I recently finished Stoicism and the Art of Happiness by Donald Robertson, a Scottish-born CBT practitioner and student of both Stoicism and Buddhism. I came to this book having read enough about CBT to be familiar with its main concepts, and many, many books on Buddhism. On Stoicism, I’d only read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. While I’m sure that book is excellent source material, it is a poor introduction to Stoicism.
So I picked up Stoicism and the Art of Happiness in hopes of finding a more thorough and structured rendering of this topic. Robertson certainly delivers there. The book is structured like a text book with well-organized chapters that build on each other. Important points are highlighted and summarized throughout.
On top of being a solid general introduction, the book draws connections between Stoicism, modern psychotherapy (particularly CBT), and religion (particularly Buddhism). As someone who hasn’t studied philosophy academically, it was interesting to learn that ancient philosophy was used much more as a pragmatic approach to the “art of living” than it is today. It was the self-help and psychology of its time. Modern philosophy feels more like an academic exercise than a handbook for living the good life. Meanwhile, religion and psychotherapy have tried to fill the role of helping guide people towards happiness and fulfillment.
Robertson draws parallels between the concepts of mindfulness in Buddhism and the cardinal virtue of wisdom in Stoicism. Both encourage the act of catching emotions as they arise before they take control and paying close attention to the space between an event and our reaction. The event is not within our control, only our reaction is.
Connections are also made between the Buddhist practice of loving-kindness and the cardinal virtue of justice, specifically Stoic cosmopolitanism and Hierocles’s concentric circles. Without overtly making it his goal, Robertson presents Stoicism as a comprehensive and completely rational replacement for religion. It’s not a big part of the book, but I found that angle helped pull Stoicism into a more modern and relatable context.
While Buddhism and Stoicism seem to have developed independently, they are remarkably similar in both goals and practice. Conversely, CBT is very much directly inspired by Stoic teachings and happens to be the gold standard for modern evidence-based psychotherapy.
I enjoyed learning a lot more about Stoicism and appreciated this book’s pragmatic “handbook” style. It’s the kind of book I can see myself referring back to frequently in the future.
