In the Pursuit of Happines

    Essentially, happiness is terminative throughout life and not a temporary state of being.  Being neither pleasure, nor virtue, it is rather the exercise of virtues and taking stock in their experience. Since the amount of exercise done for the proper attainment of such virtues depends heavily on judgment, man, being a rational animal, employs his/her reason. The ability to engage in this virtuous exercise is uniquely human and representative of the perfection of human nature. Achieving happiness mandates intellectual contemplation which is the full realization of man’s rational capabilities. 

    On the structure of happiness, Aristotle and Plato present their musings on delivery. Critically, they present the conversational aspects of happiness and how the feeling transfers. They say, "people are most delighted with a joke when the laugh is raised by the idea and the language together." Which, fundamentally, is the structure of a pun. Puns are playing on the relationships between language and meaning, and offer the comedy associated with saying one thing and meaning another. 

    What can relate Hobbes to this line of thinking would be the root of what is believed to be happiness: a punchline. That is to say "we laugh at what is ridiculous in our friends" being that the joke was birthed by a presumed friend.  Laughing at someone else's would be discomfort or sacrifice in telling the joke provokes that feeling of  short lived glory, which is to say the purely physical nature of laughing is a demonstration of that glory or a realization that "in some way we are superior to someone else."