The Pursuit Of Happiness In Pericles Funeral Oration, By Socrates

Psychologists have long classified happiness, or eudemonia as one amongst a few basic, primary emotions – happiness is our immediate, instinctive, and internal response to a situation. Yet, the texts we have studied share a common thread of discussing individual happiness in terms of the happiness of the collective. These authors come to the consensus that happiness product of service to the state, being virtuous, and keeping ones’ desires in check. In Thucydides “Pericles’ Funeral Oration”, Pericles uses the promise of happiness by way of battlefield honour to justify the deaths caused by the Peloponnesian War. Similarly, concepts of gaining happiness through service to the state are also explored in Plato’s The Republic. Plato goes on to …show more content…
Pleasure and happiness are typically thought to be synonymous; in this case, however, both texts argue that while happiness is the highest form of good, pleasure and the desire it spawns can lead to tyranny and in fact impedes happiness. Aristotle considers pleasure something to be pursued by children and animals, a brutish and unrefined “hindrance to thought” (Aristotle) that clouds logic. Similarly, Socrates claims that desire is ongoing and can never be satiated, so therefore one who desires can never be truly happy for he is always wanting more. Socrates returns to the example of the tyrannical figure – his desire drives him to the brink of madness and he willing to use any means necessary to satisfy it, not only diminishing his own happiness but diminishing the happiness of his city as well. The model of a man becoming a slave to his own lust connects to the Aristotelian conviction that vice and addiction mean loss of autonomy over one’s own happiness. Furthermore, Aristotle famously advocated the “golden mean” (a recurring theme in philosophy through the ages, and what would later be referred to as “the middle way” in Buddhism), where he urged people to adhere to the appropriate middle ground between deficiency and excess – with regards to pleasure or otherwise. In a similar vein, Socrates said that desire for pleasure is not altogether evil if he who possesses it has a balanced soul capable of ruling over his desire and does not allow his lust to eclipse his own happiness or the happiness of others. Both authors believed that pleasure does not make a happy individual – on the contrary, when left unmonitored, it has the potential to usurp