The best books are those that tell you what you already know, but didn’t know that you knew.—Neel Burton, psychiatrist and philosopher, University of Oxford
There is more to being human than the absence of disorder.
We live in an era of rapid change and growing uncertainty. Many of the structures that once gave us identity, meaning, and direction have been destabilised. More than ever, we must answer life’s great questions for ourselves. How should we live, love, work, suffer, and die?
I’ve been searching for answers across psychology and philosophy, literature and history, mythology and ancient wisdom—and sometimes in less obvious places, like a bottle of wine. The deepest truths often emerge where disciplines meet.
I hope you find something here that speaks to you.
If you’re new here, these are good places to begin.
Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus, by John William Waterhouse (1891).
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Many years ago, I went through a phase at cocktail parties. Whenever someone asked me, ‘So, what do you do?’, I would reply, ‘I’m a magician.’ I kept a straight face, but was laughing inside.
The word ‘magic’ derives from the Latin, the Greek, the Old Persian, and, ultimately, the Proto-Indo-European magh, ‘to help, to be able, to be powerful’, from which also derive the words ‘almighty’, ‘maharaja’, ‘main’, ‘may’, and… ‘machine’. We come full circle with Clarke’s Third Law, which states: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’
Magic, like religion, is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Though it has, effectively, been banished from the land, still it surfaces in thought and language, in phrases such as ‘I must be cursed’ and ‘He’s under your spell’; in children’s stories and other fiction; and in psychological processes such as undoing, which involves thinking a thought or carrying out an act in an attempt to negate a previous uncomfortable thought or act.
Examples of undoing include the absent father who periodically returns to spoil and smother his children, and the angry wife who throws a plate at her husband and then tries to ‘make it up’ by smothering him in kisses. The absent father and angry wife are not merely trying to make amends for their behaviour, but also, as if by magic, to ‘erase it from the record’.
Another example of undoing is the man who damages a friend’s prospects and then, a few days later, turns up at his door bearing a small gift. Rituals such as confession and penitence are, at least on some level, socially condoned and codified forms of undoing.
Even if the world doesn’t work by magic, our mind often does—and projects its thinking back onto the world.
What Magic Is
‘Magic’ is difficult to define, and its definition remains a matter of debate and controversy. One way of understanding it is by comparing and contrasting it to religion on the one hand and to science on the other.
On the assumption that certain entities can exert a hidden influence on one another, magic is a method of acting in the world through sheer power of will. The notion that the universe is pregnant with subtle connexions is supported by, of all things, the study of mathematics, and it can sometimes seem, when a hidden number or relationship suddenly becomes apparent, that maths is at only one remove from magic.
Magic is often considered a gift, such that some people have it to a high degree and others, the muggles, barely at all, perhaps because their will is weak, unsettled, or untrained, or because magic does not run in their family—for like madness, or kingship, magic is often hereditary. Whatever the case, people without magic are usually portrayed as lacking in cognitive faculties such as insight, intuition, and imagination, and would not see possibility or irony or poetry even if it slapped them in the face.
Kinds of Magic: White and Black, High and Low
Magic is sometimes divided into white and black, and high and low. Black magic is selfish and does not consider other people, whereas white magic is altruistic or selfless, and seeks in general to maintain or restore the equilibrium of the universe. The magician’s psychological makeup determines what kind of magic, white or black, he or she is able or likely to wield.
Speaking of equilibrium, deflecting objects and especially people from their natural or pre-ordained course is likely to have significant repercussions, which is why, aside from the mental effort and exhaustion, the use of magic is often said to come at a price, either to the magician, his or her client (for want of a better term), or a third party. The equilibrium must, ultimately, be maintained. Drinking wine, I often say, is like using magic: there’s always a price to pay—if only the price of the bottle.
The magician is, in effect, a mediator of energies. Low magic involves drawing up energies from the earth, from plants and minerals and so on, and is more the province of common folk. High magic involves drawing down raw, unprocessed energies from the sun and sky, which requires complex ritual and is more the province of an educated or trained elite. Both high magic and low magic can be either white or black.
In the popular imagination, low magic has often been associated with women—the witch, wise woman, or herbalist—while high magic has more often been associated with men: the mage, wizard, sorcerer, or alchemist. This distinction may owe less to magic than to history: learned magic required literacy, education, and access to books and institutions, privileges that were overwhelmingly reserved for men. Notable exceptions include Circe and her niece Medea, two of the most powerful sorceresses in Greek mythology—but Circe was a goddess, and Medea a granddaughter of the sun god Helios.
The magician cultivates his or her will through concentration—acquiring charisma in the process—and focuses it through ritual such as ceremony, chant, or spell. Ritual also helps to create the right atmosphere and attitude for magic to take hold. Words, in particular, can exert a power all of their own. In the language of Ancient Egypt, the sound of a word had a magical power which complemented its meaning, a view of language which we still retain when we talk of ‘spelling’ a word, or visit a psychotherapist. And while words can change the world, getting them wrong, that is, misspelling, can have disastrous consequences. If they had told us at school that we were learning magic, we would have paid a lot more attention.
