More than happiness, the Buddhist and Stoic way

Last month, I spoke to existential psychotherapist Antonia Macaro about her new book, More than Happiness, which investigates ‘Buddhist and Stoic wisdom for a secular age’. Antonia writes in her introduction:

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can listen to the podcast on Soundcloud using the player above or on iTunes, using the link in this paragraph. There are more details on the book on Icon Books‘ website.

Hedgehog & Fox

From the very first page you make it clear that your relationship with both Stoicism and Buddhism go back some considerable time. Can you recall how you first encountered both of them. Which came first in your experience?

Antonia Macaro

It’s hard to remember actually, but I think Buddhism came first. Certainly from my early twenties, I was interested in that and I started going to retreats maybe in my mid-twenties.

Hedgehog & Fox

Had you had a philosophical training before that in the Western tradition?

Antonia Macaro

Well, you studied philosophy at school in Italy, so at my secondary school we studied history of philosophy, but can’t say that I’d been really inspired, probably because of the teacher. Stoicism took me a while to discover.

I think it was probably quite a while after Buddhism. I struggled with Buddhism for quite a number of years and then gave it up, and then I discovered philosophy. I think one of the first books about Stoicism that I read that was interesting was Martha Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire. I think that was quite exciting at that time.

Hedgehog & Fox

You say early on in the book ‘I’m neither a Buddhist nor a Stoic by inclination’. So something was speaking to you in both, but you weren’t going wholeheartedly for either.

Antonia Macaro

Yes, Buddhism was a long struggle. I’m not sure how long it was with Stoicism. But yes, I think it was always mainly the more metaphysical aspects of both of them that put me off and with Buddhism I did try. I tried for years, talking to teachers, saying, ‘what about this rebirth thing? what about this karma thing?’ I think I was suspicious of anything metaphysical. I couldn’t quite get myself to accept it. I suppose it was just about being quite sceptical by nature, so that’s why I couldn’t take them on board.

Hedgehog & Fox

And with Stoicism, what was the nature of the reservation that kept you from saying ‘yes, this is it’?

Antonia Macaro

Well, it’s the whole picture in the sense that we’re supposed to be these sparks of this divine rational principle that alters the world and so on, and I never really took that on board.

The problem for me is that you could say, ‘OK, forget about that’, but I think that is connected with other things like their views on emotions and I could never really accept that we should aim to eradicate emotions. Some people these days deny that the Stoics did say that, but I think they did, although in a very, very specific way.

That’s why I preferred Aristotle, who said that you didn’t have to do that, you just needed to moderate your emotions, and you need to aim at appropriate emotions, not extreme.

Hedgehog & FoX

By page 100 Aristotle pops up and you can see from your writing that there’s a definite affinity or sympathy there! So, those reservations that you’ve just mentioned entered, why go back to those two traditions which for various reasons you had found hadn’t quite done it or you had serious reservations about? Why go back to them in order to interrogate them? In the hope of finding what?

Antonia Macaro

That’s a very good question. I had actually written a book about Aristotle a number of years ago, which ended up being about the application of his ideas to counselling and psychotherapy, although I really intended it to be for general use and I think everything I put in there could be applied to everybody’s daily life.

But yes, I think that is a good question. I think one reason is that both of these traditions have become very popular and they’re not always portrayed in an accurate way. So that’s why I wanted to do the book, because I think sometimes people help themselves to little bits of these traditions.

Hedgehog & Fox

You talk about skimming the surface, don’t you? I guess what you’re saying is that some approaches to these traditions merely skim the surface.

Antonia Macaro

Yes, I see a dual danger. I see that happening all the time about both of these traditions. On the one hand, people just take tiny bits to be happier, to be more relaxed, the same with mindfulness. I think it happens with Stoicism a lot: people take some Stoic quotations and they think they are going to be more relaxed and so on. So that’s one danger.

The other, opposite danger is that people take more than they need to in a way that is not useful, like all the metaphysical assumptions that I think we don’t need to take. And weirdly I think you can probably go from one to the other as well, because unless you’ve really thought it through – what should I take and what should I leave? – you could go from taking bits of inspiration just to be more relaxed to accepting a worldview that actually is not a good one to accept in this day and age. That’s what I wanted to address. I wanted to say, there are good things in these traditions. Unlike Aristotle, they address the human condition a lot more, which is one thing I really liked about them. There’s a lot of advice, there is a lot of wisdom…

Hedgehog & Fox

There’s practical advice about how you live your life as well as analysing the cosmos and thinking about humans’ place in it.

