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

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:30.420 here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Donald Robertson. Donald, thanks for joining me.

00:00:39.760 It's a pleasure to be here, Sam.

00:00:41.480 So how would you summarize your background academically, intellectually, philosophically?

00:00:47.960 Well, my first degree was in philosophy, and my master's degree was at an interdisciplinary center,

00:00:55.460 and I wanted to combine philosophy and psychotherapy. That's what I was studying.

00:01:01.040 So I did what a lot of people do. I had one run at it and then completely changed my mind.

00:01:06.740 So I was trying to combine existential philosophy and psychoanalysis. My dissertation was on

00:01:13.460 Jean-Paul Sartre and existential psychoanalysis. And I decided it just wasn't working out for me.

00:01:19.720 So I started again from scratch, and I began looking at stoicism and cognitive behavioral therapy.

00:01:25.460 And that's what I've been doing. I was a psychotherapist. I pursued a clinical career

00:01:29.560 instead of an academic one. And then I started writing books about it. And somewhere along the

00:01:34.980 lines, stoicism became what the young people call a thing. It sort of had a moment and became popular.

00:01:41.600 Yeah. Yeah. It's due to people like yourself and Bill Irvin and Ryan Holiday. And I should say,

00:01:48.080 you've written a couple of books here. You have How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, which I think I got

00:01:53.940 it in, maybe it was 2020, 2019. When did that come out?

00:01:57.140 It came out in 2019.

00:01:58.280 Uh-huh. Yeah.

00:01:59.260 And then also you have one, How to Think Like Socrates. How did you get into stoicism specifically?

00:02:04.680 Well, the truth is, long story, like I grew up in the west coast of Scotland and a place where

00:02:11.820 Freemasonry is popular because our national bard, Robert Burns, was a master Freemason. So my father

00:02:19.500 and most of my friend's fathers were into Freemasonry. And it gave them a kind of philosophy of life.

00:02:25.140 I looked at my father's books on Freemasonry when I was about 16 years old. And there was all these

00:02:31.920 references to Pythagoras and Plato and the four cardinal virtues of Greek philosophy. So that kind

00:02:38.140 of got me interested in reading about Christian kind of mysticism, I suppose, and world religions

00:02:46.960 and Greek philosophy. Then I studied philosophy at university and I was looking for something like

00:02:52.740 a West on Buddhism, basically. A guide to life like Freemasonry had provided my father,

00:02:58.560 philosophy of life. And I couldn't find it in modern academic philosophy. Now, in most undergraduate

00:03:05.120 philosophy curricula, stoicism isn't covered. Although it's one of the major schools of ancient

00:03:11.280 philosophy. So I didn't really read the Stoics until after I graduated. And when I did, I kind

00:03:17.040 of had an epiphany. A light went on and it felt like I was trying to juggle several competing interests.

00:03:23.180 I was into psychotherapy. I was into meditation. I was into philosophy. And I was reading loads and

00:03:28.500 loads of different books. And when I started reading the Stoics, somehow all of that seemed

00:03:32.680 to crystallize into one thing. I kind of got my fix for all of those things from reading

00:03:37.700 Seneca, basically. And, you know, I soon figured out that stoicism was the inspiration for cognitive

00:03:44.800 behavioral therapy, that stoicism contained contemplative practices or meditation techniques,

00:03:50.980 and it provided a kind of workable philosophy of life. So it really all crystallized for me very

00:03:57.060 quickly. And that was about 25 years ago or a little bit more than that now. And I'm still into

00:04:02.220 stoicism. It stuck with me. Yeah. When you read ancient philosophy and when you read Eastern

00:04:09.440 philosophy, it's pretty clear that philosophy was always meant to be a way of life, right? And there was

00:04:16.320 the implication that if a person was a real philosopher, certainly one worth respecting,

00:04:22.060 that would translate into, by definition, some mastery of the art of living. I mean, some wisdom,

00:04:30.500 you know, like you couldn't be a florid neurotic and be a great philosopher, presumably. I mean,

00:04:36.080 it would just, or at least you would be living in stark contradiction to your stated insights.

