Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-nwzlb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T15:49:40.873Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Is There Happiness After Death?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Robert C. Solomon
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin

Extract

Must no one at all, then, be called happy while he lives; must we, as Solon says, see the end? Even if we are to lay down this doctrine, is it also the case that a man is happy when he is dead? Or is not this quite absurd, especially for us who say that happiness is an activity? But if we do not call the dead man happy, and if Solon does not mean this, but that one can then safely call a man blessed, as being at last beyond evils and misfortunes, this also affords matter for discussion; for both evil and good are thought to exist for a dead man, as much as for one who is alive but not aware of them; e.g. honours and dishonours and the good or bad fortunes of children, and in general of descendants. And this also presents a problem; for though a man has lived happily until old age and has had a death worthy of his life, many reverses may befall his descendants—some of them may be good and attain the life they deserve, while with others the opposite may be the case; and clearly too the degrees of relationship between them and their ancestors may vary indefinitely. It would be odd, then, if the dead man were to share in these changes and become at one time happy, at another wretched; while it would also be odd if the fortunes of the descendants did not for some time have some effect on the happiness of their ancestors.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1976

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (‘NE’), translated by Ross, W. D., Oxford (Oxford University Press, 1925), this ed. 1954 NE 1100a, Book I, Ch. 10, Ross pp. 1920.Google Scholar

2 I thank Alex Mourelatos for supplying the Greek. Kassyma is from Aristophanes, Acharnes.

3 See, for example, Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Part B (‘Self-Consciousness’), Chapter 4, Section 3; also Kierkegaard Either/Or, Vol. I; and Sartre, Being and Nothingness, especially Part I, Chapter I, Part II, Chapter I, Part III, Chapter 3.