The Good Life
Essay by Charlie Obert, November 2020
Before you start reading this essay, consider the title, The Good Life, and just notice what comes to mind. How do you imagine the Good Life? I will ask you to consider that same question again at the end of the essay.
This is part of a series of posts in which I am looking at ways we can recover the Platonic tradition to give a firm foundation for making sense of astrology. I think it makes a lot of sense of life in general. I will cover one approach to it here that may sound abstract and theoretical at first glance, but that actually is very useful in a down to earth and practical way.
There is a section in the middle of Plato’s Republic where he uses three parallel metaphors, one after the other, to describe the different levels of being – the Sun, the Line, and the Cave. We will look at the metaphor of the Line here, which is found in the Republic sections 509d – 511e. Here is a diagram of the Line, which lays out different levels of human consciousness.
This is easiest to explain starting at the bottom and moving up. Note first there are two large unequal divisions: the lower half is the visible world, and the upper half the invisible world. We live in both worlds at once, all the time.
The lowest world is called imagination. You can also think of it as the world of sensory data and sense images. It is not just visual; it includes the other senses also. This is where we sense the world, and where we think about the world in images.
The next level up, called belief or opinion, is where we form ideas about the world, but without reasoning them out. You think you know things here, but haven’t really thought out why you think those things. This includes value judgements you make.
When you flick a switch the light bulb comes on. Winters are cold. Kale is trendy, cabbage is boring, Spam is icky. Russia is evil, Canada is good. Los Angeles is exciting, Detroit is dull.
We spend a lot of our lives on the level of belief or opinion, where we think we know all kinds of things about the world, and haven’t really given any thought to why we hold those opinions or if there is any evidence for them. The lower half of the line is about the visible world and our reactions to it. It is perfectly possible to spend your life on the lower half of this line, with no awareness there is any other way of living.
Conscious thinking does not enter the picture until the next level up, the level of discursive Reason. Reason is related to ratio, meaning to measure, to weigh and balance things against each other, to look for patterns, rules, laws. Mathematics and the other sciences are at this level. If you draw a right triangle, you can measure the lengths of the sides with a ruler. If you know the math, given two sides you can calculate the length of the third. If you really understand the math, you know why those calculations work.
If belief and opinion are the level of What we believe, Reason gets into Why – and if you examine your opinions and beliefs, you may find that some of them don’t have much in the way of evidence or reasoning to back them.
The level of Reason is where you weigh costs and benefits, and choose accordingly. Chocolate ice cream tastes great, but if I eat too much I’ll gain weight and I won’t feel as good. I love coffee, but if I drink it late at night I can’t sleep. If stay up all night and party I’ve fall asleep in class next day. If I cheat on a test I could get a higher grade, but if I get caught I could be disgraced and be kicked out of school. If I know the rules of math and geometry I can calculate things a lot quicker and more accurately than I can measure them. Reason spans from simple calculations like this to the most complex of the sciences.
The next level up, Understanding, is harder to explain in words. I think of it as unitive knowing, or all-at-once knowing. This is the place you get to if you have studied something long enough that you understand its basic principles and can weigh up a situation all at once. It is overall, all-at-once patterns and principles. It’s that place you get to doing astrology, where you have analyzed so many charts step by step, that you get to where you can look at a chart and the important things jump out at you.
The level of Understanding is also the level of general principles, including moral principles. Understanding includes concepts like symmetry, balance, beauty. It also includes moral values like justice, truth, kindness, courage, mercy.
We are covering the four levels from bottom to top because that is typically the order in which we learn them, and it matches our growth from children to responsible adults. However, in the Platonic model, the lower levels depend on the higher levels, which are their source, and determine their order. The world is created in the Platonic model from the top down. The top level, the Principles within Understanding, determine everything else.
Is this a practical model? Let’s think some things through here, and look at how we grow through the levels.
Growing Throughout Life
You start out as a young child in the bottom section of the line, where everything is immediate sensation. What is good is that sweet taste, the candy – if it tastes good right now I eat it, if it doesn’t I don’t. If it keeps tasting good I keep on eating, and never mind how I’ll feel later because that doesn’t exist yet. Toys are good, especially the flashy, bright shiny kind, that beep and glow and blink. Opening presents is good; once they’re opened you move on to the next one.
As you get a bit older, more things in the environment become important. Having friends is good – having your friends like you is really important, so you like what they like, you say the things that make them like you. This part of life is a combination of sensation and belief, where having the right opinions becomes very important – listening to the right music, wearing the right clothing, hanging out with the right people, liking and disliking the right things. Peer pressure is very important at this age, and it stay important throughout life for most people.
