Mentoring, yoga, coaching, self-help texts (now called ‘inspirational books’), mindfulness, meditation, jogging... The proposals for improving our quality of life are so numerous that they end up causing stress. Health professionals insist on an epidemic of generalised malaise to which we are unable to put into words. The life we lead leaves us exhausted, and we turn to the easy rewards of consumerism, a truce of a bastard child of peace and quiet, so ephemeral that we hardly feel it.

We worry about values, but we forget that values are a stock market word. Values are changeable, and do not oblige those who hold them to anything. That is why philosophers speak of virtues. Virtues make the person who practises them virtuous. They transform him/her. A virtue urges one to exercise it. A virtue is nothing other than doing good. And being virtuous leads to a good life which, in the end, is the most coveted desire.

The good life is one of the central issues in the history of philosophy. So much so that it constitutes a discipline: ethics. Faced with contemporary challenges (climate emergency, migration, transhumanism, polarisation, violence, post-truth...), philosophy is a legacy whose practice has individual, social and political implications. Happiness, the benefit of a good life, does not mean being complacent with reality, but knowing how to face frustration, limitation, contingency. But how does one live a good life?

From Socrates (who makes the oracle of Delphi, ‘know thyself’, an indispensable rule) to Nietzsche (and his idea that every man must seek exemplarity), via Erich Fromm's dialectical humanism, Foucault's aesthetics of existence (making life a work of art) or the body liberalisation proposed by Butler, there are numerous schools aimed at avoiding what Agamben calls ‘nuda vida’, ‘naked life’, that is, a wasted life.

Indie thought or intellectual independence:

The philosophical tradition of the West is a footnote to Plato's work. Such is its influence according to the English thinker Alfred North Whitehead (father of ‘process philosophy’, based on change as progress). For Plato, the most valuable thing is education, not understood as school or university, but as a personal cultivation in which one exercise him/herself to practice the main virtues: justice, wisdom, moderation. Cultivating oneself, this Platonic education, brings the soul closer to its divine origin. And of all the virtues to be practised, intellectual independence, one's own, is a piece of advice which, in times of claptrap and polarisation of all kinds, is an invaluable lesson. Here he is on the same page with the sceptics, who reject all dogma and refrain from judgement. To take the time to reflect on what is right and why, rather than being led by opinion leaders or charlatans with followers. ‘The aim of education is virtue and the desire to become a good citizen,’ Plato said.

If there is a philosophical current with a practical approach, it is Stoicism. Founded by Zenon of Citium in the 3^rd century BC, it believes that nothing is more conducive to a good life than keeping the mind serene and the spirit unchanged.

The Stoics teach us to appreciate what we have before it is too late, to cultivate temperance in the face of adversity, to live in harmony with nature, so they invite us to see things as they are, regardless of whether they contradict what we think, because only in this way will we find the truth. They propose to control desires and to curb outbursts. This advice invites us to live with integrity, contributing to a happier and more prosperous life together. We find the imprint of the Stoics in Montaigne, Pascal, Schopenhauer and Delouse.

Zenon lost everything he had in a shipwreck, so he did not speak of borrowing. This good life was also practised by Seneca, for whom philosophy is based on deeds and not on words (and who advocates joy and detachment from the masses), Epictetus (who insists that we should not be frustrated by what is not in our power) and Marcus Aurelius, in whose Meditations we find invigorating findings: ‘The best revenge is to be different from the one who caused the harm’, ‘What is not useful to the hive, is not useful to the bee’ or ‘Perform each of your actions as if it were the last of your life’. One last finding of the Stoics, their memento mori, remembering that one day you will die, which subdues the ego and reduces what is important to the correct. Less selfies and more listening to the other. To the others. A whole in which each part is in solidarity with the others.

Action well done as the aim

Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, tells us that all human actions tend to an end, which is happiness. Everything else (pleasures, fame, enrichment, good image) are substitutes. Happiness is the ultimate end of the good life, understood as fullness, well-being. He calls it eudaimonia, which could be translated as ‘human flourishing’. The purpose cannot be, according to him, glory, or wealth. These are paths that embezzle happiness.

Happiness is what our actions lead to when they are guided by reason and aim at excellence. It is important to ‘act rightly’: those who do so ‘attain good and beautiful things, and life is then in itself pleasant’. As an instrument, he develops his doctrine of ‘the golden mean’ or ‘the right balance’, which consists of being in the middle ground between excess and defect. Too much courage becomes recklessness; too little courage becomes cowardice. For Aristotle, the great virtues are sincerity, patience, wit, generosity and justice. Quite the opposite of the society of the spectacle that has befallen us, in which one is capable of not recognising the indisputable as long as one's image is not damaged and one can preserve one's idealised self.

Knowing that the golden mean is not an exact science, Aristotle proposes the habit, so that everyone can gauge where to find it. ‘Man is born for two things: to understand and to act, as if he were a kind of mortal god.’ He does not forget the importance of the contemplative life, of beauty, which calms the soul and teaches what is good. Contemplate, an excellent warning for times in which our attention is expropriated.

