Summary
Happiness: ancient and modern
The classical Greek tradition in ethics from Socrates to the Stoics is concerned with one very simple and fundamental question: What sort of life should one live? This inquiry is focused on the pursuit of eudaemonia, or “happiness.” Happiness consists in that sort of life in which a human being does and has what is most fitting to human nature. The happy life is the life of human self-actualization.
Hegel shares with classical ethics the idea that practical philosophy is focused on a single encompassing human good, consisting in the self-actualization of human beings as rational agents. His theory differs from classical theories in two main ways. First, as we saw in Chapter 1, § 8, it is misleading in Hegel's theory to think of this good as an end, because it is a self-actualization theory rather than a teleological theory. Second, Hegel's name for the final human good is not “happiness” but “freedom.” To appreciate the significance of this second difference we need to take a look at the way classical ethics thought about happiness, and then at the way the concept has changed in modern ethics.
Aristotle reports that some think happiness consists in pleasure, or wealth, or honor, whereas others hold that it consists in virtue, or the exercise of virtue, or philosophical knowledge. Aristotle apparently thinks that everyone in his society would agree that happiness is the comprehensive good, the good including all other goods worth having.
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- Information
- Hegel's Ethical Thought , pp. 53 - 74Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990