I often think I am not ill but recognized something that others had not hit upon: I have developed in myself a miserable view of the world that others do not share and yet is perfectly logical; I don’t understand at all how one can think in any way differently. . Those thoughts and feelings go hand in hand with dread. . To me it is inconceivable to think in any different way after having thought it over. . I wish to kill myself so as to rid myself of these thoughts, but I have a great love of life. . The terrible thing is that I can control myself to the extent that others notice nothing; indeed, I can be cheerful and am able to laugh.
(V. E. Freiherr von Gebsattel, Prolegomena einer medizinischen Anthropologie, 7)
The melancholic is condemned to continuous annihilation: his eternity is the eternity of the
right now
.
16
The never-ending “now,” despite all its negativity, is eternity, or to be more precise, extratemporality. And if the melancholic suffers from himself, then in point of fact he suffers from the recognition that time, along with its infinite possibilities and infinite constraints, depends entirely on man.17 Existence in time makes man able to unfold his own possibilities, but being enclosed in time prevents him from uniting with God. Behind the closed horizons of practical life unfolds a world in which the melancholic is at home — if, indeed, one can call home a world that prevents a person from finding solace. The melancholic steps onto a path where we cannot follow, and therefore we see him, like all trailblazers, as possessing some unknown, mysterious knowledge. His knowledge, however, is not simply knowledge of this or that fact; if that were all, he would not be melancholic. His knowledge is directly linked with the original sin (the Tree of Knowledge) and is beyond preoccupation with practical matters. The three satanic promises of knowledge, as Walter Benjamin saw them, were the following: “What tempts is the illusion of freedom—in the exploration of what is forbidden; the illusion of independence—in the secession from the community of the pious; the illusion of infinity—in the empty abyss of evil” (German Tragic Drama, 230). The melancholic’s knowledge is not true knowledge — but it is questionable whether there is any truer knowledge than his. For although his knowledge points beyond the practical world, that is possible only because he was once preoccupied with the mundane world and became acquainted with it. Just as only the experience of order makes the melancholic sensitive to disorder, so it is that knowledge of the everyday, practical world makes it possible for that knowledge to transcend the world and enter a place where there is nothing to which it can be directed. Profoundly melancholic Thomas Mann frequently wrote in his diary that he was tired of living — not for personal reasons, but because every life moves on prescribed tracks and every existence is finite, adding that the sense of the term “world-weary” (Lebensmüde) is general rather than personal (Tagebücher 1933–34, 121). The knowledge possessed by the melancholic tempts him onto unknown, untraversable terrain — or at least that is how outsiders see it. Yet he is sure that he is proceeding on very familiar terrain indeed: the unknown unfolds here, in our world, and it is here, in our world, that the paths on which we are unable to follow the melancholic intersect one another. In his poem “The Veiled Image at Sais,” Schiller tells the story of a young man who thirsted for the knowledge of everything. On reaching Sais, his gaze fell on a giant veiled image behind which stood Truth, and no one had till then dared lift the veil. One night the young man drew the veil aside — but we never find out what he saw:
. . And ask ye what
Unto the gaze was there within revealed?
I know not. Pale and senseless, at the foot
Of the dread statue of Egyptian Isis,
The priests beheld him at the dawn of day;
But what he saw, or what did there befall,
His lips disclosed not. Ever from his heart
Was fled the sweet serenity of life,
And the deep anguish dug the early grave:
“Woe, woe to him”—such were his warning words,
Answering some curious and impetuous brain,
“Woe — for she never shall delight him more!
Woe, — woe to him who treads through guilt to Truth!”
