TL;DR
Random leaves from my diary - this one - from exactly a year ago today. In which I reflect on my lessons learned on my quest for what should constitute a good life. I share that while rationality once seemed paramount to me, I now believe that a good life emerges from the interplay of love, logic, and intense emotion. The synthesis of truth lies not only in rationality but also in our capacity to feel deeply. Embracing both dimensions, we find harmony and purpose in this quest for a fulfilling existence.
For as far back as I can recall I have been concerned with questions about virtue ethics. The most intense of which has been, How should we live a good life? What is a good life?
I have read far and wide on this topic. But my inability to arrive at a conclusion out of my reading is the basis and defence for what I now think and believe, and what I am about to reflect on.
Perhaps my most significant lens of questioning was and is Stoicism. I became a stoic at a very low point in my life. There was a lot of negative emotion and I had to find a way to numb it. Reading and internalising The Enchiridion of Epictetus did that for me.
The downside, however, was that I picked on a belief that I have held during the most formative years of my life and which has shaped me so much. That is, the idea that the good life is the perfectly logical, objective, rational and truthful life - devoid of emotion, in a way.
Being a voracious reader didn’t help, you know. It’s a rabbit hole. You read Kierkegaard and then Nietzsche and then Marcus and you don’t seem to see why rationality and objectivity is not the end goal of life.
It took a 3500-word essay I read in August 2021 to start a line of questioning that I now believe has led me to a better answer. The article was titled, Democracy is sentimental, and was written by Elizabeth Cantalamessa for Aeon Magazine.
Here is the link if you want to read it.
Never mind that this article had some very important ideas I had come across in reading Bertrand Russell’s exploration of what a good life is. They just didn’t make sense coming from Russell, who to me, seemed to be a man of absolute rationality. How could a man that was that rational tell me anything about feeling, or loving?
My new idea of a good life is that it must be a quest for objectivity and rationalism driven by love and the ability to feel and cherish intense emotions. To use the exact words of Bertrand Russell - whom I now agree with to a large extent - “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Neither love without knowledge nor knowledge without love can produce a good life”.
I came to this conclusion by realising that truth exists in two dimensions. There is of course the logical, rational dimension of truth, which we are all aware of. What we are less aware of, much to our detriment, is the metaphysical dimension of truth.
Let me give you an example. We all know that time management is a key skill for success and that managing our finances is what we should be doing. We know that at least from the age of about 13. But as you would expect, many of us never do that. Not necessarily because these are hard things to do, but because that is merely truth experienced from a logical perspective.
That is why it is not until some people reach their mid-twenties and decide that they want a different life they suddenly become good time and financial managers. It is of course the same truth and reality that they had known since childhood. What has changed is their experience of this truth, or what they feel about this truth.
The argument is therefore established that we cannot fully experience truth without feeling. And what other feeling to consider for a good life than love?
It is for this reason that we must cherish our feelings and learn to feel intensely. For in as much as the laws of logic and all rational thought will guide us to logical truth, such an experience will be meaningless if it is not corroborated by our feelings guiding us to the metaphysical experience of truth. Learn to feel deeply about the things that you hold to be true.
This suggests that in as much as we train our minds to be rational by reading and debating, we must train our hearts to feel intensely by; learning to love and to be tender, learning to be vulnerable and to be intense, learning to be driven by fire in our bellies and learning to acknowledge and cherish our emotions.
To borrow the allegory of the chariot from Plato, I now think that a good life is like a charioteer, signifying reason, managing a chariot pulled by two horses, love and work. Of course what I now think is no new philosophy, it is just existing truth that I have now experienced in a metaphysical manner and which I believe has made me complete in that regard.
Since the chariot of life runs on, this idea I now hold may change. But I make no apology for holding it now, here, at this moment. It was Emerson who said that a little consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and I wholly agree with him. Learn to change your mind when the facts change and when your metaphysical experience of truth changes and you will be fine.
Let me end by concluding with the accurate words of Sigmund Freud, “Love and work, work and love, that is all there is”. A good life is indeed to love, to feel, and to work.