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.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent much of your life trying to make sense of things—happiness and suffering, love and loss, reason and emotion, the strange business of being human.
We live in an era of rapid change. Many of the structures that once gave us identity, meaning, and direction have weakened. More than ever, we must answer life’s deepest questions for ourselves. How should we live, love, work, suffer, and die?
My search for answers has taken me through philosophy, psychology, literature, history, and ancient wisdom, which I’ve woven into my books.
I hope you find something here that speaks to you.
If you’re new here, these are good places to begin.
Why Self-Deception Belongs Within Critical Thinking
The priestess of Apollo at Delphi. Before seeking answers from the oracle, visitors first met with the words, ‘Know Thyself.’
Critical thinking has never been more popular. Schools, universities, and employers encourage us to evaluate evidence, identify logical fallacies, and recognise cognitive biases. Entire books are devoted to helping us think more clearly.
Yet intelligent people continue to believe ridiculous things.
They buy into political propaganda, dubious medical claims, financial scams, cults, conspiracy theories, and all manner of comforting or self-serving lies. They do so not because they lack intelligence, and often not because they lack evidence.
They do so because modern critical thinking shares our greatest blind spot. It teaches us how to analyse arguments, but not how to analyse ourselves.
Most books on critical thinking treat reasoning as though it were mathematics. Learn the rules and you will think more clearly. But reason is not merely an intellectual achievement. It is also a moral and psychological one. We do not merely need sharper minds, but greater courage and honesty.
The greatest obstacle to reason is neither dullness nor ignorance. It is our unconscious need to protect our sense of self. This is the realm of self-deception.
Unlike ordinary deception, self-deception is unconscious. We do not deliberately lie to ourselves. Instead, we unconsciously reshape reality to preserve a comforting image of who we are. We rationalise our failures, project our faults onto others, and convince ourselves that what we want to be true is true. These are not simply errors of reasoning but acts of self-protection.
This is why intelligent people can cling to implausible beliefs despite overwhelming evidence. Often, they are not defending an argument so much as defending themselves.
To think clearly, then, it is not enough to study logic, rhetoric, and cognitive bias. We must also understand the unconscious forces that distort our judgement before reason has even had a chance to speak. Self-deception is not peripheral to critical thinking. It belongs at its very heart.
More than two thousand years ago, Socrates reached much the same conclusion. Rather than speculate about the natural world, he turned philosophy towards the study of ourselves.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, as they pass the place where Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia, Phaedrus asks Socrates whether he believes the story. Socrates politely declines the invitation. While still ignorant of himself, he says, he has no interest in such questions:
I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.
For Socrates, self-knowledge came before all other enquiry.
Perhaps it should also come before critical thinking.
Socrates had been inspired by the oracle at Delphi, the greatest oracle of the ancient world. Long before there were textbooks on critical thinking, there was a two-word inscription above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi:
Γνῶθι σεαυτόν
Know thyself.
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To explore self-deception and the hidden workings of the mind in greater depth, see Hide and Seek.
In the middle of our life’s walk, I found myself alone in a dark forest… —Dante Alighieri
Like heart disease or diabetes, depression can be highly debilitating, even fatal. But unlike heart disease or diabetes, depression is poorly understood and heavily stigmatised. People with depression are often seen as ‘failures’ or ‘losers’, too weak or lazy to pick themselves up or pull themselves together.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. If you feel the way you do, it is most likely because you tried too hard or took on too much—so hard and so much that you made yourself ill with depression. In other words, if you feel the way you do, it is because your world was simply not good enough for you. You wanted more, you wanted better, and you wanted different, not just for yourself but for all those around you.
So if you’re a ‘failure’ or a ‘loser’, that’s only because you set the bar far too high. You could have swept everything under the carpet and pretended, as many people do, that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Instead, you had the honesty and the courage to recognize that something was amiss, that something was not quite right.
Rather than being a failure or a loser, you are all the opposite: you are ambitious, you are truthful, and you are courageous. And that’s precisely why you got ‘ill’.
