I’ve moved to London to work on a specific project, which I think is of interest to Russians as much as British people. What I am exploring and researching is the philosophical idea of the Good Life, and its relevance to modern liberal societies and modern politics.

The Good Life is an idea originating in ancient Greek philosophy, that there is a wise or virtuous way to live, and it is the responsibility of the citizen or individual to discover and try to adhere to this moral ideal or set of practices.

Often, discovering and following the Good Life was a pedagogic exercise conducted between young citizens and the philosopher – Socrates would approach young men in Athens and ask them if they knew themselves, if they knew how to take care of themselves.

This wasn’t just a question of individual morality. It was crucial to politics as well. Only the young man who knew himself and discovered right ethical principals could be relied on to be a good ruler. The ethical relationship to oneself that was at the heart of the Good Life was the foundation for every other relationship – to one’s lover, one’s friends, one’s family, one’s society, and those outside one’s society.

The Greeks didn’t agree on what precisely the Good Life was. But they agreed on certain values and practices, such as the project of trying to know the self, trying to live moderately, trying to live without excessive passion and without excessive dependence on external things. Such a life, philosophers like Aristotle, Epictetus or Epicurus argued, were lives lived in harmony with nature, and thus lives of tranquillity and moral freedom.

Fast forward to the 1990s, when I was at university, and postmodernism was in its pomp at university campuses in Europe and the US.

Postmodernism can be defined in many different ways in different fields, but in philosophy, it tended to refer to a Nietzschean scepticism towards Enlightenment projects to find ‘universal truth’.

Thus Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes would deconstruct texts, including Enlightenment texts by the likes of Hegel or Marx, and try to expose the radical ambiguity of meaning in the texts, how one meaning always involved the repression of another meaning, and how in fact the text existed in a Nietzschean dance between these multiple meanings.

Perhaps even more influential for postmodernist philosophy was Michel Foucault, another French philosopher, who looked critically at western institutions such as the prison or the mental asylum, and the way they used supposedly ‘true’ scientific discourse as a means to power and domination over the individual. ‘Truth’ and ‘knowledge’ become exposed in Foucault’s work as mere rhetoric or ‘truth games’ which one group or individual uses to cloak their attempt to dominate another group or individual. Beneath every truth game is a power game.

Both Derrida’s and Foucault’s theories would be very influential for various groups who felt themselves to be oppressed or marginalized – women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, people from former colonies. Queer theory, feminist theory or postcolonial theory would seek to explore and explode the claims to ‘universal truth’ or ‘nature’ of the dominant power group – white, western, heterosexual males.

For example, postcolonialists like Edward Said would ask if western liberalism was really ‘natural’ or ‘universally true’, or just appropriate to specific historical circumstances? Was it often used as rhetoric to hide what was really an attempt by one group to dominate and exploit another group?

These endeavours led to some worthwhile philosophical and cultural investigations. Postcolonialists like Said did some very interesting analyses of western literature, to show how definitions of western civilization often depended on stigmatizing outsider groups – for example, Europe defining itself as ‘civilized’ against the ‘barbaric’ Russia, or Turkey, or Ireland, and then proving its superiority with all kind of half-baked theories of essential moral, cultural or racial superiority.

Foucault likewise did important and fascinating work into our institutions of mental health, which take away people’s freedom through definitions of insanity that are, in fact, constantly shifting and are occasionally (as in Soviet Russia) subject to purely political considerations. Mental health, as many thinkers in the 60s and 70s would claim, was a power game, with various individuals or groups trying to define other individuals or groups as mad or deviant.

Thus psychologists in the 1890s would define women as hysterical if they appeared to have too much of a libido. Was this ‘true’ or ‘scientific’ or merely an extension of their own prejudices as a power group?

At the same time, postmodernism always felt like a bit of a dead-end to me, as a young student studying at university while it was at its peak. On the one hand, it led to a priggish form of political correctness, with various minority groups constantly taking offence at other groups’ description of them or portrayal of them. It became a politics of prickliness, of offence easily taken, a constant policing of the speech acts of others, like some prickly Bolshevik committee watching for any signs of bourgeois terminology in the residents of a house.

