Achievements Don't Have to be BIG!!

First, I would like to remind you of the five main values that make your life worth living. According to Roger Crisp, those are; pleasure, understanding, achievement, friendship and practical reasoning. I wrote about understanding before, and today I will write about achievement.

There are lots of things which you might think of as an achievement. Gaining your driving license, getting married, travelling all around the world, and lost of other things are commonly considered by us ac achievements. However, this is not what is meant by making an achievement here. All of the examples mentioned before are great things but what makes them valuable might be gaining pleasurable experiences or developing a strong attachment to someone or other values in life. However, satisfying the value of achievement itself is gained through other set of activities.

I will try to explain what I have just said a little bit more. To have a valuable life, you must achieve in it. To achieve in your life you must do something that will strengthen the theory you have about this life. As I have argued before, when I wrote about the value of understanding, we all need to develop a theory about life. Such a theory must be the most coherent theory we can come up with, it should explain the nature of the universe, the human experience and life in general, and it should invite agreement among all well informed rationally thinking human beings. Efforts made in science and philosophy seem to be the most promising among other efforts in developing such a theory. It is true that we can’t claim that the ultimate theory ,we are aspiring for, have been already developed ,but I think we are justified in holding a hope that one day we will do develop such a theory. In order to gain the value of achievement you must make a contribution toward strengthening this developing theory. In simpler terms, you should make an impact on this world or on humanity that will be beneficial according to the theory that enables you to understand this world. I can give some examples here. We are already discussing the theory of welfare presented by Roger Crisp. This theory seems to be the most promising in explaining what is good about life. If you accepted such a theory, then you would be entitled to think of yourself as making an achievement when you promote the five main values of life for other people surrounding you. Helping other people to gain pleasure, understanding, achievements, friendship or better ability to reason practically would be a great achievement made by you. Another example I can think of is this; science informs us that global warming is a great threat to our existence, accordingly making an effort to eliminate the causes of this phenomenon would still be another valuable achievement since it fits well within the theory that you understand the world through.

I have argued before that those five main values in life are all founded upon our basic desires as human beings. As I have mentioned before, those desires are raw and primitive. They contradict each other. They face lots of limitations, and all of them must be managed rationally to reach the best results. All of those desires lead to happiness when they are satisfied. However, the necessity of their rational management reveals that it is not only happiness we are seeking but those five main values we have mentioned repeatedly. I think it is an appropriate place to explain this mush further by making an appeal to achievement. The value of achievement might be based on the desires of self actualization and self esteem. Those desires are best achieved by recognizing and utilizing your most promising ability. One of the best instruments, to tell you that you are on the right track to satisfy those desires, is social recognition and approval. Now, if you only focused on satisfying those desires rather than focusing on gaining the value of achievement, you might end up having a less valuable life. Imagine if you were able to paint. If you focused on gaining social recognition to satisfy your desire of self actualization you might nice paintings that would be liked by so many people. Now imagine if you didn’t care about social recognition that much and focused instead on the theory you have about this life and attempted to express such a theory through your paintings. As an artist, you are most probably capable of figuring out the aesthetics behind paintings more than anyone else. Attempting to express your point of view of aesthetics might yield far better products, and attempting to express your theory about life might give a remarkable depth and meaning to those paintings. Focusing on the value of achievement rather than the desires of self actualization and self esteem might yield far better satisfaction of those same desires.

Now there is a final point I would like to make. I totally believe that each one of us is unique. The coagulum of each one’s abilities together with our different experiences would make each one of superior in a particular aspect of life. It is this unique ability which you should recognize and utilize to reach the value of achievement. However, even though your best achievement will most probably be made by your most remarkable ability, but lots of other achievements can still be made by you without depending on any unique ability at all. Any effort to strengthen your theory of life would account as an achievement. What I really believe in is that even though it is a great thing to be ambitious but it is still very important to be humble. As I have mentioned in my previous post, it is ok to accept that the fact that we still don’t understand life fully. It would be much better to make a humble contribution to further understand the world rather attempting to rush things up by giving a full blown theory about life which is filled with incoherent supernatural claims. The same thing goes when it comes to achievement. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a famous artist to think of yourself as having a life full of achievements. Helping your friend, participating in social work, arguing for what you think is right might all be great achievements.

