An Introduction to Philosophy, Second Edition

Created March 25, 2024 by Marc Skuster

Learning Objectives - On completing this chapter, you will be able to:

Define the concept of love as philia, and discuss how love so conceived applies in relationships with other persons, with things, and with oneself.
Discuss and evaluate the concept of eros as articulated in the Symposium and in the “ideal union” concept of love.
Explain the meaning of eudaimonia in the philosophy of Aristotle and discuss the connection between this idea and Aristotle’s teleological view of the world and humanity.
Discuss the relationship between virtue and habit in the ethical philosophy of Aristotle.

In this chapter we will begin to study things that matter, things that are important. We have had brief passing encounters with ethical issues in prior chapters, but beginning with this chapter and for the remainder of this text we will be concerned with issues that are, at least broadly speaking, ethical.

We will begin with the things that matter to us individually, the things we love. Of course, different people love different things, people, and activities, so our starting point has to do with things that are good in a highly subjective way. But after thinking about the nature of love, we will turn our attention to the good life later in this chapter. It’s tempting to think that happiness and the good life are, like love, highly subjective. But notice that we can love, prefer, and pursue things that are also quite self-destructive. Between love and happiness it is quite possible for us to be at odds with ourselves. Indeed, this is the stuff of tragedy. So perhaps what will make us happy and lead to a flourishing life isn’t so subjective after all.

In subsequent chapters we’ll examine the nature of morality generally, some theories of morally good action, and finally social justice. It might be tempting to think we move from the more to the less subjective in this sequence of topics. But subjectivity and objectivity are not the organizing principle I have in mind in taking things in this order. Rather, our own sphere of concern, what matters to us or what we love can be more narrowly focused on our subjective desires or it can encompass a broader realms beginning with our own well being and proceeding to concern for others, respect for persons generally, and ultimately concern for the various often nested communities we are part of, all the way from the homeowners association up to the biosphere. Maturing as a person likewise involves moving beyond the narcissistic self-centered sphere of concern we have as infants and towards an appropriately broader sphere of concern.

Our introduction to ethics is organized around the view that developing as a person towards moral maturity is largely a matter of successively expanding our sphere of personal concern. We will take up topics in ethics roughly after the pattern of the developmental stages towards moral maturity.

Love

Friendship (Philia)

Love comes in many varieties. A few varieties of love identified in ancient Greece continue to provide useful points of orientation. The Greek terms for these are Philia, eros and agape. Philia is friendship (this word is also the root of “philosophy” literally translated as the love of wisdom). Eros refers to erotic love, and agape we are most familiar with through the Christian tradition as something like universal love for all people. Agape is the sort of love that God has for all people, and it also provides the foundation for Christian ethical precepts.

The classic account of Philia comes from Aristotle who takes friendship to be a concern for the good of another for her sake. In friendship we adopt the good of another as a good of our own. It’s important that we understand this as expanding our sphere of concern beyond ourselves.

Concern for another just because of some benefit she will bring to us is not genuine friendship. Cultivating a relationship with someone because you think it will improve your social standing or help you land a job is not really love in the sense of friendship. This is the significance of having concern for another for his or her own sake. Given this interpretation, we can see the cynical view that everyone is ultimately motivated only by narrow self-centered self-interest as entailing the non-existence of Philia or friendship. For this reason cynicism seems a rather sad and lonely view.

Friendship is not, on Aristotle’s view, opposed to self-interest. It is common to think that when we come to genuinely care for another we do so at the expense of self-interest. Love, on this popular view often involves a measure of self-sacrifice for the sake of another. But this popular view is at best a bad distortion of Aristotle’s view of friendship. This is because Aristotle takes love in the sense of friendship to involve an expansion of our own sphere of concern to include the good of another, not the refocusing of it away from ourselves. Of course there will be conflicting desires among friends. But among friends these aren’t mere conflicts between their individual wills. Rather, when I love my friend in the sense of Philia and I want one thing while my friend has a competing desire, I experience this as an internal conflict of my own will, and perhaps my friend does, too. It might not be obvious to either of us which movie we should see on our night out together. But the question of my self-interest versus my friend’s dissolves in our mutual concern for each other for his or her own sake. The salient issue becomes what movie we should see together.

We often suppose that loving another means feeling good about that person. But love is emotionally more complicated than that, and Aristotle’s account of Philia sheds some light on this. A parent who loves his child will generally feel good about that child when things are going well. But another emotional manifestation of whole hearted love for the child might include disappointment when the child makes an irresponsible choice. This makes perfect sense on Aristotle’s account since to love the child is to adopt the good for the child as the good for the parent. When the child’s bad choice threatens what’s good for the child, being disappointed can be seen as part of caring about what is best for the child. A corollary of this insight is that coddling or spoiling a child is not the loving thing for a parent to do when this is liable to undermine what is good for the child in the long run.