Antonia Macaro

Yes, there’s a lot of practical advice and I think you just need to think through which bits you’re going to take and which not. I thought it was an important thing to do because there’s so much advice and because they’re so popular, but I think not always taken in the right way. I thought it’s worth sitting down and saying, ‘OK, what’s what’s good and what’s not so good?’

Hedgehog & Fox

You could have reached that point but then decided you were only going to look at one of the traditions, at Stoicism or Buddhism, and you were going to see what things held up for you. Now, obviously there are some things in common, they both arise around the same time, but they are also salient differences. So what was it that appealed to you about looking at both traditions in tandem?

Antonia Macaro

Well, partly because I think that’s often remarked on, how similar they are, and I wanted to really understand for myself in what way there were similar and in what way there were different. And as you say, there are lots of differences metaphysically in terms of their worldview, they are very, very different. But I think that the kernel, as it were, of both of them is very similar. The motivation is very similar, which is about saying that we value the wrong things in life. So we tend to value things of the world and success and love and money and comfort and pleasure and avoid anything painful and uncomfortable.

They’re both saying this is wrong, that we should be less attached to pursuing pleasure and all these things of the world and avoiding pain; they are the wrong values and the wrong priorities, for different reasons. But the bottom line is that we should change and live differently.

Hedgehog & Fox

If you accept that analysis, then there’s a question of what do you do about it, how do you live your life having recognized that a lot of the things that we pursue are impermanent, meretricious, whatever, don’t have lasting worth. Then where do we find things of worth? Do you see the traditions as being markedly different when they come to address that question?

Antonia Macaro

Well, I think they both try to push us in the direction of being less attached to things of the world generally, as I said, for different reasons.

In Stoicism it’s about the fact the only thing that is really of value is virtue and your moral choice. That’s the only thing that should matter. Everything else they called indifferent. And in Buddhism is about cultivating non-attachment because basically the world is characterized by being dukkha, which means unsatisfactory, impermanent.

And so we shouldn’t really look for satisfaction in this world because we won’t find it. So it’s a question of being less attached to all of these things. For me it’s a question of where you draw the line. Although I think in theory both traditions, if you’re able to enjoy the things of the world without being attached to them, they would allow it. But I think in practice that is really very, very difficult and there’s certainly a streak in both of the traditions that is more extreme, that is about leaving these things behind. So I suppose my take is that we don’t need to be extreme, that we should take their advice, we should understand that things are impermanent and unsatisfactory, and that’s just a feature of human existence.

And so we should think about that. And that means both accepting that the things we value will pass. I think it’s just a good thing to do, just be aware that things are limited in time. But also we should certainly follow their advice in terms of withdrawing a lot of value from certain things, like material wealth and success and people’s approval and all these things that we get quite caught up in a lot of the time. So I think certainly at the level of daily life, we should follow their advice, that these things don’t matter that much.

Hedgehog & Fox

The subtitle of the book makes clear you’re writing for a secular age and we’ve talked a little bit about the metaphysical aspect, which you found most difficulty with, and I guess a lot of people will find difficulty with today.

But if we deduct that, are we just left with some useful lifestyle advice? Because you’re writing about traditions which have very long histories, which have no single authoritative canon, which have a lot of interpretative differences, so are we doing more than just cherry-picking useful pieces of lifestyle advice, do you think? And if so what are we founding it on?

Antonia Macaro

What I came up with – and that’s really my conclusion, other people might come to different ones – is that the two things that I think would be useful to take and that are common to both traditions are a focus on valuing thinking clearly about things, and the other is ethics, living ethically, which in some ways they spelled out differently.

But I think taking those values and deciding for ourselves how we are going to live that are important messages, to live in that way by trying to really understand things. And that doesn’t mean that we’ll see the world as it really is, like they’d say in Buddhism, I don’t believe in that. So we need to translate it to our own terms: what does it mean to think clearly? For me it means thinking critically and being sceptical and researching things before we believe them and so on.

And living ethically, again, there are lots of ways of spelling that out and we can take inspiration from what they say, but we need to translate it into our own terms. So I think for me these are important messages that mean that we’re taking more than just tips to be happy.

Obviously I can’t prove to you that that is a good life, that that is what a good life means. If you think that a good life just means hedonism, then I’m probably not going to persuade you very much. So it’s not a proof of that, but it’s just saying, I think that these things are really prominent in both traditions, there’s lots that we can take, and they would add to our life if we approach our life in that way, rather than just thinking ‘how can we be a bit happier?’

