Suffering in the Race for Happiness

Abstract

The utopian notion that there is a time and place where perfect happiness exists is deeply rooted in Western thought and alienates people from life in the here and now. Happiness is perceived as the purpose of life. Moreover, happiness and suffering are presented as opposites that are contingent upon a person’s actions. For thousands of years, happiness and the avoidance of suffering have been presented as the motives behind every action, and the conceptual basis for this still exists in contemporary discourse and culture. The roots of this perception can be found, inter alia, in the culture’s religious texts. In this paper, we use the genealogical method to interrogate the religious and constitutive texts of Western culture and to examine the origins of the perception that happiness is the purpose of life and that it constitutes the opposite of suffering. The genealogical method enables us to deconstruct the causal relationship that lies at the core of this premise. Genealogy deals with the past, but its main purpose is the understanding and critique of contemporary reality; exposing the roots of our cultural past reduces the control of necessity over our lives.

Keywords

• Western culture
• Old Testament
• happiness
• Garden of Eden
• genealogy
• suffering