The Good Life
and how to live it
In writing this paper, if you get no further than to discuss how to go about answering the question, you can do very well. For example,
Do we need to know how life turns out in order to be able to say a life is good?
Do we need to consider the differing needs and possibilities of different stages of life?
Are certain attainments necessary for any human life to be good? (e.g., happiness, love, contributing to the good of the world).
Do we need to define who is asking the question? (e.g., the organism as independent separate being, or a being that has some autonomy but is ultimately inextricably a part of the fabric of the universe).
Do we consult authorities (e.g., great philosophers, sacred texts, people we know or know of who seem to have lived a good life)?
However you go about writing your paper, don't start out with your own opinion of what makes a (or the) good life. First you need to define what is meant by "a (or the) good life". You should refer to the literature about the good life. If you were writing a longer paper, you would have a somewhat lengthy section titled "Review of the literature".
Your conclusion, when you get around to stating your personal opinion, must refer to the material you have mentioned in the earlier part of your essay. You do not want your conclusion to look as if you had your mind made up before you did any research, and the research that is in the earlier part of your essay was just thrown in there and has nothing to do with your conclusion.
Some questions you might ask:
What is the good life? Or, What is a good life?"
What is the best possible life a person could lead?
What do you need for a good life?
Are there some things that everyone needs for a good life?
Can we know whether a life has been good until we know how it ends?
Here are some candidates often offered as necessary—or sufficient—for the good life.
Happiness
Pleasure
Fulfillment of desires
Meaning
Self-actualization
Being fully alive
Love
Higher consciousness
Salvation, Enlightenment
Wisdom
“Viewed through the experiencial lens of flow, a good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.
Being ‘in flow’ is the way that some interviewees described the subjective experience of engaging just-manageable challenges by tackling a series of goals, continuously processing feedback about progress, and adjustig action based on this feedback. Under these conditions, experience seamlessly unfolds from moment to moment, and one enters a subjective state with the following characteristics:
· Intense and focused concentration on what one is doing in the present moment
· Merging of action and awareness
· Loss of reflective self-consciousness (i.e., loss of awareness of oneself as a social actor)
· A sense that one can control one’s actions; that is, a sense that one can in principle deal with the situation because one knows how to respond to whatever happens next
· Distortion of temporal experience (typically, a sense that time has passed faster than normal)
· Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, such that often the end goal is just an excuse for the process
When in flow, the individual operates at full capacity.
The making of a good life as a whole entails long-term considerations and specific and careful planning.
Even the best human life, precisely because it is the life a human and not of a god, may not escape the taint of tragedy. Every human life, even under the most fortunate circumstances, has its share of frustration and discontent, its burden of remorse for avoidable mistakes committed, its insoluble dilemmas.
“Plato had very definite ideas about the good life and what we today call ‘self-actualization.’ Only those who had the leisure to think long and deeply, to continue lifelong study, could participate in the truly good life. The contemplative life was closely identified with the good life. Because only a select few of the population were thought capable of real contemplation and because the manual work of the society had to be done, justice decreed that students be prepared for work consonant with their capacities. Plato did not argue, as Dewey did later, that people in vastly different occupations could exemplify the truly human.” Nel Noddings, Philosophy of Education. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998 [1995], p. 10.
Aristotle believed that the “theoretical life” was the best life for humans. By “the theoretical life” Aristotle meant a life where one thinks a lot, and contemplates the order of the world in a theoretical or philosophical way. I think Aristotle was on the right track, I often reach a state of mild euphoria when discussing a philosophical problem.
Aristotle claimed that the contemplative life was the best, for instance because it resembled God's mode of existence. Some have held a different opinion than Aristotle, for instance Ludwig Wittgenstein, who seems to have believed that the practical life was the best. The key here is perhaps to combine contemplation and action, but for me contemplation must always be prior to many of my great decisions and important actions.
As the existentialists emphasize, humans are beings who seek meaning, and we need to think through some of the deepest questions of life. Philosophy, in the sense that we contemplate general and abstract questions relating to our lives and society, is necessary for everyone in order to live life to the fullest. Most people do have questions about meaning, ethics, religion and society, and many seem to have a need to investigate these questions in a theoretical and general way. Thus philosophy is a means to what psychologists call self-actualization or self-realization.
