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But You Mustn’t Be

Orpheus and Eurydice, by Edward Poynter
Orpheus and Eurydice seeking to flee the Underworld.

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

In 1970, the philosopher Thomas Nagel published a short paper entitled Death, in which he asked: If death is the permanent end of our existence, is it an evil?

There are, at least to the non-believer, only two possible answers to this question: either death is an evil because it deprives us of life, or it is a mere blank because there is no one left to suffer this deprivation.

Thus, if death is an evil, this is not in virtue of any unpleasant attribute that it has (such as eternal torment), but only in virtue of what it deprives us of, namely, life. For Nagel, the bare experience of life is intrinsically valuable, regardless of the balance of its good and bad elements.

The longer we live, the more we ‘accumulate’ life. In contrast, death cannot be accumulated—it is not, as Nagel puts it, ‘an evil of which Shakespeare has so far received a larger portion than Proust’. Most people would not regard the infinitely long period before they were born, or the temporary suspension of life, as an evil. Therefore, if death is an evil, this is not because it involves a more or less lengthy period of non-existence, but because it deprives us of life.

Nagel’s Straw Men

Nagel raises three objections to this view, but only so as to later overturn them:

  • It is doubtful whether anything can be an evil unless it causes pain or displeasure.
  • In the case of death, there is no subject left to suffer an evil. So long as we live, we have not yet died; and as soon as we are dead, we are no longer alive. So there seems to be no time at which the evil of death might occur. (This is a formulation of the ancient ‘no subject of harm’ argument.)
  • If we do not regard the infinitely long period before we were born as an evil, then why should we regard the period after we are dead any differently? (This is a formulation of the ancient ‘symmetry’ argument.)

All three of these ‘objections’—really, arguments for why we should not fear death—were made already by Epicurus (d. 270 BCE). Nagel addresses them in toto by arguing that the good or evil that befalls us depends on our history and possibilities rather than our momentary state, such that an evil can befall us even if we are no longer here to experience it. For instance, if an intelligent person suffers a brain injury that reduces his mental condition to that of a contented infant, this should be regarded as a serious evil even if the person himself (in his current state) is oblivious to his fate.

In essence, if the three objections are invalid, it is because they ignore the direction of time—that is, the shape of a human life. Even though we do not materially survive our death, we can still suffer evil; and even though we do not exist in the time before our birth and in the time after our death, the time after our death is time of which we have been deprived, time in which we could have continued to enjoy the good of living.

The Problem for Nagel

The question remains as to whether the non-realisation of further life is an absolute evil or whether this depends on what can naturally be hoped for: the death of John Keats at 24 is commonly regarded as tragic, but that of Leo Tolstoy at 82 is not (even though Tolstoy died in a freezing cold train station while running away from his wife). ‘The trouble,’ says Nagel, ‘is that life familiarises us with the goods of which death deprives us … Death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive goods.’

Notice that, although Nagel’s conclusion is impeccably arrived at, it rests on an initial assumption which the casual reader may have taken for granted, namely, that ‘the bare experience of life is intrinsically valuable, regardless of the balance of its good and bad elements’. We might agree or disagree, but Nagel has not proved this. Perhaps it is too fundamental to require proof—or to be provable.

Bernard Williams and the Shape of a Human Life

Three years later (1973), the philosopher Bernard Williams took up the problem where Nagel had left off. If life is intrinsically valuable, does it follow that more is always better? Williams concluded, apparently contra Nagel, that immortality would not be desirable. What gives us reason to go on living, he argued, is not bare existence, but our desires, attachments, and projects—which must necessarily assume the shape of a human life.

Yet Nagel’s ‘abrupt cancellation’ may not be quite so abrupt. Our bodies, memories, characters, desires, and projects are continually changing. The child becomes the adolescent, the adolescent the adult, and the adult someone whom the child could scarcely have imagined. By the time death arrives, we have already died several times. Perhaps this is why, consciously at least, we are not more frightened of it: biological death is less an abrupt cancellation than the last in a series of deaths.

Death Kills Us Twice

But although biological death may be the last in a series, it is still the last. If we grant Nagel his premise, it is an evil insofar as it deprives us of indefinitely extensive goods.

No surprise, given the sheer horror of this conclusion, that theologians down the ages have sought to blunt it. But it gets worse, much worse. Death not only deprives us of life, but also compels us to spend the very life that it deprives us of in the mostly unconscious fear of this deprivation. As I have argued, much of our anxiety and the baggage that comes with it stems from our fear of death. Thus, death not only cuts us short, but prevents us from making the most of whatever it leaves us.

