By |

Synonyms, or Opposites?

Socrates at his trial
Socrates: humble, but not always modest.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

If you are brilliant and know that you are brilliant, is it arrogant to say so? And if you pretend that you are not, is that humility—or merely modesty?

‘Modesty’ and ‘humility’ are often used interchangeably, but they are actually very different concepts.

‘Modesty’ derives from the Latin modus, ‘measure’ or ‘manner’, and means restraint in appearance and behaviour. It is the reluctance to flaunt, display, or otherwise draw attention to oneself.

Modesty often implies a certain artfulness or artificiality, perhaps even insincerity or hypocrisy. In Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), Uriah Heep is characterised by his obsequiousness, and often brings up his own ‘umbleness’ in an attempt to disguise the true scale of his ambition. Modesty often poses as humility, but, unlike humility, is superficial and external rather than deep and moral. At best, modesty is no more than good manners.

Indeed, modesty can sometimes be a subtle form of vanity or advantage-seeking. By conspicuously understating some trait or achievement, we may be inviting others to contradict and praise us, or to like us better. The ego has not disappeared; it has merely become more cunning.

‘Humility’, like ‘humiliation’, derives from the Latin humus, ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’. Unlike mere modesty, true humility derives from a proper perspective on our human condition: one among billions on a small planet among billions, like a spore on a crumb of cheese.

Of course, it is nearly impossible for human beings to remain this objective for very long, but truly humble people are nonetheless far more conscious of their cosmic insignificance, an insignificance that verges on non-existence. A speck of dust does not think itself superior or inferior to another, nor does it concern itself with what other specks of dust might or might not think.

Enthralled by the miracle of existence, the truly humble person lives not for herself or her image, but for life itself.

In sum, to be humble is to subdue our ego so that things are no longer all about us, whereas to be modest is to protect the ego of others so that they do not feel uncomfortable, threatened, or small, and attack us in turn.

Because genuinely humble people often have a great deal to be modest about, they may need to slap on an extra thick veneer of modesty, or simply give up the game.

Humble people do not, as is often thought, have a low opinion of themselves. Instead, they have an accurate opinion of themselves, and, probably, of us as well. They neither elevate nor diminish themselves, but seek to see themselves and everything else for what they truly are. Erasmus (d. 1536) could not have put it more pithily when he said, ‘Humility is truth.’

If humility is truth, modesty is often a lie—so that the two can sometimes come into conflict. Modesty may require us to gloss over the truth to spare the feelings of others; humility, on the other hand, may demand that we speak the truth. Whereas Uriah Heep was modest without being humble, Socrates was humble without always being modest.

The Case of Socrates

In 399 BCE, at the age of seventy, Socrates was indicted for impiety. He was accused of ‘studying things in the sky and below the earth’, ‘making the worse into the stronger argument’, and ‘teaching these same things to others’.

At his trial, he gave a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth and reputation as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul.

After being convicted and sentenced to death, Socrates addressed the jurors, saying:

You think that I was convicted through deficiency of words—I mean, that if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone, nothing unsaid, I might have gained an acquittal. Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of words—certainly not. But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hearing from others, and which, as I say, are unworthy of me. But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defence, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live.

Throughout his long life, Socrates had been a paragon of humility. When his friend Chaerephon asked the Delphic oracle if anyone was wiser than Socrates, the priestess of Apollo replied that no one was wiser. To discover the meaning of this divine utterance, Socrates questioned a number of people with a claim to wisdom, and in each case concluded, ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’ From then on, he dedicated himself to the service of the gods by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, ‘if he is not, showing him that he is not.’ 

Was Socrates lacking in humility before the jurors? Was he, paradoxically, being arrogant by bragging about his humility? Perhaps he deliberately put on a brazen display because he wanted to die, because he understood that by dying a martyr his teachings would be preserved for posterity.

Or perhaps genuine humility can seem like arrogance to those who are truly arrogant.

