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.
Ancient Greek hoplite helmet. Socrates fought in at least three military campaigns and was renowned for his courage and composure.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In 424 BCE, the Athenian army suffered a crushing defeat at Delium. As the soldiers fled the battlefield, one man stood out for his extraordinary composure. He was neither a famous general nor a celebrated warrior, but a middle-aged philosopher.
According to the officer Alcibiades, who witnessed the retreat from horseback, Socrates walked away with such calm and confidence that the enemy soldiers left him alone, preferring to pursue those who were fleeing in panic.
It was not the first time Socrates had distinguished himself in battle. Nor would it be the last.
Socrates at War
We tend to picture Socrates as an old man in the marketplace, questioning his fellow Athenians about courage, justice, and the good life. But he did not merely talk about courage; he demonstrated it.
Like many Athenian citizens, Socrates trained as a hoplite, a heavily armed foot soldier who fought in the close formation known as the phalanx. He fought in at least three campaigns: Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis.
The earliest of these, the siege of Potidaea, began in 432 BCE, when Socrates was about 38 years old. The siege was long and arduous, with the soldiers exposed to hunger, cold, and disease.
In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades recalls that Socrates endured these hardships much better than anyone else in the army. During a severe frost, he marched barefoot over the ice, apparently indifferent to the cold. His comrades looked daggers at him, thinking that he was showing them up.
Yet, Socrates was no joyless ascetic. Alcibiades adds that no one enjoyed a festival more than he did. If called upon, he could drink everyone under the table—although no one had ever seen him drunk.
At Potidaea, Socrates also saved Alcibiades’ life. But when the generals awarded the prize for valour to the high-born Alcibiades, Socrates insisted that Alcibiades should keep it.
Here was a man who could endure almost anything, enjoy almost anything, and yet remain master of himself. No wonder Alcibiades was in love with him. To everyone’s shock, Alcibiades even shared a tent with him.
What Is Courage?
It is hardly surprising that a man with so much experience of war should have thought deeply about courage.
In Plato’s Laches, Socrates discusses the nature of courage with two distinguished generals, Laches and Nicias.
At first, courage might seem easy enough to define. Surely, it consists in standing one’s ground against the enemy, or in remaining fearless in the face of danger?
But Socrates is not so sure. After all, a man might remain fearless out of foolishness or recklessness. He might be fearless simply because he does not understand the danger he is in. Would we call such a man courageous?
After a time, Nicias proposes that courage is a kind of knowledge: knowledge of what is truly to be feared and hoped for.
Socrates finds this definition more promising, but points out that such knowledge cannot be confined to the future. To know what is truly to be feared and hoped for, we must also know what is truly good and bad. Therefore, courage, if it is to be called courage, is born out of knowledge in general.
Socrates notices that, in trying to define courage, they have stumbled upon two larger ideas. First, the virtues are closely related. To be truly courageous, we must also be wise, just, and self-controlled. This is known as the unity of the virtues. Courage is not simply the ability to face danger, but the wisdom to know whether the danger ought to be faced. Second, deep down, all the classical virtues—courage, justice, piety, temperance—amount to knowledge and wisdom.
But is knowledge alone enough? Might it not be possible to understand what is right and true and still lack the courage to act upon it? For Socrates, if we truly know what is right and true, we cannot fail to act upon this knowledge. But in Plato’s Republic, courage takes on a further dimension: the preservation of our convictions about what is and is not to be feared, despite our desires, fears, and baser instincts. This, if you like, is a kind of meta-courage: the courage to remain faithful to one’s understanding of what matters.
As I discuss in my book, The Gang of Three, calm and courage begin with knowing what is truly worth fearing and meeting it with wisdom rather than fear. The less we depend on comfort, approval, and other things we might lose, the less we have to fear, and the more freely and courageously we can live.
The Courage to Die
In 399 BCE, Socrates was put on trial for impiety and corrupting the youth. Facing the possibility of execution, he refused to abandon philosophy or say what was needed to save his life.
Instead, he reminded the jury that, just as he had not deserted his post at Potidaea or Delium for fear of death, so he would not now desert his lifelong convictions.
For Socrates, to fear death was to pretend to know what we do not know. Death might be an evil, but it might equally be a blessing. What we do know is that injustice is an evil, and that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit it.
When Socrates was condemned to death, he had the means to escape, but chose instead to drink of the poisoned cup.
With the same extraordinary composure, the man who had faced death for Athens now faced death at the hands of Athens. He had not merely talked about courage, or even demonstrated it on the battlefield. He had carried it through to the very end.
It’s quite a thought that, had Socrates fallen in battle, or, at the end, played the part of a coward, we today would be living in different minds, in a different world.
Socrates questioning the priest Euthyphro, who is in a hurry to leave.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In 399 BCE, the Athenians sentenced Socrates to death. His crime? He had spent his life making people look like the fools that they were.
Officially, Socrates was charged with impiety and corrupting the youth. For years, this eccentric septuagenarian had gone around asking people questions, exposing the inconsistencies and contradictions in their opinions. In his mind, he had been doing them the greatest favour.
Socrates had discovered something about human nature that remains as true today as it was in antiquity: Our problem is not so much that we are ignorant, but that we are ignorant of our ignorance.
The Wisest Man in Athens
According to his student Plato, Socrates had a friend called Chaerephon, who once travelled to Delphi and, on a whim, asked the oracle whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The oracle replied in the negative: “There is no one wiser than Socrates.”
Socrates was as surprised and perplexed as everyone. He knew that he was not wise—but, surely, the god of the oracle could not have been mistaken? To find out what the god might have meant, he went around questioning people with a reputation for wisdom, beginning with the politicians, then the poets, and finally the craftsmen.
The politicians, he found, could not even explain the words that they were using. The poets wrote beautiful verses but struggled to make sense of them. The craftsmen possessed genuine expertise, but mistakenly assumed that this made them knowledgeable about everything else.
Socrates concluded that he was wiser than these supposedly wise men in one small but critical respect: He did not think he knew what he did not know.
The Trouble With Knowing Everything
From then on, Socrates devoted himself to questioning his fellow Athenians. He would ask a general to define courage, a priest to define piety, or a pair of good friends to define friendship. They would offer a confident answer, only for Socrates to expose some inconsistency or contradiction. He and they would then explore the concept in every direction until everyone threw up their hands in despair at their inability to define even the most important and apparently self-evident things.
This method of questioning, known as elenchus, or the Socratic method, aimed to bring about a state of puzzlement called aporia.
Aporia, if you like, is the honest and fertile state of knowing that you do not know.
One day, Socrates met a youth called Theaetetus, whose perplexity delighted him. Socrates said to him, “I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”
The Perils of Being Right
But there was a problem. As I discuss in my book, The Gang of Three, Socrates’ interlocutors did not want to be helped. Deep down, in a place unknown even to them, they did not welcome the truth.
Our beliefs are not merely propositions that we hold in our heads. They are bound up with our sense of who we are. To challenge a person’s beliefs is to challenge that person’s identity, standing, and meaning. We defend our beliefs as if we were defending ourselves.
Socrates understood this all too well. To prevent his interlocutors from getting angry or running away, he frequently feigned ignorance or used flattery. His approach rather resembles that of Lieutenant Columbo, the apparently bumbling detective who always has just one more question.
The Price of Wisdom
By exposing the ignorance of prominent Athenians, Socrates acquired admirers, especially among the young, but also powerful enemies.
At his trial, he reproached his fellow citizens for concerning themselves with wealth and reputation while neglecting wisdom, truth, and the proper care of their souls.
He compared himself to a gadfly attached by the gods to a great but listless horse: Athens needed him to sting her into wakefulness.
Even with his life at stake, Socrates refused to change his ways. If anything, he dropped the mask.
Socrates had spent his life showing people that they were fools. In condemning him, the Athenians demonstrated just how right he was.
And two and a half thousand years later, what has changed? We still prefer certainty to doubt, reassurance to correction, and the appearance of wisdom to the difficult business of acquiring it.
