The Happiness Theory And Its Contemporary Interpretation

In all ages, whatever social economy and class structure change, happiness isalways the pursuit goal of people from vary historical ages. Based on the social andhistorical reality, the philosophers have given a lot of judgments about happiness, andhappiness problem is always a major task in ethnics study. However, the ideologists atall times and in all countries have vary opinions about happiness unable to decide whichis right. So, for the people in modern society it has important meaning to card happinesstheory and discuss its signification and essence.Firstly this paper carded the tradition of Chinese happiness theory. In the view ofhistory, Chinese ideologists’ viewpoints of happiness can be divided into two parts,deontology and utilitarianism. Although these two parts have different contestationsrespectively, they also have an accordant viewpoint at happiness realization, that is, toachieve happiness by self-improvement.Then this paper carded tradition of western happiness theory to classify it into twokinds, hedonistic eudemonism and consummate eudemonism. The hedonisticconsidered that happiness was based on people’s feeling. They thought feeling pleasurewas happiness with some representatives such as Lock, Bentham, Muller, Feuerbach etc.However the consummate was firstly mentioned by Aristotle. It considered thatperfection was happiness with some other representatives such as Paulson, Fromm etc.The third part of paper summarized Marxist eudemonism including main structure,inscapes, social historical conditions, evolution rules and characters etc. Marxisteudemonism is based on criticism and self-reflection on hedonistic and consummate. Itis scientific to lead contemporary people to correctly realize and achieve happiness.The last part of paper tried to give a contemporary interpretation on happiness. Itconsidered that contemporary happiness mainly embodied in the people’s livelihood.After clarifying meanings of people’s livelihood and its problem, this paper discussed essence of people’s livelihood happiness, gave an opinion that the government must bemainly responsible for people’s livelihood happiness, and finally proposed a method toachieve happiness, that is, to establish a people oriented concept of happiness.