) in the case of poetry and philosophy. By use of the participle 
, he refers to the inner exaltation and transfiguration with which the poet and the philosopher, in the last analysis, assist in revealing not so much future events as the truth lying concealed in the depths of the present. A prophet is present within what he speaks of and does not just experience it by maintaining a neutral relation to it, from the outside,13 which is why he is better placed than anyone to perceive the mysteries of existence, which for ordinary people is a mere given, lacking any sort of mystery.14 A prophet (
) is kin not just etymologically but also by predestination to a mad person (
), who, from another point of view, is a twin of the melancholic, and that kinship shows that all three are parts of a connection that has been forgotten in our present-day culture: the fortune-teller has become a charlatan, a mad person mentally ill, and the melancholic just moody.
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 (