The more arrogant someone is, the more modesty they require from others.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Emotions essays

By |

The West’s Dangerous Obsession With Analytical Intelligence

The Oracle at Delphi. The West before the West.
The Oracle at Delphi. The West before the West.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Everyone wants to be intelligent. But no one is quite intelligent enough to know what intelligence is.

There is no agreed definition or model of intelligence. By the Collins English Dictionary, intelligence is ‘the ability to think, reason, and understand instead of doing things automatically or by instinct’. By the Macmillan Dictionary, it is ‘the ability to understand and think about things, and to gain and use knowledge’.

In seeking to define intelligence, a good place to start might be with dementia. In Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, multiple higher cortical functions are disturbed, including memory, thinking, orientation, comprehension, calculation, learning capacity, language, and judgement. In my time, I have worked with over a thousand people with dementia, and I think it significant that they, along with people with severe learning disabilities, cope very poorly with changes to their environment, such as moving into a care home or even into an adjacent room.

Taken together, this suggests that, at its broadest, intelligence refers to the functioning of a number of related faculties and abilities that enable us to adapt and respond to environmental pressures. Because this is not beyond animals and even plants, they too may be said to be possessed of ‘intelligence’.

We Westerners tend to think of intelligence in terms of analytical skills. But in a close-knit hunter-gatherer society, intelligence might be defined more in terms of foraging skills, hunting skills, or social skills and responsibilities. Even within a single society, the skills that are most valued change over time.

In the West, the emphasis has gradually shifted from language skills to more purely analytical skills, and it is only in 1960, well within living memory, that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge dropped Latin as an entry requirement.

In 1990, Peter Salovey and John Mayer published the seminal paper on emotional intelligence, and EI quickly became all the rage. In that same year, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser. Today, we cannot go very far without having some considerable IT skills (certainly by the standards of 1990, or even 2010), and computer scientists are among the most highly paid professionals.

All this to say that what constitutes intelligence can vary quite considerably according to our values and priorities.

The West Before the West

The Western privileging of analytical skills is rooted in Ancient Greece—but the story is more complicated than it first appears.

Before Socrates, there was the Oracle at Delphi. For centuries, prominent Greeks travelled to Delphi to consult the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo, whose cryptic pronouncements were thought to issue from the god of light. One of these pronouncements concerned Socrates himself.

According to Plato and Xenophon, Socrates’ friend Chaerephon asked the oracle whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The Pythia replied in the negative. When Socrates found out about this, he did not know what to make of it. So he went about questioning one man after another, first the politicians, then the poets, and then the craftsmen, and found that those with the greatest reputation for wisdom were, in fact, the most foolish of them all. By this exercise, he came to understand the oracle’s meaning: that the wisdom of men is little or nothing, and those who know this are as wise as any man can be. Inspired by this revelation, he entered the service of Apollo, seeking out anyone who laid claim to wisdom and putting his wisdom to the test.

Thus, one of the founding stories of Western rationalism begins not with some argument, but with a rather irrational oracle.

Socrates held that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. He typically taught by the dialectic or Socratic method, that is, by questioning one or more people about a particular concept such as courage or justice to expose a contradiction in their initial assumptions and provoke a reappraisal of the concept.

But even Socrates, the great champion of rational enquiry, made room for another kind of knowing. At various times, he claimed to have a daimonion or ‘divine sign’, an inner voice or intuition that prevented him from making grave mistakes such as going into politics or fleeing Athens after having been sentenced to death. When, in Plato’s Crito, his friends urge him to flee Athens, he refuses on the authority of his daimonion: ‘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; this voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other.’

So here we have it: the father of Western rationalism, in hock to some mysterious voice.

The Rule of Reason

Plato and Aristotle built upon the legacy of Socrates, while underplaying his more mystical side.

For Plato, reason could carry us far beyond the confines of common sense and everyday experience into a ‘hyper-heaven’ (Greek, hyperouranos) of ideal forms. He famously fantasised about putting a geniocracy of philosopher kings in charge of his utopic Republic.

