What is a Good Life?
Stoner by John Williams has lived in my thoughts since I devoured it in a few evenings
On Valentine’s Day, meandering through a bookstore, I picked up John Williams’s ‘Stoner’; on its cover lies the quote ‘the greatest novel you’ve never read’. It sat on my side table, alongside the hundreds of other books, for weeks until one evening I picked it up out of boredom. Suddenly it was 3 a.m. and I was 150 pages deep, captivated by the seemingly simple, almost boring life of the character William Stoner.
‘Stoner’ is at its core a story of a man who has a brief moment of aspiration for more but quickly becomes content with his underachievement. It is a deeply sad, disheartening, and bleak story, yet so mesmerising and human that it fails to be anything but captivating. In that way, it is the story of all of us.
Born in Missouri, the titular character Stoner spends his early years working on his family farm, seemingly destined for the destitution of early 20th-century sharecropping.
Yet the decision by his father to enrol him in university sees him spend the rest of his life cocooned as an academic at the University of Missouri. There he lives what appears to be an unremarkable life, with professional mediocrity, an unhappy marriage, and relentless disappointment. This, I am sure, is not the book to read when one is down on their life.
His life story, and the book, is summed up in the opening chapter by John Williams:
“William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956.”
It has been over two months since I finished ‘Stoner’, yet there hasn’t been a day that I haven’t thought about the haunting devastation of the life he lived. The question that keeps coming to my mind is: what is a good life?
There are endless answers to this question. It is something I think about often, and I have been asking people for their views. The answers have varied as widely as the philosophies themselves. In the modern day, some would say the pursuit of money, material goods, a happy family, going to the Olympics, the perfect career, freedom, or endless status games.
Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant would say that a good life comes from living virtuously according to the categorical imperative. Aristotle says that we should aim to achieve eudaimonia (translating to ‘flourishing’), which comes from possessing virtue. A good life can only be understood by looking at its end; so, whilst you may be unhappy in achieving your virtue of knowledge, friendship, rationalism, or reason, the end result will be happiness.
Camus unhelpfully presents a good life as simply living fully against the absurdity of existence: “The literal meaning of life is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself.” To him, the good life is a life lived in defiance of the futility of existence.
For a long time, I have taken issue with how ‘good lives’ are presented. The modern ideal of pursuing money strikes me as vapid and leads to quiet lives of desperation where people wake up at fifty and realise they wouldn’t have done it the same way. I have never been motivated by money, something that the vast majority of people are.
Deontology as a method for happiness has always struck me as absurd. Kant famously never left his home town, never married, never changed his daily schedule or his diet, and died at the age of eighty. His last words were: “It’s fine.”
Aristotle’s eudaimonia has struck me as one of the closest definitions of a ‘good life’. In his book ‘Nicomachean Ethics’, Aristotle says that happiness is the chief good and famously states that happiness is an “activity of reason in accordance with virtue… and this is in a full life”. This last point is meant to emphasise that in order to achieve the chief good, one must live a complete life of excellence all the way until death: “One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”
That excellence is achieved through the virtues of courage, temperance, the pursuit of wisdom, and friendship. To Aristotle, friendship is at the core of the moral virtue of life; he views it as essential in developing all other forms of virtue. He defines friendship in three ways: friends of utility, friends of pleasure, and friends of virtue.
The first two will be immediately recognisable to all of us. Friends of utility are, for example, the friends you might have at work. Friends of pleasure are those you would hang out with. But friends of virtue are the rarest of all. They are essential to the idea of eudaimonia and are formed because you respect and truly admire the other person. Common interests might be shared, but it requires a level of emotional intimacy far beyond the others and, as a result, they are significantly more limited. Most people will only have one or two friends of virtue.
Yet, I still have a feeling of unfulfilment regarding Aristotle’s definition. Yes, I think a good life is a life full of courage, temperance, the pursuit of knowledge, and, at its core, friendship. But Aristotle’s view that happiness is not an emotional state but a praiseworthy way of living sticks out to me like a sore thumb.
This makes me return to ‘Stoner’, a life condensed into 300 pages. It feels cliché as I move from my early twenties to my late twenties to worry about time, but time moves regardless of intention, and novels like ‘Stoner’ only enforce that more.
It is a common trap to think that life will work out and everything will fall into place regardless of our intentions. But the reality is that you aren’t a passive participant in your life, the only person that can change your life is you.
Stoner chooses to marry the wrong person, shy away from the war, and stay in his dead-end academic career. Time for Stoner was relentless; he muddled through life, shying away from any real decisions all because of convenience.
So - to me at least - a good life is an active life, one where you choose the ‘good life’—whatever that means to you.