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 are being upended. Today 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.
Taken together, my books amount to an education in how to think, how to live, and how not to waste your life.
I hope you find something here that speaks to you.
If you’re new here, these are good places to begin.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Empathy is, in a sense, the opposite of anger. In anger, we are imprisoned in ourselves and unable to see another person’s perspective. We see in people only what they have done to us. With empathy, we reach out to the other and try to see the world through their eyes.
But if we take this reaching out too far and begin to merge with them, it can become a problem. The suffering of our patients can become both corrupting and exhausting.
Sympathy vs Empathy
The danger becomes clearer if we distinguish between sympathy and empathy. If a friend has lost a parent, and I say, “I’m sorry,” that’s sympathy—which is simple concern for another person’s suffering. If I imagine what that loss feels like from within my friend’s world, that’s empathy.
The power—and the danger—of empathy lies in its particularity. It’s not merely a matter of imagining myself in someone else’s situation. I must imagine myself as them, in that situation. I need to understand who they are, where they have come from, and where they are trying to go. As John Steinbeck wrote, ‘It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving.’
Why Empathy Must Remain at One Remove
Yet, to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes is not to become that person. Empathy must remain at one remove. That distance enables me to think objectively and be of help. After all, if I drown alongside a drowning person, I can hardly pull them out of the water.
If that boundary collapses, empathy can corrupt as well as exhaust us. It can lead us to favour the person before us over the many people we cannot see. And, as empathic distress, it can lead to compassion fatigue and burnout.
Regulating empathy, therefore, is not callousness but the condition of effective care.
Doctors who understand their patients without being engulfed by them are not only more effective but more fulfilled in their work.
Ultimately, the doctor’s task is not to carry the patient’s pain, but to stand close enough to understand it—and far away enough to help.
Many people have been able to cure their anger simply by looking into a mirror.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In the first century CE, the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote a short book called On Anger, which to this day, in my view, remains the best book on anger management.
The first thing we should know about anger is that it is both learnt and highly contagious. Seneca tells the story of a child who was raised in Plato’s house. When the child was returned to his parents, he saw his father shouting, and remarked, ‘I never saw this at Plato’s house.’
If you are surrounded by angry people, it is hard not, in turn, to become angry—and conversely, calm people tend to calm us. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle remarks that even wild animals grow gentle in the company of the calm—although I wouldn’t go to the zoo to test this out.
So our first defence against anger is the company that we keep. Avoid the angry, seek out the calm.
Why We Get Angry
Beyond this, it is important to understand why we get angry. Anger feels powerful because it converts injury or helplessness into reaction and aggression. But it is in fact a sign of weakness, revealing the very injury or helplessness that gave rise to it.
And it is often irrational: we assume the worst about people, exaggerate the harm they have done us, and interpret their incompetence or lack of thought as contempt.
We sometimes rationalise our anger as moral courage, that is, as a spur to virtue. But even in the face of terrible injustice, anger is not required to obtain redress or do the right thing. Indeed, anger may impair our ability to act effectively.
How Anger Defeats Us
If anger arises from an injury, it often inflicts a second injury of its own making. Whereas other vices impel the mind, anger overthrows it. Anger, said Horace, is a short-lived madness. It is from anger that Alexander the Great killed the friend who saved his life—the conqueror of kings, himself conquered by madness.
We get angry because we seek reparation. But often, we make things much worse than if we hadn’t got angry. If someone has wronged us, we would do much better to calmly explain this to them, rather than lose our temper, and, with it, their ear.
The Surest Cure for Anger
Anger begins with a judgement: someone has wronged me, and I must punish them. But it is easier to revise our judgement than to rage against the world, to rage against how things are.
Before that judgement carries us away, there is a little space. Maybe we can’t prevent the first flash of irritation. But we can refuse to go with it. In that little space that we have, we can ask ourselves three things:
Am I expecting too much of the world?
How is getting angry going to help me?
Who will remember this tomorrow, or in a year’s time, or in a hundred years’ time?
That’s why the surest cure for anger is delay.
When he retired from the imperial court, the Stoic philosopher Athenodorus advised the emperor Augustus: ‘Whenever you become angry, Caesar, say or do nothing until you have repeated the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet.’ At this, Augustus seized his departing teacher by the hand and replied, ‘I still have need of your presence here.’
Perhaps we all do. The surest way to prevent anger from ruling us is to refuse to act while it is on the throne.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Happiness exists—but as a fleeting feeling, not a permanent state.
