totality is condensed into Ananke; and it is then that he is overwhelmed by the desire to escape from her authority, to step outside existence, but it is also then that the realization dawns on him that he would flee in vain: Ananke is nestling there too. By being at the mercy of existence, he is also at the mercy of himself.
Such recognition drove melancholics to despair, but it also compelled them to accomplish breathtaking feats. Bellerophon wished to rise above everything, and he had to pay a price for his hubris.35 “Strive not to become Zeus. . / Mortals must be content with mortality,” Pindar remarks (Isthmia, 5). Bellerophon wanted to step outside life’s circles of moderation, presumably for many of the same reasons that Antiphon the sophist held life to be deplorable: “The whole of life is wonderfully open to complaint, my friend; it has nothing remarkable (
), great or noble, but all is feeble, brief-lasting, and mingled with sorrows” (Freeman, Ancilla, 150, frag. 51). Bellerophon wanted to believe in the nonexistence of the gods, and since they had flung him back to earth, his faith lived on as a sense of loss. What he sensed was not the absence of a definite existing entity; instead, earthly existence itself had become an absence. There is no way of knowing the absence of what, specifically; the all-embracing, enclosed world is capable of successfully concealing any absence. For Bellerophon, however, this absence became an exclusive attitude to life, though he was not the least comforted by this; indeed, if anything, it made him still more unfortunate. It was as if he were falling interminably into a bottomless chasm. The explanation for his sense of absence, as with other melancholics’, we, the children of a no less depressing age, can only guess at: the finitude of their world depressed them and rendered them incapable of action. (The Spartan Lysander became melancholic because he had seized for himself every power that was attainable, from which point onward he was at a loss what to do.) Antiphon had good reason to feel that life lacked overabundance (), and melancholic Empedocles saw fit to write: “In the All there is nothing empty, and nothing too full (
)” (Fragments, 13). Melancholics are prominent (
) precisely because they are too full of life; because of them, existence overflows itself. That explains their unappeasable sense of absence: since they have left the world of moderation, overflowing is inconceivable without being emptied. The universe is damaged in their person; hence, melancholics’ sense of being among the elect, but also their self-hatred to the point of self-annihilation. That makes them strong and outstanding, but also exceedingly frail. Their strength is infinite, because they have gained knowledge of the end, but they are unhappy, since having experienced the ephemeral nature of humans, they have lost their trust in existence. Their strength and frailty, their unhappiness and their heroism, cannot be detached from each other. This leads us back once again to the starting point of our argument, to the Aristotelian question “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic?”
Chapter 2. IN THE PRISON OF THE HUMORS
The Aristotelian hypothesis concerning melancholia was ominous in spite of its attempt to hold the extremes in check with the moderating force of the middle. The example of melancholics shows that they turn away from the world, and all the fixed achievements of civilization become questionable for them, whereas their indisputable capacities for learning and astuteness make them solitary and withdrawn. Not surprisingly, melancholia evoked in part envy and in part contempt from ordinary people, and the Aristotelian hypothesis itself ended up in the parentheses of that dual judgment. The sign of that contempt was a scoffing that dismissed melancholia, whereas that of envy was a striving to “tame” melancholia, to present it as a condition typical of ordinary people as well. In the age of Hellenism, some (Cicero, for instance) were either astonished by the assertion that melancholics were extraordinary individuals or they mocked it. The Stoics, for example, held melancholia to be a humdrum disease that deprived its victims of their senses. In his biography of Lysander, Plutarch used the word “melancholia” in the sense of “crazy,” while Empedocles was widely held to be half-witted.1 Seneca characteristically misinterprets Aristotle and in so doing anticipates the spirit of the Middle Ages (he credits Aristotle with the thought Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit—“There has been no great genius without some touch of madness,” translating “melancholy” as “dementia”). The late Roman age was in agreement with the early Christians in denying that melancholics had prophetic abilities, seeing divination as the ravings of people sick with fever. Such was the opinion of a self-confident age that placed too much trust in reason: the thirst for knowledge can be satisfied within the bonds of existence. Querying the conditions of perception was therefore an unhealthy, lamentably uncalled-for endeavor. But there was no denying the fact that intellectual abilities went hand in hand with melancholia. Those abilities, therefore, in line with the democratization always associated with practical notions of knowledge, had to be made attainable by everyone. Oddly enough, attempts at curing melancholia were in the service of this way of looking at things, for if melancholia were curable, then it could be drawn into the orbit