(The Poems and Ballads of Schiller, 71)
The youth glimpsed Truth, and he forgot to smile, because when he glanced behind the veil a terrible eye fastened on his frightened gaze. It was undisguised chaos, which Jakob Böhme called “the eye of the bottomless Abyss.” The Truth that he chanced upon was infallible not-knowing: a manifestation of the anarchy of existence. The young man had become a victim of his own daring: if the quest for insight or knowledge oversteps the boundaries, it becomes boundless and is fulfilled in indeterminacy. It then turns out that truth does not mean the true character of a statement — with that, one merely testifies to a respect for boundaries. By staying within boundaries, one hides from another kind of truth, which is revealed when one transgresses the boundary: while living in the truth of correspondences, one forgets about the true nature of one’s life, about how life can be fitted to nothing, subordinated to nothing, and that on account of life’s uniqueness, any statements relating to it are also invalid and false. The sole truth of one’s life is that no definite statement can be made about it, that the more one yearns for certainty, the more obvious one’s elusiveness becomes. The paralyzing spectacle of chaos plunged the youth into anguish. Before arriving at Sais, he had supposed it was a matter of time and perseverance for him to find the truth. By pulling the veil aside, however, he realized that he would have to give up on his illusion of ultimate Truth. By transgressing the boundaries, he came to recognize the chaos engulfing him — which, until then, he had shied away from in fear and trembling, and which he had hoped to eliminate from his life by investing hope in an unknown, ultimate truth. This new “truth” no longer augmented knowledge: it opened one up to one’s own abysmal depths.18
With every step he takes, man tries to smuggle some goal into nothingness. The melancholic is skeptical of those goals, seeing aimlessness as life’s main motive force. Hence his bad conscience: after all, burdened with two thousand years of Christian culture, how else could he look on the collapse following aimlessness as anything but a sin? But he cannot be absolved of his sin: it does not have a definite location, but extends to everything, and like illness, it is not an external force. In sin, existence blossoms, as it were. “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man. But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then, when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (James 1:13–15). This is what prompts the melancholic to despair when looking at the human condition, and to consider existence hopeless. From the seventeenth century on, it was precisely in arguing with God or with the explanation of existence offered by Christian theology that numerous thinkers sank ever deeper into their own despair: it was only against the context of expediency and order that aimlessness and chaos appeared enticing (Browne, Donne, Pascal, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bataille). Kierkegaard saw very clearly that melancholia, which he called “the hysteria of spirit,” melts away as soon as the person “bows with genuine humility before the eternal Power” (Either/Or, trans. Swenson and Swenson, 193–94). He adds elsewhere: “The self is in sound health and free from despair only when, precisely by having been in despair, it is grounded transparently in God” (The Sickness unto Death, 28–29). Man, the unhappiest and most unfortunate animal (Nietzsche) is human precisely because he is unable to relate to God at every moment, and ultimately is incapable of rising above the limitations of his ego. That is why Kierkegaard says the following about despair: “The possibility of this sickness is man’s advantage over the beast, and this advantage distinguishes him far more essentially than the erect posture, for it implies the infinite erectness or loftiness of being spirit” (11). The capacity for despair distinguishes man from animals, whereas what separates him from God is that he is unable not to despair — one way or another, everyone despairs at some point. And one does not necessarily have to think of “ultimate” questions; shades of an ultimate confusion can be felt in the least vexation, the slightest bother: “It was through dead fashions that Lola perceived the passage of time,” Céline writes in connection with an insignificant prostitute. “The possibility that there would never again be races at Longchamp overwhelmed her. The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time” (Journey to the End of the Night, 56–57). Melancholic Kierkegaard tried to fight his melancholia, which is why he introduced a distinction between good and bad despondency: if the good variety settles on a person, he loses his illusions, but in return he regains himself; if the bad despondency overpowers him, he loses himself along with the illusions.19 Yet if the knowledge of nothingness relates to existence itself, and sin is an organic component of supposed innocence, then the melancholic is unable to find a way back from despair to the original unity but regards duality and discord as a natural basis of life. “All that comes to be,” Schelling writes in the unfinished fragment The Ages of the World, “can only do so in discontent; and as dread is the basic feeling of each living creature, so is everything that lives conceived and born only in violent conflict,” adding “dread is the basic material of every life and existence” (The Ages of the World, 211).20 The true melancholic never recovers from his condition, and if he notices that things have an unknown face as well, he will feel eternal nostalgia for the unknown landscape toward which that face is looking. From then on, sadness, that “enigmatic pleasure,” will not only catch hold of him every now and then,21 but will attach to him like a shadow. Sadness, the attraction to evil (ill humor), cannot be clarified with the aid of reason; it is inexplicable (on the basis of sociology, anthropology, theology, or the philosophy of history) because the enigma of evil, of nothingness, is precisely that it is elusive: if one were to force it into concepts, one would be doing violence to oneself. The melancholic is incapable of hanging on to anything; he feels that existence has cast him out, and he takes the view that his life is a fatal mistake,22 for which he condemns the whole of existence. The mysterious naïveté that separates him from everyone else is precisely what makes him incapable of distinguishing his self from existence. Whatever he touches, he is thrown back on himself; and if he looks into himself, he catches a glimpse of a miniature copy of the world. Endless deprivation makes his loneliness unbearable, but only he knows of what he had been deprived: for him, lack is a kind of fulfillment, just as in losing himself he arrives back at himself as an ever-more ephemeral imprint of his ego. As if we were looking through a telescope, bewildered, to see whether the outside world continued inside us, or as if we were looking back from outside at our ego, wielding the telescope in confusion. But let the telescope be reversed and aimed at the by-now barely discernible figure of the melancholic, letting our eye rest on him for a while — only then to reverse the perspective again and look out at the overpoweringly magnified world. Who is right? The melancholic or the world? It is no use swinging the telescope — like Nietzsche’s restless boatman, we will never be able to decide whether we should feel that infinity is a cage or, in fact, freedom.