00:04:44.140 Whereas in modern times, and I'm not quite sure when we can date this. I mean, certainly there was

00:04:50.020 a linguistic turn in philosophy in the West, in England and America in particular. And you have

00:04:56.720 people like Wittgenstein and others for whom it really becomes a kind of an analysis of language

00:05:03.480 and concepts. And there's really no implication that a person would be wise based on having mastered

00:05:10.440 their area of philosophy. And even with continental philosophy in Europe and, you know, you have the

00:05:16.420 contributions of someone like Nietzsche, who for all his gifts was obviously a profoundly unhappy person

00:05:21.520 and is nevertheless a much celebrated philosopher. So I'm not sure if you can date when this broke

00:05:28.640 down, but it is remarkable that if you go in through the front door of a philosophy department in a

00:05:34.040 university, you really can't expect to encounter much wisdom.

00:05:39.180 Well, there's always been this connection. There is a connection still in 20th century philosophy,

00:05:44.760 21st century philosophy with therapy. Even Wittgenstein compared philosophy, his philosophy to a type of

00:05:51.620 therapy, but not in the way the ancient philosophers did. I mean, you know, in the ancient world, people

00:05:58.700 thought that you could often recognize a philosopher if you passed one in the street by the way that

00:06:04.260 they were clothed, the way they wore their beard, from their conduct. They were kind of like Western

00:06:10.940 yogis. Even though in the ancient world, there was kind of always a contrast between Diogenes the 0.72

00:06:16.460 Cynic and Plato and the two views of philosophy as an activity that they represented. Plato definitely

00:06:24.920 had a therapeutic idea of philosophy, but his philosophy was more academic. It was more scholarly, whereas the

00:06:30.880 cynics were seen as rejecting logic and rejecting this kind of academic discourse and being much more

00:06:39.380 focused on developing strength of character. So in the ancient world, there was this dichotomy about these two

00:06:44.320 opposing ways of interpreting it. The Stoics kind of tried to reconcile that a little bit, but the cynics in

00:06:50.720 particular couldn't be more different from what we think of as philosophy today.

00:06:54.400 So what is the essence of Stoicism in your view?

00:06:59.360 I think Stoicism fundamentally is an ethic, an ethical worldview. It's a big philosophy. It flourished

00:07:07.540 for five centuries in the ancient world. It was around for a long time and it evolved a lot, but

00:07:12.980 essentially it's based on the doctrine that virtue is the only true good. That's how Cicero, for example,

00:07:18.700 characterises the cornerstone of Stoicism. That, in a sense, a kind of moral wisdom is the only true

00:07:25.880 good. And that therefore, the things that the majority of people deem to be important in life,

00:07:32.420 like wealth and reputation, are indifferent. They're not really intrinsically good. They're

00:07:38.540 at most a kind of practical advantage in life. And what follows on from that is what Stoicism is

00:07:45.160 perhaps most famous for, which is that if somebody really embraced that ethical worldview,

00:07:51.600 they would be less attached to external possessions and reputation. And so they would develop a kind of

00:07:57.720 emotional resilience in the face of adversity. And Stoicism today has kind of become a synonym,

00:08:04.160 I guess we could say, for emotional resilience as a consequence of that. But it stems from their ethic,

00:08:08.960 their virtue ethic.

00:08:09.680 Yeah. In reading the Stoics, and we'll get into some of the specific thinkers here,

00:08:14.880 what I've gotten is that it really amounts to a way of thinking that allows for the regulation of

00:08:23.840 negative emotion. There's kind of a master value. I certainly got this from Marcus Aurelius,

00:08:29.520 that what you don't want above all is to suffer unnecessarily, right? And the lack of necessity is

00:08:37.380 in how one reacts to the world, reacts to the behavior of other people, and kind of hallucinates

00:08:43.840 the cause of one's suffering as being out there in the world, overlooking the fact that there's a

00:08:49.700 reaction that is actually the felt presence of the injustice or the annoyance. And it's in

00:08:57.520 surrendering that reaction, you know, you're reframing it, thinking so as to see the non-necessity

00:09:02.600 of it, that you become free of these collisions with annoying people, annoying circumstances,

00:09:10.500 inevitable bad luck, etc.