When Magicians Were Priests, Doctors, and Philosophers
Historically, the priest, the physician, the magician, and the scholar might have been one and the same person: the shaman, the sorcerer.
In the West, pre-Socratics such as Pythagoras and Empedocles moonlighted as mystics and miracle workers—or perhaps, since the term ‘philosophy’ is held to have been invented by Pythagoras, moonlighted as philosophers. Pythagoras claimed to have lived four lives and to remember them all in great detail, and once recognised the cry of his dead friend in the yelping of a puppy. After his death, the Pythagoreans deified him, and attributed him with a golden thigh and the gift of bilocation.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates argues that there are, in fact, two kinds of madness: one resulting from human illness, but the other arising from a divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour. This divine form of madness, says Socrates, has four parts: love, poetry, inspiration, and mysticism, which is the particular gift of Dionysus.
While Socrates, in some sense the father of logic, seldom claimed to have any real knowledge, he did claim to have a daimonion or ‘divine something’, an inner voice or intuition that prevented him from making grave mistakes such as getting involved in politics, or fleeing Athens after being sentenced to death: ‘This is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic…’
Far from being a thing of the distant past, this trope of the philosopher-sorcerer outlived the sack of Athens and the fall of Rome, and perdured well into the Enlightenment. The economist John Maynard Keynes, upon buying a trove of Isaac Newton’s papers, observed that Newton and the physicists of his time were ‘not the first of the scientists, but the last of the sorcerers’. Other notable later occultists include Giordano Bruno, Nostradamus, Paracelsus, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Arthur Conan Doyle, father of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes.
Magic vs Religion
Yet since antiquity, the West has had an uncomfortable relationship with magic, usually regarding it as something foreign and ‘Eastern’. In Plato’s Meno, Meno compares Socrates to the flat torpedo fish, which torpifies or numbs all those who come near it: ‘And I think that you are very wise in not [leaving Athens], for if you did in other places as you do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician.’
For the Greeks as for the Romans, magic represented an improper and potentially subversive expression of religion. After centuries of contra-legislation, in 357 CE, the Christian Roman emperor Constantius II finally banned it outright:
No one shall consult a haruspex, a diviner, or a soothsayer, and wicked confessions made to augurs and prophets must cease. Chaldeans, magicians, and others who are commonly called malefactors on account of the enormity of their crimes shall no longer practice their infamous arts.
The Bible, too, inveighs against magic, in more than a hundred places, for example, picked almost at random:
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. —Exodus 22:18 (KJV)
Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God. —Leviticus 19:31
But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death. —Revelation 21:8
Early Christians associated magic with mythopoeic thought, in which all of nature is full of gods and spirits, and therefore with paganism and, by extension, with demons. During the Reformation, Protestants accused the Church of Rome, with its superstitions, relics, and exorcisms, of being ‘more magic than religion’—a charge that transferred all the more to non-Christian peoples, and that, notoriously, served as a justification for large-scale persecution, colonisation, and Christianisation.
So, what exactly is the difference between magic and religion? It is often held that magic is older than religion, or that religion was born out of magic, but it may be that they co-existed, and were not distinguished.
Both magic and religion pertain to the sacred sphere, to things removed from everyday life. But, compared to religion, magic does not split so sharply between the natural and the supernatural, the earthly and the divine, the fallen and the blessed. And whereas magic involves harnessing the world to the will, religion involves subjugating the will to the world. In the words of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘religion consists in a humanisation of natural laws, and magic in a naturalisation of human actions’.
Hence, magic tends to be about specific problems, and to involve private rites and rituals. Religion, in contrast, tends towards the bigger picture, and to involve communal worship and belonging. ‘Magic’, said the sociologist Émile Durkheim, ‘does not result in binding together those who adhere to it, nor in uniting them into a group leading a common life. There is no Church of magic.’
So, one hypothesis is that, as man gained increasing control over nature, magic, as it came to be called, lost ground to religion, which, being communal and centralised, evolved a hierarchy that sought to suppress those practices that threatened its dogma and dominance.
Magic vs Science
But now religion is, in its turn, on the decline—in favour of science. What is science? Within academia, there are, in fact, no clear or reliable criteria for distinguishing a science from a non-science. For example, is ‘political science’ really a science? What might be said is that all sciences share certain assumptions which underpin the scientific method—in particular, that there is an objective reality governed by uniform laws, and that this reality can be discovered by systematic observation.
But, as I argue in my book, Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, every scientific paradigm that has come and gone is now deemed to have been false, inaccurate, or incomplete, and it would be ignorant or arrogant to assume that our current ones might amount to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
The philosopher Paul Feyerabend went so far as to claim that there is no such thing as ‘a’ or ‘the’ scientific method: behind the façade, ‘anything goes’, and, as a form of knowledge, science is no more privileged than magic or religion.
More than that, science has come to occupy the same place in the human psyche as religion once did. Although science began as a liberating movement, it grew dogmatic and repressive, more of an ideology than a rational method that leads to ineluctable progress.
To quote Feyerabend:
Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness.
