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What the Stoic Seneca Knew About Ambition, Success, and Happiness

Kind Midas turning a rose into gold
King Midas turning a rose to gold.

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

Essay substantially revised on 19 August 2026.

When Dionysus, god of wine, was in Phrygia, his teacher Silenus wandered off drunk and was carried to King Midas. When Dionysus came to collect Silenus, he offered Midas any wish. Midas asked for the power to turn whatever he touched into gold. Before dinner, he had turned every bush in his famed rose garden to gold. But he was horrified when his food and wine also turned to gold. His daughter tried to comfort him, but she too suffered the same fate. When Midas begged to be rescued, Dionysus told him to bathe in the River Pactolus, the golden sands of which later became the source of Croesus’ fabulous wealth.

By confusing means and ends, Midas had made one of today’s commonest mistakes.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca was one of the richest men in the Roman Empire. Having risen from provincial origins to become tutor and chief adviser to the emperor Nero, he spent much of his life thinking about Midas’ mistake—and his own.

In his famous letters, this is what he tells his friend Lucilius.

The Dangers of Ambition

To be ambitious is to seek out achievement not for the sake of achievement itself, which is to be high-reaching, but for the sake of distinguishing ourselves from others. Were we the last person on earth, it would make little sense to be ambitious. ‘Ambition, luxury, and caprice need a stage; you will cure them if you keep them from being viewed.’

The dangers of ambition are threefold. First, like Midas, we should be wary of what we wish for. ‘In ordinary speech, we often say that we are overjoyed that one person was elected consul, or that another was married or his wife has given birth, events which, far from being causes of joy, are frequently the beginnings of future sorrow.’ In general, the less we have, the freer, and richer, we are.

Second, ambition is future-focused; to live with ambition is to live in fear and anxiety while discounting the moment that is before us. Because ambition ties us to externals (things that are beyond our control), and, ultimately, to other people, it leaves us subject, and vulnerable, to them. ‘Liberty does not come for free. If you value it highly, you must devalue everything else.’

Third, ambition is often destructive. Great leaders like Caesar, Pompey, and Marius who are driven by ambition are not even in control of themselves, and, as a result, end up doing terrible things: Marius led armies, but ambition led Marius. While these men were whirling down on the entire world, they themselves were in a whirl, just like tornadoes, which spin everything around because they themselves are spinning. No one becomes fortunate at the expense of another’s misfortune.

On Fame and Fortune

The purpose of work is not to further our own interests, even if it is only a house in the middle of the woods that we seek, but to help others and move humanity forward—which is, in any case, the best way of furthering ourselves. The highest wisdom is perhaps that it is not necessary to be ambitious to be high-reaching, or to feel alive. Indeed, it is often our conventional ambitions that are holding us down—even, that are ageing and killing us.

If it is fame that we seek, we will have to adopt the misguided values of the majority. ‘It is by skill in wrongdoing that one cultivates popular acclaim. You must make yourself like them: they will not approve of you unless they recognise you.’

Although we would be foolish to seek out fame, we might nonetheless fall into it by way of our good works, in which case we should utilise it for the greater good.

If it is merely wealth that we seek, we would do well to remember that wealth is not the answer to our problems, since there are many wealthy people who nonetheless feel wretched, and sometimes all the more wretched for being wealthy. Had Cicero had only one house, instead of twenty properties, he would, when exiled, have lost only the one house. And with fewer administrative worries, and less travelling between houses, he might have written more books.

We suppose that wealth increases our pleasures, but the greatest pleasures are in any case simple and easy to obtain if only our mind is open to them: eating, sleeping, bathing, seeing a friend, walking in a beautiful garden. If anything, wealth removes us from our pleasures by habituating us to luxury and shifting our focus onto itself. ‘He enjoys riches most who has least need of riches. While he is thinking about its increase, he is forgetting about its use.’ Midas could possess a golden rose, but he could no longer smell a rose.

On Proper Ends

Even allowing that wealth does increase our pleasures, pleasure is not the be-all and end-all, but, like wealth, distracts from our higher purpose, which is the work of the mind. ‘Maecenas would have provided a fine example of Roman rhetoric, had he not been weakened, even castrated, by his great wealth.’

Just as a horse ought to be judged on its speed rather than its harness, so a man ought to be judged on his mind rather than his property, because it is reason, and not wealth, that is the measure of a man.

Many people have wealth in the same way that people are said to have a fever when it is in fact the fever that has hold of us. If our mind is diseased, what does it matter whether our sickbed is made of wood or gold?

Stoics, by virtue of their virtue, are predisposed to wealth, and, even without seeking it—especially without seeking it—may end up being very wealthy. There is no harm in being wealthy and occasionally enjoying wealth, so long as our money smells good and we are not tied to it.

The real value of money is to buy time for the mind; the real value of fame is to disseminate its fruits. Fame and fortune should never be our masters, but only ever our slaves.

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Why the Stoics Believed Success Is Not the Measure of a Good Life

The Stoic Archer
Antoine Bourdelle’s Herakles the Archer (1909) captures the Stoic ideal: complete commitment to the action, complete detachment from the outcome. 

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

Essay substantially revised on 12 August 2026.

We tend to measure ourselves by success: the goals we reach, the recognition we receive, the outcomes of our efforts. But for the Stoics, this is precisely where we go wrong. Because the world has a way of foiling even our best-laid plans. The question, then, is this: if success cannot be guaranteed, what should we measure ourselves by?

The Stoics captured this predicament in a simple but timeless image: the archer. The archer does all he can to shoot accurately. But once the arrow leaves the bow, its fate is no longer within the archer’s control.

The lesson is not that the archer should stop caring about the target. It is that the archer should understand where responsibility ends — and peace of mind begins. Behind this distinction lies the deeper Stoic conviction that a good life cannot be measured by outcomes alone.

The Stoic Archer

The allegory of the archer features in On the Ends of Good and Evil, a Socratic dialogue dedicated to Brutus, murderer of Caesar, in which Cicero, through a number of mouthpieces, expounds and critiques the central tenets of the three main philosophies of his day: Stoicism, Epicureanism, and a version of Platonism. Cicero puts the allegory into the mouth of his contemporary and ally, the Stoic statesman Cato the Younger, even though it predates both Cato and Cicero:

Take the case of one whose task it is to shoot a spear or arrow straight at some target. One’s ultimate aim is to do all in one’s power to shoot straight, and the same applies with our ultimate goal. In this kind of example, it is to shoot straight that one must do all one can; none the less, it is to do all one can to accomplish the task that is really the ultimate aim. It is just the same with what we call the supreme good in life. To actually hit the target is, as we say, to be selected but not sought.

The allegory encapsulates the essence of Stoic action. The archer does everything he can to shoot accurately: his bow is well strung, his arrows are carefully calibrated, and he has taken full account of the prevailing wind and other variables. Even so, the arrow may miss the bullseye, or even the target itself. Once it leaves the bow, it is subject to forces beyond the archer’s control — a sudden change in wind, an unexpected movement, or some other contingency.

Similarly, having decided upon the optimal course of action, the good Stoic carries it out to the best of their ability. But whether the enterprise succeeds depends on unpredictable external factors — or, as the Stoics called them, “externals”. Thus, the good Stoic bases self-worth and happiness not on the success of their actions, but on their correctness. The target matters, of course — but it is not what makes the archer a good archer.

Intention Rather Than Outcome

The Stoics were not indifferent to outcomes, but understood that the quality of an action and its result are not the same thing.

In the words of Epictetus:

Some things are up to us and some things are not.

Our judgements, intentions, and choices belong to us. Reputation, success, and the opinions of others do not.

