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Can the Highest Forms of Human Excellence Be Taught?

If the greatest Athenians could not teach virtue to their own sons, can virtue be taught?

Can courage be taught? Can wisdom? Can goodness?

We take it for granted that mathematics can be taught, languages can be taught, and medicine can be taught. But what of the qualities that matter most? Can they, too, be passed from teacher to pupil, or picked up from a textbook?

More than two thousand years ago, Plato wrestled with exactly this question.

The First Puzzle

In one of Plato’s early dialogues, the Laches, Socrates asks two generals, Laches and Nicias, to define courage. Laches thinks the question an easy one, and asserts that courage is when a soldier is willing to remain at his post and fight against the enemy.

Socrates objects that a soldier who flees from his post can also sometimes be called courageous. He cites the example of the Scythian cavalry who combat both in pursuit and in retreat, and of the mythical hero Aeneas who, Homer says, was always fleeing on horses. Homer praised Aeneas for his knowledge of fear, and called him the ‘counsellor of fear’. When Laches protests that Socrates is speaking of horsemen and charioteers rather than hoplites (foot soldiers), Socrates layers on the example of the Spartan hoplites at the Battle of Plataea, who fled the enemy but then turned back to fight once the enemy lines had broken. 

What Socrates really wants to know is what courage is in all of its instances—not only for the hoplite, but also for the horseman, the charioteer, and every other class of warrior, as well as for those who ‘show courage in illness and poverty’, ‘are brave in the face of pain and fear’, and so on. What is it that all these instances of courage have in common? For example, quickness can be found in running, in speaking, and in playing the lyre, and in each instance, ‘quickness’ can be defined as ‘the quality that accomplishes much in a little time’. Is there a similar, single, unifying definition of ‘courage’ that can apply to all of its instances? Before reading on, think upon it for yourself… How would you define courage?

This time, Laches defines courage as ‘a sort of endurance of the soul’. But Socrates points out that endurance can be foolish as well as wise, and foolish endurance is likely to be harmful. After several more attempts, Nicias suggests that courage is some sort of knowledge or wisdom. Socrates says that, if Nicias means that courage is knowledge of the true grounds of fear and hope, then courage must be very rare among men; while animals, which want for such knowledge, could never be called ‘courageous’ but at most ‘fearless’—which, indeed, ordinary language use seems to confirm. Nicias concurs, and surmises that the same is also true of children: ‘Or do you really suppose I call all children courageous, who fear nothing because they have no sense?’

Socrates presses the argument further until he reaches a remarkable conclusion: if courage, and virtue in general, is knowledge, it cannot be separated from the rest of knowledge and wisdom. In seeking to define courage, the three of them have succeeded in defining virtue herself. Virtue is knowledge, which is why people with some measure of one virtue usually have a similar measure of the other virtues and of virtue in general—a thesis known as the Unity of the Virtues.

The First Solution

Courage, says Socrates, is knowledge or wisdom. Suppose I am walking along a beach and see someone drowning. I know that I can’t swim and that the currents are strong, but jump in anyway because a human life is at stake. Moments later, I too need rescuing. Having misjudged the situation, I have only made it worse, and acted not courageously but recklessly.

The lifeguard, in contrast, is a strong swimmer and equipped with a floater. From her years of experience and familiarity with the beach, she knows that if she dives in she stands an excellent chance of making a rescue. Of course, there is some risk involved, but the potential benefit is so large and so likely that it far outweighs the risk. If the lifeguard truly understands all this, she will ‘courageously’ dive in. If she does not dive in, she has not fully grasped the situation.

One of Socrates’ most famous arguments is that no one ever knowingly does evil. People do wrong not because their ethics are overwhelmed by a desire for pleasure, as is often believed, but because they are unable to weigh up pleasures and pains. They act with recklessness or cowardice or foolishness or vice (which are all really one and the same thing) because, from their limited perspective, it seems like the right or best thing to do. But if they knew better, they would behave differently. Virtue, then, is a form of knowledge.