We are not merely ignorant; we are invested in remaining ignorant.
Sita and Sarita (1893–94) by Cecilia Beaux. Every animal contains a part of God, but only the cat knows it.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
We find every cat, or almost, to be beautiful. But when it comes to other human beings, beauty is more the exception than the rule. We might walk past hundreds of faces without seeing one that makes us look again.
Yet people try a lot harder than cats, expending considerable time, money, and ingenuity on beautifying themselves. We exercise, diet, dress, moisturise, dye, paint, inject, and even, sometimes, submit to the surgeon’s scalpel. Cats, meanwhile, do little more than lick themselves.
Are we just an uglier species, like bats or warthogs, or might there be more to it than that?
Of Mice and Men
It may be that our aesthetics are a product of our mind. Bats may not be ugly to other bats, and cats probably don’t think of us as ugly—but do seem to think of us as smelly.
Indeed, bats and cats may be entirely without aesthetic judgement, and respond merely to mating signals.
But even if we are the only truly aesthetic animal—as argued by the philosopher Immanuel Kant—that does not explain why we find the average cat to be a lot more beautiful than the average member of our own species.
One possibility is that we are more sensitised to human faces. To the untrained eye, all sheep look alike, whereas their shepherd may be able to recognise each one. A large area of our cerebral cortex is devoted to visual processing, with specialised mechanisms for recognising and reading other human faces.
But should that not mean that we find human faces more, rather than less, beautiful?
Beauty and the Beast
Perhaps the more important difference is not in what we see, but in what we are looking for. When we admire a cat, we admire its proportions, colouring, movements, and general appearance. But when we look at another human being, our judgement is complicated by sexual desire, or the absence of it. We are asking not merely whether a face or body is beautiful on its own terms, but whether we find it sexually attractive.
Of course, we can sometimes find a middle-aged body or wizened face beautiful, but this often requires the kind of perceptual shift that we undergo in a museum, when contemplating a work of art.
In a museum, as Kant would tell us, we suspend our ordinary practical judgements and attend to an object for its own sake. We can admire the appearance of Socrates in a David painting, without asking whether his snub nose and pot belly would feed our appetites. Yet we seldom extend the same generosity to people we encounter in everyday life. In a sense, then, the museum turns us back from animal to human.
Beauty and sexiness are not the same thing. We can find someone beautiful without being attracted to them, and vice versa—which is fortunate for ugly people.
On Youth and Old Age
And for young people too. Smooth skin, lustrous hair, and a certain fullness of the face and body are among the qualities we associate with sexual attractiveness. Not every young person is attractive, of course, but youth confers advantages that are difficult to appreciate until they have disappeared.
Indeed, one of the ironies of ageing is that we look back at photographs of our younger selves and wonder how we could ever have been dissatisfied with our looks—or made so little use of them for the few summers that they lasted.
Yet beauty, as opposed to buxomness, need not diminish with age. It is possible to become even more beautiful. An older face may acquire a beauty that depends less on its proportions than on its character and expression. To be beautiful, an older face may also need to be interesting. To be beautiful, an older face may also need to be… good.
Human beauty is not so rare as we suppose. We are simply too distracted by desire, comparison, and convention to appreciate it.
Perhaps we should learn to look at people as we do at paintings, or cats.
Cats are not just beautiful, but irresistibly cute. Part of why we find them so beautiful is simply that we love them.
Our feline friends have no conception of beauty, and certainly no ambition to be beautiful—though they purr when we call them so. They neither admire their reflection nor regret their younger selves. They, like us, simply go on being beautiful, whether we notice or not.
Continue Exploring
To explore Kant’s ideas in their historical context—and discover how they influenced Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—see my book, The German Greeks.
Harvest at the Abbaye de Lérins, on an island opposite Cannes, c. 1900.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Recently, I decided to get in touch with a childhood friend. We hadn’t spoken in twenty-five years.
He wasn’t just any childhood friend. We were born on the same day, in the same town, one hour apart. We used to joke that we were twins from different mothers.
