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The following article was written by the doctoral thesis help
Before I had read The Republic I thought that happiness is achieved through self-fulfillment, and for me it meant getting a well-paid job, having a family and a big house. In this reflection paper I will describe where my views on happiness coincide and diverge from Plato's concepts of justice, happiness and the ideal society.
Plato singled out three types of people. The first are the people ruled by their bodily appetites. These people are craving for money and satisfying their instincts. The second type is the people driven by the spirit. They strive for fame and power. The last, but not the least, is a group of people dominated by reason; their aims are the truth and wisdom. To become happy, we must have all these three elements of the soul combined under the virtue of justice. As, according to Plato, “the virtue of the soul is justice, and injustice its defect […] Only the just man is happy; injustice will involve unhappiness” (Plato, Adams 39). I agree with this idea. Living a virtuous life and cooperating with a harmonious society is a key to achieve happiness, but happiness itself is not goal in life. The main goal is to be happy for the right reason. I understand happiness as a motivation to achieve those right reasons. However, I would have added one component to Plato's definition — passion. True human happiness involves active and passionate pursuit of a goal.
Along with Plato, Ziyad Marar has come up with intriguing thesis about the nature of happiness. In his The Happiness Paradox, he raises two main questions: "what do I really want?" and "how ought I to live?" The first of these Marar considers to be “an expression of the need to feel free, while the second represents the need to be justified” (Marar 31). The paradox of happiness is that people need both freedom and justification and as they have more freedom they tend to depend less on the opinion of others, and the more they care about the justification the less freedom they have. This idea presupposes that freedom and justification exclude each other. The only way to stand against this paradox is by having the courage both to face the judgement of the audience and the courage to be independent of its judgement. However, courage does not makes us happy. Of course, we all want freedom, and we want justification, and these two issues have a conflict. However, what bothers me is that I do not consider this conflict of these two particular issues to be the key to the nature of happiness. This is where I disagree with Mara’s idea because happiness, as I see it, is motivation to achieve different major goals. Marar considers happiness to be the major goal, and that achieving it requires to be torn between freedom and justification.
In conclusion, I agree with the Plato’s argument that happiness is possible if each part of the soul performs its function. It makes me realize that happiness cannot be achieved until all three elements of the soul are balanced. Personal happiness itself is not the ultimate goal for me; it is only the motivating force to live in harmony both with your soul and society.
