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The Idea of a Life Plan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Charles Larmore
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Chicago

Extract

When philosophers undertake to say what it is that makes life worth living, they generally display a procrustean habit of thought which the practice of philosophy itself does much to encourage. As a result, they arrive at an image of the human good that is far more controversial than they suspect. The canonical view among philosophers ancient and modern has been, in essence, that the life lived well is the life lived in accord with a rational plan. To me this conception of the human good seems manifestly wrong. The idea that life should be the object of a plan is false to the human condition. It misses the important truth which Proust, by contrast, discerned and made into one of the organizing themes of his great meditation on disappointment and revelation, A la recherche du temps perdu: The happiness that life affords is less often the good we have reason to pursue than the good that befalls us unexpectedly.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1999

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References

1 Proust, Marcel, Albertine Disparue (Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1992), p. 83Google Scholar. “In exchange for what our imagination leads us to expect and which we vainly give ourselves so much trouble to try to discover, life gives us something which we were very far from imagining.”

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17 Ibid., p. 399.

18 Ibid., p. 408. More exactly, a person's plan is “subjectively rational” if it is based on an accurate conception of his existing wants and the available knowledge concerning the consequences of his actions; it is also “objectively rational” if the future actually goes as he supposes (pp. 417, 422).

19 Ibid., pp. 416–17.

20 See ibid., p. 420.

21 Ibid., p. 422. A rational person, Rawls there observes, “does what seems best at the time, and if his beliefs later prove to be mistaken with untoward results, it is through no fault of his own. There is n o cause for self-reproach.”

22 A fine development of this objection is to be found in Slote, Michael, Goods and Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), chs. 1 and 2.Google Scholar

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