To be afraid of death, therefore, is to die twice—and never to live.

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One Man’s Search for Meaning

Man in front of a bleak road
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. —Nietzsche & Frankl

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

Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist, the founder of logotherapy. His experiences in Nazi concentration camps profoundly shaped his outlook, which found its fullest expression in Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

Viktor Emil Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905. As a schoolboy, he attended evening lectures in philosophy and psychology. While still in his teens, he sent one of his papers to Sigmund Freud, who arranged to have it published in an international psychoanalytic journal. Frankl later joined Alfred Adler’s rival circle, only to break away after concluding that both Freud and Adler had got it wrong.

Freud argued that we are driven primarily by the pursuit of pleasure. Adler emphasised power, mastery, and the overcoming of inferiority. Frankl proposed a third possibility: meaning.

From 1928 to 1930, Frankl organised counselling programmes for suicidal students, which supported his growing belief that people needed reasons to live as well as reasons not to die. After qualifying in medicine in 1930, he specialised in neurology and psychiatry, treating patients with depression and suicidal thoughts.

The Decision

In 1941, Frankl obtained a visa to emigrate to the United States. Then one evening, he returned home to find his father holding a fragment of marble salvaged from a synagogue that had been destroyed by the Nazis. The fragment bore part of the Fifth Commandment: Honour thy father and thy mother. Frankl chose to remain by his parents in Vienna, tearing up his passage to safety.

The following year, Frankl and his family were deported. His parents, brother, and pregnant wife all perished. On arriving at Auschwitz, the guards confiscated the manuscript that he had been working on for years.

Stripped of his possessions, his profession, and even his name, he found himself wondering what remained of his former self.

He later recalled:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.

Frankl’s conclusion echoes that of the Stoics: while our circumstances may be taken from us, our response remains our own. Instead of sinking into despair, Frankl found purpose in imagining the future. He pictured himself lecturing to students about the psychology of the camps, subliming his suffering into knowledge that might help others or illuminate the human condition. He silently reconstructed the manuscript in his mind and, after the war, painstakingly rewrote it from memory.

He also wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, which he drafted in little more than a week. Intended as a brief account of his experiences, it went on to sell many millions of copies.

The ideas he had carried through the camps became the foundation of an entirely new approach to psychotherapy.

The Will to Meaning

Frankl’s message is ultimately one of hope. Even in the most absurd, painful, and dispiriting of circumstances, life can be given meaning—and so too can suffering. Life in the camps confirmed his conviction that our deepest motivation is neither pleasure, as Freud had believed, nor power, as Adler had believed, but meaning. Pleasure and success matter, but they cannot satisfy us for long unless they serve a larger purpose. As Frankl wrote, ‘Happiness cannot be pursued, but must ensue.’

These ideas became the foundation of logotherapy (from the Greek logos, meaning ‘word’, ‘reason’, or ‘principle’), which is often described as the ‘Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy’ for coming after those of Freud and Adler. Part philosophy and part psychotherapy, logotherapy belongs to the existential tradition—but differs from its mainstream in holding that meaning is discovered as well as created.

Logotherapy seeks not merely to relieve symptoms but to help people discover meaning in their lives. According to Frankl, meaning can be found in three principal ways: through creating or contributing something of value; through our relationships, especially the loving ones; and through the attitude we adopt in the face of unavoidable suffering.

Depression and Meaning

Frankl coined the term ‘Sunday neurosis’ to refer to the dejection that many people feel at the end of the working week when they finally have time to realise how empty and meaningless their lives have become. This existential vacuum can lead to all manner of distractions and compensations: anxiety, avoidance, binge eating, drinking, overworking, and overspending. In the short term, these distractions carpet over the existential vacuum, but in the longer term, they prevent action from being taken and meaning from being found.

For Frankl, depression results when the gap between what a person is and what they ought to be, or once wished to be, becomes so large that it can no longer be carpeted over. The person’s goals seem far out of reach and they can no longer envisage a future. As in Psalm 41, abyssus abyssum invocat—’hell brings forth hell,’ or, in an alternative translation, ‘the deep calls unto the deep.’

Thus, depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.

Unless change can be made, there will continue to be a mismatch between our lived experience and our desired experience, between the meaninglessness of everyday life and the innate drive to find meaning, to self-actualise, to be all that we can be.

From an existential standpoint, the experience of depression 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 can break out of the cast that has been imposed upon us, discover who we truly are, and, in so doing, begin to give deep meaning to our lives.

