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Neel Burton

Neel Burton Books

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“In many cases, we simply do not know what we want, and settle with what seems easiest or most obvious. But even when we are sure of what we want, we cannot be sure that it will be good or better for us. A young woman may dream of studying medicine at Oxford even if realizing her dream would mean getting hit by a bus in three years’ time, or never realizing her far greater potential as a novelist. We should never feel bitter when our desires are frustrated, because we can never be sure that what we wanted would have been good or best for us—and judging by the quality of our lives, we are obviously very bad at wanting.”

DesireFearFatePerspectiveAmbitionJudgementWanting
Author:Neel Burton
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“The disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body. Just as medicine is the art devoted to healing the body, so philosophy is the art devoted to healing the soul, curing it of improper emotions, false beliefs, and faulty judgments, which are the causes of so much hardship and handicap. To heal the body one turns to the practitioner of the art of healing the body, but to heal the soul there is no doctor to turn to, and each of us is left to become that doctor unto himself. Yet, this need not stop us from exhorting others to imitate us in the godly art, in the forlorn hope that they might transform themselves into better citizens for Athens and better companions for us.”

PhilosophyMedicine
Book:Plato: Letters to my Son
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“Poor feeling hijacks thinking for self-deception: to hide harsh truths, avoid action, evade responsibility, and, as the existentialists might put it, flee from freedom. Thus, poor feeling is a kind of moral failing, indeed, the deepest kind, and virtue principally consists in correcting and refining our emotions and the values that they reflect. To feel the right thing is to do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort.”

ReasonPhilosophyEmotionsEthicsExistentialismEmotional IntelligencePsychoanalysisSelf DeceptionCognition
Book:Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions
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“There are a great number of ego defenses, and the combinations and circumstances in which we use them reflect on our personality. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum of its ego defenses, which are constantly shaping, upholding, protecting, and repairing it. The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home.”

PersonalityEgoPsychoanalysisSelf DeceptionPsychotherapyMasksPersonhoodFreudPhilosophy Of MindSelfhoodEgo DefencesEgo Defenses
Book:Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception
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“A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.”

WisdomMadnessMental HealthMental IllnessMeaningConformitySanityPsychiatryStigmaMental DisorderDevianceBiological Reductiveness
Book:The Meaning of Madness
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“If two people with no symptoms in common can both receive the same diagnosis of schizophrenia, then what is the value of that label in describing their symptoms, deciding their treatment, or predicting their outcome, and would it not be more useful simply to describe their problems as they actually are? And if schizophrenia does not exist in nature, then how can researchers possibly find its cause or correlates? If psychiatric research has made so little progress in recent decades, it is in large part because everyone has been barking up the wrong tree. It is not a question of getting a bigger and better scanner, but of going right back to the drawing board. What’s more, medical-type labels can be as harmful as they are hollow. By reducing rich, varied, and complex human experiences to nothing more than a mental disorder, they not only sideline and trivialize those experiences but also imply an underlying defect that then serves as a pseudo-explanation for the person’s disturbed behaviour. This demeans and disempowers the person, who is deterred from identifying and addressing the important life problems that underlie his distress.”

ResearchMadnessMental HealthMental IllnessPsychiatryDiagnosisSchizophreniaMental Disorders
Book:The Meaning of Madness
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“Just as we use speech and gestures to communicate, so we use touch. Words can say, ‘I love you’, but touch can also say how and how much, and, at the same time, ‘I respect you’, ‘I need you’, and ‘thank you’. For a long time, scientists somehow thought that touch served merely to emphasize a verbal message. But now it is clear even to them that touch can be the message, and that it can be more nuanced and sophisticated than either speech or gestures, and more economical to boot. What’s more, touch is a two-way street; and a person’s reaction to our touch can tell us much more than their words ever could. Finally, while words can lie, or be taken for granted, primal touch is difficult to either ignore or discount.”

