Last night my sometimes unreliable and often unpredictable train of thought took a detour through Slightly-Less-Than-Practical-Knowledge land and past a station whose sign read: "Ancient Greek Philosophy." The realization that dawned on me was this: Socrates was a bum! This in itself may not be all that interesting or enlightening until one considers that most of Western philosophy in particular (and much of Western thought in general) is based on the ravings of a misanthropic, dirty, drunken bearded man in a piss-stained toga. So much for posterity and the gravitas of intellectual history. What strikes me about this is that perhaps the Western intellectual tradition would have turned out quite different had Plato decided to stop and listen to some other madman shouting in the Agora, of which I'm sure there were several. Of course, whether Plato, who may have either fabricated the persona of Socrates to serve as a vehicle for his own ideas, or whether Socrates actually did exist and was the mentor of Plato, is a subject of debate for pedantic philosophy nerds, and will not be taken up here by yours truly. Still, I wonder whether, by some twist of fate, things would have been different had say... Zeno's works been preserved in entirety, as opposed to Plato's. In any case, it would be a real shame since 'The Cave' is a great allegorical story, and being the dork that I am, I laugh when I read about Socrates' gadfly-esque misadventures in "The Five Dialogs."
The point of all of this digression (once again the difficulty in following such an unpredictable train) is that I remembered that the Greek philosophers were concerned with the question, "What is a good life?," and consequently, "What is good?" I spare you the details since I know for a fact that your local book-merchant probably has way too many unsold copies of the stuff taking up far too much otherwise useful retail book space. Suffice to say that I was pondering Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics which centered on his doctrine of the mean. For Aristotle, 'the good life' was composed of values on an opposing scale, i.e. courage vs. reservation. He further realized that too much couragousness leads to foolhardiness and too much reservation leads to cowardice. Moreover, the appropriate mean is different for each individual. A banker might require more reservation to be successful, for example, while a soldier would benefit from being more courageous. At the time I thought this was a pretty solid description. Common sense as it were.
Now, I've told you all this crap just so I could make this point, that every choice you make is, hopefully, at least intended to maximize your own happiness. Of course, choices are different for everyone. You may love Chinese food, and your best friend despises it. Therefore the choice for the both of you to eat Chinese may increase your own happiness while lessening the happiness of your friend. But there are limitations as well. If you ate Chinese food every day, chances are you reach a point where Chinese food doesn't make you happy (and you would probably have packed on a few inches to boot).
So, one man's trash is another man's treasure, and one woman's bliss is another woman's hell, and we don't need Artistotle to point that out. I just like to marvel at the irony that all choices have pros and cons, even when the only cons may be that we forego the other options. Which is why I like John-Paul Sartre who said, "There are no guaranteed choices, only human ones."
Labels: philosophy nerds, piss-stained toga, Socrates
