What Is Sehnsucht? The Longing Behind the Blue Flower
- Nov 12, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 19
To tell you the truth I struggled finding a way into this essay. I knew I had to address it, because the concept of sehnsucht is central to Romantic and Sparkle Valley Philosophy, but I kept putting if off. And that’s because it’s slippery.
Maybe there’s a reason why there’s no good English translation for it. But even in German, people will say they know what you mean, but then when you ask them to describe it they become tongue-tied. And that’s me now.
I don’t think it’s the type of topic you can address directly. You kind of need to come at it from an angle because Sehnsucht is one of those experiences that seems to shrink the moment you try to define it.
I can tell you want it’s not.
It's not ambition. Or wanting more money, more success, or more possessions.
It's not dissatisfaction with life.
And it's not nostalgia either.
Sehnsucht can include all of those feelings, but it points beyond them.
It's the sense that there is something larger, deeper, more beautiful, more meaningful than what we can currently grasp.
Sehnsucht is definitely about beauty, and meaning, and life, and all those deep subjects. But the operative word I think is “more.” It’s about more beauty, more meaning, more life. More everything. You can feel it. You spend your whole life chasing it.
And yet, if you ask me to try to capture that feeling in words, to even get you close to what I understand sehnsucht to be, I have to take the indirect route and point you to images or metaphors. And I’m not the only one:
A dream.
A walk in the woods.
A lonely road stretching toward the horizon.
A wonderland beyond the edge of the map.
None of these things are actually Sehnsucht, but you could say that each points toward it.
It was C.S. Lewis who described Sehnsucht as a dream:
"A lovely meaning too lovely to put into words."
Freud in memories of childhood walks in the woods with his father.
Richard Strauss found it on a lonely road.
"I went along the lonely road,
I walk it every day, and always alone...
Schiller found it in humanity's longing for the unknown.
"For longing is the soul of man, which turns toward the unknown."
Goethe found it in the intuition that everything beautiful points beyond itself.
"Everything transitory is but a symbol; what we long for is the eternal. All that is loveable in this world is but a reflection. What we really love is that by which we are made to feel that which is eternal."
Different images. But the same feeling. They're all circling the same thing from different directions. All these images—a dream, path, a distant horizon—they all point beyond itself. Each carries with it the feeling that reality may be larger than our current experience of it. That’s the feeling they’re trying to capture here.
And now let’s bring in the Blue Flower to help us make sense of this. Because the Blue Flower can be seen as the symbol of Sehnsucht itself.
As we know by now, the Blue Flower is elusive, always slightly out of reach. It beckons us. Pulls us up the next hill, around the next corner, always forward. And this is why the Romantics were so fascinated by unexplored worlds, distant mountains, roads fading into the horizon. You see it in their paintings, in their poetry. They were trying to give form to this feeling.
In these places they found visual representation of a basic human truth. We are creatures who live a life between what is and what we can imagine (being and becoming).
And this brings us once again to our old friend, Nietzsche. As usual, he came up with a metaphor—picture a rope stretched tight across an abyss.
“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”
The rope bridge works because it represents the tension between who we are and what we might become— and that is the tension of Sehnsucht.
We’re never finished. Never complete. We are always becoming. This is the common thread that runs through all these metaphors.
Sehnsucht is when we recognize that reality is larger than our current experience of it. Or at least the wish for it to be so. Because once we get that feeling, we long for that larger reality. For beauty, meaning, connection, wonder, transcendence, new possibilities.
Maybe it’s as simple as that.
Sehnsucht is the longing for new horizons. For new hills to climb, mysteries to explore, layers of meaning to discover.
And the Blue Flower is its symbol. Always ahead. Beckoning. Keeping us walking toward it.
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