Seneca echoed the same idea:

The wise person considers intention, rather than outcome, in every situation. The beginnings are in our power; the results are judged by fortune, to which I grant no jurisdiction over myself… Death at the hands of a robber is not a condemnation.

This is not quite saying that we must do the right thing, but that the right thing is the most that we can do — and therefore all we need worry about.

The Secret to Stoic Calm

Chance, says Seneca, has a great deal of power in our lives, “necessarily so, since it is by chance that we are alive.” When it comes to things over which we do not have complete control, we play our part and do our best, like the Stoic archer, but we do not fret over the outcome — which, if we have done our best, says nothing about us.

Thus, we seek to be loveable, not to be loved, because the one is within our control whereas the other is not. We seek to write well, not to become a bestselling author, because the one is within our control whereas the other is not. We seek to act with integrity, not to be admired for our integrity, because the one is within our control whereas the other is not.

So long as we focus on the things that are within our control, we will be calm and happy. But if we concern ourselves with things outside our control, we surrender our peace of mind to chance. We become anxious and angry and miserable, and all on false grounds.

The Stoic archer teaches a simple but demanding lesson:

Aim carefully. Do your best. But do not tie yourself to outcomes.

They are none of your business.

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What Is the Strongest Response to an Insult?

The Death of Socrates, by JL David
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787). Others may scatter the words. Only we can turn them into an insult.

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

Essay substantially revised on 12 August 2026.

A playwright once mocked the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes before a packed theatre in Athens. ‘Driven by Cleanthes’ folly like dumb herds,’ he declaimed.

Everyone waited for the old philosopher’s response. But Cleanthes neither protested nor replied. He did not even alter his expression. Faced with such composure, the audience turned against the playwright, heckling him off the stage. Later, the playwright came to apologise, but Cleanthes brushed off the incident as too trivial to dwell upon.

What did Cleanthes understand that the rest of us so often forget?

Insults can sting. They can undermine our confidence, poison our relationships, and linger in the mind—sometimes, for years. A cutting remark from a colleague, a sarcastic comment from a friend, a stranger’s contemptuous glance, being left out, ignored, or spoken over—these small slights can accumulate into resentment, anxiety, and self-doubt.

The Stoics did not deny the pain of such experiences. But they did make a remarkable claim: an insult does not exist independently of our response to it. Words are only sounds, gestures only movements. They become insults only when we accept them as such. This is not to deny that people can be malicious or cruel, or, at best, thoughtless. They can. The question is whether we are prepared to hand them authority over our peace of mind.

First, Ask Yourself This

Whenever someone appears to insult us, we should consider three questions.

Is what they are saying true, or partly true?

Do they know us well enough to judge?

And why are they saying it?

If the criticism is fair and comes from someone whose judgement we respect, then it is not really an insult but valuable information. Parents, teachers, trusted friends, and respected colleagues often tell us things that we would rather not hear. Their intention is not to diminish us, but to help us grow.

If, on the other hand, the criticism comes from someone who is ill-informed, malicious, or simply foolish, why should we grant it any weight? We do not feel wounded if a dog growls at us, a naughty child calls us names, or someone beside themselves raves against us. Why should an unreasonable person have any greater power over us?

Either way, offence begins to lose its grip. Often, an ‘insult’ is not really an insult. It is admonition, advice, or just noise.

The Weakest Response

True insult or not, our instinct is to get angry. But anger is the weakest possible response.

It tells the other person that they have succeeded in disturbing us. It suggests that there may be some truth in what they have said. And it unsettles our judgement, making us liable to say or do things that we later regret. As Seneca observed, ‘Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.’

People who habitually insult others are often struggling with frustrations of their own. Their words reveal more about their character than ours. If anything, they deserve our pity rather than our anger.

Answering Back

The perfect put-down is one of life’s great fantasies. Unfortunately, it usually occurs too late. The French have a delightful expression for this: l’esprit de l’escalier—’staircase wit’—because the burning reply only enters our mind when we’re on the way home.

