How to Live the Good Life

Plato & Aristotle
Originally uploaded by Muli Koppel

Ancient Greek philosophy is appealing to me as it is very much concerned with how to live the Good Life or how to achieve eudaimonia. This word is often translated as happiness but should be viewed as a state of mind rather than as a result of a particular pleasure. It is often described as ‘flourishing’ or the realization of human potential.

Greek philosophers also believed that virtue or arête was essential to happiness. Arête is not just about moral virtues such as justice, moderation, courage and wisdom, it also includes attributes such as beauty, good health and doing something well. Socrates claimed that a person who is not virtuous cannot be happy and that a person who is virtuous cannot fail to be happy. Different schools of thought grew up around the exact balance needed between virtue and happiness in order to lead a good life. Discussion on these issues was human-centred, often heated and independent of any super-natural law giver or deity which, in my opinion, makes it still relevant today.

Despite this, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are not my favourite philosophers probably because I find them so hard to understand. I prefer my philosophy or guide to life a little simpler which is why I prefer Epicurus (although Socrates was good in encouraging people to think for themselves and be sceptical). However, a study of Aristotle’s book Ethics is useful, as he claimed that the natural function of humans was to reason and that to reason well is to reason in accordance with virtue. Epicurus agreed with him saying that of all the virtues, wisdom is the greatest, for through it we can learn which pleasures to seek and which to avoid.

Aristotle believed that we are driven by our natural instincts or passions and that we can achieve virtue if we seek the mean in the expression of these feelings. For example, for the feeling of fear, courage is the mean, rashness is the excessive expression and cowardice is the deficient expression. Virtues include generosity, prudence, patience and modesty. All the old biblical vices or sins such as envy, licentiousness, vanity and shamelessness are mentioned as either the deficient or excessive expression of human feelings or actions. Aristotle believed that virtue is not necessarily a capacity we are born with, we must develop it through practice and reason.

Unlike the Stoics who believed we should be indifferent to power, wealth and bodily pleasures and be happy with virtue alone, Aristotle was not so extreme and believed that friendship and good fortune in life and body were as important as reason and virtue in living the good life.

[I have found Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers by Philip Stokes (Arcturus Publishing, London 2008) and This is not a book: Adventures in Popular Philosophy by Michael Picard (Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest NSW 2007) and of course Wikipedia helpful for this post and for the post on Epicurus.]