Aristotle—who for centuries came to be known simply as ‘our Master’—argued that our distinctive function as human beings is our unique capacity to reason, and therefore that our supreme good and happiness consists in leading a life of rational contemplation. To paraphrase Aristotle in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘Man more than anything is reason, and the life of reason is the most self-sufficient, the most pleasant, the happiest, the best, and the most divine of all.’

And with that, where else could the West go?

Aristotle, in the Metaphysics, also conceived of God as ‘thought thinking upon itself’ (noesis noeseos). In later centuries, reason became a divine property, found in man because made in God’s image. If you struggled with your SATs, you now know who to blame.

When Intelligence Becomes Human Worth

As I argue in Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, the West’s obsession with analytical intelligence has had, and continues to have, dire political, social, and, above all, moral consequences.

Immanuel Kant—probably the most influential philosopher since Aristotle—most memorably made the connection between reasoning and moral standing, arguing (in simple terms) that, by virtue of their ability to reason, human beings ought to be treated, not as means to an end, but only ever as ends-in-themselves. From here, it becomes all too easy to conclude that, the better you are at reasoning, the worthier you are of personhood and its rights and privileges.

For centuries, women were deemed to be ‘emotional’, that is, irrational, or less rational, which justified treating them as chattel or, at best, second-class citizens. The same could also be said of non-white people, over whom it was not just the right but the duty of the white man to rule.

Rudyard Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden (1899) begins with the lines: Take up the White Man’s burden–/ Send forth the best ye breed–/ Go bind your sons to exile/ To serve your captives’ need;/ To wait in heavy harness/ On fluttered folk and wild–/ Your new-caught, sullen peoples,/ Half-devil and half-child.

Although this sounds appalling today, at the time most of Kipling’s countrymen would have approved of the sentiment. In his lifetime, Kipling was offered (and turned down) a knighthood, the position of Poet Laureate, and the Order of Merit. He was not writing from the fringes.

People deemed to be less rational—women, non-white people, the lower classes, the infirm, the ‘deviant’—were not just disenfranchised but dominated, colonised, enslaved, murdered, and sterilised, in all impunity. As late as 2015, Virginia agreed to compensate surviving victims of its state-sponsored sterilisation programme for, among others, the ‘feeble-minded’.

Today, of all people, it is the white man (that is, the white male) who most fears artificial intelligence, imagining that it will usurp his status and privilege.

But even on its own terms, analytical intelligence is not quite what we make of it.

According to science, IQ is the best predictor of job performance. But that is not altogether surprising given that ‘performance’ and IQ have been defined in similar and overlapping terms, and that both depend, at least to some extent, on third factors such as compliance, motivation, and educational attainment.

Genius, in contrast, is more a matter of drive, vision, creativity, and luck or opportunity, and it is notable that the threshold IQ for genius—probably around 125—is not all that high.

William Shockley and Luis Walter Alvarez, who both went on to win the Nobel Prize for physics, were excluded from the Terman Study of the Gifted on account of… their unremarkable IQ scores.

In later life, Shockley developed controversial views on race and eugenics, using his ‘formidable intellect’ to make claims about the intelligence and worth of others. 

And so it was that a Nobel Prize winner who had failed to qualify as ‘gifted’ came to advocate eugenic measures on the basis of supposed differences in intelligence.

Of course, analytical intelligence is of value. But it is not intuition, it is not imagination, and it is not wisdom.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Cognition essays

By |

Learning to Master the Hedonistic Calculus

The food in Epicurus' Garden
For the wise, hunger is the best seasoning.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The Epicureans put pleasure at the centre of their philosophy. For centuries, they presented the main alternative to Stoicism as a comprehensive way of life. With an appealing message elevated and propagated by poets such as Horace, Lucretius, and Virgil, Epicureanism vied with Stoicism for the hearts and minds of Roman elites.

So, who was Epicurus, and what did he have to teach us?

