If there were two concepts that define a healthy, happy and high quality life for all of us those concepts would most likely be happiness and truth, both philosophically difficult but important enough to warrant the work it takes to achieve and understanding of them.

Aristotle’s definition is a great start, but really a test of happiness rather than a definition: happiness is a good in itself.  If we really want to be happy then we must look to understand what it is to be happy.  If your happiness is reliant upon someone or something else it is not truly happiness, but a lesser version of the happiness that we all so desire.  A high quality of happiness is a good in itself.

Truth is perhaps a bit more difficult, but I’ve come to a definition of it that through the years I’ve found is helpful.  [T]ruth is:

The quality of the relationship between the idea of a thing and the thing itself.

So, [T]ruth comes in degrees of quality.  Through the years I’ve claimed that philosophy is the most important human endeavor and have been looked at with incredulity.  But, given this definition of both happiness and [T]ruth and their importance to the quality of our lives philosophy is the only path by which we can understand the quality of those things that we deem most important to us.

The conclusion of this is simply that we must understand the quality of our relationships.  This has the funny and further inductive property of applying to all of our relationships, political and personal; an interesting consequent in itself.