Last updated: November 3, 2026

Philosophers have been drinking, and arguing about drinking, for as long as there has been philosophy. Socrates drank at parties and, according to Plato, was never once seen drunk. Plato wrote a whole dialogue set at a drinking party and later, in the Laws, defended carefully supervised drinking as a test of character. Epicurus warned that drinking bouts do not make a pleasant life, Seneca called drunkenness voluntary madness, Kant thought a glass of wine made dinner conversation more honest, and Nietzsche called alcohol one of the two great European narcotics while building half his philosophy around the god of wine. The history of philosophy and intoxication is not a story of drunk geniuses. It is a long argument about whether an altered mind can see anything a sober one cannot.

The meme gets the joke backwards on purpose. A figure with a thinking emoji for a face stands beside the line “I used to think drinking was bad for me, so I gave up thinking.” It is the oldest trick in the rationaliser’s book: when an argument threatens a habit, drop the argument. Philosophers have tried most of the other options too, and the record is more interesting than either the teetotaller or the barfly would expect.

Drunk and Sober: The Persians, According to Herodotus

The most famous story about drinking and decision-making comes from the Greek historian Herodotus. In Book I of his Histories (chapter 133) he reports that the Persians deliberated about their most serious affairs while drunk, and that the next day, sober, they reconsidered whatever they had agreed. If the decision still looked good, they acted on it; if not, they dropped it. Decisions first made sober were, in turn, reviewed over wine. Every important question had to survive both states of mind.

It is a delightful idea, and it should be handled with care. Herodotus is our only source for the Persian custom, he wrote as a Greek about a rival empire, and Greek writers liked to portray Persians as luxurious and excessive. The Greeks themselves mixed their wine with water and considered drinking it neat a barbarian habit. Some five hundred years later the Roman historian Tacitus told a strikingly similar story about the Germanic tribes in his Germania (chapter 22): they debated at feasts, when nobody can pretend, and decided the next day, when nobody is likely to be mistaken. Two foreign peoples with the same custom, described by outsiders: this may be a real practice, or it may be a stock way for Greek and Roman writers to describe peoples they found both admirable and wild.

Whether or not anyone ever governed this way, the story captures a thought that runs through the whole history of the subject. Wine loosens the tongue and lowers the guard; sobriety checks and corrects. The Latin proverb in vino veritas, which the elder Pliny already treats as a common saying in his Natural History, makes the first half into a slogan. The Persian procedure, if it existed, was a way of taking the honesty of drunkenness without trusting its judgement, which is a better policy than most office parties manage.

Did Socrates Drink Alcohol?

Yes, and he was famous for being unaffected by it. In Plato’s Symposium, written in the early fourth century BC, a group of Athenians gathers for a symposium, which means literally a drinking together: a dinner party where wine, conversation, music and sometimes sex were all on the programme. On this occasion the guests are hungover from the previous night, so they agree to drink moderately and give speeches in praise of love instead. Socrates, the doctor Eryximachus remarks, can take it or leave it and will be content either way.

Later the drunken Alcibiades bursts in and delivers a speech about Socrates himself. Among other things he says that Socrates could outdrink anyone when forced to, yet “no man has ever seen Socrates drunk” (220a). The dialogue ends with a scene that has delighted readers for two and a half thousand years. At dawn the other guests have passed out. Socrates is still arguing with the playwrights Agathon and Aristophanes that the same man should be able to write both comedy and tragedy, until they too fall asleep. Then he gets up, goes to the Lyceum, washes, and spends the day as he always did.

So Socrates was no teetotaller and no alcoholic. Plato’s portrait is of a man so completely in command of himself that wine simply has no grip on him. Xenophon, who also wrote a Symposium, has Socrates recommend small cups served often, so that the wine persuades the company to playfulness rather than forcing them into drunkenness. The ideal is not abstinence. It is a self that can enter the party without being taken over by it.

Plato’s Laws: Wine as a Test of Character

Plato’s most surprising contribution comes in a late work most people never read. In the first two books of the Laws, an Athenian visitor argues with a Spartan and a Cretan, whose cities banned drinking parties, that a properly run symposium can be good for a city. His reasoning is psychological. Wine, he says, works like a drug that produces fearlessness: it makes people bolder, more talkative, more themselves. That makes the drinking party a cheap and safe way to discover what a person is really like, and a training ground where citizens can practise keeping their composure while the pressure to lose it rises.

The Athenian is far from a libertine. He wants a sober leader presiding over every party, and he proposes rules by age. Children under eighteen should not touch wine at all, young adults should drink only moderately, and men over forty may drink more freely, because Dionysus gave wine to humanity as a medicine for the stiffness and gloom of old age (Laws 666a to b). The proposal has a modern ring. Plato treats alcohol neither as sin nor as harmless fun, but as a powerful substance whose effects depend on the setting, the dose and the person, which is roughly where public health research has ended up.

