It is without doubt, that the answer to the question, is ignorance bliss, will vary depending on whom you ask and this conflict is not absence in the philosophers that we have read. The root of these arguments ultimately comes from a question of whether life has a meaning and where it comes from. From an atheistic viewpoint, like that of Camus and Rimbaud, there is to ultimate being who has crafted a purpose for our life and for whom we act to inevitable reach a place much greater than here. On the other hand we have philosophers like Kierkegaard who believe that it is essential to our human nature to believe in God, that since he is the one who made us, a connection to him and a desire to be with him is an innate part of the human condition. …show more content…
For Kierkegaard happiness would be a person who can fully enact his humanity in every sense, that is to say, that being without despair is to fully accept the duality of what it means to be human in Kierkegaard’s eyes. The self for Kierkegaard is the recognition that the self exists and all of its parts. “The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation itself to its own self” (Kierkegaard, 9). To recognize the self, we as humans have to come to grips with the duality and contradiction of our own existence. Human nature is the intersection at which the divine and the finite combine, where our existence as creation meets the divinity of our creator. “Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self” (Kierkegaard, 9). It is where man refuses to accepted to divine, infinite, eternal part of himself where he finds despair, as despair is to be only man. The absence of happiness, despair, is this point, where God, for the man does not …show more content…
In this, any other sense of happiness is inauthentic, and only survives as self-denial. For Kierkegaard self-acceptance is the key to happiness, while for Camus’ self-denial is the only way to avoid suicide, though they can both agree that belief in the divine can bring a sense of happiness, but they disagree about the authenticity of the happiness that