00:09:12.140 Well, I think we can say that probably the most famous quote from Stoicism is from the Enchiridion,

00:09:19.580 or Handbook of Epictetus. And it says, people are distressed not by events, but by their opinions

00:09:25.300 about events. And the reason that it became so famous is that that quote is cited extensively in

00:09:32.400 cognitive behavioral therapy. So it became a kind of cliche in a way. But this is a fundamental insight

00:09:39.040 of Stoicism. And something that might surprise your listeners is that, you know, we think of

00:09:44.880 psychotherapy as being a modern thing, a modern invention, in a sense. I think many people believe

00:09:50.960 that psychotherapy began with Sigmund Freud, which is categorically false. Freud trained in

00:09:55.860 psychotherapy. There were modern psychotherapists around before Freud. But psychotherapy existed in

00:10:01.740 the ancient world. In fact, at the beginning of the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says that one of the

00:10:07.040 most important things that he gained from Junius Rusticus, who was his main Stoic mentor, was

00:10:12.500 therapeia, like psychotherapy based on Stoicism, basically. Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoic

00:10:19.920 school, the most prolific writer in ancient Stoicism, wrote what was once a famous book on therapeutics,

00:10:28.460 on Stoic psychotherapy, which is lost today. But we have an entire book by Seneca that still survives

00:10:35.080 called On Anger, which is all about Stoic psychotherapy for the passion of anger. So you're

00:10:41.340 right, it has this kind of therapeutic angle. It's about overcoming the passions or irrational

00:10:46.900 and unhealthy emotions. And the Stoics call that goal apatheia, which is kind of mistranslated as

00:10:54.320 meaning apathy. But a better translation, a more literal translation would be freedom from pathological

00:11:00.580 desires and emotions. So what are the primary negative emotions that Stoicism is an antidote for?

00:11:08.340 Well, desire in the sense of a kind of greed or attachment to external things. But anger also is

00:11:17.980 one of the main emotions that they were particularly concerned with. And also irrational fear or sadness.

00:11:25.180 The Stoics think that any emotion that places too much intrinsic value on external events beyond our

00:11:32.780 direct control, any emotion like that is inherently unhealthy. There's something not quite right about

00:11:38.500 it, they believe. And that's the core of their philosophy, essentially.

00:11:42.460 You said that there's a direct connection between cognitive behavioral therapy and Stoicism. Is that

00:11:46.780 historically in the field or is that merely in your practice?

00:11:50.360 Yeah. No, that's for real. Albert Ellis, who is the original pioneer of cognitive therapy,

00:11:56.020 he developed a thing called rational emotive behavior therapy, which is the earliest form of

00:12:00.900 CBT in the 1950s in New York. Ellis was originally a psychoanalytic therapist and he got disillusioned with

00:12:09.000 it and gave up and decided he was going to start again from scratch. And he'd read Epictetus and Marcus

00:12:14.540 Aurelius when he was a teenager. And so he began drawing on Stoicism for inspiration. And he describes

00:12:20.880 the Stoics as the main philosophical inspiration for his approach to cognitive therapy. Then the next

00:12:27.920 major pioneer of that approach is Aaron T. Beck, Tim Beck, in the 60s and 70s. He developed cognitive

00:12:34.440 therapy for depression and made cognitive therapy much more mainstream. And Beck also says that the

00:12:41.080 philosophical origins, he says this repeatedly, of cognitive therapy lie in ancient Stoicism.

00:12:47.420 So can you give me an example of the technique of Stoicism? How does one put these insights into

00:12:54.940 practice?

00:12:56.000 Well, first of all, there's a repertoire of techniques. There are many, many techniques.

00:12:59.980 The first book that I wrote on Stoicism, I tried to list as many as I could, and there were about 18

00:13:04.420 broad strategies. And those can take different forms. So we can pick several out, but actually I'm going to

00:13:10.900 pick one in particular because I think it might be especially of interest to you, given your

00:13:15.520 interest in mindfulness meditation and Buddhism. The Stoics have a practice that they call prosoche.

00:13:21.160 And this term is used by other ancient Greek writers as well. Epictetus has an entire discourse on it.

