Some emotions are so ancient that we share them with lizards.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
One day, while holidaying in Mauritius, I opened a kitchen drawer to find a large lizard staring back at me. Before I had time to think, I jumped back and slammed the drawer shut. Only afterwards did I notice that my heart was racing and my body primed for action. But as soon as reason reasserted itself, the fear evaporated, leaving me with nothing more than a mildly inconvenient lizard problem—which, if memory serves, I chose to ignore.
The lizard’s reaction, of course, was just as swift, if not swifter. It darted for cover before either of us had had time to think. In that split second, human and reptile behaved in remarkably similar ways.
This encounter raises an intriguing question. Are some emotions so ancient and basic that they are shared across much of the animal kingdom?
An Ancient Idea
The idea that some emotions are more fundamental than others is an old one. The Book of Rites, one of the Confucian classics, identifies seven basic ‘feelings of men’: joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, liking, and disliking.
In the twentieth century, psychologists sought a more scientific answer. Paul Ekman proposed six universal emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—while Robert Plutchik proposed eight, arranged in opposing pairs.
The theory was simple and elegant. These emotions evolved because they solved recurring problems faced by our remote ancestors. Fear helped us escape danger. Disgust kept us away from disease. Anger enabled us to defend ourselves and our resources. Being evolutionarily ancient, these basic emotions are thought to be ‘hard-wired’: fast, automatic, and largely unconscious.
It’s an appealing idea—and Plutchik’s Wheel does look striking. But is it true?
Plutchik’s Wheel
Is Fear the Most Basic Emotion?
The difficulty is that psychologists cannot even agree on the list. Some propose six basic emotions, others seven or eight, still others many more.
But there is one emotion on which almost everyone agrees: fear. Fear is found almost everywhere in the animal kingdom. A gazelle bolts before a lion. A cat startles at a loud noise. A lizard darts for cover. Before any of these creatures has had time to think, its body has already kicked in.
Fear, more than any other, may be the prototype of a basic emotion.
Beyond Fear
Other emotions are less straightforward. Take anger. We often become angry not simply because something unpleasant has happened, but because we believe we have been insulted, cheated, or treated unfairly. Those judgements involve much more than an unthinking reflex.
Someone pushes past you in a queue. If you assume they simply failed to notice you, you may feel only mild irritation. But if you conclude that they deliberately ignored you because they think they’re more important than you, you are much more likely to become angry. Same event. Different interpretation.
Even fear, perhaps the most basic of all emotions, can be triggered by beliefs and values that are themselves shaped by culture. Imagine waking up in a cold sweat, believing that you have slept through an important exam. Your panic has little to do with the examination itself, and everything to do with what the examination represents: success or failure, opportunity or disappointment, status, perhaps even self-worth. A lizard can fear a predator, but not an examination. The emotional machinery may be ancient, but what sets it in motion is often anything but.
With fear, culture often shapes the object of the emotion. With more complex emotions, it can shape the emotion itself. Schadenfreude (German, ‘harm-joy’)—the pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune—is not common to all peoples in all times.
Neither is romantic love, which seems to have emerged in tandem with the novel. In Madame Bovary, itself a novel, Gustave Flaubert tells us that Emma Bovary only found out about romantic love through ‘the refuse of old lending libraries’.
The Emotional Animal
The search for the basic emotions has taught us something important, even if it has failed to produce a definitive list.
Some emotions are so ancient that we share them even with birds, lizards, and fish, although what triggers them may be entirely different and shaped by our beliefs and values. Others depend increasingly upon language, memory, imagination, and culture.
Perhaps, then, the question is not Which emotions are basic?
It is How much of every emotion is basic?
The startle reflex, the racing heart, and the impulse to flee belong to our evolutionary inheritance. But what those responses are directed towards—and, in more complex emotions, even the emotions themselves—are increasingly shaped by language, culture, and the stories we tell ourselves.
Our emotions are at once among the oldest things about us—and among the newest.
