I am attracted to two views that have been enormously influential for thousands of years.
The first view began with Aristotle and has influenced billions of people by being incorporated (with variations) into all three Abrahamic faiths.
According to this theory, humans can be happy in the same way that we might describe a lush and towering tree as happy–or a fox that is busy hunting rabbits. It’s not about these organisms’ sensations of pleasure or pain, but whether they are doing what they are designed to do. “Flourishing” may be a better translation than “happy” for Aristotle’s Greek term, eudaimonia.
How do human beings flourish? Aristotle says it is by thinking, since that is our distinctive characteristic and evidently the advanced task for which we are optimized. But we think many things, including ugly thoughts and idle ones that fail to motivate our actions. We know the difference between good and bad thinking because we are taught to recognize virtues.
Unfortunately, it is not always evident what a given virtue means, or even whether something called a virtue deserves the title; and the various virtues can conflict. We need a master virtue that is about deciding which virtues to deploy in each situation; call that “practical reason.”
At least some people may also flourish by exercising a purer kind of reasoning that does not motivate action; for Aristotle, the very best way to spend one’s time is by contemplating the divine.
To sum up, a happy human life is one guided by practical reason, perhaps with a dose of contemplative reasoning (also known as worship). A person of virtue is fortunate and happy in the same way that a fox flourishes if it can hunt rabbits all day. They live their best lives.
A very different view is also influential, because it is the root of Buddhism, which has about half a billion adherents today. In contrast to Aristotle, Buddha taught that we are not designed for any particular end. Like everything else in the universe, we exist because previous things just happened before. Since we have turned out to be sensitive creatures, we are bound to suffer; suffering is intrinsic (the First Noble Truth). It arises wherever there is a will, because desire is inevitably frustrated (the Second Noble Truth).
However, we can introspect and discover that the self that we have valued so highly and that seems to intend and to want so many elusive things does not really exist. Specific phenomena just happen one after another, resulting from previous phenomena. This realization allows us to stop attaching our will to things. Instead of feeling wilful and frustrated, we can allow our minds to fill with compassion for ourselves and for everyone else, understanding everyone as determined by events beyond their control.
This escape can be complete and final, so that we no longer suffer (the Third Noble Truth). No supernatural force is required for escape; it is just a matter of realizing how things really work. Once that happens, we can live a life of active compassion toward others (the Fourth Noble Truth). The conclusion is rather like Aristotle’s vision of a virtuous life, but with a different underpinning and a more dramatic moral.
I am no means against either view, both of which instruct and inspire. But I am skeptical that we are designed or optimized for anything. We emerged as a result of impersonal forces, especially biological evolution. Insofar as we have intrinsic purposes, I doubt that they are all about reasoning, since we have bodies as well as brains, and our brains are embodied. In essence, for me, the First Noble Truth trumps Aristotle’s idea that any natural species has a special natural purpose or end.
Aristotle defines a virtuous life as happy or eudaimonic. He draws this link because he sees human beings as naturally designed for virtue. If we doubt this premise, then there is no reason to hope that virtue will bring happiness. On the contrary, virtue can easily enhance suffering in the form of guilt, disappointment, and frustration. We should strive to live virtuously for the good of others but not expect it to make us happy.
At the same time, I am also skeptical about the Third Noble Truth, the idea that a complete escape is possible if one fully embraces the truth that there is no self or any intrinsic purposes in nature.
I just used the word “skeptical” in relation to both Aristotle and Buddhism. Skepticism was one of the ancient Greeks’ philosophical schools, a rival to Aristotle’s tradition. In 16th-century France, Michel de Montaigne read and developed the Skeptics’ ideas, and his work has influenced–or at least found echoes–in many subsequent authors, European and otherwise.
Montaigne’s skepticism does not rest on a theory of the natural best life for human beings, nor on the idea that human selves are illusory and can be transcended. Montaigne views each human being, including himself, as something imperfect, a bit miscellaneous, without clear boundaries, and largely opaque–yet complex, distinctive, fragile, and precious. “For sure, man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and wavering subject. It’s a queasy business to try to base any constant and uniform judgment about him” (Montaigne 1580, 1:9).
For creatures like this, there is no natural best way to live, nor any escape from suffering. But there is much to be appreciated–even relished–if one attentively studies any particular person. Close, appreciative listening brings moments of compassion and consolation.
Montaigne wrote mostly about himself. “I wish to be seen in a simple, natural, and ordinary manner, without striving [he changed the word to “study” in the 1592 text] or artifice, for it is me that I paint” (Montaigne, 1580, “To the Reader”). This was his revolutionary contribution. Before him, authors in the European languages had never made subjects of themselves in a similar way. St. Augustine had written a great autobiography, but he had seen his life as an illustration of a universal story: the sinner finds God and is saved. Montaigne, in contrast, saw himself as himself. Inventing the very word “essay,” he inaugurated practices of self-description that have become ubiquitous. And he made the search for himself interesting by demonstrating how elusive we are to ourselves.
Today, we probably suffer from a bit too much self-exploration and self-description. The Romantic movement and some of its successors have encouraged writers and other artists to focus on themselves to a far greater extent than Montaigne could have imagined. In a secular and individualistic market-economy, self-presentation literally sells. Some memoirs and confessions are valuable, particularly when the authors have compelling stories. But people like me–we whose lives are quite unremarkable– should pause before we assume that anyone else needs to hear about us.
That brings me to the other side of Montaigne’s essays. He says that his subject is himself, but what does he do with his life? He spends it in his library. The self that he presents in his Essays is a devoted reader, that is, a compassionate observer of many other people, both authors and subjects, living and dead.
I’ve posted a book-in-progress on this blog entitled Cuttings. My main purpose there is not to understand texts or to explain them to anyone, but rather to experiment with compassionate attention as a modest form of consolation. This is not an original ideal. I take it from Montaigne and many others. In the book (¶20-21), I even criticize originality as another Romantic ideal that has been overemphasized. Generalizations about important matters that are right and good are also likely to be clichés, because why would any of us suddenly discover truths that had been hidden before? Still, the book is full of concrete observations rather than generalizations. It is, in fact, a collection of “cuttings.”
...
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.
-- Theodore Roethke, "Cuttings (later)," 1948
Source: Montaigne, Michel Eyquem (1580), Les Essais. See also: some basics; Montaigne and Buddhism; varieties of skepticism, etc.
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