Andreas Saugstad
In ethics and value theory, perfectionism is the persistence of will in obtaining the optimal quality of spiritual, mental, physical, and material being. The neo-Aristotelean Thomas Hurka describes perfectionism as follows:
This moral theory starts from an account of the good life, or the intrinsically desirable life. And it characterizes this life in a distinctive way. Certain properties, it says, constitute human nature or are definitive of humanity—they make humans human. The good life, it then says, develops these properties to a high degree or realizes what is central to human nature. Different versions of the theory may disagree about what the relevant properties are and so disagree about the content of the good life. But they share the foundational idea that what is good, ultimately, is the development of human nature.
The perfectionist does not believe that one can attain a perfect life or state of living. Rather, a perfectionist practices steadfast perseverance in obtaining the best possible life or state of living.
Perfectionism, as a moral theory, has a long history and has been addressed by influential philosophers. Aristotle stated his conception of the good life (eudaimonia). He taught that politics and political structures should promote the good life among individuals; because the polis can best promote the good life, it should be adopted over other forms of social organization. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the individual reaches perfection by exercising the will to power.
The philosopher Stanley Cavell develops the idea of moral perfectionism as the idea that there is an unattained but attainable self that one ought to strive to reach. Moral perfectionists believe that the ancient questions such as "Am I living as I am supposed to?" make all the difference in the world and they describe the commitment we ought to have in ways that seem, but are not, impossibly demanding. We do so because it is only in the keeping such an "impossible" view in mind that one can strive for one's "unattained but attainable self."
Wikipedia “Perfectionism”, last modified Feb 6, 2009.
Fulfillment of desires
“The essence of civilization consists not in the multiplication of wants, but in their deliberate and voluntary renunciation.” Ram Dass, in Schwartz, 1996:63
Meaning
Tony Schwartz, What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America, New York: Bantam. 1996
Writer Tony Schwartz talks about the period after his ghost-written book (with Donald Trump), The Art of the Deal became a number one best-seller, making him rich. After a while, he felt a vague dissatisfaction. “Above all, I lacked the experience of meaning—that I was here for some reason beyond succeeding in work and building a comfortable, close-knit life with my family and my friends. Both of these were honorable, important goals. They simply felt insufficient” (What Really Matters, 1996:4)
“To a large extent, I placed my faith in two modern American paths to a better life. The first was success. If only I had enough, I told myself—enough achievement, recognition, an money, a sufficiently comfortable home, more exciting vacations, a good marriage, beaming kids, a wide circle of friends—then eventually I’d feel satisfied. Ironically, it was by finally realizing this dream that I ran up against its limitations. In the aftermath of the Trump experience, I couldn’t say for sure what role external success played in a complete life, but I felt certain that at most, it was only one piece in a much larger puzzle.” (What Really Matters, p. 6)
Self-actualization, an autotelic personality
Here is a statement (reported by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Finding Flow, 1997) from a woman describing what her career means to her: “To be totally absorbed in what you are doing and to enjoy it so much that you don’t want to be doing anything else. I don’t see how people survive if they don’t experience something like that.”
Csikszentmihalyi describes living with this type of involvement and enthusiasm as having achieved an autotelic personality—being “an individual who generally does things for their own sake, rather than in order to achieve some later external goal.” Such a person needs few material possessions or any external rewards, because her life is very rewarding in itself.
He maintains that it is important to be able to control “psychic energy”, that is, our conscious attention. By doing so, we are able to find the things that give us the involvement and enthusiasm of an autotelic personality. In fact, he believes that the only way to take ownership of our own life “is by learning to direct psychic energy in line with our own intentions” (p. 130). He writes that “a simple way of improving the quality of life is to take ownership of one’s actions” (p. 137).
Happiness
Czikszentmihalyi also notes that after doing decades of research into people’s happiness, he has learned that “self-reported happiness is not a very good indicator of a person’s life. Some people say they are ‘happy’ even when they dislike their jobs, when their home life is nonexistent, when they spend all their time in meaningless activities.” And, “It is not enough to be happy to have an excellent life. The point is to be happy while doing things that stretch our skills, that help us grow and fulfill our potential” (p. 122).
Love
Love. One cannot be a full human being without experiencing love. What is love? Love is an activity as much as it is a feeling. Erich Fromm writes that, “It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self-increasing.” There is caring, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. The emotion we experience is not itself love, but is a function of our relationship to the beloved. Desire to possess or control is not love. Love is appreciation for the value and being of the beloved, and the desire to complete it, and ourselves, through our relationship with it.
There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer; no disease that enough love will not heal; No door that enough love will not open; No gulf that enough love will not bridge; No wall that enough love will not throw down; No sin that enough love will not redeem. . .
It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble; How hopeless the outlook; How muddled the tangle; How great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world.