In the middle of our life’s walk, I found myself alone in a dark forest… —Dante Alighieri
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Like heart disease or diabetes, depression can be highly debilitating, even fatal. But unlike heart disease or diabetes, depression is poorly understood and heavily stigmatised. People with depression are often seen as ‘failures’ or ‘losers’, too weak or lazy to pick themselves up or pull themselves together.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. If you feel the way you do, it is most likely because you tried too hard or took on too much—so hard and so much that you made yourself ill with depression. In other words, if you feel the way you do, it is because your world was simply not good enough for you. You wanted more, you wanted better, and you wanted different, not just for yourself but for all those around you.
So if you’re a ‘failure’ or a ‘loser’, that’s only because you set the bar far too high. You could have swept everything under the carpet and pretended, as many people do, that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Instead, you had the honesty and the courage to recognize that something was amiss, that something was not quite right.
Rather than being a failure or a loser, you are all the opposite: you are ambitious, you are truthful, and you are courageous. And that’s precisely why you got ‘ill’.
Depression as a Signal
But here’s the good news. Unlike heart disease or diabetes, depression can also have a silver lining.
Crushing though it may be, depression can present a precious opportunity to identify, acknowledge, and address deep-seated problems.
Just as physical pain evolved to signal injury and prevent further injury, so depression may have evolved to remove us from distressing, damaging, or futile situations—situations that do not serve us well as human beings.
The time and space and solitude afforded by depression can enable us to reassess our needs, reframe our perspectives, and round up the resolve to break with established patterns.
In other words, depression, or the depressive position, may have evolved as a signal that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing—or, at the very least, processing and understanding.
In the normal run of things, we become so immersed in our day-to-day that we no longer have the opportunity or perspective to think and feel about ourselves. The adoption of the depressive position invites—or compels—us to shed our defences, stand back at a distance, reassess our needs and priorities, and formulate a modest but realistic plan for fulfilling them.
At a deeper level, the depressive position can enable us to develop a clearer understanding and appreciation of ourselves, our lives, and life in general. From an existential standpoint, it obliges us to become aware of our mortality and freedom, and challenges us to exercise the latter within the framework of the former. By meeting this ultimate challenge, we are able to break out of the mould that has been imposed upon us, discover who we truly are, and begin to give deep meaning to our lives.
The Gift of the Dark Wood
It can be no coincidence that so many of history’s most creative and insightful people suffered from depression, or from a state that might today be diagnosed as depression. They include Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Leo Tolstoy, and many others.
To quote Marcel Proust, who himself suffered from depression, ‘Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.’
The concept of depression as a mental disorder may be helpful for the more severe and intractable cases treated by hospital psychiatrists, but probably not for the majority of cases, which, for the most part, are mild and short-lived and more readily understood in terms of life circumstances, human nature, or the human condition.
Thinking of our distress or protest or withdrawal in terms of a mental disorder or chemical imbalance in the brain can be counterproductive, insofar as it can prevent us from identifying and addressing the important life problems or psychological issues that lie at the root of our distress, and that are, almost literally, crying out for our care and attention.
Maybe all this is more common sense than philosophy, but I do think it merits saying.
In the middle of our life’s walk I found myself alone in a dark forest Where my path was confused.
Ah how hard it is to retell How dense, dark, and dangerous The thought of it alone fills me with fear!
So bitter that death is scarcely worse; But to speak of the good I found there, I shall tell of the other things that I saw.
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.
Article 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.
Continue Exploring
Neel Burton is author of Stoic Stories: Stoicism by Its Best Stories. Through the lives of Zeno, Cleanthes, Cato, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and many others, Stoic Stories introduces the philosophy not through abstract theory, but through the memorable stories that have kept it alive for more than two thousand years.
The Psychology and Philosophy of Pity, Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion
Empathy begins with the simple but profound attempt to see the world through another person’s eyes.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Article substantially revised on 22 July 2026.
Article summary:Empathy and sympathy are often confused, but they are not the same. This article explores the psychology and philosophy of pity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion, explaining how they differ, why they matter, and what they reveal about human nature.
