Irrespective of where people are on the pleasure spectrum, each has his or her method of describing happiness. Philosophers, politicians, actors, and everyone has their own opinion of joy. Therefore, this paper will discuss a conversation among philosophers concerning happiness that I witnessed.
While having dinner, Aristotle, Epicurus, Saint Teresa, Hobbes, and Plato began a conversation about happiness. Since I was present at the dinner, their conversation drew my attention and thus I listened to the arguments given by each philosopher. Aristotle claimed the first than anyone else that “happiness depends on ourselves”. Aristotle preserved happiness like a central resolve of people’s lives and an objective in itself. For Aristotle, pleasure is the most important, and it’s acknowledged as auto-sufficient. In the conversation, Aristotle devotes further interplanetary to the subject of happiness than any thinker. Aristotle stated that happiness is subjected to the refinement of virtue, although his virtues happen to be somewhat more distinctive than the fundamentally Confucians’ social virtues.
In his argument, Aristotle happens to be persuaded that a happy life necessitates the realization of a wide range of circumstances, comprising physical and mental well-being. In this manner, he presented the notion of a discipline of pleasure in the conventional sense, in the form of a fresh field of acquaintance. Fundamentally, Aristotle contends that “virtue” is realized by keeping the mean that is the equilibrium between two extremes. As I listened to Aristotle, I realized that his principle of the equilibrium is evocative of Buddha’s middle path, but there are intriguing variances. This pathway was the least necessity for the intellectual, natural life and not the foundation of “virtue” in itself. While in the discussion, Aristotle, however, maintains that happiness is a concluding end or objective that incorporates the entirety of a person’s life. It isn’t something that could be lost or gained in limited hours, like pleasurable sensations (Aristotle's Definition of Happiness n.p). Aristotle continues to claim that Happiness entails achieving, via the progression of an entire lifespan, all the health, goods, wealth, friends, knowledge, amongst others that hint to the aptness of nature of human and to the enhancement of the life of humans.
In the same discussion, Epicurus starts with an assertion familiar to that of Aristotle and Plato: that we desire happiness like a finale in itself, while entirely other things happen to be sought after as a method for generating happiness. Epicurus provides a straightforward description. Epicurus states that two self-induced views do make lives of people unhappy or filled with pain. The first is the conviction that we would be disciplined by the “gods” for our bad activities, and second, death should be feared. Epicurus maintains that these beliefs generate anxiety and fear, and are entirely unnecessary because they are founded on fictions. Epicurus informs the rest that the objective of natural human life is the pleasure that fallouts from the non-existence of physical agony and the nonexistence of mental turbulences (Younkins n.p).
While the “gods” do certainly exist, being eternal and perfect, they do not directly worry about people’s affairs. Thus, we do not have to panic because of any penance from them, and we even don’t need to pass the time in arduous acts of religious worship. Epicurus states a significant distinction between unnecessary and necessary desires. Necessary needs are those that are essential to generate happiness, like a wish to avoid physical agony or yearning for a situation of inner serenity. As Epicurus states, only when we are in agony, we feel the necessity to pursue pleasure, a necessity which unavoidably only generates more significant pain. To avoid this pain-pleasure-pain rotation, we require to establish a mentality in which there’s no pain. Epicurus records more than we require, wisdom to grasp which pleasures happen to be gratifying, and which troubles are essential to generate pleasure. Some pleasures hint to greater agony, like imbibing abundant amounts of liquor, and therefore the wise individual would shun them.
Saint Teresa who contributed to the discussion states that happiness evades suffering. She states that the significant thing is indeed to trail God’s system, the manner he tips us to undertake something attractive for him. Teresa holds that it is almost definite that hatred of our hearts is the standard reason that obstructs us from reaching to our everlasting and beatitude happiness because it renders us sluggish to godly activities. So dull to moral exercises, and proposes a greater struggle, that if it was not, a man would walk devoid of any molestation in the manner of “virtue,” and at extent without labor accomplish to his sought after end. The hallucination is that the further you struggle, the further you demonstrate the affection that you abide your God, and the further you would rejoice one daytime in rapture and happiness that could never end.
Hobbes who was also in the discussion asserts that we purpose at felicity that he describes as a continual achievement in attaining those things that a man desires from time to time, that is, continual prospering. In the broader context of Hobbes’ understanding, Felicity is linked to authority, or the method to acquire one’s capacity and some good to satisfy their desires. For Hobbes, authority, rather than pleasure, is the vital human inspiration and he trusts that we pursue happiness simply the same way we look for power. “In Hobbes’s understanding, a man’s happy life has nothing to do with that of Gods” (Foisneau 480). As such, Hobbes deserts the idea of ultimate good and holds that the inspiration to act stalks from an individual’s desire to increase and exercise power and eventually lies in pursuing felicity. Hobbes openly places prominence on the notion of authority as an essential human inspiration and therefore it appears more suitable to classify authority, its attainment and the procedure of accomplishment as Hobbes’ concluding moral rather than happiness, for happiness is the consequence of the recurrent exercising of supremacy and not essentially that which happens to be directly desired.
On his turn, Plato maintains that well-being or happiness is indeed the highest purpose of ethical conduct and thought, and the “virtues” are the necessary dispositions and skills needed to realize it (Frede n.p). If Plato’s idea of pleasure is indefinable and his backing for morals of happiness appears somewhat passive, there are several reasons for that. First, it does not define the idea or renders its uninterrupted target of exploration, but announces it in a slanting manner in the hunt of other queries. Second, the conduct of the good of human differs in the various dialogues. Thus readers discover themselves challenged by problems how to consider the inconsistencies in various works.
Plato keeps a unified principle from his initial to his newest works, and revisionists sustain that Plato’s beliefs underwent an essential transformation late in his natural life, whereas “develop-mentalists” grip that Plato’s opinions evolved significantly through his career. There isn’t, as there’s in Aristotle, a precise determination of pleasure as an independent situation of the vigorous individual. In the discussion, Plato’s ethical ideals seem both self-abnegating and austere. Though the model of the methods is not confined to the person’s values, it includes the entire nature. Plato appears to accept no further than the correlation between cosmic harmony and human affairs. Humans have many desires, and it is a decent thing. The challenge arises when we yearn for a moral thing in an immoral manner or an unscrupulous thing. Plato discusses that we should not allow our needs for sex, food, and drink govern lives in a technique that compromises the character. A just individual has a vigorous soul, where reason guides the desires and our yearning for the honor. The just individual is fulfilled, at Amity, and happy.
Aristotle is most likely to disagree with Hobbes because Hobbes maintains that the person’s good or “Felicity” is “continual” success in gaining those possessions which a human being from phase to phase desire. That is continual prosperity. Aristotle brings out a different opinion, identifying the person’s moral with an inner state of an individual, namely “activity of the soul” under virtue. Thus Aristotle and Hobbes are likely to disagree. However, Epicurus finds allies at the table which include Plato and Aristotle since his assertion is familiar to that of Aristotle and Plato: that we desire happiness like a finale in itself, while entirely other things happen to be sought after as a method for generating happiness.
Therefore, while the five philosophers were taking dinner, I witnessed their conversation, and all concentrated on describing happiness. Every philosopher had his or her version on the subject as I have discussed in this paper. Some differed while others found allies at the dinner table.