I am proposing that what the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” is totally at odds with what it has come to mean today. To elaborate on how this came about is not my aim here. Instead I wish to compare two ideas about happiness and suggest that somehow we’ve now got it all wrong.
What I’m attempting to express here comes from notes I took in response to a lecture on Aristotle that our philosophy club discussed a number of years ago.
Aristotle, one of the most influential of the Greek philosophers, had been a student and teacher in Plato’s school before starting his own school, the Lyceum. One of Aristotle’s central themes had to do with how to live the right kind of life. Assuming that there is such a thing as what might be called a “right kind of life,” what are the various components of this “Right kind of life?”
In my Medium article Eudeamonia vs. Hakuna Matata, I compare Aristotle's teachings on happiness with the current attitudes about happiness. The reason this is important because I believe the Founding Fathers had Aristotle's ideas in mind when they wrote about life, liberty and "the pursuit of happiness."
Over time the meanings behind the words we use have changed. Words like freedom and happiness were very different concepts in the minds of Enlightenment thinkers of two and three centuries ago.
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