It didn’t really engage me, because I was white, male, heterosexual, middle-class and European. So while I could respect and support various minority groups’ quest for civil rights and recognition, what should I aim for? Did freedom only exist in recognizing and deconstructing my prejudices towards minority groups? Did it mean nothing more than gaining the recognition and acceptance of others? Did it not consist in something higher, in one’s relationship with one’s self, or with God?

There was also the philosophical question – if we could only say ‘truth’, in inverted commas, if truth or morality could never be understood or stated, if it was never anything more than the rhetoric of power, then how could you ever say an action was ‘wrong’? How could you argue, for example, against torture?

Critics of Foucault would say that the individual in his works becomes a Kafka-esque figure, cursed to be a passive player in power games, never truly able to free himself from power, but only perhaps at the most turn the tables on those dominating him, becoming the screwer rather than the screwed. ‘There is no reciprocity in sex’, Foucault once said. ‘There is only the penetrated and the penetrator’. It was a rather dark view of human relations.

In the last decade, philosophers have tried to find a way out of this impasse, some way we can go beyond the nihilism (or radical scepticism) of postmodernism and the ethical relativism of modern liberalism to find some agreed ethical basis for modern society. This is the project many of the leading living western philosophers are engaged in, such as Jurgen Habermas, John Dewey and Charles Taylor.

Part of this project is a search for a return to the Good Life, for some agreed idea of wise and virtuous ways of living, or at least some agreed idea of what we are looking for, and of the value of that search. It’s the return of the idea of the search for truth as being also a search for self-mastery and moral freedom.

And this project is also a search for the role of the philosopher or intellectual in modern society, and their relationship to the masses. Does the philosopher have a pedagogic role to play in relation to the masses, is what he or she has to say of ‘value’, can he or she recommend ways of living or thinking to ordinary people, and if so, on what moral basis, or is everything just about personal lifestyle choices, and the life of the philosopher has no more to recommend it than, say, the life of the sadomasochist or the plumber?

The project has many different ramifications and many different areas of research. It has direct relevance for education, because the search for the Good Life was originally a pedagogic enterprise. The philosopher taught young people, particularly members of the ruling class, how to think, how to examine themselves, how to become masters of themselves, and this enabled them to become valuable and autonomous citizens and rulers, neither slaves of other people, nor of their own passions and prejudices.

It also has direct relevance for mental health, because the search for the Good Life was originally a set of therapeutic exercises. The young student was trained how to be the doctor of himself, how to cure himself of foolish beliefs or harming passions which de-centred him and robbed him of his moral freedom. Philosophy freed one from anxiety, depression and alienation, and returned one to tranquillity and self-possession.

It also has relevance for the justice system. Should we just take away the physical and legal freedom of those in our prison systems, subject them to external power games, or is it possible and worthwhile to teach them philosophical techniques to become masters of themselves, to learn how to withstand the substantial external pressures which drive them to commit crimes?

Again, it’s a pedagogic question – many individuals in prison are examples of pedagogical failure, the failure of parents and schools to pass on techniques of ethical self-management to young people. It is possible to try to pass on these techniques to people in prison?

And above all, it’s a question of freedom. Is our freedom purely a legal construct? It is purely something juridicial? Is the end of the Grand March of liberalism the establishment of legal rights? Or is freedom deeper than that, something that exists ultimately in one’s relationship to oneself, or even to God? Is freedom, in its deepest sense, a set of processes which one can only undertake on oneself, to free oneself from mental slavery?

I’ve come back to the UK to work on this project and explore the different ideas which people engaged in this project have put forward over the last few years. I’ll write about my different explorations of this project over the next few months, and the research I see going on in schools, prisons, in mental health and politics.

In my next article, I’ll talk about Foucault and how, at the very end of his life, he moved beyond radical scepticism, and started to look for a set of ethical techniques or practices that the individual could use to work on themselves and reach a higher level of ethical awareness. In other words, I want to look at how Foucault himself moved beyond postmodernism and began to search for the Good Life.

Jules Evans, a columnist of Eurasian Home website, London

August 2, 2007