How does plato define happiness

Good is generally considered to be the opposite of evil, and is of interest in the study of morality, ethics, religion and philosophy. Aristotle argues that what separates human beings from the other animals is the human reason. So the good life is one in which a person cultivates and exercises their rational faculties by, for instance, engaging in scientific inquiry, philosophical discussion, artistic creation, or legislation.

Aristotle concludes the Ethics with a discussion of the highest form of happiness: a life of intellectual contemplation. Since reason is what separates humanity from animals, its exercise leads man to the highest virtue. For Aristotle, eudaimonia is the highest human good, the only human good that is desirable for its own sake as an end in itself rather than for the sake of something else as a means toward some other end.

Paul who placed love as the greatest of them all. According to Aristotle, happiness consists in achieving, through the course of a whole lifetime, all the goods — health, wealth, knowledge, friends, etc. This requires us to make choices, some of which may be very difficult. Moral behavior is the mean between two extremes — at one end is excess, at the other deficiency. Find a moderate position between those two extremes, and you will be acting morally.

Like most other ancient philosophers, Plato maintains a virtue-based eudaemonistic conception of ethics. Live in the here and now as opposed to dwelling on one side or the other.

Striving for goals and achieving something great is one way to achieve happiness, but your goals should be centered on what you have. It's a good ambition to become a billionaire, but if you're an average Joe, perhaps you should think smaller. Maybe strive for getting a better job and achieving a realistic income bracket.

Those who reach too high may find themselves upset when their arms can't reach the stars. Humans are creatures of extremes. Temperance is one such solution to this problem. Think about parts in your life where maybe you do too much. Social media, for example.

Checking it too much can distract you from your life, and it the images and messages you find there can depress you. However, not having social media at all makes you feel isolated. A person with temperance would be one who checks social media on occasion, making sure that their job is accomplished doing so.

The opinions of the Ancient Greeks still ring true to this day. Even though our society is much more advanced, their words are common sense philosophies we can apply to our lives to achieve happiness on a much larger scale. If you find yourself unhappy, perhaps making life changes is the key that you need. Think about how you can improve your happiness, and try to set goals to make it possible. It would be great to have Aristotle or Plato as your mentors, but their time has long passed.

If you're looking for someone to help you achieve your happiness, you may consider going to a counselor. Counseling can teach you ways of achieving your goals and action, thus increasing your happiness. On the other hand, if your unhappiness is due to something in your mind, it may help you seek therapy and treat your mental condition to the best of your ability. Everyone deserves to be happy. If you are not happy, then get out there and find a reason to be happy.

You'll be glad you did. A Brief Look at Aristotle and Plato Before we write about their opinions on happiness, a few words on these historical humans. Source: pixabay. What is the use of this strange concoction? As Timaeus points out, the combination of the eternal and temporal versions of the formal concepts allows the soul to comprehend both unchangeable and changeable objects in the world 37a—c.

By mixing together the unchangeable and the changeable versions of the formal concepts, Plato maintains the unity of the soul. In other words, there is no such thing as a world-reason — dealing only with eternal being, sameness and difference — separate from the world-soul , which is concerned with temporal and changeable things, their being, sameness and difference. Rather, there is one mental force that does both, resulting in either knowledge or firm belief.

The portions 1 - 2 - 4 - 8 - 3 - 9 - 27 of the mixture, with further subdivisions according to the arithmetical, geometrical and harmonic means, are the proportions that demarcate the intervals in theoretical harmonics 1 : 2 is the ratio underlying the octave, 3 : 2 the fifth, 4 : 3 the fourth, 9 : 8 the major second, etc.

As these harmonic divisions suggest, the world-soul is at the same time a kind of musical instrument. No music of the spheres is mentioned in the Timaeus , but Plato seems to have in mind at least the possibility of heavenly music. The mathematical proportions are applied, in turn, to explain the order and the motions of the heavenly bodies 36b—d. For the soul-bands, divided in different proportions, form circles that are ordered in a complicated system, and in doing so they represent a geometrical model of the motions and distances of the stars revolving around the earth.

Why does Plato burden himself and his readers with such a complex machinery and what does this heavenly instrument have to do with ethics? Since the human soul is formed from the same ingredients as the world soul albeit in a less pure form , and displays the same structure 41d—e , Plato is clearly not just concerned with the order of the universe, but with that of the human soul as well.

He attributes to it the possession of the kinds of concepts that are necessary for the understanding of the nature of all things, both eternal and temporal.

