By |

The Psychology and Philosophy of Imagination

John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral
John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831).

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

Einstein held that imagination is more important than knowledge: ‘I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’

What Is Imagination?

Imagination is the faculty of the mind that forms and manipulates images, propositions, concepts, emotions, and sensations above and beyond and sometimes independently of incoming sensory stimuli, opening up the realms of the abstract, the figurative, the possible, the hypothetical, and the universal.

Imagination comes in many forms and by many degrees, ranging from scientific reasoning to musical appreciation, and overlaps with a number of other cognitive constructs including belief, desire, emotion, memory, supposition, and fantasy. Belief, like perception, aims at according with reality, while desire aims at altering reality. Like belief, emotion also aims at according with reality, but more particularly at reflecting the significance of its object, or class of object, for the subject—an aspect that it shares with many forms of imagination. Like imagination, memory can involve remote imagery. But unlike imagination, memory is (or aims to be) rooted in reality and serves primarily to frame belief and guide moment-by-moment action. Memories are often more vivid than imaginings, which are, in turn, more vivid than mere suppositions. Suppositions tend to be cold and cognitive, lacking the emotional and existential dimensions of imagination, and much of its vividness. Finally, fantasy may be understood as imagination directed towards the improbable.

I say the improbable rather than the impossible, because there is a theory that, just as perception justifies beliefs about actuality, so imagination justifies beliefs about possibility (or at least, metaphysical as opposed to natural possibility). To quote David Hume, ‘it is an established maxim in metaphysics, that whatever the mind clearly conceives, includes the idea of possible existence, or in other words, that nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible.’

Could ghosts, the devil, time travel, and other imaginary things really be possible? I think inconceivability may be a better guide to impossibility than conceivability to possibility. But what does it mean for something to be conceivable or inconceivable, and by whom? It is easy to conceive of something other than oxygen in the place of oxygen, if one does not know anything about oxygen. In that much, knowledge and science constrain imagination—although, no doubt, they also help to focus it. The interplay between knowledge and imagination is most problematic when the ‘knowledge’ is wrong.

In any case, until very recently, most human societies did not mark a strict divide between imagination and belief, or fiction and reality, with each one informing and enriching the other. In fact, it could be argued that, in many important respects, the fiction took precedence over the reality—and even that this has been, and no doubt still is, one of the hallmarks of Homo sapiens. Today, there are pills for people who confuse imaginings and beliefs, but back in the day no one ever thought that life, despite its much harder hardships, might be meaningless—which I think tells us quite a bit about imagination and its uses, and also, incidentally, about mental illness and its causes.

Imagination and Meaning

The uses of imagination are many, more than I can enumerate. Most children begin to develop pretend play at around 15 months of age. What are children doing when they pretend play? And why are they so absorbed in works of imagination? When I was seven years old, I devoured book after book and pleaded with my parents for those not already in the bookcase. By playing out scenarios and extending themselves beyond their limited experience, children seek to make sense of the world and find their place within it. This meaning-making is full of emotion—joy, excitement, awe—and finds an echo in every subsequent act of creation.

Whenever we look at an object such as the Mona Lisa, we see much more than just the frame and the brushstrokes. In fact, we barely see the brushstrokes at all. In imagination as in our dreams, we ascribe form, pattern, and significance to things, and then reflect them back onto those things. Without this work of interpretation and assimilation, the world would be no more than an endless stream of sense impressions—as it may sometimes seem to those who lack imagination—with no hope of escape or reprieve.

Imagination in Everyday Life

More than that, by imagination we are able to complete the world, or our world, by conjuring up the missing parts, and even to inhabit entirely other worlds such as Middle-earth or the Seven Kingdoms. Imagination remains highly active throughout adulthood. What are novels, films, computer games, and even pornography if not aids to the adult imagination? 

If imagination lets us feel at home in the world, it also enables us to get things done in the world. Science advances by hypothesis, which is a function of imagination, and philosophy makes frequent use of thought experiments such as the brain in the vat, the trolley problem, and Plato’s Republic. More than that, imagination enables us to form associations and connections, and thereby to apply our knowledge to real-life situations. It opens up alternatives and possibilities, and guides our decision-making by playing them out in our mind. So many of our failures—and, dare I say, a few of our more boring successes—are in fact failures of the imagination.

