What is happiness
Marx and Engel's conceptions about happiness refer mostly to laborand how you can achieve happiness through labor. As described on one ofthe Internet websites, "happiness involves expressing our 'speciesnature"[1] and this 'species nature', the thing that makes us differentfrom other species is our ability to be creative and, especially, to "laborcreatively". Admitting in their works that happiness was the supreme endand goal of man, Marx and Engels sought to achieve this type of materialhappiness through "organized collectivism"[2], because history and societyitself was determined by basic economic needs. A better organizedcollective would have had more chances to achieve the material happinessthey saw for man. So, both Marx and Engels, founders and theoreticians ofcommunism saw happiness as being material, determined by the best assurance Jeremy Bentham's definition of happiness can be found in one of hisfirst books, published in 1768 when he was only 20 years old and called TheFirst Principles of Government and the Nature of Political, Civil andReligious Liberty. In this book, he states that "the good and happiness ofthe members, that is the majority of the
Further more, he points out towards the fact that theindividual's happiness must be subordinated to that of his community. htm[2] The Philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Quite similarly to Bentham ( if we consider how Benthamsaw the impact of law of the happiness of a community), Mill further moreexplains that the higher the number of happy individuals in a community,the happier each individual in part. Thus, happiness means self attainablepleasure, individual pleasure, but also a 'community pleasure', as well asavoiding causing other people's pain. According to him, the impact of the laws on the society, hence,on the individual, is the first and most important determinant ofindividual happiness. It ishard to side with any of them because of the fact that their perspectivesare entirely different from one another. members of the state, is the greatstandard by which every thing relating to that state must finally bedetermined. This concept of the"greatest happiness of the greatest number" was Bentham's most importantlegacy related to the concept of freedom. Bentham presented happiness through the eyes of a man of the law,that is, as the happiness of an individual integrated in a functionalsociety. Marx and Engels preferred an economic and materialisticperspective, where the happiness of the individual meant his materialachievement. The end of suffering means the supreme happiness. Confucius did not necessarily set inplace a religious or philosophical system, but, even more so, a social andpolitical way of life.
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