![]() “’So you’re happy, young man? What do you do with orphans from Kashmir? Or the New Zealand lepers who aren’t “happy” as you say?’” Don’t say ‘I’m happy’ otherwise you will hear condemnation all around.” “Today happiness is like a crime-never admit it. A translation (generously provided by roughly reads: Is this moralization really necessary for human flourishing, and does it actually promote a superior form of happiness? Or does it simply introduce a means for controlling other people’s behavior and shaming them for their supposed lack of virtue? If you were to ask Albert Camus this question, he might have suggested the latter, and anyone who has read The Stranger and thought about the social coercion the novel portrays will hardly be surprised. In the video above, Camus strongly implies his own view with an imagined Stranger-like dialogue, in French. Thus, when the various Greek philosophers recommended the cultivation of virtue in order to live happily, and since the word we translate as ‘virtue’ really means ‘excellence’, the Greeks were basically telling us that the happiest (and the best) life is the most excellent life. Greek inquiries into the nature of the good life were really inquiries into the nature of the best life. Aristotle and the other Greeks, however, were not concerned with relative or subjective happiness – they wanted to know what the objective features of a truly happy life would be. When happiness is equated with subjective well-being, the vast majority of people turn out to be relatively happy. Matthew Pianalto at Philosophy Now discusses the contrast as one between “psychological and philosophical concepts of happiness.” ![]() It can mean pettiness, apathy, and emotional immaturity, qualities that may not necessarily be immoral but are certainly unpleasant and socially corrosive.īut we might refer to the difference between Hedonia and Eudaimonia another way. The problem, as the Greeks understood it-and as proponents of positive psychology like Jonathan Haidt and founder Martin Seligman recognize as well-is that subjective happiness for some can mean deep unhappiness, or tyranny, for others. ![]()
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