Depression as a Signal
But here’s the good news. Unlike heart disease or diabetes, depression can also have a silver lining.
Crushing though it may be, depression can present a precious opportunity to identify, acknowledge, and address deep-seated problems.
Just as physical pain evolved to signal injury and prevent further injury, so depression may have evolved to remove us from distressing, damaging, or futile situations—situations that do not serve us well as human beings.
The time and space and solitude afforded by depression can enable us to reassess our needs, reframe our perspectives, and round up the resolve to break with established patterns.
In other words, depression, or the depressive position, may have evolved as a signal that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing—or, at the very least, processing and understanding.
In the normal run of things, we become so immersed in our day-to-day that we no longer have the opportunity or perspective to think and feel about ourselves. The adoption of the depressive position invites—or compels—us to shed our defences, stand back at a distance, reassess our needs and priorities, and formulate a modest but realistic plan for fulfilling them.
At a deeper level, the depressive position can enable us to develop a clearer understanding and appreciation of ourselves, our lives, and life in general. From an existential standpoint, it obliges us to become aware of our mortality and freedom, and challenges us to exercise the latter within the framework of the former. By meeting this ultimate challenge, we are able to break out of the mould that has been imposed upon us, discover who we truly are, and begin to give deep meaning to our lives.
The Gift of the Dark Wood
It can be no coincidence that so many of history’s most creative and insightful people suffered from depression, or from a state that might today be diagnosed as depression. They include Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Leo Tolstoy, and many others.
To quote Marcel Proust, who himself suffered from depression, ‘Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.’
The concept of depression as a mental disorder may be helpful for the more severe and intractable cases treated by hospital psychiatrists, but probably not for the majority of cases, which, for the most part, are mild and short-lived and more readily understood in terms of life circumstances, human nature, or the human condition.
Thinking of our distress or protest or withdrawal in terms of a mental disorder or chemical imbalance in the brain can be counterproductive, insofar as it can prevent us from identifying and addressing the important life problems or psychological issues that lie at the root of our distress, and that are, almost literally, crying out for our care and attention.
Maybe all this is more common sense than philosophy, but I do think it merits saying.
In the middle of our life’s walk I found myself alone in a dark forest Where my path was confused.
Ah how hard it is to retell How dense, dark, and dangerous The thought of it alone fills me with fear!
So bitter that death is scarcely worse; But to speak of the good I found there, I shall tell of the other things that I saw.
—Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno
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If this article spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Madness, my award-winning exploration of what mental disorders can teach us about human nature and the human condition.
If you are struggling with depression, you can also download my practical self-help guide Growing from Depression free of charge.
The Deepest Cure for Fear and Anxiety—No Prescription Required
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs culminates in self-actualization. But the journey does not end there.
In his influential paper of 1943, A Theory of Human Motivation, the psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed that healthy human beings have a certain number of needs, and that these needs can be arranged in a hierarchy, with some needs (such as physiological and safety needs) being more primitive or basic than others (such as social and ego needs).
Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ is often represented as a five-level pyramid (Figure 1), with higher needs coming into focus only once lower, more basic ones have been met. Maslow called the bottom four levels ‘deficiency needs’ because we do not feel anything if they are met but become anxious or distressed if they are not. Thus, physiological needs such as eating, drinking, and sleeping are deficiency needs, as are safety needs, social needs such as friendship and intimacy, and ego needs such as self-esteem, status, and recognition.
In contrast, he called the fifth and highest level of the pyramid a ‘growth need’ insofar as the drive to self-actualize requires that we move beyond the pursuit of comfort and security to fulfil our deepest potential as human beings.
Once we have met our deficiency needs, the focus of our anxiety shifts to self-actualization, and we begin, even if only dimly, to contemplate our bigger picture. However, only a minority of people ever truly self-actualize, because self-actualization requires unusual qualities such as independence, awareness, creativity, originality, and, above all, courage. Many people who have satisfied all their deficiency needs remain unable to self-actualize, instead inventing more deficiency needs for themselves, because to contemplate the meaning of life would lead them to entertain the possibility of its meaninglessness and the prospect of their own death and annihilation.
