The Good Life
this is a repost from my Yahoo! 360 blog
Friday January 20, 2006
Yesterday, a friend of mine told me a story about something stupid she did earlier in the day. (I won’t repeat the story now because I need to preserve my blackmail ammo) After she told the story she said “You should write about that in your blog!” My response was “F**k you! Write that s**t yourself! You smell like piss!!!” or something of that nature. But, today it came back to mind and inspired me to write:
There are many misconceptions about the field of philosophy and what it entails. When I tell people I studied philosophy they respond with questions like “what’s your philosophy on life?” Academic philosophy basically involves two things. 1) Logic and argument – a lot of academic philosophy is learning how to form a proper and logical argument. If a statement begins with “I believe”, then it doesn’t have much of a place in philosophy. A statement carries weight when it logically follows previous statements that have already been proven or at least well argued. 2) Specific arguments to a few central questions or “problems.”
What first interested me in philosophy was the question of the good life. What is it to live a good life? This always seemed like such an important question to me, but I don’t think it is one most people ask themselves very often. Do you consider yourself a good person? What is the good life? If your answer to the first question is yes but your answer to the second is “I don’t know” then there is a logical problem here. Most people would look at someone who lives a life of servitude to humanity as a good person. In fact, I think philanthropy is one of the current “standards” of goodness. Hard work, honesty and good manners are some others. If you know someone who is a polite, honest and hard working humanitarian, chances are you consider that person to be an angel or even God incarnate. But, that causes problems for the rest of us. Everyone can’t be a humanitarian or else the world would stop. This is especially true in today’s world of multi-tasking dabblers. Is it impossible for a cook-by-day/performer-by-night with no time to volunteer to live a good life? Of course it is possible that the answer is ‘no’ but I can’t even contemplate such a bleak picture.
To make this daunting question seem simpler, let’s pretend to break it down into simpler parts. What is good? In order to understand what a life of goodness entails it is first necessary to know what goodness itself is. Pause to consider…….errr…this is why our attempts at simplification were just for show. ‘Good’ is a concept that touches just about every aspect of our lives. We try to be good, do the right thing, teach our children to be good, etc but it is one of the most slippery concepts to define. I’m not going to go through all the possible definitions and their shortcomings, but if you’re interested you can do some reading on moral philosophy. We spend our lives blindly pursuing a specific goal that we can’t identify.
I’ve spent a good amount of time reading about, writing about and thinking about the meaning of ‘good’, and I have yet to find a satisfactory definition. One thing I am convinced of is that it’s an important question. Nobody is perfect and if we all took time everyday to consider ‘the good life’, we’d find examples in our own lives where we know we definitely are not living it even if we can’t define it. Plato and Aristotle both arrived at the same conclusion by different paths. The best life is that of a philosopher because a philosopher constantly seeks the good life. A philosopher (by that definition) is constantly questioning himself and others, taking nothing on assumption. That concept leads to great discussions in the classroom, but I think it needs to be taken out of the classroom.
So I say: Live the best life you can – take some time to think about ‘the good life’.