00:13:27.500 Prosoche is a word that you'll see in modern Greece on signs. So you'll see signs that say prosoche

00:13:33.320 skilos, which means beware of the dog. So prosoche means be mindful, be aware, watch out. It can be

00:13:41.420 translated as pay attention. And the Stoics describe this as a kind of practice of continual attention

00:13:48.140 to the way that we're using our mind. So you could see it as a kind of Stoic mindfulness practice.

00:13:54.540 They think that we should conceptually observe the use we make of impressions,

00:13:58.180 for example, or the automatic thoughts that pop into our mind. Marcus Aurelius, for instance,

00:14:04.080 says we should continually ask ourselves, what use are you making right now of your psyche,

00:14:09.420 of your mind? And what character does your psyche have right now? So constantly reflecting on the type

00:14:16.380 of judgments we're making, and in particular, the value judgments that we're making from moment to

00:14:21.680 moment, and how those might be affecting our emotions. So there's this kind of sort of mindfulness

00:14:28.460 practice that we find in Stoicism pretty explicitly. And then there's the use of the Socratic method,

00:14:35.020 or Socratic questioning, which is integral to cognitive therapy. I'll take a step back and say

00:14:39.740 the reason for that is, you know, this idea that it's not things that upset us, but our opinions about

00:14:45.580 them, the Stoics had a cognitive model of emotion. So it's similar, very similar, surprisingly similar

00:14:52.480 to the premise of modern cognitive therapy. And if you believe that your cognitions shape your emotions

00:14:59.160 to a greater extent than we normally assume, then you're going to arrive at broadly similar

00:15:05.060 conclusions, perhaps, about what you would do about that. So you might try to identify what the

00:15:10.180 beliefs are that cause your anger, for example, and then challenge those beliefs, question them,

00:15:16.300 whether they're contradictory, or whether they contain certain logical errors, for example. So

00:15:21.760 the Stoics use questioning techniques to root out and challenge rationally or philosophically,

00:15:28.100 in a similar way that we do in modern cognitive therapy, to help deal with these irrational beliefs.

00:15:33.800 But they also have a variety of other meditation or contemplative practices. And I think you'll find

00:15:39.720 parallels to those in Eastern traditions like Buddhism. So I know in the Buddhist tradition,

00:15:45.220 there are meditations that involve contemplating the character of the Buddha and the qualities that

00:15:51.200 he possessed. In Stoicism, they have a practice called contemplating the sage, or the sophos in

00:15:56.420 Greek. So the Stoics didn't believe that any perfect person had ever existed, but they thought that

00:16:02.640 we're able to imagine what a wise person might look like and how they might act. It's an imaginative,

00:16:09.720 contemplative, contemplative exercise. They think we should contemplate our own death, which is

00:16:14.720 also a practice that we find in Buddhism. And they thought we should also try to imagine potential

00:16:21.240 misfortunes that could befall us and prepare ourselves in advance for them. Imagine, for example,

00:16:27.180 poverty or illness as if it's happening right now, and then rehearse responding to it with a

00:16:32.140 philosophical attitude, which is kind of similar to practices that we find in modern cognitive

00:16:36.400 behavioral therapy as well, what we call mental rehearsal or imaginal exposure exercises and CBT.

00:16:43.400 Okay. So I'm going to ask you to help me untangle a very familiar pattern of reaction that I have

00:16:51.300 to one of the misfortunes in life. So you mentioned reputation and how one should not put too much

00:16:59.260 stock in it. I find as a writer, podcaster, speaker, I find that the thing I find most annoying

00:17:06.360 on this front is the all too frequent experience of seeing my views misrepresented, right? So it's not

00:17:15.720 criticism per se, or even just any kind of defamatory attack on me that I care about. What I care about is

00:17:23.200 is to see somebody lying or otherwise consciously or unconsciously misrepresenting my views and to see

00:17:31.300 that, you know, at scale become effective, right? So the truly crazy making experience from my point

00:17:37.080 of view is to see vast numbers of people believe that I think things that I have never thought in

00:17:44.100 my life, right? Much less said out loud. And so how would you, if you're going to be my stoic therapist,

00:17:50.060 how would you ask me to interact with that phenomenon? Well, first of all, I sympathize

00:17:55.180 and it's going to get worse because AI is going to start misrepresenting your views as well. I think

00:17:59.220 that happens or you will get misquoted by AI. No, AI has me, someone sent me an ad where an AI

00:18:06.940 generated version of me or an AI voice overlaid on an actual version of me has me selling some

00:18:14.760 cognitive enhancement that I've never heard of. So I'm pushing pills out there that you shouldn't buy.

