Eudaemonism

H. Friese

Eudaimonia (Glückseligkeit, prospérité, happiness) has been one of the central concepts of ethics and philosophy. It has been cast in a variety of ways and points in a number of different directions. Happiness was, for one, connected to virtue; it was conceptualized in subjective terms, with reference to the self, to the (restraining of) passions and affects, to the realization of one's objectives, or of one's overall life. Second, happiness has been cast in relation to the other, as friendship, love, recognition, as ethically founded intersubjectivity. And third, the conception of happiness has been taken for incomplete as long as it is not connected to a just political order.