Whatever one makes of Feyerabend’s provocation, science differs from magic in its method. Magic begins with hidden sympathies; science with verifiable hypotheses. Yet, once the human mind gets involved, the boundary between the two becomes less clear, and Newton spent more of himself on his secret alchemy than on his public science.
So, Does Magic Work?
So far, I’ve been talking as if magic works. But does it work, and, if so, how?
Unless one broadens the definition of magic to include cognitive faculties such as insight, intuition, and imagination, or simply peak performance, magic does not work, or, at least, not in an immediate, instrumental sense. But magic might work indirectly, by focussing the mind and energies on a particular problem, or through a mechanism akin to the placebo effect or psychoneuroimmunology.
The term ‘placebo effect’ derives from the Latin placere (‘to please’) and refers to the tendency for a remedy to ‘work’ simply because it is expected to do so. In essence, people who associate taking a remedy with improvement may come to expect improvement if they take a remedy, even if the ‘remedy’ in question is no more than an inert substance, or a substance that has no therapeutic effect but only adverse effects that can be interpreted as indicative of a therapeutic effect. It may be that the expectation alone suffices to mimic the effect of the remedy, and brain imaging studies indicate that, in some cases, remedies and their placebos activate the very same mechanisms in the nervous system.
Remedies that are perceived to be more potent have a stronger placebo effect. Perceptions of potency are influenced by factors such as the remedy’s size, shape, colour, route of administration, and general availability. A brightly coloured injection administered by a silver-haired professor of medicine can be expected to have a much stronger placebo effect, and therefore a much stronger overall effect, than the unremarkable over-the-counter tablet recommended by the teenager next door. When doctors in England lost their white coat, they lost much more than a coat.
This highlights the importance of the psychological, social, and cultural context in which a treatment or intervention is administered, and, more particularly, the significance of the therapeutic act or ritual. If the practitioner, the patient, and their society believe in the magic, then the magic is real by the very force of that shared belief.
No wonder the magician, the priest, and the healer used to be one and the same person—and, in many societies, still is. Like religion, magic may represent a response to anxiety, distress, and a feeling of inadequacy or impotence, especially in the face of natural disaster. And like religion, it may represent a spiritual path, akin, perhaps, to a martial art, which also involves concentrating the mind, channelling instinctual drives, and leveraging forces.
So, does magic work? Yes and no.
Magic as a Mirror of the Mind
Whether it works or not, magic is an external projection of the human psyche, an external projection of our internal or psychological truth, which is why it features so prominently in fiction. Fairy tales often begin with a formulation such as, ‘Once upon a time in dreamland’, and magic is that dreamland. Like dreams, magic makes use of condensed symbols, and like dreams, it is a kind of wish fulfilment.
In the same vein, magic might be compared with mental states such as psychosis and neurosis, which, like dreams, can also involve condensed symbols and wish fulfilment. Sigmund Freud linked magical rituals and spells with neurotic and obsessional thought processes, and there are some parallels with compulsive acts, which are a response to obsessional thoughts or rules that must be rigidly applied.
Magic is, arguably, on a spectrum with madness, and magical thinking is especially prominent in schizotypy, or schizotypal personality disorder, which predisposes to schizophrenia—and, indeed, to shamanism. As I’ve said, Plato distinguished between madness resulting from human illness and madness arising from a divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says that this divinely inspired madness has four forms: mysticism, inspiration, poetry, and love. Love, according to Socrates, is not a god, as most people think, but a great spirit (daimon) that intermediates between gods and men.
Similarly, in The Sorcerer and His Magic (1963), the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that magic is a mediator between normal thought processes (common sense, reason, science…), which suffer from a marked deficit of meaning, and pathological thought processes, which abound with meaning:
From any non-scientific perspective (and here we can exclude no society), pathological and normal thought processes are complementary rather than opposed. In a universe which it strives to understand but whose dynamics it cannot fully control, normal thought continually seeks the meaning of things which refuse to reveal their significance. So-called pathological thought, on the other hand, overflows with emotional interpretations and overtones, in order to supplement an otherwise deficient reality… We might borrow from linguistics and say that so-called normal thought always suffers from a deficit of meaning, whereas so-called pathological thought (in at least some of its manifestations) disposes of a plethora of meaning. Through collective participation in shamanistic curing, a balance is established between these two complementary situations.
The function of magic may not be to explain the world or act upon it so much as to imbue it with meaning. Science can tell us why an eclipse occurs; magic can tell us what the eclipse might mean. The first is a question of cause, the second of significance—and man, uniquely, is an animal in search of meaning. Which is why animals may have pointed ears, but never pointed hats.
Why We Miss Magic
Today, magic, like mythopoeic thought, is seen as ‘primitive’, and has largely been relegated to fiction and illusionism. But as a result, people have come to associate magic with delight and wonder; and with the retreat of Christianity, at least from Europe, a growing number are returning to some form of paganism as a path to personal and spiritual development.