Loving Things

If philosophy is genuinely a case of Philia, then we should be able to make sense out of talk of loving things other than persons. We do commonly talk of loving chocolate, loving this or that band, or loving our house. In most cases this probably shouldn’t be taken literally. Love is not mere appreciation, preferring, or desiring. So saying I love the new Spoon album isn’t saying that I care for it for its own sake or that I have adopted its interests as my own. It doesn’t have interests that I’m in any position to adopt as my own. So, talk of loving things other than persons is often merely metaphorical. But is it always metaphorical?

Philia requires that a thing have a good of its own that we can adopt as part of the good for ourselves. We don’t ordinarily regard things other than persons and relatively sophisticated animals as having a good of their own. My computer has value only in that it is useful to me. We refer to this kind of value as instrumental value. This is the sort of value a thing has because it is instrumental to satisfying other ends that we have. Typically we deny that non-sentient things have any value beyond their usefulness to us. In this frame of mind we are prone to think the young hot rodder who takes his vintage Mustang to have a good of its own, a value that is intrinsic to it and not merely instrumental to him and its admirers, as suffering from a kind of delusion. But perhaps this doesn’t tell us so much about whether non-sentient things can have the kind of value that can make them appropriate objects of love as it does about the shortcomings of our ordinary state of mind. It might be worth considering the matter from a more creative state of mind and pondering the relationship between an artist and his or her art.

As a listener I can admire or enjoy a Spoon song or a Rachmaninoff piano concerto, but I’m not in much of a position to adopt the good of the work as a good of my own. However, Britt Daniel and his colleagues are in a position to adopt the good of a Spoon song as a good of their own. Rachmaninoff could very well be concerned with the aesthetic quality of his piano concerto for its own sake. The cynic will snidely remark that artists only aim to please their audience for the sake of drawing praise and honor on themselves. But I think the cynic fails to understand the artist and the experience of creating art. Practicing artists are typically not too concerned with reviews and prizes while they are actively creating. The concert pianist invests most of her time and concern in playing well. The adulation of an audience may be icing on the cake, but what really matters to the serious artist is the art. The creative activity is not a mere means to some further end, but it’s absorbing, even all consuming. The artist is concerned with playing well, dancing well, making a beautiful and functional building, cooking well. We might worry that this is all just so much self-indulgence.

The cynic might claim that artists are just doing what they want to, and if they are really lucky, others might like it too. But again, this doesn’t really do justice to the nature of creative activity. When I bake an apple pie I might be inclined to do so this way or that, and I might be perfectly happy with the results. But I don’t get to set the standard of apple pie goodness. If I’m to be serious about my baking, I have to learn from people who know. Then I have to practice a lot, recognize my mistakes, and learn from them. In this process I have to sublimate my own inclinations and aspire to standards of excellence that lie well beyond my self-interest narrowly conceived. Really baking well requires a kind of aspiration and devotion that goes beyond self-indulgence. In recognizing this we can see the potential for love in creative activity. Creative activity can involve expanding one’s sphere of concern to include the goodness of some activity or product for its own sake and this is the essence of Philia. Art, I’d suggest, is distinguished in part by the loving devotion of the artist. Now, depending on your inclination, listen to some Rachmaninoff or some Spoon and see if you get my point.

Self-Esteem

What if we apply Aristotle’s classic treatment of Philia to ourselves? The result is just that to love ourselves is to adopt the good for ourselves as a good of our own. Broadly speaking, to love yourself is just to care about what is best for you. We haven’t yet said much about what is best for you. But let’s suppose for now that what is best for you is in some ways subjective and to be understood in terms of what I love. If what’s best for me is just what’s good for the things I love, then to love myself is just to love what I love. This is pretty much the view of self-love advanced by Harry Frankfurt in his essay, “The Dear Self,” which is the last chapter of his book The Reasons of Love.

The idea that to love yourself is just to love what you love sounds kind of poetically appealing, but a significant worry about this application of Aristotle’s view of Philia to the self is that it is also appears to be trivial. After all, how could you fail to love what you love? If loving what you love is all there is to self-esteem this would seem to make poor self-esteem logically impossible. Our account of self-esteem should not rob the idea of all content. Frankfurt appreciates this problem and addresses it in an interesting way. He argues that we can fail to love what we love by being half hearted. Sometimes we are at odds with ourselves in ways that undermine our love for the things we love. To take an all too common example, many of us both love our health and at least like things like fatty foods that aren’t so good for our health. Our appetite for unhealthy food frustrates and undermines our love of being healthy. So we are half hearted and at odds with ourselves about the prospect of going to the gym and having tofu for dinner. To have low self-esteem on Frankfurt’s account just is to have a divided will that leaves us half hearted about the things we love. So we might love our bodies, but not whole heartedly when we hold ourselves to unrealistic standards of physical beauty. Too many of us love our lovers, but not whole heartedly because we still wish they were somehow more ideal. Or we might love our work, but not whole heartedly if we feel it is underappreciated or if it has too much drudgery attached to it. On Frankfurt’s account, these are all examples of ways in which we might suffer from low self-esteem. To love yourself is nothing more than to love your friends and family, your community, your activities, and projects whole heartedly. To love yourself is to wholeheartedly love what you love.