I think everyone once defined the most promising theory to understand life, should start seeking achievements. You should recognize your most promising ability and make a long term plan to actualize the potentials you can achieve. However, in addition, it would be great to make an achievement every single day. Think each day of how you might do even a little thing to strengthen the theory you have about this life. Teaching your kid something that would benefit him or others, participating in charity, helping the deprived, acting morally, and promoting benevolence might all be great achievements that can be done on daily basis.

Passion to Understand

As I have argued before, whenever you feel like life is becoming nonsense or whenever you feel like you lost your purpose, remember that all of this is wrong. You are a human being. You are born in this world with desires, rationality, and abilities. All of those are mixed together to give you the five genuine sources of life fulfillment. These are; pleasure, friendship, understanding, achievement, and practical reasoning.

Today, I will write about one of them which is understanding.

Life is a great mystery which is still, largely, unsolved up till now. Many different people through out time have attempted to rush things up by offering a theory explaining life and what it is all about. Religions, ancient and modern spiritual ideologies were all among the products of such attempts. Those many different forms of religions aimed for more than any of them could have ever accomplished. They attempted to explain how we came into being, why we exist, what we should do in life, how to think about death, and lots of other difficult questions that maybe all of us have to encounter sooner or later.

Unfortunately, those super natural claims are infected with so many incoherencies. In addition to the particular incoherencies related to each one of them, they all share a common fatal problem. They use terms such as “God”, “soul”, “inner spirit” all of which can’t be used to yield a meaningful sentence at least within the context of reality. The details of this problem are mainly related to the theory of understanding and the arguments presented by Dummett, Platts, and Grayling. I will not go into its details here but maybe later.

Anyway, you might become content with such theories and reject their dismissal. If you do so, you are following your raw desires instead of attempting to rationally control them. Rational control of such a desire to know and to understand will lead you into rethinking about those super natural claims. Later you would find that we have to depend upon our rationality to understand. The proper way through which our rationality can be expressed is through philosophy and science.

Reality is not simple. It is so much complex. It will take more than a single, allegedly, divinely inspired man to solve its mysteries. However, lacking a theory that allows us to understand life should not lead us into despair. Having this passion to understand is all that you need to think of life as worthy living. Making a modest contribution among other contributions made by other humans through out different ages would one day allow us to see the bigger picture and to start dealing properly with all the problems we face in life.

Here is What Makes Your Life Good

I argued in my last post that it is not only happiness which we are looking for in life. Don’t get me wrong. Having a happy life is a great thing. However, focusing on happiness as the sole end of your life will most probably lead you into an unhappy life. So, what is it that we want in life? We have different desires in life. I have mentioned them repeatedly in previous post. However, it might be a good thing to remind you with them. Our basic desirers are; biological needs, security, attachment, self esteem, and self actualization. Some psychologists added self transcendence to the list. It is a bad idea to focus on the mere fulfillment of your desires as your strategy to have a good life. Our desires were designed by evolution to enhance our survival. I don’t want to under estimate them though. They were in fact great in accomplishing what was required of them to do. However, they are still primitive and not so well designed to be our sole compass toward having what is good. They might represent the foundation of what constitutes what we might conceive as good in this life, but there are other factors which are important as well, even more important. Another feature of human beings which was also developed by nature to enhance survival is our ability of rational thinking. It is very important to recognize the importance of rationality when it comes to determining what is good in life. The rational assessment of our desires and our abilities is the only way through which we can determine what is really good about life. Without going into the philosophical details, I would like to present to you one of the most plausible theories concerned with what makes our life good. Roger Crisp argued convincingly that what makes our life good and accordingly the ultimate end of our life are the following five main features to which any other feature can be reduced:


• Pleasure, including aesthetic pleasure
• Friendship and if possible the highest degree of friendship which is love
• understanding
• achievement
• practical reasoning


Each of those features deserves further explanation. Before I do so, I would like you yourself to think about what those features mean to you and their value to your life.

What is Good about Life?

