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.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Ataraxia—literally, ‘lack of disturbance or trouble’—was the Holy Grail of ancient philosophy: a state of profound mental tranquillity in which a person was no longer tossed around by anxiety, anger, desire, and the vicissitudes of fortune. For what is the point of wealth, power, pleasure, or even freedom if we ourselves remain in a state of inner turmoil?
Prior to the advent of Christianity, there were, of course, the pagan gods, but, especially for the high-minded, there were also a number of philosophical schools.
Aside from the more academic Platonism and Aristotelianism, the four major philosophical schools of Western antiquity were Cynicism, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism.
Despite each having their own outlook and approach, all four schools emphasised the attainment of mental tranquillity and mastery, or ataraxia—making them, in my view, much more similar than different. If you like, ataraxia was to the Western schools what liberation was to the Indian schools.
The best way to grasp the concept of ataraxia is to look at how it fitted into each of the four schools, starting with Cynicism.
Cynicism
The first Cynic appears to have been the Athenian philosopher Antisthenes (d. 365 BCE), who had been an ardent disciple of Socrates. Then came Diogenes (d. 323 BCE), the paradigm of the Cynic, who took the simple life of Socrates to such an extreme that Plato called him ‘a Socrates gone mad’.
Diogenes held that human beings had much to learn from the simplicity and artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not ‘complicated every simple gift of the gods’. In fact, the term ‘Cynic’ derives from the Greek kynikos, which is the adjective of kyon, or ‘dog’.
Diogenes placed reason and nature firmly above custom and convention, which he held to be incompatible with happiness. Rather than pursuing wealth, renown, and other worthless things, people should have the courage to live like animals or gods, partaking in life’s simplest pleasures—which are also its greatest—without bond or fear.
The stories surrounding Diogenes, though embellished, or because embellished, help to convey his spirit. Diogenes wore a simple cloak which he doubled up in winter, begged for food, and sheltered in a tub. He made it his mission to challenge custom and convention, famously ‘defacing the currency’—that is, overturning the false values that governed society. Upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, he mused, ‘If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly.’ He used to stroll about in broad daylight brandishing a lit lamp. Whenever people gathered around to gawk at him, he would explain, ‘I am just looking for a human being.’
His fame spread far beyond Athens. One day, Alexander the Great came to meet him. When Alexander asked whether he could do anything for him, he replied, ‘Yes, stand out of my sunlight.’
For Diogenes and the Cynics, much of our disturbance is self-inflicted. We surrender our peace of mind to things we do not need: money, possessions, and the good opinion of others. The less we depend upon such things, the less power they have to disturb us.
Stoicism
Diogenes was followed by Crates of Thebes (d. 285 BCE), who renounced a large fortune to live the Cynical life of poverty. Crates married Hipparchia of Maroneia, who, uniquely, adopted male dress and lived on equal terms with her husband.
By the first century, Cynics could be found in cities throughout the Roman Empire. At that time, Cynicism vied with Stoicism, a broader philosophical system that emphasised perspective and clear thinking. Stoicism was popular with leading Romans such as the senator Cato the Younger and the emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Zeno of Citium (d. 262 BCE), the founder of Stoicism, had been a pupil of Crates, and Cynicism came to be seen as an idealised form of Stoicism.
Like their ancestors the Cynics, the Stoics sought freedom by reducing our dependence upon things outside our control. But whereas Diogenes had dramatised this freedom by living in radical simplicity, the Stoics developed a more nuanced, and moderate, psychology of judgement and emotion.
Events do not simply make us angry, anxious, envious, or miserable. Between the event and the emotion lies our interpretation of the event. If we can catch and work on that interpretation, we can alter our emotional response. Thus, Stoics such as Epictetus drew a line between things that are ‘up to us’ and those that are not. Our possessions, reputation, and body are vulnerable to fortune. But our mind is more properly our own. Marcus Aurelius often returns to Epictetus in his Meditations, for example, when he says, ‘If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.’