This might sound pretty good. Enough so that it can be easy to miss just how dramatic a departure Frankfurt’s account of self love is from conventional popular wisdom. We are frequently told that we have to love ourselves before we can love others. And in this conventional wisdom, loving ourselves just means feeling good about ourselves or thinking we are perfectly fine the way we are. But this is the narcissistic approach to self-esteem, a self- referential approach that is continually and simultaneously perpetuated and exploited in our consumer culture. Pop psychology tells us that we can’t care for others until we care for ourselves and consumerism makes sure that we are never quite done taking care of ourselves. This view is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it can be hard to penetrate even with pretty clear and compelling argument. What Frankfurt is recommending, perhaps without enough fanfare, is that this popular cult of self-esteem gets things backwards. Leading a meaningful life and loving yourself is a matter of whole heartedly caring about other things. There is no reference to feeling good about yourself in Frankfurt’s account of self-love. If things go well, feeling good about yourself might be the result of whole heartedly loving what you love. But trying to feel good about yourself is exactly the wrong starting place.

Erotic Love

Even the most subtle minds are often overly tempted by the lure of simplification. So it is not too surprising to hear smart people speaking of erotic love as nothing more than friendship plus sex. This view has the attraction of reducing erotic love to just a special variety of Philia. But the world has seen plenty of serious lovers that for one reason or another can’t or don’t have sex.

And we are familiar enough with the notion of “friends with benefits” that aren’t cases of erotic love. We also struggle here with the unfortunate fact that the word “erotic” has acquired a seedy connotation over the past century or two and now often serves as a code word for “X Rated.” This is somewhat worse than a distortion of the word’s traditional meaning. Erotic love does involve desire, attachment, and passion that is focused on a person, but this is not exhausted by the desire for sex. It’s not even clear that this kind of love entails desire for sex. So it’s probably best to try to examine erotic love on its own terms, first and then maybe somewhere down the line think about how it relates to Philia or friendship.

The classic work on erotic love is Plato’s Symposium. This dialogue is a literary masterpiece as well as an interesting philosophical discussion of enduring themes on love. Do we search for our ideal other half in love? Do we love for reasons? And if so, what of the individuals we love? Do they matter except for the qualities we find lovable in them? These issues remain relevant in the very active contemporary literature on erotic love.

Erotic love is traditionally thought of as the kind of love that involves passionate longing or desire. This would appear to make erotic love self-centered and this seems to be at odds with the idea of Philia where another is valued for his or her own sake. A developed account of eros might resolve this apparent tension. And some further reflection on passionate longing might motivate this. If erotic love is hopelessly mired in selfish desire, then we might deem it a bad thing, nothing more than a euphemism for lust. But this would entirely miss what many people seek and sometimes find in erotic loving relationships.

When we desire something we generally have our reasons. There is something about it we appreciate. When we are attracted to and desire some person, it may be because of this person’s wit, beauty or some other quality we find charming. Socrates makes this point in Plato’s Symposium and it becomes the first step towards a highly impersonal view of eros. We might love an individual for their beauty, but this is just a step towards loving beautiful people generally and ultimately to loving beauty itself. As Socrates sees it, this is all for the good as our attention and love is drawn ever closer to the most real and divine of things, the form of goodness itself. Attachment to a particular individual is not the proper aim of erotic love and may even be a hindrance. The view of erotic love voiced by Socrates in the Symposium becomes refocused on God in the thought of Augustine with the result that in some veins of the Christian tradition proper erotic love becomes passionate devotion to God. When focused on a person, it is dismissed as mere sinful lust, a misguided eros focused on less than worthy objects.

Christianity aside, the Socratic conception of erotic love is much broader than personal love. Any passionate aspiration can fall under the scope of the erotic on this broad view. An artist’s passionate devotion to creative activity might count as erotic even when it has nothing to do with sexuality itself. Freud offers a kind of inversion of this view. All creative aspiration is erotic, but Freud sees erotic aspiration as essentially sexual. When our sexual longings get thwarted or repressed, they surface in other kinds of creative activity. So Socrates would say that aspiration generally is erotic and not necessarily sexual. Freud would also say all aspiration is erotic and still indirectly sexual.

Socrates’ view of erotic love in the Symposium is a highly intellectualized view that most people simply can’t relate to. The contemporary literature on erotic love has framed the problem with this impersonal view of erotic love in new ways. Robert Nozick, for instance, has pointed out that if erotic love for another is focused on qualities we find charming or desirable, then it should make sense for us to “trade up” whenever we find another individual who has those qualities to a higher degree or those qualities plus others we find charming. Indeed, in the shuffle of immature relationships we see this happen often enough. He dumps her for someone hotter, or she dumps him for someone cooler. And granted some adults never quite outgrow this behavior. But as erotic loving relationships go, we see something deficient in this “trading up” behavior.

We are inclined to say that these are rather sad cases where some of the people involved don’t really know how to love. And we are inclined to say this precisely because there is something superficial about loving just the qualities we find attractive to the exclusion of the individual person that might have some of those qualities. So, insofar as passionate longing or desire is focused on qualities we find attractive or charming, we seem to be missing most of what we find valuable in loving relationships. Perhaps what we do prize is a mix of Philia and eros. But just saying this hardly solves the problems of erotic love, since it should be clear now how there is liable to be some tension between the two.