Imagination and Other Minds

Imagination also enables us to talk to one another, understand one another, and work together. Without it, there could be no metaphor, no irony, no humour, no past or future tenses, and no conditional either. Indeed, there could be no language at all, for what are words if not symbols and representations? Every conversation depends upon imagination—for every listener must recreate in the theatre of the mind what the speaker can only suggest. By imagination, we can put ourselves in other people’s shoes, think what they think, feel what they feel, and project them and our relationship into the future. Difficulties with imagination are thought to contribute to some of the characteristic features of autism, including impairments in social interaction and communication together with restricted interests and patterns of behaviour.

Cultivating the Imagination

Imagination is the highest form of thought, and almost divine in its reach. With enough imagination, we could identify and solve all our problems. With enough imagination, we would never have to work again—or, at least, not for money. With enough imagination, we could win over, or defeat, anyone we wanted to. But our imagination is so poor that we haven’t even imagined what it would be like to have that kind of imagination.

I’m lucky to have received a decent education, but one thing it certainly didn’t do for me is cultivate my imagination. In fact, medical school in particular did everything to destroy it. In recent years, I’ve been trying to recover the bright and vivid imagination that I left behind in primary school. For that, I’ve been doing just three things, all of them very simple—or, at least, very simple to explain.

  • Recognising the importance of imagination.
  • Making time for sleep and idleness.
  • Taking inspiration from the natural world.

I’ll conclude with these few words from William Blake:

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

Continue Exploring

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

You may also enjoy

Explore all Cognition essays

By |

How Logical Fallacies Exploit Human Nature

The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787).
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787). Plato believed that bad arguments had condemned his teacher to death, inspiring Aristotle’s search for the principles of sound reasoning.

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

History is full of brilliant minds who believed false things and defended absurd ideas. Isaac Newton spent decades trying to create the philosopher’s stone. Thomas Edison championed radioactive products as remedies for various ailments. Steve Jobs skipped bathing in the conviction that his vegan diet could cleanse his body of mucus and toxins.

The problem is not that intelligent people cannot think. It is that they are human.

We all have hopes, fears, loyalties, ambitions, prejudices, and desires. We are naturally drawn to arguments that flatter our opinions, excuse our behaviour, or confirm our suspicions.

More than two thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks began studying arguments that were unsound and yet persuasive, calling them fallacies. Learning to recognise them remains one of philosophy’s most practical lessons. But more interesting than what they are is how they work.

Why Bad Arguments Persuade Us

Most fallacies succeed not because they overwhelm our intelligence, but because they appeal to our human nature and frailties.

We are more receptive to arguments that confirm what we already believe than to those that ask us to change our minds. We welcome arguments that flatter our side, condemn our opponents, simplify a complicated world, or promise certainty where none exists. Reason is less often an impartial judge than a disingenuous lawyer, excelling at defending conclusions that we reached for wholly other reasons. And, sadly, the brighter the mind, the more elaborate—and persuasive—its rationalisations.

From Rhetoric to Logic

The study of fallacies emerged in ancient Greece as a branch of rhetoric, the art and science of persuasive speaking.

Following the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE, Athens became a radically participatory democracy. Citizens served as jurors, debated laws, and competed for influence not with swords but with words.

Sophists such as Gorgias, Protagoras, and Hippias enriched themselves by teaching this new art of persuasion. Gorgias was not merely a teacher of rhetoric, but a performer, master of verbal display, and intellectual celebrity. According to tradition, when he appeared in the theatre at Athens, he would invite the audience: ‘Come, propose me a theme.’ He took pride in his ability to speak on any subject and defend even the most improbable of positions.

For Plato, this represented a profound problem. It had been by bad arguments that his teacher, Socrates, had been put to death. If persuasive speech could triumph over truth, what hope could there be for philosophy?

Plato’s pupil Aristotle sought to address these concerns by laying the foundations of logic. If rhetoric explains how people are persuaded, logic asks when they ought to be.

Formal and Informal Fallacies

Logic distinguishes two broad kinds of fallacy: formal and informal. A fallacy is a defect in an argument, whether accidental or deliberate.