Skepticism
Skepticism and Epicureanism also took off around the time of Alexander. Unlike the sophists whom he opposed, Socrates had skeptical tendencies, claiming that he knew little or nothing and cultivating a state of non-knowledge, or aporia.
Pyrrho of Elis (d. 270 BCE) travelled with Alexander across Persia and into India, where he encountered various schools of thought and ascetics, including the ‘naked wise men’ or gymnosophists (probably Jain monks), with their emphasis on detachment and inner peace.
Blending East and West, Pyrrho came to believe that certain knowledge is impossible and urged suspension of judgement with the aim of exchanging anxiety and dogmatism for ataraxia. After all, if we cannot know what is true or false, or good or bad, why attach so much importance to our opinions? For example, most people are convinced that death is a terrible thing, when it might in fact be the best thing for us.
The Pyrrhonian Skeptic Sextus Empiricus (d. 210 CE) compared Pyrrho’s prescription for ataraxia to a real or fabled episode in the life of the painter Apelles of Kos. One day, Apelles was painting a horse but failed so completely to depict its froth that he gave up and flung his sponge at the picture—thereby accidentally achieving the desired effect. When we stop straining and let go of our judgement, as Apelles did, tranquillity may arrive as if by accident.
In the sixteenth century, the translation of the complete works of Sextus Empiricus led to a resurgence of Pyrrhonian Skepticism, and the work of Descartes—‘I think therefore I am’—can be read as a response to a Skeptical crisis… with roots in Ancient Athens and Ancient India.
Epicureanism
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.’
Like Zeno, Epicurus dedicated himself to attaining happiness through the exercise of reason: reason teaches that pleasure is good and pain bad, and that pleasure and pain are the ultimate good and bad. This has often been misconstrued as a call for rampant hedonism, but actually involves a kind of hedonic calculus to determine which things, over time, are likely to result in the most pleasure and least pain. Epicurus explicitly warned against overindulgence, because overindulgence so often leads to pain; and, rather than pleasure, emphasised the avoidance of pain, the elimination of unnecessary desire, and ataraxia. ‘If thou wilt make a man happy,’ said Epicurus, ‘add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.’
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, is 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.
Where the Cynic says, ‘free yourself from convention and artificial wants,’ the Stoic says, ‘stop trying to control what you cannot control,’ the Skeptic says, ‘stop demanding certainty where certainty is unavailable,’ and the Epicurean says, ‘simplify your desires and free yourself from unnecessary fears.’ Different diagnoses, different methods, but a remarkably similar destination: ataraxia, freedom from disturbance.
The Ultimate Cool
As a psychiatrist, I find the concept of ataraxia especially appealing. Psychiatry is chiefly concerned with the treatment of mental disorder, as of course it ought to be. Once a person has stopped taking the tablets, surely, that cannot be the end of their journey. I believe that there is much more to mental health than the mere absence of mental disorder. Mental health is not just about surviving, but about thriving, about developing and expressing our highest, fullest potential as human beings.
The concept of ataraxia is so important to me that I named my six-book Ataraxia series after it. Like each of the ancient philosophical schools, each book in the series adopts a distinct but complementary approach to peace of mind: exploring the deep origins of our distress in The Meaning of Madness; defending against the demons of self-deception in Hide and Seek; understanding and refining our emotions in Heaven and Hell; regulating our relations with others in For Better For Worse; developing our cognitive capacities in Hypersanity; and, finally, rethinking success and failure in The Art of Failure.
These books are not only about achieving tranquillity but also about expressing our full potential as human beings. Ataraxia is closely linked with eudaimonia, which is often translated as ‘happiness’ but which is, in fact, a much deeper, fuller, and richer concept, sometimes articulated in terms of flourishing, or living a life that is both fulfilling and fully realised.
Ataraxia may be more difficult to attain today than it was in Ancient Athens. In our economy of disturbance, the danger is not merely that we become more restless, but that we have become so accustomed to disturbance that we cease even to notice it. Younger people in particular, who may have spent their whole lives answering, reacting, worrying, scrolling, and striving, may not even know what it is like to enjoy an undisturbed mind.