The Ideal Union

Nozick proposes a model of love as a kind of union. In Nozick’s version of the union model lovers form a “we” which is a new and different kind of entity, something more than just the sum of two individuals. We might be on to Nozick’s idea of a “we” when we think of lovers as couples. Being part of a couple changes how we relate to the rest of the world. The IRS now wants to hear from “us” every year. We now socialize with other couples as a couple. I might be known as her husband to some, and she will be known as my wife to others.

Nozick is hardly the first to think of erotic love as a kind of union. The first was probably, once again, Plato, who has Aristophanes offer a colorful telling of the myth of the origins of love at the outset of the Symposium. In this story people were once two-headed eight-limbed round beings who upstaged the gods in their joyful vitality. To instill a bit of humility, the gods split them in two, and since then erotic love has been the attempt by us incomplete halves to find our other half and rejoin, if only temporarily. Less mythical versions of a union model of erotic love have been articulated by several contemporary philosophers of love.

Critics of the union model often see a metaphor run amuck. To think of the couple as a new entity distinct from the individuals that form it obscures the underlying reality. In fact, lovers are autonomous individuals making their own decisions. My selfishness and my self-sacrifice remain relevant in the relationship, but they are impossible to conceptualize on the union model. Our individual tastes, desires, and transgressions get dissolved in a “we.” Love as a kind of union sounds appealing as an ideal, but it may shed only limited light on the nature of our relationships and attitudes, even when these are at their best.

However philosophical theories of love as a union work out, many of us seek partners we think will be ideal complements to ourselves. The dream of a “soul mate” has powerful appeal. In the grip of this vision we often find ourselves projecting what we want to see on to others who probably don’t actually live up to our desires. This may be a pretty good description of infatuation. A classic literary expression of “the birth of love” is given by the French writer Stendhal (1822 On Love). Stendhal describes falling in love as a process of crystallization, referring to how a twig left in a salt mine for a period of time will be retrieved covered in salt crystals. Similarly, our perception of our beloved is laced with projections of our own imaginative desire. In infatuation, our imagination gets the best of us and presents a distorted picture of another. The prospects for disappointment are built into such high expectations. If you haven’t personally fallen victim to the cycle of infatuation, disillusionment, and heartbreak yourself, I’m sure you know others who have.

Perhaps the stumbling block of distorting imagination is just a practical problem and the quest for one’s soul mate can be redeemed if only we can get a clear picture of who really is ideal for us. But there are other stumbling blocks built into the quest for one’s soul mate. A problem inherent to this quest is that, except for the searching, it puts one in a totally passive position, expecting another to conform to one’s own needs and desires. There is a tendency towards narcissism in this view when it encourages us to limit our sphere of concern to our own desires. This passivity renders us vulnerable to dependency and disappointment.

Another problem with the ideal union vision of love is that people are not just packages of qualities and capacities. People are active, dynamic, malleable beings that have their own will, grow in their own way, and have their own experience of the world. The person with the qualities you like might not have them tomorrow. Or you might come to prefer different qualities. The person you admire has his or her own desires and will, and fixating on what you want in a partner will render you ill equipped to be responsive to the autonomy and agency of another person.

Our challenge at this point is to find a way of understanding erotic love that is not both selfish and self-defeating. As easy as it might be to fall victim to cynicism, we should find hope in the many cases of people who do find mutually enriching loving relationships. It might help to turn our attention away from what we want and towards trying to understand how erotic love enriches the lives of lovers when it does.

Bestowal

Notice how lovers affect each other. A kindness from a lover isn’t just pleasant, it can also improve the beloved. A sincere complement isn’t just acknowledgement of something attractive or admirable in us, it amplifies that attractive or admirable quality. When we value something or someone we generally appraise that thing or person positively. Further, doing so can make that thing or person more praiseworthy. Through valuing something we bestow value on it. The marketplace provides a simple illustration of this in a very straightforward sense. If lots of people value a house when it goes on the market, its value in a very objective sense increases. It will fetch a higher price as a result. We bestow objective market value through subjectively appraising things highly. Popularity and attraction works something like this in a superficial way. A person’s popularity can be substantially boosted by a few people deeming him or her to be likable. But this is not the kind of bestowal of value that makes loving relationships so enriching to the lives of lovers.

The marketplace example is just supposed to illustrate how valuing something can make it more valuable. Popularity and attractiveness are fleeting things that are as liable to mask vices and insecurities as contribute to flourishing. Much more significant kinds of bestowal are at work in loving relationships. When people care about each other they have much greater impact on each other. And this is not just a matter of degree. We affect those we care about in very different ways. Valuing an admirable quality in someone we love is a way of cultivating that quality.

