Conviviality and Happiness
Abstract
In this paper, I try to show that happiness is an effect of conviviality, the highest form of living together, is the aesthetic form of a rational relational ethic. For Miskawayh, like Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, reflective wisdom is a way of moving with a friend towards perfection and happiness. Most of the wisdoms insist on reason in order to reach happiness, which for Aristotle, as for Fârâbî and Miskawayh, is legitimately the end pursued by man. Spinoza, on the other hand, insists rather on desire which is a positive vital force. The knowledge of the causes that make us act frees us from sad passions and leads us to bliss. Spinoza’s ethics is also a treatise on freedom and happiness. Living together happily requires fundamentally the reason that founds freedom and autonomy, the desire for the beautiful and the good and the reciprocity that founds hospitality and respect for others. We present here a political approach to conviviality understood in this way, always starting from Fârâbî, but also calling into question the Khaldunian anthropological solution.