The terms empathy and sympathy are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Sympathy is care or concern for another person’s suffering. Empathy goes a step further: it involves understanding and, to some extent, sharing in that person’s emotional experience. Compassion, which involves the desire to relieve suffering, builds upon empathy. These distinctions matter—not only in psychology and medicine, but also in friendship, parenting, education, and everyday life.
Suppose a friend has just lost a parent. If I say, ‘I’m so sorry this has happened to you,’ I’m expressing sympathy. If I can also imagine, however imperfectly, what this loss feels like from within their own world, I begin to empathise. If that empathy inspires me to support them through their grief, it becomes compassion.
Before examining these concepts, it is worth asking where the modern idea of empathy came from.
What Is Empathy?
In 1909, the psychologist Edward Titchener translated the German Einfühlung (‘feeling into’) as empathy. At that time, German philosophers discussed empathy in the context of artistic or aesthetic evaluation, but Titchener proposed that empathy can also help us to recognise one another as minded beings.
Today, empathy might be defined as a person’s ability to understand and, to a greater or lesser extent, share in the emotions of another person, fictional character, or sentient being. Empathy involves two closely related capacities: (1) seeing another person’s situation from their embodied perspective, and (2) resonating with, or sharing in, the emotions that they are feeling.
For me to share another person’s point of view, it is not enough merely to put myself into their position or situation. Instead, I must go further still and imagine myself as them, and, more than that, imagine myself as them in the situation in which they find themself. One cannot empathise with an abstract or detached feeling, only with a particular person. To empathise with them, I need to have some understanding of who they are and what they are doing, or trying to do. I need to have some idea of where they came from and where they want to go. As John Steinbeck famously wrote:
It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving.
Pity, Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion
Empathy is easily confused with pity, sympathy, and compassion, which are all prosocial reactions to the plights of others. Let us look at each one in turn.
Pity is a feeling of discomfort at the distress of one or more sentient beings and usually carries paternalistic overtones. Inherent in the notion of pity is that its object does not deserve its plight, and is incapable of preventing or overturning it. Pity is less engaged than sympathy, empathy, or compassion, often amounting to little more than a conscious acknowledgement of another’s suffering.
Sympathy (Greek, ‘fellow feeling’ or ‘community of feeling’) is care or concern for someone, often someone close or relatable, accompanied by a wish to see them better off. Compared with pity, sympathy implies a greater sense of shared similarities and deeper personal engagement. But unlike empathy, sympathy need not involve a shared perspective or shared emotions, and while the facial expressions of sympathy convey caring and concern, they do not ordinarily convey shared distress.
Sympathy and empathy often lead to one another, but not invariably. For instance, it is possible to sympathise with a hedgehog but not, strictly speaking, to empathise with it, since our access to its subjective experience is necessarily limited. Conversely, psychopaths with little or no sympathy for their victims may nonetheless possess sufficient understanding of another person’s thoughts and motivations to ensnare and manipulate them.
Sympathy might also be distinguished from benevolence, which is a more detached and impersonal attitude—akin to the attitude that I might have towards my students or neighbours, or that a monarch might have towards his or her subjects.
Compassion (Latin, ‘suffering alongside’) is more engaged than empathy and is associated with an active desire to alleviate the suffering of its object. With empathy, I share your emotions; with compassion I not only share your emotions but also elevate them into a universal and transcending experience. Compassion, which builds upon empathy, is one of the principal motivators of altruism.
Researcher Brené Brown has done much to popularise the distinction between sympathy and empathy, arguing that sympathy creates distance while empathy creates connection. Her work has helped bring empathy to a much wider audience. Even so, sympathy need not be distant or dismissive. Properly understood, it is often the beginning of empathy rather than its opposite.
The relationship between pity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion can be summarised as follows:
Can We Ever Know Another Mind?
My friend tearfully confides that, as a child, she was sexually abused by her father. Moved by her plight, I try to comfort her:
‘I know just how you feel.’