No one can remain cheerful all the time. Nor should they want to. A life without sadness would be shallow and dishonest, scarcely a human life at all. Our sadness is often the measure of what we value: we grieve because we have loved, worry because we care, and struggle because something matters.
Part of the problem with happiness is contained in the word itself. In English, happy is related to happen, which derives from the Old Norse happ, meaning fortune or luck. Like luck, happiness is something that happens to us. It comes and goes, often without asking our permission.
That is why happiness is such a poor goal. If we make a passing feeling our chief aim, we condemn ourselves to chasing it. Worse, we begin to monitor ourselves continually: Am I happy yet? Am I as happy as yesterday? Am I as happy as my friends appear to be?
The more we scrutinise our happiness, the more dissatisfied and self-absorbed we become. Happiness is turned into a performance indicator—and almost invariably found wanting.
From Happiness to Flourishing
The Spanish word for happiness points in a different direction. Feliz derives from the Latin felix, which originally meant fruitful, fertile, or productive. Whereas the English word points to fortune, the Spanish word points to fertility: not merely to how we feel, but to what we bring forth.
The Ancient Greeks aimed higher still. They called their ideal eudaimonia, which is often translated as “happiness” but is better understood as flourishing. Literally, eudaimonia means something like being possessed of a good spirit or divinity. It is not simply about feeling good, but about living well—leading a life that is worthwhile, fulfilling, and elevating.
Unlike happiness, flourishing can contain a great deal of unhappiness. Indeed, grief, struggle, and sacrifice may belong to our finest achievements and relationships. Raising a child, writing a book, caring for a dying parent, or standing up for a principle may bring anxiety, exhaustion, or pain. Yet we would not therefore wish these things out of our lives.
A pleasant life is not necessarily a good life, and a good life is not always pleasant. If we lived badly, what could it mean to be happy except to feel good about the wrong things?
What Cannot Be Taken Away
Socrates supplied the extreme test. The Athenians condemned him and made him drink the hemlock. But although they could put him to death, they could not take away who he was or how he had lived. They could take his life, but they could not make it a bad one.
Indeed, by killing him, they made him greater. His death became the final proof of his philosophy and transformed his life into an example for all humanity.
Aristotle, the intellectual grandson of Socrates, made flourishing an activity rather than a mood. Eudaimonia, he argued, consists in developing and exercising what is best in us—reason, judgement, and character—across the whole course of a life. It cannot be reduced to manufacturing a pleasant but insubstantial state of mind.
That’s why happiness often arrives when we are not looking for it: while absorbed in a friendship, a landscape, a piece of music, or some difficult and worthwhile work. At such moments, we are not standing apart from life to assess it. We are living it.
So, yes, happiness exists—but chiefly as a by-product, not an aim in itself.
Instead of asking, “Am I happy?” we should ask, “Am I living well?” and “What am I becoming?”
The duck–rabbit: nothing changes but the way of seeing.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
How to think outside the box and have more original ideas.
The word ‘insight’ is sometimes used to mean something like ‘self-awareness’, including awareness of our thought processes, beliefs, desires, emotions, and so on, and of how they relate to one another and to the truth.
Of course, self-awareness comes by types and degrees. Owing to chemical receptors in their tendrils, vining plants know not to coil around themselves, and in that much can be said to have awareness of self and not-self. Infants only begin to develop reflective self-awareness at around 18 months of age, enabling them to recognise themselves in pictures and mirrors.
But insight is also used to mean something like ‘penetrating discernment’: a deep understanding of a person, problem, or situation. Such understanding may emerge gradually, but it can also arrive all at once, with a previously hidden truth—or the solution to a previously intractable problem—suddenly flooding the mind. This sudden apprehension of an insight is sometimes called an epiphany (Greek, ‘manifestation’, ‘coming into the light’), revelation, or ‘aha’ moment.
It is this epiphanic form of insight with which I am principally concerned. Unlike analytical thinking, which proceeds consciously and laboriously from one step to the next, it seems to come from nowhere. One moment, we are staring helplessly at the problem; the next, we can see straight through it. It is rather like climbing a mountain in fog, turning round, and suddenly seeing the entire landscape spread out below.
The Anatomy of Insight
Such ‘aha moments’, epitomised by Archimedes’ cry of Eureka! Eureka! (Greek, ‘I found it! I found it!’), involve a sudden shift in understanding, often by seeing something familiar in a new light or bringing previously disconnected elements together. They carry a characteristic feeling of clarity and conviction, and often delight—though they can also devastate, depending on what has been apprehended.