Both traditions say that the real joy that we can get isn’t from things going well in the world, because that’s quite unreliable; it’s from things like thinking clearly about things, accepting things the way they really are, and acting ethically. Doing the right things. That is the way to be happier, not relying on the world giving us what we want, because a lot of the time it doesn’t.

Hedgehog & Fox

Tell me about your title, More than Happiness, because the casual observer might think you are aiming at some greater state of bliss. But tell me what in fact you’re pointing to there.

Antonia Macaro

It’s about what I just said really, that when we look at the wisdom of these traditions, we shouldn’t really aim just at happiness, we shouldn’t focus on happiness all the time anyway.

Hedgehog & Fox

Because we miss it because it’s a byproduct rather than a target.

Antonia Macaro

Yes, for a start it’s counterproductive; it raises our expectations about what things should be like in the world and they’re not going to be like that. So the higher our expectations, in a way, the less happy we’ll be, so it’s not a good thing to aim for. And also it’s quite self-centred, just thinking about being happier; we should think more about how we are in the world and how we act towards other people and so on.

Hedgehog & Fox

I guess a lot of people listening know that mindfulness is derived from Buddhism in a fairly significant way; maybe they’re a little bit less familiar with Stoicism and cognitive behavioural therapy. You quote Epictetus saying people are disturbed not by things but by the views they take of things. How direct is the filiation between the Stoics and that therapeutic practice?

Antonia Macaro

I don’t know what Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, for example, who quotes that, I don’t really know how central he thought it was. That quotation is used a lot. People use it as if to say, CBT is applied Stoicism, and I don’t think it is. Because that is quite a general quotation, you can read it in different ways, and the Stoic reading of it goes very much back to their theory of value, to the fact that you shouldn’t get disturbed by things because the only thing you have control of is your moral choice. That sums up in a way the whole Stoic worldview and CBT doesn’t take on the Stoic worldview. So that quotation just means, if you exclude the Stoic side of it, that we can look at things in a different way, which is true. And that is the basis of CBT, but CBT has got also a lot more in it so I think you’d be wrong to think that CBT was just an application of Stoicism. For example, in terms of emotions, CBT is much more Aristotelian in my view, in the sense that it aims at appropriate emotions and certainly not eradicating emotions like Stoics would say. So I think it’s certainly possible to overemphasize the similarities.

Hedgehog & Fox

Because certain of the ancient writers you quote, if you were to apply them strictly, the level of radical detachment would be quite hard core. You quote Bernard Williams calling Stoicism ‘lethal high-mindedness’. It would be quite a strong prescription, wouldn’t it, hardcore Stoicism?

Antonia Macaro

I think a lot of people who consider themselves Stoics probably aren’t quite. Obviously people do adapt it in modern life, but I’m not sure that they’d even be considered Stoics. I can’t remember the exact quotation but Epictetus does say that a lot of his students, a lot of the people studying Stoicism, if they really examined themselves would find that they are maybe Aristotelians or Epicureans, but not really Stoics, because Stoicism is very, very extreme and I don’t think that many people really live like that. I personally don’t think that it would be necessarily a good thing to be that extreme, so it’s always a modified Stoicism that I advocate.

Hedgehog & Fox

And maybe even the Stoics were modified Stoics. I did smile when Epictetus was suggesting you shouldn’t have more than you need to eat, and you shouldn’t have a bigger house than you need, and you shouldn’t have more slaves than you need! And then you’ve got Seneca, a very wealthy man wrestling and not quite resolving his problems [with wealth], and I thought maybe there’s a little difficulty there even with the early practitioners of Stoicism applying it rigidly.

Antonia Macaro

Yes, I definitely think that’s true; maybe some more than others. I don’t really know what Epictetus was like in his daily life. He’s certainly quite extreme in what he says. In fact, if you read Seneca’s letters, there are some things that are more Epicurean than than Stoic. So he was a much more rounded individual and had, as you say, his fair share of dilemmas about how attached he should be to wealth and material comforts.

Hedgehog & Fox

In your final chapter you distil some of the wisdom which you think is applicable in a secular context. How did you go about doing that? Were the things you ended up with things which you have personally found useful in those traditions?

Antonia Macaro

Yes, I think I just approached it in that way, just looking at things that I found useful. We haven’t talked yet about the ideal of equanimity, which was quite important for both of them, although it was tempered by compassion, there is a bit of a tension between equanimity and compassion in both traditions.