But even when a clever retort is perfectly timed, it is rarely the strongest response. By exchanging insults, we allow the encounter to become a contest on the insulter’s terms. We bring ourselves down to their level while raising them to ours.

Humour, however, is different. When used lightly, it exposes the absurdity of the situation without escalating it. The Roman statesman Cato the Younger was once spat upon by an opponent in court. Wiping his face, he remarked, “I will swear to anyone that people are wrong to say you cannot use your mouth.”

Another strategy is to embrace the criticism. “If you knew me better,” we might reply, “you would find much greater faults than that.” Such responses undermine the insult by depriving it of its oxygen.

The Strongest Response

But humour, too, demands wit, timing, and presence of mind. The strongest response is often the simplest: to ignore the insult altogether.

One day, a boor accidentally struck Cato at the public baths. Upon recognising the senator, the horrified man hurried to apologise.

“I don’t remember being struck,” Cato replied.

The point was not to humiliate the man, but to show that the incident had not disturbed his tranquillity—that, though his body had been struck, his mind had not been touched.

This was also Cleanthes’ secret. He did not suppress his anger. He had no need to. The playwright’s words had remained just that—words—because he had not collaborated in turning them into an insult.

Of course, there are occasions when we should speak up. If someone repeatedly insults us at work, at home, or in any unavoidable relationship, calmly and firmly asserting our boundaries may be the wisest course.

The crucial distinction is between defending our dignity and defending our ego. The first may sometimes be necessary. The second seldom is.

The Insult We Create

An insult begins with another person’s words, but it ends with our judgement.

We cannot control whether people are careless, cruel, arrogant, or simply foolish. Nor should we pretend that hurtful words do not hurt. They can wound, and some wounds take a long time to heal. But we need not add a second injury to the first: the injury of allowing another person’s behaviour to disturb our peace of mind.

The Stoics understood that our freedom lies not in preventing every insult, but in refusing to become its accomplice. We may examine criticism, learn from what is useful, laugh at what is absurd, ignore what is beneath us, and challenge what genuinely crosses a boundary. But we need not hand over our tranquillity to the person who would disturb it.

A barking dog, a naughty child, or someone raving beside themselves may all make noise. But noise is not the same as an insult. It becomes an insult only when we assent to it.

That was Cleanthes’ achievement.

The playwright thought he was insulting a philosopher.

In reality, he was only scattering words into the air.

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Life in Epicurus' garden
Life in Epicurus’ garden

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

Essay lightly revised on 21 August 2026.

Why do we garden? We spend extraordinary amounts of time and effort digging, planting, pruning, watering, and weeding, only to have to do it all over again. Yet gardens have been with us since the beginnings of civilisation, serving not merely as sources of food but as expressions of power, religion, philosophy, and our relationship with nature.

Ineni, architect to Pharaoh Thutmose I (d. 1492 BCE), had his garden painted into his tomb, along with a list of all the trees within it—presumably, so that they might be accounted for in the afterlife.

Ineni’s garden included:

  • 170 date palms
  • 120 doum palms
  • 73 sycamore figs
  • 31 persea
  • 16 carob
  • 12 grapevines
  • 10 tamarisks
  • 8 willows
  • 5 figs
  • 5 pomegranates
  • 5 garland thorns
  • 2 moringas
  • 2 myrtles…

A grand garden of this sort symbolised control and mastery over nature, a haven of peace and plenty, of order and beauty, by which to project the status, power, and temperament of its owner. Other, more famous, examples include the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Gardens of the Real Alcázar in Seville, and the Gardens of Versailles.

The garden could also have a religious or philosophical message or dimension. For example, the Old Testament’s four rivers of Eden are represented by four watercourses in Islamic paradise gardens, and four paths in Christian cloister gardens. The Zen garden, by hinting at hidden principles, serves as an aid to meditation about the true meaning of existence.