Formal fallacies arise from the structure of an argument.

If I have the flu, then I have a fever.
I have a fever.
Therefore, I have the flu.

The conclusion, of course, does not follow, since I may have any number of other pyrogenic (fever-inducing) illnesses. This formal fallacy is known as affirming the consequent.

Far more common are informal fallacies, whose weakness lies not in their logical form but in their content. These are the fallacies that fill newspaper columns, political debates, boardrooms, dinner tables, and social media.

We Prefer People to Arguments

The easiest way to answer an argument is often not to answer it at all. Instead, attack the person making it.

This is the ad hominem fallacy. Closely related are the genetic fallacy, which judges an argument by its source, and the appeal to hypocrisy (tu quoque), which dismisses an argument because its author fails to live by it.

None addresses the argument itself. They succeed because judging people is easier than judging ideas.

A striking example of the genetic fallacy came during the 2016 Brexit referendum. On 3 June 2016, the then Lord Chancellor, Michael Gove, declared: ‘The people in this country have had enough of experts…’

We Prefer Easy Victories

Some arguments are difficult to refute. It is then much easier to invent a weaker one.

A straw man caricatures an opponent’s position before knocking it down. Closely related is the red herring, which changes the subject altogether. Neither brings us closer to the truth, but both bring us closer to victory.

Some regard straw man as a form of red herring, since both serve to deflect. ‘Red herring’ takes its name from the custom of using stinky smoked herring to throw dogs off a trail. Think of it as a form of pre-Internet trolling.

For example:

—Critical appraisal of the new Bordeaux vintage would be more objective and meaningful if the wines could be tasted blind.

—Just Bordeaux?

We Prefer Agreement

Human beings are social animals. This makes us especially vulnerable to social arguments.

An appeal to popularity asks us to believe something because many other people believe it. An argument to moderationassures us that the middle position must be right. A false dilemma presents only two options when reality usually offers many more.

These fallacies appeal to our desire for belonging, certainty, and simplicity.

False dilemma is often a veiled attempt to force a Hobson’s choice of ‘take it or leave it’. For example, Theresa May insisted: ‘It’s my deal or no deal.’ At times, she expanded this into a false trilemma: ‘It’s my deal, no deal, or no Brexit at all.’

We Prefer Simple Stories

The human mind delights in finding patterns—so much so that it finds them where none exist.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc (‘with this, therefore because of this’) mistakes correlation for causation. The gambler’s fallacy imagines that independent events, like a throw of dice, somehow remember what came before. Both satisfy our hunger for neat explanations in a messy world.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc is also known as the Chanticleer fallacy after the fictional rooster who believed that his crowing made the sun rise. I prefer to think of it as the scientist’s fallacy.

We Prefer Being Right

Perhaps the most bone-headed fallacy of all is begging the question. Instead of proving a conclusion, it quietly assumes it.

For example, the argument that opposes same-sex marriage on the grounds that marriage is the union between a man and a woman is no more substantial than ‘I’m right because I’m right.’

Circular arguments persuade because they begin where we already stand.

The Discipline of Thinking Clearly

This article may have seemed to be about reasoning. It has really been about self-deception.

Logical fallacies endure because they satisfy our desires more readily than they satisfy the demands of reason. We rarely believe bad arguments because we cannot think. More often, we believe them because they tell us what we wanted to hear.

Learning to recognise fallacies in others is useful. Learning to recognise them in ourselves is the beginning of self-knowledge.

Continue Exploring

If you enjoyed this introduction to logical fallacies, you’ll find many more practical lessons on reasoning and rhetoric in How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

To explore the forces that so often lead us astray, see Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Cognition essays

Explore all Rhetoric essays

Explore all Plato essays

By |

A Psychiatrist and Philosopher Interprets the Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice

Orpheus and Euydice, by Edward Poynter

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

Everyone knows the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. And it means the exact opposite of what everyone thinks.

