László Földényi - Melancholy

A melancholic stands on the borderline between being and nonbeing, which is how the prophet and the madman were characterized, and one might so characterize melancholic heroes as well. The case of Bellerophon, however, shows that this border position arms the melancholic with knowledge, insight, and wisdom. If that is compared with what has been said about prophecy and divine madness, that knowledge can be considered the deepest possible, and one can also trace the beginnings of philosophy itself to there. In one of Aristotle’s early dialogues that is extant in fragmentary form ( On Philosophy ), he traces the love of sagacity historically to ancient Greek theology, to the Orphic doctrines, and the magi of Persia, and claims that the acquisition of philosophy is a process akin to initiation into the mysteries (think of Heraclitus, who, after his own initiation, became mad, melancholic, and penetrating in vision), and, like Plato, calls those initiated in the mysteries true philosophers. We have seen that Plato indicates the enthusiasm of poets and philosophers with the passive voice of the verb “to prophesy,” and the young Aristotle also considers passivity to be a characteristic state of those who were to be initiated into the Eleusinian rites (that is, predisposed to philosophy and thus suited to being readied for a philosophical way of looking at things): “Those who are being initiated into the mysteries are to be expected not to learn anything ( ) but to suffer some change, to be put into a certain condition ( )” (Aristotle, Aristotelis qui ferebantur librorum fragmenta , frag. 15). “Pathos” means at once passion, fate, suffering, and an intriguing experience — that is to say, an inner identification with things, suffering them in the widest sense of the word, as opposed to mathesis , mental discipline, the objective, rational comprehension of things (though the adjective “rational” is hardly appropriate for characterizing the process). Pathos, or its exercise ( ), leads to so-called illumination ( ), which for Plato was the key to seeing the Ideas, and for Aristotle, a more profound understanding of Being. A true philosopher is thus also a soothsayer — in line with the expression taken from Philebus , he too examines the process of coming into being — but since, as a soothsayer, he is strongly linked with madness, he is at the same time also melancholic. He too, like the prophet Heraclitus, stands on the boundary between being and nonbeing, and is compelled as a result to return constantly to where he started: to negativity, which, however, is not the converse of a state of being regarded as positive but being itself, totally positive reality. “I know I know nothing”—that statement by melancholic Socrates (for Aristotle thought of him also as that) is no mere play on words but irony engendered by his astonishment. And his reply when asked whether it was worth his getting married or not, as recorded by Diogenes Laertius (bk. 2, 33), was: “Whatever you do you will regret it,” once again testifying to a philosopher’s profound sense of mission: he leads all who desire instruction to the boundary of being and nonbeing not in order to drive them to despair but to lead them to self-understanding. (The diabolical inference that this is precisely what will drive one to despair was the handiwork of the Baroque way of looking at things, more particularly of Kierkegaard, Socrates’ most faithful latter-day disciple.) “What shall be done to the man who has never had the wit to be idle during his whole life,” Socrates says, “but has been careless of what the many care about — wealth, and family interests, and military offices, and speaking in the assembly, and magistracies, and plots, and parties. Reflecting that I was really too honest a man to follow in this way and live, I did not go where I could do no good to you or to myself” (Plato, Apology , 36b — c). (It was likewise recorded of another melancholic philosopher, Empedocles, that he held freedom dear, disdained all power, and declined the royal post that he was offered.)

Melancholic Socrates was an obsessed ( manic ) seeker of truth, and his madness, the love of wisdom (he was a philosopher ), as well as the deep melancholia stemming from that, gave him some insight into the most profound secret. The accusation leveled against him by the Athenians — Socrates was infringing the law “by speculating about the heaven above, and searching into the earth beneath” ( Apology , 18b) — was true at a deeper level, since Socrates declared more than once that his daemon ( ), or familiar spirit, would always tell him what was to come. Demons, who became evil spirits only much later, were not only responsible for the future but were also the source of possession, and perhaps the main cause of Socrates’ melancholia was his connection, never fully clarified, with the other world. That was what drove Bellerophon mad, just as unapproachable destiny troubled Ajax, and homelessness between earthly and divine existence first landed Heracles in madness and later onto the bonfire he himself had built. The same irresolvability troubled Empedocles of Sicily, whose name likewise figures in Aristotle’s list of melancholics: “It is not possible to draw near (to god) even with the eyes, or to take hold of him with our hands, which in truth is the best highway of persuasion into the mind of man; for he has no human head fitted to a body, nor do two shoots branch out from the trunk, nor has he feet, nor swift legs, nor hairy parts, but he is sacred and ineffable mind alone, darting through the whole world with swift thoughts” ( Fragments , 344). It was this that clouded Bellerophon’s mind, and Empedocles can be considered to have been possessed in his own way: he may not have had doubts about the gods, but as mystics are wont to do, he made their existence almost inconceivable. He declared himself to be a god who, because of sins committed in an earlier life, was obliged to remain far from the world of the gods for a long time, wandering along the weary pathway of life. “But why do I lay weight on these things, as though I were doing some great thing, if I be superior to mortal, perishing men?” (113): he was an immortal god ( ) who was fully