Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 What Is Happiness?
- 2 Happiness as Fulfillment
- 3 Aristotle's Ethics
- 4 Actualization: Psychological Views
- 5 Finding Potentials
- 6 The Things We Need to Be Happy: Goods, Intrinsic Motivation, and The Golden Mean
- 7 Introduction to Virtue
- 8 Some of the More Important Moral Virtues
- 9 Virtue and Emotion
- 10 Early Psychological Views of Virtue and Emotion
- 11 Virtue and Emotion: Recent Psychological Views
- 12 The Physiological Basis of Virtue
- 13 Emotional Intelligence
- 14 The Development of Virtue
- 15 Psychological Views of Virtue Development
- 16 The Polis
- 17 Contemplation: A Different Kind of Happiness
- References
- Index
- References
3 - Aristotle's Ethics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 What Is Happiness?
- 2 Happiness as Fulfillment
- 3 Aristotle's Ethics
- 4 Actualization: Psychological Views
- 5 Finding Potentials
- 6 The Things We Need to Be Happy: Goods, Intrinsic Motivation, and The Golden Mean
- 7 Introduction to Virtue
- 8 Some of the More Important Moral Virtues
- 9 Virtue and Emotion
- 10 Early Psychological Views of Virtue and Emotion
- 11 Virtue and Emotion: Recent Psychological Views
- 12 The Physiological Basis of Virtue
- 13 Emotional Intelligence
- 14 The Development of Virtue
- 15 Psychological Views of Virtue Development
- 16 The Polis
- 17 Contemplation: A Different Kind of Happiness
- References
- Index
- References
Summary
Reason is God's crowning gift to man.
Sophocles (496–406 B.C.)There are 54 volumes in the Great Books of the Western World series edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. Charles Darwin's writings are found in Volume 49 and Sigmund Freud has the last word in Volume 54. Some people may take these two intellectual giants for granted and others may doubt their sanity, but all must admit that Darwin's and Freud's inclusion with the likes of Plato, Copernicus, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Newton counts for something. Darwin and Freud have much in common, but from the perspective of this book, one shared idea stands out: Humankind is something less than divine. To put it even more strongly, humans are very much like animals. Pointing out our irrationality is Freud's major contribution. He reminds us that our major motives derive from irrational sex and aggression urges which often cause us to make bad decisions and to misbehave. If you doubt the influence of sex and aggression motives, just turn on the TV tonight.
When these urges lead us to irrational behavior, we frequently excuse ourselves by proclaiming “I'm only human.” The idea of our inherent irrationality is very much ingrained in us. Darwin says that we're very much like animals and Freud says that we are driven by unconscious motives that make life really interesting but also very troublesome. One can expect only so much from our species; we are, after all, only human.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Psychology of HappinessA Good Human Life, pp. 17 - 27Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009