Aristotle on the Selective Happiness

Abstract

Happiness is such a common and seemingly clear word. However, as a philosophical concept, it is endowed with numerous meanings and contradictions. Aristotle also pointed to these difficulties. Of course, happiness is a feeling of ultimate pleasure from achieving the goal, a special state of the soul, when harmony, luck and divine instruction characterize the world and fate. However, people understand happiness in different ways. Examples from different cultures illustrate it particularly well. Thales in his time made fun of people who saw happiness in achieving wealth. Most often, the state of happiness is associated with hedonism, specifically with obtaining certain life benefits. The creation by Aristotle of eudemonism as an integral felicitary doctrine, hierarchized in relation to the benefits, laid the systemic foundation to the science of happiness. In antiquity the main opposing felicitary doctrines were born – hedonism and stoicism, the latest in its extended version is proposed to name non-ontologism. Christianity transcends Aristotelian eudemonism, abandoning its hedonistic motives. However, Hedonism of the XVIII century acts under the name of eudemonism, making imbalance in the understanding of Kant’s deontological ethics directed against such eudemonism, which in fact is hedonism. The Russian philosophy with its origins in the Orthodox Church, does not relate its doctrines directly to the happiness, but contains the basic felicitary ideas.

The need for happiness is quite natural, as the desire for it. However, this idea is quite disputable. For example, N. Berdyaev noted that the word “happiness” is the most meaningless of all human words. There is no criterion and measure of happiness. There can be no comparison between the happiness of one person and the happiness of another. It is also not true that man is always and mainly a being who loves himself. Man is a being who torments himself and others and experiences pleasure from this torment. A person does not seek happiness. Such a desire would be pointless and meaningless. A man seeks substantive benefits and values, which can give him happiness and bliss, but happiness and bliss itself cannot be a conscious goal. Aristotle interprets eudemony as active completeness of life, which corresponds to the completeness of virtue; and it is obvious that virtue is rather something integral, then a genus containing species.

The author shows that the very understanding of happiness in Aristotle does not have integrity. There are questions that require clarification of what exactly the ancient thinker had in mind.

Of course, many philosophers did not ignore this problem. Each of them sought to find a formula for integral comprehension of happiness. Aristotle explores the different facets of this problem. Nevertheless, he is convinced that happiness is extremely selective. Ascetic, for example, ignores the benefits of life, but sees the highest pleasure in the spiritual states. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s approach to this problem tends to prioritize the benefits of life. He notes that eudemonia is possible only under certain material conditions, in modern language, a level of life must be sufficient to live in material well-being.

Thus, the systematic studies of happiness show that the greatest disorientation is observed in the value understanding of happiness, which includes the subject of happiness, determines its types, parameterizes the result of happiness and manifests itself in its functions. If in the category of ideal happiness antagonism is expressed in the construction of axiology of values, then in the category of real happiness it manifests itself in the conflict of felicitary types.

The Aristotelian understanding of happiness as the ultimate goal correlates with other principles of the essence in its highest manifestation. In the system of categories, ideal happiness is an absolute concept, and real happiness is a comparative concept and, accordingly, is subject to quantification in the modeling. Within the philosophical-anthropological paradigm, happiness acts as a cultural concept. The etymological archetype of happiness comes to the first conflict in history – the division of farmers and hunters, which gave rise to a doublet understanding of happiness: as the fruit of labor and as hunting trophy.