“For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” (Shakespeare 250-260). This is how David Gilbert opens his essay “Paradise Glossed", in which he discusses what happiness is and how a person can find happiness in the darkest of situations. To Gilbert, happiness is a positive way of looking at a life. He also argues that people can feel happiness in the midst of a crisis because the human brain is capable of unconsciously warping a situation in a way that benefits it, meaning that people tend to see the brighter side of any situation they are put in. Gilbert’s assertion that human can subconsciously manipulate the facts about any situation to find happiness.
According to Gilbert, happiness is a positive way of looking at life. He makes this point clear when he uses three men as examples of happy people. His examples are Jim Wright, Moreese Bickham, and Christopher Reeve. All three of these men had terrible things happen to them. They were publicly embarrassed, wrongly imprisoned, and …show more content…
Martha Nussbaum disagrees with Gilbert. She is a philosopher and the author of “Who is the Happy Warrior? Philosophy Poses Questions to Psychology”. She discusses in her essay the idea that people are only content if they are active. Nussbaum claims that Aristotle’s second account on happiness is the best. This account describes how, “pleasure is something that comes along with, supervenes on, activity, ‘like the bloom on the cheek of youth’,” (Nussbaum 108). Nussbaum claims that people’s happiness stems from activity, and that pursuing happiness without activity would be like applying blush to someone’s cheek, it would be fake (Nussbaum 108). Therefore, Nussbaum claims that people need meaningful activity to have happiness, and it cannot be found in just any situation, nor can it be adequately pursued without these activities. However, there are a few flaws in this
According to Gilbert, happiness is a positive way of looking at life. He makes this point clear when he uses three men as examples of happy people. His examples are Jim Wright, Moreese Bickham, and Christopher Reeve. All three of these men had terrible things happen to them. They were publicly embarrassed, wrongly imprisoned, and …show more content…
Martha Nussbaum disagrees with Gilbert. She is a philosopher and the author of “Who is the Happy Warrior? Philosophy Poses Questions to Psychology”. She discusses in her essay the idea that people are only content if they are active. Nussbaum claims that Aristotle’s second account on happiness is the best. This account describes how, “pleasure is something that comes along with, supervenes on, activity, ‘like the bloom on the cheek of youth’,” (Nussbaum 108). Nussbaum claims that people’s happiness stems from activity, and that pursuing happiness without activity would be like applying blush to someone’s cheek, it would be fake (Nussbaum 108). Therefore, Nussbaum claims that people need meaningful activity to have happiness, and it cannot be found in just any situation, nor can it be adequately pursued without these activities. However, there are a few flaws in this