The Greeks had a well-known comic version of the same wisdom. A fragment of the playwright Eubulus, preserved by the later writer Athenaeus, has Dionysus himself explain that he mixes only three bowls of wine for sensible people: the first for health, the second for love and pleasure, the third for sleep, after which wise guests go home. The fourth bowl, he says, is no longer his but belongs to insolence, the fifth to shouting, the sixth to rowdy processions through the streets, the seventh to black eyes, and so on down to the tenth, which belongs to madness and throwing the furniture. Plato’s Athenian would have recognised the scale. The question was never whether to drink, but where on that ladder of bowls a city, or a person, should stop.

Aristotle, Epicurus and Seneca: The Case for Sober Reasoning

Aristotle is reported to have written a whole treatise On Drunkenness, which is lost. What survives is mostly legal and moral. In the Nicomachean Ethics (Book III, chapter 5) he defends the custom of doubling penalties for offences committed while drunk: the drunk man is responsible for his ignorance, because it was in his power not to get drunk. The excuse “I wasn’t myself” does not work if you chose to stop being yourself. A text from Aristotle’s school, the Problems (Book XXX), adds a famous question: why are outstanding men in philosophy, politics and the arts so often melancholic? Its answer compares the black bile of melancholy with wine, which also changes character, making people talkative, emotional or bold depending on the dose.

Epicurus is the philosopher most often misremembered as a party animal, and the record could hardly be clearer. In his Letter to Menoeceus he insists that it is not an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and revels that makes a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, which examines the grounds of every choice and drives out the opinions that cause the greatest disturbance of the soul. His idea of luxury was bread, water and the occasional pot of cheese. Pleasure, for Epicurus, meant the absence of pain and anxiety, and a hangover is a poor way to get there.

The Stoic Seneca was more ambivalent. In his 83rd letter to Lucilius he defines drunkenness as nothing other than voluntary madness, and runs through the crimes and humiliations it has caused, from Alexander the Great killing his friend Cleitus at a banquet onwards. Yet in his essay On Tranquillity of Mind he allows that we should sometimes go as far as intoxication, not to drown in wine but to be lightly swept along by it, because Liber, the god of wine, frees the mind from cares and stirs it like a medicine. Even the strictest school of antiquity left room for the occasional good night.

Kant and Hegel: Wine at the Table, Revel in the Concept

Immanuel Kant, often imagined as a joyless clock on legs, was a sociable host who held long lunches with guests and wine. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) he discusses intoxicants with real psychological curiosity. Wine, he notes, loosens the tongue and opens the heart, and for that reason moderate drinking at a dinner party has a moral side: it encourages candour among people who would otherwise stay guarded. In the Metaphysics of Morals, however, he lists drunkenness among the vices against oneself, because a person who stupefies himself temporarily destroys the very capacity that makes him a moral agent. Kant’s line is not between drinking and abstaining. It is between drinking that serves sociability and drinking that abolishes the drinker.

Hegel left the most beautiful drinking image in German philosophy, and it has nothing to do with drinking. In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) he describes truth as a Bacchanalian revel in which not a single member is sober, yet which, because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, is just as much transparent and simple repose. The image says that truth is a movement in which every particular idea gets carried away and dissolved, while the whole remains calm. Hegel took his metaphor from Dionysus, which is a fair warning that philosophers who talk about intoxication are often talking about something else.

Marx and the Pub Crawl on Tottenham Court Road

Karl Marx did drink, and the stories are well documented. As a student at Bonn in 1835 and 1836 he was a leading member of a club of students from his home region that met in a tavern. The university records note a day’s detention for “drunken noise and disturbing the peace”, and he fought a duel in which he was slightly wounded. His father’s letters complain about money and rowdiness. Marx moved to Berlin, joined the circle of Young Hegelians, and turned his energies to philosophy, though the circle still argued in taverns.

The best-known Marx drinking story comes from his London exile and from his friend Wilhelm Liebknecht, who later published memoirs of him. One evening Marx, Liebknecht and Edgar Bauer set out to take a drink in every pub between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road. They got into a political argument with a group of Englishmen, made a narrow escape, and on the way home Marx started smashing street lamps with paving stones, until the police gave chase and the three revolutionaries had to run for it. It is a funny story, and it is also a small portrait of exile: brilliant, poor, frustrated men in a foreign city with time on their hands. It does not mean that Capital was written drunk. Marx spent years of sober drudgery in the reading room of the British Museum, filling notebook after notebook with excerpts from government reports and economic statistics, which is about as far from a pub crawl as research gets.