Existential Anxiety
A person who begins to contemplate their bigger picture may come to fear that life is meaningless and death inescapable, while at the same time clinging to the comforting belief that they are somehow immortal, important, or at least significant. This inner conflict gives rise to existential anxiety. Whereas fear and anxiety and their pathological forms (such as phobias or panic disorder) are grounded in threats to life, existential anxiety is rooted in the brevity and apparent insignificance, or absurdity, of life.
Existential anxiety is so disturbing that most people avoid it at all costs, instead constructing a false reality out of goals, ambitions, routines, relationships, customs, values, culture, and religion in a bid to deceive themselves that their lives are meaningful and that death is distant or delusory.
Unfortunately, such self-deception comes at a heavy price. According to the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, those who refuse to face up to ‘non-being’ are acting in ‘bad faith’ and living out a life that is inauthentic and unfulfilling. Facing up to non-being can bring insecurity, loneliness, responsibility, and, with them, anxiety, but, beyond that, it can also bring a profound sense of calm, freedom, even nobility. Far from being pathological, existential anxiety is a necessary transitional phase—a sign of health, strength, and courage, and a harbinger of greater things to come.
The Courage to Be
The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich took this idea a step further. In The Courage to Be, he argued that refusing to confront non-being leads not only to inauthenticity, as Sartre had argued, but also to pathological—or neurotic—anxiety.
He wrote:
He who does not succeed in taking his anxiety courageously upon himself can succeed in avoiding the extreme situation of despair by escaping into neurosis. He still affirms himself but on a limited scale. Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being.
According to this striking outlook, pathological anxiety, although seemingly grounded in threats to life, in fact arises from repressed existential anxiety, which itself arises from our uniquely human capacity for self-consciousness.
Squaring up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty. It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into a life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make—and get—the most out of our lives.
This, I believe, is the philosophical cure for fear and anxiety.
Some philosophers have gone further still in asserting that the very purpose of life is none other than to prepare for death. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates, who is about to face the executioner, tells his friends that absolute justice, beauty, and goodness cannot be apprehended by the senses, but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks as far as possible to separate soul from body. As death is the complete separation of soul and body, the philosopher aims at death—and can be said to be almost dead.
Only a true philosopher who no longer fears death truly possesses courage and the other virtues. Those who remain in fear of death can only have, at best, the appearance of virtue; but behind the facade, they are forever trading one fear against another.
How the Sophists forced Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to rethink truth.
Protagoras’ dictum: Anthrōpos metron pantōn—’Man is the measure of all things.’
For centuries, Greek philosophy had looked outwards. The first philosophers sought to understand the nature of the universe, inquiring into the substance, origin, and hidden principles of all things. Thales is remembered for upholding water as the fundamental substance, Heraclitus for his principle of perpetual change, Parmenides for his diametrically opposed principle of unchanging being, and Democritus for his atoms.
But by the middle of the fifth century BCE, philosophy faced an altogether different challenge. The question was no longer what the universe is made of, but whether we can know anything with certainty. Philosophy’s first great crisis arose not in a school or temple, but in the bustling streets and public squares of democratic Athens.
The Need for Sophists
By naturalising the world, the pre-Socratics had been responding and contributing to a waning of the old myths. As the world became demythologised, attention shifted from the gods to man, from the temples to the law courts, from questions about the cosmos to questions about logic, language, politics, morality, and society.
This intellectual revolution was matched by a political one. By the middle of the fifth century BCE, Athens had emerged triumphant from the Persian Wars. Enriched by empire and transformed into a radical democracy, it became a city in which political influence depended less upon noble birth than on the ability to persuade an assembly, sway a jury, or carry a crowd. In this new world, rhetoric became power.