The Fatal Objection

If Socrates is right in holding that courage and all of virtue is knowledge, then surely courage and the other virtues can be taught by the same methods as geometry or medicine or any other field of human knowledge. So who is wrong, Socrates in holding that courage is knowledge, or us in our common intuition that courage cannot simply be taught?

Plato returned to the problem in a later dialogue. In the Meno, Socrates observes that people with wisdom and virtue are very poor at imparting those qualities. Themistocles, the great Athenian statesman and general, was able to teach his son Cleophantus skills such as standing upright on horseback and shooting javelins, but no one ever credited the poor wretch with anything like his father’s wisdom—and the same could also be said of Lysimachus and his son Aristides, and Thucydides and his sons Melesias and Stephanus.

Perhaps it was too early in 402, the dramatic date of the Meno, for Socrates to have added his own three sons to the roll of dolts and dunderheads, but Aristotle, who had the benefit of hindsight, tells us that they too grew up to be ‘fools and dullards’.

In another dialogue, the Protagoras, Socrates says that Pericles, who led Athens at the peak of its golden age, gave his sons Paralus and Xanthippus the most excellent instruction in everything that could be learnt from teachers. But when it came to wisdom, this paragon of wisdom simply left them to ‘wander at their own free will in a sort of hope that they would light upon virtue of their own accord’.

A New Answer

If virtue cannot be taught, not even by the most eminent and distinguished of Athenians, then it is not, after all, a type of knowledge.

But then how, asks Meno, did good people come into being?

Socrates replies that he and Meno have overlooked that right action is possible under guidance other than that of knowledge. A man who has knowledge of the road to Larissa (a city in Thessaly) may make a good guide, but a man who has only correct opinion of the road, but has never been and does not know, may in some cases make just as good a guide. If he who thinks the truth can be just as good a guide to Larissa as he who knows the truth, then correct opinion can be just as good a guide to right action as knowledge.

If this be true, how is knowledge, which is the more highly prized, any different from correct opinion? Socrates compares correct opinions to the statues of Daedalus (a mythical architect and craftsman of unsurpassed skill), which had to be tied down to prevent them from running away. Correct opinions can be tied down with ‘an account of the reason why’, whereupon they cease to be correct opinions and petrify into knowledge.

Since courage and the other parts of virtue are not knowledge, all that remains is for them to be correct opinion. This much explains why the likes of Themistocles and Lysimachus and even the great Pericles were unable to make anything much out of their sons—and why, then as today, having children is to dice with the devil. Good people are no different from soothsayers, prophets, and poets, who say many true things when they are inspired but have no real knowledge of what they are saying.

The Teachers We Remember

Courage, like all the virtues, consists not in knowledge but in correct opinion. The virtues relate to human behaviour, and in particular to good or moral behaviour—that is, to ethics. In ethics, the choice of one action over another, or others, involves a complex and indeterminate calculus that cannot be condensed into, and hence expressed as, knowledge. Whereas knowledge is concrete and exact, correct opinion is subtle and ineffable, and more the province of intuition than of reason, of art than of science. For this reason, correct opinion cannot be taught but only ever invited or inspired.

The best education consists not in being taught but in being inspired.

The teachers who we hold in our hearts, those we never forget, are not those who assiduously taught us the most facts, or fastidiously covered every bulleted point on the syllabus, but those who inspired us and opened us up to ourselves and to the world.

Unfortunately, many people are not amenable to being inspired, not even by the most charismatic teachers or greatest works of art—which is why, in the final reckoning, Socrates and Plato held virtue to be a gift of the gods.

…if we were right in the way we spoke … virtue would be neither an inborn quality nor taught, but comes to those who possess it as a gift of the gods which is not accompanied by understanding, unless there is someone among our statesmen who can make another into a statesman. If there were one, he would be said to be among the living as Homer said Tiresias was among the dead, namely, that ‘he alone retained his wits while the others flitted about like shadows’. —Plato, Meno

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If you enjoyed Plato’s insight, you might also enjoy The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, which contains one or two others.

