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The Art of Living

Living According To Nature

Massimo Pigliucci goes back to Nature to seek happiness.

We should all live according to Nature. No, I don’t mean that we should run naked into the forest and hug trees (though there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that). I mean that if we want to be happy, we should conduct our lives in agreement with what Nature itself suggests, and in particular, our own nature.

Consider a simple example, originally formulated by British philosopher Philippa Foot. Let’s say you invite me over for dinner and I show up with a bottle of wine. I also bring you a gift of a cactus plant. Now you’re responsible for the wellbeing of the cactus. The best course of action for you is to treat it in agreement with Nature. Since it’s a desert plant, this means that you should give it plenty of light but only a little bit of water. That will make the cactus thrive, because you’re handling it in accordance with cactus nature. Foot’s idea is that the very same concept applies to human beings, despite the fact that our nature, and our needs for happiness, are a little more complicated than the needs of a cactus.

Foot, together with a number of other British philosophers active during the twentieth century, were largely responsible for the renewal of virtue ethics – an approach that began with Socrates, Aristotle, and the Stoics. The phrase ‘to live according to Nature’ was, according to the commentator Diogenes Laertius, the motto of the Stoic school, though it was also adopted by their arch rivals, the Epicureans. Naturally (pardon the pun), Stoics and Epicureans interpreted the phrase very differently. For the Stoics, human nature is fundamentally the nature of a species that’s highly social and capable of reason. It follows that to live ‘according to Nature’ means to live prosocially, and to attempt to solve one’s problems by reason rather than, say, violence. The Epicureans, by contrast, thought that the most crucial thing about human beings is that we naturally avoid pain and seek pleasure – which just happen to be the two goals of the Epicurean life.

Both schools pointed to the same evidence to make their case: observe the behavior of human infants and you’ll see that they like to bond with others and like to solve problems (Stoics); but they also look for pleasure and stay away from pain (Epicureans). Modern psychologists think that the two approaches are, in fact, complementary: we are simultaneously eudaimonic (character-cultivating) and hedonic (pleasure-seeking) creatures. The trick is to find a good balance between these two tendencies. The empirical evidence leans toward the conclusion that a good human life consists of a main dish of eudaimonia accompanied by a peppering of hedonia (see, for instance, ‘Hedonic vs. Eudaimonic Wellbeing: How to Reach Happiness’, by Anna Katharina Schaffner, at positivepsychology.com).

“Hold on a second!” you might object: “Doesn’t all that flagrantly violate the famous is/ought gap identified by David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature?” There, Hume noted that it “seems altogether inconceivable” that one could slide from descriptions of matters of fact (‘is’) to claims about values (‘ought’) – and that at least ‘a reason should be given’ for the alleged connection between the two.”

However, such a connection is arguably provided by the reasoning of Aristotle, Foot, and modern positive psychologists: certain things augment human flourishing, while other things get in the way of it, and human flourishing is the aim of ethics. Ethics, therefore, is an empirical discipline, just like medicine. So in the same way a doctor can advise you on how to improve and maintain your health on the basis of objective considerations, so can a philosopher or a psychologist.

The Stoic Epictetus was aware of this analogy nineteen centuries ago, when he wrote, “Gentlemen, a philosopher’s school is a doctor’s office. You shouldn’t leave after having had a pleasant time, but a painful one, because you arrive unhealthy, one with a dislocated shoulder, another with a tumor, another with an abscess, another with a headache” (Discourses, III.23.30). Epictetus was known for not coddling (or cuddling) his students!

That said, living according to Nature does not mean that whatever is natural is therefore good. That’s a well known logical fallacy, known as the ‘appeal to nature’, and neither your doctor nor your philosopher should fall for it. Poisonous mushrooms are natural, but are not good for your health. Similarly, anger is natural, but it often gets in the way of your happiness (see my ‘Seneca On Anger’, Philosophy Now, Issue 165, for more on this).

The next time you find yourself wondering how to live well, remember the cactus. Just as that desert plant thrives when we honor its particular nature, we too flourish when we pay attention to what we actually are: reasoning social beings who benefit from both meaningful engagement with others and the occasional dose of (simple) pleasure. This isn’t about following rigid rules handed down, but about the more challenging work of honest self-examination, of observing what genuinely contributes to our wellbeing, and what merely seems like it should. In the end, living according to Nature is less about returning to some imagined state of purity, and more about the ongoing practice of becoming fully, authentically human.

Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Other Ancient Philosophers (with Greg Lopez and Meredith Kunz, The Experiment). More by him at figsinwintertime.substack.com.