CommunicationCommunication SkillsTouchingTouch
Book:For Better For Worse: Should I Get Married?
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“Solitude removes us from the mindless humdrum of everyday life into a higher consciousness which reconnects us with ourselves and our deepest humanity, and also with the natural world, which quickens into our muse and companion. By setting aside dependent emotions and constraining compromises, we free ourselves up for problem solving, creativity, and spirituality. If we can embrace it, this opportunity to adjust and refine our perspectives creates the strength and security for still greater solitude and, in time, the substance and meaning that guards against loneliness.”

LonelinessSolitudeMeaningExistentialism
Book:For Better For Worse: Should I Get Married?
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“Ultimately, loneliness is not the experience of lacking but the experience of living. It is part and parcel of the human condition, and, unless a person is resolved, it can only be a matter of time before it resurfaces, often with a vengeance. On this account, loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of meaning from the universe, an absence that is all the more glaring in modern societies which have sacrificed traditional and religious structures of meaning on the thin altar of truth.”

ReligionLonelinessSolitudeMythMeaningExistentialism
Book:For Better For Worse: Should I Get Married?
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“Ultimately, whether myth is religion or folk tale is, and always has been, a question of faith. When Europeans encountered the narratives of the peoples they colonized, they dismissed them as ‘myths’—whence the modern, pejorative sense of ‘myth’ as ‘fiction’ or ‘falsehood’—but their own Garden of Eden, Holy Trinity, and Easter Resurrection they regarded instead as theology.”

PhilosophyMythology
Book:The Meaning of Myth: With 12 Greek Myths Retold and Interpreted by a Psychiatrist
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“While ants and bees, and perhaps even wolves, may be more social than human beings, we are by far the most rational of all animals. Just as leopards ought to excel at running if they are to count as good leopards, so human beings ought to excel at reasoning if they are to count as good human beings. If we aim instead to excel at running or jumping or making money, we have not properly understood what it means to be a human being. Thus, of one who boasted of his diving, Aristippus [a student of Socrates] asked, ‘Are you not ashamed to be proud of that which a dolphin can do?”

ReasonPhilosophyMoney
Book:Augustus: Invitation to Philosophy
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“Just as Prometheus delivered stolen fire to man, so Eve, and the serpent, delivered man into self-consciousness, setting him up, were it not for his short lifespan, as rival to God. At the same time, man’s self-consciousness removed him from nature into a life of toil, doubt, fear, guilt, shame, blame, enmity, loneliness, and frailty—and the product of this separation, the fruit and flower of this exile, is, of course, culture. ‘God,’ said the writer Victor Hugo, ‘made only water, but man made wine.”

ReligionCultureConsciousnessWineGreek MythologyBible StudyCreation Myths
Book:For Better For Worse: Should I Get Married?
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“Socrates is a shining example of a man who bravely lived up to his ideals, and, in the end, bravely died for them. Throughout his life, he never lost faith in the mind’s ability to discern and decide, and so to apprehend and master reality. Nor did he ever betray truth and integrity for a pitiable life of self-deception and semi-consciousness. In seeking relentlessly to align mind with matter and thought with fact, he remained faithful both to himself and to the world, with the result that he is still alive in this sentence and millions of others that have been written about him. More than a great philosopher, Socrates was the living embodiment of the dream that philosophy might one day set us free.”

PhilosophyTruthFreedomCourageSelf EsteemPlatoSocratesGreek PhilosophyAncient Philosophy
Book:Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions
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“True humility derives from a proper perspective of our human condition: one among billions on a small planet among billions, like a fungus on a tiny fragment of cheese. Of course, it is nearly impossible for human beings to remain this objective for very long, but truly humble people are nonetheless far more conscious of the insignificance of their true relations, an insignificance that verges on non-existence. A speck of dust does not think itself more superior or inferior than another, nor does it concern itself for what other specks of dust might or might not think. Enthralled by the miracle of existence, the truly humble person lives not for herself or her image, but for life itself, in a condition of pure peace and pleasure.”

PhilosophyHappinessJoyPsychologyPerspectiveEmotions
Book:Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions
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