By |

Growing from Depression cover

What if depression were a blessing as well as a curse? This is a book about how depression can have benefits as well as costs, and how to reap those benefits while making yourself feel better—better, in fact, than ever before.

🏆 Semi-finalist, the BookLife Prize

🏆 Highly Commended, the BMA Book Awards

A comprehensive, sympathetic, and thought-provoking guide for those who want to explore their depression in more depth. —The British Journal of Psychiatry

This book brings understanding and encourages independent solutions. It is remarkable in its shortness and practicality. —The British Medical Association Book Awards

★★★★★ I have read most of Dr. Neel Burton’s books and have enjoyed them immensely … All in all, I found this to be a very insightful and engaging book on depression. —Jamie Bee, Amazon.com Top 50 Reviewer

Grab your copy now for a new and powerful way of looking at depression.

READ now FOR FREE

By |

And how Leibniz stumbled upon the unconscious.

Gottfried Leibniz

For Aristotle (384-322 BCE), all living things had a vegetative or nutritive soul; animals also had a sensitive soul; and humans, on top of that, had a rational soul. As a result, medieval theologians and philosophers debated whether humans had a plurality of souls.

To pluralists such as Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Kilwardby (c. 1215-1279), the vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls were distinct entities stacked within the human body. For Kilwardby, this served to explain how Christ’s body remained holy in the tomb after his human soul had departed.

The pluralists were fiercely opposed by unitists such as St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who argued that a person with multiple souls would be no more than a bundle of parts, rather than a single, unified substance. For a short time after his death, Aquinas’s single soul “heresy” was banned in Paris and Oxford. Following centuries of debate, the unitist view, of course, came to prevail.

Descartes’s Daughter

The philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) completely changed the conversation. To uphold his dualism of mind and body and defend the immortality of the human soul, Descartes argued that only humans (and higher beings such as angels) possessed both a physical body and an immaterial soul. Being the source of thought and reason, this immaterial soul qualified human beings for things like heaven and eternal life. All other living things—plants and animals—were soulless, and functioned like complex machines.

Animals, claimed Descartes, are mere automata, whose functions “follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counterweights and wheels.” For Descartes, it is not only that animals do not reason, but also that they do not feel, perceive, or sense. Clearly, he did not have a cat. According to lore, he once threw a cat out of a window to demonstrate that the poor thing lacked consciousness. 

Although French, Descartes spent the greater part of his adult life in the relative safety of the Dutch Republic. There, he met a servant called Helena, who became the mother of his illegitimate daughter, Francine (b. 1635), whom he passed off as his niece. When Francine died, aged five, of scarlet fever, he called it the greatest sorrow of his life—even stating that it was not unmanly to cry. Later, a legend arose that he constructed an automaton in Francine’s likeness.

How Leibniz Stumbled Upon the Unconscious

In the early 1700s, the polymath Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) investigated and documented a famous “talking dog” in the village of Zeitz, Saxony. He concluded that the dog was not in fact “talking,” but merely echoing the sounds of his master.

Even so, Leibniz rejected Descartes’s idea of animals as soulless machines. Relying heavily on the Aristotelian concept of entelechy (the vital force that drives an organism), he returned their sensitive soul to the animals. Still, animals lack a rational soul, and act purely empirically, that is, on the basis of experience. Instead of reasoning or calculating, they merely associate ideas—as do we, most of the time. It is not all that often that we actually reason, and some of us, it seems, never do.

Whereas Aristotle had made self-nutrition the fundamental characteristic of living things, Leibniz opted for perception and appetition. Leibniz distinguished between perception and its heightened form, apperception, that is, conscious perception. In bare monads, perception is diffuse and unconscious, but in animals and humans, it is conscious and focused. Bare monads, which ground inanimate bodies, are as in a deep sleep or stupor, and unconscious of their perceptions.

For Leibniz, humans, when unconscious or in a deep sleep, are as bare monads. That a loud noise can rouse us from a deep sleep indicates that, even then, we are perceiving, though unaware of doing so.

In his Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), Leibniz wrote:

… even though our senses are related to everything, it is impossible for our soul to attend to everything in particular; that is why our confused sensations are the result of a truly infinite variety of perceptions. This is almost like the confused murmur coming from the innumerable set of breaking waves heard by those who approach the seashore…

In other words, there are two levels of consciousness, one where we register stimuli, and the other where the most salient of these stimuli, or the mean of these stimuli, are brought to our conscious attention. This notion of petites perceptions (“small perceptions”, or unconscious perceptions) anticipates Schopenhauer and Freud.