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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.

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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To explore these ideas further, see The Meaning of Madness.

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If Aspasia taught Socrates, Western philosophy begins with a woman.

According to Plato, Socrates’ education may have included the occasional slap.

Few figures in ancient Greece are as intriguing—or as neglected—as Aspasia of Miletus, the companion of Pericles, the friend of Socrates, and the greatest female intellectual of classical Athens. Although she has been erased from the traditional history of philosophy, there is substantial evidence that she did far more than beguile great men. If that evidence is to be believed, Socrates is rooted not only in Anaxagoras and Pythagoras, but also in Aspasia.

The first piece of evidence comes from no less than Plato’s Menexenus, in which Socrates claims to have learnt the art of rhetoric from Aspasia of Miletus, ‘an excellent mistress… who has made so many good speakers [including] the best among the Hellenes—Pericles, the son of Xanthippus.’

To prove it, Socrates recites a funeral oration that Aspasia recently composed and taught to him. He tells Menexenus that he still ought to remember the speech because, whenever he forgot the words in rehearsal, Aspasia threatened to slap him.

The speech closely resembles—and gently satirises—the famous funeral oration delivered by Pericles and recorded by Thucydides. When Socrates is done reciting, Menexenus marvels that such an oration could have been written by a woman.

The Menexenus is not the Gorgias or the Republic. Even those who do read it tend to skim over this passage or dismiss it as mere fiction or comedy.

But should they? Fortunately, Plato is not our only witness.

The Most Remarkable Woman in Athens

Aspasia emigrated from Miletus to Athens, where she lived as a metic, or resident alien. After his amicable divorce from Deinomache, she became the companion of Pericles, the leading statesman and general of Athens. According to Plutarch, Pericles kissed her every morning before leaving and every evening upon returning.

Owing to her foreign birth, unmarried status, and influence over Pericles, Aspasia became one of the most controversial figures in Athens. Comic poets branded her a prostitute, and in the Acharnians Aristophanes goes so far as to blame her for starting the Peloponnesian War.

This raises an obvious question. Why would Plato have chosen such an infamous woman for the Menexenus? Plato is no Aristophanes, and even his comic touches are generally in the service of his philosophy. Had his intention been merely to parody funeral oratory, he could easily have done so without invoking Aspasia. The more interesting question is not why Plato jokes about Aspasia, but why he mentions her at all.

Socrates’ Teacher

The Menexenus is not the only Platonic dialogue in which Socrates claims to have been taught by a remarkable woman.

In the Symposium, he relates a conversation that he once had with a mysterious priestess, Diotima of Mantinea, who, he says, taught him the true nature of love. This is Plato’s famous ‘Ladder of Love’, by which aching lust can be sublimed into wisdom and virtue.

Armand d’Angour, among others, has argued that Diotima is in fact Aspasia under another name—with Plato, this time, having taken the precaution to disguise her identity.

If so, Plato has presented Aspasia not only as Socrates’ teacher of rhetoric, but also as the source of philosophy’s most influential account of love.

Plato Was Not Alone

Plato was not alone in portraying Aspasia as an intellectual authority.

Besides the two famous ones, Plato and Xenophon, at least another nine of Socrates’ followers wrote Socratic dialogues. Among these dialogues we know of two with the title Aspasia, one by Aeschines and another by Antisthenes.

In the Aspasia of Aeschines, Socrates urges the millionaire Callias to send his son Hipponicus to Aspasia for instruction. Socrates presses his recommendation by citing Aspasia’s credentials in rhetoric and in marriage guidance—precisely the same combination of talents that we find independently confirmed in Plato (rhetoric) and Xenophon (marriage guidance).

A pattern is beginning to emerge. Aspasia is not some isolated anecdote. She is repeatedly presented by various Socratics as someone from whom others—including Socrates himself—could learn.