Did Nietzsche Drink Alcohol? Against Beer, For Dionysus

Nietzsche is the most interesting case, because he despised alcohol and celebrated intoxication. In Ecce Homo he says that alcohol did him harm, that a single glass of wine or beer in the evening was enough to make his life a vale of misery, and he advises all more spiritual natures to abstain entirely. Water, he says, was sufficient for him. In Twilight of the Idols he is harsher about his countrymen: he asks how much beer there is in German intelligence and calls alcohol and Christianity the two great European narcotics.

At the same time, intoxication, Rausch in German, is one of the central concepts of his philosophy. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) he contrasts the Apollonian principle of form, measure and individual clarity with the Dionysian principle of frenzy, in which individuals dissolve into the shared ecstasy of music, dance and the festival. Greek tragedy, he argued, was born from the union of the two. In Twilight of the Idols he goes further: for there to be art at all, he writes, one physiological precondition is indispensable, intoxication, by which he means a feeling of heightened strength and fullness. Nietzsche signed some of his last letters, written as his mind collapsed in January 1889, as Dionysus.

The contradiction is only apparent. What Nietzsche hated in alcohol was its dulling effect, the beer-hall comfort that makes people satisfied with mediocrity. What he praised in Dionysian intoxication was the opposite: an intensification of life. For Nietzsche, getting drunk in a German tavern was a way of feeling less. The intoxication he cared about was a way of feeling more, and it did not need wine at all. For more on the Apollonian and the Dionysian, read The Birth of Nietzsche from the Spirit of Philosophy.

From Baudelaire to Huxley: Intoxication as an Experiment

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some writers began to treat intoxication not as a vice or a festival but as a method. Charles Baudelaire wrote Artificial Paradises (1860), a study of wine, hashish and opium that is far more ambivalent than its reputation, and the prose poem “Get Drunk”, which urges us to be drunk always, on wine, on poetry or on virtue, as we choose, so as not to feel the horrible burden of time. The American philosopher William James experimented with nitrous oxide and, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), made a famous claim about why alcohol has such power over mankind: it stimulates the mystical faculties of human nature. “Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.” James did not recommend drunkenness. He thought its appeal showed something real about the mind’s hunger for a larger reality.

Walter Benjamin recorded experiments with hashish from 1927 onwards, under the supervision of physician friends, in notes published only after his death as On Hashish. In his 1929 essay on Surrealism he wrote of a profane illumination, a materialist, worldly kind of insight to which hashish and opium could give an introductory lesson, though he thought the real goal lay beyond drugs. Jean-Paul Sartre took mescaline under medical supervision in 1935 while researching the imagination, and for months afterwards complained that crab-like creatures seemed to follow him around. Simone de Beauvoir describes the episode in her memoir The Prime of Life, and later Sartre leaned heavily on alcohol and on the amphetamine Corydrane to sustain marathon writing sessions, which is a reminder that the experimental attitude also had its casualties. Aldous Huxley took mescaline in 1953 and wrote The Doors of Perception (1954), borrowing his title from William Blake. Huxley argued that the brain acts as a reducing valve that filters the flood of reality down to what is useful for survival, and that some drugs open the valve.

These were serious people asking a serious question: does the ordinary sober mind give us the whole truth, or only the part of it that is useful for getting through the day? Their answers differed, and none of their experiments settled the matter. But they changed the debate, from a moral question about vice into an epistemological question about perception, which is where contemporary research on psychedelics has taken it up again.

Why Do People Get Philosophical When Drunk?

Everyone knows the late-night conversation that suddenly turns to the meaning of life. Psychology offers a sober explanation. In 1990 Claude Steele and Robert Josephs proposed what they called alcohol myopia: alcohol narrows attention to whatever is most immediate and salient, and blunts our ability to process more distant cues and inhibitions. The usual brakes on conversation, the worry about looking foolish, the awareness that it is late, the sense that this topic is too big, fade into the background. What remains is the question in front of you, which suddenly seems enormous and urgent. You feel profound because the things that usually make you cautious have gone quiet.

That is also why drunk philosophy rarely survives the morning. Philosophy depends precisely on the more distant cues alcohol switches off: the objection you have not yet considered, the counterexample at the edge of attention, the memory of what you said an hour ago. The Persians, if Herodotus is right, understood this better than most. The drunken session could generate boldness and honesty, but only the sober session could test it. William James’s line cuts both ways. Drunkenness says yes. Philosophy, at least in its working hours, has to be able to say no.

So the meme’s punchline is the real lesson in reverse. Giving up thinking to keep drinking is the rationaliser’s choice. The tradition offers better ones: drink like Socrates, in good company and without losing yourself; drink like Plato’s old men, a little, as a medicine for stiffness; or take Nietzsche’s advice and look for intoxication in music, art and strenuous thought rather than in a bottle. What none of the great philosophers recommended is the option the meme describes, and that is the one worth avoiding, whatever is in your glass.