A tale of two farmers

Richard Taylor thinks that the ultimate goal of human life is to be creative. By this he means, following Aristotle, that we should exercise our abilities and skills in such a way that we live an original, challenging and interesting life. People who don’t do that are missing the very point of being alive and waste their one opportunity to reach true happiness.

Consider two farmers: The first one does not know anything about farming, but he has a book with all the solutions to all possible problems that can appear while farming. When there is a problem, he looks it up in the book and does exactly what it says. He never thinks, he never questions the book’s advice. And that’s good, because the book is a marvellous work of deep and useful expertise, and the farm has been flourishing for years because of it.

A creative life, Taylor think, does not mean that one has to be an artist. 

The other farmer does not have such a book. Instead, he always runs around the farm with an old toolbox, with pieces of string and rolls of tape and whatever else seems useful, trying to diagnose and fix things by himself. In the beginning, he had no idea what he was doing, but over the years he has learned a bit about plants and now he can deal with most problems that he encounters daily on his farm. If some new issue comes along, he’ll study it, try various remedies out, and see what works. Sometimes plants will die with his method, but after a while, he’ll learn how to fix the problems.

In the long run, both farms manage to run with reasonable success and, let’s assume, both men work about the same number of hours per day and earn roughly the same income from their farms.

But here comes the question: which of the two would you think is a happier man?

Or, to put it another way, which one would you like to be?

Most of us would probably prefer to be the second farmer. As long as his method is equally successful as the first’s, we feel that there is some value in experimenting, in finding things out for ourselves, in learning and, finally, in being proud of oneself when a remedy works and a problem has been successfully fixed.

The life of the farmer with the book looks, in contrast, mind-numbingly dull. To run around all day following to the letter the instructions one is given by a book, without ever understanding any of it, without being able to experiment or try new ideas out, seems somewhat like work at a factory assembly line. Where’s the fun in that?

But why exactly would we think that the farmer without the book is happier? What, precisely, is the source of his happiness?

Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)