The Pursuit for Happyness free essay sample

In Collards what Is peppiness, he claims that defining happiness Is not an easy task and he attempts to do so by setting two extremes of happiness, material and spiritual [mental], and working his way toward the middle. He then proceeds to claim that happiness Is In the pursuit of happiness itself, not in the end result. In Hoffmann Happiness and Illusion, Hoffman rebuts Cirris definition and claims that happiness is in fact easy to define and he uses the duration and the intensity of it to evaluate and define happiness as many form of mental pleasure that generalizes to the point of coming an overall good feeling (Acrid).These two essays are both correct in what they define, but they define different things. Acrid defines a way to achieve happiness, the pursuit of happiness itself; Hoffman defines a type of happiness, the mental type. Acrid presents an example of an Indian man in a catatonic state and says that the man is probably happy. We will write a custom essay sample on The Pursuit for Happyness or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The he doubts the mans happiness, assumes that this kind of state would be torture for any Western man, then asks, How can happiness for one man be torture for another? (Acrid) Acrid Is correct in his assumption that the catatonic state would be torture for any Western man, but he is wrong when he assumes that the catatonic state Is happiness Itself. The catatonic state Is Just Is Just the Indian mans way to achieve happiness and achieving and maintaining that state simply adds to his happiness because It Is more effort that he exalts to get the end result.This Is where I partly agree with Scalars belief that happiness Is In the pursuit Itself-only partly because happiness Is not only In the pursuit, but also In the end result. Clara might believe that a student rating and essay would only be happy in the duration of time that he spent writing the essay. Hoffman might believe that the same student writing the essay would only be happy if he put large amounts of effort into developing the paper.Neither of these beliefs makes up the whole of a happy feeling, but instead they combine with while he is writing the paper (the pursuit), he could be happy because he has put a lot of effort into writing the paper (the work put into the end result), he could be happy because he has finished the paper (the end result in itself), and he could be pappy because of any combination of these three key elements. Although there are different ways to achieve happiness and our reactions to stimuli differ from person to person, the feeling is uniform for everyone.When some people receive affection from their mate, for an example of mental happiness, they feel the need to show off or impress their mate to put effort into earning that affection. Some people, on the other hand, are more secure with their mates affection and feel that the affection is unconditional. No matter how secure or insecure a person is with heir mates affection, the feeling is the same for both cases. The person feels loved and accepted. A good example of material happiness is when people find money, especially large denominations of it.There is a great feeling of happiness in the end result- that the finder found money and didnt have to work for it. One the other hand, there isnt as much happiness involved in finding money as there would be if the person had put time into earning it because there would be the happiness caused by the pursuit of happiness and also caused by the end result. Of course, both of these examples assume that love and money bring happiness, respectively. Hoffman is very critical of Acrid throughout his essay.He basically states that Acrid is speaking from a perspective from which he has no experience and the only type of happiness that Acrid is familiar with is the happiness brought to him by his writing. He elaborates on this by referring to Acrid and stating, Cirris bias is to believe that only the type of happiness that he and his kind have pursued produce meaningful happiness (Hoffman). With this statement, Hoffman presents the idea that Acrid is arrogant, with which I completely agree.Are we left to believe that prolonged happiness is an illusion and that it can only be found out of the search for happiness? Or are we to believe that some stimuli are better than others simply because they last longer? No- happiness cannot be defined by either of these. Instead we can define the two types of happiness with the three key factors or any combination of them: the pursuit if happiness, the effort put into the final result, and the final result itself.