A common trope in fantasy fiction is the ‘thinning’ of magic: magic is fading or has been banished from the land, which is caught in a perpetual winter or otherwise in deathly or depressive decline, and the hero is called upon to rescue and restore the life-giving forces of old.
It is easy to draw the parallel with our own world, in which magic has been progressively driven out, first by religion, which over the centuries became increasingly repressive of magic, and latterly by science with its zero-tolerance.
The sociologist Max Weber referred to it as the ‘disenchantment of the world’. The more completely the world can be calculated, predicted, and explained, the less room it leaves for mystery, correspondence, and intrinsic meaning. Although we have gained enormously in knowledge and control, something may have been lost in the exchange—and by gaining control, we have, ironically, lost control of the planet.
Some of my regular readers may have wondered why I turned my pen to so apparently frivolous a subject as magic. But we now know that magic is much more profound than it may at first seem. Aside from its links with madness and with healing, it is a mirror of the mind, and even, like love or beauty, and science and religion, a mode of belonging to the world.
Perhaps this is why magic has survived every attempt to banish it. Though we may no longer believe in sorcerers and spells, we continue to fall under charms, break curses, tempt fate, thank our lucky stars, and search for signs. We still speak the language of magic because that is the oldest and truest part of us.
That is why, when we read fantasy fiction, it is always for the side of the old magic that we root, for a time when everything shone brightly and we didn’t have to go around begging for meaning.
Scipio looks down upon the Earth from the Milky Way. From this far away, even Rome looks provincial.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
At its height, the Roman Empire brought most of Europe, together with large parts of North Africa and the Near East, into a single political and economic space. Roads and sea lanes connected distant provinces, trade flourished, and the Pax Romana, or ‘Roman Peace’, brought long periods of peace, security, and prosperity to peoples more accustomed to being at one another’s throats.
Unlike the European Union, Rome created its union, in the main, by conquest, rather than by cooperation and the voluntary pooling of sovereignty. That’s two thousand years of progress for you. But the EU and the Roman Empire enlarged the political community beyond the borders of individual peoples, with profound consequences for how people lived—and, in time, for how they thought about themselves.
By the Late Roman Republic, the world had never been more cosmopolitan. Stoics such as Panaetius, who shuttled back and forth from Athens to Rome, Rutilius, who stood up for the inhabitants of Asia against his own countrymen, and the Syrian Posidonius, who moved from Athens to Rhodes to start a school that became the empire’s stopping place, were not Greeks or Romans so much as citizens of the world.
The First Citizens of the World
This broadening of horizons had begun well before Rome. In the fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great built an empire that took in the already multinational Persian Empire and stretched into India.
As Alexander battled his way to the Hyphasis River, back home in Greece another boundary was being broken, not, this time, from some palace or military tent but from an empty jar. Upon being asked where he came from, Diogenes the Cynic declared, ‘I am a citizen of the world (Greek, cosmopolites)’. This is the first recorded use of the term that became our ‘cosmopolitan’. In many parts of Britain or America, to call yourself a citizen of the world would be asking for trouble. In a Greek world still organised around close-knit city-states, it was a truly radical and dangerous claim.
Diogenes inspired Crates of Thebes, a wealthy man who abandoned his fortune to follow in the Cynic path. Crates in turn taught Zeno of Citium, who went on to found Zenonism—better known as Stoicism. The Cynic ideals of living according to nature, freedom from external goods, and cosmopolitanism thus passed, in modified form, into one of the most influential movements of the ancient world.
‘The eagle,’ said the Stoic teacher Musonius, quoting Euripides, ‘can fly through all the air, and a noble man has all the earth as his fatherland.’ The wise, argued Musonius, can make themselves at home anywhere, so that exile, to them, is not the punishment that it may seem. Indeed, one of several advantages of exile is that we are not dragged into political service by a country that only seems to be ours, or bothered by people who only seem to be our friends, or waylaid by petty relatives. Musonius points out that the Stoic Rutilius flourished so fulsomely in exile that he refused Sulla’s invitation to return to Rome.
Musonius taught Epictetus. When he was young, the future emperor Marcus Aurelius had the greatest men of his age for tutors, but it was a dog-eared copy of Epictetus that made the greatest impression upon him. Still, today, it is difficult to read Marcus’ Meditations without hearing the echo of Epictetus… and, ultimately, Diogenes: ‘My city and state are Rome… But as a human being? The world. So for me, ‘good’ can only mean what’s good for both communities.’
The Philosophical Basis of Cosmopolitanism
Stoic cosmopolitanism is rooted in the belief that all human beings form part of the same organism and that this organism, like each of its parts, is shot through with God. It is true that some people behave like cancers, but even they, if only they knew it, are doing the work of God, or the universe. Just as our eyes, ears, and teeth each have a role to play in our body, so we, too, each have a role to play in society—even if it is only to serve as a warning to others.
‘Kindly remember,’ said Seneca, ‘that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.’
To live selfishly is fundamentally self-defeating. To feel alive and happy, we need to have a sense of working with others, for others—because, like ants and bees, that is the kind of creature that we are. If we do not contribute to our community, we will feel disconnected and depressed. In a word, we will feel dead—and, in truth, might as well be.
