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EUDAEMONISM (from Gr. eb&u,uosla, lit...

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Originally appearing in Volume V09, Page 881 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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EUDAEMONISM (from Gr. eb&u,uosla, literally the See also:state of being under the See also:protection of a benign spirit, a " See also:good See also:genius ") , in See also:ethics, the name applied to theories of morality which find the See also:chief good of See also:man in some See also:form of happiness. The See also:term Eudaemonia has been taken in a large number of senses, with consequent See also:variations in the meaning of Eudaemonism. To See also:Plato the " happiness " of all the members of a state, each according to his own capacity, was the final end of See also:political development. See also:Aristotle, as usual, adopted " eudaemonia " as the term which in popular See also:language most nearly represented his See also:idea and made it the keyword of his ethical See also:doctrine. None the less he greatly See also:expanded the content of the word, until the popular idea was practically lost: if a man is to be called ebbaiµwv, he must have all his See also:powers performing their functions freely in accordance with virtue, as well as a reasonae: degree of material well-being; the highest conceivable good of mad is the See also:life of contemplation. Aristotle further held that the good man in achieving virtue must experience See also:pleasure (i7Sovi)), which is, therefore, not the same as, but the sequel to or concomitant of eudaemonia. Subsequent thinkers have to a greater or less degree identified the two ideas, and much confusion has resulted. Among the ancients the Epicureans expressed all eudaemonia in terms of pleasure. On the other See also:hand attempts have been made to See also:separate See also:hedonism, as the See also:search for a continuous See also:series of See also:physical pleasures, from eudaemonism, a See also:condition of enduring See also:mental See also:satisfaction. Such a distinction involves the assumptions that bodily pleasuresare generically different from mental ones, and that there is in practice a clearly marked dividing See also:line,—both of which hypo-theses are frequently denied. Among See also:modern writers, See also:James See also:Seth (Ethical Princ., 1894) resumes Aristotle's position, and places Eudaemonism as the mean between the Ethics of Sensibility (hedonism) and the Ethics of Rationality, each of which over-looks the complex See also:character of human life. The fundametal difficulty which confronts those who would distinguish between pleasure and eudaemonia is that all pleasure is ultimately a mental phenomenon, whether it be roused by See also:food, See also:music, doing a moral See also:action or committing a See also:theft.

There is a marked disposition on the See also:

part of critics of hedonism to confuse "pleasure" with See also:animal pleasure or " See also:passion,"—in other words, with a pleasure phenomenon in which the predominant feature is entire lack of self-See also:control, whereas the word "pleasure." has strictly no such See also:connotation. Pleasure is strictly nothing more than the state of being pleased, and hedonism the theory that man's chief good consists in acting in such a way as to bring about a continuous See also:succession of such states. That they are in some cases produced by physical or sensory stimuli does not constitute them irrational, and it is purely arbitrary to confine the word pleasure to those cases in which such stimuli are the proximate causes. The value of the term Eudaemonism as an See also:antithesis to Hedonism is thus very questionable.

End of Article: EUDAEMONISM (from Gr. eb&u,uosla, literally the state of being under the protection of a benign spirit, a " good genius ")

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