How Socrates Beat Addictions

[Music] foreign [Music] things are looking up for me that's what my tarot said been pumping Socrates likened the soul to a chariot to be improved by two horses one rational pulls us upwards towards heaven the other unruly rascable drives us down towards Earth we all have two horses cool one reason the other passion one Logic the other emotion one Prudence the other desirous however way The Duality is split it's a common one in the history of philosophy and psychology Socrates said that sometimes these internal guides are in accord sometimes at variants and I won gains the Mastery now the other and when judgment guides us rationally towards what is best and has the Mastery the Mastery is called Temperance but when desire drags us irrationally towards pleasure and has come to rule within us the name given is wantonness [Music] wow the soul can lose its wings though and wings have something Divine about them Wings symbolize wisdom virtue truth Divinity Beauty they aim upwards towards the gods towards the outer rims of Heaven towards immortality troubled Souls Socrates says cannot break through into heaven they're carried around under the surface trampling and bumping into one another as one tries to overtake another so there is utter chaos nothing but sweat and conflict the Greeks had a word for being pulled back down to earth acracia or lack of willpower quite literally lack of mastery Mastery is rational it thinks about what is right what is good in the long term what's useful what's wise the writer Lucy's son said that not so long ago all the world smoked and that all of Waking Life was measured out in cigarettes Mark Twain said that he'd rather not go to heaven if you can't smoke there writing about giving up Richard Klein has said that he was enamored by their charms and grateful for their benefits and David Lynch has said that smoking has something of the artist's life about it [Music] a long list of writers have puffed away about their love of smoking against a increasingly large backdrop of scientists over the last 50 60 years warning that it's now likely the stupidest thing you could do and despite having smoked for quite a long time now I can't share those writers enthusiasms maybe it's because the consequence of smoking have been hammered into us more than any other generation but no matter how I interrogate it I can't seem to identify its charms yet like Socrates is unruly hoarse and pushed to and fro occasionally by it unlike alcohol the buzz is minimal and like sugar The Taste is Harsh and like caffeine the spark is dim it's no longer cool it's no longer inexpensive it tastes disgusting it smells horrible it drags you outside on cold nights and yes it kills you and yet I can resist all those other Temptations with much more ease and while I'm only a social occasional or drinking smoker now when I do go months here and there without when it comes down to it with a cold beer there's something inimitably unidentifiably satisfying about it but in making this video recently I realized the bad habits addictions desires impulses are fascinating because they are uniquely philosophical because the impulse to do something especially a habit we find hard to resist is more than anything about Freedom Free Will ethics what the right thing to do is how we should and shouldn't act [Music] and we all do things we feel we should resist whether we're talking about alcohol or sugar or gambling or nicotine or cocaine or sex or the internet or work or exercise I'd argue that those bad habits those addictive traits are near Universal of The Human Condition but at crassia weakness of will resisting ourselves is counter-intuitive if you think about it how can we act against ourselves is there two of us when we give in to desire to too much food to drink gambling work even cigarettes it's like we're pulled in two different directions forward and backward maybe up and down it's like we're waited down chained drowned beckoned by that unruly horse that we're not free to act in what we want to do but instead as slaves to something in our own bodies we are like under a spell compelled in his confessions Augustine wrote The Madness of lust took complete control of me and I surrendered holy to it foreign of lust Madness the opposite of Reason Insanity do we have the spark of that in us why would we ever feed a grotesque mad insane Beast that resides somewhere in us against our clear-headed reasonable health-seeking part why would we ever do that that just doesn't seem to make sense but actually this is where Socrates takes a different View ah while he uses the twin horse's metaphor in one of Plato's dialogues he also says in another that the soul is an organic whole in other words we're not really driven by two horses there's only one of us and we act for reasons the question is what is the reason for us acting in a certain way Socrates said when people make a wrong choice of pleasures and pains that is of Good and Evil the cause of their mistake is lack of knowledge what being Mastered by Pleasure really is is ignorance so at Gracia weakness of the will is not really weakness but a lack of knowledge but for Socrates knowledge is very broad it's not just bookishness it's knowledge of desires and tastes and the Beautiful and the good and the consequences of actions after all what isn't knowledge knowledge can cause the wings of the reasonable horse to grow he says further nourishment pours in the quills of the feathers swell and begin to grow from The Roots upwards and to spread all over the underside of the Soul because previously the whole soul was winged and choosing to do one thing rather than another eating an orange rather than smoking a cigarette say it's really just the knowledge that one is going to be preferable in the present moment no one he States who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action better than the one he is following will ever continue on his present course it's not that we have the wrong knowledge that the cigarette is going to be pleasurable in the moment and the right knowledge that it's going to be bad for our health in the long term knowledge is made equal what's happening is that the knowledge that it's going to be preferable in the present moment is stronger than the knowledge of the consequences in the long term and so we act with recourse to the strongest knowledge he said that people erroneously think that they may have knowledge and that that knowledge could be over Mastered by anger or pain or pleasure or fear perhaps as if knowledge were a slave and could be dragged about somehow he said that instead knowledge is a noble and commanding thing that cannot be overcome and will not allow a person if only he knows the difference between good and evil to do anything which is contrary to knowledge points out that we have this common idea that something we're doing when we have a Gracia that weakness of will the bad habit is evil but he asks how can enjoyment something Simply Good be an evil it's not he said what we're really doing is balancing what feels pleasurable as good with what we think will be painful as Evil And if what we think will give us pleasure in the moment is greater than what we perceive the consequences to be then it's the right action it's the correct thing to do and so we'll do it he says no man voluntarily pursues evil or that which he thinks to be evil to prefer evil to good is not in human nature and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils no one will choose the greater when he may have the less now of course he acknowledges that we all make mistakes and make bad decisions but he says what's really going on is that we're acting on faulty judgments which again can be corrected with the right knowledge he said that when we do something because the pleasure seems greater in the moment and the consequences seem distant later in life say we've misjudged because while things in the distance consequences appear to be smaller appear to be distant when we get up close they're just as big in other words appearances can be deceiving poor judgment is the result of poor measurement here's a key passage he says do not the same magnitudes appear larger to your site when near and smaller when at a distance he continues and I suppose happiness to consist in doing or choosing the greater and in not doing or in avoiding the less what would be the saving principle of human life would not the art of measuring be the saving principle The Art of measurement would do away with the effect of appearances and showing the truth would teach the Soul at last to find rest in the truth and would thus save our life he says the key to this to measuring to thinking is knowledge ignorance causes us to choose poorly wisdom causes us to choose correctly our goal should be to balance all of the consequences all of the virtues all of the pleasures and pains and bring them into proportion the Dutch rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza would later agree with Socrates he says that an effect by which means a feeling or impulse to do something cannot be taken away unless by an effect that is opposite to and stronger than the one that is to be restrained Spinoza thinks that if we have adequate knowledge of a choice it will always beat the Lesser impulse to do otherwise the wisdom in all of this for me has been to keep trying to acquire knowledge of my habits why I do them when I do them what you need in the moment what the alternatives are what the consequences are and eventually they're affective Force Espinoza calls it will be diminished and we can learn from Socrates that in his famous words it's an examined life that presents the best possible course foreign supporters these videos take a long time to research write and make I do a lot of reading they're always sourced and there's a bibliography in the description below I've written something short on why I think this kind 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Channel: Then & Now

Views: 44,177

Keywords: socrates, akrasia, bad habits, addiction, overcoming bad habits, ancient greeks, plato

Id: LFYRO3DKWfg

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2023