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Aristotelian Concept Of Happiness

827 Words4 Pages

According to Aristotle, an individual can achieve happiness only by realizing all the works and activities in accordance with reason throughout his lifetime. He claimed that happiness consists in cultivating and exercising virtue and it is the ultimate purpose of human existence, as stated in his work Nicomachean Ethics “He is happy who lives in accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some chance period but throughout a complete life”. However, such Aristotelian concept of happiness inevitably contradicts the understanding of history as development which maintains that fulfilling the work of human exceeds the limits of an individual and thus can only be achieved in the course of history. Three …show more content…

Lessing describes the Old Testament as an educational primer a student had outgrown, after which a more suitable instructor was required. As shown in his statement “That is, this portion of the human race had come so far in the exercise of its reason that it required, and could make use of, nobler and worthier motives for moral action than the temporal rewards and punishments had hitherto been its guide. The child becomes a boy.”, when human reason was finally ready for the second step of its education, Christ became the first practical teacher of the immortality of the soul and the New Testament came to serve as the second primer which was better suited for the second step of revelation.
As such, Lessing presents human history as a progressive development of human reason that is enabled by the education of human race through revelation. Lessing concludes his argument by affirming that humanity will certainly arrive at the ultimate stage of the education of the human race. This ultimate stage is represented by the fulfillment of revelation as well as the complete realization of human

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