The earliest mentions of the supreme musician Orpheus date to the sixth century BCE. By the fourth century BCE, Plato was already commenting on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Today, the fullest accounts survive in Virgil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The Story of Orpheus

Apollo gave his son Orpheus a lyre of gold and tortoise shell. Orpheus mastered the instrument so completely that no creature, and scarcely nature itself, could resist his playing and singing: the animals of the forest gathered around him, the trees bent toward him, and the streams and rivers came out of their beds to greet him.

Orpheus fell head over heels for Eurydice, and she readily returned his love. Hymen, the god of marriage ceremonies, presided over their wedding, but, in a terrible omen, his torch spluttered and spat and marred the feast with bitter fumes.

Eurydice ventured into the nearby woods, where the shepherd Aristaeus espied her dancing with the dryads. Enraptured by the scene, he began to chase her. As she beat back through the bushes, she tripped on a nest of vipers and died from a snakebite to the heel.

Orpheus sang of his grief from earth to heaven, moving the gods and all of creation. So empty did life seem without Eurydice that he resolved to go and see her in Hades—and, if possible, return her to the land of the living.

Orpheus entered Hades through a cave of poisonous vapours and, by his lyrical song, made it unhindered to the palace of King Hades and Queen Persephone. His lament entranced the ferryman Charon and the ordinarily fierce three-headed hound Cerberus, and even Hades himself, who, for the first and last time, shed a black and sooty tear.

With Persephone leaning heavily upon him, Hades declared that Orpheus could leave with Eurydice, as long as he did not look at her until they had both crossed into the land of the living—but should he break this one condition, Eurydice would forever remain in the underworld, where few of the living can enter, and none twice.

Orpheus led Eurydice back the way he came, resisting the urge to turn around and meet her doe eyes.

Then he realised that he could no longer hear her footsteps behind him, and began to fear that Hades had tricked him.

As soon as he saw the light of the sun, he glanced over his shoulder and glimpsed his beloved. But Eurydice had not yet crossed the threshold and was whipped back in a whirl into the bowels of the Earth.

Orpheus sat in a clearing and played mournfully on his lyre, spurning the many maidens who called upon him. According to Ovid, he was “the first of the Thracian people to transfer his love to young boys.” The scorned women threw sticks and stones at him, which fell back to the ground at the sound of his mesmerizing music. In the end, the Maenads, in a state of Dionysian frenzy, tore him apart from limb to limb.

Orpheus’ lyre and dismembered head, still dolefully singing, floated down the River Haebrus to the sea and washed up on the isle of Lesbos, which became famed for its poets. The Muses found his head and buried it in a cave, over which the nightingales sang more prettily than in any other part.

As for his lyre, it can still be seen in the constellation Lyra.

Orpheus and Eurydice before Hades and Persephone

Interpretation of the Myth

Orpheus is a personification of music, poetry, and art in general. In modern times, he has inspired countless paintings, poems, novels, ballets, operas, and films. More curiously, he became the patron of an ancient religious cult called Orphism.

In Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus says that, rather than a great man, Orpheus was, in fact, a coward. In arguing that the mark of true love is the readiness to die for it, Phaedrus contrasts the chicanery of Orpheus in seeking to cheat death to be reunited with Eurydice with the willingness of Alcestis to lay down her life for her husband Admetus when not even his elderly parents would do so. Alcestis was permitted to return alive from Hades, a rare reward indeed, whereas Orpheus returned empty-handed to be torn apart by women.

Although Orpheus traveled through Hades like a hero, he missed the mark of a hero. His anxious doubting, his turning to boys, and his being torn apart by women all point, in the Ancient Greek mind, to a lack of virility.

The gaze objectifies the beloved: If Orpheus had truly loved Eurydice, he would not have needed to look back upon her. Indeed, he would readily have died to be reunited with her and would never have found himself in such a predicament.

The descent into the nether regions, or katabasis, is found in mythologies from all over the world. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is strikingly similar to the Japanese myth of Izanagi and Izanami: Izanagi travels to the underworld to retrieve his wife Izanami, who warns him not to look at her. But so ardent is his desire that he lights a torch and casts his gaze upon her, only for it to be met by a rotting corpse.

By blurring the line between life and death, the katabasis explores themes of mortality and immortality. It is, by extension, a means of explaining natural cycles, especially the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life, as symbolized also by the viper that undid Eurydice.

