At least since Socrates, intelligent men have repeatedly attempted to infuse meaning into human life to compensate for its hollowness. They have attempted to replace the tedium of Hesiod's "Works and Days" with the elevated pursuit of the "good life" as the paradigmatic human condition. In his column "One Version of the Good Life" (Oct. 9, 1995), Abiola Lapite revives these teleological urgings.
The seductive charm of Lapite's column lies in the fact that we do indeed long for something more than simply living for the sake of living. In his ability to evoke such longings, Lapite appears as a worthy heir of Socrates and his disciples, of their lofty desire to grasp the beautiful and the good. One is almost ashamed, then, to approach his column with "ifs" and "buts."
So let me begin with a concession: I agree with Lapite that the pursuit of the "beautiful," or in the modern psychologist's more comprehensive parlance, the search for "meaning," should be the proper end for the noble souls.
What I disagree with is his ascription of the pursuit of the good life as a natural calling for all men. In so doing he forgets that the pursuit of the good life was always thought by its greatest explicators as the privilege of the few.
Lapite's misapplication of the good life is not merely a technical matter for idle pedants to fret over: It is symptomatic of a certain modern misunderstanding and has had dangerous consequences for our times.
Before enumerating this misunderstanding, however, I should like to recount the original teaching on the good life in order to find our bearing.
The most profound teaching concerning the good life may be contained in Plato's "Republic," in the famous allegory of the cave. In it Plato presents the condition of all men as prisoners in a dark cave, bound and forced to look at a wall against which are reflections of reality. The cave represents all things that prevent man from grasping reality, most important among them the conventions of his society. Attachment to society therefore means attachment to opinion, whereas liberation from it represents knowledge of reality.
The good life for Plato was escaping from society's fetters, leaving the cave and ascending to where the sun illumines all phenomena as they really are. This is philosophy. Lapite may object by saying that he only speaks of the aesthetic life as the good life, but the aesthete's version of the good life is directly related to and derivative of the philosophic life. It was Rousseau and Nietzsche who transformed philosophy from knowing to creating or willing, thereby broadening its horizon.
Yet Plato and the ancients (as well as Rousseau and Nietzsche) never suggested that all men can view the sun without harm, or become philosophers. They knew that those without philosophic natures -- which is to say almost all men -- would become blinded and disoriented by the exposure to the sun. Two unpalatable possibilities could result from this: The masses could come to depreciate philosophy out of frustration, or philosophy may become diluted to suit the masses and therefore be misused.
To safeguard the sanctity of philosophy, the ancients and the more discerning modern philosophers therefore resorted to a teaching that distinguished the philosophers and the masses. Philosophy was to be the exclusive right of the philosophic types, while the masses were to be indoctrinated with ideology or opinion which would keep the masses content with their humble stations in life. Unbeknownst to Lapite, the good life is not possible without an arrangement where, to use his criticism, "some [actually most] men eat only so that they might work."
The modern intellectual project on the other hand, culminating in the Enlightenment, reversed the ancient formula and universalized philosophy. The moderns believed that they could make all men reasonable, and that all "enlightened" individuals could profitably pursue their own particular visions of the good life.
The development of modernity, however, has vindicated the ancients' misgivings about popularization of philosophy, or the liberation of the masses from the cave.
The great illness of modern man, according to our social scientists, is a kind of existential dissatisfaction, an absence of meaning in his life. The reasons are transparent. In a world which trumpeted the extraordinary individual's creative power to endow his life with purpose, the masses still lacked the ability to respond to this summon. For them the old certitudes of belief, of occupation, and class were decidedly preferable to the improbable dream of attaining the good life.
Instead of satisfaction gained from the attainment of individuality and by extension the good life, the masses were thus overcome with a feeling of inferiority and inadequacy for themselves, and envy toward the capable few. This initiated the appearance of the entire catalogue of modern psychological malaises which Freud and his school made famous, as well as the new tyranny of the majority, an effort to extinguish individuality and creativity altogether. It is against this majoritarian, anti-philosophic outlook which Mill wrote his eloquent defense, "On Liberty."
Of course, the ancients' warnings about the distortion of philosophy as a result of its popularization is nowhere as justified as in the example of our dilettante. In his unqualified espousal of the pursuit of the good life without awareness of its origins or dangers, Lapite reveals the essential nature and limits of philosophy.
