Luka Zevnik - Critical Perspectives in Happiness Research: The Birth of Modern Happiness

Chapter 7: The Evolution of Happiness: Development of Happiness from its Birth to its Contemporary Manifestations

The Christian experience of sin marked the refusal/sacrifice of the self that preceeded the experience of Happiness can be seen as a period in the history of Western thought characterized by what could be called a “negative constitution of the subject.” Insofar as the birth of happiness was in large part constituted as a break away from the Christian experience of sin, the pursuit of happiness represents a refusal of this negative constitution of the subject. Instead, the experience of happiness from its initial eighteenth century outlook to its contemporary manifestations can be seen as closely connected to what Foucault (2000) calls the positive constitution of the subject.

Happiness understood in terms of a positive constitution of the subject, however, did not occur without retaining certain elements from the preceding experience of sin that are mostly related with the implicit sediments of the Christian hermeneutics of the self and the individualizing form of power closely related to it. Following from this, one of the great problems of Western culture largely connected to the birth of happiness ‘has been to find the possibility of founding the hermeneutics of the self not, as it was the case in early Christianity, on the sacrifice of the self but, on the contrary, on a positive, on the theoretical and practical, emergence of the self’ (Foucault 1999, p. 180). The main consequence of this development is that ‘a hermeneutics of the self has been diffused across Western culture through numerous channels and integrated with various types of attitudes and experience, so that it is difficult to isolate and separate it from our own spontaneous experiences’ (Foucault 2000, p. 224).