Praise for "high seriousness" in scholarship and poetry Some use "seriousness" as a term of praise for scholarship or in literary review.
Philosophical disdain for seriousness Many have expressed an attitude of disdain toward taking things too seriously, as opposed to viewing things with an attitude of humor. Poet, playwright, and philosopher
Joseph Addison said that being serious is dull, "we are growing serious, and let me tell you, that's the next step to being dull."
Epigramist, poet, and playwright
Oscar Wilde said that "life is too important to be taken seriously." In a play on words, novelist
Samuel Butler indicated that the
central serious conviction in life is that nothing should be taken with too much seriousness, "the one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously." In some
ascetic or
puritan religious sects, an attitude of seriousness is always to be taken, and
solemnity,
sobriety, and puritanism with its hostility to social pleasures and indulgences are the only acceptable attitudes.
Perry Miller, "the master of American
intellectual history", wrote of excessive seriousness of the
Puritans, "simple humanity cries at last for some relief from the interminable high seriousness of the Puritan code." And yet Bernard Dukore, quoting Joy Goodwin, observes the mutually reinforcing facets of seriousness with humor, "[t]he fact that [an author] 'can write witty repartee and slapstick scenarios with the best of them doesn’t mean that his play doesn’t have deep roots.' [Ayckbourn] draws [his] comedy [in Intimate Exchanges] 'from some of the most distressing corners of the human heart.'" In a similar vein, the philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
The "spirit of seriousness" in existential philosophy Existentialist philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre called the "spirit of seriousness" the belief that there is an objective and independent goodness in things for people to discover, and that this belief leads to
bad faith. He argued that people forget that values are not absolute, but are contingent and subjectively determined. In Sartre’s words, "the spirit of seriousness has two characteristics: it considers values as
transcendent givens, independent of human subjectivity, and it transfers the quality of ‘desirable’ from the
ontological structure of things to their simple material constitution." == Seriousness and comedy ==