The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is what I would consider to be a paradigmatically good human being.
By that I don’t mean that he didn’t say or do terrible things. He did. What I mean is that he oriented himself toward and allowed himself to be guided by those things which have absolute worth and which make a human life worth living.
I read Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein when I was about 21, and I found it incredibly depressing. I don’t even think I finished it. I think because of genetic factors—three of his siblings committed suicide—he was prone to depression. And he died relatively young. Thinking back over it now, I have a very different perspective, though.
I’m not sure Wittgenstein ever “found” truth or goodness—whatever that would mean—but I think it is difficult to pursue truth and goodness with the kind of intensity Wittgenstein did and be a bad human being. I think the determined questing for truth and goodness cannot but help make a life worthwhile—in part because it apparently cannot be done without also marshaling forces that cannot but help deepen one’s character.
I think being satisfied with easy answers to such questions—which honestly most people are, and they become angry when you point out that their answers are unsatisfying, vide Socrates—does not necessarily make someone bad. I think it makes them vulnerable to corruption, though. They end up in that supposed middle place that the goddess warned Parmenides about (which doesn’t even exist, it’s just a place one supposes one is in when they’re nowhere at all, which is appropriate to a person whose character is also neither here nor there).
In other words, there is a tight (if not necessary) relationship between what one attempts to know or behold and what kind of person one is. We can’t separate knowledge, being, and ethics as cleanly as modern philosophers would sometimes like to.
Wicked people generally don’t spend a lot of time worrying whether they’re giving people in their lives what they are owed.
Bad human beings don’t lay awake at night wondering if their fear has prevented them from doing what is right.
It’s difficult to live a worthless life but also constantly wonder whether you’re deluded or whether you are deceiving yourself or others.
“Wicked,” “owed,” “bad,” “right,” “wrong,” “worthless,” “deluded”—it doesn’t matter whether there are once-and-for-all definitions of these terms. The very habit of giving these terms serious consideration is what develops a person’s character in what the Greeks called a eudaimon or “happy” direction (where “happy” does not mean “chipper” but something closer to what we would now consider to be “positive growth”).
Which is why a habit of offering thought-terminating clichés to these sorts of questions—”It’s all relative,” “Everyone has their own reality,” “The goal of life is whatever you decide is the goal”—is not merely an epistemological error. The problem is not that the statement has a truth value of “false” relative to some external, objective, transobservable state of affairs “out there”.
The problem is that we cannot fail to struggle with the meaning of truthfulness, courage, and justice without also failing at being human.