Kant On Happiness

Considering happiness has been the core idea of western traditional ethics all the while, but in Kant's ethics, happiness, when being compared with morality, only attains a relatively less important position. So understanding fully the meaning of Kant's idea of happiness and inquiring into its origin, undoubtedly have key significance for us to understand the issues of existence, ethics and politics of occidental so much as the whole world. Therefore, I intend to start with Kant's main works of ethics and discuss the three aspects of Kant's idea of happiness and its position in Kant's whole ethical system in detail, and analyze the cause of Kant's idea of happiness and give some advisable opinions in this text. The whole text conceives of three chapters and mainly contains in turn: In Chapter One, I have introduced the three aspects of Kant's idea of happiness, namely sensory happiness(also natural happiness), rational happiness(also moral happiness) and holy happiness(also eternal happiness). In Chapter Two, I have studied from three aspects, i.e., Kant's prescript of dualism of human nature, his prescript of polarity of virtue and happiness and the doctrine of the highest good as the accordance of virtue and happiness and its hypotheses, to watch over the general system of Kant's ethics and have illustrated what position happiness attains in it. In Chapter Three, I have briefly illuminated the cause of relation of Kant's idea of happiness and idea of virtue in his ethical system and shortly evaluated it from its influence on its afterworld. In this text, I try to indicate that Kant's idea of happiness mainly orients in sensory level, while rational happiness and holy happiness are just a kind of analogy, or only owe to god, so they cannot be called as happiness being pursued by human beings. Therefore, this kind of idea of happiness naturally only can attain a relatively less important position in Kant's ethical system which sets morality as its core idea. While the cause of this situation most likely rests with an essential change of manner in which we look on nature and reason. And practical life attains a more important position when compared with theoretical life and this is also some symbol of such kind an essential change. And it is owing to Kant's virtue ethics that the cause of all kinds of phenomena of the world after Kant can be made clear.