of empirical science, so its symptoms (for example, extraordinary intellectual abilities) would thereby lose their extraordinariness, and consequently all could acquire them and could be prevailed upon to come under the spell of common sense. A typical example was Aristotle’s comparing the substance of black bile to wine; Galen in the second century BCE, on the other hand, wrote that a heavy red wine could cause melancholia — and of course, drinking red wine requires no special skills. The physical signs of melancholia spring to the foreground, and they seem to lose the comprehensive cosmic-metaphysical grounding that had characterized the Hippocratic and Aristotelian notions of this condition. In the fourth century BCE, Diocles of Carystus, seeing a close connection between liver and bile, attributed melancholia to the swelling of the liver, and by the beginning of the Christian era, liver complaints were thought to be always connected with it. In Galen’s view, however, melancholia stemmed from a disorder of the hypochondrium, the upper abdomen,2 so it is easy to understand that he associated it with diseases of the gastric tract. (Kierkegaard was later to protest against this and to reject the suggestion that everyone who has a digestive disorder is suffering from melancholia.) The disorder of the hypochondrium affects the liver on the right-hand side as well as the spleen on the left,3 and Galen linked it not just with digestive ailments but also with mental disorders. Those mental complaints were later cut free from digestive ailments, but physicians continued to label mental disturbances with unknown causes as hypochondria, which is why melancholy came to be imputed to hypochondria, or imagined bodily ailments.
The spread and propagation of the explanation that melancholia has a purely physical basis is inseparable from the notion that strove to represent its “mental” symptoms as “baseless” or “unwarranted.” If a melancholic judged the world differently from a nonmelancholic, then there was not a question of some novel interpretation of existence; his thoughts were to be disregarded as mere side effects of some bodily change. The dual doctrine4 of a “pure mental problem” and “unalloyed physical change” sundered the original, indivisible unity of body and mind that had characterized the classical Greek interpretation of melancholia. Hellenism’s notion of melancholia presumed from the outset a duality of mind and praxis (body and soul) — hence, an expressly psychological or somatic explanation for melancholia (which, of course, is not to say that the two were diametrically opposed, as they have become in recent times). Duality, it seems, is the normal state of existence, and even the most comprehensive way of looking at things needs to behold its subject in that perspective. It is understandable that public opinion tried to make melancholia accessible, mundane. The most characteristic manifestation of that process was humorism as it evolved from the theory of humors, which, just by grouping people, took the edge off melancholia, for something that is classifiable in a group cannot be used to force that group apart. Humorism hypothesized closedness, which excludes the possibility of a person stepping outside his own bounds, precludes his self-transcendence, and shackles him from the outset. It is generally believed that the theory of humors can be tied to Hippocrates (before him, Alcmaeon of Croton, in the fifth century BCE, had sought the source of diseases in the body’s humors), but in truth it was only a good deal later, in the Middle Ages, that it was articulated in its definitive form. Of course, the basis for the four temperaments — choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic — stretched back into antiquity and stemmed from the cosmic outlook characteristic of that era. The teaching about the four humors, though, was empirical in origin (Alcmaeon, Hippocrates), though not as yet unequivocally connected with the temperaments. Each of the humors had its own season, which meant that anyone suffering from an overabundance of black bile would have no complaint on entering autumn, the atrabilious season, though they might take ill in the other three seasons. Much the same applied to those suffering from congestion (they would be healthy in spring). The season of yellow bile was summer, whereas that of phlegm was winter. One thing implicit in the theory is that a humor can signify disease as well as temperament — but never a normal state of existence: anyone who is healthy throughout the whole year is not suffering from an overabundance of any humor; therefore, he is not sick and has no temperament. But can one really be human without having any temperament? Deep at the bottom of humorism there is also another way of looking at things, related to the number four. The conferring of cosmic distinction on four, a sacred number of the Pythagoreans, goes back to Empedocles. He was the first to name the four elements of the world (earth, air, fire, water) and to make the number four a basic principle of the cosmos. This number determined everything, including humankind, both its body and its soul. Empedocles was also the first to write about the four kinds of mental disposition, which in his view were the product of a mixing of the four elements (not humors). There were two kinds of school of medicine: on the one hand, an empirical school based on humorism (Hippocrates), starting from the physical reality of the body and organism and arriving, via the concept of