Great Ideas of Philosophy

Lecture FiftyFour Theories of the Good LifeScope: In the preceding 49 lectures, various solutions to the problems of knowledge, conduct, and governancehave been reviewed. Various candidate “forms of life” have been described or at least hinted at. Theseinclude the contemplative, the active, the fatalistic, the hedonistic. There are developed arguments for eachand serious limitations in all. In order to begin to choose among them, it is necessary to consider what sortof beings we are at bottom. And if in the end it is not possible to answer any of these questions, WilliamJames, among other great philosophers, will not be overly surprised—or aggrieved.OutlineI. In this final lecture on the “big picture” part of the project, I hope to distill much of what has come before andaddress that aching question about the examined life and, yes, “the good life.”A. It seems to me that the “theories of the good life” traditionally advanced by the most influentialphilosophers can be boiled down to four.1. In choosing four—or, for that matter, 44—one has at least implicitly accepted an essentialist theory ofhuman nature.2. The good life, then, is good for a certain form of life, and as the pun would have it, one man’s fish isanother man’s poisson.B. Aristotle, in his conception of the contemplative life, takes a page from the Socratic maxim that theunexamined life is not worth living.C. The same Aristotle—along with a whole legion of philosophers, some Stoic, some medieval—will offerthe active life, which is lived, not just thought about, as the right sort of life.D. There is also a fatalistic model of the good life. The good life is something that you’re extremely lucky ifyou end up living any part of your life in.1. There is a sense of inevitabilities, that somehow the future is already known at some level and the mostwe can do is give it a good try.2. A key element of fatalism is that resignation is an essential property in the good life. The good life isjust coming to grips with inevitabilities and being realistic about one’s chances.E. Finally, there is hedonism.1. The true hedonist is not out for any and every pleasure.2. The true hedonist is trying to track that narrow path between pain and pleasure, never wanting apleasure so much that its deprivation constitutes pain and never avoiding pain so assiduously as tomiss out on every and any conceivable pleasure.3. The goal of a hedonistic life is tranquillity.II. What sort of life do the saints or heroes choose?A. We think of saints as persons who have engaged in what ethicists call supererogatory actions, which is tosay, actions above and beyond the call of duty.B. Yet saints and heroes do not usually think of themselves as such. “It gives me joy,” says the saint. “It’s justmy job,” says the hero.C. The lives of saints and heroes do not seem to match up with any of the schemes of the good lifeenumerated above; they seem rather to be exemplary: “Think of how I would have lived my life if I were asgood as that person.”D. This has to do with how we think about ourselves and others. How we think about anything depends onbrain activity and the programming that we’ve gone through, life’s experiences, the cultures that mold us.E. If all we know is just the result of a conditioning history, the best life could be supplied to us by artificialstimulation of our brains, separated from our bodies and nourished in a vat.1. We could have pleasure or be saints and heroes.2. Presumably, brain centers could be stimulated that would have us doing Fermat’s last theorem.©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 5