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Growing from Depression cover

What if depression were a blessing as well as a curse? This is a book about how depression can have benefits as well as costs, and how to reap those benefits while making yourself feel better—better, in fact, than ever before.

🏆 Semi-finalist, the BookLife Prize

🏆 Highly Commended, the BMA Book Awards

A comprehensive, sympathetic, and thought-provoking guide for those who want to explore their depression in more depth. —The British Journal of Psychiatry

This book brings understanding and encourages independent solutions. It is remarkable in its shortness and practicality. —The British Medical Association Book Awards

★★★★★ I have read most of Dr. Neel Burton’s books and have enjoyed them immensely … All in all, I found this to be a very insightful and engaging book on depression. —Jamie Bee, Amazon.com Top 50 Reviewer

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Lessons from Aristotle: Protecting democracy from demagogues.

Both Plato and Cicero argued that the best orator is a philosopher, or, at least, a good person or person of virtue. If you were not a philosopher or a good person, you were not an orator but merely a sophist or demagogue.

Against this, we have to contend with the fact that even a wretch like Hitler was able to move crowds—and quite powerfully and world-historically at that. Everything about Hitler was warped, his character (ethos), the arguments he used (logos), and the emotions that he sought to instil (pathos), but, still, people followed him in their droves because they themselves were wretched and warped.

A lesson from Aristotle

Plato’s long-time student Aristotle, who lived some twenty-four centuries ago, was perhaps the first to understand that the bedrock of democracy is an affluent, educated middle class.

In the Politics, Aristotle says that, compared to states with a large middle class, states of the rich and poor tend to strict oligarchy (“rule by a few”) or rampant democracy, and, ultimately, to tyranny.

Unfortunately, few states have a large middle class, so that the middle, balanced form of government is rare. According to Aristotle, a democracy becomes preferable when the quantity of the poor exceeds the quality of the rich. Otherwise, an oligarchy is preferable.

The form of the democracy or oligarchy depends on the precise composition of the state. But in every case, the middle classes ought to be included in government, because only they are able to successfully mediate and arbitrate between the rich and the poor.

What we can do right now to protect against demagogues

If today’s democratically elected governments wish to preserve and perpetuate the system that elected them, and ensured an unprecedented eighty years of peace, they need to introduce better, stronger safeguards and balance an excess of democracy with oligarchy, or, to be more precise, aristocracy (“government by the best”) or repositories thereof—such as tighter rules and more stringent criteria for selecting political party leaders and a more independent or autonomous judiciary.

But for the longer term, they need to look to the economy, social justice, culture, and education. Because rhetoric, or oratory, is not carried out in a vacuum. What is ethos, what is pathos, even what is logos alter according to the dispositions and inclinations of the audience or public—although I do believe that, overall, and over time, with the lessons having been learnt, the good, the true, and the just are naturally more persuasive.

No tyrant lives forever. Now war rages on forever. Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees, and every second or third generation must learn the lessons anew.

Or read.

Neel Burton is author of How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in 1712 in the Republic of Geneva. At the age of 16, he ran away from the city and the abusive engraver to whom he was apprenticed.

In neighbouring Savoie, he found shelter with a priest, who put him onto the attractive Françoise-Louise de Warens, who had separated from her husband, converted to Catholicism, and become a proselytiser in the pay of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy. Completely smitten, Rousseau completed his conversion to Catholicism in the Piedmont-Sardinia capital of Turin, where he supported himself by working as a footman and secretary for an ailing countess.

At the age of 20 or 21, Rousseau returned to Warens in Chambéry, and their relationship turned sexual. Although Warens was also intimate with her household steward, Rousseau considered it the greatest love of his life. He began to call her Maman (“Mummy”), and she him Mon petit (“My little one”).

In those years, Rousseau struggled to establish himself in a career and spent a year travelling. He travelled mostly on foot, meeting people from all walks of life. When he returned to Warens, he pursued his passion for music and read deeply. But Warens could no longer support him, so, at the age of 27, he took up a position as a tutor in Lyon, which gave him the opportunity to reflect on pedagogy.

Paris and Venice

With Warens growing cold on him, in 1742, at the age of 30, Rousseau moved to Paris to present a new system of musical notation to the Académie des Sciences. The Académie praised his mastery but found his system impractical and rejected it.

In 1743, his Enlightenment connections led him to a job as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice. He revelled in Italian music but did not get on with the ambassador and, the following year, returned to Paris.