As you get a bit older and move into young adulthood, the things that are important start to change, but they are almost all about the outer world – getting a good job, earning a lot of money, being well-known and loved – wealth and power and reputation. All of those values are mostly about how you appear in the eyes of the world around you.
Most of the signals we get from the world around us today stop there, in the lower two levels. What is important? Having a good job, a nice place to live, friends who like and admire us. Wealth, fame, power, pleasure, reputation.
Most of our education stops there. Notice the self-help of books that trend well. How to get a good job. How to win friends and influence people. The secrets of persuasion. The secret key to getting rich. Getting to the top. Making your blog successful. How to build your follower list on Twitter. How to get more Facebook likes.
If you’re lucky, you start to learn how to think, how to plan, how to reason things out, how to make choices with their consequences in mind. You discipline immediate pleasures to get something better – rein in your eating and exercise to stay in beter shape, learn things that will help you get on in the world. This is learning how to use reason, but the focus mostly stays outward. Reason is a tool to help you get what you want in the world.
And for some people that is enough. You go to work, you take care of yourself, you spend time with your friends and family, you take care of your house, you watch tv or netflix or surf the net. If you don’t think too much about it you can spend your entire life on the lower half of that line, focused on the visible world, on sensation and opinion. Is that enough to live a good life? If you listen to the media, yes – look at the role models the entertainment industry holds up for you. Look at what the commercials try to sell you.
Just don’t stop and think about it.
The piece that is missing is taking the time to stop and think about what is most important in life, what your main values are, and planning your life accordingly. Most people borrow their values second-hand from the media and from the people around them.
For many people things change as you get older, and all those things that seemed so important when you were just starting out in the world fade into the background. This can happen at different ages. It can happen gradually, or suddenly due to a traumatic life event – losing a job, getting a divorce, having a serious injury or illness, having someone near you die.
Events like that can give you a different perspective. When you reflect on your life, the questions that come to mind are not, did I make enough money, am I powerful enough, do I have enough followers on Facebook. The questions are things like this:
– Have I been kind?
– Have I been loving?
– Have I been truthful?
– Have I been courageous?
– Or, to sum it up in one word, have I been good?
All of those are basic moral qualities, virtues. In Plato’s model they are basic principles that are up at the top of the chain in the invisible world. The outer material world circumstances matter only insofar as they embody and reflect those eternal principles.
You live your life according to your values, whether or not you are even aware of what those values are. If you never stop to consciously think about and choose your values, you likely pick them up without thinking from the world around you. If haven’t thought about what is important to you, don’t worry – the media will be more than happy to tell you.
The One Thing that is important about our lives is the nature of the values it embodies. The things that make life worth living are the principles, the virtues, the values at the top of the chart.
The values we live by are also the most real things in our lives, and have the most profound and long-lasting effect. Kindness, courage, truthfulness – all of those are much more real than chocolate ice cream or a big bank account.
We need higher values to live by if we are to live well. It helps to find that out sooner rather than later.
Look at that chart of The Line at the start of this essay. The progress in awareness, from the lowest to the highest, is typically what happens as you go through life. You figure out, when you get older, that all of the really important things are up in the top section: the eternal values, the eternal principles.
When you first look at that model of the Line, it is typical to think that the highest and most abstract level has to be the most useless of all. What really matters is impacting that lower half, the world we live in. Or rather, the world that part of us lives in. Remember, in the Platonic model we live in both the visible and invisible worlds all the time, and the source levels are up at the top.
You are living within the structure of those higher principles every minute of your life, and the quality of your life depends directly on how well your life mirrors those highest values.
Recall that, in the Platonic model, life is created from the top down. In practical terms, our life works out the best when we are consciously aware of our higher values and shape our lives accordingly.
Our lives need a firm foundation. That foundation is up at the top of this line.
Education for the Good Life
I did not really start figuring this out until my fifties, after my wife died. That was when I started asking myself these questions. That was also when I seriously read Plato and Aristotle for the first time.
When I first read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics a couple of years ago, it had an enormous impact on me. I felt cheated. Why wasn’t I told this when I was younger?
How in the world can you possibly lead a good life when you have no idea what the good is? When the question hasn’t even occurred to you?
I wish I’d been taught about this Line in high school. I wish I’d been taught about Plato and Aristotle and the Good Life.
To be honest, if someone had given me Nicomachean Ethics to read in college, I probably wouldn’t have gotten it. I wasn’t mature enough to learn from it. I needed to go ahead and do things my own way, and learn the hard way from my mistakes.
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Recall, back at the start of this essay, that I asked you what comes to mind when you think about The Good Life. It is well worth thinking about.
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Image of the horizon at the top of this post is by DarkmoonArt_de from Pixabay.