The Sophists travelled from city to city offering public lectures and private instruction, especially to ambitious young aristocrats hoping for careers in public life. They taught rhetoric, argument, memory, and the art of persuasion. They were also handsomely rewarded. Some charged fees so enormous that Plato and Aristophanes never tired of mocking them.
Although itinerant, the Sophists naturally converged upon Athens, where they often resided at the houses of wealthy patrons such as the magnate Callias or the politician Callicles. According to Plato, Callias owned ‘the greatest and most glorious house’ in Athens and ‘spent a world of money on the sophists’. In Plato’s Greater Hippias, the Sophist Hippias tells Socrates, ‘If you were to know how much money I have made, you would be amazed…’
What the Sophists Taught
The Sophists were not a school in the usual sense. They had no common doctrine or shared founder, and often disagreed with one another. Some, such as Protagoras and Prodicus, were serious thinkers who won the respect even of Plato. Others became famous as intellectual entertainers, dazzling audiences with verbal tricks and paradoxes. Yet all shared a new concern with language, argument, rhetoric, politics, and practical life.
This marked a profound shift from the pre-Socratics. Rather than asking, ‘What is the universe made of?’, the Sophists asked, ‘How do we persuade others?’, ‘What is justice?’, and even, ‘Can there be any objective truth at all?’
No Sophist embodied this new outlook more fully than Protagoras. His most famous dictum, Anthrōpos metron pantōn—’Man is the measure of all things’—came to epitomise the movement. In the Theaetetus, Plato argues that if each and every man truly were the measure of all things, then nothing could be inherently true or false, or right or wrong—not even the dictum itself.
Protagoras is also remembered for the remarkable opening line of his lost work, About the Gods: ‘About the gods, I cannot be sure whether they exist or not, or what they are like to see; for many things stand in the way of the knowledge of them, both the opacity of the subject and the shortness of human life.’ Such agnosticism was startling in a deeply religious society, and only reinforced the suspicion that the Sophists were undermining traditional beliefs.
Gorgias, who lived for 108 years, pushed scepticism further still. Whether or not he believed his own arguments, he delighted in demonstrating the astonishing power of rhetoric. He boasted that he could speak on any subject at a moment’s notice and likened the effects of speech upon the soul to those of drugs upon the body. Words, like drugs, could heal, intoxicate, or poison.
Other Sophists explored different aspects of the same revolution. Prodicus became famous for distinguishing between near synonyms with pedantic precision, and for suggesting, not unlike Wittgenstein twenty-four centuries later, that philosophical progress begins with linguistic clarity. Antiphon contrasted nature (physis) with convention (nomos), raising the unsettling possibility that many of the laws and moral codes by which we live are no more than a matter of convention. The dichotomy surfaces in the Antigone of Sophocles (c. 441 BCE), when Antigone seeks to justify her attempt to bury her brother Polynices by claiming the superiority of divine over man-made law. Hippias claimed to be an authority on everything and wrote many books. He held that the purpose of life is autarkeia (self-sufficiency), and boasted of presenting himself at Olympia wearing nothing that he had not himself made, down to his girdle, sandals, seal-ring, strigil, and oil-flask.
The Sophists transformed Greek education, but they also raised an unsettling question: if every position can be defended by a sufficiently skilful speaker, what becomes of truth?
Why Socrates Objected
Socrates accepted many of the Sophists’ starting points. Like them, he turned away from cosmology to focus on ethics, politics, and the human condition. Like them, he engaged his fellow citizens in conversation. Yet there was one crucial difference.
The Sophists taught their pupils how to argue. Socrates sought to discover what was true—and never charged for it.
For Socrates, words were not instruments of persuasion but tools of inquiry. His famous method of questioning—the elenchus—served not to win debates but to expose contradictions, undermine false confidence, and inch towards genuine knowledge. He believed that careful questioning could reveal objective truths about justice, courage, friendship, and the good life.
Whereas the Sophists taught the art of persuasion, Socrates insisted that persuasion and truth were not the same thing.
This was the question at the heart of philosophy’s first great crisis: is philosophy a search for truth, or merely the art of persuasion?