Aspasia Speaks

A substantial fragment of the Aspasia of Aeschines has come down to us, preserved in Cicero. In it, we can finally hear Aspasia in her own voice.

Aspasia asks a husband named Xenophon whether he would prefer his own horse or a better horse belonging to his neighbour.

“The better horse,” he replies.

Would he prefer his own farm or a better one?

“The better one.”

Would he prefer his own wife—or a better wife?

At this Xenophon falls silent.

Aspasia then asks his wife a parallel series of questions. She too admits that she would prefer finer possessions—and then blushes into silence when asked whether she would prefer a better husband.

Aspasia concludes:

Since each of you avoids answering me that question alone which was the only one which I wished to have answered, I will tell you what each of you are thinking of; for both you, O woman, wish to have the best husband, and you, O Xenophon, most exceedingly desire to have the most excellent wife. Wherefore, unless you both so contrive matters that there shall not be on the whole earth a more excellent man or a more admirable woman, then in truth you will at all times desire above all things that which you think to be the best thing in the world, namely, that you, O Xenophon, may be the husband of the best possible wife; and you, O woman, that you may be married to the most excellent husband possible.

The conclusion is striking enough. More striking still is the method. Aspasia proceeds much as Socrates would: by asking apparently innocent questions, drawing analogies, exposing contradictions, and gently leading her listeners towards a conclusion they reach for themselves. Her conclusion, moreover, echoes that of Diotima. Love’s highest purpose is not pleasure but virtue.

Did Aspasia Teach Socrates the Socratic Method?

According to Plato, Socrates developed his method of questioning, the method of elenchus, after his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle of Delphi whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates. Astonishingly, the oracle replied that there was no one wiser—leaving Socrates, who knew only that he knew nothing, perplexed.

To discover the meaning of the oracle, Socrates questioned several supposedly wise people, and in each case concluded: “I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.” From then on, he dedicated himself to the service of the god of the oracle by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, “if he is not, showing him that he is not.” 

Plato presents the oracle story as the turning point of Socrates’ career. By validating his skeptical stance, it gave him the impetus to develop his own distinctive method of doing philosophy. 

The method of elenchus consists in questioning one or more people about a concept, exposing contradictions in their initial assumptions, and provoking a reappraisal of the concept. As the process is iterative, it leads to an increasingly refined definition of the concept, and, in due course, to a shared recognition that it eludes our understanding—and hence that we know far less than we thought we did.

With our initial dogmatism transmuted into a state of puzzlement and suspended judgement, we are ready to become much more open and subtle thinkers—assuming, of course, that we have not first become angry and resentful. 

But although Socrates may have perfected the method of elenchus, it is unlikely that he originated a mode of conversation that seems so naturally and fundamentally human. Diogenes Laertius, the ancient biographer of philosophers, claims that it was the sophist Protagoras who ‘first introduced the method of discussion which is called Socratic’. In Plato’s Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who was a generation older than Protagoras, himself uses the method of elenchus on Socrates to undermine Plato’s Theory of the Forms.

It remains that while other thinkers tried to make a show of their knowledge, Socrates tried to make a show of his and everyone else’s ignorance. In contrast to the pre-Socratics and especially to the sophists, he seldom claimed to possess any positive knowledge; whenever he did, it was because he had learnt it from somebody else, or because he had been ‘divinely inspired’. In Plato’s Phaedrus, he compares himself to an empty jar, filled through the ears by the words of others.

Against this background, Aspasia begins to look less like a literary curiosity and more like a plausible influence. In Plato, she teaches Socrates rhetoric. Perhaps she teaches him love. In Aeschines, she employs the very methods later associated with Socrates himself.

Did Aspasia invent the Socratic method? Almost certainly not. Did she influence the man who perfected it? The surviving evidence suggests that the possibility deserves to be taken far more seriously than it usually is.

