The Good Life

What is it and why study some bunch of old, dead Greeks?

Socrates caused a radical shift in the focus of philosophy, turning away from the external world and into the personal. He was an irritable, ugly and often unwashed individual who never wrote anything down that we know of but wandered the streets of ancient Athens arguing with people. He was prepared to challenge any idea or belief and worked not by disagreeing but simply by asking awkward questions and forcing them to realise that their ideas were illogical, a process that we still call ‘Socratic Dialogue’. This made him incredibly unpopular at times except with his group of friends and students – so much so that he was eventually tried and condemned to death, the great martyr of philosophy. To be fair, it was a time when Athens was at war with Sparta and losing badly - not the best time to criticise a government! All we know of his ideas are the accounts of his great debates and his technique from a few writers, mostly by Plato who uses him as a character in his own work. Even then we cannot be sure how much of it is a straight report and how much is Plato’s invention and Plato’s ideas.

So what was this change that he brought about? He began to ask, “What is a good life and how do we live it?” This is ethos, your whole way of life and from which we get the word ethics. These days we tend to think of Ethics as identical to morality, that is to do with the way in which we treat other people. But technically it includes our whole way of life, the way in which we treat ourselves more than others. And an ethos does not have to be moral - Hitler had an ethical code, just not one that most of us think of as 'good' or moral. An ethos can be 'good' for yourself or your group and lousy for everyone else around you. In the Gorgias the character Callicles has an ethos - every man for himself and take whatever you can can get away with! We get confused about the term Ethics because he Greeks had two ways of pronouncing the word ethos and it meant either a personal view or a social view, depending on the accent on the first 'e'. As even the Greeks eventually stopped using accents, the distinction was lost.

People like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and their students were elite members of their society. They had the time to sit and argue in the streets and cafés of Athens without having to work the farm or grind out their days in the factory (yes, they had factories making cloth and carts and so on). As the English thinker Thomas Hobbes once commented, “Leisure is the mother of philosophy.” Aristotle admitted that you didn’t have to be wealthy to be happy – but he thought it helped. They also belonged to a society where thinking was part of the culture, where new ideas were celebrated and where debates between philosophers and politicians were as popular as a football match is now. Well, almost.

So what did they decide about a good life? Well, what would you expect? If I were to ask any group of teenagers to define it they would probably mention material things (especially the boys); wealth or high income, fancy car big house, foreign travel, flash lifestyle, celebrity. The average Athenian in the 5th Century BCE would have a similar list; wealth, large house, slaves, nice horse and chariot – material comforts. But people who have those things are often dissatisfied. They take up weird religions, adopt third world orphans, get into a mess while looking for love or with drugs and alcohol. It seems that just owning all the goodies isn’t enough.

Most of us know this at some level and if asked what we really want from life we’ll tend to ask for friends, family, good health, security and happiness. Simple things and though we all want to be happy, few of us know what this happiness thing really is. I sit in my local café and stare at the wall opposite me, at a community bulletin board covered with advertisements for courses in art, Zen Buddhism and witchcraft; third world music festivals; environmental protests; alternative medicine; martial arts; discovering the ‘sensual woman’ within (where?!) – all part of the search for meaning. But then I look downwards and read the women’s magazines on the table and I'll be persuaded instead that happy people are thin women who buy lots of stuff. If you survey people around the world you’ll discover that the happiest people tend to be those who are religious and live in extended families in stable poorer countries. The unhappiest are those who live under oppressive regimes (no surprise) and those who are locked into cultures that value high income and status. I’ve met people of all ages who have worked this out including one young man in that same café who often seemed to be there in the middle of the day instead of working. 'My needs are simple – I don’t want much', he told me. He preferred to be there, talking to friends thinking, writing enjoying. It took me a lifetime to achieve even part of the freedom that he has embraced in his twenties, dammit.