We might wonder whether Eurydice, beautiful but not much else, is something of a MacGuffin: an insignificant or irrelevant quest object that serves merely to motivate the adventure, like the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend or the ring in Lord of the Rings.

Far more fully realised than Eurydice is the power of art itself. No one and nothing remained unmoved by Orpheus’ song. For all his might, Hercules did not travel so easily through Hades. Even after his death, Orpheus’ severed head continued to sing, suggesting that art, besides being powerful, is immortal.

With such a gift, Orpheus had far more than most to be happy and, better than happy, useful. Yet he squandered it all for the mortal Eurydice, unable to understand that, for all her beauty, she was, like Izanami, never more than a decaying corpse.

How much better for him, and for all, if he had learnt to be happy on his own or with his one true love, music.

Instead of looking back on Eurydice, he ought to have been looking ahead, like a real hero, paying no heed to his own selfish, self-absorbed, self-indulgent happiness—the kind of happiness that, like Eurydice, dies in the moment that it is held.

Continue exploring

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

You may also enjoy

Explore all Mythology essays

Explore all Relationships essays

Explore all Success & Failure essays

By |

How We Stopped Needing One Another

Three people at a café, looking at their phones

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

We have never been more connected, yet many of our interactions feel strangely empty. Modern life has left us with abundant contact but thinner encounters, as we have become less dependent on—and less attentive to—one another.

We are more connected than any generation in history. We can speak to almost anyone, at almost any time, across almost any distance. Yet all this connection feels strangely empty. We sit in conversations, meetings, and relationships—surrounded by words and faces—and have the quiet sense that nothing is really happening between us.

Not absence.

Presence without encounter.

We have more connection than ever, but less of what makes connection feel alive.

Presence Without Encounter

Loneliness is commonly thought of as “being alone”. But its deeper form has little to do with physical isolation. It is the experience of no longer being met by another mind. That is why loneliness can be at its keenest within relationships, families, and social lives that appear full from the outside. Contact continues, but recognition fades. Conversation carries on, but nothing quite lands.

When this happens, loneliness often does not feel like pain. It feels like flatness. And this is where boredom becomes revealing.

We think of boredom as a lack of stimulation. Yet it often appears in situations where stimulation is plentiful and still nothing meaningful is happening between people. The conversation is pleasant enough. We exchange opinions, anecdotes, updates. Yet nothing surprises us, challenges us, or changes us.

Nothing happens.

Attention, finding nowhere to go, folds back upon itself. What we call boredom in these moments is often social contact that has ceased to feel alive.

Abundant Contact, Thin Encounter

Modern life amplifies this condition. We move through dense networks of people—workplaces, cities, cafés, airports, and digital spaces—where interaction is constant but encounter is fleeting. We know more people than ever, but are deeply engaged with very few.

The result is not isolation.

It is something subtler: abundant contact, but thin encounter.

People cease to become discoveries. They lose weight. We mistake familiarity for knowledge, communication for conversation, and proximity for presence. Social life grows smoother, more efficient, more continuous. And strangely empty.

From this perspective, boredom and loneliness begin to look less like separate problems than different expressions of the same condition. When meaningful contact is absent, we experience loneliness. When contact is plentiful but psychologically empty, we experience boredom. In both cases, what is missing is not company but encounter.

The End of Necessity

Why has this happened? Technology has changed our relationships, but it has not fundamentally changed human nature. The deeper change is that we no longer need one another as we once did.

For most of human history, our lives were interwoven by necessity. Families, neighbours, and communities depended upon one another not merely for companionship but for everyday survival. People met repeatedly, over many years and in many different contexts. They quarrelled, reconciled, forgave, relied upon one another, and could not simply disappear whenever things became uncomfortable.

Dependence demanded attention. We pay close attention to those upon whom our lives depend. We notice their moods because they affect our own. We learn their strengths and weaknesses because they matter to us. Necessity sharpens perception.

Today, much of that necessity has quietly disappeared. We can shop without speaking to anyone, work from home, entertain ourselves alone, and replace awkward conversations with easier ones. Our relationships have become lighter, freer, and more voluntary. This is one of the great achievements of modern society. But every achievement carries a hidden cost.

