GENIUS FORUMS

Here is a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science

A single joyless person is enough to create constant discouragement and cloudy skies for a whole household, and it is a miracle if there is not one person like that. Happiness is not nearly so contagious a disease. Why?

Why do you think that happiness is less easily spread than gloom?

It's not necessarily true just because Nietzsche said it.

But sometimes people are addicted to being gloomy. It's just their way of acting in the world. When someone smiles in their face, they may smile back but they'll go right back to being their sad selves.

Happiness requires uncertain emotional investment.

Steven,

Happiness requires uncertain emotional investment.

Actually, I think it just requires letting go of your sadness.

Happiness requires uncertain emotional investment.

Actually, I think it just requires letting go of your sadness.

True, but I was addressing Elizabeth's question.

Sadness is prevalent, because happiness requires investment.

sschaula wrote:Steven,

Happiness requires uncertain emotional investment.

Actually, I think it just requires letting go of your sadness.

When I did my experiment of trying to rid myself of all emotions for one week, getting rid of the happiness was easy - I was able to stop myself quickly and within a few days, I didn't even have the spontaneous reaction of happiness. The sadness took longer to squelch down, and in some ways got worse without the happiness there to fend it off.

But Nietzsche was talking about one sad person dragging down a group much more often than one happy person bringing up a group. I have noticed this phenomenon too - a sad or grumpy person can get everyone in a foul mood soon, but a happy person is more likely to get fussed at for their cheerfulness.

sschaula wrote:But sometimes people are addicted to being gloomy. It's just their way of acting in the world. When someone smiles in their face, they may smile back but they'll go right back to being their sad selves.

This is true, just as there are some people addicted to being happy. The ones that appear not to be able to think can be rather annoying, but people who are chonically the gloom-and-doom type also get on people's nereves. Both the brainless joy addict and the gloom-and-doomer tend to incite negative feelings, rather than both incite positive feelings.

My guess is that this is something left over from before the human animal developed language. If two members of the tribe went out and one got killed, the other would return home sad. The rest of the group would also get sad, and stay closer to home. By the time they felt better enough to leave, the danger may have passed, or perhaps they walked more slowly and saw the danger. If another member had arrived home with food, they would be happy, but with sadness predominating, they stayed home and away from the danger.

If there was a tribe that the happiness predominated over the sadness, they might have gone out and gotten killed to - so that trait may have died off.

Steven,

I guess I didn't understand what you were saying.

Elizabeth,

This is true, just as there are some people addicted to being happy.

It seems to me like people who are addicted to being happy are the ones which try the hardest to make themselves happy. Someone who is always happy isn't necessarily one of these people. Usually these people seem sad to me, despite their smiles.

The ones that appear not to be able to think can be rather annoying, but people who are chonically the gloom-and-doom type also get on people's nereves. Both the brainless joy addict and the gloom-and-doomer tend to incite negative feelings, rather than both incite positive feelings.

On the other hand, mindless people don't annoy me. I am absolutely neutral towards them. But the people who try to be happy annoy me, as well as the gloomers.

I should add that being annoyed is a sure sign that you're functioning irrationally.

My guess is that this is something left over from before the human animal developed language. If two members of the tribe went out and one got killed, the other would return home sad. The rest of the group would also get sad, and stay closer to home. By the time they felt better enough to leave, the danger may have passed, or perhaps they walked more slowly and saw the danger. If another member had arrived home with food, they would be happy, but with sadness predominating, they stayed home and away from the danger.

If there was a tribe that the happiness predominated over the sadness, they might have gone out and gotten killed to - so that trait may have died off.

It could be. I tend to think it's just that people are raised in the midst of a bunch of gloomy and constantly-striving-to-be-happy people, so they become like that.

I don't think there's some tendency for people to empathize. It's just that people are, by nature, sad...so when they see a frown they can relate.

Conversely, when they see genuine everlasting happiness, they recognize that as well...on some level.