Humans, unlike animals, are able to reflect upon their perceptions to derive the notions of the “I” or self, and of God. This sort of meta-reflection (“reflection upon reflection”) calls to mind Aristotle’s description, in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics, of the activity of God, which, he says, consists in “a thinking upon thinking”. It is this notion, or meta-notion, of the self, subsisting through time, that makes us moral beings, and susceptible to punishment and reward.

By returning their soul to the animals, Leibniz had to explain how their minds worked without relying on conscious reason. In so doing, he shattered the Cartesian assumption that mind and consciousness are the same, effectively discovering the unconscious mind. In his own words, “the difference between intelligent substances and substances that have no intelligence at all is just as great as the difference between a mirror and someone who sees.”

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

By |

And why ours may be the best of all possible worlds.

Gottfried Leibniz

For Aristotle (384-322 BCE), all living things had a vegetative or nutritive soul; animals also had a sensitive soul; and humans, on top of that, had a rational soul. As a result, medieval theologians and philosophers debated whether humans had a plurality of souls.

To pluralists such as Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Kilwardby (c. 1215-1279), the vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls were distinct entities stacked within the human body. For Kilwardby, this served to explain how Christ’s body remained holy in the tomb after his human soul had departed.

The pluralists were fiercely opposed by unitists such as St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who argued that a person with multiple souls would be no more than a bundle of parts, rather than a single, unified substance. For a short time after his death, Aquinas’s single soul “heresy” was banned in Paris and Oxford. Following centuries of debate, the unitist view, of course, came to prevail.

Descartes’s Daughter

The philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) completely changed the conversation. To uphold his dualism of mind and body and defend the immortality of the human soul, Descartes argued that only humans (and higher beings such as angels) possessed both a physical body and an immaterial soul. Being the source of thought and reason, this immaterial soul qualified human beings for things like heaven and eternal life. All other living things—plants and animals—were soulless, and functioned like complex machines.

Animals, claimed Descartes, are mere automata, whose functions “follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counterweights and wheels.” For Descartes, it is not only that animals do not reason, but also that they do not feel, perceive, or sense. Clearly, he did not have a cat. According to lore, he once threw a cat out of a window to demonstrate that the poor thing lacked consciousness. 

Although French, Descartes spent the greater part of his adult life in the relative safety of the Dutch Republic. There, he met a servant called Helena, who became the mother of his illegitimate daughter, Francine (b. 1635), whom he passed off as his niece. When Francine died, aged five, of scarlet fever, he called it the greatest sorrow of his life—even stating that it was not unmanly to cry. Later, a legend arose that he constructed an automaton in Francine’s likeness.

How Leibniz Stumbled Upon the Unconscious

In the early 1700s, the polymath Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) investigated and documented a famous “talking dog” in the village of Zeitz, Saxony. He concluded that the dog was not in fact “talking,” but merely echoing the sounds of his master.

Even so, Leibniz rejected Descartes’s idea of animals as soulless machines. Relying heavily on the Aristotelian concept of entelechy (the vital force that drives an organism), he returned their sensitive soul to the animals. Still, animals lack a rational soul, and act purely empirically, that is, on the basis of experience. Instead of reasoning or calculating, they merely associate ideas—as do we, most of the time. It is not all that often that we actually reason, and some of us, it would seem, never do.

Whereas Aristotle had made self-nutrition the fundamental characteristic of living things, Leibniz opted for perception and appetition. Leibniz distinguished between perception and its heightened form, apperception, that is, conscious perception. In bare monads, perception is diffuse and unconscious, but in animals and humans, it is conscious and focused. Bare monads, which ground inanimate bodies, are as in a deep sleep or stupor, and unconscious of their perceptions.

For Leibniz, humans, when unconscious or in a deep sleep, are as bare monads. That a loud noise can rouse us from a deep sleep indicates that, even then, we are perceiving, though unaware of doing so.

In his Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), Leibniz wrote:

… even though our senses are related to everything, it is impossible for our soul to attend to everything in particular; that is why our confused sensations are the result of a truly infinite variety of perceptions. This is almost like the confused murmur coming from the innumerable set of breaking waves heard by those who approach the seashore…

In other words, there are two levels of consciousness, one where we register stimuli, and the other where the most salient of these stimuli, or the mean of these stimuli, are brought to our conscious attention. This notion of petites perceptions (“small perceptions”, or unconscious perceptions) anticipates Schopenhauer and Freud.

