Hedonism

Abstract

Most ancient philosophical, especially ethical, theories devoted a lot of attention to the wellbeing of citizens in the ancient polis (πόλις), with the main goal of exploring how to achieve happiness and comfortable, meaningful life. This was mainly explained by combining two concepts – eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία) – flourishing, wellbeing, a kind of happiness that entails life led, ruled and guided by reason, and hedone (ἡδονή) – pleasure as a goal of life and ultimate aim of philosophy. However, hedonism has often been juxtaposed with egoism, with the explanation that the only thing people desire for their own sake is pleasure. In the consumerist and materialistic society in which we live today, selfishness is common, especially in cities – centres of human interaction in a very limited space, with limited resources, and shared goods, which even brought us to “The Tragedy of the Commons” as put by some scholars. Therefore, the main question posed in the presentation is how to equilibrate this dichotomy of seeking and achieving one`s own pleasure, without jeopardizing others` wellbeing in a city, that is, achieving some kind of altruistic hedonism in a specific place. One of the first steps might be demanding a careful and delicate holistic approach to production and development of cities in order to integrate materiality of architectural forms and urban infrastructure, with immaterial social, cultural and economic events that take place in a city. These events and behaviours strongly depend on the social reality and the context in which events take place. Even though already with the urban uprising in the 1960s and 1970s scholars spoke about just cities and right to cities, it is of utmost importance to reconsider these ideas once more.