감성의 형성 : 근대성으로서의 행복: 역사적 접근 = Happiness as Modernity: A Historical Approach

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

According to a dictionary definition, happiness means a mental state representing contentment or pleasure. It belongs to individual sensibility. But the present trend that many people seek happiness in everyday life, is the characteristic of the modern society, and a feeling of happiness is also one of modernities. Because many intellectuals, from the ancient times to the middle age, have thought that happiness meant the completion of virtue rather than the pursuit of pleasure. The purpose of this paper is to reconsider happiness as modernity by examining Roy Poter`s Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000) critically. Porter emphasizes the importance of English Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. According to his explanation, the trend that everybody tried to represent his own sensibility and to pursue pleasure became stronger and stronger at that times, which would mean the creation of the modern world. The appearance of the attitudes was based on the development of commerce and foreign trade in England. With the financial revolution and commercial trade, the so-called consumer revolution was developed, and rich people bought exotic goods and enjoyed various types of leisure. In this process the campaigners for enlightenment stimulated individuals to express their personalities and emotions beyond the boundary of religious belief or tradition. It is called affective individualism. The pursuit of happiness as modernity seems to have been a long-termed phenomenon. By emphasizing the enlightenment too much, Porter regarded the consuming movement of the minority of the society as one of the majority. Furthermore, it seems that he re-interpreted eighteenth-century England on the base of the present English society in which is de-christianized and is becoming the higher mass-consuming society. I think that his view would be more suitable to late nineteenth-century England.