In the intervening years, he had become a Trappist monk: a strict kind of monk who practises deep silence and speaks only when necessary. I write him long, flowing letters; he replies laconically, but touchingly.
His life is austere. Every morning, he wakes up at 3:30 to pray. And yet I find myself envying something in it: its simplicity, its mindfulness, and its constant, if mostly silent, companionship.
My twin brother got me thinking about the monastic life. As I researched, I found something most astonishing: If you are poor and uneducated, you may be able to enjoy the same health outcomes and life expectancy as the richest and most educated… simply by becoming a monk or nun.
This remarkable fact ought to be better known, and probably would be if it did not sit so uneasily with our cut-throat consumerist society.
The Price of Inequality
A major American study found that, at age 40, the richest 1 per cent of men could expect to live 14.8 years longer than the poorest 1 per cent. For women, the gap was 10.6 years.
The inequality is not just in how long people live, but how well. In England, people born in the most deprived areas in 2018-20 could expect nearly twenty fewer years in good health than those born in the least deprived areas: 19.3 fewer years for women, and 18.6 for men.
In a monastery, these inequalities simply vanish. A 2025 study followed 2,421 German Catholic monks born between 1840 and 1959. The researchers used the order’s titles “brother” and “padre” as indicators of socioeconomic status, with brothers often engaged in manual labour and the better-educated padres holding senior administrative posts. Across the different birth cohorts, they found no statistically significant survival difference between the two groups.
The contrast is all the more striking because monks appear not only to escape the inequality between rich and poor, but also to live unusually long lives. A study of Bavarian religious communities found that young adult monks could expect to live up to four years longer than other men. A Korean study analysing newspaper death notices across occupational groups between 1963 and 2010 found that clergy, including Buddhist monks, had the highest reported average age at death, at about 80.
Cloistered life reduces inequality not just between rich and poor, but also between men and women. A girl born in America in 2024 could expect to live 4.9 years longer than her male counterpart. By contrast, a study of Bavarian religious communities found that nuns’ life expectancy exceeded monks’ by only about one year.
A Different Way to Live
What might explain this all-round levelling effect? In a monastery, many of the things that make life better and safer are shared. Monks eat together, live under the same roof, follow a common routine, and receive the same care.
The monastery also offers something harder to measure: a place within a community, useful work, and a strong sense of purpose. Its members have a role and a status, but little of the competition that governs life outside. They have peace and quiet without being alone. Even death belongs to a shared—and continuing—story.
The implication that you can “win at life” simply by stepping out of the rat race is, of course, deeply disturbing. Our society assumes that income and education represent genuine advantages. But the monastery suggests that they matter partly because the world outside is insecure, competitive, and unequal. Once people share the same housing, food, healthcare, community, and purpose, much of the advantage of wealth and education simply disappears.
I think of my friend waking up at 3:30 to pray and chant. His life is austere, but far from empty. Perhaps that is what I envy: not the silence alone, but the sense that a life can be rich—in fact, far richer—without being organised around acquisition, comparison, and the fear of falling behind.
Old Vines, Mountain Wines, and Spain’s Garnacha Revival
Comando G’s famous Rumbo al Norte vineyard.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In the Sierra de Gredos, west of Madrid, once-neglected old bush vines are yielding some of Spain’s most compelling wines: pale, elegant Garnacha and complex, characterful whites from Albillo Real. I have a bottle of the Garnacha open beside me as I write.
The vineyards lie across three main valleys: the Alberche in the centre, the Alto Alberche to the north, and the Tiétar to the south. Both the Alberche and the Tiétar flow into the Tagus. Enormous granite boulders punctuate the landscape; Comando G’s famous Rumbo al Norte looks more like a sculpture park than a vineyard, more like Easter Island than Spain. San Martín de Valdeiglesias, Cebreros, and El Tiemblo are about an hour away from Madrid. A further hour’s drive takes you into the Alto Alberche, close to the fortress city of Ávila.
Map of the Sierra de Gredos wine region.