Ataraxia is not indifference or disengagement. Diogenes was anything but disengaged, and Marcus Aurelius led armies and governed an empire. It is the ability to engage fully with the world without being continually thrown off balance by it.
The person who needs less, fears less, and is less easily manipulated has achieved a rare kind of freedom.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
According to lore, when Victor Hugo wanted to know how Les Misérables was selling, he sent his publisher a telegram consisting of a single character: ‘?’
The publisher replied: ‘!’
Two punctuation marks had been able to carry an entire conversation—because they could lean on shared knowledge and expectations.
Much of our communication works like that.
Suppose I am hosting a dinner party at 7pm. At 4pm, one of my guests texts me, ‘I’m free from 6pm.’ From that, I will understand, ‘I’m free from 6pm, and I’d like to arrive early if that’s OK?’
As the evening progresses, another of the guests says something horribly rude. I respond with, ‘So, what did you all think about the fish?’ From this, my guest ought to understand that he has overstepped the mark.
As a writer, I am acutely aware that I am conveying much more than the words on the page. As a psychiatrist, I am acutely aware that my patients are disclosing much more than the face value of their words.
So, how exactly do our words and sentences achieve so much?
The Theory of Implicature
The Oxford classicist and philosopher Paul Grice (d. 1988) attempted to answer this question with his theory of implicature.
Grice distinguished conventional implicatures, inherent in certain words such as ‘but’, ‘therefore’, and ‘indeed’, from conversational implicatures, which arise from a sort of game-playing, and rule-observing, between speakers.
Let me give you an example of each.
If I say, ‘She was poor but honest’, I am, by the simple use of the word ‘but’, also conveying or betraying a certain prejudice that poor people are generally dishonest.
A few hours before my dinner party, I bump into a friend while stepping out of a bakery with three loaves under my arm. My friend asks, ‘How are you?’ To which I respond, ‘Dinner party tonight!’ By which she understands, ‘I’m excited and rather busy preparing for the dinner party I’m hosting tonight—and so may not have time to chat.’ That’s at least three separate things.
With conversational implicatures, our utterances can take on added meanings, or different meanings, according to the situation or context in which they are uttered.
When we speak to our partner in a crowded place, they are able to derive much more meaning from what we are saying than the strangers who are also in earshot, in part because they are leaning upon background information known only to the both of us. Our partner is capturing not only our words, but also how they work with or wrap around the world that we have in common. Like a compression algorithm, conversation can dispense with whatever information the receiver is already able to reconstruct. The more we know about each other, the less we need to say.
More interesting, I think, is that non-literal meaning can also be created by pushing against certain general and deeply ingrained principles of communication and co-operation, shared even with strangers.
In particular, meaningful conversation can only take place on the assumption that the speakers are, at least on an epistemic level, cooperating with one another.
Grice divided this so-called cooperative principle into four maxims of conversation:
Maxim of quality: That utterances ought to be sincere, justified, and truthful.
Maxim of quantity: That the right amount of information ought to be provided.
Maxim of relevance: That the information provided is in some way pertinent.
Maxim of manner: That the information provided is as clear and unambiguous as possible.
Whenever one or more of these maxims appears to have been flouted, we reflexively assume that the speaker must somehow have observed the maxims and start searching for a likely non-literal meaning.
After my dinner party, I ask one of my guests, ‘How did you like the dinner?’ and she replies, ‘The conversation was stimulating.’ My friend has apparently failed to answer my question. But because I assume that she is cooperating with me, this failure becomes informative: she has politely and indirectly answered my cooking, while also telling me what she thought of the company.
In other words, implicature arises when the Gricean maxims are flouted, or would have been flouted had it not been for the implicature.
We are, in effect, pushing against expectations to save on words. The speaker need not transmit the entire meaning because the listener already possesses most of the apparatus required to reconstruct it. As a writer, I try not to underestimate your reconstructive machinery—because if I do, I risk becoming literal and boring.