It is said that, upon sinking into his bath, Archimedes noticed the water level rising and suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced corresponded to the volume of the parts of his body that had been submerged. Less rarefied examples of aha moments include suddenly understanding a joke, or suddenly ‘seeing’ the other aspect of a reversal image such as the duck-rabbit (pictured).
Aha moments, it seems, primarily arise from unconscious and automatic processes, and—you might have noticed—our eyes naturally tend, when mulling over insight problems, to look away from visual stimuli. Brain-imaging studies suggest that this withdrawal of attention, or ‘looking inside’, may be part of the mechanism of insight. By screening out the immediate environment, the mind creates the spare capacity for loose associations to come together. The flash of insight may be sudden, but the work that produces it is not. Indeed, that work may draw upon a lifetime of experience and study.
This helps explain the so-called incubation effect. We wrestle with a problem, reach an impasse, and put it aside—only for the answer to come to us in the shower, on a walk, or upon waking. Had Archimedes not already been wrestling with the problem of measurement, his bath would not have become so famous.
Insight is closely related to intuition. If an intuition is a disposition to believe without conscious deliberation, an epiphanic insight is the sudden apprehension of a previously hidden relation. Intuition may lead to insight, but it can also remain no more than a hunch—rather than a sudden coming together.
Aha moments of the Archimedean kind might be distinguished from uh-oh moments, in which we become aware of an unforeseen problem, and from d’oh moments, popularised by the Simpson patriarch, when a foreseeable but unforeseen problem hits us or we have a flash of insight into our complete lack of insight.
In all three cases, something previously hidden is suddenly revealed, be it an answer, a danger, or our own stupidity.
Although insight often puts us in touch with some truth, there can also be false insights. Insight, therefore, is not exempt from analytical verification. Insight proposes; reason disposes. The highest thinking is not the one or the other, but both together.
The Price of Seeing Differently
‘Thinking outside the box’ is a cognitive feat. When we understand something in a particular way, it is very difficult to apprehend it in any other way, even in the face of the strongest contradictory evidence. It is not merely that we cannot imagine the answer; often, we are trapped inside the wrong question or assumption.
In When Prophecy Fails (1956), the social psychologist Leon Festinger discusses his experience of infiltrating a UFO doomsday cult whose leader had prophesied the end of the world. When the end of the world failed to materialise, most of the cult members dealt with the dissonance that arose from the cognitions ‘the leader said that the world would end’ and ‘the world did not end’ not by ditching the cult or its leader, as you might expect, but by rationalising that the world had been saved by the strength of their faith. Taking their assumptions for facts, the cult members simply reinterpreted the evidence in a way that preserved their existing beliefs.
Very often, to see something in a different light also means to see ourselves and the whole world in that new light, which can threaten and undermine our sense of self and raise atavistic defences. It is more a matter of emotion or self-conception than of reason or intelligence, which explains why even leading scientists can struggle with contravening evidence.
As the physicist Max Planck (d. 1947) observed, ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’ Or, to put it more pithily, science advances one funeral at a time.
What is true of eminent scientists is true also of us. Our life cannot possibly have been a long list of mistakes. A new insight can demand a new self—which is a higher price than we are willing or able to pay. Younger people, having less to lose, can still afford to be open to ideas—but not for long. By the age of about 22, there is little left of the god in them.
Our attachment to our beliefs is so strong that contravening evidence or attempts to convince us otherwise can in fact entrench them—which is why, as a psychiatrist, I rarely challenge my patients, or indeed anyone, directly. But you don’t have to take my word for it: in a study, supplying ‘corrective information’ to people with serious concerns about the adverse effects of the flu jab made them less willing to receive it. This more than substantiates the German proverb: ‘Never give uninvited advice. The wise won’t need it, the fools won’t heed it.’
Some Insights Into Having Insights
So, short of dissolving our egos, which might take twenty years in a temple, or, ironically, an unusually strong ego, what can we do to increase our cognitive flexibility?
Naturally, it helps to have the tools of thought, including language fluency and multiple frames of reference as given by knowledge and experience. But more important is to develop that first sense of insight—namely, insight as self-awareness.
Self-awareness enables us to distinguish the problem from the assumptions that we have brought to it. At a practical level, we can change the way in which the problem is represented: draw it, explain it aloud, reverse it, reduce it, enlarge it, or translate it into an analogy. More searchingly, we can ask: What am I taking for granted? What would someone from another discipline, culture, or period see here? What if the opposite were true? What am I reluctant to notice because noticing it would cost me something? And how much more is it costing me to be that sort of person?
