Why Not Happiness? Marx’s Notion of the Free Life

Abstract

It has recently been claimed that Marx’s aspiration to achieve happiness by reducing human suffering makes it possible to dismantle the conceptual walls between his approach, contemporary socialist approaches, and Eastern and Western perceptions of happiness. In contrast, this essay argues that Marx’s notion of freedom not only cannot be conceived as a means of achieving happiness but actually contradicts the possibility of happiness. The essay instead interprets the dialectical negation of the ideal of happiness in a way intended not to reinforce the walls between Marx’s approach and different worldviews but to reveal a common denominator relevant to different streams of nineteenth-century thought on this subject. Marx’s own conclusion that satisfaction is not a natural purpose of human existence originates in a dialectical approach regarding human needs that expresses radical criticism toward the hierarchical binary conception of pleasure and pain and of physical and spiritual needs.