One Ought To Live A Good Life By Josef Pieper

One Ought to Live a Good Life To live a good life one must be seeded in faith, truth, and self-giving love for the good of others. To be successful in this good life, we must be in a friendship with God, first and foremost. Without knowing God, truth will allude us and we will not be able to foster good, self-giving, and healthy relationships toward one another. God gave us intellect and the power of reasoning to be able to tell truth from lies, good from bad, and justice from injustice. Through this faith and reason we grow our relationship with God and therefore reflect this loving and self-giving relationship from God to our fellow man for their good. All we do should not be for our own selfish pleasure, but should be for willing the good of others.

These people are, in fact, lovers of wisdom and seekers of truth. We will support each other as we journey through this good life. To begin we look at a writing by Josef Pieper entitled, Leisure The Basis of Culture. Here, in the beginning of the book, we find the foundation of life, which is God. Pieper writes, “Culture depends for its very existence on leisure, and leisure, in its turn, is not possible unless it has a durable and consequently living link with the cultus, with divine worship.” (Leisure, 15). Pieper is saying that we are not meant for the sole purpose of work, but our sole purpose is for leisure, to contemplate and worship the living God. Our Goal then, is that “we work in order to have leisure.” (Leisure, 20). Today and in the past this is a very controversial notion and has been met with many criticism. It has been the normal condition that we live to work, and if we are not working, then we are useless. We see this when Pieper says that, “According to Kant man’s knowledge is realized in the act of comparing, examining, relating, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, demonstrating – all of which are efforts of active intellectual effort.”