The contemporary philosopher of love Irving Singer has made bestowal of value central to his treatment of erotic love. Singer’s central idea is that through valuing another in a loving relationship we create value and bestow it on our beloved. Loving another is not just a feeling on this view, it’s a creative activity. Loving another and being loved brings out the best in us and improves the quality of our lives. It might seem obvious enough when put this way. What Singer would underscore is that through loving, we create and bestow value. Of course, as most of us will recognize, the value we bestow on people we care about is not always positive. We can tear down our lovers by being overly critical or unkind. So the first rule of being a good lover is to try to be charitable and kind. Love, when it goes well, is the cultivation of value and goodness in the person we love.

Happiness

Let’s start with the idea of something mattering or being important. First notice the difference between something mattering to us and something mattering for us. Almost anything could matter to someone. All it takes for something to matter to someone is for that person to be concerned with it. Mattering to or being important to someone is pretty subjective. Stamp collecting might matter to one person but not another. Football matters to some people but not others. The difference lies entirely in what the various parties are concerned with, prefer, or value.

Mattering for is another matter. Eating well and getting exercise matter for your health whether you prefer to do these things or not. Participating in caring relationships matters for your psychological well being and this is arguably so even for relatively introverted people who enjoy their solitude. The notion of mattering for is not entirely subjective. And what matters for you is not relative to you in the way that what matters to you is. But mattering for is relational in a different way. There is a sense in which the idea of something mattering for you is incomplete.

Things matter for your health, for your psychological well being, your happiness, your marriage, your career, your projects, or for the quality of your life. You don’t get to just pick and choose which things matter for your health or for your psychological well being. For these things at least, what matters for you is largely settled by what and who you are. It remains an open question whether what matters for our happiness is up to us or subjective in the way that what matters to us is subjective.

Consumerism

Do I get to pick and choose what matters for my happiness? Is what matters for my happiness a question of what matters to me? Assuming the good life is the happy life, the question we have before us now is whether or not happiness and the good life are subjective and relative to our values and preferences the way that what matters to us is. Popular opinion would seem to make short work of these questions and straightaway affirm the subjectivity of happiness and the good life. Surely different people enjoy different things depending on their preferences and values. And nobody gets to decide what I enjoy or prefer but me. So, concludes this line of argument, happiness for me and the good life for me are up to me.

Cultural norms of individualism and liberty probably feed a bias towards subjective ways of thinking about happiness and the good life. The American way of life at the beginning of the 21^st century does seem to include an implicit view of the good life. We are indoctrinated into that view of the good life by advertising and media from a very early age, and our peers, similarly influenced, reinforce the programming. We are used to being referred to as consumers rather than citizens, or simply people. And consumerism might be as good a name as any for the philosophy of the good life that is standard issue in our culture. Consumerism as a philosophy of the good life tells us that what is good for us is just getting what we want. It’s a seductive view. Who could possibly object? We all want what we want after all.

No matter how seductive the conventional wisdom is, if we want to address questions about happiness and the good life philosophically we had better resist the urge to settle them by wishful thinking. A bit of critical thinking should get us past our culturally ingrained bias and at least suggest a more subtle and interesting appreciation of these issues. For starters, let’s look at cases where people really do get everything they want and ask whether these make for plausible examples of happiness and the good life. The spoiled child comes to mind. The spoiled child, by definition, is the child that always gets what he or she wants. But spoiled children are typically not very pleasant or happy. Closer to home, we are all familiar with instances where we get what we wanted and then find that we aren’t as pleased as we’d hoped. Even when we are well satisfied, we are generally not pleased for long. The next even more pressing want waits just around the corner and we are dissatisfied again until we are briefly sated by its attainment.

Getting what he or she wants doesn’t seem to help the spoiled child either. Part of the problem might be that having your every wish indulged provokes insecurity. The spoiled child becomes completely and passively dependent on the parent who indulges, and the stakes are ever higher as the desires become more pressing. Clearly we can get what we want and still not be happy. This should be a pretty clear indicator that what we want is not a perfectly reliable guide to what will make us happy.

Self-Control

Perhaps we have said enough to debunk consumerism as a plausible theory of the good life. But in doing so we ran roughshod over an issue that might be worth exploring. We often suffer from internal conflicts between two or more of the many things that matter to us. It might be that losing a few pounds and being physically fit matter to me. And yet when the dessert cart comes around I give in to the temptation for chocolate. What I want at the moment might diverge from what really matters to me. Of course if I want the chocolate cake, then there is a sense in which it matters to me as well. So we are conflicted. Our wants also change. We get drawn in and in our craving we neglect other things that also matter to us. Our wants don’t just conflict, they seem to jostle and vie for the privilege of commanding our will. So when we choose among the various things we want, like losing some weight or enjoying a piece of cake, we might begin to wonder whether there is some wise rational executive function in our mind that can systematically bring our competing desires into line with each other. Perhaps there is, but the effectiveness of this rational deliberative function varies significantly from person to person, and from period to period in the lives of the same person. It seems that among the people we know some do better and some do worse at resisting the temptation of the moment and staying motivated by what matters to them most. Even in our own lives, most of us can identify times when we exercised self-control more effectively than others.