The Gardens at Versailles reflect a rationalist, Cartesian vision of God-given ideas and principles for the intellect to apprehend, whereas English landscape gardens are more in the empiricist mould, presenting nature as a stream of sensory experiences skirting across the blank slate of the mind.

In either case, the garden represents a taming of nature, from dark and deadly forest, or disease-infested swamp, to an extension of our living space: open and structured to still our minds, but retaining enough mystery to sustain our interest and even, perhaps, capture our imagination.

Trees as Symbols

Individual plants too can have a meaning. English churchyards often feature yew trees, which are poisonous, dark, and evergreen, and symbolise both death and immortality. A yew tree is commonly found near the lychgate, where, prior to the advent of mortuaries, the dead awaited burial while mourners kept vigil.

In the ancient world, the palm tree symbolised victory, peace, and bounty, while the cedar of Lebanon symbolised pride, majesty, and dignity. Both also stood for righteousness, as in Psalm 92:12: ‘the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree, grow tall like the cedar of Lebanon.’ Today, Cedrus libani is the national emblem of Lebanon, and a symbol of the peaceful Cedar Revolution of 2005.

Trees can also be planted to mark an important occasion, which is why British royals are often asked to brandish a shovel. In an annual tradition, the Friends of my local park purchase a noteworthy tree and invite a dignitary such as the Lord Mayor to plant it.

A New Religion?

Today, gardens and gardening are more popular than ever. Millions of people in the UK garden, whether in a garden, on an allotment, or simply on a balcony.

The BBC’s flagship Gardeners’ World, presented by Monty Don, attracts millions of viewers—which, in the UK, is many more people than go to church.

Community garden projects and ‘guerrilla gardening’ are on the rise, as are garden towns and villages. A few years ago, one of my neighbours organised for thousands of daffodils to be planted on a neglected and overlooked common, transforming it into a Wordsworthian idyll for the selfie generation. I wonder, do they know that ‘daffodil’ is Narcissus in Latin?

Screenshot of Monty Don sharing this article on Twitter
Monty Don sharing this article on Twitter. Narcisse, moi?

Good for Mind and Body

Gardening is more and more recognised, and even prescribed, for its health benefits. These include increased muscle strength and cardiovascular fitness; improved sleep and diet (if you grow your own produce); reduced stress, anxiety, and depression; a greater sense of community and belonging; and better self-esteem.

You don’t even have to get your hands dirty: some of these benefits accrue simply from visiting a garden, or even just looking over one—although it probably helps to notice and mentally engage with the greenery.

Researchers in Korea randomly assigned hospital patients recovering from thyroidectomy to rooms with plants and flowers, and rooms without, and found that the test group fared significantly better, asking for less pain relief and requiring less time in hospital. So yes, it makes sense to bring flowers, and, at home, to have indoor plants.

Even street trees greatly benefit our health. An American study looking at the city of Toronto found that, for cardio-metabolic conditions (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity…), an increase of just 11 trees per city block had a comparable effect to an increase in annual personal income of USD 20,000.

How might gardening help with mental health? To various degrees, we live inside the stories we tell ourselves. But gardening drags us out of our tortured heads and back into the natural world, which blunts the ideological and emotional extremes to which detached, abstract thought is prone.

In 1920, a mentally strained Ludwig Wittgenstein took up the post of assistant gardener at Klosterneuburg Abbey, explaining in a letter to a friend that he had been longing for ‘some kind of regularized work which, of all the things I can do in my present condition, is the most nearly bearable…’

Voltaire’s Candide (1759) is an attack on the highly abstracted, convoluted, and strained philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz (whom I nevertheless love), and famously concludes with the phrase ‘we must cultivate our garden.’

The Gardening of the Soul

In the Philosophy of Existence (1938), Karl Jaspers describes this disinterested process of looking outside oneself—or phenomenology, as it is sometimes called—as ‘a thinking that, in knowing, reminds me, awakens me, brings me to myself, transforms me.’