More benignly, we need to create the time and conditions for thoughts to connect. My own associative thinking is much more active when I’m both well-rested and at rest, for example, standing under the shower or ambling in the park. The very title of this essay came to me while cooking dinner and pouring a glass of wine, after the essay had been written. Jack Welch (d. 2020), as Chairman and CEO of General Electric, spent an hour each day in what he called ‘looking out of the window time’. And August Kekulé (d. 1896) claimed to have discovered the ring structure of the benzene molecule while daydreaming about a snake biting its own tail.
We tend to treat looking out of the window as the opposite of thinking. Often, it is thinking relieved of its supervisor. In my early twenties, as a strategy consultant in Paris, I would get told off for going out for walks. I once responded, ‘How do you expect me to think, locked up in a cubicle?’ (They didn’t like me.) Modern life supplies endless stimulation and very little mental vacancy, leaving us rich in information but poor in opportunities for this information to reorganise itself.
Time is a very strange thing and not at all linear: sometimes, the best way of using it is to waste it.
The Western, Buddhist, and Upanishadic Answers to the Problem of the Self
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Your body and mind have changed enormously in the course of your life, and will continue to change. Yet, convention has you, from the baby to the retiree, as the same person.
But let’s not be so conventional. Let’s take the time to ask: what is a ‘person’, and what would it take for a person no longer to be that same person? Are you the same, identical person at all times? Are you the same person that you were a minute, a day, a year, ten years ago? If so, what is the abiding factor?
The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) famously defined a person as ‘a thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.’ According to this definition, you are a person because you can think about yourself in the past, future, and conditional, and in a variety of different places: ‘Last month I could have won the lottery, if only I had bought a ticket.’
This may tell us what it takes to be a person, but it does not tell us what constitutes the person—or what it is that makes you this self-conscious mental being. Is it your body, your brain, your ‘soul’?
Three Thought Experiments
Imagine, God forbid, that you have a serious accident that leaves you lying brain-dead on a hospital bed. Your body is being kept functioning, but you are no longer self-conscious nor can you ever be again. Are you, in that permanent brain-dead state, still a person? If not, then your physical body cannot be that which makes you a person. And if it is not your physical body, the obvious candidate is your brain or mind.
Some philosophers have argued that you remain the same person because your body or brain remains the same body or brain, in the sense that it is spatiotemporally continuous (continuous in space and time). Others have argued that you remain the same person because you are psychologically continuous, that is, because your later mental states derive or descend from your earlier mental states.
To help decide this problem, the American philosopher Sydney Shoemaker (1931-2022) asked us to imagine that science has advanced to such an extent that brain transplants are now possible. On the same morning, two men, Mr. Brown and Mr. Robinson, each have their brain removed and operated upon. However, a poorly trained assistant inadvertently puts Brown’s brain into Robinson’s head, and Robinson’s brain into Brown’s head. One of these men dies, but the other—say the one with Brown’s brain and Robinson’s body (let’s call him ‘Brownson’)—eventually regains consciousness. When asked his name he replies, ‘Brown.’ Subsequently, he is able to recognise Brown’s wife and family and to relate Brown’s childhood memories, but he cannot recognise Robinson’s wife and family nor relate Robinson’s childhood memories.
Who then is this man Brownson with Brown’s brain and Robinson’s body? If he is Brown, as most people would argue, this would confirm our earlier intuition that a person cannot be reduced to a body. This leaves us with two possibilities: Either Brownson is Brown because he has Brown’s brain, or he is Brown because he is psychologically continuous with Brown.
To decide between these two possibilities, let us push our thought experiment further still. As people can survive with extensive damage to one cerebral hemisphere, let us imagine that Brownson’s brain (or indeed anyone’s brain, say Smith’s) is divided into two hemispheres and that each hemisphere is transplanted into a brainless body. After the operation, two people awake who are both psychologically continuous with Smith, and who have the same character and memories as Smith.
Although both people are psychologically continuous with Smith, they cannot both be Smith—or, by the transitivity of identity, they would also be each other! Moreover, from the moment they awake, their lives and experiences will begin to diverge.
Our attempt to decide between brain and psychological continuity as the seat of personal identity has landed us in an even deeper difficulty: whereas both brain and psychological continuity seem capable of division, personal identity is not.