So here’s what we have so far: There can be conflicts among the things that matter to us and some things matter to us more than others. We can do a better or worse job of resolving the various conflicts in favor of the things that matter more to us. When we do well at this we have willed rationally and exercised self-control. When we fail we fall victim to weakness of will. Based on this, it should be clear that self-control is a good thing. That is to say it’s a virtue. Self- control empowers us to act most effectively on what matters most to us.

We are now in position to articulate another view of the good life, one that still doesn’t appeal to any external standards and makes the good life a function of what matters to us, but doesn’t simply make the good life a question of whatever I want or choose. The good life on this model is one where we reflectively weigh the various things that matter to us in a way that makes it possible to resolve conflicts among them in favor of the things that matter more to us and then exercise the virtue of self- control in formulating the will to act in accordance with those things that matter to us most. On this view, consumerism takes a step in the right direction by looking to what matters to us, but then fails to articulate a model for resolving conflicting values and desires and misses the virtues of rational deliberation and self-control in adjudicating these.

The next big question should be how do we determine what matters most to us? How do we settle the conflicts among our competing desires? Is this simply a matter of our choice? If so, then the whole structure we just articulated might be at risk of collapsing. If what matters to us most can be read off of what we choose, then the distinction between exercising self-control and being weak-willed simply collapses. Suppose we say that if I choose the chocolate cake, that can only be because that’s what matters most to me. If what matters to us is simply a question of what we choose, then there can be no such thing as weakness of will or self-control. So formulating a plausible view of the good life seems to require that we somehow reach beyond our subjective preferences, but it is not yet clear just how. Should some things matter more to us than others? It begins to look like we need to recognize some substantive difference between what matters to us and what matters for us. But it is not yet clear how to do so.

One thing does seem clear on the question, however: we don’t want to be told what is good for us. Settling on what is good for us shouldn’t be a matter of acquiescence to some authority, whether it is our parents, some tyrant, or the tyranny of popular opinion. If we don’t get to decide what matters for us, then it won’t do to have anybody else deciding for us. The possibility that remains open is that determining what matters for us is not a matter of anybody deciding, but instead a matter of us figuring it out. If this suggestion is on the right track, then questions about happiness and the good life are not subjective, that is, they aren’t matters for us or anybody else to just decide. Rather, they are objective in the way that scientific truths are. We have to investigate, discover, reason well, and figure out what is good for us. Enter Aristotle.

The Nicomachean Ethics

When we considered the consumerist conception of happiness and the good life we spoke of identifying what would make us happy. Notice that this way of thinking about happiness puts us in a passive position. Something outside of us does something to us, and it makes us happy. All that is required of us is to be fortunate enough to be in a position to receive this wonderful benefit. By contrast, for Aristotle, happiness is active. Things external to us might help or hinder, but ultimately, for us to be happy just is for us to be active in the right sorts of ways.

Eudaimonia

Aristotle identifies leading the good life with being happy. But happiness in the sense he has in mind is not just feeling happy or being in a happy mood. Moods and feelings are things that come and go in our lives. They are temporary states of mind. Aristotle is not interested in moods so much as what it means to live well. So we are after the idea of an excellent life. The Greek term Aristotle uses is eudaimonia and this might be best translated as living well and doing well. So when Aristotle identifies the good life with happiness, he has something more enduring and emblematic of a life in mind than just feeling good.

You might recall that Aristotle has a teleological view of the world. That is, everything has an end or a goal towards which it strives. He is inclined to understand the nature of things in terms of how they function in pursuing the ends towards which they are oriented. In this spirit, Aristotle would take goodness to be something we naturally aim at, something we are oriented towards by nature. So for Aristotle, the idea of the good life is understood in a naturalistic way. Aristotle conceives of ethics in a way that blends seamlessly into his broader paradigm for understanding the natural world. Goodness is an integral aspect of the natural world. What is good for a thing can be understood in terms of that thing realizing its telos.

The good life, conceived of as happiness in the broader enduring sense, is a goal or an end for a person’s life. But it’s an end of a particular kind in that it is sought for its own sake, not as a means to some further end. Aristotle refers to ends like this as final ends. In more contemporary language we might speak of things that are pursued for their intrinsic value, the value had “in itself” as opposed to things that are pursued for their instrumental value, their value in the sense of being useful as a means to other ends. Money, for instance, has instrumental value, but no intrinsic value. It’s a useful instrument for attaining other things of value like clothes or food. And these also may have only instrumental value toward yet further goals. The value of clothing is to keep us comfortable and make us look good. But clothes don’t have a value of their own independent of their usefulness towards these other ends.

The idea of things having instrumental value seems to presuppose that some things have value just for their own sake. Otherwise we seem to have a regress of value where many things are valuable as means to further and further ends, but at no point do any of these ends have any value of their own. So to make sense out of anything having any sort of value, it seems there would have to be some things that have intrinsic value or value in themselves. In the broadest sense, goodness is an end that has “to be pursued” built into it. Thus goodness, for the ancient Greeks, was a natural and obvious theoretical posit, needed to make sense out of any sort of talk of value. For humans, the kind of goodness that matters is the good life. So ethics in general is concerned with how to live well, how to lead an excellent life.

