On The Theory Of Nel Noddings' Happiness And Its Enlightenment

Happiness is the human eternal desire, but the concept of humanity's happiness in contemporary society is distorted. In social life, people put equality between happiness and the satisfaction of material interests, while ignoring their own spiritual needs; in school education, people excessively pay attention to the standardized education program, while ignoring the individual differences and the emotional response of students. As a famous care ethicist in contemporary, Noddings makes an excellent interpretation on the subject of happiness. Noddings builds the theory of happiness on the basis of the care ethics, which emphasizes the care by way of social interaction and school education and brings enlightenment that we seek after the true happy life.The formation of Noddings's theory of happiness has its special setting of social reality. The formation of Noddings's theory of happiness is significantly affected by the concept of happiness of the classical philosophers, Christian theologians and modern utilitarian. Noddings's theory of happiness is based on her theory of the care ethics. Care Ethics includes four contents: the caring nature, the caring source , the circle of care and the continuity of care, these contents perfectly conform to the concept of happiness.Noddings defines the meaning of happiness from the relationship among the suffering, needs, virtue and happiness. She believes that happiness is far from tribulation, is satisfied of needs and possesses of virtue. Happiness not only has a prescriptive side, but also a spiritual side. People obtain the happiness from the field of private life, public life, and professional life. In the field of private life, happiness mainly comes from the aspect of home, parenting, residence and nature, relaxed quality and interpersonal relationships, etc. Among them, the home yet constitutes the main dwelling house of obtaining happiness; Public life is another field that people obtain happiness, these fields mainly includes democratic life, community life and schooling life, etc. As most time of our life spends on working, the professional life becomes one of the areas that people obtain happiness. As far as the ways of cultivating happiness is concerned, Noddings believes that it needs multi-pronged approach, for instance cultivating overall quality of caring, developing the self understanding ability, cultivating individual good character and optimizing the school's studying connects, etc. Through the analysis of it, Noddings's theory of happiness can be summed up with four characteristics, namely the openness of happiness meaning, the living of experiences'ways, all-directional of happiness'resources and beginning from family of obtaining process and so on.Noddings's theory of happiness plays an important enlightenment to the contemporary China. It takes on the perceptual and utilitarian undesirable tendencies to the contemporary Chinese concept of happiness. There are also many problems during the education of young people, such as family education neglects of children own feeling, school curriculum is too stylized. Therefore Noddings's theory of happiness makes us realize that: enhancement of the virtue is the true happiness of human; family harmony is the primordial being of children received; children's happiness is the real purpose of school education.