Life is Suffering, Be a good person anyway (Jordan Peterson + Aristotle)

An Aristotelian Framework for the Human Good
Life is Suffering, Be a Good Person anyway.

Purpose
- Life is suffering so be a good person anyway
o Don’t make it worse

“Now this is the noble truth of pain: birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful, sorrow, lamentation, dejection, and despair are painful. Contact with unpleasant things is painful. In short, the five groups of grasping [the body, feelings, ideas, volitions, conscious awareness] are painful.”

So then what does it mean to be a “good person” and to strive towards that
- The full expression of one’s human potential
- It is this overarching end that makes it possible to live in a coherent, rational way because this end serves to order our choices of other ends and their attendant activities.
- is a matter of how one’s life comes together as a whole. He clarified that “the good man is an activity of the soul (psyche)
o if there is an ultimate good which all human activities serve
o a lifelong pattern of activities devoted to choosing worth ends pursued in accordance with virtue (character strengths – Where I need to improve - that make it possible to pursue what is good)

How do we become good people
- we have to have goals that satisfy three things:
- First, basic human activities have an instrumen- tal form. provide the infrastructure nec- essary to pursue constitutive ends, the second level. The pursuit and attainment of constitutive ends comprises eudaimonia, the third level.
- Concept of human good is found in activity rather than in possessions or subjective experience
- not simply a matter of psy- chological experience, but is located in our actions in the world and particularly in the quality of those actions.
pursuing characteristically hu- man goods, such as belonging, knowledge, and justice. Aristotle characterizes these goods as choiceworthy and states that “it is through them that we will be eudaimon”