As our dependence upon one another has diminished, so too has the sustained attention that dependence once demanded. We have become remarkably good at communicating while becoming less practised at encountering—and have grown, almost, to fear genuine encounter.

The Loss of Shared Depth

There is another, quieter shift. Not only have we become less dependent on one another—we also inhabit fewer shared worlds.

For much of history, conversation rested on a relatively common symbolic ground: shared stories, shared texts, shared moral and religious reference points. People could assume that others recognised the same narratives and allusions, and so a single phrase could carry layers of meaning. In that sense, conversation carried implicit depth.

Today, that shared cultural background is thinner and more fragmented. We no longer reliably inhabit the same symbolic world. Our references diverge, our media diverge, our intellectual inheritances diverge. Even when we speak the same language, we often do not share the same implicit meanings.

This does not make people less intelligent or less educated. But it does make encounter more literal. Conversation stays closer to surface experience because there is less shared depth for it to fall into. Where there is no common symbolic ground, there is less space for resonance.

We are not only less necessary to one another. We are less interiorly shared with one another. And so even when we meet, we meet more lightly.

From Aristotle to Buber

This idea is older than it may seem. Aristotle distinguished three kinds of friendship: those grounded in usefulness, pleasure, and virtue. He regarded the last as the highest, since friends united in virtue help one another to live and flourish. Practical need may first bring people together, but in depending upon one another, they may discover deeper reasons to remain together.

More than two thousand years later, Hegel carried the thought further. We become fully ourselves only through recognition by another consciousness. The self is not something we discover alone, but something that emerges in being recognised by another self.

Martin Buber distilled the matter to its essence. Human life is built upon encounter. We become fully human not through information or interaction, but by meeting another person as a Thou rather than an It.

Across these thinkers runs a single intuition: we do not merely live alongside one another. We become ourselves, and our best selves, through one another.

What We Have Forgotten About Connection

Perhaps this is what modernity has quietly eroded. We have not become less social. In many ways, we have become more social than any people in history. But we have become less necessary to one another. Less dependent. Less bonded. Less anchored in common worlds of meaning.

Without necessity, we attend less closely. Without shared depth, we encounter one another more lightly. Without attention, recognition begins to fade. Without recognition, encounter becomes rare. Without encounter, other people cease to surprise us or feel fully alive.

Perhaps the deepest paradox of modernity is not that we have become less connected, but that we have forgotten what connection is. We have confused communication with encounter. Proximity with presence. Contact with recognition.

We have become connected to almost everyone.

And truly encountered by almost no one.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Relationships essays

By |

What Kissing Reveals About Us

Gustav Klimt: The Kiss
Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907–08). Few human gestures have carried more meanings than a kiss.

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

Kissing is not universal among human beings and, even today, there are some cultures that have no place for it. This suggests that the behaviour is not purely innate or intuitive, as it may seem to us, but culturally shaped and historically variable—one of the ways in which human beings negotiate the boundary between self and other.

It could be that kissing is a learnt behaviour that developed from ‘kiss feeding’, the process by which mothers in some cultures feed their infants by passing masticated food from mouth to mouth. Yet, there are some present-day indigenous cultures that practise kiss feeding but not social kissing. Another possibility is that kissing is a culturally determined form of grooming behaviour, or, in the case of deep or erotic kissing, a representation of, substitute for, and complement to penetrative intercourse.

Whatever the case, kissing behaviour is not specific or unique to human beings. Primates such as Bonobo apes frequently kiss one another; dogs and cats lick and nuzzle one another and members of other species; even snails and insects engage in antennal play. It could be that, rather than kissing, these animals are in fact grooming, smelling, or communicating with one another, but even so, their behaviour implies and strengthens trust and bonding.

Ancient Kisses

Vedic texts from Ancient India seem to talk about kissing, and the Kama Sutra, which probably dates back to the second century CE, devotes an entire chapter to modes of kissing. Certain anthropologists have suggested that the Greeks learnt about erotic kissing from the Indians after Alexander the Great invaded India in 326 BCE. But even if true, this need not mean that erotic kissing originated in India, or that it does not predate the oral roots of the Vedas.

