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
1 - What Is Happiness?
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
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence, 1776I find it astonishing that Thomas Jefferson placed happiness alongside liberty and life itself in the Declaration of Independence. While we don't know for sure why Jefferson included happiness in the document, Darrin McMahon discovered “that formulations linking happiness, life, liberty and property” appeared in a number of colonial constitutions. Thus, interest in happiness seems to have been “in the wind” at the time of America's birth. McMahon also noted that while the delegates to the Continental Congress “scrutinized” every line of Jefferson's draft, “cutting and slashing,” not a single one recorded reservations about the “pursuit of happiness.” Everyone agrees that happiness is good, but should it be up there with life and liberty, and made so prominent in the founding document of the United States?
Psychologist Jonathan Freedman wrote that when one of his interviewers tried to talk about happiness to people in groups, they joked and gave it no real importance. However, “when she interviewed them alone, the topic became too serious and emotional and people stopped talking.” Perhaps Jefferson's idea of happiness is the serious kind, the kind that people have difficulty talking about. In this chapter, we will try to understand Jefferson's view by looking at some of the alternative meanings of happiness.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Psychology of HappinessA Good Human Life, pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009