aware of every enigma of earthly life, and through that knowledge he was able to observe everything as if from outside. “For scant means of acquiring knowledge are scattered among the members of the body; and many are the evils that break in to blunt the edge of studious thought. And gazing on a little portion of life that is not life, swift to meet their fate, they rise and are borne away like smoke, persuaded only of that on which each one chances as he is driven this way and that, but the whole he vainly boasts he has found” (2). Human existence is eternal suffering (“O eternal mystery, what we are / And what we seek, we cannot find; and what / We find, that we are not”—this is Hölderlin in the opening scene of his play The Death of Empedocles ), and like the melancholic heroes, Empedocles wanders in the region that lies beyond human existence but falls short of the divine. His knowledge gave him the right to form an opinion about everything, but that same knowledge also cast him out of all contexts of earthly existence: for he who sees through everything will find his home — or more precisely, his homelessness — in the infinite. Whether the historical person named Empedocles really did know everything is an open question (his contemporaries certainly thought so, and Lucretius was later to write: Ut vix humana videatur stirpe creatus —“He scarcely seems to be from the mortal race” [ De rerum natura , bk. 1, 733]). More importantly, he himself was convinced of that. But that conviction was sufficient for his fate to be the same as that of the heroes: his superhuman, extraordinary achievement (he was the greatest physician of his day) and his inner state, that of an outcast (he was a philosopher and therefore mad, which is to say, ecstatic), were inseparable. “For me as well this life became a poem,” Hölderlin puts in his mouth (act 1, scene 4), with a touch of Romantic bias toward apparent roundedness (for what appears from the outside as a poem is from the inside an aggregate of torn prose). There is no roundedness; in a portrait of Empedocles in Orvieto Cathedral, Luca Signorelli depicts the philosopher leaning out a window while examining the stars, and in so doing his figure virtually demolishes the fixed rules of Renaissance perspective. That is Empedocles, the person felt to be a kindred spirit by Hölderlin and Novalis, and the person about whom Nietzsche wanted to write a tragedy (in measureless prose!). His melancholia was multiply compound: his belief in his own divinity made him obsessed in the Platonic sense; his search for the secrets of death carried him beyond the boundaries of life: Empedocles instructed Pausanias, his pupil, on how a person in a state of suspended animation should be restored to life, and according to a story reported by Heraclides of Pontus, he had saved many people from Persephone’s underworld empire. On reaching the border between being and nonbeing as an oracle, he had a glimpse into the secrets of life. Thus, his death was not an ordinary affair: for anyone able to make life and perishing relative, death is not death but a consummation. Not in a Christian sense, of course, but in accordance with the beliefs of antiquity: life and death become of secondary importance when compared with the exclusivity of being. Being lays a claim on us even beyond death: recognizing this is at once uplifting and depressing. Inevitably, two kinds of reports of Empedocles’ death have remained extant. According to one of them, early one morning after a sacrificial feast, the philosopher could not be found by his companions. A servant recounted to them that he had been awakened at midnight by the sound of Empedocles’ voice, and on rising from his bed, he had seen a light flickering like a flaming torch in the sky. Empedocles’ pupil Pausanias unraveled the mystery of the celestial light: the gods had summoned to their presence the philosopher, who left the earth behind him, not as a human but as a god. According to the second version, he had not been summoned by the gods: he brought his life to an end voluntarily by jumping into the crater of Etna in order thereby to prove his divinity. This salto mortale , however, has a deeper meaning: it was looked on by ancient Greeks as one of the forms of ecstasy, hence (bear in mind the connection between ecstasy, melancholia, and divine furor) a fine death ( ); and at the same time, death by fire brought about purification. A person committed to die in flames was purified ( ) of earthly dross. For that reason, fire was a source of a higher order of life. 15According to Greek religious beliefs, Heracles’ death by fire, which was an inevitable consequence of his melancholia, guaranteed him immortality, just as it was to do for Empedocles. 16That is how fire becomes a source of higher life: it is itself logos (Heraclitus). 17Empedocles’ self-immolation went ahead under the spell of “resurrection,” and it led him out of the world of earthly existence, which in Plato’s view was a prison, and in Empedocles’ view a cave. (As Schiller wrote about Heracles, who was translated to the other world after death by fire: “casting off his earthly frame” [“The Ideal and Life”]). Resurrection, however, does not necessarily follow the moment of death; just as a soothsayer, standing outside time, can obtain an overview of human time itself, resurrection is not simply an event that occurs in time: it proceeds outside time. It eclipses life just as it does death. Just as death does not imply resurrection for everybody, few partake of resurrection in their life as well. As the word itself suggests, resurrection is a physical as well as a spiritual phenomenon; its Greek equivalent ( ) also means “awakening,” that is, stepping out of the previous state. Since that stepping out ( ) is connected with the moment, it is therefore absolutely present tense (not just in the sense of the verbal tense). From all this it follows that resurrection is granted to those who recognize not only the laws of our existence in time but also those of our existence prevailing over time itself, and who see its possibilities and its limits. These are the soothsayers, the mad, the extraordinary people, and the philosophers — those whom we can describe in one word as melancholics.