But equanimity is an important ideal and I personally don’t think that pure equanimity is a realistic goal. I’m not entirely sure it would be a really good goal, because it would mean in a way that we’re too detached from certain things that give life meaning, like personal relationships and other things.

But I think we can certainly do with a bit more equanimity, so some of the things that I have there are things that maybe aim to put things in perspective. That’s an important thing to do, although I am a bit suspicious of chasing states of mind because they come and go. And I don’t think that they’re the things that really matter. But yes, we could be a little bit more detached and a little bit more tranquil and that would be a good thing. So some of the things I have in there probably have that aim.

And there are some thoughts about how to deal with with people, which again is an interesting one because for the Stoics, for example, you had to be realistic about what you were going to encounter in your daily life and people can be very annoying. So there are quite a lot of really nice quotations about that. But at the same time there is the thing of being compassionate and understanding that everybody has flaws and trying to understand that people act badly because they don’t understand things and that’s the same for us and it’s the same for everybody else. So there’s a lot about trying to be compassionate.

Hedgehog & Fox

One point you make a number of times in the book is that our understanding of the mind and the brain, our processes, what’s actually going on beneath the surface, our understanding of that has changed radically. Not just from two-and-a-half thousand years ago but in the last ten years, five years. How recuperable do you think therefore the kind of wisdom traditions are within a framework where we have a very different understanding from they did of how the human mind works?

Antonia Macaro

Yes, that’s quite a difficult one because especially the Stoics put a lot of emphasis on only thing we can control being our moral choice.

Hedgehog & Fox

And rationality is well to the fore, isn’t it?

Antonia Macaro

Yes, yes, exactly. So I certainly think they were wrong in that, in the sense that we are told that a lot of our functioning is unconscious and that we don’t even know our motivation very well; sometimes we act thinking that we are acting for one reason and in fact we’re acting for a completely different reason. There are a lot of studies in social psychology that show that. So I certainly think we shouldn’t overemphasize those abilities because we need to be aware of the fact that we don’t really understand ourselves.

But on the other hand, they are good aims to have, to be rational. That is a very good aim to have. It’s true that we have probably more choice on our reactions to things and the way we act than on actual things that happen in the world. So in that sense I think they were correct. So it’s good to remind ourselves of that, because we do get very worked up about how things go for us in the world and a lot of the time it’s good to remind ourselves that we don’t have any control on on that, so focusing more on our reaction. I think it’s good as an inspiration and as a kind of ideal, but not in that extreme way that they were they were saying.

Hedgehog & Fox

You have emphasized ethical action, but a worry I always have about traditions which emphasize renunciation and detachment is what that means for politics and political engagement and the ability to effect any change. Now, both traditions would say the world is so far from perfect and everything is so impermanent that we’re never going to achieve a perfect political state of being. But is there a danger that if we’re attending too much to this kind of advice that we may just think all sorts of wrongs will go unrighted. Can you say something about how you see going beyond the ethical into a more political arena?

Antonia Macaro

Again, it’s a difficult one. Definitely there’s a tension in both traditions between detachment and action. The Stoics did have an ‘action streak’, as it were, which was about fulfilling your duties and doing what you could, given the circumstances you were in.

But yes, it is definitely a tension and maybe this is the sense in which maybe I’m a bit more of an Aristotelian. I think in the end it’s the Serenity Prayer, which is about having the courage to change things that you can change and the serenity to accept the ones that you can’t change and the wisdom to know the difference, which is actually very hard to do. But I think it’s certainly worth trying to change things in the world that you think is possible to change, maybe sometimes even if you don’t think it’s possible to change. Some things may be worth fighting for anyway. It’s a question of finding a balance between that and not getting too attached to things. I suspect that that balance may be a personal, individual choice.

Hedgehog & Fox

We started out talking about the fact that you’ve had a relationship with both these traditions that dates back a number of decades. Did writing the book and doing the research enable you to resolve your relationship with them in some sense, to make you decide exactly where you stand in relation to them, the extent to which you go along with them? You talk about walking the tightrope and this balancing act between taking too much and taking too little, going too deep or not going deeply enough. Did writing the book help you come to some sort of conclusions about that?

Antonia Macaro

Yes, I think some of the things probably I was already quite clear about, for example, in Buddhism the rebirth thing I really couldn’t accept. Or the fact that you could see things as they really are. In stoicism there is the whole thing about eradicating emotions and being sparks of the Divine Principle and so on.

So I think I was quite clear about what I didn’t want to take. I think I’m now clearer about what I do want to take and what advice I think is sound. I think I’ve become clearer about that picture.