Donald Robertson is a therapist with a strong interest in philosophy and especially Stoicism. This book is about the Stoic techniques of self-calming and controlling emotions. He sets out the life of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the various people and thinkers who influenced the young man before he became emperor. He presents Marcus not just as a man who was good at self-control, but also as someone who was reasonable and thoughtful. While as the leader of the Romans he engaged in wars and put down civil unrest, and that involved discipline and killing, he was more ready than others to also treat some people leniently and to minimize the amount of violence used. He also had a reputation as a wise and reliable man who did not go in for excesses and preferred to avoid adulation and aggrandizement. He considered himself a philosopher first and an emperor second. This is in contrast to previous emperors and some of the other prominent figures of the time. 

Robertson focuses on Marcus’s Meditations but he also discusses other Stoic writers. Often he draws direct comparisons between Stoic techniques and modern methods of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) such as cognitive distancing and even kinds of mindfulness, which help people to cope with their anxiety, fear, anger, desires, and pain. He also describes some scenes of Marcus’s life in a novelistic fashion, bringing alive some crucial moments that illustrate how his philosophy transformed his life. There is a final chapter imagining Marcus on his death bed, facing his final moments, using his Stoic philosophy to come to terms with his mortality and reflecting on his life.

This combination of history, philosophy and psychology is an appealing mix, although it does mean that it does not go into any of these three in any great depth. We get a little history and one suspects that Robertson paints Marcus in the best possible light. The psychological exposition refers both to the work of Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, and even some recent research in CBT but it is not a systematic explanation of this psychological movement. There is some philosophy but one gets the false impression that Stoic philosophy is all about techniques of managing one’s emotions. There is very little reference to Stoic metaphysics, logic, epistemology, and even the discussion of morality is minimal.

The Stoic approach to life says that we should aim to live wisely — seeing wisdom in a practical way. Robertson emphasizes that what is important is to aim to live wisely rather than to succeed. There is the famous analogy of the archer, where what is important is to aim at the target rather than to actually hit the target. This analogy does make clear that there is a target to hit, and so there are right and wrong answers about how to live wisely and what values to have. But Robertson underplays the extent to which the Stoics believe in virtues and right moral answers. His approach is thoroughly psychological, which pushes towards a more subjectivist stance that says each person has to decide for themselves what the right answers are. While Robertson does make a distinction between Stoicism and Epicureanism, there’s almost nothing in his version of Stoicism that an Epicurean could not agree with, and could not use as a way to achieve a life of pleasure. 

Robertson’s approach highlights a question for Stoicism. The Stoics famously say that what happens in the world is neutral and our reactions to the world are caused by our judgments of the world. So for example, if someone close to us dies, then we are upset. The Stoics say that our upset is not caused by the death but rather by our judgment that the death is bad. We can learn to be less overcome by our emotions by reflecting on our judgments, and putting them in context. We can keep in mind that even when something terrible happens, life goes on, and it is not the end of the world. So one question that we might consider is how we should react when the end of the world is actually coming. Even when we are not facing the end of the world, are there not events which are genuine tragedies? In these cases, our existing judgements might be exactly right. Some of the Stoic techniques seem to point to an attitude that we are just tiny parts of the universe and nothing in our lives really matters. But that judgment might just be mistaken. One worry about Stoicism is that the technique of controlling our emotions requires replacing accurate judgments with mistaken ones. To put it another way, some of the techniques that the Stoics use to control emotions seem to assume a moral nihilism that nothing really matters, and that is at odds with the moral realist view that they seem to adopt, that some things really do matter. That suggests there is an internal contradiction within Stoic thought. 

There is a great deal to like about Robertson’s book. It is well written and sophisticated in its exposition of Stoic psychology. The connections with CBT are interesting. These can raise useful questions about how to understand Stoic philosophy. 

© 2020 Christian Perring

Christian Perring teaches in NYC

Categories: Philosophical

Keywords: stoicism, philosophy