What is the Good Life? Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, & Kant’s Ideas in 4 Animated Videos

We all have some vision of what the good life should look like. Days filled with read­ing and strolls through muse­ums, retire­ment to a trop­i­cal island, unlim­it­ed amounts of time for video games…. What­ev­er they may be, our con­cepts tend toward fan­ta­sy of the grass is green­er vari­ety. But what would it mean to live the good life in the here and now, in the life we’re giv­en, with all its warts, rou­tines, and dai­ly oblig­a­tions? Though the work of philoso­phers for the past hun­dred years or so may seem divorced from mun­dane con­cerns and desires, this was not always so. Thinkers like Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Niet­zsche once made the ques­tion of the good life cen­tral to their phi­los­o­phy. In the videos here, Uni­ver­si­ty of New Orleans phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Chris Sur­prenant sur­veys these four philoso­phers’ views on that most con­se­quen­tial sub­ject.

The view we’re like­ly most famil­iar with comes from Socrates (as imag­ined by Pla­to), who, while on tri­al for cor­rupt­ing the youth, tells his inquisi­tors, “the unex­am­ined life is not worth liv­ing.” Pithy enough for a Twit­ter bio, the state­ment itself may too often go unex­am­ined. Socrates does not endorse a life of pri­vate self-reflec­tion; he means that “an indi­vid­ual become a mas­ter of him­self,” says Surprenant,”using his rea­son to reign in his pas­sions, as well as doing what he can to help pro­mote the sta­bil­i­ty of his com­mu­ni­ty.” In typ­i­cal ancient Greek fash­ion, Pla­to and his men­tor Socrates define the good life in terms of rea­son­able restraint and civic duty.

The Pla­ton­ic ver­sion of the good life comes in for a thor­ough drub­bing at the hands of Friedrich Niet­zsche, as do Aris­totelian, Kant­ian, and Judeo-Chris­t­ian ideals. Nietzsche’s dec­la­ra­tion that “God is dead,” and in par­tic­u­lar the Chris­t­ian god, “allows us the pos­si­bil­i­ty of liv­ing more mean­ing­ful and ful­fill­ing lives,” Sur­prenant says. Niet­zsche, who describes him­self as an “amoral­ist,” uses the pro­posed death of god—a metaphor for the loss of reli­gious and meta­phys­i­cal author­i­ty gov­ern­ing human behavior—to stage what he calls a “reval­u­a­tion of val­ues.” His cri­tique of con­ven­tion­al moral­i­ty pits what he calls life-deny­ing val­ues of self-restraint, democ­ra­cy, and com­pas­sion (“slave moral­i­ty”) against life-affirm­ing val­ues.

For Niet­zsche, life is best affirmed by a striv­ing for indi­vid­ual excel­lence that he iden­ti­fied with an ide­al­ized aris­toc­ra­cy. But before we begin think­ing that his def­i­n­i­tion of the good life might accord well with, say, Ayn Rand’s, we should attend to the thread of skep­ti­cism that runs through­out all his work. Despite his con­tempt for tra­di­tion­al moral­i­ty, Niet­zsche did not seek to replace it with uni­ver­sal pre­scrip­tions, but rather to under­mine our con­fi­dence in all such notions of uni­ver­sal­i­ty. As Sur­prenant points out, “Niet­zsche is not look­ing for fol­low­ers,” but rather attempt­ing to “dis­rupt old con­cep­tu­al schemes,” in order to encour­age us to think for our­selves and, as much as it’s pos­si­ble, embrace the hand we’re dealt in life.

For con­trast and com­par­i­son, see Surprenant’s sum­maries of Aris­to­tle and Kant’s views above and below. This series of ani­mat­ed videos comes to us from Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy (Wi-Phi for short), a project joint­ly cre­at­ed by Yale and MIT in 2013. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured video series on meta­phys­i­cal prob­lems like free will and the exis­tence of god and log­i­cal prob­lems like com­mon cog­ni­tive bias­es. The series here on the good life should give you plen­ty to reflect on, and to study should you decide to take up the chal­lenge and read some of the philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments about the good life for your­self, if only to refute them and come up with your own. But as the short videos here should make clear, think­ing rig­or­ous­ly about the ques­tion will like­ly force us to seri­ous­ly re-exam­ine our com­fort­able illu­sions.

For many more open access phi­los­o­phy videos, check out the Wi Phi Youtube chan­nel. You can also find com­plete cours­es by Prof. Sur­prenant in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

105 Ani­mat­ed Phi­los­o­phy Videos from Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy: A Project Spon­sored by Yale, MIT, Duke & More

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

How to Live a Good Life? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions Nar­rat­ed by Stephen Fry on Aris­to­tle, Ayn Rand, Max Weber & More

Learn Right From Wrong with Oxford’s Free Course A Romp Through Ethics for Com­plete Begin­ners

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness