You Can List a Good Life. Can You Say What Makes It Good?

Socrates asks Hippias a simple question: what is the fine? He means what makes anything fine at all, whether it is a vase, a law, or a good life. Hippias is the most successful paid teacher in Greece. He likes to mention that he once earned more on a single trip than any two other teachers combined, and he answers the way a successful man answers. A fine young woman is fine. When that does not satisfy, he tries gold. When that does not satisfy either, he gives the full answer.

For every man, everywhere, the finest thing is to be rich, healthy, and honored by the Greeks, to reach old age, to give your parents a fine burial when they die, and to be finely buried by your own children.

That is a good life the way most people would describe it, and it could run on a retirement brochure today. Swap “honored by the Greeks” for “respected in your field” and you would not notice it was 2,400 years old.

Socrates accepts every item on it and asks what makes them fine. Hippias has nothing to say.

You can name everything on your good-life list and still not know what makes any of it good. I did that for years. When you cannot say why the first item is good, you have no way to tell when the fifth one stops being good, and the list keeps growing.

(Scholars still argue about whether Plato wrote the Hippias Major. The question in it works no matter who wrote it.)

Stage One: Ask What Makes a Good Life and You Get a List

Ask anyone what a good life is and you get nouns. Health, family, enough money, work that matters, respect, a decent house, a few good friends, time to enjoy them.

None of those are wrong. Hippias was not wrong about health either. The trouble is that a list answers “what” and says nothing about “why.” It also has no rule for what to do when two items fight. Health and money pull against each other in most careers, and the house and the time pull against each other in most marriages. A list cannot settle that, because it treats every item as equally good and never says what they are good for.

Socrates finds the first crack fast. He points out that Hippias’s list is fine for some people and shameful for others. Achilles was the son of a goddess. He could never bury his immortal mother, and Homer has him choose a short, famous life over a long one. By Hippias’s list, the greatest hero the Greeks had would count as a failure.

When a reason only works in some cases, it tells you about the person who likes it, and nothing about what makes the thing good. What Hippias had was a list of things successful people tend to have, and he was one of those people.

Stage Two: The List Grows Because Nothing Tells It to Stop

In my thirties I owned a company during a bad economy. My kids were in competitive soccer, which is not cheap. The business was barely breathing. We pared the family down to the basics. I bought a twenty-year-old Toyota 4Runner on purpose, and we kept the house simple.

There was no philosophy behind it. We had no money and very little choice. But those years were good in a way I did not understand until later.

Then the kids graduated and the economy turned, and I refilled. I bought multiple cars, did rounds of remodels, and took on more commitments. I told myself I had earned it, and in some ways I had.

Every one of those things was fine. A reliable car is good, and so is a kitchen that works. I could have defended each purchase in a sentence. What I could not do was say what made the first car good in a way that would tell me when the third car had stopped being good. I had a list of good things with no reason behind it, and nothing inside a list like that ever tells it to subtract. In my thirties the economy did the subtracting for me. Once it stopped, every new item passed, because good things are good.

It cost me something the lean years had given me. I had less attention and less time, and I lost the plain clarity of knowing what mattered because there was no room for anything else. I traded those away without noticing, one fine purchase at a time.

The Hippias Major has a test that would have caught this. All through the dialogue one rule holds: whatever makes a thing fine cannot be something that produces harm. When Socrates and Hippias try “the powerful” as an answer, it fails on that rule right away. Power to do bad things is not fine, and every later candidate has to survive the same test.

My growing list never faced that test. I asked whether each item was good, and the answer was always yes. I never asked whether the pile was doing harm. It was, slowly, in ways that did not show up on any one receipt.

The Last Answer Is the Most Tempting One

After the list fails, the dialogue tries more candidates, and the order matters.

First comes the appropriate: what fits, what suits the occasion. It fails because what fits can make a thing look fine without making it fine. A man in good clothes looks better, and the clothes do not make him better.

Then the useful. It fails because a thing can be useful for bad ends, and those uses are not fine.

Then the beneficial, meaning whatever produces good. That one comes closest, and it fails in a way Socrates finds absurd. If the fine is the cause of the good, then the fine and the good are two different things, and neither man can accept that the fine is not good.

The last candidate is what pleases the eye and the ear. Of everything they try, it looks the most like an answer, and it fails too.

The Greek word in play is kalon, which means fine, beautiful, and noble in a single word. (In this piece I use “good” in the everyday sense for what the dialogue calls fine.) The dialogue keeps finding that the beautiful part of it is the easiest to fake. I think most people make that mistake once the list stops working. Their good life starts to mean the good life that looks good, like the photo from the trip or the kitchen in the after picture. A remodel can please the eye every time you walk in and still tell you nothing about whether your life is going well.

The dialogue never reaches a definition. Socrates closes with an old proverb: fine things are difficult. That ending frustrates people. I find it honest, because it admits the question takes work and that most people quit on it early.

Stage Three: An Account You Can Use on Something New

Looking back, the economy made the choice for me in my thirties. A reason is what lets you make the same choice when nothing is forcing you, and there is no need to wait for a bad year to start.

In my late forties I came back to a pared-down life. Most of the credit goes to my wife. She is a hardcore minimalist, much more disciplined about it than I am, and she has been the anchor that keeps me there. Her example helps, and the reason still has to be mine, because the choice gets made in my own head when something catches my eye.

A shorter list would have grown back. What changed was that I started to have a reason I could use on something new before it came in the door. Mine came back to something I had felt in the lean years without saying it: there is beauty and simplicity in keeping less, and anything new has to earn its place against that. Something still shows up and I want it. I let most of it pass now, because I can ask what it would be good for and whether the answer is one I actually believe.

Run my reason against my own history and it sorts things fast. The twenty-year-old 4Runner I bought on purpose passes, and the third car fails, because it was one more thing to keep up and did nothing the first two could not.

Keeping less is not the account either. An empty garage can turn into one more thing to be proud of. In his later dialogues Plato puts the fine in a well-ordered soul, where good judgment decides what a person wants and things are good when that judgment uses them well. That is closer to what I mean by a reason than any count of what is in the garage.

The word for what Socrates kept asking people to produce is logos, which here means an account: a reason that holds across cases and tells you what to do with the next one. Hippias could list fine things all day and still could not give an account of them, so his list was useless the moment something new came along.

An account explains several items on your list and rules out something you have been tempted by. If your reason only explains the one item you wrote it for, you have a preference with a sentence attached.

You see the same failure at work, and it costs teams real decisions. Most company values pages are a Hippias list: integrity, excellence, customer first, innovation. Nobody can make a hard call with them, because nobody wrote down what makes those things good or what to do when two of them collide. When customer first and excellence point in opposite directions on a Friday release, the values page is silent, and the loudest person in the room decides.

How to Turn Your List Into an Account

This takes an evening, and you will not finish it. Start anyway.

1. Write the list. Ten minutes. Use honest nouns. Put down what you chase, not what you think you should.

2. Finish one sentence for each item. “This is good because…” Write the real answer, even when it is embarrassing. “Because people will see it” is a real answer, and it tells you something.

3. Find the reason that repeats. Look across the sentences. Usually two or three reasons keep coming back. One of them is closer to an account than any item on the list. The reason worth keeping says what the items are for. If your answer to “what is it for?” is another item on the list, you have not left the list yet.

4. Run the harm test. For each item, ask when it would stop being good. A second car is good up to some point. Where is that point? If you cannot name it, all you know so far is that you like it.

5. Use it on the next thing before it arrives. The account earns its keep on decisions you have not made yet: the car, the job offer, the remodel you are pricing, the commitment someone asked you to take on. Run the reason against it out loud. If the thing passes, take it without guilt. If it fails, let it go and notice how little you miss it.

6. Expect to come up short. Socrates did not finish this and neither will you. A rough reason you use every week beats a polished list you cannot apply to anything.

I wrote about a cousin of this in It Was Never a Sacrifice, about the things you give up that were never the good in the first place. That piece covered what to drop, and this one asks why you keep anything at all. If the larger question of what a flourishing life is interests you, I took it on directly in eudaimonia versus happiness.

Final Thoughts

Hippias walked away from that conversation with his list intact. He was still rich and still sure of himself, and he did not have a single reason he could use.

Most of us are in the same spot. We know what is on the list and would defend every item, and we still cannot say what makes any of it belong there, which is why the list keeps growing and the life does not seem to get any better.

Only a reason can tell you when to stop adding to the list. Get one by tonight, even a rough one, and use it on the next thing that catches your eye.

If you want to work alongside people who want to know why the things they keep are good, MasteryLab is where that work happens.

FAQ

What makes a good life according to Plato?

Plato never gives a one-line answer, and the Hippias Major shows why. When Socrates asks what makes things fine, every list of good things fails, because the items are fine for some people and harmful for others. The working demand in the dialogue is that whatever makes a life good has to hold across cases and can never be something that produces harm. Plato’s later dialogues tie that reason to justice and wisdom in the soul, not to the possessions on the list.

What does kalon mean in Greek philosophy?

The Greek word kalon means fine, beautiful, and noble at once. It covers a beautiful object, a well-made tool, and a brave act with the same word. Aristotle says virtuous action is done for the sake of the kalon. The Hippias Major is an extended attempt to say what the kalon is, and it ends without a definition.

What is the Hippias Major about?

The Hippias Major is a short dialogue in which Socrates asks Hippias, a famous paid teacher, what the fine is. Hippias offers a beautiful young woman, then gold, then a list of the good life: wealth, health, honor, old age, burying your parents well and being buried well by your children. Socrates tests more candidates, including the appropriate, the useful, the beneficial, and what pleases the eye and ear. All of them fail. Scholars still debate whether Plato wrote it.

How do you define a good life for yourself?

Start with the list, because everyone has one. Then finish the sentence “this is good because” for every item and look for the reason that repeats. Test that reason by asking when each item would stop being good. A reason that explains several items and rules out something you have been tempted by is the start of an account, and you can use it on the next decision before it arrives.