Humans, unlike animals, are able to reflect upon their perceptions to derive the notions of the “I” or self, and of God. This sort of meta-reflection (“reflection upon reflection”) calls to mind Aristotle’s description, in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics, of the activity of God, which, he says, consists in “a thinking upon thinking”. It is this notion, or meta-notion, of the self, subsisting through time, that makes us moral beings, and susceptible to punishment and reward.

By returning their soul to the animals, Leibniz had to explain how their minds worked without relying on conscious reason. In so doing, he shattered the Cartesian assumption that mind and consciousness are the same, effectively discovering the unconscious mind. In his own words, “the difference between intelligent substances and substances that have no intelligence at all is just as great as the difference between a mirror and someone who sees.”

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

By |

Theodicy: Leibniz’s Answer to the Problem of Evil.

Many people who have heard of Leibniz first heard of him through Voltaire’s satirical Candide (1759), in which Leibniz is caricatured as the deluded Dr Pangloss, “the greatest philosopher of the Holy Empire”—a parody that is a hard to get past. In so far as Leibniz is remembered, it is for holding, in the words of Voltaire, that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”.

Unlike his predecessors Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz received a university education in philosophy, even though, in his day, university philosophy amounted to little more than Aristotelian-Christian Scholasticism. In April 1661, at the age of fourteen, he enrolled at Leipzig University to study liberal arts. Five years later, in 1666, Altdorf University granted him a doctorate in law, along with the offer of a professorship. However, he declined the professorship, deeming, perhaps, that a university might not be the best place for an original thinker.

Still, Leibniz now had a licence to practise law. Later, in the Theodicy (1710), he would pose as God’s own attorney—to defend God against the charge of having introduced evil into the world. “Theodicy”, a word that he himself coined, derives from the Greek for “vindication of God”.

The Problem of Evil

In 1755, nearly forty years after Leibniz’s death, Lisbon suffered a magnitude 9 earthquake, sparking fires that led to greater devastation than the earthquake itself. Voltaire has Candide crawling through charred ruins, saying to himself, “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what can the rest be like?”

This so-called problem, or paradox, of evil has the pedigree of antiquity, having been attributed by Lactantius (d. 325 CE) to Epicurus (d. 270 BCE): God either wishes to take away evils, but cannot; or he can, but does not wish to. In the first instance, he is less than omnipotent; in the second, less than benevolent.

In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume eloquently restated the problem:

Epicurus’ old questions remain unanswered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

Leibniz’s Response

In the Theodicy, Leibniz’s response to the Problem of Evil is that God, having created the best of all possible worlds, that is, the one that is simplest in theories while being richest in phenomena, does not cause evil but permits it for the greater good. Evil results indirectly or accidentally from the absence of good. Because God did not create evil, evil is not a substance and has no proper existence. What from our limited perspective appears to be evil in fact contributes to the greater goodness of Creation, like shadows in a painting which bring out its colours, or discordant notes in a piece of music which contribute to its richness.

Leibniz distinguishes between three forms of evil:

  • Metaphysical evil, which is the necessary imperfection or limitation in creation—since created things are not God, and if they could be perfect, would collapse back into God.
  • Natural evil, which is pain and suffering, and a consequence of metaphysical evil.
  • Moral evil, which arises from the poorly exercised free will of rational minds, and leads to natural evil.

God could have created a world without minds. But though such a world would have been free from moral and natural evil, it would not have been the best of possible worlds.

Man’s Role

What’s more, the world, in man, carries within itself the potential for its own optimization. We can work, first, to improve ourselves, and, then, to improve the world and reduce suffering. If asked, what is the meaning of life, Leibniz would reply, “To perfect God’s creation!”

Schopenhauer, that paradigm of a pessimist, riffing on Leibniz, would remark that ours is the worst of all possible worlds.

And if it were any worse, it wouldn’t exist at all—a hypothesis that humanity seems keen to test.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

By |

The Scientific Revolution disrupted the centuries-old Aristotelian system of the Church and universities. It all began in 1542, when the Pole Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. This work challenged the geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy in which the Earth—and, more importantly, man—stood proud and unmoving at the centre of the universe.