After the War

After the war, Frankl returned to Vienna, where he rebuilt both his life and his career. In 1947, he married Eleonore Schwindt, with whom he had a daughter, Gabriele. He became head of neurology at the Vienna Polyclinic Hospital and lectured at universities around the world. He refused to let himself be defined by his wartime experiences. He remained an enthusiastic mountaineer into old age and, in his sixties, fulfilled a lifelong ambition of earning a pilot’s licence.

By the time of his death in 1997, Man’s Search for Meaning had sold millions of copies in dozens of languages. It continues to inspire psychologists, philosophers, doctors, teachers, clergy, and countless ordinary readers searching for purpose amid suffering, loss, and uncertainty. He helped broaden psychology beyond pathology, arguing that resilience depends not merely on optimism or self-esteem but on having a reason to get up in the morning.

His message has become more relevant than ever. Many people today enjoy unprecedented freedom and prosperity, while struggling with loneliness, anxiety, and a pervasive sense of emptiness. Technology offers endless distraction, consumerism endless temptation, and social media endless comparison. Yet none can answer the question that mattered most to Frankl: What is my life for?

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Sartre, Bad Faith, and the Freedom We Deny

A waiter looking in the mirror
In the Odyssey, Odysseus is never more free, or more himself, than when he declares himself to be ‘Nobody’.

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

In Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours, Julianne Moore plays Laura Brown, a pregnant housewife living in 1950s California. She spends the morning baking a birthday cake for her husband, caring for her young son, and performing all the duties expected of a devoted wife and mother.

But all is not as it seems.

Beneath this picture of domestic contentment, something has begun to shift. Perhaps for the first time, Laura seems to experience her own life as though she were standing outside it. Later that day, she books into a hotel room. Alone at last, she lies on the bed reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. For a few precious hours, she escapes the life waiting for her outside the door.

Some years later, she vanishes without trace, abandoning her husband and young children and inventing a new life for herself in Canada. What she did is difficult to understand, or forgive. But it is not her decision that makes the story so compelling. It is the feeling that precedes it. Long before she acts, she has begun to look upon her own life as though it were not her own.

Many thoughtful people have experienced something similar.

Perhaps you are at a birthday party or sitting in a meeting when, suddenly, everything feels strange. You zoom out of the room and wonder, How did I end up here? Or perhaps it happens on the homeward commute or while changing a nappy in the middle of the night. The feeling lasts only a few seconds before necessity kicks in. But for that brief moment, you are no longer simply living your life. You are looking in on it.

It was precisely this human potential that fascinated the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). For Sartre, human beings are unlike anything else in the natural world. A tree simply exists. A stone simply exists. But human beings are conscious not only of the world but also of themselves within it. We can step back from our own lives and ask questions that no other creature appears capable of asking: Who am I? How did I become this person? What now?

This capacity for self-reflection is both our highest freedom and our heaviest burden—for we are never wholly identical with the life we happen to be living. Had things been only slightly different, we would be living an altogether different life. Indeed, there are countless lives that we could have lived, and could still live.

Most of the time, however, we do our utmost to forget this unsettling truth. Sartre called this mauvaise foi, or ‘bad faith’.

Bad faith is not ordinary lying. We do not consciously deceive ourselves. Rather, we come to identify with the roles we occupy. We begin to see ourselves as nothing more than a teacher, a doctor, a parent, a husband, or a wife, forgetting that these are only the lives we happen to be living. We begin to mistake our lives for ourselves.

One example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a waiter who does his best to conform to everything that a waiter ought to be. His every movement is a little too precise; his every smile, a little too practised. He is trying so hard to be a waiter that he forgets that he is first a free human being who happens to be waiting tables.

When I was a junior doctor, I too played at being a doctor—partly because it was what everyone expected, and what many of my patients needed. But because I had read Sartre as a teenager, I could sometimes catch myself doing it.

Like Laura Brown, I would suddenly become aware that my role was only a role. Laura had not ceased to love her husband or her son, nor had she forgotten her responsibilities towards them. But she could no longer identify with the life that she happened to be living. A gap had opened up between herself and her life.

Most people expend a great deal of effort trying to close that gap. They tell themselves that they have no real choice, that it is too late to change, that people depend on them, or that this is simply who they are. Often these rationalisations contain a good deal of truth. We are born into circumstances that we cannot simply wish away, and we acquire obligations that we cannot lightly discard.

Still, there is a world of difference between acknowledging our constraints and denying our freedom altogether. The first is maturity. The second is bad faith.

For Sartre, freedom does not mean doing whatever we feel like doing. Laura Brown is not some heroine of liberation. Her story is tragic because freedom and responsibility so often pull in opposite directions. Sartre’s point is not that we should walk away from our commitments whenever they become alien or burdensome, but that we should not simply endure them as though we had no choice in the matter.

