Aristotelian Approach To Happiness

Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274)

Thomas Aquinas is another important name in the Christian philosophical and theological tradition. Thomas Aquinas deals with issues related to happiness in a detailed manner in his work Summa Theologica. He begins an enquiry into ‘those things in which human happiness consists’ and examines in great detail if it consists in wealth, honour, glory, power, bodily good, pleasure, good of the soul and finally whether it could consist in any created good. While agreeing with both Aristotle and Augustine on the universal desire for happiness, he takes the side of the latter in arguing that happiness is grace of God. But with regard to the obtainability of happiness he seems to take a position in between Augustine and

He is well known for his arguments in favour of a social contract between the state and its citizens to empower the former to be a sovereign force to protect the latter. Like many other great thinkers, his concern was to create a social and political system that could best protect men and women from the dangers of civil conflicts.

However, Hobbes marks the beginning of a tradition that started to question the usefulness of Aristotelian approach to knowledge acquisition. With rationality as the touchstone for the progress of knowledge, Hobbes, influenced by Bacon and many others, sought to rebuild its foundations on mathematics and empiricism. His contempt for the methods of the ancients is clearly seen as he notes:

The natural philosophy of those schools, was rather a dream than science, and set forth in senseless and insignificant language; which cannot be avoided by those that will teach philosophy, without having first attained great knowledge in geometry: for nature worketh by motion; the ways and degrees whereof cannot be known, without the knowledge of the proportions and properties of lines, and

This position of Hobbes brings him in direct confrontation with Aristotle, Stoics, Epicureans, Aquinas and the like. The most important turning point in the history of happiness arises at this junction when Hobbes equates felicity or happiness with the ‘obtaining of those things which a man from time to time desireth’ thus confining the concept of happiness to objective and materialistic