The misunderstood cynicism of Diogenes seems to have taken over the post-modernity ways of life. Shamelessness, provocation and indolence in the face of morality are commonplace, but the cynics, above all, demanded frankness in conversation and the renunciation of the superfluous, closer to the Spartan than to the Epicurean. Epicurus, by the way, was governed by four rules (the ‘Tetrapharmakos’, as his disciples called it): do not fear gods, do not worry about death, what is good is easy to get and what is evil is easy to bear. Four guidelines which, in his opinion, guarantee a good life.

The connecting vessel between the ancient and modern world in the philosophical tradition is St. Augustine. To him we owe the synthesis of a good life which he called ordo amoris; having a well ordered love ensures happiness. It sounds like a tongue twister, but let us try to understand his words: ‘He lives justly and holy who has ordered love, so that he neither loves what should not be loved, nor does not love what should be loved, nor loves more what should be loved less, nor loves equally what should be loved more or less, nor loves less or more what should be loved equally.’ Love is the way, one might say. It is worth meditating on it in times of emotional hypertrophy.

In the 15^th century, the humanists rescued the philosophical traditions to put a good life into practice. We find Platonists (Pico della Mirandola), Epicureans (Thomas More), Sceptics (Montaigne), Stoics (Bruni) and Cynics (Erasmus). To live properly is one of the great concerns of humanism.

In the Baroque period, Baltasar Gracián is perhaps one of the great philosophical examples. He preaches fleeing from appearance (‘There are many who are satisfied for what is apparent’), acting with prudence, will, intelligence and restraint, which, for a convulsive age such as ours, is quite a challenge. Gracián insists, like the classics, on the importance of having one's own judgement. It was not in vain that he entitled his most famous essay, El criterio (The Criterion).

Despite the heterogeneous nature of their nuances, the moralists (Pascal, La Fontaine, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Castiglione, Stendhal, Adam Smith) kept observing the customs of their time, the ways of living and relating to others. Attention was one of their axes; attention to how people live, what moves them, what they pursue, in order to distinguish good from evil on the basis of observation, trying to make the best of every moment of life.

However, distinguishing good from evil is not as easy as it might seem; sometimes it is quite a feat. Hence Kant set out a way of doing so, his ‘categorical imperative’, that action which becomes necessary, absolute, unconditional, whatever the circumstances in which it occurs. A sort of ecumenical law: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can will that, at the same time, it should become a universal law.’ This is the most well-known formulation, but there are others no less significant: ‘Act in such a way that you treat humanity, both in your own person and in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means’. This virtue, which procures a good life, is not an impossibility, but a matter of will, ‘a promise that a person makes to himself’.

Here, will is closely related to sacrifice, which has a bad reputation nowadays because of the time it requires — as if we had forgotten that what truly matters (love, knowledge, friendship…) demands an entire lifetime. A perfect, Kantian duty is not to lie. Another is to reject dogmas, for they destroy reason. Yet another is to think for oneself.

Attention — ‘the soul’s chief quality,’ according to Malebranche — enables listening: to oneself, to what is other, to the Other. And listening, together with attention, frees us from evil, namely: presentism, fragmentation, superficiality, the lowering of the empathy threshold, the atrophy of narrative capacity, and the fantasy of invulnerability.

Meanwhile European tradition focused on the dialectic between idealism (with its Marxist and Romantic offshoots) and proto-existentialism, we had Freud, later taken up by Foucault, for whom the good life consists in the satisfaction of needs — condemning us to fleeting happiness.

Opening up to Others

The 20^th century is perhaps the most pessimistic time when it comes to the possibility of leading a good life in a world marked by inequality, exploitation, and conflict. Fortunately, we have Russell, for whom happiness is not a divine gift but something one can achieve in persevering to: ‘Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly intense, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and an unbearable pity for the suffering of humankind.’ This confession could well serve as a formula for attaining happiness.

Russell identifies some of the causes that undermine a good life: ‘competitive success,’ which leads us to prefer power over intelligence (thus turning us, in his view, into dinosaurs) and brings us sadness; and an excessive retreat into ourselves, neglecting the world. The antidote: opening up to others, overcoming fear, which always lurks where evil is found, making us tiptoe through life. The self must not ignore its circumstance — that which surrounds it and allows it to be itself. ‘The secret of happiness is to make your interests as wide as possible and to react to the things and people that interest you in a friendly and not hostile way,’ Russell tells us.

More innovative is the proposal of Hannah Arendt. For her, a good life must involve action and speech — those very things that, according to experts, are being corroded by new technologies; without them, life is dead. Through action and speech, we insert ourselves into the world and exist for others. Political life is then true life, since ‘action is the exclusive prerogative of humans; neither a beast nor a god is capable of it, and it depends entirely on the constant presence of others.’

Political life, once again, demands an old password: to know oneself even better. In this sense, the effort of Alfred Schmidt stands out, as he proposes to reclaim the Enlightenment demand of learning to govern oneself and not handing over one’s own care to others. This is the core, the crux of the good life. The old Latin adage vindica te tibi claims back for you the possession of yourself.

See, El arte de vivir

Illustration by Óscar Gutiérrez