The Garden School

Epicurus of Samos (341–270 BCE) and Zeno of Citium (the founder of Stoicism) were almost exact contemporaries in Athens but may never have met. A few years before Zeno began teaching, Epicurus founded a school of philosophy in a garden outside the city’s Dipylon gates. This school, called ‘the Garden’, dedicated itself to attaining happiness through the exercise of reason, and, in a highly sexist and stratified society, admitted both women and slaves.

Life in the Garden was not as you might imagine. Epicurus was content with bread and water and famously asked a friend to send him a little cheese so that, when he wished, he might feast. Far more important than luxury was friendship. ‘Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life,’ he wrote, ‘by far the most important is friendship.’ Thus, the Garden was more of a live-in community, or fellowship, than a school—influenced, no doubt, by Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum.

Although the most famous, Epicurus was not the first philosopher to make pleasure the highest good. A century earlier, Aristippus of Cyrene, a student of Socrates, had advocated a more immediate and sensual form of hedonism. The irony is that Aristippus lived rather more like our idea of an Epicurean, while the moderate Epicurus lived more like our idea of an Aristotelian—or simply our idea of a philosopher.

Pleasure as the Highest Good

According to Epicurus, reason leads to the conclusion that pleasure is good and pain bad, and that pleasure and pain are the ultimate measures of good and bad. This has often been misconstrued as a rampant call for unbridled hedonism, rather than the absence of physical and mental suffering that Epicurus actually had in mind. He referred to freedom from bodily pain as aponia, and to freedom from mental disturbance as ataraxia. His highest pleasure, then, looked more like tranquillity than ecstasy. 

Indeed, Epicurus explicitly warned against overindulgence, since overindulgence so often leads to pain. ‘The pleasant life,’ he wrote in the Letter to Menoeceus (the most important of his three surviving letters), ‘is produced not by a string of drinking bouts and revelries, nor by the enjoyment of boys and women, nor by fish and other items on an expensive menu, but by sober reasoning.’

Pleasure is the highest good, and all else that is good is so only by virtue of the immediate or deferred pleasure that it can procure. The behaviour of infants confirms that human beings instinctively pursue pleasure. All our actions, including those that may be construed as virtuous or altruistic, are, in the final analysis, aimed at obtaining pleasure for ourselves. Just as we can instantly sense whether something is hot or cold, or colourful or dull, so we can instantly sense whether something is pleasurable or painful.

Even so, not everything that is pleasurable ought to be pursued, and not everything that is painful ought to be avoided. Instead, a kind of hedonistic calculus ought to be applied to determine which things are most likely to result, over time, in the greatest pleasure and least pain—and it is above all with this arithmetics of pleasure that people struggle.

Lesson 1: The Two Types of Pleasure

To help us along, Epicurus began by distinguishing between two types of pleasure, ‘moving pleasures’ and ‘static pleasures’. Moving pleasures involve the satisfying of a desire—for example, tucking into a meal when hungry. Static pleasures, on the other hand, involve the state of having had a desire satisfied—for example, feeling sated after having eaten the meal. According to Epicurus, static pleasures are better than moving pleasures because they free us from the pain of need or want.

Lesson 2: The Three Classes of Desire

Because pleasure often arises from the satisfaction of desire and pain from its frustration, Epicurus also distinguished between three classes of desire: natural and necessary desires, such as those for food and shelter, which are hard to eliminate but naturally limited and both easy and highly pleasurable to satisfy; natural but non-necessary desires such as those for luxury food and housing, which offer ever diminishing returns; and vain desires such as those for fame and fortune, which, being inculcated by society, are not naturally limited and neither easy nor highly pleasurable to satisfy.

Epicurus advised that desires of the first class ought to be satisfied, desires of the second class can be satisfied if doing so is easy, but desires of the third class should be entirely eliminated. ‘If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.’ Modern life has multiplied vain desires beyond anything that Epicurus could have imagined. The problem with vain desires, such as acquiring the next thing or gaining another thousand followers, is not merely that they are more difficult to satisfy, but that they have no natural point of satisfaction.

Lesson 3: The Two Greatest Fears

Epicurus divided pleasures and pains into physical and mental, and argued that fear of the future, especially fear of the gods and fear of death, are the greatest obstacles to happiness.