It is arguably Newton who completed the Copernican Revolution, and put the nail in the coffin of the Aristotelian system, with the publication, in 1687, of his Principia mathematica. In this work, which is deemed impenetrable, he introduced his three laws of motion along with the Law of Universal Gravitation. In the mid-1660s, Newton kept a notebook with the title, Certain Philosophical Questions. Above this title, he inscribed the motto (which is a paraphrase of Aristotle): Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is a greater friend still.

The Scientific Method

Also contradicting the Aristotelian worldview were William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of blood, published in his De motu cordis of 1628, and Galileo’s discovery that falling objects undergo uniform acceleration irrespective of their mass, published in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (i.e. the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic and the Copernican) of 1632. Aristotle had held that heavier objects fall faster, and that blood is constantly produced in the liver and consumed in the body’s periphery.

More radically, both Harvey and Galileo privileged experiment and observation over the authority of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen, and the Bible. Only a decade earlier, in 1620, Francis Bacon had formalised the modern scientific method in his Novum organum, which sought to undermine and replace Aristotle’s canonical treatise on logic, the Organon (hence the title, Novum organum, or New Organon). Galileo even published in Italian rather than the de rigueur Latin.

The Search for a New Metaphysical System

The demise of the Aristotelian system, for all its promises, left a void that needed filling, ideally by some all-encompassing metaphysical system on the scale of the old, Aristotelian one. If the Earth no longer stood at the centre of the cosmos, was man not the glory of creation, as affirmed in the Bible (1 Corinthians 11:7)? In this new mechanistic, atomistic world of matter in motion, where might God and the immaterial soul fit in? Where freedom and justice? And where, therefore, heaven and hell?

The three seventeenth century philosophers who rose to the challenge of formulating a comprehensive metaphysics were René Descartes (1596-1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716).

Leibniz and the Principles of Logic

Leibniz built his system of monads on just two fundamental principles, the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason, which are rooted in Aristotle’s Organon. The principle of non-contradiction states that a proposition and its negation cannot simultaneously be true; therefore, if the one is true, the other must be false, and vice versa. The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a reason or cause, even when those reasons cannot be known to us. There are no brute facts. Later philosophers, such as Hume, Kant, and Hegel, would not deviate an inch from these two sacrosanct principles of logic, established by Aristotle and Leibniz. Nietzsche, with his perspectivist theory of truth, would be the first to do so.

The Parable of the Madman

In The Gay Science (1882), which consists of 383 aphorisms, Nietzsche pulls the rug on the projects of his predecessors to rescue the old order, that is, to somehow reaffirm, through abstract logic and elaborate metaphysics, the place of God and the dignity of man. Nietzsche could not have been more categorical about this: God, he says, is dead.

The Gay Science is especially remembered for Aphorism 125, the so-called Parable of the Madman, announcing the death of God under the weight of reason and science. In the Parable of the Madman, a madman lights a lantern in the bright morning hours, runs into the marketplace, and cries incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!” When the people laugh and jeer at him, he jumps into their midst and pierces them with his eyes: “Whither is God? … I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the seas? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?”

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the din of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. [Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet!]

Later that same day, the madman forces his way into several churches to strike up a requiem for God. When dragged out and called to account, he always replies, “What after all are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?” 

Was sind denn diese Kirchen noch, wenn sie nicht die Gräber und Grabmäler Gottes sind?

In response to the death of God, Nietzsche advocates a so-called “gay science”: a skeptical, light-hearted, artistic approach to life.

What Nietzsche Meant by the Death of God

God is dead. And we have killed him. But who or what are we going to replace him with?

While we wait for the enormity of what we have done to sink in, God’s shadow lingers on, not only in our empty churches but in our groundless morals and values. But what are these towering edifices without their fount, reason, and justification? Merely the “tombs and sepulchres of God”.

Instead of facing up to this crisis, we linger in a state of denial and false hope, like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, who lend their lives structure and meaning by waiting for Godot.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) had been the first openly atheistic philosopher. His response to the demise of the old world order had been a “passive nihilism” or “will to nothingness”. But for Nietzsche, it is only when the nihilism is overcome that life and culture can be reborn.

If Nietzsche sought to accelerate and precipitate a crisis of meaning, it was only to hasten humanity’s arrival into the sunlit uplands that lay beyond it.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.