Four Theories of the Good Life
The Great Ideas of Philosophy (The Great Courses)
Professor Daniel N. Robinson (1937-2018), Georgetown University

1) The Contemplative Life
Aristotle is taking a page from the Socratic maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living.

2) Active Life
Get out of the armchair; stop that skeptic form of self-inquiry and do something.  Life is to be lived, not thought about.

3) Fatalistic Life
That one is extremely lucky to live a good life, much less an uninterrupted one. In any case it is “written”.  How it’s going to work out is pre-established.  It’s fated (like Lawrence of Arabia, give it a good try). “Never say of anything that I have lost it, only that I have given it back” (Epictetus).  The Good Life is coming to grips with inevitabilities.  What it means to live a good life is to be realistic about one’s chances.

4) Hedonistic Life
H.L. Mencken insisted that the definition of Puritanism is the haunting feeling that someone, somewhere maybe happy.  Not a debauchee who thinks only of pleasing himself constantly. The true hedonist want to avoid suffering.  The surest route to suffering is desire. The true Hedonist treads the narrow path between pain and pleasure.  Tranquility is the key to happiness for the true hedonist.

The Four Theories of the Good Life (lecture summary)
In regard to theories of the Good Life, people whose lives strike us as emulable (eg, Mother Teresa) are people living lives that don’t match up very well either with the life of contemplation or a hedonistic life or a fatalistic life or even a life of activity as one is inclined to think of activity the first-time activity is mentioned.  The lives they are living are not essentially political.  They’re not civic in the restricted sense.  There is something utterly selfless of these lives that we nonetheless come to regard as exemplary.  Perhaps not exemplary as in ‘if I can only get myself to do it, I’d start living that life’.  But exemplary as in ‘think of how I would of lived my life if I were good as that person’.

This has to do with how we think about ourselves and others; how we think about anything depends on brain activity and the programming we’ve gone through, life experiences, the cultures that mold us.  We’re constructed by essentially linguistic and cultural resources (and ‘determinism’ - the ridiculous supposed “facts” we are told about ourselves).  And there surely would be a world in which Mother Teresa would be considered foolish for that that sort of thing.  And why would anybody run into a burning building under any circumstances? 

Now if all this is a result of a conditioning history, if it’s just the result of certain grammatical nuances or fallacies, then the best life of all, depending upon the culture you’re in, is to specify what sort of life you would wish you were living then have the scientists put your brain in a vat and play that sort of life into it.  There you are.  You want to be Mother Teresa, you’ll be Mother Teresa. 

So the question that arises and it must arise any time of any version of either a hedonistic or a contemplative or an active or a fatalistic model is asserted as the good life, the question that arises is this:  Every one of those lives can be created by brain stimulation.  Presumably you could find centers which when triggered have people doing ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’.  After all, how did Fermat do ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’, except by way of brain activities?  So presumably, whatever what was going on in Fermat’s brain can be made to go on in someone else’s brain. 

Similarity with activity.  Everyone in this room, everyone listening to this lecture, almost everyone, has had a dream in which they have been doing things.  Now they were not doing things, they were dreaming of doing things.  Dreaming of riding a bicycle or dreaming of taking an airplane, you are not actually riding a bicycle or taking an airplane.  Yet, in the realm of experience and the knowledge you have access to that’s precisely what you’re doing.  Well, if that can be brought about by a dream, it can be brought about by stimulating the brain.

So again, the argument is supposing you had the option.  Suppose you could be given any life of your choosing played into you.  What are the grounds on which you wouldn’t do it?  I’m not going to answer that question.  I’m offering, not as a rhetorical question, but as a question that should be dealt with.  What’s the basis upon which you would forfeit a life that is frustrating, in which desires remain unrequited, in which you cannot achieve the level of excellence, goodness or decency?  The basis upon which nonetheless you would choose that life over a life, in which by way of direct activation of the brain, all of these desiderata would be achieved.

Suppose you say, ‘well, of course, in this latter case there would be anything I earned; anything I was responsible for’.  Suppose I said there’s also a ‘responsibility’ center – it hasn’t been found yet, but if you stimulate that, then everything else going on in your experience you now assume you’re responsible for.

I would ask all students interested in philosophy, as a general guide, to address the question:

“If you would not accept that kind of life, why would you not accept it?”

I think this is an important question is the following:  it raises the possibility that the esteem that others hold us in, the esteem we hold ourselves, the experiences of pleasure that we have when we regard ourselves as having accomplished something, may finally not be the core desires of the good life.  Because if all that could be produced in us and produced in us reliably and regularly and yet we would not choose that mode of having the experience, then there must be something missing there.

Aristotle, when he moves toward the notion of eudaimonia – that everything is done for the sake of something else, which is done for the sake of something else, but it’s not an infinite regress.  Ultimately you get to the point where that is done for its own sake and not in order to secure anything else, but because it is desired in and of itself.  And Aristotle says that is what we mean by eudaimonia – translated as ‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’.  I’m suggesting that we do the same kind of analysis, this point.  If those experiences, if that recording, of the esteem in which one is held, if that self-recording of the esteem in which one holds oneself in virtue of one’s accomplishments.  If all that actually could be brought about synthetically, then your refusal to accept it on those terms means there must be something else.  And, of course, the question is, ‘what is that something else?’ And does one find that in the search for happiness?  Is one fated never to know it?  Does one reach it by contemplation or is it found in the external world through a life that is active?