He met a laundry girl called Thérèse Levasseur, who would become his life companion. In 1746, she bore the first of their five illegitimate children. All five were immediately handed to a foundling hospital, where the chances of surviving into adulthood would have been slim. Later, Voltaire would anonymously publish a pamphlet to expose this secret and discredit Rousseau as a moral and educational authority.

Rousseau wrote ballets, with little success. He began to spend a lot of time with Diderot, Condillac, and d’Alembert, and became involved with Diderot’s brainchild, the Encyclopédie, to which he contributed almost four hundred articles on politics and music. The Encyclopédie, which stood at the heart of the Enlightenment, was denounced by both the king and the Church.

Rise to fame

In 1749, Diderot was imprisoned in Vincennes. While walking to Vincennes, Rousseau read an announcement in the Mercure de France for the Dijon Academy’s essay contest, on the question, “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?” This led to the radical idea that the arts and sciences had led to the moral degeneration of man, who began as moral and vigorous—or, at least, uncorrupted by vanity, superficiality, inauthenticity, luxury, and inequality. In his Confessions, Rousseau wrote, “Within an instant of reading this [advertisement], I saw another universe and became another man.” With his prize-winning essay, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (the “First Discourse”), he rose into a cause célèbre.

In 1752, he wrote a simple, Italian-inspired one-act opera, Le Devin du village, which premiered at the royal court at Fontainebleau. The king liked it enough to offer him a pension, which he declined—gaining notoriety as “the man who had refused a king’s pension.”

In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva and converted back to Calvinism. He embraced a personal, natural religion, or “religion of the heart,” which, together with his belief in the corrupting influence of civilisation, set him apart from the other Encyclopédistes, who championed reason, progress, and atheism.

In 1755, he completed his second major work, the Discourse on Inequality (the “Second Discourse”), in which he painted a rosy picture of man in the original “state of nature” and argued that private property is the original source and basis of all inequality and misery. When Voltaire received his copy, he wrote back to Rousseau: “No one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work one is seized with a desire to walk on all fours.”

Sophie d’Houdetot and La Nouvelle Héloïse

The saloniste Madame d’Epinay, having noticed the second discourse, offered Rousseau a pension together with a cottage on her estate in Montmorency. He refused the pension but moved into the cottage with Thérèse and her mother.

He resented being in the keep of Madame d’Epinay and soured things by falling head over heels for her cousin, Sophie d’Houdetot. He came to believe that there was a plot against him and wrote a series of damaging letters. In 1757, he moved with Thérèse into a villa on the nearby estate of the duc de Luxembourg, who became his patron.

His bestselling novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), is inspired by his liaisons with d’Houdetot and Warens.

The Social Contract and Emile

After Julie, Rousseau turned his pen to his two most acclaimed works, the Social Contract and Emile.

In the Social Contract, he sets out how to create a just state in which we may recover some of our natural freedom and goodness.

In Emile, he lays out a system of education that might preserve the individual’s innate vigour and morality. Having encouraged the child to become active, curious, and critical, it remains, in adolescence, to make him into a loving and feeling being, “to prefect reason by sentiment.”

Emile, however, is aimed exclusively at wealthy orphan boys with a dedicated, live-in tutor (orphan, to remove the corrupting influence of the parents). In the section on Emile’s female counterpart, Sophie, Rousseau states that women should be “passive and weak” and “put up little resistance.”

Book IV contains the controversial “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” in which the vicar’s argument leads only to natural religion, that is, to an unmediated, self-discovered relationship with a creator God.

In a letter, Voltaire deemed Emile “a hodgepodge of a silly wet nurse in four volumes, with forty pages against Christianity, among the boldest ever known.”

Years of exile

Both the Social Contract and Emile were banned from France and Geneva, with warrants issued for Rousseau’s arrest.

Over the next few years, Rousseau moved from place to place until his reputation caught up with him. His nemesis Voltaire invited him in vain to Ferney on the Geneva border, where renegade writers could border hop to escape the authorities.

In 1766, Rousseau travelled to England with David Hume. Tasked with escorting Thérèse to England, James Boswell seduced her en route, with Thérèse telling him, “Don’t imagine you’re a better lover than Rousseau.”

His paranoia intensified, and he began to suspect Hume of being at the centre of a plot to ridicule him. The two men fell out when Hume, seeking to protect his reputation, published an account of the whole affair.

Return to France and death

Rousseau returned to France in 1767 under an assumed name and spent the next three years in relative seclusion. He married Thérèse, practised botany, and wrote his disarmingly candid Confessions.