Near El Tiemblo stand four pre-Roman granite bulls, the Bulls of Guisando. In Don Quixote, the rival Knight of the Mirrors boasts of having lifted them at his ladylove’s command. The region’s vineyards faced a less fanciful trial. The railway brought competing wines from Valdepeñas to Madrid, while Gredos’s steep, often terraced plots were costly to work and difficult to mechanise. Rural depopulation compounded the decline, leaving many vineyards abandoned. The modern revival gathered momentum with pioneers such as Telmo Rodríguez and Pablo Eguzkiza, who bought their first Gredos vineyard in 1999. Comando G, established in 2008, brought the region to international prominence.
The Bulls of Guisando
Above the granitic bedrock, coarse sands derived from weathered granite range from a few centimetres to several metres in depth. There are also pockets of friable schist, notably around El Tiemblo. Whereas the granitic soils tend to yield fragrant, silky Garnacha, the schistous soils are associated with greater firmness and depth.
The combination of old bush vines, granite, and schist recalls another of my favourite wine regions: South Africa’s Swartland. In both places, a new generation of winegrowers recognised that vines valued chiefly for bulk production could yield wines of extraordinary distinction. If you already love Swartland, you will love Gredos.
Gredos has hot, dry summers and cold, wetter winters, with snow at higher elevations. In 2026, Spain suffered the worst wildfires in its history. When I visited the region that September, several producers reported losing two or three hectares of vines—a considerable loss for estates with only a dozen or so hectares, and one made harder, and sadder, by the age of the vines.
Summer 2026: Century-old vines reduced to ash.
In total, there are some 4,000ha of vines. Vineyards tend to be small and scattered, with many abandoned plots. Some lie above 1,000 metres, some even above 1,200, where high diurnal temperature variation helps preserve freshness and develop aromatic complexity. Yields are low, often below 30hl/ha. The dry summers and strong winds favour organic viticulture. As one winemaker told me, “It’s hard to make bad wine here.”
Despite its reputation, Gredos has no eponymous appellation—in part because the wine region straddles the provinces of Madrid, Toledo, and Ávila, each in a different autonomous community. Wines carrying a geographical designation appear under Cebreros, Méntrida, or Vinos de Madrid, or the broader Vino de la Tierra de Castilla y León. Still, qualifying wines within Cebreros may carry ‘Sierra de Gredos’ on the label.
Grenache Noir (Garnacha Tinta) accounts for some four-fifths of plantings. I found two broad styles: pale, ethereal wines driven by acidity, and the soupier kind of Grenache best left to others. The finest examples can recall the best of Burgundy, with their superfine tannins and notes of rosehip, lavender, violets, incense, thyme, and fennel—often reflecting the aromatic plants growing among the vines.
Albillo Real—not to be confused with Albillo Mayor—was once sold as a delectable table grape, but in Gredos yields some of Spain’s most serious and intriguing white wines. Its low, sprawling bush vines ripen early, and growers prize its affinity for warmth and sunshine, whereas Grenache often benefits from cooler, north-facing slopes. The examples I tasted were complex and full-bodied, with notes of honeycomb, jasmine, citrus pith, and herbs, and a saline finish. Yet in 2025, only around 50 hectares of Albillo Real were registered within the Cebreros appellation.
Barrel tasting at Bernabeleva, in San Martín de Valdeiglesias. Arroyo del Tórtolas is Juan Diez’s favourite wine, and it was mine too.
Favourite producers in Gredos include 4 Monos, Bernabeleva, Comando G, Daniel Ramos, Las Moradas, and Sotomanrique. Daniel Ramos makes his wines as naturally as possible and releases them over several years. At Las Moradas, Isabel Galindo has been making wine since 2003 and has perfected her art. My favourites at 4 Monos and Bernabeleva were the single-vineyard Molino Quemado and Arroyo del Tórtolas respectively. Sotomanrique in particular struck me as very good value for money, especially in their three single vineyard wines.
If you ever visit beautiful Gredos, the tiny Hotel Labranza in San Martín is a traditional casa de labranza (farmhouse) built in the eighteenth century—with such a soundscape, and such breezes, that I struggled to get out of bed in the mornings.
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