Going philosophical on all you peeps.

Anyways, can you ever have happiness without ever experiencing sadness? 
I say no. Without sadness, you really don't know the "low" standard of emotions. Without sadness, you can't set the bar for all the other times you may feel sad. Maybe you are experiencing joy, but without that standard guidance of where sad would be on your emotional meter, then any positive emotion can be sadness, and vice versa. 
Sometimes you need to experience heartbreak to truly feel happiness later on. Maybe you just broke up with someone who have been dating for quite some time. You are devastated, but as you progress along, you finally see that maybe that person was not meant for you. That person could have been a drag on your life, and now that you are free of that, you can experience life in a better view point. 

In honest truth, it's basically the same as the idea of you can't succeed without ever failing. Failing is a stepping stone for success...you need to experience one to experience the other. 

What do you think? 

This is part of the yin and yang of life. The same can be said for all other experiences/feelings in life without loss there is no gain, without freedom there is no captivity, without pain there is no pleasure, the list goes on and on. 

I wish there were no bad parts about life but if there weren't we would have no way of knowing what is good.

Sidewinder :

Well, this is an interesting question especially for someone your age. I guess it depends on situations and circumstances. I don’t think it is realistic for one to expect everything to be ideal and to their liking all the time. I do however; think that is possible to be happy in certain areas of your life, while at the same time not being happy in other areas.

 

For example, someone can be very happy in their personal life and be settled down with a family and such, but at the same time not be so happy in regard to their career. It can be just as easily vice versa.

 

If you are talking about one feeling overall content with their life; I believe that is possible as well but I do think that it takes years for someone to reach that point.

How would you truly know happiness if you would not have ever been sad?

You can have happiness without sadness but you might not understand or recognize it.

Before people went to space and discovered physics, we had gravity.  We were all held down on the earth due to its mass and it existed here. There is gravity everywhere, even in space.  It's impossible to find somewhere that has completely zero gravity.  So it exists without a counter-balance.

Happiness is an emotion and it's different from a physical manifestation of nature.  The principle is the same.  Yes, you can have happiness without sadness.  You just may not recognize the emotion.

No. You wouldn't be able to appreciate the happiness because you do not know what it is like to be sad. And for every person that is happy, there is a person that is upset.

As long as death is inevitable, everyone will experience sadness at some point in their lives.

You probably could, but if there has been a point of sadness in your life, then that point of happiness will seem even sweeter.

No, you can't. If you never experienced sadness, you wouldn't know what happiness is. It's like "can you have good with out bad?" If you don't have anything bad in the world, than nothing would be "good" would it? Same with sadness and happiness.

I'd say yes. I don't think people need the comparison to be happy. Perhaps you could claim that they wouldn't be as happy without the comparison but they'd still be happy. I also think you can succeed without failing. If you always get everything right on the first time then you succeed. Try to catch a fish and do it immediately and you succeeded in catching a fish.

Vincent1875 : Hm, your fish example is a good one. When I first throw the line in the water, I'm not sad that I don't get a fish right away, but when I do, I'm very happy.

I think you need to feel some kind of disappointment on occasion to truly understand happiness, but I don't think sadness is needed. I am very very rarely sad, I mean very rarely. But I'm very happy.

Of course you can experience happiness without experiencing sadness. What I keep reading is that unless you have something to compare it to, you can't truly rate it, therefore are not experiencing TRUE happiness. The opposition to that conflict is exactly what it means when someone says "Ignorance is bliss". Happiness and sadness is really nothing more than mere stimuli that your brain either interprets as preferable or not preferable. But you don't have to experience rejected stimuli for your brain to accept stimuli as preferable. For example, try to imagine a fetus that JUST entered that point where the brain starts processing information. Before that point in time, the brain has had absolutely no conscious experience. So it's first experience is either going to be processed as something that it prefers, or it will be something that will be processed as something it does not prefer. Either way, it will interpret that stimulus with absolutely nothing to compare. But it is still able to make that processing decision. 

Now, you can make the argument that the experience of 'happiness' can be strengthened by experiencing 'sadness'. The more you have to compare something to, the more appreciative you can be of something. But level of appreciation is not the same as experiencing happiness. On a base level, you can have happiness without sadness. It just wouldn't be as strong without that opposite experience to gain more appreciation for happiness. 

There can be happiness without sadness in one sense and there cannot in another. Pain and pleasure inherently go together, but people can be happy while in pain or sad while experiencing pleasure. I separate the two by saying pleasure and pain are the current external circumstances and happiness and sadness are internal states of being. A common stereotype is for girls to grab a pint of ice cream when they're depressed. Eating the ice cream is pleasurable. They are still sad. Equally, there can be a old man dying in great pain, yet be happy because he knows family loves him.

A guy that likes whips and chains in the bedroom experiences pain, but is happy. A heroine addict can get a high, but they might be depressed with or without their high. Pleasure cannot be without pain due to biology. The same nerves that communicate pain also communicate pleasure (and tickling, fyi). If I can taste cake and taste that it is good, I can also taste stale, C-grade bread and taste that it is bad. If I only ever eat cake or only ever eat nasty bread, it is the norm and I don't actually know anything more. The norm is neutral.

Happiness and sadness, however, do not need each other. We all go through both, but these "states of being" don't "become the norm" like pain and pleasure. This is because pain and pleasure require experience while happiness and sadness require rationality and knowledge can be reached by reason. If I never have any sort of simple sugar in life, I won't know what it tastes like. I might guess it is similar to complex sugars like potato or grains, but I won't know exactly what the difference is. Although I have experienced both, I can achieve knowledge of both by reason, not experience. So long as I can reason, I can have just one, never experiencing the other, yet legitimately have one.

Pleasure and pain need mutual experience, but happiness and sadness do not. Happiness and sadness require rationality.

I think the answer really comes down to our discoveries in neuroscience, there could theoretically be some sort of super drug that constantly opens the "pleasure(or reward) pathway " and makes it seem to be a novel experience every 30 minutes with dopamine and other neurotransmitters, and also keeps you from feeling pain.

Sadness is simply a complex biological response to life's stressors, and if we could somehow block certain neurotransmitters that cause sadness from reaching receptors, maybe someone could live an entire life without sadness. I don't think this should be attempted in any case, it's just a thought experiment.

philosophically however, no. There would be no word for happiness, if only sadness existed and vice versa. There would be no word for good if only good existed and vice versa. The universe really does have a ying and a yang to it.

sloanstar1000 : We speculate about non-existence and other abstract things plenty. Why wouldn't we have words for both?

I don't think you can have happiness without having sadness and can't have sadness without happiness. The reason why I say this, if you look around the globe, not every single person is happy and not every single person is sad, and also, a person can't be happy their entire life nor bant be say for their entire life as well, so that's in a way we have a perfect mix between happiness and sadness so to answer this question, you can't have happiness without sadness.

It all really depends on how you look at it, I think that the example that txgangsta gave was a pretty good way of proving the point. In a way you can have one without the other and in another way, you can't.

I think this follows the same principles of pain and pleasure, light and darkness, good or bad.

You have been making a lot of these cool threads that ask very intriguing questions lately. This one in particular.

It all really depends on how you look at it because the answer can vary because you can and cannot have one without the other, I am just going to leave it at that for now.

Good thread by the way!

Txgangsta : Granted, you can invent a name for any random abstract concept that comes from the imagination. I guess my point was, evil(as a definition as opposite to good), would not actually exist if only the phenomena we call "good" existed. It could only exist conceptually with no real world phenomena to attach it to.