Stoicism Versus Buddhism On The Power And Limits Of The Mind

In my first quarter at UC – San Diego in the Fall of 1995, my suitemates dragged me to a bookstore. At the time I was a washed up former athlete filled with anxiety and self doubt drifting aimlessly through life. I had zero interest in books or anything intellectual.

As chance would have it, I came across Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand on one of the shelves. I had heard of Ayn Rand from reading the articles of the bodybuilder Mike Mentzer in Flex and Muscle & Fitness in high school. He claimed to have based his training philosophy on her epistemology. I thought she was a man and her name pronounced “Ann” but I bought the book anyway – and it changed my life as described in “Three Books That Changed My Life”.

The other day a book on my shelf caught my eye. When I went to see what it was, I saw Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations right next to it and knew immediately that that was the book for me at that moment. I devoured it over the last few days and have been thinking about Stoicism.

Let me try to summarize my understanding of Stoicism from the Meditations. The only thing that you truly have control over is your own mind. External circumstances are in many ways outside of your control. Therefore, you should focus your attention on managing your own mind, applying reason and discipline to your thoughts and actions. Fortunately, if you do so you will achieve peace of mind and happiness regardless of external circumstances. That’s because your mind can choose to take whatever view of external circumstances it chooses and thereby remain unaffected by even the worst and most difficult situations.

It’s an appealing vision. It would certainly be nice if happiness was completely under our own control. But I think Stoicism overplays the power of the conscious, rational mind. Before I say why I believe that to be the case, let me say that I do think Stoicism gets a lot right. I think the distinction between what is and is not in our control is a crucial one. You should focus on the things that are in your control rather than those that are not. Further, I believe you can develop and strengthen your mind to better equip it to manage, adapt and deal with whatever life throws at you.

But there are limits. We are embodied social animals. Let’s start with embodied. It’s impossible in my opinion to draw a firm distinction between the mind and the body. The Mind-Body Problem is one of the thorniest in Philosophy and it has not been satisfactorily solved in my estimation (see “The Structure of Knowledge and The Limits of Physical Science” for my take on the failure of materialist metaphysics and the need for a paradigm shift). As a result, the mind cannot fully insulate itself from the body since they are inextricably intertwined.

For example, consider neurosis. Psychoanalysis has shown that many of the emotional and behavioral problems we suffer from have their roots in early childhood trauma. Breaking free from these patterns is extraordinarily difficult as anyone who has suffered from them can attest to – or any psychotherapist. These early traumas run deep and frequently overwhelm reason and willpower in the moment – to the frustration of those of us who would like to impose rationality on all aspects of our lives. The Greeks called this akrasia or “weakness of will”. Akrasia is therefore a refutation of Stoicism’s claim that the mind can fully insulate itself from powerful emotions.

In addition, we are social animals. We are wired to live together with other people and cooperate with our ingroup. In my experience, many of the most difficult problems in life involve conflicts with other people. When other people do things that hurt or upset us, the mind is frequently overwhelmed by emotion and has difficulty imposing rationality on how we feel and behave. In other words, the fact that we are so deeply social also mitigates against Stoicism’s claim that the mind can fully insulate itself from external events.

Therefore, while you should develop your mind and willpower to their fullest extent in order to best manage life, external factors will also play a large role in how well your life goes. This is where I think Buddhism is more realistic. The Buddha supposedly said: “Life is suffering”. But according to the Buddhist Psychiatrist Mark Epstein what he really said was: “Life is dukha”. And “dukha” means something like “difficult to face”. In other words, life is inherently difficult to face. Always has been and always will be.

Expecting yourself to become some Stoic sage able to easily manage all the slings and arrows life throws at you is an illusion; it’s an impossible standard. Instead, you should realize that life is inherently difficult and many things will be a struggle for you. Indeed, for some people the obstacles they face will be too much and they will be overcome by them through no fault or lack of effort of their own – even strong and virtuous people. For most, however, accepting that life will frequently be a struggle and doing our best to manage and work through it as best we can will be enough to live a satisfactory life. But it won’t always be smooth or easy. At the end of the day all of us are human, all too human.