Why Was Socrates Mistaken for a Sophist?
Ironically, many Athenians mistook Socrates for one of the Sophists. Like them, he challenged traditional beliefs and exposed the ignorance of prominent citizens through relentless questioning. In Aristophanes’ Clouds, he is portrayed as the head of a ‘Thinking Shop’, where students learn ingenious arguments and how to make the weaker case appear the stronger.
The caricature was unfair, but revealing. Socrates charged no fees, claimed no expertise, and repeatedly insisted that he knew nothing. Yet to many Athenians these distinctions seemed trivial. They saw only another unsettling intellectual who questioned convention and undermined established authority.
If Socrates was put on trial and, ultimately, to death, this was in part because many Athenians mistook him for a Sophist.
Plato’s Response
If Socrates sought truth through dialogue, Plato sought to explain why truth is possible in the first place.
The Sophists had shown how easily opinions differ. Plato agreed. But he refused to conclude that all opinions are therefore equally valid.
Instead, he argued that behind the changing world perceived by the senses lies a higher reality of eternal Forms: perfect Justice, Beauty, Equality, and Goodness. Our arguments may be confused and our perceptions unreliable, but these realities remain unchanged. Philosophy is therefore not merely the art of persuasion, but the search for objective truth.
Many of Plato’s greatest dialogues are shaped by this confrontation. In the Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, and other dialogues, the Sophists become Plato’s principal interlocutors. Sometimes they are treated with respect, sometimes with devastating irony, but always they represent the challenge that philosophy must overcome.
Whether Plato portrayed them fairly remains an open question. Much of what we know about the Sophists comes through his writings, and he had every reason to emphasise their weaknesses while strengthening his own case. It was, perhaps, one of history’s most resounding philosophical victories—so complete that the word ‘sophist’ still carries negative connotations.
Aristotle’s Response
Aristotle inherited the same problem but answered it differently. Whereas Plato had looked beyond the visible world, Aristotle looked more closely at it.
Instead of grounding knowledge in transcendent Forms, he sought reliable methods for investigating the world itself. His answer to the Sophists lay not in another metaphysical theory, but in the careful disciplines of logic, observation, and demonstration.
Aristotle analysed arguments with a new precision, distinguishing valid reasoning from fallacy and demonstration from mere persuasion.
The Sophists had shown how arguments can mislead. Aristotle sought to show how, properly constructed, they can also lead us to truth.
Rehabilitating the Sophists
After Plato, the Sophists became the villains of Greek philosophy: eloquent teachers more interested in winning arguments and enriching themselves than discovering the truth.
Yet this judgement is probably too harsh. The Sophists helped lay the foundations of higher education. They recognised the importance of language, communication, critical thinking, and cultural difference. They questioned inherited assumptions and forced philosophy to justify itself rather than merely assert its conclusions.
Many of their questions remain alive today. Are moral values objective or culturally relative? Does language shape thought? Is law grounded in nature or merely in convention? Can rhetoric obscure truth as easily as reveal it? To these questions there are still no universally accepted answers.
The Sophists did not destroy philosophy. They transformed it—albeit, sometimes, despite themselves. By questioning truth, morality, justice, and knowledge itself, they created the first great crisis in Western philosophy. Socrates responded by seeking definitions, Plato by defending objective reality, and Aristotle by developing the tools of logic. Much of subsequent philosophy can be understood as an attempt to answer questions that the Sophists were among the first to ask.
They may have lost the argument in the eyes of Plato. But they changed philosophy forever.
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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy The Gang of Three, an engaging overview of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the birth of Western philosophy.
If you’re struggling with depression, or know someone who is, I’d like you to have this book—free of charge.
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.
Drawing on psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and literature, Dr Neel Burton explores depression not only as an illness to be treated, but also as an opportunity for insight, growth, and transformation.
🏆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
Neel is an incredibly insightful and elegant writer, with a deep knowledge of all he surveys.—Dr James Davies, psychotherapist, author of Cracked
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
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