A theory of recollection of the nature of all things is no longer being advocated. Rather, Plato is concerned with ascertaining all of the following: 1 the most important concepts used to identify and differentiate objects in the way necessary for dialectical procedure; 2 the numbers and proportions needed to understand numerical relations and harmonic structures of all sorts; and 3 the capacity of the soul to perform and comprehend harmoniously coordinated motions.

This, it seems, is all the soul gets and all it needs in order to perform its various tasks. His overall message should be clear, however: the soul is a harmoniously structured entity, that can in principle function forever, and it also comprehends the corresponding structures in other entities, and therefore has access to all that is good and well-ordered.

This last point has consequences for his ethical thought that are not developed in the Timaeus itself, but that can be detected in other late dialogues.

It shows up rather early. If mathematics looms large, then, it is as a model science on account of its exactness, the stability of its objects, and their accessibility to reason. A systematic exploration of the notion that measure and proportion are the fundamental conditions of goodness is confined to the late dialogues.

The importance of measure in a literal sense becomes more explicit, however, in the Philebus , the dialogue that is concerned with the question of whether pleasure or knowledge constitutes the human good. The dialectician must know precisely how many species and subspecies a certain genus contains; otherwise he has no claim to any kind of expertise. This is because Socrates suddenly remembers that neither of the two contenders suffices in itself for the good life, and that a mixture of the two is preferable.

As he now states, all beings belong in one of four classes — namely 1 limit peras , 2 the unlimited apeiron , 3 the mixture meixis of limit and the unlimited, or 4 the cause aitia of such a mixture.

As the subsequent explications concerning the four classes show, the unlimited comprises all those things that have no exact grade or measure in themselves, such as the hotter and colder, the faster and slower. Although at first the examples are confined to relative terms, the class of the unlimited is then extended to things like hot and cold, dry and moist, fast and slow, and even heat and frost. Mixture takes place when such qualities take on a definite quantity poson or due measure metrion that limits their variation.

For there would be no blending in such cases at all, but really an unconnected medley, the ruin of whatever happens to be contained in it.

Since indeterminate elements usually turn up in pairs of opposites, the right limit in each case is the right proportion necessary for their balance. In the case of health, there must be the right balance between the hot and the cold, the dry and the moist. The cause of the proper proportion for each mixture turns out to be reason; it is the only member of the fourth class. As Socrates indicates, divine reason is the ultimate source of all that is good and harmonious in the universe, while human reason is but a poor copy 26e—27c; 28a—30e.

Reason, by contrast, belongs to the fourth class, as the cause of good mixtures. It turns out that pleasure is at best a remedial good: pleasure is always the filling of a lack, or the restoration of a harmonious state, and therefore pleasure presupposes some kind of disturbance of the physical or mental equilibrium.

The rivals of the pleasures — the different intellectual disciplines — also vary in quality; but in their case the difference in quality depends on the amount of mathematical precision they contain 55c—59d. In the final ranking of goods, measure and due proportion, unsurprisingly, get the first rank, things in proper proportion come in second, reason is ranked third, the arts and sciences obtain fourth place, whereas the true and pure pleasures get fifth and last place on the scale of goods 64c—67b.

If Plato in the Philebus is more favorably disposed towards a hedonist stance than in some of his earlier works, he is so only to a quite limited degree: he regards pleasure as a necessary ingredient in human life, because both the physical and the psychic equilibria that constitute human nature are unstable. There is always some deficiency or lack that needs supplementing. But even they are deemed goods only because they are compensations for human imperfection.

There are two questions worth exploring here. One concerns the role that Plato assigns to measure in his late concept of ethics. This explains his confidence that even physical entities can attain a relatively stable state. This applies not only to the nature of the visible universe, but also to the human body and mind, as long as they are in good condition.

His confidence seems to have extended not only to the physical, but also to the moral state of human nature.

That assumption is confirmed not only by the emphasis on right mixture in the Philebus , but also by the the discussion in the Laws about how the laws are to achieve peace in the state and harmony in the souls of the citizens.

If a man draws the right amount from the right one at the right time, he lives a happy life. Suffice it to note that the discussion of the right measure of pleasure and pain forms the preface to the entire project. But there is one element you could isolate in any account you give, and this is the correct formation of our feelings of pleasure and pain, which makes us hate what we ought to hate from first to last, and love what we ought to love.

That individuals differ in their internal and external conditions is as clear to Plato as it is to Aristotle. This does not shake his faith in the Laws that right habituation through the right kind of education, most of all in the arts, will provide the necessary inner equilibrium in the good citizen. It should be noted, however, that Plato carefully refrains from going into any specifics about concrete mathematical relations.

