Topics Happiness

Question Is there pleasure in the melancholic? I like reading sad films, I enjoy solitary walks getting sad about sad things, puffing cigarettes that I know will kill me, alone in cafes, half-drunk and looking out at swarms of people buzzing around me, getting sad that I might turn out to be one of them. Is there pleasure in the melancholy? Why?

Accepted:
December 26, 2005

Comments

You have given a number of examples, each of which probably deserves specific responses. But as a general reaction, I think your cases do show that there certainly can be pleasures taken from things that also arouse or contribute to sadness or melancholy. There may be any number of reasons for this, though I suspect that many of these reasons have to do with the ways in which we have evolved as a species. For example (and purely speculative at that!)--as a social beings, we often take pleasure from the experience of being put in a position to see or empathize with the way other people experience things. Seeing a sad film may induce a kind of empathic sadness in us...but even so, we may experience some pleasure at seeing things "through the eyes" of the characters in the film.

According to a general approach to virtue theory, there is nothing wrong with "getting sad about sad things." What would be inappropriate, surely, would be to fail to get sad about sad things.

On the other hand, several of your examples suggest to me that you may be struggling somewhat with depression (and also addiction--to cigarettes, at least, and I worry a bit about the "half-drunk" part, as well). If so, you would do well to discuss this with a physician, whose help you might find more ueful at this point than a philosopher's. (Dare I say that at this site?!)