One needs to listen to gloomy people. When you do, you get an idea of what they're deriving from it. Gloomy people are having a whale of a time, believe me. Offer such people a way out of their gloom and I guarantee most people will ignore it, at even the most mudane level.

Gloom can be like a psychological drug as powerful and as addictive as moral indignation. Happiness is often an anticlimax.

Very true, Dan.

Moral indignation I think must be the essence of gloom.

Indignation towards the company, indigantion towards a race, towards the other country,

The list goes on.

Gloom often results from deriving ones gratifications in a way that is closer to the truth, yet not the truth.

Cory Duchesne wrote:I must say, it seems that generally, woman are characteristically more happy, spotaneous, and carefree while men seem more inclined towards gloom, anxiety, stiffness.

Many women would have said the exact opposite - that men are just bigger boys with bigger toys. I wonder how much each gender normally hides their darker sides from the other gender. I know that sometimes guys talk differently when there are females present from how they talk with just the guys - and females do the same thing (generally speaking on both), but I wonder how deep that goes as far as keeping things from the other gender.

The consequences of our actions grab us by the hair, extremely indifferent to whether we have “improved” in the meantime. - FN

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All people identify with sadness because all people identify with suffering. The suffering is the thing that connects and the happiness is the episodic. When we speak of our happiness, we separate ourselves from others. When we speak of our sadness or suffering, we commiserate. It is little wonder that the buddha (amongst many philosophers), found suffering to be the major thing, and suffering, for the buddha, the fundamental root of compassion.

Here you are plying apart with gender what you can no more ply apart based upon income$, or anything else, for that matter. No matter what it is over or how it is manifest, it's ours.


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Yes, that was a good point, pye.

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cory writes:

Woman and children, generally, seem happier and more 'light' in general.

Men just give me the image of seriousness, heaviness and gloom.

:) no matter the way in which one behaves, everyone has their dark nights and their isolated days, no matter how they behave. Everyone in some way feels the discomfort of being a thing that knows it lives and dies alone, in all its forms from childhood on. The terror of, or the running from the fullest subjectivity and what that mortally means. I cannot say that everyone knows the flat-out joy of saying Yes anyway, much less again and again, and to the everything that your life is just now and always, and not the way you delude you are or hypothesize about.

I think Nietzsche looked toward conscious life that was not afraid of its own mortality or pain, and expended itself joyously anyway - and because of - amor faite.


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It is inhuman to bless where one is cursed - FN

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Cory writes:

Woman, because they are more conscious than children, suffer more than children, and men, because they are more consciousness than woman (generally) suffer more than woman.

Yes to the bitter fruit of the tree of knowledge; yes to the disorientation upon leaving Plato's cave; yes, that consciousness somehow hurts in order to raise. Everyone who wakes hard in the morning knows how it feels, that coming into consciousness, however so, sometimes hurts, from sleep to waking to staying there, and waking more.

You know I'm not going to agree with you who is more conscious, men or women, Cory. It is always the most who are sleeping on their feet and the few of either who are waking more.

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Cory Duchesne wrote:Yes, that was a good point, pye.

I guess I was pointing out how happiness seems feminine. I don't know if this is just my own idiosynrantic projection or not.

Woman and children, generally, seem happier and more 'light' in general.

Men just give me the image of seriousness, heaviness and gloom.

Women are culturally conditioned to smile more often, whether they mean it or not. Men are allowed to only smile when they feel like it. If a woman doesn't smile on greeting someone, everyone thinks there's something wrong with her.

Cory Duchesne wrote: I'm not denying woman and children don't suffer. Woman, because they are more conscious than children, suffer more than children, and men, because they are more consciousness than woman (generally) suffer more than woman.

What do you mean by "more" - quantitative or qualitative?

Abused children may suffer as badly as concentration camp prisoners.

Elizabeth wrote:

Abused children may suffer as badly as concentration camp prisoners.

ah, exceptions to the general rule. Sure, plenty of those.

I guess I brought gender into this because I wanted to generate discussion about whether or not Nietzche was a philosopher who valued femininity.

Afterall, near the end of his life he did assert that he was a 'Dionysisian' philosopher.

Dionysus was the greek God of 'sensuallity, of spring, fertility, sexuality, intoxication, the god of wine, chaos, music, and dancing'

Whereas Apollo was more masculine: concerned with order, justice, and ratonality.

Cory writes:

I guess I brought gender into this because I wanted to generate discussion about whether or not Nietzche was a philosopher who valued femininity.

Afterall, near the end of his life he did assert that he was a 'Dionysisian' philosopher.

Dionysus was the greek God of 'sensuallity, of spring, fertility, sexuality, intoxication, the god of wine, chaos, music, and dancing'

Whereas Apollo was more masculine: concerned with order, justice, and ratonality.

Apollo is the god of individuation -- the serene and encouraging force for self-standing self-identity, away from nature's darker, collective swells. Apollo stands for the individual pieces of creation.

Dionysus is the god of self-forgetting -- that force in nature that seeks to re-merge the individual into nature's darker, collective swells from whence it comes. Dionysus stands for the whole and wholeness of creation.

Nietzsche's high-estimation of the Dionysian falls along the lines of

. . . the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent, the conception of individuation as the prime cause of evil, and of [Dionysian] art as the joyous hope that the bonds of individuation may be broken in augury of a restored oneness.

The Birth of Tragedy out of The Spirit of Music

The desire to escape the necessary rigors of Apollo in establishing and defending the self-standing self -- the desire to become "self-forgetful" of this isolating work and re-merge into the strong forces of nature -- belong to a fundamental torn-ness for every human thing.

A man does this everytime he goes drinking with his buddies or gets swallowed back into the dark continent of his primal sexuality or when he joins a massive crowd at a sporting event, and "forgets himself" by merging into its collective ebbs and swells with his shouts and punches of air, or when he dances wildly, lost in the music and found by a stronger pull of creation than he will, as a little self, ever know. Woman experience the same or similar ambivalence and do same or similar things; humans move toward the individuating mind just as they do many things to move away from it.

If you drop the "femininity/masculinity" part, you could just say that Nietzsche valued the Dionysian forces of self-forgetfulness and re-mergence into nature's darker, collective swells. But just like this fundamental human ambivalence goes, Nietzsche also valued the isolating work of the individuating mind.


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. . . in other words, I don't think Apollo and Dionysus were ever meant to negotiate over us and shake hands - the whole greek point of it - of Euripides' Bacchae and its ambivalent message and tone.

I tend to think the high-appetite for movie-watching - getting 'lost' in movies and forgetful of the self (and its work and woes) is another of the modern forms the dionysian takes. And this, of course, is also scarcely a phenomenon of gender.


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Cory Duchesne wrote:Moral indignation I think must be the essence of gloom.

Gloom is moral indignance directed at fate. All forms of moral indignance are deeply ego validating, which is why people tend to resist overcoming them. The "I" component of it is very powerful.

Indignation towards ones parents, towards the company that one is employed by, indigantion towards a race, towards the other country,

That's a lot of indignance!

ah, towards women. ;)

Indignance directed at women is ignorance (and in truth, is in all the other cases mentioned).

The list goes on.

Indignance is essentially shaking your fist at Reality. Gloom is what happens when Reality doesn't respond.

I must say, it seems that generally, woman are characteristically more happy, spotaneous, and carefree while men seem more inclined towards gloom, anxiety, stiffness.

One might argue that this is an illusion created by feminine flowiness and spontaneity. Male and female gloom is different. For females it is predominantly tied to fear of not embodying "Woman" to the required degree. For men it's usually more a control issue.

Gloom often results from deriving ones gratifications in a way that is more intellectual, introspective, closer to the truth, yet not the truth.

Gloom is an instropsective thing, as is moral indignance directed at fate. Women don't experience gloom as much as men. Women experience something that I would characterise more along the lines of angst.