Seligman's Ideas On Happiness

Everyone has different ideas about whether happiness is a state of being or a process. Arthur Schopenhauer claims that happiness is a state of mind that one must strive for, while Friedrich Nietzsche claims that happiness is the process of pursuing one’s desires. Martin Seligman’s concept of the three lives explains that happiness can be both a state of being and a process depending on which of the three lives one is experiencing. Both Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s ideas on happiness relate to Seligman’s concepts of the three lives: the Pleasant Life, the Good Life, and the Meaningful Life. Martin Seligman is a renowned psychologist who studies in the field of positive psychology. In this field, he focuses on studying the three different
The Pleasant Life is about positive emotions and learning how to savor pleasurable experiences. “When I press people about the positive emotion underlying their experience of pleasure, they tend to describe a felt, conscious, positive feeling. Great food, a back rub, perfume, a hot shower -- all produce what Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind calls ‘raw feels’: salient, felt, articulable emotion” (Seligman 83). Since pleasure is the presence of raw feels, Schopenhauer’s view of happiness explains that pleasure is a state of
Nietzsche calls this process “the will to power” and he explains it as a paradox. “The will to power implies a desire for resistance to overcome, which cannot be satisfied unless the agent also desires some determinate ends in terms of which this resistance can be defined; yet, in desiring the overcoming of resistance, the agent must also desire resistance to the realization of those ends” (Reginster 56). There are two levels of desire. The first level of desire is the physical object, such as a big house or a Mercedes and the second level of desire is the desire to desire. Without the second level of desire, one becomes bored. The paradox states that if one has to desire in order to be happy, then one can never achieve