Happiness- comparing two works
Happiness is easy to define for some, and very difficult to define for others. It can be more easily defined after being split into two types of happiness- mental and material. Mental happiness is the state of pleasure one receives from completing a goal, doing something generally good, getting a good grade on an exam, or reaching a state of mental well-being; while material happiness is the state of pleasure one receives from finding a 20 dollar bill or buying a new truck. In Ciardi's "what is happiness," he claims that defining happiness is not an easy task and he attempts to do so by setting two extremes of happiness, material and spiritual [mental], and working his way toward the middle. He then proceeds to claim that happiness is in the pursuit of happiness itself, not in the end result. In Hoffman's "Happiness and Illusion," Hoffman rebuts Ciardi's definition and claims that happiness is in fact easy to define and he uses the duration and the intensity of it to evaluate and define happiness as "...any form of mental pleasure that generalizes to the point of becoming an overall good feeling" (Ciardi).These two essays are both correct in what they define, but they define different things. Ciardi defines a way to
Ciardi is correct in his assumption that the catatonic state would be torture for any Western man, but he is wrong when he assumes that the catatonic state is happiness itself. The catatonic state is just is just the Indian man's way to achieve happiness and achieving and maintaining that state simply adds to his happiness because it is more effort that he exalts to get the end result. This is where I partly agree with Ciardi's belief that happiness is in the pursuit itself-only partly because happiness is not only in the pursuit, but also in the end result. Ciardi might believe that a student writing and essay would only be happy in the duration of time that he spent writing the essay. Hoffman might believe that the same student writing the essay would only be happy if he put large amounts of effort into developing the paper. Neither of these beliefs makes up the whole of a happy feeling, but instead they combine with the end result to create happiness. So, with this in mind, the student could be happy while he is writing the paper (the pursuit), he could be happy because he has put a lot of effort into writing the paper (the work put into the end result), he could be happy because he has finished the paper (the end result in itself), and he could be happy because of any combination of these three key elements. Are we l
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Approximate Word count = 896
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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