Defining a Good Life - Essay Example

Defining a ‘Good Life’ The idea of a good life has been an important concern of philosophy over the centuries. Many thinkers have tried to define what entails living a good or happy life. Among these, one of the first ideas was that of eudaimonia among the ancient Greeks. According to Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, happiness could be achieved only if people led virtuous lives. Aristotle set up an ultimate goodness as the aim of all human activity and thought. He held that if there is any goodness in humans, it is in the functions that they serve. For instance, a good flutist is ‘good’ as far as his flute playing is good (Parry). Aristotle’s definition also held that goodness was an end in itself. Eudaimonia was reached when there was ‘nothing missing’ from a life. Therefore, a good life was also a ‘complete’ life. He also specifically identifies human goodness with psychological goodness rather than a material or physical goodness. His happiness is of the mind, rather than of the body (Parry). These are just a few facets of the more complex notion of eudaimonia or happiness that Aristotle defines in his treatises. This idea however has evolved over the years and ‘goodness’ or a ‘good life’ today does not necessarily have to do with serving one’s ‘function’ or leading a purely virtuous life. There has even been the question of whether goodness or happiness is really of the mind alone. Bill Clegg and Matthew Dickman are two contemporary writers who present rather different opinions on what makes an excellent life. Bill Clegg’s memoir Ninety Days traces his progress through ninety days of rehabilitation from drug addiction while Dickman’s poems touch upon many contemporary issues found in relationships like gender roles, abuse, and pain, among others. These two writers present rather different views on what makes a ‘good life’ and this paper will explore how they compare to each other as well as to Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia. Bill Clegg, in his autobiographical work, Ninety Days, formulates a set of principles that, to him, make a life worth living. He traces his descent into drug addiction and back again into sobriety in the memoir. One of the key requirements, according to Clegg’s worldview, to moving towards a good life, is honesty; honesty with one’s friends and family, but most importantly, honesty with oneself. This honesty needs to be coupled with a strict regime to recover from any negative or debilitating experience like turning into an addict. Clegg’s own commitment to rehabilitation, as recorded in Ninety Days, is not free from trouble. He has a relapse, for instance, when just three days away from his goal and yet he starts again. Clegg, therefore, leaves room for mistakes and believes in a greater redemptive power that can overcome weakness. Another one of Clegg’s requirements for a good life is the need to establish contact with others. For instance, at one point, when he has only sixteen more days to go, he has to move out from Noah’s apartment when he is not there. However, he needs to have a friend, Sai, with him while he moves out only to have a ‘glamorous force field’ around him to make him feel better and stronger when he reenters the building he left on a stretcher for the first time. This need for companionship and the value that Clegg attaches to forming human relationships is missing from Aristotle’s idea. Clegg’s friend in rehab, Polly, is another example of how Clegg considers establishing human contact with others as an instrumental part of getting sober and back to living a good life again. Polly is in many ways a foil to Clegg, she is both similar to him in circumstances and yet very different. In the extract where Clegg describes his first meeting with Polly, he declares how his first thought at seeing her was ‘I hope she doesn’t want to talk after the meeting’ but he winds up chasing after her for her number. Their growing attachment is also responsible for his staying sober as Clegg maintains: Somewhere in the camaraderie and comfort and genuine usefulness to each other we made our way first to ninety days clean and then, slowly, began to live sober lives (Clegg, ‘The Struggle’). Even the last words of the book ‘Find them now’ speak about how important it is to find other people to connect to while recovering from something like drug addiction and returning to a good life. For Clegg then, this brutal honesty about one’s own mistakes and failures coupled with the importance for connecting to others in similar situations and finding comfort in camaraderie are essential components of leading a good life. Matthew Dickman, in his poems, proposes a different set of principles to abide by when looking to reach eudaimonia. For instance, in ‘Love’, Dickman presents a view of love that involves a certain degree of pain or suffering. He talks about how people go to movie theaters where people are in love with Spiderman who is himself in love with ‘a girl he can’t have.’ This quality of unrequited love is present throughout the poem. But there is also something more optimistic, a joyous quality in his conception of love also. Dickman raises the quotidian to greater heights when he speaks of how stamps love envelopes, incidents of ‘love in an elevator’ or ‘love in the backseat of your parent’s Corvette’. Most interestingly, Dickman addresses this binary of love and suffering directly at the end with his final line: ‘I hope you do not suffer.’ This is a message that a father wants to tell his young daughter but in some ways it goes against the kind of love that Dickman has been visualizing in the poem. Perhaps Dickman deliberately includes this facet of love, also – this need to protect our loved ones from hurt and pain – to widen the scope of love as he sees it. The poem is aptly titled as it truly does explore all the various ways in which love touches us and expresses itself. Being in love, whether or not it is reciprocated, then, is important to Dickman in his conception of a ‘good life.’ This is similar to Clegg’s view of empathy and socialization as important requirements to a good life. However, where Clegg needs to break the ‘addict and enabler’ relationship that he has with Noah to recover, Dickman seems to be asserting quite the opposite: ‘If the world knew how/ much they loved each other/ then we would all be better off.’ In another poem, ‘Slow Dance’, Dickman again emphasizes how more important than ‘putting another man on the moon’ or ‘a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga’, it was to slow dance with ‘exquisite’ strangers. Through his elaborate analogy of the slow dance of ‘haiku and honey’ and ‘orange and orangutan’, Dickman proposes how important it is to form, unhurried and deep relations with even stranger sometimes as that is what being human is about. The deadening nature of everyday routine must be supplemented with these chance meetings with strangers for it is this that Dickman believes ‘what we should be doing right now. Scrapping/ for joy.’ In ‘Some Days’ also Dickman visualizes unknown beautiful women who will walk in to the café where he works. This need for the exotic and unknown is somewhat contradictory to his emphasis on the commonplace in ‘Love’. In effect, Dickman seems to be proposing that for a truly ‘excellent’ life, one must be connected to people one loves – be it brothers, fathers, strangers in a café. His conception of love is an unconventional, broad idea that becomes an important requirement for achieving eudaimonia. In ‘We Are Not Temples’, Dickman explores a slightly more spiritual approach to the good life. He brings up the Buddhist concepts of how resisting the changes that life inevitably brings, is the real reason behind all our unhappiness. In this poem, Dickman proposes that the route to happiness and a good life lies in being flexible and detached. Dickman’s usual sensual style is restrained in this poem for a more spiritual and uplifting voice. The human body that Dickman usually evokes in his previous poems (like in ‘Love’, for instance, where he mentions the ‘altar of the mouth’ or ‘the gothic archways of feet’), is transformed into a more philosophical idea. Our bodies are too ‘chemical’, the poet says, they are not sacred temples but rather overindulged ‘organic bed and breakfasts’. To compare these ideas with the idea of eudaimonia, we notice that in Dickman’s more spiritual verse, the idea of goodness being more of the mind rather than only of the body is in some ways similar to Aristotle’s idea. And as far as Aristotle believes that all life must be directed towards an end, there is in this some resonance with Clegg’s notion that the good life is one where there is a disciplined movement forward to growth and development. But other than these minor points of convergence, Clegg’s and Dickman’s ideas of an excellent life are much more personal, and less concerned with serving a particular ‘function.’ Clegg focuses on the need for redemption and how through collaboration, empathy and discipline, this is possible; while Dickman focuses on love and opening ourselves up to new and exotic experiences for true happiness. He also ties in the Buddhist philosophy of being fluid and open to change with this idea of new experiences and unconventional love to formulate his concept of a good life. Each of these notions has their own emphasis on different aspects of happiness, and it is up to individuals to choose the path that suits them best. Works Cited: Clegg, Bill. Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2012. Print. ---. ‘The Struggle to Ninety Days.’ HuffingtonPost.com. 12 Apr. 2012. Web. 15 Nov. 2012. Dickman, Matthew. ‘Love.’ So Much Joy it Hurts. 5 Dec. 2009. Web. 15 Nov. 2012. ---. ‘Some Days.’ So Much Joy it Hurts. 14 Mar. 2010. Web. 15 Nov. 2012. ---. ‘We Are Not Temples.’ The Ron Blog. 27 Oct. 2009. Web. 15 Nov. 2012. Parry, Richard. ‘Ancient Ethical Theory.’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 7 Aug. 2009. Web. 15 Nov. 2012. Read More