The Middle Ages

Student’s Name

Institutional Affiliation

Course Tittle

Professor’s Name

Date

Stoicism and Hedonism

The Dark Ages signify the era in Western Europe that designates the changeover from the degeneration of the Greek (Classical) moral belief to the commencement of the feudal culture in the renaissance. The church came out of the Dark Ages because of famine, plagues and basic needs. Hedonism can be defined as a classification of philosophy which supports the quest of pleasure and the averting of pain as the main goal. Individuals typically have one moral commitment: to satisfy the need for pleasure and to eliminate or at least lessen agony as much as probable (Vogt, 2018). Compare to stoicism, hedonism leans more towards pleasure. Stoicism is the idea that emotions lead to poor judgments and poor decisions. Stoicism attains bliss in a way that someone should live in conventionality with God’s will or nature. It implies that someone needs to desire what occurs in nature and that unhappiness upshots from wishing for things to happen other than they are.

Individuals ought to make every effort for the greatest pleasure regardless of any painful outcomes to others. Cyrenaic school of Hedonism established by Aristippus (453-356 BC) supports instantaneous pleasures as the main objective in life. They had no worries about the potential forthcoming life but only with contemporary life (William, 2019). Hedonism leans more towards happiness since it implies that each experience ought to be delighted to the maximum for fear that the occasion for such experience might be lost forever.

Hedonism was derived from the Greek word hedone, which means pleasure during the Hellenistic time (Kondo, 2018). It focuses more on happiness since it implies that individuals should do whatever suits them and avoid pain. It infers that a happy life is measured in terms of having the utmost conceivable pleasure and less pain. Hedonism is the brazen quest of pleasure, and happiness for hedonists is a legacy. An individual does not learn pain or pleasure since they are natural. Someone knows morals, such as how to be sincere and honest, but it is not who they are. To have self-control is to go against the rudimentary hedonist natures.

Reference

Kondo, T. (2018) Stoic Happiness as Self-Activity In The Realizations of the Self (pp. 167-183) Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94700-6_9

Vogt, K. M. (2018). What is Hedonism? 1. In Pain and Pleasure in Classical Times (pp. 93-110). Brill.https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004379503_007

Williams, D. M. (2019). Darwinian hedonism and the epidemic of unhealthy behavior Cambridge University Press