned with the parts of you that you share with non-human animals. Basically, the things that are required for survival and procreation. That is food and sex. So, says Plato, think of yourself as having 3 parts: a part that you share with non-human animals, That's full of appetites for things like procreation and consumption, a part of you that's concerned with social standing and affection and human connection, and then a very small part of you that's supposed to be in charge, which is the part of you that is distinctly human and capable of reason and reflection.

It's fascinating, Tamar. As you're talking here, I'm again hearing echoes of the work of Sigmund Freud.

Indeed. There are echoes of Plato's picture in every world wisdom tradition. So Sigmund Freud distinguishes 3 parts of the human being, which he calls the ego, the superego, and the id. It doesn't exactly align with Plato's picture. Freud's id is very much aligned with what Plato thinks is the part of the soul that is filled with appetite. But some of what Plato would call the spirited part of the soul might fit into Freud's id. Freud's superego is the part that roughly corresponds— To the id. to Plato's reason, and the ego in Freud's picture is its own complicated self. But the idea that you can use some metaphoric description to make sense of human beings and their inner life is universal. In the Buddhist tradition, in contrast to speaking of a charioteer and 2 horses, It's traditional to speak about an elephant and a rider who sits atop the elephant and plays the role of the charioteer.

And we, of course, explored the ideas of Danny Kahneman, whose famous book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, also suggests that we are a house divided. And in fact, we have these different modes of thinking inside our heads.

So if you think about the dual processing tradition, of which Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky are the most famous proponents, what you're getting there is an exact echo of this Buddhist or Platonic picture. Here's the way to think about it. The rider on the Buddha's elephant and the charioteer in Plato's metaphor is what Kahneman and Tversky would call—

The agent.

System 2. That's the thinking slow part. And the elephant and Plato's horses and all of our drives and instincts are what Kahneman and Tversky would call System 1. That is the set of autonomous systems that operate fast. The thinking fast Part of ourselves are these horses who just run off in whatever direction they're used to. And the thinking slow part of ourselves is this poor charioteer who's trying to keep the horses in line. So when I'm not returning my shoes, the horse, which just wants to run off and do fun things and not go to the post office, is just dashing off in its System 1-y kind of way. And then my little poor rider, which wants to return the shoes, it isn't doing so because my charioteer isn't strong enough to control my horses. That's the story of System 1 and System 2. But notice, this is right there in almost identical metaphoric form in the tradition of ancient Greece and in the tradition of ancient Buddhism.

I understand, Tamar, that there are resonances here, not just in the works of economists and psychologists, but also in the work of modern neuroscientists looking at how it is the brain comes to have these 2 different systems inside our heads.

Absolutely. So you might think of the idea of System 2 as being a way of identifying behaviorally something that corresponds to the thought that takes place in the very front of our brain. in the prefrontal cortex. And you might think of System 1 as the amalgamation of the rest of the things in our brain. It is completely unsurprising that anybody who has thought about human experience over the last 3,000 years has noticed that we are pulled in different directions, given that our brains are accumulated amalgamations of relatively independent systems, each of which is designed to give us particular information about the world. So of course, we are pulled in different directions.

Did Plato believe that this state of internal division was inevitable and unchangeable?

So Plato believed that human flourishing came about by getting your parts Yes. What Plato wanted you to try to do was to train your social horse, that is what he calls your spirited horse, and to train your appetite-driven horse so that they were inclined to follow the commands of reason. Take the story of my returning the shoes. Or of Leontius rubbernecking at the body at the side of the wall of Athens. Plato points out that I'm unhappy with myself when this happens. Leontius is unhappy with himself when that happens. We are in a state where our soul feels divided to us. We feel pulled in different directions. What Plato suggests is We are best off when what it is that we want to do and what it is that we're inclined to do coincide so that you're not fighting against the parts of yourself. You're just moving together in the way that you do when you are doing something that comes naturally.

Socrates emphasized the importance Plato highlighted the need to bring our conflicting inner selves into harmony. But how? One of Plato's students had an idea about this, an idea with many modern echoes. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

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You are correct. As I entered the decade of life in which I currently find myself, one that starts with the number of fingers that we have on a single hand, I discovered that my balance wasn't as good as it had been Previously. So I wanted to make sure that I spent a certain amount of time every day working on my balance. And I had read a lot of the literature on habits and on the way in which when you want to cultivate a new habit, you should chain it to an old habit. And the thing that I do most consistently for 2 minutes every morning and 2 minutes every evening is to brush my teeth. I have an electric toothbrush that does 30 seconds, 4 times. So what I started to do was for each 30-second segment to stand on one foot while I brushed my teeth. And this ended up having fabulous consequences. One was that actually I practiced standing on one foot for 4 minutes a day, 2 minutes on each foot while I was brushing my teeth. But the second thing that happened is that it came to be a cue for me That when I am holding something in my hand, I should lift one of my feet and stay in balance. And so I noticed that not only do I spend 4 minutes a day while I brush my teeth standing on one foot in ways that have helped me with my balance, but very often if I pick up a pen or an umbrella or a small tote bag that I'm holding with my hand, I will lift up one of my feet because it is an overlearned association between holding something in my hand and lifting a foot.