Kleobis and Biton (by legend, brothers who gained immortality and eternal recognition for the respect and love they had shown toward their mother) those two worthies pulling their mother to the Temple of Hera as if they were a pair of oxen themselves.  Sweating the whole five miles and probably tearing up the soles of their feet, their sandals having been ripped by the rough roads.  There their mother is imploring the goddess Hera to see to it that their sons die the happiest of men and Kleobis and Biton never awaken.  They die the happiest of men.  Solon thinks they have died the happiest of men.  Solon, as reported by Plutarch, coming out of that Hellenic tradition, in which the esteem in which you are held by others, you’re standing within the polis, how men and women who are decent, how men of virtue come to regard you, the pride they take in the fact that you were one of them.  That to know all that is finally what it means to be happy.

Well, Kleobis and Biton, if they did derive eudaimonia from that, if dying in that state they left the world having lived the right kind of life, the good life.  Of course, they’re not conscious of how they are remembered.  They just went to sleep.  So this isn’t something you can play into their brains because it isn’t something they even know about.  So you see living the good life then, if the ‘Kleobis and Biton’ model is the right model, maybe living a life that you don’t know is a good life.  It may be living life as a certain kind of being, as a certain kind of person.  Indeed, whether you’re particularly happy with it or not.

Now I wasn’t there to interview Kleobis and Biton just before they fell asleep.  One of them might have said to the other, ‘my goodness what an exhausting pull that was!  I’ve got new sympathy for oxen!’  And Bito might have said, ‘yeah, you can’t even get a lemonade in this town.  You’d think they could put up a Temple to Hera in someplace where there be some outdoor take-away stand.  But, nonetheless, Mum had to get here on time and the only way she was going to get here on time is if we bought her.  And thank goodness for here sake that she got to where she wanted to be.  To do what was so important to her’.  They might have been saying in effect that we want what is good for her for her sake.  And in that they would have been expressing themselves as her true friends – Teleophilia: Fulfilled or completed friendship.  Where you want what is good for others, for the sake of others, for what is so good in them as to warrant that.

So Kleobis and Biton might actually, I don’t mean this in the Freudian sense, have been living the good life unconsciously.  I prefer to say un-self-consciously. 

I think one of the lessons that comes from saints and heroes is that when a saintly and heroic life is lived it’s not lived self-consciously in saintly and heroic terms.  If fact, it’s not lived self-consciously at all.  It’s lived in a way that conscious of others.  Their needs.  Their desires.  Their deserts. 

The good like very often is a life of service or sacrifice.

(sidenote: without expecting applause; to overcome 'Specialness of Self' - the idea that the world owes you.  Transcendence from ‘Lower Mind' ego.)

And the problem of having that played into the nervous system is you know what the game is already.  If the position you’ve taken is ‘my life can’t be a good life unless I’ve actually served the legitimate interest and needs of others’, then playing it in a hallucination according to which I’m doing that simply defeats the whole project.  That isn’t going to work at all.  It’s not that I want to experience the sensation of having done it, it’s that I want to do it.  That means, first off, one has to determine what is in the best and abiding interest of others.  And I don’t know how anybody can do that except through what is finally a contemplative mode of life.  And then it’s a matter of getting out there and doing it.  And I don’t know how anybody can do that except by way of what finally is an active form of life. 

You have no promises in advance as to how your actions will succeed or not succeed or even how they’ll be perceived, they may be misperceived.  Some very good people have been crucified for doing very good things.  So, you have to take an essentially fatalistic position.  That although you do not what the future will bring, you do know what your duties are.  And the great and exulting pleasure that comes from enlarging the possibilities in the lives of others has to meet the fundamental objectives of the (psychologically) hedonistically inclined individual.  Indeed, there must be great joy and pleasure in the life of a Mother Teresa.  There must be that deep sense of satisfaction that a hero has, knowing that he is not a hero, but that he has saved a life.

Now, one can become sentimental of considerations of these kinds if one is not careful.  And I find anytime I have this ‘sensitivity’ toward sentimentality, the answer to the question ‘what’s wrong with sentimentality?’ is the usual the inflationary pressure put on it.  By inflation you depreciate the value of the thing.  The thing that’s wrong with sentimentality is that it depreciates the value of sentiment.

One can have the right kind of sentiment about these prospects for the good life.  And recognize, at some level, that entities that find life satisfying in these terms have transcended, at least in their aspirations, the realm in which their own materiality is located.  It just seems to be the case.  That once one adopts this perspective, according to which a life is good in virtue of the contribution it makes to others, not for the experience that comes from acknowledge, for the experience created in others.  That once one begins to think that way one begins to lose one’s consciousness of material being, and one enters a rather different realm.

I think it’s a spiritualistic realm and William James referred to this in a rather trenchant passage:

"The spiritualistic reader may...believe in the soul if he will; whilst the positivistic one who wishes to give a tinge of mystery to the expression of his positivism can continue to say that nature in here unfathomable designs has mixed us of clay and flame, or brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being, but how or why, no mortal may ever know."

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