The most important philosophy is the good life, unfortunately nobody has ever been able to define what this is satisfactorily.

Every philosopher in history has been trying to give humanity their take on what is the best way to live, personally, spiritually, or structurally.

Mozi is the origin of the golden rule, where the treatment of others is the key to being treated well by others, his is the principle of reciprocity, kindness creates kindness.

Epicurus thought that a good life was one where the minimisation of pain and strife were fundamental, where a person would learn but not too much, eat well but not in excess, enjoy pleasure but not the type that had difficult consequences.

Plato thought that building a society that catered for the base needs of an informed populace would provide the circumstances where a good life could be realised, the good city is the enabler of a life where the individual could actualise themself.

Aristotle felt that knowing the self was paramount to eliminating the angst of the self, his was an enlightenment type of good life.

Seneca thought that the good life was about the attitude you take to the objects and the happenings that you experience, wherever you are, or whatever happens to you, you decide how you feel about it.

St Thomas Aquinas believed that a good life was one where the self is fulfilled by worship and knowing the christian deity in a personal way, this is very often espoused by the religious even now.

Many philosophies centre around mechanisms that remove anxiety, but the methods are different. Hedonism is a form of distraction, self focus is a form of understanding, worship is a form of externalising, learning is a way of felling good about making progress toward something. Each is a form of feeling better than we naturally do. So the question for me is one that asks, and not for the first time, are we as humans naturally miserable?

To understand this we can look to a few other philosophers….

Lacan identified that appreciation had to be cultivated whereas desire is natural, desire when fulfilled does not lead to long term satisfaction, and that is a problem that brings on anxiety.

Kierkegaard points out that anxiety is not merely a mood, it is a structure of being a human, to remove it would be to remove the human part. He points out the flaws in methods of removal saying that these disengage the human from a primary force that defines them.

Schopenhauer points out that nature is cruel and we are within it, that all pleasure is at the expense of something in nature and our will has no other option than to seek pleasure.

Christian stoic philosophy, because the two are very much linked, along with Judaism and Islam, find solace in the idea that we can successfully betray and deny our nature and avoid natural pleasure replacing it with a created token of value equal to it we then call virtue. Nietzsche points this out in his Genealogy of Morals as a criticism, he feels it cannot work and is a doctrine of self loathing and hatred. I agree with him because the denial of the natural self is one of the things that creates more angst rather than mitigating it.

We can see clearly from Freud’s work that facing the demons of the inner self is much more likely to bring about a calm and rational, less problematic self, than burial or denial of their existence. In other words, sooner or later it’s going to come out and if left unresolved it will always do harm regardless of if you are conscious of it or not.

Anxiety, existential dread, inner turmoil, questions without answers, all are part of of the human condition, regardless of if you are a modern human living in a tower block and pouring coffee for a living or if you are a nomad of the Serengeti, there’s just something about being so conscious that makes you wonder and be scared of all you do not understand. It is the 3.5lbs of meatloaf between your ears, and all that it is capable of, combined with evolutionary imperatives, coupled with the compromise of other people and their motivations getting in the way of yours, handcuffed to the ever increasing complexity that we inflict upon ourselves, that makes the concept of the good life such a difficult thing to define.

In Israel they do not pull the plug even in cases of brain death, there is no humane end as the machine just keeps the meat alive until it just cannot any longer stay ticking, for relatives there is no closure. In western cultures we equate the life of a person to their continual conscious thread of existence more than the physical specimen they are because that is what a person is, but in cases where there is no thread, say like dementia, we still charge the estate of the person that was and they will still receive regular visits from the relatives that are now virtual strangers, who are visiting a person that is no longer in there, they just resemble the previous occupant.

But why all of this preamble? Get to the point Wilson!

The things in life that are important are not necessarily measurable or demonstrative. One might imagine that, and here I am going back to an earlier piece I wrote about two monkeys and inequality, a society where everyone has all the same opportunities and the same fundamentals would be a happy one. This is a mistake. The command economies of communist countries did not produce greater happiness, or less strife, because they did not allow for aspiration or self actualisation in the areas that people wanted. What they produced was miserable existences with no meaning, a feeling of limitation, what people needed was diversity and something to bitch about. The Liberal societies that fostered ideas of freedom, but created at the same time great inequalities, often produced the opposite reaction, that people had little but were still mainly happy because they could hope for more.

What we can draw from this is that it is nearly impossible to build the good life in a structural sense, to plan it for other people. What is the important factor to one group may be different to another. I remember the story of the guy near where I live who stood to lose his fortune and was facing living an existence very little different that the one I now have. So one day he burned his mansion, killed his wife and child, and torched the stables. Now I feel like he made a mistake in his evaluation of what a good life is. I do much complaining and I am always anxious, but that is just who I am, paradoxically I don’t feel I could be better off in terms of happiness than I am currently. I find myself leaning towards Seneca’s postulate, that I am as happy as I have decided to be, as well as being attracted to Kierkegaard’s contention that anxiety is a part of who we are, not merely a mood.

So if we cannot agree on the fundamentals of the good life, then how could we build a society that fulfils the good life, that enables it? Well, we can’t, we just have to have ideas in that direction, see the movements of the tides, and hope for the best, accepting that sometimes we may need to revise an earlier plan. What I am almost certain of is that more is gained through achievement that attainment, what you build/create is better than what you buy. That may just be personal growth, you might build an intellect, build your body, grow some vegetables, build a shed, make memories etc.

A good life is just the one that pleases you.

Paul S Wilson