Whatever good we do, said Marcus Aurelius, we should do it quietly, without expecting anything in return, ‘as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.’ Our reward will be our own, and much greater than any wealth or honour that might or might not be bestowed upon us: to lead and to have led a good life, to do and to have done what we were born to do.
What brings no benefit to the hive brings none to the bee. —Marcus Aurelius
From Rome to Europe
In 212 CE, Rome extended citizenship to almost every free inhabitant of the empire. But for the Stoics, citizenship had no frontier: every human being belonged to the same community. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe divided and redivided into kingdoms, empires, and nation-states whose rivalries repeatedly ended in war. During the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), to take an example, the population of the Germanic lands fell from 21 million to 13 million.
After the Second World War, Europeans returned to an ancient problem: how to belong to something larger without ceasing to be themselves. The European Union offered a new answer. It brought together nations that had fought one another for centuries, contributing to an extraordinary period of peace, security, and prosperity. Unlike Rome, it did so not by conquest but by cooperation.
The importance of European unity becomes clearest when it begins to fracture. Brexit removed one of Europe’s largest powers from the Union. Six years after the referendum, Putin invaded Ukraine, apparently calculating, among other things, that a divided West would fail to respond decisively. Whether Brexit entered into that calculation is impossible to know, but the timing is at least worth noticing.
Perhaps the EU’s most interesting achievement is psychological. A Frenchman can be French and European, just as Marcus Aurelius could be Roman and a citizen of the world.
The Stoics would have gone further still, emphasising that, as well as French and European, the Frenchman was also, and above all, a citizen of the world.
The Stoics sometimes arrived at this insight by looking down upon human affairs as though from the heavens. Marcus Aurelius repeatedly adopts this ‘view from above’ in the Meditations. In Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, Scipio looks back upon the Earth from the Milky Way and is struck by how small the Roman Empire appears. From this far away, even Rome looks provincial.
What about the view from below? When we imagine an alien planet, we rarely imagine it to be divided into countries. We do not even stop to think: surely, the aliens would not be so backward.
Continue Exploring
If this article spoke to you, you might look into Stoic Stories, a comprehensive account of Stoic philosophy presented through its greatest stories.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
The Epicureans put pleasure at the centre of their philosophy. For centuries, they presented the main alternative to Stoicism as a comprehensive way of life. With an appealing message elevated and propagated by poets such as Horace, Lucretius, and Virgil, Epicureanism vied with Stoicism for the hearts and minds of Roman elites.
So, who was Epicurus, and what did he have to teach us?
The Garden School
Epicurus of Samos (341–270 BCE) and Zeno of Citium (the founder of Stoicism) were almost exact contemporaries in Athens but may never have met. A few years before Zeno began teaching, Epicurus founded a school of philosophy in a garden outside the city’s Dipylon gates. This school, called ‘the Garden’, dedicated itself to attaining happiness through the exercise of reason, and, in a highly sexist and stratified society, admitted both women and slaves.
Life in the Garden was not as you might imagine. Epicurus was content with bread and water and famously asked a friend to send him a little cheese so that, when he wished, he might feast. Far more important than luxury was friendship. ‘Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life,’ he wrote, ‘by far the most important is friendship.’ Thus, the Garden was more of a live-in community, or fellowship, than a school—influenced, no doubt, by Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum.
Although the most famous, Epicurus was not the first philosopher to make pleasure the highest good. A century earlier, Aristippus of Cyrene, a student of Socrates, had advocated a more immediate and sensual form of hedonism. The irony is that Aristippus lived rather more like our idea of an Epicurean, while the moderate Epicurus lived more like our idea of an Aristotelian—or simply our idea of a philosopher.
Pleasure as the Highest Good
According to Epicurus, reason leads to the conclusion that pleasure is good and pain bad, and that pleasure and pain are the ultimate measures of good and bad. This has often been misconstrued as a rampant call for unbridled hedonism, rather than the absence of physical and mental suffering that Epicurus actually had in mind. He referred to freedom from bodily pain as aponia, and to freedom from mental disturbance as ataraxia. His highest pleasure, then, looked more like tranquillity than ecstasy.
Indeed, Epicurus explicitly warned against overindulgence, since overindulgence so often leads to pain. ‘The pleasant life,’ he wrote in the Letter to Menoeceus (the most important of his three surviving letters), ‘is produced not by a string of drinking bouts and revelries, nor by the enjoyment of boys and women, nor by fish and other items on an expensive menu, but by sober reasoning.’
Pleasure is the highest good, and all else that is good is so only by virtue of the immediate or deferred pleasure that it can procure. The behaviour of infants confirms that human beings instinctively pursue pleasure. All our actions, including those that may be construed as virtuous or altruistic, are, in the final analysis, aimed at obtaining pleasure for ourselves. Just as we can instantly sense whether something is hot or cold, or colourful or dull, so we can instantly sense whether something is pleasurable or painful.
