Happiness and Authenticity

Abstract

Engaging in present debates on happiness, this essay shows that a good, happy life and an authentic life entail one an- other. Doing so, the essay first explores the Confucian approach to the relationships between happiness and authenticity, and between authenticity and value. It then presents the Heideggeran approach. Therefore, it demonstrates how authenticity, happiness, and value are inseparable in a person's being; the so called fact-value dichotomy, even if it is applicable to non-human beings, has no magic touch in human existence. The relationship between a good, happy life and an authentic life, as a philosophical issue, is part of the more general problem of human existence. It is central both to ethics and human ontology. We cannot answer an assortment of human existential questions without concerted examinations of this relationship. No wonder, philosophical interests in this relationship rise rapidly, and debates on it turn heated and intense today. Against such a backdrop, taking Confucius's The Analects and Heidegger's Being and Time as the guide, the present enquiry purports to demonstrate that an authentic life and a worthy, happy life are inseparable; that human authenticity and the authenticity of a non-human being, a non-human animal or a non-life being alike, differ in meaning, criteria, focus, and substance; that a person's worthiness and his / her happiness are constitutive of his or her authenticity. Perhaps, at the end of the day, the present enquiry still demonstrates only to a certain extent, not fully, the relationship between authenticity and happiness and that between authenticity and value. Still, the main objective—that is, to indicate the inseparability of a worthy, happy life and an authentic life—will be achieved.