A Comparative Study of Pleasure in Aquinas and Mulla Sadraa’s theories of Happiness

One of most important issues discussed by philosophers is the nature of man’s happiness and its relationship with the pleasure. St. Thomas Aquinas in Christian tradition and Sadr al-Muta’allihin Shirazi in Islamic tradition has discussed in details this issue. Both of them maintain that man attains happiness when his intellect, as the Characteristic of human being, fulfills its potentials and apprehends the highest intelligibles. Also because they consider pleasure as the conception the things which are pleasant and agreeable to powers, man can reach the excellent and the most perfect pleasure through the perception of the highest intellects. Nonetheless they differ in that St. Thomas considers pleasure as concomitant to happiness and Mullasadra believes in the identity of the happiness and the pleasure. To put it in a different way, while St. Thomas categorizes the happiness and the pleasure respectively as action and affection, Mulla Sadra holds that these two concepts, though different with regard to their meaning, denotes a unique reality which is simultaneously both happiness and pleasure, so they are not included among the categories.