Although the gods exist, they have absolutely no concern for, or even awareness of, humankind. Indeed, for the gods to involve themselves in the menial matters of men would be to perturb the supreme happiness and tranquillity that characterises and defines them. Instead of fearing the gods, we would do better to emulate them in their supreme removal and detachment.

Neither should we fear death, and this for two main reasons. First, Epicurus, drawing on Democritus, held that everything in the universe, including the human body and mind, is ultimately composed of atoms. Our death entails the disintegration of both body and mind and the re-dispersion of their atoms. As there is no longer any person to be troubled, death cannot trouble us after we are dead. And if death cannot trouble us after we are dead, neither should it trouble us while we are still alive. Second, the eternity that comes before our birth is not regarded as an evil; therefore, neither should the eternity that comes after our death. These two arguments are early formulations, respectively, of the ‘no subject of harm’ argument and the ‘symmetry’ argument, which have both, more or less, withstood the test of time.

Epicurus’ Own Death

Epicurus died at the age of 72 from the complications of renal colic (kidney stones), which is associated with one of the most intense of all bodily pains. On the last day of his life, he purportedly penned this letter to his friend and follower, the political grandee Idomeneus, which is nothing if not a testament to the overriding powers of philosophy:

I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life. For I have been attacked by a painful inability to urinate, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which comes from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplation, counterbalances all these afflictions. And I beg you to take care of the children of Metrodorus [Idomeneus’ brother-in-law], in a manner worthy of the devotion shown by the young man to me, and to philosophy.

The philosopher of pleasure died in agony—and called it a happy day.

Some three centuries later, Seneca, in his Letters to Lucilius, compared his relationship with Lucilius to that between Epicurus and Idomeneus. ‘Who would have known of Idomeneus,’ he asks, ‘had not the philosopher thus engraved his name in those letters of his? All the grandees and satraps, even the king himself … are sunk in deep oblivion.’

When all is forgotten, only the humble philosopher will be remembered.

Continue Exploring

If this article spoke to you, you might look into The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Success & Failure essays

By |

What the Logicians Have Missed

Le Char d'Apollon, by Odilon Redon
Both Plato and the Katha Upanishad compared the human soul to a chariot.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Plato was a master of metaphor. He compared the soul to a chariot and the state to a ship at sea. He compared his teacher Socrates both to a gadfly and to a midwife.

But the most famous of all his analogies is the Allegory of the Cave, in which he compares unphilosophical people to prisoners who, having spent their entire lives in a cave, are unable to imagine a world beyond.

How exactly do allegories work? An allegory (Greek, ‘a speaking about something else’) is a complete and cohesive narrative, for example, a myth, or George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that seems to be about one thing but is actually about another. Or, to put it differently, it is a story with two (or more) meanings: a superficial, literal meaning, and a deeper, figurative one.

Allegories are often described as ‘extended metaphors’, so one way of understanding the allegory is by understanding the smaller metaphor. Whereas an allegory is a complete narrative that seems to be about one thing but is actually about another, a metaphor is a sentence or short segment that equates two seemingly unrelated things. For example, Solomon 2:1-2:

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

The first sentence consists of two metaphors (‘I am the rose of Sharon’ and ‘I am the lily of the valleys’), and the second sentence consists of a simile.

Metaphor, Simile, and Analogy

What is the difference between a metaphor and a simile? In two words, not much. Whereas a metaphor says that something is something else, a simile says that it is like or as something else.

Simile might be considered a type of metaphor, as might also analogy, which involves drawing a comparison for the purpose of explaining or clarifying an idea, for example, if I say, ‘Scientists are as blind to their own paradigms as fish to water.’

In fact, the second sentence from the Solomon (‘As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters’) is more properly an analogy than a simple simile. But my broader point is this: they are close relatives and their boundaries are porous.

Metaphor and simile are figures of speech, which are a type of rhetorical device (also called, depending on context, literary or poetic device). They are both forms of analogy, which can be purely cognitive as well as rhetorical—in the mind and in the mouth, or in the mind only.

