In his famous metaphor in the dialogue Protagoras , the self is a chariot pulled by two horses working at cross-purposes. The dark horse representing physical desire pulls against the white horse representing virtue. But both are necessary to pull the chariot; so the charioteer, representing reason, guides them to work together in the direction of the good. It assumes that we will continue to have the powerful opposing drives or pulls of the desire for food, sex, etc, and also for social acceptability; but they need not be out-of-control if guided by a practical reason which can look ahead, distinguishing short-term objectives from long-term goals.
Tolstoy, on the other hand, seems to lack faith in the guiding power of reason and tortures himself with his vacillation between two strong opposing human forces, sensuality versus spirituality. A sad insight. On the other hand, pursuing a larger moral meaning, such as peace, kindness, justice, or human betterment, gives us transcendent purpose in life and thus a long-term sense of satisfaction.
This radical mind-body ethical dualism is another example of the false dilemma: either live completely in the soul or completely in the body. So was Tolstoy finally a victim of his own utopian dualism? But we need not follow him there. This site uses cookies to recognize users and allow us to analyse site usage. By continuing to browse the site with cookies enabled in your browser, you consent to the use of cookies in accordance with our privacy policy.
Please visit woodrawspictures. Sheldon A. Strack L. Martin S. Suh E. Thayer R. Newman T. Tsai, J. Knutson and H. Wenzlaff D. Wegner S. Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Correspondence to Chris Tkach. The authors would like to thank Sabine French for comments on earlier drafts and Andrew Comrey, Dan Ozer, and Chandra Reynolds for their valuable statistical advice. Reprints and Permissions.
Tkach, C. How Do People Pursue Happiness? J Happiness Stud 7, — Download citation. Issue Date : June Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:.
Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Skip to main content. Search SpringerLink Search. In his recent book, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness , historian Ritchie Robertson argues that the Enlightenment should be understood not as the increase in value of reason itself, but instead as the quest for happiness through reason.
The determining intellectual force of modernity was about happiness and we are still grappling with the limits of that project today. Some values which once were paramount, such as honour or piety, have faded in importance , while emotions like " acedia " our feeling of apathy comes closest have disappeared completely. Both the language we use to describe our values and emotions and even the feelings themselves are unstable.
Modern conceptions of happiness are primarily practical and not philosophical, focusing on what we might call the techniques of happiness. The concern is not what happiness is, but instead on how to get it. We tend to see happiness in medicalised terms as the opposite of sadness or depression, implying that happiness emerges from chemical reactions in the brain.
Being happy means having fewer of the chemical reactions that make you sad and more of the reactions that make you happy.
Martha Nussbaum , a prominent virtue ethicist, claims that modern societies take happiness to "be the name of a feeling of contentment or pleasure, and a view that makes happiness the supreme goods is assumed to be, by definition a view that gives supreme value to psychological states".
Self-help books and "positive psychology" promise to unlock that psychological state or happy mood. But philosophers have tended to be sceptical of this view of happiness because our moods are fleeting and their causes uncertain. Instead, they ask a related but wider question: what is the good life?
One answer would be a life spent doing things you enjoy and which bring you pleasure. A life spent experiencing pleasure would, in some ways, be a good life. Every human life, even the most fortunate, is filled with pain. Painful loss, painful disappointments, the physical pain of injury or sickness, and the mental pain of enduring boredom, loneliness, or sadness.
Pain is an inevitable consequence of being alive. For the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus BCE , a good life was one in which pain is minimised.
The sustained absence of pain grants us tranquillity of mind, or ataraxia. This notion has something in common with our modern understanding of happiness. To be "at peace with yourself" marks the happy person out from the unhappy one and no one would imagine that a life filled with pain could be a good life. But is the minimisation of pain really the essence of happiness? What if living a good life increases the pain we experience? Studies have shown that having loving attachments correlates with happiness, but we know from experience that love is also the cause of pain.
What if pain is necessary and even desirable? Can pursuing happiness make you unhappy? Retrieved November 12, from www. Researchers found that people judge These impairments may stem from disrupting a protein that aligns the brain's They may act as though the limb is missing or even seek its ScienceDaily shares links with sites in the TrendMD network and earns revenue from third-party advertisers, where indicated.
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