Philosophy / Sadness

Exploring the Depths of Sadness

A Philosophical Perspective on the Human Experience

“The word happiness would lose its meaning if it were not accompanied by sadness.” — Carl Jung

Without sadness would we realize, at the same time, body and spirit?

Physiology and knowledge meet in its constitutive ambiguity, so that you are no more present to yourself and more in solidarity with yourself than in moments of sadness.

It will be — like consciousness — an agent of estrangement from the world, a factor of exteriority; the more it removes us from everything, the more we coincide with ourselves.

Seriousness — sadness without affective emphasis — makes us sensitive only to a rational process, for its neutrality lacks the depth that associates the whims of the viscera with the vibration of the spirit.

A serious being is an animal that fulfils the conditions of a man; stop his thinking mechanism for a moment; he will not notice how easily he has become again the animal of the past. But reduce its sadness to reflection; there will remain enough gloomy imbecility for zoology not to accept you.

To take things seriously is to weigh them without participating; to take them tragically — to engage in their fate.

Between seriousness and tragedy ( this sadness as action ) there is a greater difference than between a civil servant and a hero. — Philosophers are poor agents of the Absolute, paid for out of the contributions of our sorrows.

From taking the world seriously they have made a profession. Sadness — in its elementary form — is a genius of matter.

Primary inspiration without thought.

The body has overcome its condition and tends to a “higher” participation of itself, and in the reflective forms of sadness the process is completed by a descent of the spirit through the vine, as if to show us how organically we belong.

By taking away our being and giving it back to us, sadness is a substantial isolation of our being, as opposed to the ontological dispersion of happiness.

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