A estrutura da felicidade um estudo sobre a ética em sêneca

Abstract

This study aims to build a philosophical and psychoanalytic understanding about the structure of subjective happiness from an analysis of the ethics proposal of Sêneca. Such study serves to raise reflections that contribute to a reordering of the contemporary subject towards a happy life. The issue, therefore, is in the finding that the means the culture indicates to achieve happiness, through objects and images, are in the opposite direction to the ones that thinkers indicate as being the path to a happy life. Then it results that the man of our time plunges into existence in an infinite and disordered pursuit of happiness, by totally misleading ways, which only result in anguish, despair, and overwhelming emptiness. As a research method, the analysis of the concept and statements that the writings of Sêneca circumscribe the question of happiness is proposed. As a result, it is concluded that happiness can be understood as the subjective condition resulting from the consistency of a ternary structure that, when producing an irreducible lack, operates to free the man from the anguish and torments of the soul.