The Natural Function for Humanity

In the idea of flourishing, we have at least one familiar notion that should help us better understand how Aristotle sees the good life. Think about what it is for the vegetable plants in the garden to be flourishing. The flourishing tomato plant is one that grows vigorously without disease and is well on its way to achieving its natural end, growing lots of sweet ripe tomatoes. In line with his teleological view of the natural world, Aristotle has it that the good for any sort of thing can be understood in terms of fulfilling its natural function well and thereby realizing its telos. So what then is the unique function of humans in terms of which our essence can be understood?

It seemed we had a pretty good idea of what it means for a tomato plant to flourish. Roughly it is for it to take in nourishment and grow. Biologically we might say its function is to photosynthesize, converting nutrients and CO2 into lots of sugar and oxygen (and, ultimately, tilthe). But we are essentially different from plants, so our function must be different as well.

Aristotle entertains the idea that our function might be to satisfy our appetites. This much seems in line with the consumerist idea of the good life. But Aristotle rejects this too since it fails to separate us from barnyard animals. Perhaps as infants we are similar to animals in functioning only to satisfy our appetites, but then we outgrow this similarity. We might now see the consumerist conception of the good life as infantilizing us since it appeals only to how we function as infants, getting our appetites satisfied. But for Aristotle, how we function beyond the developmental stage of small children is important to understanding our telos as human beings. Ultimately Aristotle settles on our rational capacities. He takes the function of the human being to lie in exercising our rational capacities because these are the ways of functioning that are unique and special to humans. Humans are distinguished from others sorts of being by their ability to function rationally. For Aristotle, the human being essentially is the rational animal.

The ability to reason is what sets us apart from other animals and this is what defines us. Since for Aristotle, what’s good for us is not something we get to choose for ourselves, his idea of the good life might seem much less flexible and personalizable than the consumerist conception of the good life. But the apparent flexibility of the consumerist conception might be just that, only apparent. On the consumerist conception of the good life, the preferences that fix what is good for you are just given. What we want is taken as the starting point for thinking about what is good for us. For this reason, the consumerist philosophy affords no means of critically evaluating our wants. We just want what we want; that’s all there is to it. In our contemporary consumerist culture, any challenge to the aptness of our wants is received as grounds for offense, where our freedom to choose is compromised by someone else telling us what we should want. However, our desires are quite malleable. Our tastes are typically acquired and usually this happens without much critical reflection. Advertisers, and political pundits among others know this well. The most powerful institutions in our culture put immense and sophisticated effort into shaping and manipulating our desires. We are free to choose what we want as consumers, but only after our wants have been engineered with care by others that aren’t really concerned about what’s actually in our interest. In practice, the supposed freedom and flexibility of the consumerist conception of the good life is more illusion than reality.

On the other hand, Aristotle’s view of the good life as the life of actively exercising one’s rational capacities might be more flexible than it appears at first. Interpreted narrowly, Aristotle offers a highly intellectualized view of the good life. The good life is the life of the philosopher/scientist. It would not be unreasonable to suspect a bit of professional bias in Aristotle’s idea of what it is to live well. We might object that some people would rather work in the garden, ride bicycles, or practice yoga than just do philosophy all the time, and that this is a good way to live too. A reply that Aristotle can offer here (the reply I think he ought to offer) is to say, “very well, and any of these activities will contribute to your flourishing only if you engage your rational capacities and do them in thoughtful and inquisitive ways.” Many crafts, arts, and skills can be cultivated in ways that exercise and develop our rational capacities. A life spent working in the garden, riding bikes, doing yoga, or working as a plumber can be a flourishing life on this more liberal interpretation of Aristotle’s account. There are details to work out here concerning just what ways of life will exercise and cultivate our uniquely human rational capacities. But more generally, perhaps I can understand the good life as the active life of exercising and developing our uniquely human rational, capacities whatever specific endeavors and activities I ultimately identify as serving that end.

Virtue and Habituation

Once we have a thought out idea of what the good life is, there remains the issue of how to go about leading such a life. Through critical reflection on our nature and capacities we might discover (as opposed decide or choose) where our genuine interests lie. But then how do we bring ourselves to act in our best interest. What if it turns out that we don’t desire what is best for us? Are we then just fated for misery? Aristotle doesn’t think so. There is a degree of flexibility in our inclinations and preferences and we have some ability to shape these over time. On the consumerist conception, what matters for us is set by our desires and the theory of the good life is made to conform to them. On Aristotle’s view, the theory of the good life is developed according to what matters for us and this is set by the sort of being we are. So living well is a matter of bringing our desires into line with our interests. If Aristotle’s idea that we don’t get to simply choose what is best for us still seems at all stifling, your sense of personal autonomy might be replenished in appreciating how we are empowered to shape our tastes and preferences and gradually bring them into line with what we can learn about our interests.

