Theme
The good life
10 philosophers, 4 traditions
How should one live, and what makes a human life go well? Traditions have answered with virtue, tranquil pleasure, harmony with nature, or an end to suffering.
What makes a life good for the person living it? Philosophers now often call this the question of well-being, and usually sort the answers into three kinds: a good life is one of pleasure, one in which our desires are satisfied, or one that contains things worth having whatever we want, such as knowledge and friendship.
Much older answers take the form of advice on how to live. In India, the Buddha taught that craving brings suffering, and set out a path by which suffering can end. In China, Confucius placed the good life in moral cultivation through family and ritual, while the Daodejing counselled simplicity and freedom from excessive desire. In Greece, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle held, in different ways, that well-being is bound up with virtue; Epicurus made tranquil pleasure the goal, and the Stoics held that virtue is the only good.
Later thinkers carried the question on. Al-Farabi saw ultimate happiness in the human intellect’s conjunction with the Agent Intellect; Mill defended pleasure but ranked some pleasures above others; and Nietzsche asked whether we could affirm our lives even imagining them repeated in every detail.
Through time
6th century BCE
Laozi
Disorder, personal and political, comes from excessive desire. The Daodejing counsels living in accord with the ways of nature (ziran), with simplicity and quietude, and acting without self-serving desire (wuwei); its sage does not act as conventional morality expects.
Confucius
A good life is one of moral self-cultivation. By working “at the roots”, above all respect within the family, and by practising benevolence (ren) and ritual with real reverence, anyone can become a junzi, a person of exemplary character whose virtue supports harmony in family and state.
5th century BCE
Socrates
“The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” Socrates, who embraced poverty and took no money for his work, made it his mission to improve the souls of his fellow Athenians by questioning them about what matters most: courage, moderation and the state of their souls.
The Buddha
A life driven by craving is bound to suffering, because we cling to what is impermanent as “I” and “mine”. But suffering can cease, and the Buddha taught a middle path between indulgence and self-mortification, with training in wisdom, ethical conduct and concentration, that leads to its end.
4th century BCE
Aristotle
The highest human good is eudaimonia, or flourishing: fully realising our nature by developing our human capacities in a life lived according to reason, not a matter of subjective preference. As political animals, humans can flourish only within a city, which exists “for the sake of living well”.
Epicurus
The goal of life is pleasure, understood as freedom from bodily pain and mental disturbance (ataraxia). It is reached by keeping to natural desires, living prudently and justly among friends, and seeing through the fear of death and of the gods.
About 500 years later
2nd century CE
Marcus Aurelius
Only virtue is good and only vice bad; health, wealth and reputation make no difference to happiness, which lies wholly in our own power. So we should live by reason, welcome whatever the whole allots us, and work for the good of all people as fellow citizens of one cosmic city.
Drew on Epicurus
About 700 years later
10th century CE
al-Farabi
Ultimate happiness is the human intellect’s conjunction with the Agent Intellect, and the way to it is philosophy, which begins with logic and a curbing of the passions. Later philosophers reported, though, that a lost commentary of his dismissed such conjunction as a tall tale.
Drew on Aristotle
About 900 years later
19th century
John Stuart Mill
Happiness, meaning pleasure and the absence of pain, is the sole end of human action. But pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity, with those of the intellect, feelings and imagination ranking higher, and it is best for individuals to have the freedom to develop their own characters.
Friedrich Nietzsche
As belief in the Christian God collapses, so must the morality built on it. Nietzsche’s ideal is to affirm life without them: to “give style” to one’s character, and to live so that one could affirm one’s life as it is, even imagining its return in every detail.
Sources
- Roger Crisp, Well-Being, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy