The doctrine that pleasure is the highest ethical good lends itself to immediate misunderstanding because of the unfortunate ambiguity of the key term “pleasure.” The Epicureans were purposely misrepresented as sensualists and “high livers” by their philosophical rivals and later by the Christian Fathers. Actually they were rather ascetic and even puritanical both in teaching and in practice, and this fact is borne in on anyone who reads the surviving Epicurean texts sympathetically.
Hartmann
There are three fundamental illusions about the value of life. The first illusion is that “Happiness is attainable in the present stage of development of the world” (573). This is an illusion, Hartmann argues, because, for all the reasons just given, happiness in a positive sense is unattainable, and because pain and suffering far outweigh
The true mystic learns that salvation comes not with belief in a supernatural realm that satisfies our desires but in the complete renunciation and eventual extinction of desire; only then do the troubles and torments of life cease to matter to him.
It is in this context that we should understand Mainlander’s paradoxical doctrine of the death wish. The inner striving of the will is for death because it is only in death that we find true happiness, which is the highest good for every human being. Such happiness resides in complete tranquillity and peace, which comes only with death, the utter nothingness of annihilation. If Mainlander describes life as a means toward death that is because death promises what life really wants: tranquillity and peace.
mainlanderKitabı okudu
The highest good is happiness
Honour, pleasure, intelligence, and the virtues are, he says, not only aimed at as ends in themselves, but are also aimed at for the sake of happiness, whereas happiness is never pursued for the sake of anything else. And because these other things are both ends and means, whereas happiness is never a means to anything else...
Sayfa 41 - Aristotle
