What is Plato’s big idea about living the good life, you’d be wondering? It’s a solid sense of self, yes, that does it.
Now let’s begin with Plato, who was he? We all know that he was a Greek philosopher who was born around 428 BC and lived till 347 BC. Scholars and critics consider the great mind that Plato was as one of the most important philosophers, utmost influential, in history. Especially in the domains of Western Philosophy, Plato’s works were instrumental in shaping its course.
Plato’s work subtly and insightfully focuses on the analysis of pleasure while also explores the intimate connections it forms with his discussions related to value and human psychology. Plato’s ethics dictate that we have got to examine how good things factor in happiness and we have to understand how Plato’s ethics analyses pleasure as something that is unable to determine happiness owing to pleasure’s lack of its own direction.
Plato believes that wisdom is the very skill of living one’s life which has a key role in determining happiness as it helps one direct their life as a whole. Wisdom has the power to bring about goodness and happiness in each and every sphere of our lives. It is understood as a skill of living that governs order in all the materials of our lives.
According to Plato’s understanding and theory he puts these ‘materials’ in the bracket of inchoate, much like other aspects of psyche. They majorly inform our directions in life through the wisdom we have gained. Such attributes of psyche include pleasure, which, according to Plato is not merely a sensation rather he treats it as an attitude using which one would assign value to any particular object it is dealing with.
Pleasure is one of the most important factors informing our state of being and according to Plato’s philosophy if it is shaped using the direction provided by our wisdom, our skill of life, it has the ability to form a crucial part of virtue and helps us understand happiness through the lenses of our virtuous characters, in its entirety.