Playing with Meaning
Common examples of floutings that, by implicature, are not true floutings include irony (maxim of quality), metaphor (maxim of relevance), and euphemism (maxim of manner). And some jokes as well. When my neighbour arrives late—from next door—to my dinner party, she exclaims: ‘Sorry, the traffic was really bad!’ Once we notice the gap between what is said and what is meant, we begin to see it everywhere.
Flirting is especially dependent upon this ambiguity. ‘Are you staying for another drink?’ can be nothing more than a question about another drink—or not. The advantage is precisely that neither party need decide, at least not yet, which meaning is intended. If the invitation is declined, both can retreat into the literal meaning without embarrassment.
This possibility of retreat gives rise to one of the great uses—and abuses—of implicature: plausible deniability. The diplomat, politician, seducer, passive-aggressive friend or relative, or social media troll can all communicate something without assuming full responsibility for having communicated it. ‘I never said that’ may be literally true, but entirely disingenuous.
At its darkest, implicature can become the political dog-whistle: an expression innocuous enough to one audience but freighted with additional meaning for another. The speaker communicates on two levels at once, while the ambiguity itself provides cover.
The maxims can also be flouted in a genuinely non-cooperative way. Thus, politicians often answer a different question to the one asked, or provide a much longer answer when a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would have sufficed, or been preferable. In such cases, most of the interviewer’s interjections are, in effect, attempts to return the politician to the maxims. In ordinary life, we might do much the same when we don’t know the answer to a question, but are too embarrassed to admit it.
Conversational implicatures serve a number of important functions such as: increasing the efficiency of communication; making communication more lively, varied, and humorous; and introducing ambiguity or restraint to avoid being ostracised or otherwise penalised for speaking hard truths.
But this slipperiness, this malleability, also gives rise to a number of ethical and legal problems—which is why legal contracts, witness statements, and the like are expected or even required to be as concrete and literal as possible.
More fundamentally, while we can be held responsible for what we say, to what extent can we be held responsible for what we implicate?
The same leaning on context that enables a bad actor to insinuate without admitting also enables friends to joke, lovers to flirt, diplomats to negotiate, and all of us to communicate far more economically and effectively than if we had to spell everything out. Meaning is not contained in words alone, but arises between words, expectations, and circumstances. Language is not merely the transmission of meaning from one mind to another. It is the art of sparking another mind to reconstruct meaning for itself.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
I’ve been searching for years for a unified theory of laughter. I still haven’t found one. Ha, ha.
Philosophers and psychologists have proposed any number of explanations for why we laugh. We laugh because we feel superior, because tension has been released, because something is incongruous… Each theory explains something. None explains everything.
And that may be because laughter is more complicated than we think.
Is Laughter Good or Bad?
When looking for romance on dating sites and apps, people often ask for, or promise to offer, a good sense of humour (GSOH).
Today, we tend to think of laughter as a good thing, but historically, this has not always been the case. Laughter seldom features in Plato’s dialogues, and, when it does, it is usually in the mouths of sophists and fools. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates suggests that, to set a good example, heroes in myths and stories should never be portrayed as being overcome with laughter.
The Stoics, too, frowned upon laughter, as did, for many centuries, the monasteries. Even the mild Rule of St Benedict condemns laughter in the strongest terms, for example, in Chapter VI, Of Silence: ‘Coarse jests, and idle words or speech provoking laughter, we condemn everywhere to eternal exclusion.’
Nowadays, most people associate laughter with happiness, health, and a virtuous attitude. But if laughter were that innocent, it wouldn’t be so fun.
The Superiority Theory
The notion that laughter can overcome reason or corrupt moral character finds an echo in the superiority theory of laughter, according to which laughter is a way of raising oneself by putting others down.
The superiority theory is most closely associated with the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who conceived of laughter as ‘a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly’.