Even in the Timaeus , he does not apply his complicated system of proportions when it comes to specifying the actual size, distance, and speed of the heavenly bodies. Nor does he indicate in the Philebus how the art of establishing the limits of good mixtures should be attained.

It therefore remains an open question to what extent Plato regarded mathematical physics and metaphysics as viable projects. That Plato went some way in that direction seems to be indicated by claims in later reports on his theory of the Forms, that he either treated the Forms as numbers or associated numbers with them. Because Aristotle is quite vociferous in his criticism of this theory in Book A of the Metaphysics A 6; A 9 and further expands his criticism of ideas as numbers or idea-numbers in books M and N, there must be some substance to that claim.

Aristoxenos, Harmonica , II, But it was not just the general public who found the message hard to comprehend. Simplicius also reports that Porphyry, his source, used the Philebus to unravel the enigma In Aristotelis physica , Given the disagreements in our sources, it may forever remain a matter of debate how far Plato went in his mathematization of his ethics and metaphysics. We may well ask why he shouldered his philosophy with such heavy baggage that made it inaccessible to the mathematically untrained, an inaccessibility that largely persists to this day and age.

Clearly, there is one conviction that Plato never gave up: The nature of all things requires knowledge, and that condition applies most of all to the Good.

And if it takes mathematical knowledge to comprehend what is good, then that is the way to go. Signs of this more conciliatory stance can be seen in the depiction of a mixed life in the Philebus , which is a life open to everyone, as well as in the portrayal in the Laws of the city-state of Magnesia, which is depicted as the second-best state, but as a one that is more accommodating to ordinary human nature.

It is a state that is no longer divided into three classes, and where there are no philosopher-kings and -queens in control of everything; the heavy work is done by slaves of foreign origin. If Plato does not assign unlimited power to a special class it is for two reasons: he recognizes that persons of super-human virtue are not easy to find and that scientific education and philosophy alone are no warranty of goodness.

Plato no longer expects any human being to be immune to the temptations of power. Humans are to be servants of the laws, not masters of each other. It may seem paradoxical that Plato became more conciliatory towards the ordinary human condition at the same time as his confidence in scientific rigor increased.

But there actually is no paradox. His conciliatory stance seems, rather, to reflect his insight that, the more complex things get, the less precision is to be attained. Therefore no mathematical precision can be expected in the ordering of such complex mixtures as the human soul and life. That ethics cannot be done with the same precision as mathematics is not, then, an insight that occurred only to Aristotle.

But Plato must have thought that precision should at least be aimed for, if life is to be based on a harmonious order that is accessible, at least to a certain degree, to human knowledge. But he no longer puts so much emphasis on the distance between the best and the ordinary.

He retains his conviction, however, that a well-ordered soul is the prerequisite of the good life and that human beings need not only a careful moral education, but also a well-regulated life. Preliminaries 2.

The early dialogues: Examining life 2. The middle period: Justice and other virtues 3. The later dialogues: Ethics and Dialectic 4. The late dialogues: Ethics and Cosmology 5. Hutchinson eds. Single-Authored Overviews Annas, J. Crombie, I. Dover, K. Irwin, T. Kahn, C. Lorenz, H. Mann, W. McCabe, M. Meinwald, C. Menn, S. Moravcsik, J.

Nehamas, A. Popper, K. Price, A. Prior, W. Rist, J. Ross, W. Rowe, C. Russell, D. Schofield, M. Scott, D. Silverman, A. Vasiliou, I. Vlastos, G. White, N. Wolfsdorf, D. Anthologies Anton, J. Barney, R. Bobonich, C. Calvo, T. Detel, W. Dillon, J. Fine, G. Gill, C. Griswold, C. Hermann, F.

Kraut, R. Lee, E. Lisi, F. Mohr, R. Sattler eds. Morrison, D. Notomi,N and Brisson, L. Pappas, N. Thus, they feel justified about seeking happiness, and thus they are more likely to attain it. In other words, they may think they have an unfair advantage, and that is the reason they're happy.

Happiness aided our survival in all sorts of important ways—it made us fitter, more attuned to our environment, more social, more energetic—and because happy people were more apt to survive, they were more likely to pass on their happiness genes. What did Plato say about happiness? Category: religion and spirituality atheism. Like most other ancient philosophers, Plato maintains a virtue-based eudaemonistic conception of ethics.

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