He died in 1778, at the age of 66, from what was recorded as apoplexy (some said suicide). In 1794, his remains were transferred to the Panthéon and placed next to those of… Voltaire.

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Despite his love of hosting, conversation, and fine dining, Kant’s house was unadorned and austere. He had only one picture, which hung above his bureau. This picture was of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was only 12 years older than him. According to lore, the only time Kant failed to take his daily walk was when he received his copy of Rousseau’s Émile.

How did Rousseau’s outlook work its way into Kant’s moral philosophy? If for Rousseau, it is by following the “general will” that we can be said to be free, for Kant, it is by obeying those moral laws that we would will as universal laws. Moral laws that we would will as universal laws are given not by our individual will but by our rational will, which we have in common with all other rational beings.

We often experience this dichotomy in our minds: this is what I selfishly or frivolously want to do, and this is what I truly ought to do—because I want to live in a better society that abides by this rule, and would resent it if other people behaved in such a biased, thoughtless way.

To conform to the universal law is not to be a slave; on the contrary, it is to follow reason and free ourselves from our irrational and disordered appetites. For Kant, this capacity to overrule our individual will lies at the heart of our special dignity as human beings.

The Categorícal Imperative vs. the Golden Rule

When obeying those moral laws that we could consistently and rationally will as universal laws, we are following the so-called Categorical Imperative, which might be re-stated as, “Always act such that the maxim of your action can at the same time be upheld as a universal law.”

This is similar to the much older Golden Rule of the Bible, according to which we should treat others as we would want to be treated. But whereas the Golden Rule is based on personal desire, which is subjective (I might, for example, be a masochist, or be willing to tolerate a degree of mistreatment), the Categorical Imperative is based on reason, which is objective.

Hypothetical imperatives and consequentialism

Hypothetical imperatives are practical rules for achieving a desired outcome, for example, “If you want to lose weight, you should watch what you eat.” If you do not desire a particular outcome, you do not need to follow the rules. In this much, hypothetical imperatives are conditional and contingent. Categorical Imperatives, in contrast, are universal moral commands that bind everyone regardless of their aims, for example, “Do not lie” or “Do not steal.”

Hypothetical imperatives answer to the lower faculty of desire, which aims at pleasure. Categorical Imperatives answer to the higher faculty of will, which functions rationally and autonomously by following the laws which it legislates for itself, regardless of consequences or personal feelings.

For Kant, true moral actions must be motivated by duty, not some desired outcome. Thus, Kantian ethics are sometimes described as deontological, or duty-based, and contrasted with consequentialism (for example, utilitarianism), which is outcome-based. For Kant, moral systems based on outcomes or desires, such as utilitarianism, operate on hypothetical imperatives, not true moral law.

Perfect vs. imperfect duties

Kant provides some examples to add flesh to the bones of the Categorical Imperative. Imagine a person in financial need who borrows money and promises to pay it back, in the knowledge that they never will. If this action were universalised, promises of repayment would no longer be believed and the entire practice of lending would collapse. Kant also points out that abusing the lender in this way reduces a dignified being with ends of his own to a mere means to an end (“Act always treating humanity, in yourself and others, as an end and never merely as a means” is the second formulation of the Categorícal Imperative).

Second, imagine a person who does not intervene to help a person in distress. Were this maxim to be universalised, no one would ever help anyone, making the world into a worse place.

In the first case, not repaying a loan, the maxim cannot be universalised because it would involve a contradiction. In the second case, not helping a person in distress, there is no such contradiction. Nonetheless, it would not be rational to will a world in which no one ever helped anyone. Whereas repaying a loan is a “perfect duty,” helping someone in need is an “imperfect duty” in that we have some latitude in how we go about fulfilling it. Though we ought to be benevolent, we do not need to go about helping everyone all the time.

Failing in an imperfect duty, such as helping others or cultivating our talents, does not attract the same strict blame as violating a perfect duty, so long as we do not adopt a maxim contrary to the imperfect duty.

Kant’s example of the prudent grocer

When we do help someone, our action must be motivated by duty if it is to have moral worth. If I help someone from inclination, for example, from sympathy or because it makes me feel good, I am still doing a praiseworthy thing, but my action, being circumstantial rather than principled and reliable, lacks moral worth.

