Socrates likened the soul to a chariot being pulled by two horses. The rational horse listens to our commands and pulls us upwards towards heaven, and the unruly one, irascible and wild, pulls us down towards earth. We all have two horses.

Call one reason, call the other passion, one logic, the other emotion, one prudent, the other desirous – the duality, however it is split, is a common one in the history of philosophy and psychology.

Socrates said sometimes ‘these internal guides are in accord, sometimes at variance; now one gains the mastery, now the other. And when judgment guides us rationally toward what is best, and has the mastery, that mastery is called temperance, but when desire drags us irrationally toward pleasure and has come to rule within us, the name given to that rule is wantonness’.

He said that one horse – desire – pulls us down towards objects on earth. The other drives us upwards towards heaven.

A soul can lose its wings though, and wings have something divine about them. Wings symbolise wisdom, truth, virtue, they aim upwards. Up towards towards immortality, towards the outer rim of heaven, towards the gods, towards the divine.

Troubled souls, Socrates says, cannot break through into heaven, ‘they are 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 Ancient Greeks had a word for being pulled down to earth: akrasia – lack of willpower, or quite literally, lack of mastery.

Mastery is rational. It thinks about what is right, what is good in the long term, what is useful, wise.

The writer Lucy Sante said that, ‘not so long ago, all the world smoked, and that all of waking life was measured out in cigarettes’. Mark Twain said he’d rather not go to heaven if you can’t smoke there. Writing about giving up, Richard Klein said that he was enamoured by their charms and grateful for their benefits. David Lynch said smoking has something of the artist’s life about it. A long list of writers have puffed about their love of smoking against a now much larger chorus of scientists warning that, today, it’s likely the stupidest habit you could maintain.

And I have to confess that, despite having smoked on and off since fourteen, I cannot share these writers’ enthusiasm. Maybe it’s because the consequences of smoking have been hammered into us more than any previous generation, but no matter how I interrogate it, I cannot identify the charms of smoking, yet still, like being led to and fro by Socrates’ unruly horse, I do it.

Unlike alcohol, the buzz is minor, unlike sugar, the taste is harsh, unlike caffeine, the spark is dim. It is no longer cool, no longer inexpensive, drags you outside on cold nights, coarsens the throat, and yeah, kills you.

And yet I can’t resist all those other temptations with much more ease, and, while I’m only really a social/occasional/drinking smoker now, and I go for months here and there without a cigarette, when it comes down to it, there is, something – with a cold beer – unidentifiably, inimitably satisfying about it.

But in making this video recently, I realised that bad habits, addictions, desire, impulse 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, how we act.

And we all do things we feel we should resist. Whether we’re talking about alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine, social media, work, exercise or gambling, addictive traits, I’d argue, are a near universal feature of the human condition.

But akrasia – weakness of will, resisting ourselves – is counterintuitive, 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, drink, gambling, work even, cigarettes – it is like we’re pulled in two different directions – forward and backward, up and down – it’s like we’re weighed down, chained, dragged, beckoned, by that unruly horse, that we’re not free to act in what we want to do, but are slaves to 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 wholly to it’.

The madness of lust – madness, the opposite of reason. Do we all have a spark of the insane in all of us? Why would we ever feed a grotesque crazed mad beast within us, against our own clearheaded, rational, health seeking, decent part – why would we ever willingly do that? It surely doesn’t make sense.

But this is where actually Socrates takes a different view.

While he uses the twin horses 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 single reasons.

He 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 akrasia – weakness of the will – is not really a weakness – but a lack of knowledge.

But for Socrates knowledge is very broad. Not just bookishness. It includes knowledge of taste, joy, beauty, consequences of actions  – after all, what isn’t knowledge?

Knowledge can cause the wings of the reasonable horse to grow.

Socrates 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 under side of the soul, because previously the whole soul was winged’.

In choosing to do one thing over another – smoking a cigarette over eating an apple – the soul is really just acting on the knowledge that one is preferable in that moment. Enjoyment after all is reasonable.

‘No one’, says Socrates, ‘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 is not that we have correct knowledge that the cigarette is bad for our health and wrong knowledge that it is enjoyable in the moment. Knowledge is equal. What’s happening is simply that the knowledge that the cigarette is enjoyable in the moment is stronger than the knowledge that its bad for us in the long term, and so we act with recourse to the stronger knowledge.

He says that people erroneously think they ‘may have knowledge, and yet that the knowledge which is in him may be overmastered by anger, or pleasure, or pain, or love, or perhaps by fear,—just as if knowledge were a slave, and might be dragged about anyhow’.

Instead, Socrates says, ‘knowledge is a noble and commanding thing which cannot be overcome, and will not allow a man, if he only knows the difference of good and evil, to do anything which is contrary to knowledge’.

He points out that we have this common idea that something we’re doing – when we have akrasia – that weakness of will – the bad habit, is evil.

But he asks how can enjoyment – something good – be an evil? It’s not.

He says that in all of our actions we’re essentially balancing what feels pleasurable as good and what feels pain as an evil. And if the pleasure from doing something in the moment is greater than what we perceive as the consequences, then, it’s a good, it’s a preferable choice, and 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, here’s the thing – obviously we make wrong decisions, do things we know are bad for us, make mistakes. He says what we really have, though, is a failure of judgement, which again, is resolved with the right knowledge.

He points out that when we do something because the benefits are present and the consequences are distant – later in life say, further away – we have misjudged because while the consequences appear to be distant, we should know that objects in the distance only appear to be smaller – and that appearances can be deceiving.

A poor judgement is the result of poor measurement.

Here’s a key passage: Socrates says, ‘Do not the same magnitudes appear larger to your sight when near, and smaller when at a distance?’.

He continues: ‘Now 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 fain teach the soul at last to find rest in the truth, and would thus save our life’.

Socrates says the key to this, to measuring, thinking, is knowledge. Ignorance leads us to choose poorly, wisdom to choose correctly. The goal should be to think through something and bring all possible outcomes – all pleasures and pains – into proportion.

The Dutch rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza would later agree with Socrates, saying, ‘an affect – by which he means the impulse or feeling to do something – cannot be restrained or taken away except by an affect opposite to and stronger than the affect 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 this, for me, has been to keep acquiring knowledge of habits – why you do them, when you do them, what you need in the moment, what the alternatives are – and eventually their ‘affective force’, as Spinoza would call it, will be diminished. And we can learn from Socrates that it is an examined life that presents the best possible course.