When we think of mediaeval mobs jeering at people in stocks, or, closer to our time, Candid Camera, we can see that Hobbes had at least half a point. But the superiority theory is unable to account for all cases of laughter, such as laughter arising from joy, surprise, or relief.
The Relief Theory
According to the relief theory of laughter, most often associated with Sigmund Freud, laughter represents a release of pent-up nervous energy.
Like dreams, jokes are able to bypass our inner censor, enabling a repressed emotion such as xenophobia (or, at least, the nervous energy associated with the repression) to surface—explaining why, at times, we can be embarrassed by our own laughter. By the same token, a comedian might raise a laugh by conjuring some costly emotion, such as admiration or indignation, and then suddenly puncturing it.
More flexible than the superiority theory, the relief theory is able to account for how we might use laughter as a form of release, or to tell or reveal some uncomfortable truth. Upon awakening on her deathbed to see her entire family around her, Nancy Astor quipped, ‘Am I dying, or is this my birthday?’ But not all laughter arises from a release of pent-up energy—not, for example, laughter at a pun or word play—and those who laugh the hardest at offensive jokes are not generally the most decorous or repressed of people.
The Incongruity Theory
Much more popular today is a third theory, the incongruity theory of laughter, associated with the likes of Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard, according to which the comedian raises a laugh, not by conjuring an emotion and then killing it, but by creating an expectation and then contradicting it.
In the Critique of Judgement, Kant shares a few jokes to illustrate his theory of laughter, for example:
A merchant returning from India to Europe with all his wealth in merchandise was forced to throw it overboard in a heavy storm, and grieved thereat so much that his wig turned grey the same night!
In the Poetics, Aristotle states that ‘the ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others…’ Leaning on Aristotle, Kierkegaard highlights that the violation of an expectation is the core not only of comedy but also of tragedy—the difference being that, in tragedy, the violation leads to pain or harm.
Possibly, it is not the incongruity itself that we enjoy, but the light that it sheds, in particular, on the difference between what lies inside and outside our heads. Kant compares the pleasure of laughter, the free play of thought, to the pleasure of music, the free play of sound, and to the pleasure of gambling, the free play of fortune.
Perhaps the only difference between the comedian, the psychologist, and the philosopher is that you can’t pretend to be a comedian.
The incongruity theory is arguably more basic than the relief and superiority theories. When someone laughs, our inclination is to search for an incongruity; and though we may laugh for superiority or relief, even then, it helps if we can pin our laughter on some real or imagined incongruity.
But although the incongruity theory takes us closer to a general theory, it struggles to explain why incongruity should produce laughter rather than, say, surprise, confusion, or mere indifference.
The Social Corrective Theory
In Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, the monk Jorge de Burgos commits a string of murders to prevent the sole surviving copy of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy (the lost second book of the Poetics), hidden in the abbey’s labyrinthine library, from ever coming to light. For Jorge, the book is dangerous, because laughter, once understood, could undermine the very foundations of religion and society.
After Aristotle, the first major philosopher to write a book specifically on laughter was Henri Bergson.
In On Laughter (1900), Bergson begins by making three observations:
Laughter is a human preserve. ‘Many philosophers have defined man ‘a laughing animal’, but they could also have said a ‘laughable animal’—for if another animal can make us laugh, this is only insofar as it reminds us of man.’
More than that, laughter is a social activity. Even when we laugh alone, it is because we have conjured up a social context, a gathering of ghosts—‘for laughter implies a certain complicity with others, whether real or imaginary.’
Emotion is the enemy of laughter, inasmuch as laughter presupposes a certain distance, a certain indifference, even if it is only momentary—and, in fact, manufacturing this distance can be one of the purposes of humour.
Life, wrote Horace Walpole, is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.
These, then, are Bergson’s conditions for laughter: a human dimension, a social aspect, and a detached attitude.
But what is laughter, all laughter, actually about? It is, says Bergson, about a kind of mechanical rigidity, either in body or mind.
