What is the Good Life?

The French philosopher, Luc Ferry, in his book, What is the Good Life? (2005), asks whether it is still possible to speak of meaning, value, ethics, happiness and beatitude, in a "disenchanted" world once and for all stripped of divinity. Is it possible to ponder and pursue a meaningful life in a deconstructed world stripped of every trace of divinity, reducible only to technology, finitude, brokenness and death? Using Nietzche as his guide, he is trying to trace a new secular soteriology, in the "intensity" of what he calls the "eternal recurrence" of the instants, the here and now and never the "beyond."

I can't help but think that Ferry is constructing a new stoicism, an amor fati of the present that demands a heroic that posits (imposes artificial) meaning on the chaotic fragments that deconstruction has hammered out for us. He sees or imposes a cosmological order on the universe without a surviving Logos to stabilize or secure anything in place. I am not yet convinced that he has succeeded.

But, give Ferry his due, modern philosophy has left young people today without salvation and without meaning. For them, every moment is an eternity of their own competing interests, ultimately destined to disappoint because everything is unhinged from any mooring whatsoever. Ferry sees the disaster in this and wants to rally philosophy to its ancient task of "salvation" by other means.

Modern education has to confront the question that Ferry poses -- is there such a thing as a "good life" in a deconstructed world? And what is the "good life" that we are proposing to students? One of the threats of modern education is that we simply ignore the question and give our students only the tools to make a living, have a career, and ply their trade in the marketplace. We introduce them to technology but leave the deeper questions of meaning, hope, love and life to chance. It's hard for a Catholic university to compete with this prevailing allure of avoidance, when the forces of consumerism are so strong. But, we do have an alternative.

The Franciscan imagination posits an alternative narrative of what is the good life. Like Nietzche, it involves a stripping, a sort of deconstruction, but not to scarcity or emptiness and not to Nietzche's limited version of the "intense" life of disconnected "instants." We posit a stripping to experience abundance. This is the significance of St. Francis' initial gesture before his father. He is stripping not to "let go" as if to disencumber himself of the baggage of the universe and arrive at a purity of solitude. Just the opposite.

Francis is stripping for the sake of abundance. He goes naked to experience the nakedness of God, the raw power of transcendence, the immediacy of creation and the divine without any artificiality or interference. Francis goes naked without protection to gamble an experience of the divine that has been hidden and obscured in layer upon layer of mediations.

Our task at St. Bonaventure University, it seems to me, is to pose and provide the Franciscan imagination as a progressive, positive and optimistic alternative to the derisory secular imagination that has captured the marketplace today.

What Ferry says of Nietzche could apply to Francis, "He (Nietzche) seems to say that a successful life and a successful death are one and the same; we cannot live well unless we have vanquished all fear, and the way to attain that goal is to work on our lives, to render them so wise and so untouched by folly that we succeed in 'dying as little as possible.' In short, in order to live well one must be ready to die well, with no fears or regrets, and in order to die well one must have lived in such a way that only an infinitely small and inessential part of the self disappears."  Maybe one of the great differences between Francis and Nietzche may be in N's exorcism of folly. Francis did not seem to think that folly could or should be so easily dismissed.