Just picture the gardener’s pure and simple delight at the first crocuses or tulips, a bird’s nest, a swarm of bees…

If gardening makes us feel better, it also makes us into better people. It is a moral education, a school of life, instilling virtues such as pragmatism, patience, perseverance, reliability, and humility, which then transfer out into other spheres.

In his treatise on agriculture (c. 160 BCE), Cato is quite clear that farmers make the bravest and strongest soldiers, and that, of all men, they are ‘the most highly respected, most stable, and least hated (minime invidiosus).’

In Plato’s Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE), Socrates compares the wise man to the good husbandman, who is careful to scatter the right seed in the right soil in the right season. Similarly, the good teacher is careful to sow the right words in the right soul at the right time. For Plato, the Divine Teacher, teaching is the gardening of the soul.

Building on these notions, Epicurus (d. 270 BCE) founded his philosophical school in a garden just outside Athens. The Garden sought to return to an agricultural golden age of harmony, community, and self-sufficiency—to ground a flourishing life in the midst of a flourishing garden.

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.’ 

Time Made Visible

A garden is a microcosm of the outside world. Gardeners are acutely aware of the rhythms and cycles of nature: which flowers are in their prime, when to plant out the seedlings, when and how and how much it last rained. Just as music is time made audible, so the garden is ‘time made visible’ (Clive James).

Winter is difficult, yes because it is dark and cold, but also because time is no longer structured by a succession of flowerings and fruitings. Time becomes amorphous, to be entertained and endured rather than savoured and celebrated like the season of magnolias, cherry blossom, rhubarb, plums, or chestnuts.

More than just keen observers of time, gardeners are real-life Time Lords, able to speed up time by working in the garden, and, later, to slow it right down by sitting back and surveying the fruits and flowers of their labour. Some gardeners are even able to step out of time altogether, working year-round to create Arcadian moments of perfection.

But moments are all they will ever be. When you paint a picture or write a book, it is there for ever (and isn’t that just amazing?), but when you mow the lawn you have to do it all over again in just a few days’ time. The gardener is like Sisyphus, the mythological king made to repeat for all eternity the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again.

In his essay of 1942, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus concludes: ‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognising and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, he at the same time transcends it.

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The Psychology and Philosophy of Wonder

The architecture of wonder
The architecture of wonder

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

Essay substantially revised on 24 July 2026.

In Plato’s Theætetus, written some 2,400 years ago, Socrates presents the sixteen-year-old Theætetus with a series of difficult contradictions. This is the exchange that follows:

Socrates: I believe that you follow me, Theætetus; for I suspect that you have thought of these questions before now.

Theætetus: Yes, Socrates, and I am amazed when I think of them; by the Gods I am! And I want to know what on earth they mean; and there are times when my head quite swims with the contemplation of them.

Socrates: I see, dear Theætetus, 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. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris [the messenger of heaven] is the child of Thaumas [Wonder].

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle surmises that it must have been wonder that led the first philosophers to philosophy, since puzzled people think of themselves as ignorant and turn to philosophy to escape from their ignorance. St Thomas Aquinas concurred, adding in his commentary on the Metaphysics that, ‘Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.’

If Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas are right in tracing philosophy—and, by extension, science, religion, art, and all else that transcends the mundane—to wonder, then it behoves us to ask: What exactly is wonder?

What is Wonder?

Wonder is a complex emotion involving surprise, curiosity, contemplation, and joy. It can be thought of as a heightened state of consciousness and emotion brought about by something unusually beautiful, rare, or unexpected—that is, by a marvel. ‘Marvel’ derives from the Latin mirus [wonder] via mirabilia [‘wonderful things’]. ‘Admire’ shares the same root and originally meant ‘to wonder at’, although, since the sixteenth century, this sense has been steadily eroded—along, some might say, with wonder itself. Aquinas spoke of philosophers and poets in the same breath because both are moved by marvels, with the purpose of poetry being, broadly, to record and, in some sense, recreate marvels, to inspire wonder.