Even so, not everything that is pleasurable ought to be pursued, and not everything that is painful ought to be avoided. Instead, a kind of hedonistic calculus ought to be applied to determine which things are most likely to result, over time, in the greatest pleasure and least pain—and it is above all with this arithmetics of pleasure that people struggle.
Lesson 1: The Two Types of Pleasure
To help us along, Epicurus began by distinguishing between two types of pleasure, ‘moving pleasures’ and ‘static pleasures’. Moving pleasures involve the satisfying of a desire—for example, tucking into a meal when hungry. Static pleasures, on the other hand, involve the state of having had a desire satisfied—for example, feeling sated after having eaten the meal. According to Epicurus, static pleasures are better than moving pleasures because they free us from the pain of need or want.
Lesson 2: The Three Classes of Desire
Because pleasure often arises from the satisfaction of desire and pain from its frustration, Epicurus also distinguished between three classes of desire: natural and necessary desires, such as those for food and shelter, which are hard to eliminate but naturally limited and both easy and highly pleasurable to satisfy; natural but non-necessary desires such as those for luxury food and housing, which offer ever diminishing returns; and vain desires such as those for fame and fortune, which, being inculcated by society, are not naturally limited and neither easy nor highly pleasurable to satisfy.
Epicurus advised that desires of the first class ought to be satisfied, desires of the second class can be satisfied if doing so is easy, but desires of the third class should be entirely eliminated. ‘If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.’ Modern life has multiplied vain desires beyond anything that Epicurus could have imagined. The problem with vain desires, such as acquiring the next thing or gaining another thousand followers, is not merely that they are more difficult to satisfy, but that they have no natural point of satisfaction.
Lesson 3: The Two Greatest Fears
Epicurus divided pleasures and pains into physical and mental, and argued that fear of the future, especially fear of the gods and fear of death, are the greatest obstacles to happiness.
Although the gods exist, they have absolutely no concern for, or even awareness of, humankind. Indeed, for the gods to involve themselves in the menial matters of men would be to perturb the supreme happiness and tranquillity that characterises and defines them. Instead of fearing the gods, we would do better to emulate them in their supreme removal and detachment.
Neither should we fear death, and this for two main reasons. First, Epicurus, drawing on Democritus, held that everything in the universe, including the human body and mind, is ultimately composed of atoms. Our death entails the disintegration of both body and mind and the re-dispersion of their atoms. As there is no longer any person to be troubled, death cannot trouble us after we are dead. And if death cannot trouble us after we are dead, neither should it trouble us while we are still alive. Second, the eternity that comes before our birth is not regarded as an evil; therefore, neither should the eternity that comes after our death. These two arguments are early formulations, respectively, of the ‘no subject of harm’ argument and the ‘symmetry’ argument, which have both, more or less, withstood the test of time.
Epicurus’ Own Death
Epicurus died at the age of 72 from the complications of renal colic (kidney stones), which is associated with one of the most intense of all bodily pains. On the last day of his life, he purportedly penned this letter to his friend and follower, the political grandee Idomeneus, which is nothing if not a testament to the overriding powers of philosophy:
I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life. For I have been attacked by a painful inability to urinate, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which comes from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplation, counterbalances all these afflictions. And I beg you to take care of the children of Metrodorus [Idomeneus’ brother-in-law], in a manner worthy of the devotion shown by the young man to me, and to philosophy.
The philosopher of pleasure died in agony—and called it a happy day.
Some three centuries later, Seneca, in his Letters to Lucilius, compared his relationship with Lucilius to that between Epicurus and Idomeneus. ‘Who would have known of Idomeneus,’ he asks, ‘had not the philosopher thus engraved his name in those letters of his? All the grandees and satraps, even the king himself … are sunk in deep oblivion.’
When all is forgotten, only the humble philosopher will be remembered.
Both Plato and the Katha Upanishad compared the human soul to a chariot.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Plato was a master of metaphor. He compared the soul to a chariot and the state to a ship at sea. He compared his teacher Socrates both to a gadfly and to a midwife.
But the most famous of all his analogies is the Allegory of the Cave, in which he compares unphilosophical people to prisoners who, having spent their entire lives in a cave, are unable to imagine a world beyond.
How exactly do allegories work? An allegory (Greek, ‘a speaking about something else’) is a complete and cohesive narrative, for example, a myth, or George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that seems to be about one thing but is actually about another. Or, to put it differently, it is a story with two (or more) meanings: a superficial, literal meaning, and a deeper, figurative one.
Allegories are often described as ‘extended metaphors’, so one way of understanding the allegory is by understanding the smaller metaphor. Whereas an allegory is a complete narrative that seems to be about one thing but is actually about another, a metaphor is a sentence or short segment that equates two seemingly unrelated things. For example, Solomon 2:1-2:
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
The first sentence consists of two metaphors (‘I am the rose of Sharon’ and ‘I am the lily of the valleys’), and the second sentence consists of a simile.
Metaphor, Simile, and Analogy
What is the difference between a metaphor and a simile? In two words, not much. Whereas a metaphor says that something is something else, a simile says that it is like or as something else.
