The Phenomenon of Happiness and Its Meaning in Human Education

Abstract

The concept of happiness plays an increasingly important role in politics and public life, in the humanities as well as in education, especially humanistic. The concept of happiness includes psychological, philosophical, ethical aspects. For the educational concept of social, emotional and ethical learning, happiness is an integrating center, and it was understood as such in the Rus­sian pedagogical tradition (N.I. Novikov; K.D. Ushinsky). The differences noted by researchers in the interpretation of happiness, influenced different understanding of moral tasks and ap­proaches in education. To explain the possible difference in the ethical positions of the domestic pedagogical tradition and foreign educational programs, it is necessary to clarify the very phe­nomenon of happiness. The phenomenon of happiness was analyzed, from the point of view of different layers of experience. Thus, the nature of the “vagus nerve” of happiness and the rela­tionship between happiness, desire, objects of desire were clarified. For ethical collisions, in par­ticular those sensitive to education, it was essential to explain the phenomenon of happiness by unfolding “subjectnost’”, whichoccurs due to the unity of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ and interac­tions with the other. It was revealed that, unlike pleasure, with which desire ends when it brings the possible to reality and reaches the definite, happiness corresponds to the indefinite. The con­clusions present a number of advantages of this interpretation in relation to ethical problems and to the tasks of human education related to the understanding of happiness.