Metaphor and the Structure of Thought

Unlike other rhetorical devices, such as alliteration and resonance, metaphor is not merely ornamental, but a cognitively respectable way of knowing.

Metaphor and analogy enable an abstract or unfamiliar idea to be grasped in terms of a more concrete or familiar one. What’s more, the superimposition or juxtaposition of two superficially dissimilar ideas brings out any hidden or secondary correspondences between the two. This is not unlike formal deductive logic, which marries two ideas to give birth to a third—and is, in fact, a lot more common.

Logicians and their students prefer to focus on deduction and induction, but it may be that analogy is the principal form of human reasoning.

Faced with something new, the mind reaches for something familiar: What is this like? It then carries the structure of the familiar over to the unfamiliar, enabling us to make inferences that it may not otherwise have made.

We reason by analogy whenever we apply the lessons of one situation to another. A historian reaches for the past to illuminate the present, a doctor compares a new presentation to previous ones, a lawyer argues from precedent. Darwin reasoned from artificial selection to natural selection. In each case, analogy helps us connect the familiar to the novel.

In the words of Aristotle, whom Dante described as ‘the master of those who know’:

It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

What Makes for a Good Metaphor

The force of a metaphor depends above all upon its freshness and originality, in some sense, upon its disruptive qualities.

If a metaphor is overused, it becomes a cliché, and some metaphors are so tired that they are no longer visualised or even thought of as metaphors. For instance, in English (as opposed to, say, Spanish), we tend to talk of time in terms of space and distance, even if we are no longer aware of doing so: ‘I won’t be long’, ‘Let’s look at the weather for the week ahead’, ‘His drinking finally caught up with him.’ Metaphors such as these that are no longer visualised are called dead metaphors, and language is full of them.

Indeed, an argument could be made that all language is either onomatopoeic (or imitative, like ‘cough’, ‘splash’, and ‘thud’) or metaphorical. After all, what else could it be? The word ‘metaphor’ derives from the Greek for ‘a carrying over’, so it is itself a metaphor.

In its broadest, Aristotelian sense, metaphor is the carrying over of meaning from one thing to another on the basis of some perceived relation between them. Metaphor is a large family, including simile, analogy, metonymy, synecdoche, and more. Here’s a metaphor, or arguably a simile, by Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer…it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.

Unlike tired or dead metaphors, fresh, vivid metaphors like this one are experienced as beautiful and pleasurable. Beautiful because they are so concise and condensed. Pleasurable because, like humour, which they often contain, they exercise our cognitive range and flexibility. And like humour, they can be a little playful, a little naughty, and a little dangerous.

In the words, again, of Aristotle:

To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people, and words signify something, so whatever words create knowledge in us are the pleasantest.

The Most Brilliant Metaphors

Now back to the allegory. Like the metaphor, the allegory serves to convey abstract and at times subversive ideas in more concrete and condensed forms that then become symbolic of the ideas, making them easier to reveal or conceal or otherwise play with.

When an abstract notion is given the form of a person or animate being, this is known as personification. Narcissus, for example, is a personification of vanity and self-absorption, and Icarus of hubris. The Mahabharata, the Iliad of India (although a lot longer), presents three approaches to moral problems, personified by Bhima (brute force, ego, desire), Yudhishthira (rigid moral law, deontology), and Arjuna (virtue ethics, moral indeterminacy), who, wavering between the paths of his two elder brothers, is forced to make difficult, existential choices.

An important advantage of the allegory is that it can be approached on more than one level, meaning that people can enjoy it as it suits them, and see in it as much or as little as they are prepared to see—or indeed, whatever they wish to see, bending the allegory to the curve, or twist, of their minds.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero and Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Rhetoric essays

Explore all Cognition essays

Explore all Aristotle essays

By |

First, Tell Me What You Mean by God

William Blake, The Ancient of Days (1794).
William Blake, The Ancient of Days (1794). Is Urizen what Blake meant by God?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In February 2012, three of the world’s most distinguished intellectuals gathered in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre to discuss the origins of human beings and, tied with that, the existence of God. There was Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and celebrated atheist; Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury; and the philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, a former Catholic priest who professed to be ‘ignorant’—that is, an agnostic. Kenny, who died in August 2026 at the age of 95, was a philosopher of exceptional range and clarity, and perhaps the ideal person to sit between the other two.

