“The idea is something like the following: A question for all known civilizations until modernity was: What is the good life and how do you live it? So at one level, although everyone professes confusion and obscurity, this is a question every civilization poses—Chinese, Islamic, Hindu etc. and in some way all tribal societies: What’s the point of living? In its philosophic elaborations these are long standing questions. Certainly in the West, but also in these other traditions, the answer is always that the accumulation of riches, or power, is never sufficient to achieve the good life, which is translated as “flourishing” or “happiness” in the 18th century. Happiness is a bourgeois idea. When we use the Greek concept of eudaimonia it doesn’t mean happiness—again the house, the Volvo and two dogs. It means something else: a kind of growth of capacities, some degree of resolution of living with the life one’s made. Even under extreme conditions; EPICTETUS was born as a slave (OLDFATHER, 1928). So it’s not just a ruling class ideology, it’s a way of anthrōpos asking: What kind of being is anthrōpos? Anthrōpos is the kind of being that, if he/she is capable of it, seeks to live a life worth living. To which, being the king might be an answer, but it’s most likely not an answer. Then, through a long trajectory through Christianity it took other forms and then it of course was shattered by the Modern, which said the point of thinking and of knowing is instrumental. Control, mastery, prosperity, enrichments, and that in fact, knowledge is separate from the knower. Whereas one doesn’t want to go back after everything I’ve said to sort of sitting in the Philosophy Department and trying to figure out the conditions of the subject. Nonetheless, why are people doing what they’re doing? If the only answers are “I’m going to cure AIDS” and then they haven’t cured AIDS, or “I’m going to get rich” and then they’re not as rich as the next guy in Silicon Valley and furthermore they’re on their third marriage and they’re not happy and their kids don’t like them and the rest of it: then what?’
rest @ http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/2542/3940