That is why those fleeting moments of estrangement matter. When you suddenly wonder, How did I end up here?, you are not necessarily having a crisis. You are opening a window of choice and freedom.

We are something more than the lives we have cornered ourselves into. We could have been a million different people—and still could.

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My Philosophy of (Most) Depression

A path through dark forest, with light at the end
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.

—Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno

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If this article spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Madness.

If you are struggling with depression, you can also download my practical self-help guide Growing from Depression free of charge.

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The Deepest Cure for Fear and Anxiety—No Prescription Required

A man standing on top of a pyramid, which represents Maslow's pyramid
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs culminates in self-actualization. But the journey does not end there.

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

In his influential paper of 1943, A Theory of Human Motivation, the psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed that healthy human beings have a certain number of needs, and that these needs can be arranged in a hierarchy, with some needs (such as physiological and safety needs) being more primitive or basic than others (such as social and ego needs).

Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ is often represented as a five-level pyramid (Figure 1), with higher needs coming into focus only once lower, more basic ones have been met. Maslow called the bottom four levels ‘deficiency needs’ because we do not feel anything if they are met but become anxious or distressed if they are not. Thus, physiological needs such as eating, drinking, and sleeping are deficiency needs, as are safety needs, social needs such as friendship and intimacy, and ego needs such as self-esteem, status, and recognition.

In contrast, he called the fifth and highest level of the pyramid a ‘growth need’ insofar as the drive to self-actualize requires that we move beyond the pursuit of comfort and security to fulfil our deepest potential as human beings.

Once we have met our deficiency needs, the focus of our anxiety shifts to self-actualization, and we begin, even if only dimly, to contemplate our bigger picture. However, only a minority of people ever truly self-actualize, because self-actualization requires unusual qualities such as independence, awareness, creativity, originality, and, above all, courage. Many people who have satisfied all their deficiency needs remain unable to self-actualize, instead inventing more deficiency needs for themselves, because to contemplate the meaning of life would lead them to entertain the possibility of its meaninglessness and the prospect of their own death and annihilation.

Existential Anxiety

A person who begins to contemplate their bigger picture may come to fear that life is meaningless and death inescapable, while at the same time clinging to the comforting belief that they are somehow immortal, important, or at least significant. This inner conflict gives rise to existential anxiety. Whereas fear and anxiety and their pathological forms (such as phobias or panic disorder) are grounded in threats to life, existential anxiety is rooted in the brevity and apparent insignificance, or absurdity, of life.

Existential anxiety is so disturbing that most people avoid it at all costs, instead constructing a false reality out of goals, ambitions, routines, relationships, customs, values, culture, and religion in a bid to deceive themselves that their lives are meaningful and that death is distant or delusory.

Unfortunately, such self-deception comes at a heavy price. According to the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, those who refuse to face up to ‘non-being’ are acting in ‘bad faith’ and living out a life that is inauthentic and unfulfilling. Facing up to non-being can bring insecurity, loneliness, responsibility, and, with them, anxiety, but, beyond that, it can also bring a profound sense of calm, freedom, even nobility. Far from being pathological, existential anxiety is a necessary transitional phase—a sign of health, strength, and courage, and a harbinger of greater things to come.

The Courage to Be

The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich took this idea a step further. In The Courage to Be, he argued that refusing to confront non-being leads not only to inauthenticity, as Sartre had argued, but also to pathological—or neurotic—anxiety.

He wrote:

He who does not succeed in taking his anxiety courageously upon himself can succeed in avoiding the extreme situation of despair by escaping into neurosis. He still affirms himself but on a limited scale. Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being.

According to this striking outlook, pathological anxiety, although seemingly grounded in threats to life, in fact arises from repressed existential anxiety, which itself arises from our uniquely human capacity for self-consciousness.

Squaring up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty. It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into a life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make—and get—the most out of our lives. 

This, I believe, is the philosophical cure for fear and anxiety.

Some philosophers have gone further still in asserting that the very purpose of life is none other than to prepare for death. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates, who is about to face the executioner, tells his friends that absolute justice, beauty, and goodness cannot be apprehended by the senses, but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks as far as possible to separate soul from body. As death is the complete separation of soul and body, the philosopher aims at death—and can be said to be almost dead.

Only a true philosopher who no longer fears death truly possesses courage and the other virtues. Those who remain in fear of death can only have, at best, the appearance of virtue; but behind the facade, they are forever trading one fear against another.

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