Nature is full of vital energy and never exactly repeats itself, but we human beings tend to fall short, to fall into patterns and habits, to ossify, to lose ourselves to ourselves—and laughter is how we point this out to one another, how we up our collective game.
For example, we may laugh at one who falls into a hole through absentmindedness, or at one who constantly repeats the same gesture or phrase. More subtly, we may laugh at a pun or a literal interpretation of a figure of speech; or at a misunderstanding that arises from a scene so formulaic that it is able to belong at the same time to two completely independent series of events.
I would add that we may also laugh at, or from, an unusual or unexpected lack of rigidity, as, for instance, when we break a habit or have an original idea—although this kind of divine laughter, as I call it, may only arise out of the contrast with our customary rigidity.
Ultimately, says Bergson, we are laughable to the extent that we are a machine or an object, to the extent that we lack self-awareness, that we are invisible to ourselves while being visible to everyone else.
Thus, the laughter of others usually draws attention to our unconscious processes, to our modes or patterns of self-deception, and to the gap, or gulf, between our fiction and the reality. This gap is narrowest in poets and artists, who have to transcend themselves if they are to be worthy of the name.
Zen masters teach that it is much easier to laugh at ourselves once we have transcended our ego. At the highest level, laughter is the sound of the shattering of the ego. It is a means of gaining (and revealing) perspective, of rising beyond ourselves and our lives, of achieving a kind of immortality, a kind of divinity.
Bergson has taken us further than Hobbes or Freud. Laughter is no longer merely an expression of superiority or a discharge of nervous energy: it has become a mechanism by which human beings police rigidity and preserve adaptability. Still, Bergson’s theory cannot explain all laughter, such as the laughter of a baby or a primate.
Evolutionary Theory
Another way to understand laughter is to look at it like a biologist or anthropologist might.
Laughter is evolutionarily much older than language, and we share its precursors with other animals. Primates in particular produce laughing sounds when playfighting, play-chasing, or tickling.
As with human children, it seems that their laughter functions as a signal that the danger is not for real—which may be why characters such as Batman’s Joker, who send a misleading signal, are so unsettling.
Perhaps, then, the basic evolutionary meaning of laughter is extraordinarily simple: this is only play, or the danger is not real.
Derivative Uses
Most laughter is not directed at jokes, but at creating and maintaining social bonds. Humour is a social lubricant, a signal of acceptance and belonging.
It is also a way of communicating, of making a point emphatically, or conveying a sensitive message without incurring the usual social costs.
On top of that, it can be turned into a weapon, a sublimed form of aggression, serving, like antlers or plumes, to pull rank or attract a mate.
The subtlety and ambiguity involved is in itself a form of play, and we know that laughter is associated with stress reduction and other health benefits.
If laughter began as a signal of play or safety, it has, in human beings, evolved a number of other functions, none of which are mutually incompatible. Humour is shaped by culture and education, and, if people laugh differently in Berlin or Tokyo, imagine how differently they must have laughed in Ancient Greece or Ancient India.
The same may be true of complex, elaborated emotions such as Schadenfreude and, indeed, romantic love, which build on primitive mechanisms, or ‘basic emotions’. Evolution lays the foundations; culture builds the house.
Why Can’t I Stop Laughing?
This may be where the search for a unified theory begins to go wrong. Superiority, relief, incongruity, social correction, play, and bonding need not be rival explanations. They operate at different levels and, in many cases, answer different questions.
The incongruity theory is principally cognitive; the relief theory is psychological and physiological; the superiority theory is interpersonal; the social corrective theory is social; the play or danger theory is evolutionary; and theories of bonding and aggression are functional. If someone slips on a banana skin, several of these theories could provide an account of the ensuing laughter.
But laughter often admits of several accounts, and, in fact, the more accounts it admits of, the harder we may laugh, as our mind flits from one account to another. Next time you laugh hysterically, pay attention to this flitting and its cascading effect.
When the teacher asks you to tell the class why you were laughing, you’d have to be a genius to explain it.
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.
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