Simile might be considered a type of metaphor, as might also analogy, which involves drawing a comparison for the purpose of explaining or clarifying an idea, for example, if I say, ‘Scientists are as blind to their own paradigms as fish to water.’
In fact, the second sentence from the Solomon (‘As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters’) is more properly an analogy than a simple simile. But my broader point is this: they are close relatives and their boundaries are porous.
Metaphor and simile are figures of speech, which are a type of rhetorical device (also called, depending on context, literary or poetic device). They are both forms of analogy, which can be purely cognitive as well as rhetorical—in the mind and in the mouth, or in the mind only.
Metaphor and the Structure of Thought
Unlike other rhetorical devices, such as alliteration and resonance, metaphor is not merely ornamental, but a cognitively respectable way of knowing.
Metaphor and analogy enable an abstract or unfamiliar idea to be grasped in terms of a more concrete or familiar one. What’s more, the superimposition or juxtaposition of two superficially dissimilar ideas brings out any hidden or secondary correspondences between the two. This is not unlike formal deductive logic, which marries two ideas to give birth to a third—and is, in fact, a lot more common.
Logicians and their students prefer to focus on deduction and induction, but it may be that analogy is the principal form of human reasoning.
Faced with something new, the mind reaches for something familiar: What is this like? It then carries the structure of the familiar over to the unfamiliar, enabling us to make inferences that it may not otherwise have made.
We reason by analogy whenever we apply the lessons of one situation to another. A historian reaches for the past to illuminate the present, a doctor compares a new presentation to previous ones, a lawyer argues from precedent. Darwin reasoned from artificial selection to natural selection. In each case, analogy helps us connect the familiar to the novel.
In the words of Aristotle, whom Dante described as ‘the master of those who know’:
It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.
What Makes for a Good Metaphor
The force of a metaphor depends above all upon its freshness and originality, in some sense, upon its disruptive qualities.
If a metaphor is overused, it becomes a cliché, and some metaphors are so tired that they are no longer visualised or even thought of as metaphors. For instance, in English (as opposed to, say, Spanish), we tend to talk of time in terms of space and distance, even if we are no longer aware of doing so: ‘I won’t be long’, ‘Let’s look at the weather for the week ahead’, ‘His drinking finally caught up with him.’ Metaphors such as these that are no longer visualised are called dead metaphors, and language is full of them.
Indeed, an argument could be made that all language is either onomatopoeic (or imitative, like ‘cough’, ‘splash’, and ‘thud’) or metaphorical. After all, what else could it be? The word ‘metaphor’ derives from the Greek for ‘a carrying over’, so it is itself a metaphor.
In its broadest, Aristotelian sense, metaphor is the carrying over of meaning from one thing to another on the basis of some perceived relation between them. Metaphor is a large family, including simile, analogy, metonymy, synecdoche, and more. Here’s a metaphor, or arguably a simile, by Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces:
I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer…it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.
Unlike tired or dead metaphors, fresh, vivid metaphors like this one are experienced as beautiful and pleasurable. Beautiful because they are so concise and condensed. Pleasurable because, like humour, which they often contain, they exercise our cognitive range and flexibility. And like humour, they can be a little playful, a little naughty, and a little dangerous.
In the words, again, of Aristotle:
To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people, and words signify something, so whatever words create knowledge in us are the pleasantest.
The Most Brilliant Metaphors
Now back to the allegory. Like the metaphor, the allegory serves to convey abstract and at times subversive ideas in more concrete and condensed forms that then become symbolic of the ideas, making them easier to reveal or conceal or otherwise play with.
When an abstract notion is given the form of a person or animate being, this is known as personification. Narcissus, for example, is a personification of vanity and self-absorption, and Icarus of hubris. The Mahabharata, the Iliad of India (although a lot longer), presents three approaches to moral problems, personified by Bhima (brute force, ego, desire), Yudhishthira (rigid moral law, deontology), and Arjuna (virtue ethics, moral indeterminacy), who, wavering between the paths of his two elder brothers, is forced to make difficult, existential choices.
An important advantage of the allegory is that it can be approached on more than one level, meaning that people can enjoy it as it suits them, and see in it as much or as little as they are prepared to see—or indeed, whatever they wish to see, bending the allegory to the curve, or twist, of their minds.
What the Odyssey Can Teach Us About Wine—and Drinking
Odysseus offers Polyphemus the wine of Maron. After a design by John Flaxman.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Wine flows through the Odyssey. Homer mentions it well over a hundred times, and even supplies the first recorded tasting note in history. He loves wine so much he sees it on the face of the sea: the famous ‘wine-dark sea’.
But wine in the Odyssey is far more than a drink, or even a poetic image. It is a measure of civilisation. How people drink, and whether they drink at all, tells us what kind of people they are.
What Odysseus Most Loves
Many people imagine that the Odysseyunfolds in straightforward chronological order, from Troy to Ithaca. In fact, most of the adventures for which it is famous—the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis—are narrated retrospectively, as Odysseus recounts them to the Phaeacians.
