ABSTRACT
In what follows, I intend to proffer a sketch of a robustly lived life. If the social and meta-ethical ontology that I have articulated in the previous chapters holds, then what would it mean for individuals to realize their lives fully? I suggest that the good life consists in the articulation of ground projects. By ground projects, I mean comprehensive forms of life to which persons dedicate their entire beings in the hope of the most in-depth and broadest realization possible.1 I argue below that there are at least four irreducible and interanimated articulations of ground projects: world-articulation; selfarticulations; knowledge and aesthetic articulations; and meaning-articulation. By world-articulation, I mean that a ground project ought to be textured by justice and ethics. By self-articulation, I mean at least two things: first, that the ground project ought to be oriented toward expanding and stretching the very limits of a person’s capacities, and, second, that the ground project ought to expand an individual’s well-being, that it ought to hold some form of “subjective resonance” to the individual. By knowledge and aesthetic articulation, I mean that the ground project ought to be oriented toward discovery, interpretation and performances of truth, knowledge and creativity. And, finally, by meaning-articulation, I mean that the ground project ought to be existentially meaningful. In characterizing ground projects as textured by justice and ethics;
oriented by knowledge and aesthetics; as realizations of the self; and as
deep with meaning, I am also breaking with the dominant accounts of the good life as driven by a singular or prioritized object, telos or practice: for example, philosophical contemplation (Aristotle); morality (Kant); political glory (Arendt); or creativity (Marx). But by insisting on ground projects as substantively structured by justice, knowledge, aesthetics, meaning, and self-articulation, I also reject relativist notions of the good life as reducible to pleasure (vulgar utilitarianism); freely chosen preferences (liberalism); or expressive authenticity (Romanticism). My use of the term articulation is deliberate. First, it emphasizes that
the ground projects are emergent relationally and socially. I reject the Nietzschean belief that there are only an elite few capable of stamping their will on the good life. Second, I mean to stress that the realization of ground projects is evaluated both diachronically and synchronically. Ground projects are articulated in time and space. Thus, their evaluation is a matter of degree, as is hinted at in the epigraph above. Ground projects are not judged as “successes” or “failures” based on an absolute standard, on the purity of their beginnings, or on their endpoint or consequences. Fully realized ground projects can be ephemeral or enduring, singular or repeated, intentional or serendipitous. Fourth, by articulation I also aim to underscore the tensions that wrack the realization of ground projects – tensions between and among world articulation; knowledge and aesthetic articulation; self-articulation; and meaning articulation. Below, I explore these four dimensions.