What is good about life? What makes life worth living? Terms such as “good”,”bad”,”right” and “wrong” are all evaluatory terms. In other words, such terms will not make any sense if we though of them in isolation from an evaluating subject who applies certain evaluative criteria to determine whether those terms can be used or not.
I can further clarify this through the use of an example. What does the statement “this is a good car” mean? This statement would mean that if we took the car in question and examine its fulfillment to certain evaluative criteria we would be able to determine whether it’s good or not and accordingly whether this statement is true or false. Evaluative criteria for distinguishing a good car from a bad one might include; its speed, its design, its horse power and so on. All of those criteria are considered to be the evaluative criteria we need to use since they determine what the evaluator would like this car to do for him. Hence, the process of evaluation has to be under lied by the interests of the subject making the evaluation.
Now let’s go back to our main question; what is a good life? It might be clear to you now that this question can be paraphrased into the following; “what are the evaluative criteria we would tend to apply to determine whether a particular form of life good or bad?” we might think that the only one criteria that is of importance in distinguishing a good life from a bad one might be happiness. We might find it plausible to claim that I can say of myself that I had a good life if I had a happy one. Those who hold this assumption are called hedonists. It is important to notice that this assumption is a highly respectable one. Some might think that holding this assumption would mean depending on material and sensual sources of happiness to provide a good life. However, this is not necessarily the case. There are a lot other different sources of happiness other than sensual and material ones. It is clear that serving others, defending a higher cause or gaining success in work are all important sources of happiness which are neither material nor sensual.
However, hedonism still suffers from internal incoherencies which make it a less plausible theory. Those incoherencies were best demonstrated through the objections that have been raised against John Stuart Mill’s hedonism. Those objections were recognized by Mill as we will see and he attempted to defend his hedonism against them. However, it seems that he failed to do so. I will mention some of those objections here. It might seem highly intuitive that a good life is a happy one, but isn’t it intuitive as well that Socrates, who was delineated by his society and was sentenced to death, had a better life than any other fool who rejected his wisdom. You might argue that Socrates might have had difficulties in his life but this doesn’t necessarily mean that he was unhappy. He must have enjoyed his wisdom to a greater degree than what he suffered because of the people surrounding him. Even if this was true, we can still think of someone who was not happy in his life and yet he had a good life. We can think of some one who has discovered a particular truth that would benefit humans greatly. However, he suffered a great deal in his life to come up with this discovery; his discovery was not appreciated till after his death. Such a person might have felt happy for some time when he came up with his discovery but any one else who suffered less in his life must have had a happier life than him. Even though such a person didn’t have the happiest life possible but he can still be considered as having lived a good life, might be even better than the lives of most of us. It is important to notice that it is not only us, who see the whole thing from the outside, who judge his life as a good one, but this person himself would be considering himself as having lived a good life based on his assumption that he made a great achievement that will be evaluated properly one day even after his death. We might still argue that it’s his realization that he has made an achievement which will be recognized one day is still a significant source of happiness that can overweight any other suffering that he might have experienced. Therefore, over all, he had a happier life and thus a better life than most of us. By accepting this response we accept the assumption that making a big achievement yields a greater amount of happiness than most of the other sources and therefore it would over weight any other suffering that one might have experienced.
This would lead us to the following argument that was offered again in objection to hedonism. Imagine that you were given the choice between leading the life of a great scientist who would make very big achievements to the human kind, but who would die at the age of 78, and the life of a moderately intelligent man who would lead a luxurious life style full of sensual delights and who will die at the age of 500 or even will live forever. It seems that most of use would still find the life of this scientist better than the life of this immortal man, even though the amount of happiness experienced by the immortal man must at some point exceed what was experienced by the scientist. Note that even though you might choose to live this luxurious long life, but it is still hard to deny that the life of the scientist would still be more memorable and better.
In response, we might still argue that the happiness created by achievement is of entirely different nature that it can never be compared to what ever the amount of happiness developed by other sources. In such a case, we must have to face this question: what makes the happiness developed by achievement better or of higher value than the happiness developed by other sources. It seems clear now that there must be other evaluative criteria which we have to use to distinguish higher sources of happiness from lower ones. Accordingly, there must be other evaluative criteria which are important in distinguishing a good life other happiness.
We will continue searching for those criteria in later posts.