Abstract
The cardinal aim of this chapter is to argue that within the dominant medieval Christian experience ranging from the fourth to the sixteenth centuries in the strict sense, we cannot speak of happiness. To that end, it analyzes how Christianity established the truth about the ideal of human existence that was marked by the problematization of salvation and why, within the concomitant Christian experience of sin, this ideal wasn’t achievable in the present life. More specifically, the chapter examines the tightly connected issues of original sin and free will, with the help of which it identifies the main inhibitions precluding the ideal of human existence in the Middle Ages to be envisioned in this world.
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Notes
- 1.
Here, we have to note that Foucault is not seeking the Kantian a priori, but the historical a priori and not all possible experience, but historically singular experience.
- 2.
Above we have seen that in addition to the wider understanding of experience as a shared a priori, the Foucauldian approach also implies the understanding of experience in terms of ‘the ability to both account for and facilitate the transformation of experience through deliberate intervention’ (O’Leary 2010, p. 164). With our analysis we therefore also hope to produce what Foucault calls an experience book. A book, that could result in a certain transformation of our experience of happiness and perhaps also in the transformation of experience of happiness of our readers.
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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Zevnik, L. (2014). Middle Ages: The Time Before Happiness. In: Critical Perspectives in Happiness Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04403-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04403-3_4
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