Higher Consciousness
Ken Keyes Junior’s Path to Higher Consciousness
1. The continuous experience of love, serenity, happiness, joy, perceptiveness, effectiveness and wisdom is possible. Set the highest imaginable standard; Then you are ready to begin your journey
2. To find happiness we only need to perceive clearly who we are : pure consciousness.
a. This requires constant self-work
b. Knowing how to work consciously on ourselves
c. Emotionally accepting whatever we encounter here and now
d. Accepting the previously unacceptable
e. Previous problems now become opportunities
f. Everything you experience is a step to higher consciousness
g. Happiness through using negative emotions to learn what needs reprogramming in our mind
h. Creating happiness or unhappiness depends on the quality and quantity of critical, rejecting energy, or accepting, loving energy you feed back to the world
i. We see things not as they are, but as we are.
3. Working on your consciousness is the most fulfilling thing you can do.
Living from higher levels of consciousness becomes the source of satisfaction and meaning
Instant consciousness doubler: Experience everything as if you had done it yourself.
4. Your only real problem is life involves how consciously you use your mind. The only thing you don’t have is direct experience that there’s nothing you need that you don’t have.
The Good Life Reading List
http://faculty.smu.edu/jkazez/promotion/thinklink.htm retrieved 7/16/2009
Jean Kazez jkazez@smu.edu
Philosophers have been thinking about the nature of the good life since ancient times. There is lots and lots to read. The topics and readings below are explored in my book The Weight of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life (Blackwell 2007).
HAPPINESS
Is happiness the only thing that counts? A spate of recent books by psychologists assume the answer is yes. See, for example, Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness and Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis. As these authors define it, happiness is a positive feeling. It's feeling good, enjoying yourself, experiencing pleasure, having a positive state of consciousness. I discuss these two books in a forthcoming discussion/review.
Some philosophers agree that happiness, defined as a pleasant sensation, really is the only thing that matters. For example, that was the view of the hedonistic Utilitarians of the 19th century, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham as well as the ancient philosopher Epicurus. "The experience machine" argument suggests otherwise (convincingly, in my view). It's made by Robert Nozick in his book The Examined Life. Useful excerpts from Mill, Bentham, Epicurus, and Nozick are in the excellent anthology Ethics, edited by Peter Singer.
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
The good life was a central topic during the ancient period of philosophy (starting about 500 bc and stretching into the second century ad). Plato's dialogue The Phaedo is a great place to begin. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the most comprehensive ancient work about the good life. Though rich and rewarding, it's pretty dense reading. After Plato and Aristotle, philosophical schools became increasingly focused on the business of everyday life. The Handbook by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus reads like a first century self-help book. It's full of great advice for dealing with problems of living, large and small.
The ancients are generally united in thinking of a good life as a virtuous life. So the person living a good life will be brave, truthful, just, generous, wise, and so on. Today we think about morality somewhat differently than the ancients did. We think it's morally very admirable of Bill Gates to be giving away billions of dollars to save lives in distant countries. The Greek philosophers would have seen it as simply strange.
Strange? In fact,it seems far more strange that we don't do more for people in distant countries, focusing instead on the luxuries we are lucky enough to be able to afford. But just how much should we do?
MORALITY
How good do we have to be? How much should we give up in order to save distant lives? Way back in 1970, this question was forcefully brought to the attention of academic philosophers by Peter Singer in the article “Famine Affluence and Morality”.
More recently he's written two articles in the New York Times Magazine on the same subject—“What Should a Billionaire Give - and What Should You?” (2006) and “The Singer Solution To World Poverty” (1999). I highly recommend Singer's very accessible book How Are We To Live?
How much can we really do? Paul Farmer, a Harvard-affiliated doctor who runs a clinic for the poor in Haiti, is living proof that we can do a lot. I love Tracy Kidder's biography of Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains. But can I live my life like that?
In Singer's Ethics anthology, a negative answer is given by Friedrich Nietzsche (with bravura) and by Susan Wolf (with subtlety). I discuss my own struggles with the question in a short article in the magazine Philosophy Now: “How Good Do We Have to Be?”
If we should help, where are the problems most serious? What can be done? I learned a lot about the facts and the controversies from The End of Poverty, by Jeffrey Sachs and The White Man's Burden by William Easterly. An entertaining novel that explores how good we have to be is Nick Hornby's How To Be Good.
EVERYTHING ELSE
Are happiness and morality together all that matter? What about autonomy, self-expression, growing or making progress, knowledge, fun, family, work, religion, cooking, sports? Are they essential to a good life? Just icing on the cake? My book explores these questions and many more.