Abstract

The investigation of the emotion of joy is indispensable for accomplishing the mission of philosophy and the sciences, and not simply psychology, to articulate and promote the "good life." Psychology as a cultural therapeutics is a discipline geared precisely to perform such a task. In the investigation of the contemporary literature on the psychology of emotion, one finds an unmistakable thread: a negligible lack of attention to the positive emotions. As a consequence, it is argued, psychology has become caught in the web of instrumental or calculative rationality, which manifests itself in emotion theory as a reduction of all human behavior to the achievement of instrumental goals. As such, psychology perpetuates and legitimates a nihilistic current in Western thought which has been present since antiquity but only fully realized in modernity. The present study puts forth and defends the primary thesis that a critical phenomenology is a method that is prerequisite for overcoming nihilism and for making a place for joy and other positive emotions not only in theory and research but also in our cultural-historical life-world. This thesis is defended both in theory and empirically. In theory, the thesis is defended through the synthesis of critical theory and phenomenology. Empirically, the thesis is defended through the examination of a prior, empirical-phenomenological study of joy. The findings are re-visioned in light of the theoretical arguments. In conclusion, it is found that joy is the pure appreciation of the world-whole's fulfillment-of-happening