A Different Beginning

None of this proves that Aspasia was Diotima, or even that she taught Socrates. Ancient history rarely affords such certainty. 

But the evidence does point in that direction. Plato presents Aspasia as Socrates’ teacher—and has her threatening to slap the man he most admired. Other members of the Socratic circle independently portray her as a teacher. The surviving fragments show her employing the same methods, and pursuing the same moral aims, for which Socrates became renowned.

For centuries, the story of Western philosophy has begun with Socrates. It may be that it ought to begin not with Socrates alone, but with the remarkable woman from Miletus who taught him rhetoric, perhaps taught him love, and may even have helped shape the philosophical method that transformed the Western world.

If Aspasia taught Socrates—and perhaps even slapped him—Western philosophy begins with a woman.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy The Gang of Three, an engaging overview of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and how they laid the foundations of Western philosophy.

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A laughing philosopher (Democritus)
Democritus laughed at human folly—not out of contempt, but because he saw the world more clearly.

Philosophers are not generally renowned for their sense of humour. They spend their days pondering free will, personal identity, and whether the external world really exists. Yet philosophy has always had a playful side. Socrates delighted in teasing his companions, Diogenes made a career out of puncturing pretension, and Zen masters often concealed profound truths inside what seemed to be little more than jokes. According to one tradition, Chrysippus the Stoic saw a donkey eating figs, gave it wine to wash them down, and laughed himself to death.

Despite all his outstanding achievements, the people of his native Miletus mocked Thales for his material poverty. So, one year, having predicted a bumper crop of olives, he took out a lease on all the olive presses on Miletus and made himself a fortune. “You see,” he said, “a philosopher could easily be rich if only he did not have better things to do with his time.”

Xanthippe, after berating Socrates at length, emptied a chamber pot over his head. Wiping himself dry, Socrates remarked, “After thunder comes rain.”

Aristippus was the first of the Socratics to take money for teaching. When he demanded five hundred drachmas to tutor a man’s son, the man protested, “For that much money, I could buy a slave!” “Go ahead,” replied Aristippus. “Then you’ll have two.”

When someone chided Aristippus for his extravagant catering, he replied, “Wouldn’t you have bought this yourself if you could have had it for three obols? … Very well then, it is not I who am a lover of pleasure, but you who are a lover of money.”

When Dionysus I, the tyrant of Syracuse, asked Aristippus why he had come to his court, he replied, “When I needed wisdom, I went to Socrates; but now that I am in need of money, I come to you.”

Although he prized reason, Diogenes despised the abstract philosophy practised at Plato’s Academy. When, to great acclaim, Plato defined a human being as ‘a featherless biped’, Diogenes plucked a chicken, carried it into the Academy, and declared, “Behold! Plato’s man.” Plato is said to have amended his definition by adding, ‘with broad nails.’

One day, Diogenes asked Plato for a handful of figs from his garden. When Plato had a whole bushel sent out, he muttered, “Typical Plato.”

Diogenes used to wander about Athens in broad daylight carrying a lit lamp. Whenever anyone asked what he was doing, he would reply, “I am looking for a human being.” 

Diogenes delighted in walking backwards through the streets or entering the theatre against the tide of people leaving. Once a crowd had gathered to laugh at him, he turned on his heel and said, “Why do you mock me, when you’ve spent your whole lives walking backwards? At least I can turn around.”

When a young man asked to study under him, Diogenes handed him a fish and told him to carry it around the city. Ashamed, the young man threw it away and fled. Some time later, Diogenes met him in the agora and remarked, “Fancy—our friendship was ended by a fish.”

Epictetus neither married nor had children, despite urging others to do so. When he reproached his friend and pupil Demonax for remaining unmarried, Demonax replied, “Very well, then. Will you give me one of your daughters for a wife?”

Descartes invites his date, Jeanne, to a fine restaurant for her birthday. The sommelier hands them the wine list, and Jeanne chooses the most expensive Burgundy. “I think not!” exclaims an indignant Descartes. Poof. He disappears.

