Abstract
This chapter argues that the experience of happiness is a specifically modern occurrence that has gradually transformed and eventually replaced the medieval experience of sin. The seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries are depicted as the decisive period in which, after hundreds of years of Christian emphasis on the afterlife, Western culture again started to envision the ideal of human existence predominantly in the earthly realm. The analysis focuses in on the social, religious, ethical and political processes that lead to the birth of the experience of happiness and describes its main characteristics. Chapter 6 also describes how modern happiness manifests itself in the form of two main modes: the religious experience of happiness and the secular experience of happiness. It argues that these two modes of happiness have created two sets of distinctive basic characteristics of happiness within which the majority of strategies of happiness and individual experiences of happiness emerged, and continue to emerge, in Western culture.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
A more indirect refusal of original sin could also be found in the ideas of the so-called natural theologians writing in roughly the same time as Locke (such as John Ray (1691) and William Derham (1711)) who argued that God as the Devine Architect created a providential order designed for the harmonious benefit and well-being of its inhabitants, a notion that was -as we shall see- also adopted by Locke and other Deists.
- 2.
Here we should note that this innovation was did not go completely unquestioned. There were some conservative and reactionary churchmen such as Edmund Calamy (1662), who still vigorously emphasized the old Christian vision of salvation.
- 3.
From the point when the problematization of good feeling/pleasure and the affirmation of everyday life become firmly consolidated and dominant, also a shorter (but wider) expression can also be used: the problematization of happiness.
- 4.
We are not implying that so-called new-age spirituality also worships Christian God, which in fact most of the numerous new-age approaches don’t. Rather we would like to suggest that many new-age approaches share this basic model of accepting a certain divine, higher principle or force, which a person has to take into account or follow in order to pursue happiness in the present life.
- 5.
We are on the same page with Israel (2001, p. 159) that Spinoza indeed had no rival as the chief progenitor and author of the main radical enlightenment ideas of ‘eliminating divine Providence and governance of the world’ that have culminated in ‘the Naturalistic, materialist, one-substance’ system of thought characteristic of the Enlightenment.
- 6.
The idea of the divine providential order was not only questioned theoretically, but also satirized in works such as Voltaire’s Candide (2006) and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1805), which were symptomatically both published in 1759 after the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake.
- 7.
Bentham even goes so far as to argue that pleasure and pain in fact constitute the root of all psychological entities: ‘Among all the several species of psychological entities… the two which are as it were the roots, the main pillars or foundations of all the rest, the matter of which all the rest are composed—or the receptacles of that matter, which so ever may be the physical image, employed to give aid, if not existence to conception, will be, it is believed… seen to be, Pleasures and Pains. Of these, the existence is matter of universal and constant experience. Without any of the rest, these are susceptible of,—and as often as they come unlooked for, do actually come into, existence: without these, no one of all those others ever had, or ever could have had, existence’ (Bentham in Schofield 2006, p. 30).
- 8.
In Das Kapital Marx (1982, p. 758) for example regarded English utilitarian philosophy only as a dull reproduction of the preceding French enlightenment philosophers.
- 9.
While this famous phrase is commonly associated with Bentham, McMahon explains (2006, p. 212), ‘He was merely reiterating what was already a widespread eighteenth-century conviction’. In fact, the “proto-variations” of the phrase were already employed by thinkers such as Hutchenson, Leibnitz, Beccaria and Helvetius (McMahon 2006, p. 212).
- 10.
The reasons for La Mettrie’s death still haven’t been completely disclosed as various theories and reports exist.
- 11.
Therefore, the Enlightenment thinkers are often considered to have made the first attempts of modern scientific analysis of man and society.
- 12.
Even though Jefferson’s idea about the pursuit of happiness was largely inspired by European philosophers such as Locke and Hutcheson and although the early American settlers were mostly emigrants from Europe, the American experience of happiness had a specific development, which would require a particular examination that won’t be pursued here.
- 13.
In spite of the general growth of affluence resulting in a more inclusive consumer culture, there were still considerable class class-related differences in consumption patterns.
- 14.
While a similar observation pertaining to natural laws was made much earlier by Galileo Galilei, the Deist innovation was that from the “Book of Nature” it is also possible to draw inductive conclusions about ethical and soteriological questions.
- 15.
Within the preceding experience of sin, a lot of attention and ingenuity was dedicated to designing objects that produced suffering (as we have seen above, there was a strong competition between the craftsmen of torture instruments, which even had “catchy” names that, to a certain extent, resemble consumer brands). Within the modern experience of happiness, the competing efforts in the context of emerging capitalism are now directed to produce various objects of pleasure.
- 16.
While the increase in consumerism as a pleasurable practice or as a leisure activity was no longer only reserved for the elites, it remained an ‘expression to the social hierarchy’ (Thomas 2009, p. 118). In this sense, Thomas explains (2009, p. 118), ‘possessions were used to signify power, wealth, ancestry, mental cultivation, and nobility of character. As a result, most commodities acquired a distinctive set of symbolic meanings and associations, full of social resonance. To possess them was inevitably an act of self-definition’.
- 17.
For a more thorough reflection of this theme one should also consider Foucault’s analysis of the modern sexuality in the History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (1978) that attempts to illuminate how sex towards the end of the eighteenth and in the nineteenth century has been ‘put into discourse’ (Foucault 1978, p. 11).
- 18.
Methodism was an evangelical movement that emerged in the eighteenth century in the United Kingdom.
- 19.
As we shall see, the understanding of police in the early modern period was quite different and much broader than it is now.
- 20.
Foucault (2002, p. 299) further explains that ‘such trail would trap us into playing the arbitrary and boring part of either the rationalist or the irrationalist’.
- 21.
These developments of knowledge coincide with the foundation of ‘the classical episteme,’ which Foucault describes in The Order of Things (2005).
- 22.
These developments have eventually resulted in the understanding of the world as the divine providential order designed by God for the well-being of its inhabitants adopted by the Deists (see above).
- 23.
According to Foucault (2007, p. 314), ‘with principia naturae and ratio status, principles of nature and raison d’État, nature and state, the two great references of the knowledge (savoirs) and techniques given to modern Western man are finally constituted, or finally separated’.
- 24.
Being based on the refusal of the old Christian understanding of the cosmos it is hardly surprising that some orthodox Christian thinkers assimilated the political theory of reason of state to atheism.
- 25.
Above in the section about progress towards happiness we have already mentioned several examples of such knowledge.
- 26.
This was also clearly expressed through the mercantilist politics in this period.
- 27.
‘Even if the semantic distinction between Politik endorsing negative tasks and Polizei endorsing positive tasks,’ explains Foucault (2002, p. 415), ‘soon disappeared from political discourse and from the political vocabulary, the problem of a permanent intervention of the state in social processes,’ is still ‘characteristic of our modern politics and political problematics’. Namely the discussions from the end of the eighteenth century till now about issues such as liberalism and welfare state actually originate ‘in this problem of the positive and negative tasks of the state, in the possibility that the state may have only negative tasks and not positive ones and may have no power of intervention in the behavior of people’.
- 28.
Above in the section about pastoral power we have argued that the principle Omnes et Singulatim implies that the pastor/shepherd does everything for the totality of his flock, but he does everything also for each sheep of the flock.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Zevnik, L. (2014). The Birth of Modern Happiness. In: Critical Perspectives in Happiness Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04403-3_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04403-3_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-04402-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-04403-3
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)