The basic premise of the book is this: Philosophical reflection helps us come to understand important truths about ourselves and the world. These important truths help us to live well; they might even be essential to living well as a human being. But this philosophical reflection needs to be suitably informed. We need to understand how to reflect philosophically before we can make proper use of philosophical reflection. And sometimes to know how to do philosophy requires that you know a thing or two about it. That is the starting point for this book. You need to learn how to think well in order to understand how to live well.
Here is one small example: Many philosophers would say that there is a difference between living pleasantly and living well. Sometimes we should choose the less pleasant option if it means doing the right thing. Basic stuff, really, but it’s easily forgotten. To understand this, you need to understand that there is a difference between the right and the good: Pleasure might always feel good, but it is not always right.
This ought to be obvious, but it’s amazing how often it’s ignored. When it’s ignored, we tend to end up pursuing a life of pleasure, or ‘feeling better’, rather than living well or being better. It’s easy and natural to make ‘feeling better’ our top priority, but that pursuit comes with a cost. Often this cost is that we live in a way that we would not, if we reflected on it, choose. And what follows then is regret, shame, and dissatisfaction. We have lived pleasantly, but we have not lived well.
Neither is ‘living well’ necessarily aligned with the other common tropes of the modern self-help genre: wealth, success, confidence, productivity, etc. We are all familiar with the dated stereotype of the successful confident wealthy productive businessman who comes to the end of his working life and only wishes he’d spent more time with his children. He thought he was pursuing something important but instead comes to realise that life has passed him by. He has misunderstood what is of value to him. Regret, shame, dissatisfaction. He feels the need to apologise, but he is not sure what for. He has lived wealthily, successfully, confidently, productively, but he has not lived well.
To understand what it is to live well requires a deeper understanding of value, beyond the superficial aims of wealth, success, and pleasure. Gaining a deeper understanding of value requires philosophical reflection: that is what philosophers have been doing for 2,500 years. But how can you be expected to reflect on the difference between living pleasantly and living well, between the right and the good, if you are not aware that there is a difference between the right and the good? How can you weigh up options when you don’t even know that there are options? There is a minimal requirement for some knowledge and understanding in order to engage in the practice of philosophical reflection.
And how should you engage in this practice? What are the approaches, methods, or techniques that you can use to do so? This is also a kind of minimal knowledge and understanding needed to do philosophy properly. This is what the discipline is.
This book is an introduction to philosophy, first and foremost. Its purpose is to show you what philosophy is and how to do it. It does this by showing you some paradigmatic examples of what philosophy looks like when it is done well. This provides the necessary minimal requirement of knowledge and understanding to enable you to engage in your own suitably informed philosophical reflection on what it is, for you, to live well.
People often complain that philosophy doesn’t give you any definitive answers. But that’s because they misunderstand what philosophy is for. Philosophy is meant to equip you to find your own answers.
Philosophy does not tell you what to think; it shows you how to think. That is a cliché that tells an important truth. There are no answers here because it’s not my place to give you answers. That’s your job because, when it comes to living well, the answers must be your own. The best that philosophy can do is to offer you the right questions, asked in the right way, and some possible methods by which you can answer those questions for yourself. You have to work out the answers for yourself.
But we do not have to start from scratch: the long history of philosophy already has a variety of good answers to the question of how to live well as a human being. Those ‘answers’ form the main content of this book. Here you’ll find sketches of the philosophical background for each historical school of thought on the art of living well. Against that background, it will be clearer to see what the answers are and, more crucially, why they might be good answers for you.
I think the philosophical background is important because it provides the justification for the truth of the answer being given. Without that justification, the answers float precariously, untethered, without foundation. It might seem to be true, on the face of it, but if you don’t understand what makes it true then it could easily be an illusion; how would you know if you were wrong?
A philosopher would say that this ‘belief without justification’ leaves you with opinion but not knowledge. And when it comes to things of great importance, we want to trust to knowledge, not mere opinion. If you were being launched into space on a rocket, you’d want the rocket to be made by someone who has knowledge about rocket-building; you’d want a rocket scientist, not just someone who has strong opinions about rockets. Would you be happy to be operated on by a surgeon who had an ‘opinion’ about how to do surgery, but no justification for that opinion? We want our beliefs to be grounded on good foundations.
For me, it’s also the foundations that give the answer its strength and power. In coming to understand why something is true, we come to see the real truth in it and not just the semblance of truth. It’s this understanding that really changes us; it’s the philosophy underlying the answers that gives them their power and depth. Many answers to the question of how to live well as a human being can seem trite or platitudinous without these deep foundations.
The danger of this is shown when we sum up the lessons (of each philosophical school of thought featured in this book) as slogans: ‘Prioritise the ethical’, ‘trust in reason’, ‘aim for the happy middle’, ‘align with nature’, ‘take pleasure in the simple things’, ‘control yourself’. Read as ‘rules for life’ these platitudes seem trivial. Understanding what makes them true transforms them into powerful life-orienting philosophies. This transformation comes from the change that is made in you when you come to greater philosophical understanding.
Philosophical understanding often comes from coming to see the same familiar things in new and different ways. When you learn something in philosophy, the world does not change; you do.
My intention is to offer a range of different philosophical answers to the question of what it is to live well as a human being, providing enough of the philosophical background for each to avoid any remaining a mere platitude. You can take what you like from them. You will probably not agree with all of the arguments supporting these answers – in fact, you cannot agree with all of them all of the time because they sometimes disagree with one another – but I am certain that you will find helpful ideas in all of them, even if only to define yourself against. Understanding what you are not is a good way of more clearly seeing what you are.
For all the difference and disagreement, there is something common to all the philosophical schools of thought, which is this: In order to live better, we need to better understand what it is to live well. If we do not understand what it is to live well, we have almost no chance of actually doing so (and if by chance we did, we wouldn’t realise it anyway). This is what generates the need for philosophy. We need to reflect on our lives, and on our thoughts about how to live, and subject them to examination: we need to put our thoughts to the test. There is a certain method to doing this, and it can be done well or it can be done badly. ‘Philosophy’ is the name we give to the method of examining your thoughts when it is done well. It is what Socrates did, and it is what all that followed Socrates have continued to do. You need to ask the right questions in the right way; you need to learn how to ask the right questions in the right way.
Once you start asking the right questions in the right way, the answers will soon follow, with a little effort. Fortunately for us we do not have to put in much effort because many of these lines of reasoning have already been thoroughly examined over 2,500 years. The paths have all been clearly mapped out. All we need to do to benefit from their combined wisdom is read the map, locate ourselves within it, then follow a path and see where it leads. Hopefully this book can help you do just that.
As this book is a brief introduction to the history of philosophical thinking on the art of living well, it is composed in more or less chronological order. There is a direction of travel in the history of philosophy, such that what came later often follows from what came before. But the importance of this needn’t be overstated. Whilst it might be helpful to understand the arc of philosophical history, each sketch should be able to stand on its own two feet, even if what it is standing on is the shoulders of giants.
Academic philosophers will probably be annoyed by this book, because I skip over a lot of the technical details and interpretative disagreements that are characteristic of the subject in universities. But it is not written for them. They should understand it to be an exoteric work.
This book is a ladder, useful for climbing out of a pit, and can be left behind once climbed. If the day comes when you, too, see this book as lacking in technical depth, then its task will already be done.
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