Psychological Happiness, Prudential Happiness and Reality

Introduction:

Depress, anxiety, heartbroken, lonely, dissatisfied with life, these negatives usually view as unhappy. The opposites, cheerfulness, stress free, at peace, elated, delighted with life, these positives typically regard as happy. These expressions are the fundamental sense for human. None would like living in the sadness or suffering; pleasure and well-being are meaningful for us, for majority, both are the most desirable achievement in their life. This is consistent with the hedonism (Gosling, 1998), maximize the pleasure and enjoyment and minimize the pain and suffering, and life satisfaction theory (Nozick, 1989, pp.110), we want nothing to be superior to a happy life. However, can someone be happy if his/her sincere perception that his/her life is going well is false or unjustified? In other words, what are the values of reality in our happiness? The aim of this paper is to attempt to draw an answer. The paper proceeds as follow. I firstly address the meaning of happiness. It can be mainly divided into two categories, psychological happiness and prudential happiness (Haybron, 2001). Second, base on Nozick’s experience machine (1989), he concluded that human concern about living in contact with reality more than pleasurable experiences, I attempt to draw out the relationship between happiness and reality.

What is happiness?

There are various definitions of happiness for different group of people. Some may say that shopping (mostly females), delicacies, money are the happiness for them. According to philosophy, those itself can not be called happiness but the feelings or experiences created by those can be labeled as happiness. This is the simplest way in which our understanding of happiness, psychological happiness, is just the state of mind we experience when we say that we feel happy on certain activities and/or achievements (Haybron, 2001). In hedonism, Narrow Hedonists believe that pleasures and pain are two types of fundamental experience...