But before beginning his story, Odysseus tells King Alcinous and the Phaeacian court what, to him, constitutes the happiest scene imaginable:
For I say that there is no fulfilment more delightful than when joy possesses a whole people, and the banqueters in the halls sit in rows listening to a singer, while beside them the tables are laden with bread and meat, and the wine-bearer draws wine from the mixing bowl and carries it round and pours it into their cups. This seems to my mind the fairest thing there is.
This is the very scene before him. It is a revealing picture of the good life, three thousand years ago. Wine is not drunk alone, or merely for intoxication. It is shared, with food, music, conversation, and storytelling. And the adventures that Odysseus is about to relate will show what happens when those customs break down.
The Wine That Bested a Giant
Odysseus begins with the Cicones at Ismarus. After sacking their city, he orders his men to leave immediately. But they refuse. Instead, they remain on the shore slaughtering livestock and drinking wine. ‘There,’ Homer tells us, ‘much wine was drunk.’ While they are feasting, the surviving Cicones summon reinforcements. They counterattack, and Odysseus loses six men from every ship. Already, wine-drinking has become a test of self-command.
One assumes they were drinking the local wine—from what is now PGI Ismaros, in Thrace. At the heart of this wine region is the ancient town of Maroneia, named for Maron, the legendary priest of Apollo—and in later tradition, grandson of Dionysus. During the raid, Odysseus had spared Maron, together with his wife and child. In gratitude, Maron gave him gold, a silver mixing bowl, and twelve jars of an extraordinary wine.
It is here that Homer gives us the first tasting note:
He gave me twelve jars of wine, sweet and unmixed, a divine drink. No servant or maid in the house knew of it, but only [Maron] himself, his dear wife, and one housekeeper. And whenever they drank this honey-sweet red wine, he would fill one cup and pour it into twenty measures of water, and from the mixing bowl there rose a marvellous sweet fragrance: then indeed it would have been no pleasure to hold back.
Admittedly, Homer is not using the WSET tasting template. But I think the examiners would be satisfied that this is no rustic plonk.
Odysseus takes a skin of the wine when he goes to investigate the Cyclopes. The Cyclops Polyphemus, though a shepherd, is not a social or civilised creature. He has generous grapes—later tradition would place him on the volcanic slopes of Mount Etna—and milk and cheese, but no wine. So when Odysseus pours him some of Maron’s wine, he drinks it neat and is overwhelmed by it. When he asks for more, Odysseus obliges him three times, until he slumbers. That’s when the red-hot olive stake is driven into his single eye. It was not merely by his cunning that Odysseus defeated the vastly stronger Cyclops, but by wine, and by turning the monster’s own savagery against him.
The Sorceress’s Wine
Several adventures later, Odysseus and his remaining men reach the island of Circe. The sorceress welcomes a group of them into her house and feeds them a mixture of cheese, barley meal, honey, and Pramnian wine, a strong, celebrated wine of uncertain origin—interlaced with amnesic drugs. As they gulp it down, she strikes them with her wand, and they are transformed into pigs. (Circe is the original sorceress, and why Western witches and sorcerers carry a wand.)
Men surrender to their appetites, forget their homes, and become animals. Yet Homer is not preaching abstinence, but self-control. After Odysseus overcomes Circe and she restores the men, wine and feasting help lift their spirits.
Two Kinds of Feast
Much later, when back in Ithaca, Odysseus offers one of the shrewdest descriptions of drunkenness in ancient literature. In Alexander Pope’s verse translation:
And wine can of their wits the wise beguile, Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile, The grave in merry measures frisk about, And many a long-repented word bring out.
For Homer, then, the question is not whether to drink, but how. For a positive model, we need only return to the Phaeacians. They mix their wine with water, pour libations to the gods, exchange gifts, eat together, listen to music, and tell stories. They welcome the shipwrecked Odysseus and create the conditions in which a stranger might tell his story. Here, wine does not obliterate memory, but facilitates its recovery. And the scene is, of course, ‘the fairest thing there is.’ Grapes have been turned into wine, ingredients into cuisine, sounds into music, strangers into guests, and experiences into stories. Only once he has recovered his story is Odysseus fit to return to Ithaca.
Ithaca, where the suitors have been occupying Odysseus’ palace, slaughtering his livestock, draining his wine stores, and feasting at his expense while competing for Penelope. Outwardly, theirs is a civilised feast. There is meat and wine, music and conversation, servants and guests. But the suitors abuse that hospitality and gorge themselves day after day. Like Polyphemus, they know how to consume but not how to live.
Homer lived almost three thousand years ago, in a world in which wine was not treated simply as another form of ‘alcohol’. It was agriculture and craftsmanship transformed into hospitality, fellowship, ritual, pleasure, and even enlightenment. But Homer was not uncritical. Wine could indeed loosen the tongue, overwhelm judgement, invite forgetfulness, lose men, and return them to animals. The same drink could accompany Odysseus’ fairest vision, while also bringing down a giant, turning his men into swine, and foreboding the demise of the suitors. Civilisation requires not the abstinence of Cyclopes, but the moderation of men.
For Homer, the opposite of drunkenness was not sobriety, but civilisation.
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