Kant once joked: A man tried to arrange a solemn funeral for a wealthy relative, but failed. “The more I paid the mourners,” he complained, “the merrier they looked.”

On another occasion, Kant joked: A merchant returned from India with a great fortune, but, caught in a violent storm, was forced to throw all his cargo overboard. The shock was so great that his wig turned grey overnight.

A student lent his copy of Objects of Thought by A. N. Prior to his tutor. At their next meeting, the tutor said that he had browsed the book and left it in the student’s pigeonhole. Some time later, the student burst into his office crying, “Professor, Professor! Someone’s stolen my Prior!” The old man calmly replied, “You’d be lucky around here if they hadn’t taken your posterior as well.”

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are on a camping trip. In the middle of the night, Holmes nudges Watson awake and says, “Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.” “I see millions of stars, my dear Holmes.” “And what do you infer from these stars?” “Well, a number of things,” he says, lighting his pipe. “Astronomically, I observe that there are millions of galaxies and billions of stars and planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I expect that the weather will be fine and clear. Theologically, I see that God is all-powerful, and man, his creation, small and insignificant. What about you, Holmes?” “Watson, you fool! Someone has stolen our tent!”

A renowned philosopher was held in high regard by his driver, who listened in awe as his boss lectured and answered difficult questions about the nature of things and the meaning of life. Then, one day, the driver approached the philosopher and asked if he would be willing to switch roles for just one evening. The philosopher agreed, and, for a while, the driver acquitted himself remarkably well. However, when the time came for questions, someone at the back of the room asked, “Is the epistemological meta-narrative that you seem to espouse compatible with a teleological account of the universe?” “That’s an extremely simple question,” replied the driver. “So simple, in fact, that even my driver could answer it.”

Two behaviourists meet in the street. “Hello,” says one. “How am I feeling today?” 

Some months later, the two behaviourists have sex. One turns to the other and says, “That was good for you. How was it for me?”

Upon waking, a woman said to her husband, “I dreamt that you gave me a necklace of pearls. What do you think it means?” The man smiled and kissed his wife. “You’ll know tonight,” he whispered. That evening, he came home with a small package. She eagerly unwrapped it. Inside was a book entitled The Meaning of Dreams.

Seeing the Zen master on the other side of a raging torrent, a student shouted, “Master! Master! How do I get to the other side?” The master smiled. “You are on the other side.”

A Zen student asked the master how long it would take to attain enlightenment. “Ten years.” “And if I work twice as hard?” “Twenty years.”

For his seventieth birthday, one of his students presented the Zen master with a beautifully wrapped box. Inside was nothing. “Aha,” exclaimed the master. “Just what I wanted!”

A novice was loading the larder with flour and oil. Seeing one of the monks sitting beneath a banyan tree, he asked if he might lend a hand. “Sorry,” said the monk. “I’m busy.” “But your eyes are shut!” “Yes. I’m busy doing nothing. It’s much harder than what you’re doing. It’s what the food is for, what the kitchen is for, and why we built the temple. Don’t interrupt me again with your lardering.” Hours later, the weary novice found the monk still sitting on the bench. “Can we talk now?” he asked. “No,” he snapped, “I haven’t finished yet.”

“After twelve years of therapy,” said a man, “my psychotherapist said something that brought tears to my eyes.” “What did he say?” “No hablo inglés.”

Humour and philosophy have more in common than might first appear. Both begin by challenging what we take for granted. A joke lures us into one way of thinking before pulling the rug from under our feet; philosophy often does the same. In both cases, we emerge seeing the world a little differently.

No wonder philosophers have always been drawn to wit, irony, paradox, and satire. A good joke can expose a bad argument, puncture pomposity, or illuminate an idea more effectively than pages of solemn analysis. As Nietzsche observed, ‘It is not by wrath but by laughter that one kills.’

Perhaps, after all, laughter is simply another way of thinking.