In Homer’s Iliad, which dates back to the ninth century BCE, King Priam of Troy memorably kisses the hand of Achilles in pleading for the return of Hector’s defiled corpse:

Fear, O Achilles, the wrath of heaven; think on your own father and have compassion upon me, who am the more pitiable, for I have steeled myself as no man yet has ever steeled himself before me, and have raised to my lips the hand of him who slew my son.

In the Histories (fifth century BCE), Herodotus speaks of kissing among the Persians, who greeted men of equal rank with a kiss on the mouth and those of slightly lower rank with a kiss on the cheek. Herodotus reports that, because the Greeks ate of the cow, which was sacred to the Egyptians, the Egyptians objected to kissing them on the mouth.

Biblical Kisses

Kissing also features in the Old Testament. Disguised as Esau, Jacob deceives his blind father Isaac and steals his brother Esau’s blessing, sealing the deception with a kiss. When Jacob returns after years of exile, Esau runs to him, embraces him, falls on his neck, kisses him, and they weep. Naomi, insisting that her Moabite daughters-in-law Ruth and Orpah remain in Moab to make new lives for themselves, kisses them farewell, and they weep. Absalom wins the hearts of Israel by kissing all who come to him seeking justice. In the Song of Songs, which celebrates sexual love, a lover implores, ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine.’

The Roman Art of Kissing

Under the Romans, kissing became much more commonplace. Romans kissed their partners or lovers, family and friends, and rulers. They distinguished a kiss on the hand or cheek (osculum) from a kiss on the lips (basium) and a deep or passionate kiss (suavium).

Roman kisses fulfilled a range of purposes, from the political and legal to the social and sexual. The status of a Roman citizen determined the part of the body—ranging from cheek to foot—on which he or she would be allowed to kiss the emperor. In an age of widespread illiteracy, kisses served to seal agreements—hence the ‘X’ on the dotted line, and the expression ‘to seal with a kiss.’ Couples were wed by kissing before a gathering, a practice that carries on to this day.

Kissing and Desire

Roman poets such as Catullus and Martial treat erotic kissing as something far removed from sentimental delicacy. Kissing is intensely physical, emotionally charged, and often unsettling in its implications.

In Catullus, kisses emerge within the turbulence of erotic attachment and jealousy, where intimacy is inseparable from fear of loss and replacement. ‘Who will you kiss? Whose lips will you bite?’ is not celebratory, but a bitter imagining of desire redirected elsewhere.

In Martial, kissing becomes more explicitly corporeal and public in character, sometimes figured as excessive or intrusive—an act that overwhelms the boundaries of the self and edges into domination or comic excess.

Across both poets, kissing is less a gentle emblem of love than an occasion in which desire becomes unstable, contested, and materially insistent. In short, in Roman poetry, kissing is not a symbol of love so much as one of its problems.

The Holy Kiss

Customs changed with the decline of Rome. Early Christians often greeted one another with a ‘holy kiss’, which was believed to lead to a transfer of spirit. The Latin anima means both ‘breath of air’ and ‘soul’, and, like animus [mind], comes down from the Proto-Indo-European root ane- [to breathe, blow]. Although St Peter had spoken of the ‘kiss of charity’, and St Paul of the ‘holy kiss’, early Christian sects omitted kissing on Maundy Thursday, the day of the year on which Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Outside of the Church, kissing was used to cement rank and social order, for instance, subjects and vassals kissed the robe of the king, or the slippers or ring of the pope.

The Rise of Romantic Love

After the fall of Rome, the romantic kiss (as distinct from other types of kiss) becomes less prominent in surviving literature for several centuries, before re-emerging in new forms with the rise of courtly love from the late eleventh century. The kiss in Romeo and Juliet is emblematic of this long cultural trajectory, which sought to remove courtship from the purview of family and broader society and celebrate romantic love as a liberating, self-determining, and potentially subversive force.

The fate of the star-crossed lovers reminds us that such carefree abandon is not without risk, and it may be that vampirism evolved as a representation of the dangers—to health, rank, reputation, prospects, and happiness—of crossing too easily between selves.

Continue Exploring

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

You may also enjoy

Explore all Emotions essays

Explore all Relationships essays