Happiness and Sadness - opposites?

I came to this question when I discovered how repulsed I am/get when people talk of opposites. Like the opposite of a cat is a dog. Or the opposite of wet is dry. Or hot and cold. Why is it that I have a problem with this, well, in this brief look into it I will explain why. That's why. Yup.

I recently posed the question of happiness and sadness to a friend, and very quickly she said: 'happiness and sadness are separated by about 30 degrees. joy and woe are woven fine, etc. the opposite of both is apathy'. I'm not sure if i agree with the specifics, but the complexity of ones emotions idea is one i share.

I am of the opinion that the distinct markers we have of emotions are never static – they evolve and change over time. We experience sorrow or joy or amusement many times over our lives, but one is not equivocally the same as a previous emotion. We like to compartmentalise these into discrete packages because that's what language forces us to do when we attempt to convey any information to another.

Though the act of thinking or feeling transcends language. For a long time I was of the opinion that thinking is language based – whereby to think is to hook onto words and meaning in order to progress with understanding or conception. But, there are various examples where this is not the case at all. It is only when measuring our thinking in terms of communication that words become involved. Up to that point the act of thinking can involve only shape, feeling, recall or being witness to sensation. Now I don't want to go as far as to discuss consciousness and what it entails to be conscious and if merely being conscious is an act of thinking (cogito ergo sum). One thing is for certain, is that if you are alive, activity is happening in your brain. So 'thinking' has levels, but the route of them is outside language.

Emotions are always a strange one. We experience them mostly without any decision of our own for them to form in the way they do. They are a reaction from something, not usually the origin. The stimulus changes the chemical signature of the chemical reaction which is the outcome. If you are making soup, the flavour of soup is dictated by the ingredients you put in, and also the timing and heat of those ingredients. But the taste (emotions) is formed as a result. It didn't dictate the soup itself. Now, if you recreate the dish, no matter what you do, it will never be exactly the same soup. Subtleties outside our conception of understanding change that to mean for a slightly different outcome. That's why I'm of the opinion that our perception of things change daily, so we never hold exactly the same feelings on things. If we were able to watch a movie on one day and wipe our memory of it and watch it again on another, we would find we would always come out of the screen with slightly different reactions to it. It's the same film, but there are always different pre-conditions (environmental, physical and mental) that alters ones reaction. That's how one person can love a film and another hate it – sometimes out of playing against others, the status quo, being different, or from the mood established that day. As Heraclitus said: 'You can never step into the same water twice'.

These are the fundamentals of why an opposite regarding our own subjective self is never a true opposite, they constantly change and become others as time goes on.

Now moving onto distinctions of opposites again, if we now discuss things on a sliding scale, which are not limited to a subjective sense, then we come to a point where we have to declare the existence of opposites. Temperature is not one of them. If you talk about hot and cold, then again, these are subjective things – we feel and so experience temperature, but temperature is not a 'thing' it is only a reaction to a sensation. Likewise, tall and short or good and bad.

Where we can start discussing opposites is when we talk about physical constructs; matter etc... It is known (as far as we can know anything) that our universe is composed of elemental particles known as atoms, and beneath that are quarks etc... These are thus composed of protons and neutrons, as well as particles and anti particles. It is relatively understood (as far as it can be) that if there is a positive something then there is a negative something. This goes with protons, muons, quarks etc... There is always an anti to something. So when talking about physical matter the truth is that there are opposites. The thing in question has the same mass and dimensions but opposes the thing we understand in every way. Like the fact that even in empty space, virtual particles come in and out of existence, some called gluons do this to create the strong nuclear force as well as quarks and anti quarks.

Now they may cancel each-other out, they do so in dramatic ways. In the process they release all of their total energy, which is frightening as there is a lot of energy in even a single gram of matter. Since there are about 30,000,000.0 seconds in a year, this means that a 100 watt bulb running for 30,000 years produces as much energy as 1 gram of matter converted into energy. This theme featured in the central plot of Dan Brown's 'Angels and Demons'. The point is that opposites don't exist how we tend to view them, and if the claim is that for instance cold is the opposite of hot, then you have to consider that they are weakly opposing. The matter which makes up hot and cold are the same, the particles are just either moving slow or fast.

Anyway, I could get lost in all this quantum stuff, so I will stop there and sum up my findings. The topic was 'is happiness the opposite of sadness', and through this small wankery of an article (typed rather haphazardly) I have come to the conclusion that really only constructs of matter are comparable to be opposite or opposing. The perceived aspects such as heat, height, goodness, wetness are just sliding scales – there is no clear definition of any of these things as they are entirely subjective. Yes, one can say such and such has a higher water content, or is of a higher temperature. But the opposites we declare here are too self orientated and not objective enough to be opposites.

This is the same reason why happiness cannot be the opposite of sadness. They are on a sliding scale and never inhabit the same exact point again. We play our lives forwards and with each moment the previous moment is lost to memory. No exact act can be exactly repeated - there are too many factors which prevent such a thing from reoccurring; particularly as we inhabit the space in which we test. isolating something for testing is one thing, but it is isolated within the space we are working within. It's like a fish doing some experiments with water - no matter how well the fish establishes walled areas and clean sterile conditions, the whole experiment will be within the bowl and as such will never truly be isolated. Like emotions, as we evolve and change over time, that which went on before will never repeat itself exactly. We have self-imposed categories for things, but objectively they don't exist. This is why happiness and sadness are not opposites.