„O szczęściu” i radości

The main aim of this article is to present Władysław Tatarkiewicz’s concept of joy in the context of his research on the issue of happiness. The phenomenon of joy is shown as a very important but not well known problem, playing a clue role in the philosophy of Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Lévinas, not only in the ethical but also in the epistemological context. W. Tatarkiewicz’s Analysis of Happiness is one of a very few works in Polish humanities, which is possible to treat as the frame of reference for the philosophical euforiology. In Analysis of Happiness he compares the joy and the happiness, according to such a differences between them as intensity, permanence, transcendence or mentality. The phenomenon of joy is also interpreted as a base for the happiness in the psychological understanding. Tatarkiewicz formulates a hierarchy of good states of mind, placing the joy between the pleasure and the jollification. The work Analysis of Happiness contains also the typology of joy – from the joy of life, Elysian joy, mystical joy, the joy of love, to the joy understood as the happiness of the moment.