A dispute · spans 5 eras
What is the Good Life?
Pleasure, virtue, contemplation, tranquillity, self-creation, defiant happiness?
Maybe the central question philosophy has ever asked. Plato: the philosopher's life of contemplation. Aristotle: the active life of virtue, in a community, with friends and modest fortune. Epicurus: a quiet garden, simple pleasures, deep friendships, no fear of death. The Stoics: virtue is sufficient; everything else is indifferent. Nietzsche: create your own values, affirm the eternal recurrence. Camus: revolt lucidly against the absurd; one must imagine Sisyphus happy. There is no consensus. The continued absence of consensus is part of what makes philosophy worth doing.
// The sides
Contemplation
The highest life is the life of the mind, the contemplation of eternal and worthiest truths, for in it a person touches whatever is divine in them.
Tranquillity
The good life is a state of unshakeable calm, freed from fear and needless desire, in which the soul becomes sufficient to itself.
Self-creation
There is no ready-made good handed down from outside; the good life is one a person creates, forging their own values and affirming it entirely.
Lucid revolt
The good life is to look the absurd in the eye, fleeing neither into hope nor into suicide, and to live the more fully for it.
Agape
The good life rests on love and on standing before God. It is given from above and received, where contemplation, tranquillity, self-creation, and lucid revolt each seek it within the self. Agape moves the center of a life beyond the person – toward the One before whom she stands.