On the Way: Sorrow of Being

Sorrow of Being

Nicola Masciandaro

He who increases knowledge, increases sorrow.  

– Ecclesiastes 1:18

At that time the two of us were in Heliopolis and we both witnessed the extraordinary phenomenon of the moon hiding the sun at a time that was out of season for their coming together, and from the ninth hour until evening it was supernaturally positioned in the middle of the sun.

– Pseudo-Dionysius, Letter Seven

This book offers, through creative interpretation of select medieval texts, a non-systematic speculative realist ontology of sorrow in the mystical tradition, that is, a thinking of the reality of sorrow in relation to the absolute and beyond the humoral confines of the human. Radicalizing Heidegger’s insight that “the being of Da-sein is care [Sorge, sorrow],” it argues that sorrow belongs universally to the fact of being itself, as well as to the obscurer region of nonbeing. Prior to and beyond the parameters of mundane emotion, sorrow exists in the universal form of the negative identity of thought and being, in the pure negativity through which thought and being are the same. Sorrow, far from being limited to the evolutionary environment of our terrestrial sphere, is more properly conceived as a weird kind of cosmic substance composed of all being’s refusal of itself. Grasping sorrow in these terms does not render actual sorrow irrelevant, but instead redeems its palpable darkness from both the hallucinogenic obscurity of affordable, instrumentalized problematicity (sorrow as problem to be fixed or solved in the interest of making everything alright) and base ‘Manichean’ materiality (sorrow as merely an evil psychical ingredient in things).[1] In this theory of sorrow, sorrow is projectively restored to reality as not only a reflective index, but a perfectible operation of the universal, a way forward into new reality. The sorrow of being, in the mystical mode of a most radical sorrow that one is, is not an affective byproduct of knowledge, but the very means of intensifying knowledge of the real, of actually realizing its truth. Touching at once the wondrous general fact of being (Why something instead of nothing?) and the horror of individuation (Why am I me?), the sorrow of being follows the dark but inversely paradisical path along the twisted root that grounds all entities to the outside. Sorrow reveals the ‘twist’ of the root as the total cosmic complication of the individuated entity: its ultimate confounding of distinctions as to what is inside/outside, self/world, creature/creator. In the context of the speculative realist will to escape the correlation of self and world, the sorrow of being is not simply a passion, but the digestible substance of facticity, the unavoidable portal through which philosophy must pass in order to go beyond itself.^[2] More than a feeling, it is the live form of the refusal of the principle of reason whereby the absolute is alone thinkable.[3] Or, in the words of Bonaventure, this sorrow is the gemitus cordis [groaning of the heart] that is the essential double of the fulgor speculationis [brilliance of speculation] whereby mind is desirously led beyond itself.[4]                 

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[1] My dialectical opening of the sorrow of being thus draws inspiration from Reza Negarestani’s critique of affordance (as illusory and restricted from of openness) and hopes, through this special form of the ‘folly of the impossible’, to extend its work of unbinding: “only by rigorously embracing this folly can we develop a genuine non-restricted dialectical synthesis with the universal absolute and unbind a world whose frontiers are driven by the will of the open and whose depths are absolutely free” (Reza Negarestani, “Globe of Revolution: An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism”).

[2] “We now know the location of this narrow passage through which thought is able to exit from itself—it is through facticity, and through facticity alone, that we are able to make our way towards the absolute” (Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier [London: Continuum, 2008], 63).

[3] “The absolute is thinkable only by a refusal of the principle of reason. . . . speculation, understood as thought about the absolute, is possible only by not being metaphysical” (Quentin Meillassoux, “The Immanence of the World Beyond,” 444). Accordingly, the principle of the sorrow of being demands understanding thought’s ‘not being’ metaphysical in a literal sense. The sorrow of being is the real negative form whereby thought is not metaphysical.  

[4] “No one is disposed in any way to the divine contemplations which lead to ecstasies [excessus] of the mind without being, like Daniel, a person of desires [vir desideriorum]. But desires are inflamed in us in a double way, namely, through the cry of prayer which makes us roar with groaning of the heart, and through the brilliance of contemplations, by which the mind turns itself most directly and intensely to the rays of light” (St. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, Works of St. Bonaventure: Volume II, trans. Zachary Hayes [New York: Franciscan Institute, 2002], Prologue.4, trans. modified).