Parfit and the Pearl of Self
In considering this kind of ‘fission’ thought experiment, the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit (1942-2017) argued that personal identity may not be what matters.
Because neither of the two people who acquired one of Smith’s brain hemispheres is Smith, Smith cannot be said to have survived the fission of his brain. Yet, everything that matters about Smith—his memories, character, intentions, relations—has survived in both of the transplantees. And it would be absurd to destroy one of the transplantees simply so that we could preserve numerical identity and claim that Smith had survived.
For Parfit, there is no further fact about personal identity, no ‘pearl of self’ that passes intact from one moment, or body, to the next. What matters is not identity but continuity.
This sounds radical. But to me, who has written on Indian philosophy, it rings a bell—or even two.
The Buddhist Take
More than two thousand years before Locke, Shoemaker, and Parfit, the Buddha had argued that what we take to be the self is composed of five elements (skandhas), namely, body, sensation, perception, will, and consciousness. The five skandhas are in a constant state of flux but together create the illusion of integrity and continuity, that is, the illusion of the self.
This explains why, when I try to become aware of myself, I can only ever become aware of such and such perception, such and such sensation, or such and such thought, but never of any actual, core self.
The death of the bodily self leads to the disaggregation of the skandhas and to their re-aggregation into another not-self, which is neither identical to nor entirely different from the previous one, but forms part of a causal continuum with it. An analogy that is often offered to describe this process of rebirth is that of a flame, fuelled by desire, passing from one candle to the next.
The cycle of rebirth can only be broken by transcending our subjective and distorted image of the world, which is built around the ‘I am’ conceit. This, then, is nibbana, or, in Sanskrit rather than Pali, nirvana.
Nirvana, as I see it, rests on the understanding that consciousness is a sequence of conscious moments rather than the continuous, unbroken consciousness of the ‘I am’ conceit. This understanding, so long as it can be maintained, amounts to freedom from the self.
The Upanishadic Take
While Parfit and the Buddha have much in common, the Upanishadic tradition adopts a different approach.
When I look for my self, I find my body, sensation, perception, and so on. The Buddhist concludes that, since none of these is permanent, there can be no permanent self. But the Upanishadic sage might ask: who, or what, is aware of all these things?
The answer of the Upanishads is the Atman, or true Self: not the skandhas, which wax and wane, but the consciousness that is aware of them. Just like the eye cannot see itself, though it sees all else, so this ‘witness consciousness’ cannot observe itself. But through every change, it is the one constant.
Whereas the Buddhist concludes that there is no enduring self, the Upanishadic sage concludes that we have been looking for it in the wrong place. The self is not something that we experience, but that by which we experience. It is not an actor on the stage, but the prince watching from behind the curtain.
The jiva and Atman, sitting in a tree
East and West
We began by asking what, from baby to retiree, makes you the same person. The body could not provide the answer, while brain and psychological continuity proved capable of division. Parfit’s solution was to question the question: beyond continuity, there is no further fact of personal identity.
The Buddhist arrives, by a very different route, at essentially the same conclusion. What we call the self is a succession of changing states and processes, held together by causal continuity and the ‘I am’ conceit. Liberation lies not in finding the self, but in freeing ourselves from it. To ‘know yourself’ is, paradoxically, to know that there is no self to know.
The Upanishadic sage, though acutely aware of the problem, succeeds in salvaging the abiding self. No abiding self can be found among the changeable contents of consciousness, because the true Self is not one of those contents, and not changeable.
All three traditions have noticed that the self cannot be found among the contents of experience. From this, the Western tradition and Buddhism conclude that there is no self. The Hindu tradition preserves the self by distinguishing between the personal self, or jiva, and the universal Self, or Atman. Where the jiva is attached, ever-changing, and mortal, the Atman is detached, steadfast, and immortal, and of a kind with God, or Brahman. The precise relationship between Atman and Brahman is a major theme, and dividing line, in Hindu philosophy.
In the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, the jiva and Atman are compared to two inseparable birds sitting in a tree (the body). One bird, the jiva, gorges on the sweet and bitter fruits of the tree, while the other bird, tasting of neither, calmly looks on.
We can never catch the second bird, because it is the one that is looking. And so it remains forever elusive. But if the Upanishadic vision is correct, to know that bird is to know both ourselves and God, and, as in Buddhism, to transcend the distinction between self and other.
In the West, we tend to look upon the personal self as a problem to be solved; in India, as the key to salvation.
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