Introduction: The Struggle for Happiness and Autonomy in Cultural and Personal Contexts: An Overview

Abstract

The main thesis that we want to defend in this book is that people's happiness and well-being are inseparable from their experience of personal and motivational autonomy in pursuing freely chosen life-goals, actions, and behaviors. We consider this axiom to be universal and applicable to people from all cultural communities. As we will argue, the feeling of autonomy and self-determination is what makes us most fully human and thus most able to lead deeply satisfying lives—lives that are meaningful and constructive—perhaps the only lives that are worth living. In this chapter we will first present the thoughts of such contributors to this topic as Socrates, Stoic philosophers, Spinoza, and Kant, and then try to reconcile their ancient admonitions with the recommendations derived from the empirical tradition of modern psychology, represented mostly by self-determination theory (SDT). In addition to a brief history of Western thoughts concerning the relations between happiness and human autonomy, we will provide an account of how these relations are reflected in the Confucian teaching in Ancient China and how they are accounted for in modern South Asian societies. We will also take a look at the problems that the issue of autonomy has experienced in mainstream psychology, and consider the challenges to the notions of autonomy brought by the determinist and constructionist approaches in social and cultural psychology. This introduction will conclude with a summary of the subsequent chapters. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved) (chapter)