The good life

What is happiness and how do you get it? The ancient answer is that it is a way of living rather than a state of feeling, and that it has to be learned. Aristotle’s Ethics works this out in detail: the good life is the active exercise of the virtues over a whole lifetime, with enough luck and enough friends to make the exercise possible. Plato’s Republic says much the same, but insists that only the philosopher gets there. Epicurus says pleasure, then defines pleasure so carefully that it turns out to mean bread, water and a garden of friends. The Stoics say virtue alone, and nothing else, not even health.

The moderns doubt that the question has one answer. Montaigne finds his own good life in a tower with his books. Rousseau argues that civilisation itself made the good life impossible and that the happiest humans were the ones who never built a city. Kant says happiness is not the point at all, and Mill tries to bring it back by counting.

This is the theme students most often come to a great books program looking for, and it is the one on which the books argue with each other most directly. Read Aristotle first and everyone else as a reply to him.