Do you believe happiness to be subjective?

Question

Many people find happiness to be the acquisition of money or a life of tranquility but is there a universal notion of happiness or is it subjective?

Answer 1

Absolutely, it's subjective.

Everyone's definition of happiness is slightly different, although I'm sure if you polled 1000 people, there would be some marked similarities in the responses.

The aquisition of money is not an effective road to happiness, because it never ends. How many people that you know who are moderately "successful" have ever said,"OK...that's enough. I'm happy?"

Sure, money can buy nice things, but one will never have enough "things."

True happiness comes from finding contentment and joy in the small things in life, instead of becoming jaded by aquisition.

We'd all be better of to make the discovery Dorothy did in the "Wizard of Oz;" that happiness was really in our own back yard all along...

Answer 2

Yes, I believe so since such happiness is relative or subjective to something both from inside and outside us. As for the acquisition of money or a life of tranquility is, I think, a mere dimension of happiness, in other words, any happiness can come and go like any abstract attribute unless we can control the mind. As we can see from those major religions in the world, they stress the importance of mind control and there is an English proverb stating, "All happiness is in the mind".

Answer 3

Unhappiness is more a subjection than is happiness, but unhappiness is an unavoidable condition of a start to the individuals life, i.e. the self is not born into life happy. Happiness is a quality identified in the Judgment as a negation for a negation and is therefore that reason a temporally changing quality or in other words, happiness is not an eternal absolute. As we are as much subjecter and subject, happiness is as much objective as it is subjective.

As to the question 'is there a universal notion of happiness?': as happiness is a spiritual condition and a notion in itself is not spiritual content but content in the mind, intellectual content, that it is of logic, the notion itself is not universal a priori but could be universal as a universally shared notion. This notion would be an object for utilitarianism.

Here is some interesting reading:

The Phenomenology of Mind

— B —
Self Consciousness

B: Freedom of Self-Consciousness — Stoicism: Scepticism:
The Unhappy Consciousness
Free Self-Consciousness

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phbb.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slidea.htm#SL236

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slidea.htm
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/li_terms.htm

The Will is positive, the Judgment is negative.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prconten.htm

Answer 4

Happiness isn't subjective because anybody especially a lot knows what the sensation of being chuffed is like. If happiness became subjective, some human beings does not even comprehend that they are chuffed.

Answer 5

Well Yeah....I mean what makes me happy does not necesarily make you happy right?