We are creatures of habit. While this often presents an obstacle to acting on our considered interests, habit is also the means available to us for shaping our lives for the better. Recognizing that making some a change would be good for us typically doesn’t result in our immediately preferring it. Many of us, for instance, recognize that getting more exercise and eating better would be good for us. But thinking that more exercise would improve our lives doesn’t automatically result in feeling the urge to go for a run. Habituation, however, can bring our preferences and urges into line. People that regularly go for runs do often have the otherwise unusual urge to go for a run. Good habits are potentially as addictive as bad ones. And once we establish a good habit, that becomes what we prefer and what we enjoy the most. For Aristotle, the power you have to shape your life for the better lies in your ability to intentionally shape your habits.

Once we have figured out what really is in our best interest by examining who we are and how we function, the key to being happy and living well is to mold our inclinations, preferences, and pleasures through habituation. The good life, which is also the virtuous life, will be the most pleasant life because it is the life in which our pleasures cohere rather than clash with our interests. The good life is one in which we have resolved the conflicts in our inclinations and pleasures, and we no longer have things that matter to us fighting against things that matter for us. The truly virtuous person can wholeheartedly pursue what pleases her most because this will be well aligned with what is best for her. The affinity between Aristotle’s advice on how to live well and Frankfurt’s account of self-esteem should be easy to see here. Both would say living well is largely a matter of getting your desires, inclinations, and motivations to hang together in a unified coherent way. Where Frankfurt and Aristotle will differ is just in how that unified will gets oriented. Frankfurt would have our considered best interest be determined by what we love. Aristotle sees our considered best interest as settled by our nature as rational animals.

For Aristotle, to be virtuous is to have habitually established inclinations and preferences for actively exercising our human rational capacities. Virtue aims at flourishing. Habit, on this view, is quite literally character building. This way of thinking about virtue stands in sharp contrast to more popular conceptions where to be virtuous involves lots of self-sacrifice. We suffer from a Christianized notion of virtue that is more often than not associated with self-denial. To be virtuous in the popular sense means something like not overindulging in cheesecake or sex. But we are concerned with the idea of virtue as a kind of excellence. When Aristotle talks about virtue, he is just talking about the excellent character traits a person might have. What makes a character trait a good one is that on the whole, it contributes better to a flourishing life than contrasting traits. So life in accordance with virtue promotes human flourishing, and for this reason it is also likely to be the most pleasant.

Happiness, however, requires more than just virtue. It also requires some degree of good fortune. A person with a virtuous character who is also in a coma is not really flourishing. Likewise, a virtuous person who lives in a community of not so virtuous people faces a significant obstacle to flourishing. Living in community of fools might provide very limited opportunities for exercising one’s rational capacities. There would be no one to talk philosophy with for starters. More seriously, disputes could not be settled reasonably, but only through vicious maneuvering for dominance. Extreme poverty can be an obstacle to flourishing. Being always anxious about where your next meal is coming from could make leading the active life of the rational element a difficult proposition. But extreme affluence and luxury could present its own obstacles since they offers endless distractions, draw your attention to trifles, and ultimately render you passive and weak. How much and what kind of good fortune does leading the good life require? Perhaps we can’t give a very precise answer, but it might do to say that we require enough good fortune to give us ample opportunity to exercise our rational faculties.

Review and Study

Review Questions:

Explain Aristotle’s view of Philia.
What is it to love one’s self on Frankfurt’s account?
How is love of the self the purest form of love? How doe Frankfurt handle the two complications for his analysis of self love he raises at the end of section 9?
How is self love different from self indulgence? What does Frankfurt mean by “wholeheartedness” and how does this bear on self love.
How does Frankfurt see self love as related to morality?
How does he see it as related to the meaningfulness of one’s life? Do think he is right on these points?
How does Frankfurt’s analysis of love as wholeheartness square with Aristotle’s view of virtue and happiness?
Explain the apparent tension between eros and Philia.
Explain the view of erotic love voiced by Socrates in the Symposium.
Explain Nozick’s union model of love. What problems does it raise?
What problems are inherent in the idea that the search for love is a quest for one’s ideal other half or “soul mate”?
How does the cycle of infatuation, disillusionment, and heartbreak work? Explain the role of the imagination in this.
What failings do the consumerist conception of the good life and the vision of love as a quest for one’s “soul mate” share?
How do we bestow value in a loving relationship?
How do we understand what matters for us and what matters to us on the consumerist conception of the good life?
What sort of evidence can be brought against the consumerist conception of the good life?
How can rational deliberation and self-control help the subjectivist view of the good life?
What is weakness of will, and what does the possibility of weakness of will tell us about how we can determine what matter most to us?
What is the good life according to Aristotle?
Explain the ways in which the good life is passive on the consumerist conception and active on Aristotle’s view.
Explain instrumental and intrinsic value. On Aristotle’s view, once we know what the good life is, how do we lead it?
How does Aristotle understand virtue?
What sorts of things can be aids or obstacles to our flourishing?
What role do habit and good fortune play in Aristotle's concept of happiness?

Names, Concepts, Terms

Philia
Eros
Agape
Instrumental Value
Intrinsic Value
The Ideal Union
Mattering To
Mattering For
Consumerism
Eudaimonia
Telos
Habituation
Virtue
Flourishing
Good Fortune

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