Yeah. So it's interesting how these habits at some level, it's precisely because they're unthinking that they're so powerful.

One of the things that is extraordinary about the human brain is that it kind of only has one trick, which is follow the easiest pathway, right? In some sense, our brain is like ChatGPT. It's doing the most likely thing given the configuration of things that have happened before. And so in some really literal sense, the more you do something, the more you are likely to do something. Your brain's job is to minimize its energy expenditure. And the way that it does that is by doing the thing that is relatively easiest. And the thing that is relatively easiest is the thing that it has learned how to do before. That is what it is to learn.

Well, of course, you know, standing on one leg when you pick up a pen, you know, maybe your students will will sort of raise an eyebrow at you, but it's perfectly harmless. But you can imagine habits that can have slightly bigger consequences. If you're traveling overseas, for example, and you're used to traffic being on one side of the road, and the traffic in the city that you're in is now on the other side of the road, that could have important consequences if you bring the same habits to bear.

I spent a bit of time in England last summer. No matter how many times I said to myself, they drive on the left, I was repeatedly shocked as I crossed the street by the direction from which cars were coming. Had I tried to sit at the wheel of a vehicle, which of course would have been on the wrong side of the car, I would have found it almost impossible to drive. One of the things that causes you to realize is how habitual your responses So one of Plato's students was very interested in the power of habits.

Tell me the story of Aristotle.

So Plato had a student named Aristotle who was in some sense the first encyclopedist. He was the first person to write down everything there was to know about the world around him. So Aristotle collected the constitutions from every city-state in the ancient Greek world. Aristotle did all sorts of scientific experiments in physics and biology, collected zoological specimens. And Aristotle also thought about the entire range of philosophical questions that had been raised by his teacher Plato. And Plato's teacher, Socrates. And he wrote them down in various forms and delivered them to students as lectures. And his views about what it is to live a good life have survived in an extraordinary volume, basically of lecture notes, known as the Nicomachean Ethics. And in that book, Aristotle describes what it takes to be a flourishing human being, given all the facts that Aristotle knows. How should human beings live?

Aristotle sums up his view about virtue in a single line in this great work. What does he say, Tamar?

He says, that virtue is acquired through habit. That just as one becomes a harpist by playing the harp, just as one becomes a builder by practicing the art of building, so too does one become brave by acting bravely Moderate by acting moderately. Kind by acting kindly.

So in other words, if you want to become a particular kind of person, you practice being that kind of person and that's the person you become.

Yeah. So what Aristotle is saying is practice, practice, practice. Fake it till you make it. You are what you do. You learn what you live. Every poster that you've ever seen in a doctor's office that says children learn what they live is an example of the Aristotelian lesson that things that we do a lot become things that we do naturally. Somewhat more poetically, act as if you already were I mean, it almost sounds like a tautology.

If we want to turn our beliefs into actions, we need to turn our beliefs into actions.

It is tautological if we were unified selves. But the reason that the suggestion is not tautological is because our actions are actually controlled by different aspects of ourselves. And so what Aristotle is saying is, if you want to turn your beliefs into actions, use your beliefs to set up the world in such a way that the actions you undertake accord with your beliefs. So my belief was, My balance will be better if I stand on one foot. I was completely aware that I couldn't think my way into having good balance. I needed to do something with my body. So how did I turn that belief into action? I needed a trick for using my belief system to cause my body to practice the thing that it needed to practice. And so the trick was, to find a 2-minute segment during which I would remember to do the thing that I intended to do and that I wouldn't have reason not to do it. And it would be a short enough amount of time that I would have the self-control to do it. So it's not tautological because you start by doing it self-consciously and you end up doing it automatically.

So in some ways, what you're saying is that A habit is a sort of tool for turning the things that we ought to do or that we want to do or we'd like to do into the things that we actually do do.

That's exactly right. Habits are tools for turning oughts into ises. But habits are indifferent between oughts and ought-nots. So I made a very nice habit that I like, which is that when I brush my teeth, I stand on one foot. But I also made a habit that I don't like very much, which is when I see my phone with a number next to any one of the little icons on it, I push on that icon to see what has caused that red circle with a number on it to appear. And I do that even when, on reflection, I would rather be in a conversation with the person across the table from me. So it's just as easy to build a habit to do something that you would like to be doing as it is to build a habit to do something that you would not like to be doing. Each is easy to acquire. Each is hard to extinct.

So to go back to the metaphor of the rider and the 2 horses that Plato gave us, You've said before that Aristotle's idea was that rather than instruct the rider, the idea here is to tame the horses.