Here, apparently, were the three great positions in the God debate: belief, disbelief, and quiet uncertainty. But there was a problem. What did each man mean by ‘God’?

This is no minor philosophical quibble. Before asking whether something exists, we need, surely, to establish what that something is. Yet people routinely declare themselves theists, atheists, or agnostics without first defining the object of their belief, disbelief, or doubt. You cannot meaningfully ask whether something exists until you have some idea of what you are looking for. And ‘God’ can mean radically different things to different people.

Which God?

At one end of the spectrum is the God that Dawkins principally attacks: a supernatural intelligence who created the universe, designed living things, listens to prayers, judges our actions, performs miracles, and otherwise intervenes in human affairs. Millions of people believe in some version of this God, so it is perfectly reasonable for Dawkins to argue that such a being does not exist.

But it is far from the only conception of God. Aristotle’s God, for example, is the unmoved mover: the ultimate cause of change in the universe, itself unchanging. Aristotle’s God did not create the universe, which Aristotle believed to be eternal, and certainly does not sit in heaven listening to our prayers. Instead, he is the ultimate introvert, described by Aristotle as noesis noeseos, ‘thought thinking itself’.

Spinoza went even further in collapsing God. For him, God and Nature are one and the same: Deus sive Natura, ‘God or Nature’. Everything that exists is in God, because God is the single infinite substance of which everything else is a mode—a recognised position also in Indian philosophy.

Now ask the atheist: ‘Do you believe in Spinoza’s God?’ What would it mean to say no? That he does not believe in the rock that he is kicking? Unless the atheist wishes to deny the existence of Nature, the disagreement is no longer about whether something exists. It is about whether we ought to call that something ‘God’.

What Does an Atheist Not Believe In

When someone says, ‘I don’t believe in God’, what they really mean is, ‘I don’t believe in a particular idea of God.’

This becomes increasingly apparent as soon as we begin stripping attributes from God. Suppose we start with a personal creator who designed the universe, answers prayers, performs miracles, rewards virtue, punishes sin, and promises an afterlife. There is plenty here to believe or disbelieve. Now progressively remove the afterlife, divine intervention, answered prayers, God’s personality, and even the act of creation. With each subtraction, there is less for the atheist to reject. Eventually, we might arrive at God as the order of nature, the ground of being, Nature itself, or some such.

The less we say about God, the harder God becomes to disbelieve in.

At the limit, the atheist and the believer may agree completely about what exists. The disagreement is only about whether to call it ‘God’. Indeed, the atheist who tells Spinoza, ‘I don’t believe in your God’, may really be saying, ‘I believe in exactly the same thing as you, but I don’t think you should call it God.’ More commonly, Spinoza was himself accused of atheism, on the grounds that identifying God with everything amounted to believing in nothing.

The Problem with Agnosticism

The same problem applies to agnosticism. An agnostic typically says, ‘I don’t know whether God exists.’ But again: which God?

It makes perfect sense to be agnostic about a supernatural creator. Perhaps such a being exists; perhaps not; perhaps we cannot know. But what would it mean to be agnostic about Spinoza’s God? ‘I don’t know whether Nature exists’ is hardly a coherent position.

Like atheism and theism, agnosticism depends upon some prior conception of God. Until that conception has been supplied, saying, ‘I am an agnostic’ tells us surprisingly little. The familiar spectrum—theist, agnostic, atheist—is not really a spectrum of attitudes towards God. It is a spectrum of attitudes towards a particular—some might say quasi-mythological—conception of God. Change the conception and you may change your position without having altered a single belief about reality.

Is Dawkins Attacking a Straw Man?