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If you enjoyed these philosophical jokes, you might also enjoy The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, an engaging overview of the three thinkers who laid the foundations of Western philosophy. To discover how their ideas can sharpen your own reasoning and communication, see How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

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What Wine Reveals About Being Human

The Symposium by Anselm Feuerbach (1869). In ancient Greece, wine was not merely consumed; it created a space for conversation, friendship, poetry, and philosophy.

Wine is in decline.

Across much of the world, especially among younger generations, people are drinking less wine than they once did. The reasons are several: changing attitudes to alcohol, concerns about health, economic pressures, changing patterns of socialising, and shifting cultural values.

Perhaps this is no great loss. If wine is merely alcohol, then one drink can be replaced by another.

But wine has never been merely alcohol. For thousands of years, wine has occupied a remarkable place in culture and civilisation. It has flowed through religion and ritual, philosophy and poetry, friendship and celebration.

The deeper question, then, is not why people drink wine, or are drinking less of it, but why wine has mattered so much to human beings.

Human beings have always sought ways to turn necessity into meaning. We do not merely eat; we dine. We do not merely speak; we tell stories. We do not merely gather; we celebrate. We do not merely see; we behold. We do not merely survive; we live.

Wine is one of the oldest ways in which we transform ordinary experience into something more elevated. It takes grapes, sunlight, soil, and time, and turns them into something capable of carrying memory, place, history, and human intention.

Wine is nature transformed into culture.

Wine lovers know that wine is so much more than a drink. But how are we to explain this to those who do not already know it?

When you uncork a bottle of mature fine wine, what you are drinking is the product of a particular culture and tradition, a particular soil and exposure, a particular climate, the weather in that year, and the love, labour, and lives of people who may now be no more. If you know how to read it, the wine, like a book, will speak to you of all those things and more.

The wine is still alive, still evolving, so much so that no two bottles can ever be quite the same. By now, the stuff has become incredibly complex, almost ethereal. Without seeking to blaspheme, it has become something like the smell and taste of God.

This moving mirror. This distillate of time and place. It will send shivers down your spine. It will make you burst into laughter and tears. It will knock you right out of yourself, release you from the abstract and self-absorbed prison of the mind, and redeliver you into the magic and mystery of the world as though you had just been reborn.

Every wine that can do this does it in its own way, so that there can be no end to your journey. At its best, wine returns us to the world: more alive, more embodied, and more at home in it.

To get the most out of wine, you will need to sharpen your senses, and you will need to deepen your knowledge. Through wine, we become more aware of our senses and begin to develop them, especially the neglected, almost vestigial, senses of smell and taste. By awakening our faculties, we begin to experience the world more intensely. We also begin to experience it in a different way, as though we were a different kind of animal. We become more instinctual—until, like Nietzsche, we can declare:

My genius is in my nostrils.

Modern life encourages us to live as detached minds moving through an abstract world. Wine returns us to our senses. We are embodied creatures, creatures of sensation and perception, rooted in place and time.

Through wine, I have learnt a great deal about geography, geology, meteorology, biology, agriculture, chemistry, gastronomy, art, history, languages, literature, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Through wine, I have communed with many parts of the world—and visited many of them too. Wine regions, with their gardened slopes and Goldilocks climates, are among the most agreeable destinations imaginable.

Blind tasting has sped up my development. It has also taught me about the methods of the mind and, in the process, made me less bigoted and less dogmatic.

On so many levels, wine offers both a motivation and a medium through which to apprehend the world. It is, ultimately, a kind of homecoming, a way of feeling at home in the world.

A dinner without wine may still be a perfectly serviceable dinner, but for me—and, I suspect, for many wine lovers—it feels somehow incomplete. To put a bottle onto the table is to offer more than a drink. It is to invite conversation, companionship, and the possibility of transforming the quotidian and utilitarian into something more.