00:18:20.180 Yeah. That's welcome to the future. But this was a common problem in the past as well. So Marcus

00:18:26.580 Aurelius had to deal with his views being misrepresented and parodied and satirized. That's something that we

00:18:34.780 know that he had to deal with. And so did other influential people in the Roman empire that were

00:18:40.320 into stoicism. So it's kind of a familiar problem in a way. And one of the first things you might do

00:18:45.720 is to ask yourself, well, how would somebody else cope with that problem? How would someone that we

00:18:52.520 admire for their wisdom and patience and temperance deal with a similar problem? And it could be someone

00:18:58.780 you admire personally. It could be like a colleague or something like that, or it could even be a fictional

00:19:03.260 character. It could be the hypothetical sage. It could be Buddha. My Buddhist views are misrepresented

00:19:08.160 all the time. How would Buddha respond to that or deal with it? How would Socrates deal with his

00:19:14.000 views being misrepresented? So that's what we call modeling. It's cognitive modeling in modern therapy.

00:19:19.640 How would someone else cope well with the same challenge? Another way of dealing with it in

00:19:24.720 stoicism is- But before you move on, what I find interesting about that is that it's a method of

00:19:29.400 seeing yourself from the outside. I mean, you're kind of triangulating on yourself and you-

00:19:34.300 It's a funny feature or really bug of human psychology that there are many things that we

00:19:41.260 recognize to be unflattering or otherwise not admirable in others, but in ourselves when we're

00:19:49.480 in the grip of them, we don't have the perspective on it. I mean, this takes us kind of far afield,

00:19:54.880 but to be boastful or to be name-dropping, from the outside, we always notice what is wrong with

00:20:03.060 it. But from the inside, people tend not to notice what is wrong with it. And so I think that move of

00:20:09.500 triangulation is quite useful.

00:20:12.380 This idea is integral to Greek philosophy, actually. It's in Plato's dialogues. It's integral to

00:20:19.800 stoicism. The Galen, Marcus Aurelius' physician, has a book called On the Diagnosis and Cure of the

00:20:27.860 Soul's Passions. So a cure on psychopathology and psychotherapy, where he talks precisely about the

00:20:33.340 problem of this blind spot. And he describes it using one of Aesop's fables. Aesop said we're all

00:20:39.220 born with two sacks hanging around our neck. There's a big one that hangs in front of our chest and we

00:20:45.000 can see it everywhere we go. And it contains everybody else's flaws. And then there's a little

00:20:49.640 one that hangs behind the back of our neck that we can never see because it's in our blind spot.

00:20:54.240 But everyone else can see it really clearly. And it contains our own flaws. So they have a really

00:20:59.120 neat little kind of illustration of this problem. And you're right that these kind of perspective

00:21:05.580 shifting exercises are one way of trying to kind of get outside of that blind spot. But the Stoics also

00:21:13.700 thought that it was important to have a mentor or a teacher and engage in dialogue with another living

00:21:19.680 human being. And they seem to think that was one. Galen's pretty clear about that. He says,

00:21:23.960 find an older, wiser mentor, someone that you can be completely transparent with. And that's one way of

00:21:30.140 learning to transcend this blind spot because they'll give you an outside perspective. I guess like a

00:21:35.340 counselor or a psychotherapist might help people gain perspective today.

00:21:39.460 Yeah. Yeah. So I cut you off. You were on to a next method to deal with all that ails me.

00:21:46.040 Yeah. We're looking for it, doesn't we? There's a bunch of solutions. Like, you know, that's a good thing.

00:21:49.420 We've got a whole box of tricks. So another one, I mean, one might just be to repeat what Epictetus

00:21:54.900 says, which is, you know, it's not these other people and their behavior.

00:21:58.880 If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

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00:22:28.880 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - May 28, 2025

#417 — Philosophy for Life

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