Wonder is most similar to awe. But compared to wonder, awe is more explicitly directed at something that is much greater or stronger than ourselves. As such, it is more closely associated with fear, reverence, or veneration than with joy. Without this element of respect and reverence, all that remains of awe is fear, that is, no longer awe but terror or horror. Awe is also less detached than wonder, which allows for much greater and freer contemplation of its object.

Wonder may be stirred by grand landscapes, natural phenomena, extraordinary achievements, or astonishing facts. It is expressed by a bright-eyed stare, sometimes accompanied by an opening of the mouth and a suspension of the breath. By drawing us out of ourselves, wonder reconnects us with something greater than our everyday. It is the ultimate homecoming, returning us to the world that we came from and were in danger of losing to our narrow selves.

But notice how this kind of wonder is not the same as the more abstract wonder that moved Theætetus to philosophy.

Socratic Wonder

The wonder of the philosopher, also known as Socratic wonder, is not so much wonder in the sense of awe as wonder in the sense of puzzlement or perplexity. Rather than grand vistas and the like, Socratic wonder arises from contradictions in thought and language, and impels us to investigate these contradictions in the hope of resolving them into some higher truth.

Theætetus: Yes, Socrates, and I am amazed when I think of them; by the Gods I am! And I want to know what on earth they mean; and there are times when my head quite swims with the contemplation of them.

Socrates himself came to philosophy—and to his revolutionary method of doing philosophy—after being bewildered by the Delphic oracle, which, despite his professed ignorance, pronounced him the wisest of all men. To get to the bottom of this apparent contradiction, he questioned several supposedly wise men—first the politicians, then the poets, and finally the artisans—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.’

Wonder in the sense approaching awe is a universal experience found also in little children (picture a child at the circus or zoo) and even in higher-order primates and some other animals. Socratic wonder, by contrast, is much more rarefied, and, as Socrates implies by calling it ‘the feeling of a philosopher’, not given to all and sundry.

In his Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon called this kind of Socratic wonder ‘broken knowledge’, and there is a sense in which wonder, which may be cognate to the German Wunde [wound], breaches us and draws us out of ourselves. That breach yearns to be filled, not only by philosophy but also by science, religion, and art, giving rise to a third kind of wonder: the wonder of insight and creation.

Like Plato and Aristotle before him, the philosopher AN Whitehead (d. 1947) observed that ‘philosophy begins in wonder’, adding that, ‘at the end, when the philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.’ More than remain, the wonder grows. Scientific breakthroughs such as Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Newton’s theory of gravitation, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the periodic table of the elements, and Einstein’s theory of relativity are often more wondrous than the mysteries they were intended to solve. Wonder begets culture, which begets yet more wonder, and the end of wonder is wisdom—not the extinction of wonder, but its perfection.

The Loss of Wonder

Unfortunately, many people do not open themselves up to wonder for fear that it may distract or derail them. After all, wonder is wounding, and thauma is only one letter removed from ‘trauma’. To wonder is also to wander, to stray from society and its norms and constructs, to stand alone, to be free—which is, of course, deeply subversive, and why even organised religions need to tread a fine line with wonder.

To rationalise the fear of it, wonder is dismissed as a childish emotion that ought to be outgrown rather than invited and cultivated. So much is true, that children brim with wonder, before it is leached out of them by need and neurosis.

Today, many young people who go to university do so not for the sake of marvelling or even learning, but of obtaining a piece of paper by which to advance careers that they have scarcely had the freedom to question—entirely bypassing the wonder and wisdom that might have saved them from needing a career in the first place. For the child is not merely innocent but a natural philosopher, still open to wonder before the world.

Jesus said:

Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

And again:

Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven… whosoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

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