Imagine a grocer who always gives the correct change, but only to avoid being caught and losing his reputation. His behaviour, though not blameworthy, is lacking in moral worth. If he knew that he could not get caught, he may behave differently and dishonestly. Because his behaviour is prudential and circumstantial, rather than born out of duty, it is not categorical.

For Kant, a paradigm of moral worth is the person who hates life and longs to commit suicide, but stays alive purely out of duty. Because this person has no self-serving inclinations, he is acting purely from duty, rather than mere “conformity to duty.” Similarly, a hard-hearted person who has no other motivation than duty has a moral worth “beyond all comparison the highest.”

How to identify the Categorical Imperative

During his trial in Jerusalem in the 1960s, the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, a major organiser of the Holocaust, claimed to have been abiding by Kant’s Categorical Imperative—having interpreted “doing your duty” as blind obedience to superior authorities.

To identify the Categorical Imperative, we need to look inward to our rational self and engage in our own moral reasoning—asking whether the maxim guiding our action could be universalised—rather than delegate responsibility to some external authority such as a dictator (say, Hitler) or even a religious doctrine (say, the Ten Commandments).

So long as they reason correctly, every rational being, human or otherwise, should be able to arrive at the same Categorical Imperative. As pure rational wills, shorn of our attributes, temperaments, and desires, we are all the same. Whenever we carry out an action with a moral dimension, we implicitly universalise that action for all other wills.

In her analysis of the Eichmann trial, the philosopher Hannah Arendt introduced the concept of the “banality of evil,” highlighting that evil can be perpetrated not only by fanatics and psychopaths, but, more ordinarily, by “normal” people who fail to engage in critical self-reflection.

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The sublime: What is it and why are we so keen to experience it?

The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime goes back at least to Longinus (first century CE), who saw the sublime as an overwhelming, ecstatic force that uplifts the soul with grandeur. A flower is beautiful, and so is a great oak, but the great oak is also sublime, and it is its sublimity rather than its beauty that we retain.

Longinus and literary sublimity

At the heart of our attraction to natural grandeur is our desire for transcendence, which is then expressed through sublime art and language. In On the Sublime, Longinus laid out five sources of literary sublimity: noble concepts; passionate feeling; figures of speech; noble diction; and dignified composition. The first two, he claimed, are innate, while the last three are learnt.

Edmund Burke on the sublime, or why we ride rollercoasters

Later thinkers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant more sharply distinguished between beauty and sublimity, which they presented as antithetical. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1757), Burke associated beauty with the likes of smallness, smoothness, and delicate form; the sublime, in contrast, he associated with power, vastness, and obscurity.

Whereas the beautiful (like a flower or a gentle landscape) gives rise to feelings of love, pleasure, and relaxation, the sublime (like the open seas or a raging storm) gives rise to overwhelming feelings of awe, terror, and delightful horror.

However, the sublime is only delightful, awe-inspiring, and aesthetic when it is experienced from a certain distance or place of safety; otherwise, if it represents an imminent danger, it is simply terrible.

Many who partake in extreme sports like paragliding or bungee jumping, ride rollercoasters, or watch horror movies are really seeking the thrill of the sublime, triggering the atavistic fear of death in the full knowledge that they are safe.

Feelings associated with the sublime are far more powerful than feelings associated with beauty, because feelings associated with self-preservation are far more powerful than feelings associated with pleasure. Who, asked Burke, would choose a life of great pleasure if it were fated to end in slow torture?

Kant on the sublime: A bridge between two worlds

Kant read Burke and elaborated upon his ideas. He distinguished between two forms of the sublime, the mathematical sublime, which arises from the contemplation of immensity (like the starry heavens or the pyramids) and overwhelms our cognitive capacity, and the dynamical sublime (like a violent thunderstorm or raging waterfall), which arises from the contemplation of great power and overwhelms our practical capacity.

With the mathematical sublime, the failure of our senses awakens our divine reason, which can easily grasp the idea of infinity or absolute totality, even when our senses cannot. With the dynamical sublime, our feeling of helplessness and physical insignificance awakens our moral vocation, which is immune to natural forces, as well as the noumenal world (the world as it really is, beyond mere appearances), in which we too are powerful, majestic, and absolutely free.

In sum, the feeling of the sublime reminds us of the superiority of our rational, moral noumenal selves over the phenomenal world and our mortal, phenomenal selves. Whereas the beautiful makes the phenomenal world feel like a better place, the sublime reminds us that we belong to an altogether different world.

Both beauty and sublimity bridge the divide between the two worlds, the one through harmony, the other through disruption, or disjunction.