The ancient Greeks understood all this quite well. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that their life was simpler way back then. It wasn’t. The plumbing wasn’t as good and they didn't have iPods but they had lifestyles every bit as fast paced and stressful as ours and sometime more dangerous too. It's a common arrogance of all ages to assume that we live in the most exciting or fast moving of times and usually, we're wrong. People don’t really change much, even over millennia. Plato presented Socrates as rejecting a life based on material possessions because no matter how much we get, we always want more and more – that’s a leaky jar that we just can’t fill, he said and we waste or lives in the attempt. Aristotle has a lot to say about happiness and finds it in friendship, duty to the community (the polis) and in quiet contemplation on the meaning of life.

Aristotle used the term eudaimonia to define happiness. It translates as ‘good-spirited.’ He felt that if you were in good spirits, healthy and going along well through life then you were happy. You didn’t have to be rich and own lots of toys. Further, he claimed that it was the ultimate aim of all human activity, the final end. Everything we do is aimed at achieving happiness. Happiness is not exactly a thing in itself but Aristotle was one of those natural librarians who like to see everything properly defined and described. It’s enough to think of happiness as a state flowing naturally from an ethical life.

Plato felt that it came from knowing and accepting your role and place in society and if you had the ability, from understanding the ‘good’ and showing it to others. He didn’t have much sympathy with more typical ideas of freedom and democracy as he felt that the wrong kind of people rose to power in that kind of system. Better to train perfect leaders and let them run the place while the rest of us got on with happy, uneventful lives.

Epicurus was a hedonist. These are people who argue that the purpose of life is to maximise your ‘pleasure’ and so achieve a happy state. But he had a very basic view of pleasure – not sex and drugs and rock and roll but merely the absence of pain. A life without pain or distress was a happy one and the simpler the better. Against most of these ideas were the Stoics. They claimed that you have little control over what happens to you in life, good or bad. For them, the happy person is one who deals well and honorably with good fortune and bad luck, whatever life brings. To complain, protest and refuse to co-operate only brings trouble and pain. Acceptance is the key.

Epicurus reduced life to simple forms in search of happiness. He founded communes called The Garden where he and his followers lived together, grew their own food, made what they needed and spent time in thought and discussion. His enemies told lies about it that stuck, claiming that because they let women into The Garden, they were having orgies of rich food, sex and luxury in there. In fact they lived simple lives and Epicurus thought sex wasn’t really worth the trouble it caused, apart from reproduction. But his enemies won the popular history narrative and even today we think an Epicurean is someone who lives well, especially regarding gourmet food. The man himself was happy enough with a bit of basic cheese to go on his home baked bread and thought the food you ate was less important than the people you ate it with.

"The philosophers of antiquity thought that although it is obvious that (almost) everyone desires happiness, it is far less obvious what happiness actually consists of , and that therefore it is necessary to analyse the concept to see what it implies.
Aristotle described it as what attends the life of reason and practical wisdom.
Epicurus said that it was the fruit of moderation and quietness.
The Stoics said that it is the peace of mind that comes from self-mastery and the philosophical acceptance of life’s externally imposed and inescapable vicissitudes, such as illness, grief, failure and death.
They all agreed that happiness attends the reflective life of restraint and proportion, based on the right attitude to life: for life’s value to us, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry much later observed, lies not in external things but in how we face them."
A .C. Grayling, The Heart of Things, p.6

Later religions imposed a quite different view. Happiness was not necessarily something that you attained here and now. It came from leading a moral life, no matter how miserable, painful and short because a ‘good’ person who lived according to the rules of their religion was rewarded in the afterlife. This was the core of medieval life and is now sometimes seen as the way in which the church and state kept the vast majority of peasants under control, with promises of ‘treasures in heaven.’

The Renaissance and Enlightenment periods which followed, a few hundred years ago not only brought us scientific thinking but also brought the idea of autonomy. A happy life was one where you had freedom, choice and power over your own life. You could strive to achieve worthwhile goals and your happiness was often in the process and not necessarily in a success.

Most of us here have access to happiness based in freedom and choice. We live in a stable nation, eat regularly and probably too much, have a roof over our heads and aren’t about to freeze to death. Our basic needs are met (life and liberty) and we are free to pursue an ethical and happy life, once we have determined exactly what that is for us.
So why do so many of us insist on being unhappy?