Without it, something intangible is missing: the transition from eating to dining, from nourishment to pleasure, from company to companionship, from the practical to the contemplative, from the necessary to the meaningful.

Wine brings people together, not merely to drink, but to converse, create, and celebrate. The Greeks understood this well. In the symposium, wine was not consumed merely for intoxication. It formed part of a carefully cultivated social and intellectual ritual. Friends gathered to eat, drink, debate, sing, and explore ideas. The word symposium itself means ‘drinking together’.

The drinking may have been the pretext, but not the true purpose—and in the most immortal of all symposia, that of Plato, the guests make a point of moderating their intake. Wine created the conditions for conversation, friendship, poetry, and philosophy. It loosened the mind without clouding it. It allowed people to step outside their ordinary roles and encounter one another in a different way.

The Romans continued this tradition in their convivia, gatherings in which food, wine, and conversation became an art. For many centuries, wine occupied this place in human life: not as an escape from civilisation, but as one of its highest expressions.

Yet wine has always possessed another, more mysterious dimension. It has not only helped to shape civilisation, but also reminded us that civilisation cannot be everything. The Greeks expressed this through Dionysus, the god of wine, regeneration, theatre, religious ecstasy, and ritual madness. Dionysus embodied something that every civilisation must somehow accommodate: the human need to loosen the boundaries of the self, to escape from rigid identities, and to experience a larger reality.

Wine played a central role in the Dionysian Mysteries, which aimed above all at ecstatic union with the divine—an idea that has survived to this day in the sacramental blood of Christ. The Dionysian impulse stood in tension with the Apollonian order and restraint imposed by society.

Civilisation depends upon both: the impulse to create form and the impulse to dissolve it. Without form, there is chaos; without dissolution, there is stagnation. This is why wine has always stood between refinement and abandon, cultivation and dissolution. Blind tasting, with its emphasis on reason and deduction, is an attempt to marry these forces. It requires intuition and imagination, but also discipline and analysis.

In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche recognised the Dionysian impulse as a primal and universal force:

Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak, or through the powerful coming on of spring … that Dionysian excitement arises. As its power increases, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self. In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea.

‘Ecstasy’ literally means ‘to stand outside oneself’. Modern life, with its relentless emphasis on the sovereign self, has made such moments increasingly rare. More than ever before, we are encouraged to construct, defend, and project our individual identities. From a young age, we are taught to remain in tight control of our ego or persona, with the aim of projecting it as far out as possible. As a result, we may have lost the art of letting go, leading to a poverty or monotony of conscious experience. Yet there are times when the surest way of finding ourselves is, paradoxically, to lose ourselves.

Letting go can threaten the life that we have built and even the person that we have become. But it can also free us from our modern narrowness and neediness, and deliver—or re-deliver—us into a bigger and brighter world.

Wine matters not because it is unique, but because it reveals something universal. It represents something deeply human: our desire to transform necessity into meaning, and to experience life more fully and authentically.

A grape becomes wine. A meal becomes a celebration. Company becomes companionship. A moment becomes a memory. Necessity becomes meaning.

Perhaps what we risk losing is not merely wine, but one of humanity’s oldest reminders that life is not only something to endure, preserve, or prolong.

It is something to experience, savour, and celebrate—something that returns us to the world with our senses awake, our minds open, and our place within it restored.

‘Man,’ said Balzac, ‘dies in despair, while the spirit dies in ecstasy.’

Discover the world of wine

In The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting, Neel Burton offers an engaging introduction to the art, science, and meaning of wine. Going beyond grape varieties and tasting notes, the book explores how wine connects nature, culture, history, and human perception.

Whether you are a complete beginner or a seasoned enthusiast, you will learn how to taste wine with greater confidence, understand what makes different wines distinctive, and develop the skills of blind tasting. Along the way, you will discover why wine has occupied such a unique place in human civilisation—for wine is not merely something we drink, but something we experience, interpret, and share.

A guide to becoming not just a better wine taster, but a more attentive observer of the world.

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