The world is not on speaking terms with the melancholic, which immerses the latter even more deeply in his melancholia. “A melancholic flees from society and only feels all right alone,” Diderot wrote in 1765—good-naturedly, it is true, but simplifying the problem (quoted in Schalk, “Diderots Artikel ‘Mélancolie’ in der Enzyklopädie,” 182). The melancholic does indeed flee, but he does so because he is persecuted. Being ignored, he becomes isolated and solitary (he can count on himself only—
, as the Greek has it, a private person); yet in following the command of the most elementary vital instinct, he tries to prove that he most certainly does exist, and his feelings and thoughts are not illusions but are real and solidly grounded. From the eighteenth century onward, the melancholic has been singled out by loneliness and a compulsion for self-justification. The sentimentality that the modern era associates with melancholia is not pure affectation, but a self-indulgence of the melancholic personality, an inward-looking self-justification derived from isolation. The word “sentimental” began to spread in England from the 1740s: Thomas Warton published in 1747 what is still his most famous poem, “The Pleasures of Melancholy,” following the success of Edward Young’s The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742–45), in which he observed links between loneliness, pleasure, and suffering. In France, the Jesuit Dictionnaire de Trévoux, which first appeared in 1734 (that is, well before Diderot’s article in L’Encyclopédie) coupled melancholia not just with sadness but also with pleasure (un certain triste plaisir) and called it a satisfying form of daydreaming (une rêverie agréable). The usual place of the verb songer had by then been taken over in the context of melancholia by rêver, with its more personal connotations, to the point that in the eighteenth century “daydreamer” and “melancholic” had virtually become synonyms.26 In spite of all its negative side effects, Diderot called melancholia a “sweet feeling” (sentiment doux) that had the merit of allowing one to enjoy oneself when in that state, and to be aware of oneself. Sweet, sentimental melancholia became a platitude, even a pose, in the eighteenth century27—nevertheless, sentiment and sentimentality, while becoming a fashionable norm to be observed, did not conceal from the inward gaze the by-no-means-painless gesture of self-justification. Of course, that in itself became a kind of trap, and things that were painful to contemplate inwardly appeared to the outside world as pleasant sentimentality. If one shuts one’s eyes to the attempts at self-justification, then all that remains is what one can relate to oneself: a feeling that in itself is harmless and puts one under no obligation. But if one genuinely enters the world of the melancholic, then one will discover something beyond feelings — the sort of thing about which the Hungarian poet Dániel Berzsenyi could write in 1820: “My soul died long ago, and its place was occupied by a new, unknown soul, which is dark and cold, like the sky, and tranquil as a grave” (Berzsenyi, Összes művei, 430).
Chapter 6. PREMATURE DEATH OF THE ROMANTICS
Compulsive self-justification and self-absorption are in a way also an expression of political impotence. As an anthropological “factor,” melancholia has always been sensitive to given social relations. The inadequacy of these relations — an ideal society is conceivable only in a utopia, that is, nonexistence — cannot be explained sociologically; it seems that the sociopolitical fact that man is incapable of establishing an ideal society points to a more basic phenomenon that, like melancholia, is an anthropological characteristic. That explains the dual sensitivity of melancholia: a sensitivity to politics as much as to the preconditions of the prevailing politics. It not only pays attention to sociologically demonstrable negatives but also offers a sociologically illimitable existential raison d’être. It relates to positive endeavors of human communities as death does to life: it is always menacingly present, and although one may forget about it, it is insurmountable. Sociopolitical arrangements always conceal within themselves the threat of disintegration, even in the absence of an outside enemy, that sooner or later they will start wilting like a plant. The circumstances and manifestations of this can be described politically and socially, but its cause, the why of it, can be approached only existentially, without the hope of receiving a satisfactory answer. An existential raison d’être is necessarily destructive: an insight into the fragility manifested in decay is unlikely to inspire hope in anyone. Nor is there any need for philosophical-historical perspectives: a frustrated encounter, a momentary irritation, or a recoiling at the beauty of a child is sufficient to expose how unstable the ground is on which one tries to organize one’s life as if it were eternal. Melancholia may even be regarded as a negative imprint of everyday life: everything that one suppresses there becomes articulated here, and what is mere possibility there is let loose as “negative” reality here. Melancholia views the world from the reverse perspective, and the more perceptible the lines of force of modern development, the more obvious is the rectitude of the melancholic way of looking at things. The melancholic openly accepts solitude, which the bourgeois world would like to gloss over by reference to the community, society, humanity, etc., even though it keeps reproducing the foundations for that solitude; the melancholic sees the world as senseless and evil, and although everyone senses that, no one admits it; he says out loud that the emperor has no clothes on. In modernity, this had all become clear by the time of the Romantic era — modern development had been sketched out sufficiently to permit everything to be turned into its opposite. Negative standpoints began to lose their negativity; indeed, it looked as if that was the only normal attitude that a self-respecting person could adopt, and it was the world’s judgments and opinions that were upside down. The compulsive self-justification connected with solitude, as well as the pleasure in the self that a person derived from it, was constructed on a tacit insight that for man, he himself is the ultimate reality. However enticing it may be to place one’s trust in the community, in others, one can never be free of oneself and can never dissolve definitively into anyone or anything else. The Middle Ages traced all souls back to one substance, giving it a theological explanation; melancholia had to be denounced precisely because the melancholic trusted exclusively in himself. In modern times — after numerous failed attempts had made it obvious that the self could not be traced back to a single substance but, notwithstanding its independence, was not omnipotent either — Kant raised the possibility that ultimate powerlessness, with its attendant loneliness and isolation, should be regarded as the normal human condition. By tracing everything back to the apperception of the self, and by being the first to declare that everyone constructs the world for himself, he posited individual autonomy as the most important criterion of human existence. Since one’s constitution could be based only on itself, it could not be traced back to anything; it was not explicable theologically, only aesthetically and ethically.1 What earlier had been seen as negativity (namely, that individuals regarded themselves as the ultimate basis), with Kant, whom one might therefore count as one of the great Romantics, became man’s positive possibility. Melancholia — which in the final analysis was metaphysical solitude, self-justification, and relish of the self — also won a positive note,2 and since it was ethically tinged, that was a sign of ethical self-consciousness. Ideal freedom made an appearance in melancholia, and a mournful withdrawal from the bustling world became a noble gesture. “Melancholics,” Kant writes,