This helps explain something peculiar about the modern God debate. Dawkins is not attacking a straw man when he attacks the supernatural, interventionist God. Millions of people believe in precisely such a God.

But difficulties arise when an argument against that concept of God is treated as an argument against God tout court.

The God of philosophy and theology can be much more elusive. God may be described not as a being but as Being itself; not as one cause among others but as the ground of causation; not as something within the universe but as that upon which the universe ultimately depends. Dawkins’s arguments against a supernatural designer may have considerable force without touching these concepts at all.

The atheist can reasonably reply, ‘You have defined God into existence.’ The theologian can equally reasonably reply, ‘You have been attacking a God I don’t believe in.’ And there, in miniature, lies the problem.

The more concrete and anthropomorphic God becomes, the easier God is to attack. But the more abstract and deflationary God becomes, the less obvious it is what atheism could mean—and, eventually, why we need the word ‘God’ at all.

Why Does the God Debate Persist?

If the problem is so simple, why do some of our most distinguished intellectuals sit there arguing about God without first agreeing what they mean by the word?

One reason may be that belief and disbelief are about far more, and far less, than metaphysics. For many people, religion is bound up with family, community, culture, morality, and personal identity. When someone starts questioning their idea of God, they are also questioning their idea of who they are.

Atheism can function in much the same way. For some, especially since the rise of the New Atheism, it can signify reason, science, intellectual independence, or emancipation from religious tradition. People on both sides may therefore be defending not merely propositions, but identities and the ego defences that buttress them. This may account for the extraordinary heat surrounding the debate. Once people start agitating, it is no longer simply about the facts.

Another reason is that the God debate has acquired the status of the ultimate intellectual question. It seems to encompass the origins of the universe, the meaning of life, morality, death, and our place in the cosmos. To call oneself a theist, atheist, or agnostic is not only to take a position in the debate but to take a position on reality itself—even if said position happens to be incoherent.

The ambiguity that makes the question philosophically troublesome may be precisely what makes it so attractive. Everyone thinks they understand the question, and even ‘I have no clue’ counts as a valid answer. All in all, the God debate makes for excellent theatre—hence the Sheldonian for the venue, while virtue ethics is for the basement.

A more rigorous debating approach would begin by defining God, fragment into more precise questions, and attract smaller audiences.

Three Clever Men in the Sheldonian

Which brings us back to Dawkins, Williams, and Kenny. Perhaps the most striking thing about their discussion is not that three exceptionally intelligent men could disagree about God, but they could appear to disagree before establishing whether they were talking about the same thing.

Dawkins was principally rejecting a supernatural creator. Williams resisted treating God as another object or explanatory cause within the universe. Kenny, sitting between them, professed uncertainty. All three positions are perfectly intelligible in themselves. The difficulty arises when we treat them as answers to the same under-defined question—as though Dawkins were saying no, Williams yes, and Kenny maybe.

Perhaps, then, there is no single God debate. There are only debates about particular conceptions of God, some more substantial than others. Once those conceptions are made explicit, apparent disagreements may sharpen into real ones—or disappear altogether. As things stand, everyone can leave feeling that they have won. In a properly defined debate, some people might have to accept that they are wrong.

Of course, none of this says whether God exists, or does not exist. It makes a simpler point: neither statement means very much until we know what ‘God’ means.

So before you tell me that you are a believer, an atheist, or an agnostic—or worse, ask me whether I am one of those—there is something else I need to know.

What do you mean by God? —And, do you know your Aristotle and your Advaita Vedanta?

What I mean is that the familiar God debate is culturally provincial. It tends to assume a conception of God shaped by Christianity: a personal creator, separate from the world, who takes an interest in human affairs. But Aristotle’s unmoved mover already unsettles that picture, while Advaita Vedanta can dissolve the distinction between God, ultimate reality, and the deepest self.

Once we step outside the familiar Christian frame, the apparently simple opposition between belief and disbelief begins to break down.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Rhetoric essays

Explore all Cognition essays