Needy

Landscape with House and Ploughman, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

From The Philosophers’ Magazine:

Modern philosophers have been understandably reluctant to pontificate about “the good life”. They have mostly taken the view that it is not the job of philosophers to tell other people how to live their lives. Tastes and preferences differ, people get a kick out of a great variety of things, and if your particular enthusiasm is for gardening, or running marathons, or playing computer games, or playing the financial markets, why should you take any notice of philosophers telling you that you ought to be doing something different?

Maybe there is a place for philosophical accounts of what the morally good life is like. Given the diversity of ways of life, any society, and any modern pluralistic society in particular, is bound to need moral rules which hold this diverse society together and enable people with different ideals and enthusiasms to live alongside one another – values of mutual respect and tolerance, of cooperation, of justice and honesty.

So, it might be said, there is room for substantive philosophical theories about the content of morality, but when it comes to competing pictures of the good life in that wider sense, philosophers are no better placed than anyone else and should refrain from imposing their own predilections on others. We could take a warning from Plato and Aristotle, who were held back by no such inhibitions, and who laboured as philosophers to convince the world that the best life is … the life of the philosopher! To which the appropriate response is “Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

Nevertheless, while acknowledging the diversity of tastes and temperaments, maybe we can say something in more general terms about what any human life would have to be like in order to be experienced as satisfying and fulfilling. Perhaps after all we can take a leaf out of Aristotle’s book. The good human life, he says, is the life of happiness – but that as it stands is an empty truism (and it’s even more of a truism in Greek, where the term translated as “happiness” is “eudaimonia”, which could also be translated as “well-being”). What we need, Aristotle says in the Ethics, is some more definite account of what eudaimonia consists in, what makes for a flourishing human life, and for that purpose we need to look at what is distinctive of human beings compared with other living things. I want to take that idea and turn it on its head. What are the distinctive ways in which human lives may fail to be satisfactory? Human beings don’t just suffer physical pain; they don’t just suffer from lack of food and shelter. They may suffer loneliness. They may be bored and frustrated. They may find their lives empty and meaningless. I don’t know whether we can confidently state that these kinds of experience and suffering are uniquely human, but in comparison with the experiences of most other living things they are distinctively human. Conversely, we can venture the general claim that any human being, whatever the particular activities which he or she may go in for, will need to live in a way which avoids or surmounts those sufferings and failings.

So what these distinctive features of human life might point us to is an account of distinctive human needs, in the sense of conditions for a flourishing and fulfilling human life.

…

If it is to escape criticism the narrativity thesis must not be overstated. It’s not that we all write autobiographies, even in our heads. The story which one tells about one’s life may not be explicit, it may simply be implicit in how one talks about oneself, what one focuses on in conversations, what memories one dwells on and what aspirations one prioritises.

If it is to escape criticism the narrativity thesis must not be overstated. It’s not that we all write autobiographies, even in our heads. The story which one tells about one’s life may not be explicit, it may simply be implicit in how one talks about oneself, what one focuses on in conversations, what memories one dwells on and what aspirations one prioritises.

Think of that great song “The Folks Who Live on the Hill”.

It’s an exceedingly simple narrative of two lives:

Someday we’ll build a home on a hilltop high,
You and I,
Shiny and new a cottage that two can fill ….

Someday we may be adding a wing or two,
A thing or two.
We will make changes as any family will …

And when the kids grow up and leave us,
We’ll sit and look at the same old view,
Just we two …

The folks who like to be called,
What they have always been called,
“The folks who live on the hill”.

It’s easy to be patronising about this “narrative” – in the words of another song made famous by Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?” – but it is probably the story by which the great majority of people shape their lives. The “narrative” of succeeding generations – of nurturing life, of having children, and seeing them grow and leave, and being able to look back with a sense of completeness – has informed and shaped the experiences and aspirations of countless individuals.

“Meeting human needs”, Richard Norman, The Philosophers’ Magazine