Aristotle's idea is exactly that you need to tame the horses. Imagine you're trying to tell your cat to stay off the couch. You can't talk to your cat and say, I'm sorry, Tyroneus. whatever kind of name your cat has, you are not permitted on the couch. That doesn't work. You need to tell a cat what to do by associating certain kinds of actions with certain kinds of consequences. If you get on the couch, there will be a loud noise that you don't like. Same with our inner selves. I can draw a parabolic design To tell you where a ball is going to come if you throw it towards my catcher's mitt. But talking to the charioteer, that is drawing me a parabola, is not helpful in training my hand to catch the ball and not helpful in training my face to pull itself out of the line of fire as the ball is coming towards it. Aristotle's point is, how do you train yourself to How do you train yourself to stand on one foot? You don't talk to your foot. You stand on one foot. How do you train your cat to stay off the couch? You don't talk to your cat. You make it unpleasant for your cat to be on the couch. How do you train yourself to catch a ball? You don't model the parabolic structure. You hold up your hand until it becomes instinctive. Learning how to type, learning how to do anything routine and automatic is training Plato's horses.

Tamar, you say that for Aristotle, another key to forming virtuous habits was the practice of moderation. What did he mean by this?

Aristotle thinks all virtues are moderate intermediates between 2 extremes. Take the example of bravery. So to be brave is certainly not to be cowardly, but it's also not to be reckless. It's to be brave at the right time in the right way. Likewise, says Aristotle, to be generous is not to be selfish, but it's also not to be extravagant. To be generous is to give the right amount at the right time in the right way. Aristotle thinks this is true for every virtue.

So it's quite clear that with Socrates and Plato, there were echoes in modern psychology, modern thinking, modern literature. What are the echoes and resonances you're seeing in Aristotle's work in modern psychological science, modern brain science?

The scientific insights that lie at the heart of the entire contemporary discussion of habit are the scientific insights that lie at the heart of what Aristotle is saying. That is, what we practice is what we become. Notice that that's not just true in the contemporary literature on habit, of which there are numerous examples. You cannot go to an airport without being confronted with a set of books about habits. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, various books that are going to tell you how to get micro habits, macro habits. But if you think about a second meaning of the word habit, it's a term that we use to describe the uniform that is worn by someone Religious. And you might think that one of the great insights of religious traditions is to instill in us certain kinds of habits. I was raised in the Jewish tradition, and one of the things that the Jewish tradition wants to instill in people is a habit of expressing gratitude. And so it is a rule, In Judaism, whenever I am handed a piece of food, I recite a blessing that notes how it is that that food comes into being. That is, I need to stop for a minute and think, does it grow on a vine? Does it grow from the tree? Does it come from the earth? How does this food come about? It becomes habitual that every act of eating, is associated with an act of gratitude. Medieval monasteries are structured in such a way that what you do is habitually built into the rhythm of your life. The practice of wearing a wristband that says WWJD is to create in you a habit. At any moment where I'm trying to figure out what the right thing to do is, I should check, what would Jesus do? And I would say virtually everything that I say and do is shaped by my meta-awareness that the reasons that I seem to be doing something may not be the reasons that I'm actually doing it, that I am pulled in different directions, and that I do what I find easy. So every day I am presented with multiple opportunities to realign anything from a tiny habit— where I put my keys— to a major habit. How often do I talk to my kids on the phone so that it is part of the rhythm What happens when, despite our best efforts to build our lives right, things don't break our way?

When we are victims of unfairness, illness, or tragedy? Turns out, the ancients struggled with these conundrums too. In our companion piece to In this episode, available exclusively to subscribers to Hidden Brain Plus, Tamar Gendler explores what we should do when we are confronted by bad luck and also how we can change our luck. If you're already a subscriber to Hidden Brain Plus, you can listen to that episode now. It's titled What Homer and Epictetus Can Teach Us Today. If you haven't subscribed as yet, you can check it out for free on a 7-day trial. To do so, go to apple.co/hiddenbrain on your phone. Again, that's apple.co/hiddenbrain. Your support helps us to build more episodes like this one and keeps the show thriving. Tamar, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thank you.

Tamar Gendler is a philosopher at Yale University and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. If you have follow-up questions about today's conversation that you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please email them to us. Record a short voice memo, 1 to 2 minutes is plenty, and send it to ideas@hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line Wisdom. Again, that email address is ideas@hiddenbrain.org. And thanks. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. See you soon. Football season is here and the Fantasy Footballers are back to help you dominate your league. And this season we're bringing you 5 episodes every week. That's more starts, more sits, more waiver wire wins, and more trades from draft day all the way to your fantasy championship. We've got the rankings, the matchups, the news, and the advice you need to win. The Fantasy Footballers Podcast, 5 episodes a week all season long. Watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. You wouldn't take financial advice from a 72 hours in a single day alpha influencer, would you? Same goes if you're in a car accident or any accident. Who you choose matters. That's why Morgan and Morgan exists. They're the largest injury law firm in America, and they've built their reputation by actually winning cases, not just talking about it. Over 1,000 lawyers across all 50 states and $30 billion recovered. Injured? Go to forthepeople.com/podcast. That's forthepeople.com/podcast.