To my surprise and alarm, she snaps back:
‘No, you don’t know how I feel! How could you?’
Notice that, in claiming that I cannot know how she feels, my friend is implying that she knows how I feel—or, at least, that however I might be feeling, it is not how she feels. But if she is correct in asserting that I cannot know how she feels, how can she know how I feel, or that how I feel is not how she feels?
A similar paradox is raised in the Zhuangzi (c. third century BCE), one of the two foundational texts of Taoism:
Zhuangzi and Hui Shi were strolling on the bridge above the Hao River. Zhuangzi said, ‘Out swim the minnows so free and easy; this is the happiness of fish.’ Hui Shi said, ‘You are not a fish. Whence do you know the happiness of fish?’ Zhuangzi said, ‘You are not me. Whence do you know I don’t know the happiness of fish?’ Hui Shi said, ‘Granted that I am not you, I don’t know about you. Then granted that you are not a fish, the case for your not knowing the happiness of fish is complete.’ Zhuangzi said, ‘Let’s trace back to the root of the issue. When you said, ‘Whence do you know the fish are happy?’, you asked me already knowing I knew it. I knew it from up above the Hao.’
The exchange captures an enduring philosophical puzzle. We can never inhabit another person’s consciousness. Yet, in everyday life, we routinely understand enough of one another’s inner worlds to communicate, cooperate, comfort, teach, love, and forgive. How is this possible?
Theory of Mind and Mirror Neurons
Empathy rests upon what psychologists call theory of mind: the ability to understand that different people see the world from different perspectives and possess different beliefs, desires, sensitivities, commitments, and forms of understanding.
Some writers distinguish between cognitive empathy and affective empathy. From a philosophical point of view, however, it is preferable to distinguish theory of mind from empathy, rather than to divide empathy into ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ forms, thereby obscuring the distinct role of theory of mind. On this view, theory of mind forms the cognitive basis for empathy, while empathy itself also involves emotional resonance.
Theory of mind is innate (‘from up above the Hao’), first appearing at about four years of age. Thereafter, it continues to develop, and can be trained in both reach and accuracy. Crucially, theory of mind enables us to posit the intentions of others and to explain and predict their actions.
Researchers have proposed that mirror neurons contribute to this capacity. These neurons fire both when we carry out a particular action and when we witness that same action in someone else. By internally modelling the actions of others, they may help us infer some of the thoughts, emotions, and desires that gave rise to them. Although empathy and theory of mind involve a broader network of cognitive processes, mirror neurons offer one suggestive illustration of how we may come to understand the experiences of others.
Why Did Empathy Evolve?
From an evolutionary standpoint, empathy has been selected for because it promotes parental care, prosocial behaviour, and non-verbal communication, and, by extension, the survival of the proximal gene pool. By supporting social interaction, collective enterprise, resource sharing, teaching and learning, and storytelling and other art forms, empathy increases the strength, stability, and resilience of a society and its members.
Empathy enables us to anticipate the actions and reactions of others and to respond effectively to their ever-changing needs and expectations. At the same time, to empathise is not to merge. Because empathy remains at one remove, it provides a degree of distance in which to make normative judgements about the person or people being empathised with and to weigh up their best interests.
The Limits of Empathy
That said, empathy can also skew our judgement, leading us to violate moral principles to favour the one or the few over the many. It can be distressing or exhausting. Doctors and nurses who are surrounded by human suffering often constrain or regulate their empathetic faculty, not out of callousness or unconcern but to guard against compassion fatigue and burnout.
Yet in less pressured environments, the exercise of empathy is often rewarding and even revitalising. Doctors and nurses who are able to empathise with their patients—though not so much that it prevents them from resting and recuperating—are more likely to feel fulfilled in their work, to say nothing of the benefit to the patients themselves.
Empathy does not grant direct access to another person’s inner world. Rather, it is our best means of approaching that world while respecting its separateness. It allows us to understand without possessing, to care without collapsing distinctions, and to recognise that every human being lives a life that is uniquely their own.
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