A Good Man is Hard To Find (Part 1)

For the past few months, I’ve been reading about what makes a “good” person. There’s about a million different ways of answering this question, but I was looking for something that was personally satisfying: something I could take away and use in my own life, as opposed to abstract moral theory. I’m nowhere close to being done with my journey, but I thought I’d share a few major takeaways from my first two reads.

I started on this journey with The Republic by Plato. You can trace origins to almost every field of philosophy in this book: in the process of answering what makes a person “good,” Plato touches upon political theory, science, education, ethics, and epistemology. Now of course, the interesting part of the Republic is that Plato wrote it in the form of a dialogue through the perspective of his mentor, Socrates (but when I say dialogue, it’s not really a back-and-forth discussion). It starts out with Socrates and Glaucon debating, but at one point Glaucon just starts agreeing with everything Socrates says.

Regardless of the writing style, Socrates sets up his argument as follows: we can liken the human soul to a nation-state. If we can find a nation-state that is maximally successful, we can use that to find the virtues of a noble man. After a lot of discussion, we are given a picture of Socrates’s ideal state: an aristocracy where everyone is given a duty to complete, and the entire state is ruled by philosopher-kings. What’s interesting here is that there is no free will or creative expression allowed in this ideal state: you are confined to the role that you are assigned during the education process. In fact, Socrates ties his definition of justice to this: justice for a person is doing their obligations and minding their own business. Socrates shows how the other forms of government (democracy, tyranny, and oligarchy) have their own pitfalls that yield aristocracy as the best form of government (although he does rely on the slippery slope fallacy a lot in this section).

Socrates then finally connects this back to the human soul. His message, although winding and unclear at first, was made apparent at the end: the “ideal” man is one who is self-disciplined, carries out his assigned duty without hesitation, and is always in the pursuit of knowledge. Socrates shows this by splitting the soul into three parts: reason, spirit (essentially honor), and desire. A person is “good” when the “rational” part rules the soul, supported by the “spirited” part, to keep the “desire” part in check. I think this lesson ties in to how I perceived The Republic: not as a treatise on political theory (a bizarre one, at that), but instead as a guidebook to personal ethics. I don’t think that Plato truly believed that we should remove all free will and remove all arts from society; that would be ridiculous and unwise. I think Plato conjures up the idea of the ideal state to help us understand our souls and how we should govern ourselves.

At this point, I found myself at a juncture. I needed to choose my next book, something completely different from the ancient Greeks. But still seeking the wisdom of the ancients, I turned to the Bhagavad Gita. I had read the story of the Mahabharata as a kid, like many of my fellow Indian-American children. The tales of Arjuna, the infallible warrior, decimating his enemies on the battlefield always lingered in the back of my mind, the pinnacle of athleticism and prowess. One story in particular always stuck with me: when Arjuna was training with his brothers, their instructor Drona told them to hit a wooden bird in a tree. All who try fail, except for Arjuna, who splits it right down its eye. Arjuna explains that he closed off his mind to anything but the eye of the bird and only saw that when he fired his bow.

This was my image of Arjuna, the unwavering warrior, never failing in his duty. But the Bhagavad Gita shows a very different picture: as the Kurukshetra War begins (the climactic battle of the Mahabharata), Arjuna gets off his chariot and weeps because he refuses to fight against his own family. Krishna, who at this point was nothing more than a humble charioteer and friend, reveals his true nature to Arjuna as the lord of the universe (the Bhagavad Gita literally translates to “the song of the lord”). Keep in mind, Krishna has attained three separate identities here: a human prince and subject of many folk tales, an avatar of Vishnu (the preserver deity in Vedic mythology), and now this even higher existence as an omnipotent creator even higher than Vishnu in the cosmic hierarchy. This revelation, known as the Vishvarupa, is a sublime vision of the entire universe contained within a single being.

Krishna, revealing his divine state in the Vishvarupa, tells Arjuna what it is that makes a good man: to fulfill your dharma (translating loosely to “duty” or “calling”). We, as humans, must rise to the occasion to always fulfill our tasks, but with the caveat that we cannot be attached to the results of our actions. Krishna wisely instructs Arjuna, “You have a right to the action, but not to the fruit of the action.” The “enlightened” individual performs their duty in a selfless manner, never hesitating to think about the personal reward of the task at hand. By operating in this detached manner, we are able to break free from the cycle of “karma” (actions).

Now of course, I’m skipping a lot of the mythology here. Krishna also instructs Arjuna to fulfill his dharma, act selflessly in charity, and pursue knowledge of Krishna to understand our divine nature. This last part is the most interesting (and ambiguous) instruction to me. In Hinduism, we can see the world in two parts: “brahman” (the divine) and “atman” (the self). In the Advaita school of philosophy, the Brahman and the Atman are one and the same, indicating that humanity has an underlying divine nature that is good. This divine nature is shielded by selfish human tendencies, so we must search for the atman/brahman in ourselves by forgetting our desires and studying Krishna. The most interesting (and personally applicable) lesson from this is as follows: because Krishna is the entire universe, when Krishna tells us to pursue his knowledge, he is telling us to study the universe.

Inadvertently, Krishna has instructed us that the way to find the divine in ourselves is to study the world around us. Of course, this is a great oversimplification, and I’m missing a lot of the mythological details on how Krishna tells Arjuna that we can attain moksha and break the cycle of samsara. Finally, at the end of the Gita, Arjuna returns to his former self and decimates the enemy on the battlefield. The Bhagavad Gita is such a fascinating work, as in the midst of one of the greatest military epics in history, we get a lesson in personal ethics and enlightenment in the middle of the battlefield.

So what has Krishna told us in essence? Fulfill the duties given to us, temper our passions, and let the pursuit of knowledge guide us. Sound familiar? This is exactly the same conclusion that Plato arrived at in The Republic. Plato’s definition of justice (doing one’s duty) is exactly the same as the concept of dharma. They also agree that we must tame selfishness and pursue knowledge to live a “good life.”

While Plato finds the “good” through rigorous logic and statecraft, Krishna finds it through devotion and the realization of oneness. But regardless of the different backgrounds that led to the creation of these two texts, they arrive at the same conclusion on how to live a happy, enlightened life.