Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
7th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOCIAL SCIENCES, Budapest, Macaristan, 10 - 12 Mart 2023, ss.2-4
What is generally called happiness includes a plurality of sometimes
conflicting life aspects, which makes it hard to comprise satisfactorily from
either psychological or philosophical standpoint, as for its elusive nature. Is it eartly or divine? As if talking about
perfection, there is benchmark applicable to it in an unanimous intellectual
acceptance. There have been many attempts to define it over 2500 years, from
Antiquity until nowadays which created conundrums of this apparently simple
concept at the present day. From Plato’s concept of soul harmony, Aristotle’s
idea of achievement, Aquinas’ understanding of divine essence to the opposed
ideas of Freud and Nietzsche, the views of happiness coming from the major
ancient thinkers and the Stoics give a sense of skepticism to today’s people in
an nerver-ending search of a better life. This pursuit is profoundly human and
will probably never cease to exist since it is related by many authors to the
purpose of live itself. Such wise knowledge will be addressed in order to find
out if they make sense to modern times to ordinary people too, not only to
specialists in the field of humanities.
Even contrary to each other, some
of the theories on happiness revolve round a commont nexus, which is human
nature.
Following the trajectory of the
western tradition this paper attempts at demonstrating that the large diversity of interpretations happiness has may
actually become comprehensible to those who know how to adapt such principles
to their own particular lives and the times they live in.
Keywords: happiness, philosophy,
psychology, human nature