HAPPINESS IS ETHICAL AND DIALECTICAL

How many definitions do we have on happiness, I do not know, but knowing only that we have plenty of many attempts to formulate it. Philosophers such as Epicurus, Hobbes and Bentham see it in terms of a balance sheet of pleasure and pain in which pleasure is higher than pain, or Socrates as knowledge and wisdom. For Nietzsche, there is no such a thing like happiness. For Russel, like Aristotle, it underlies the mean of extremes.

Psychologist and psychiatrist have more rational and scientific starting points. The former says that you are happy if your expectations are relatively equal to your possibilities and capacities. The latter knows very well that insufficiency in the level of serotonin hormone makes us unhappy, depressed, paranoiac, maniac, etc.

It is sure that they have to explain why expectations becomes incompatible with possibilities and why the production and circulation process of serotonin hormone within body is broken down or inadequate. Is this because of individual or social reasons, or due to social life of the individual? Are those criteria valid for all individuals, they need to work on?

Actually, the problem has been mistakenly put. Not what is happiness but how we become happy is more decisive and meaningful. For some people, it is indeed a utilitarian principle, a success, victory, health against their counterparts respectively.

I suggest that it appears to us when our values are realized or our principles of life are satisfied.

Happiness for an ethical person, is an ethical satisfaction which shows that he/she is ethically right and correct.

For an unethical person, it is success, victory, superiority, competence, or as widely seen, wealth, status, respect.

However, considered that without any of them many people can become happy, we must suspect that happiness can even emerge with defeat, failure, subjugation, poverty, inferiority and exclusion.

Therefore, happiness must be looked for somewhere else.

First, until now, happiness has been considered in the context of individual. This is a cul de sac as criteria of happiness may change from individual to individual.

Happiness, I observe, is a feeling, a state of mind, which is related with social relations of individual. Real or imaginative adaptation to, unity and connection with social whole makes an individual happy. If real adaptation, unity and connection is not available, imaginative ones fulfill the same happiness function. The former is a succesful solution on the surface level since it artificially make individual happy and comfortable before the alienated social power of other people. The latter is more difficult but far safer and deeper as it makes individual a part of social whole without being a real part of it. This is the position of an ethical person, who is not a part of mass, but a part of society, a part of social consciousness, but not a part of its causal psychology and attitude.

This sort of happiness needs criticism, creativity, individualism on one side, and acceptance, adaptation and sociability, on the other side.

Therefore, happiness of individual underlies his/her dialectical thinking of, living and adaptation to social life.

Just as the fact that we critique the things we love, acknowledge, care of and respect.

Since we love and respect people, we want to develop and improve its conditions. Or else, we do not care of it.

Thus, happiness is an ethical and dialectical peace of mind while its all other definitions are concerned with only satisfactions in any kind.