23. The German word Faulheit (laziness, indolence) derives from Middle High German vulheit, which has the primary meaning of rottenness (Fäulnis). In laziness, the inexorable decay of existence manifests as being at the mercy of destruction; that was why Friedrich Schlegel could call it “the godlike art of idleness” (Lucinde and the Fragments, 63): decay and deterioration are states of existence as elemental as formation and unfolding.
24. In 1672 there appeared a work by Gideon Harvey entitled Morbus Anglicus, or a Theoretick and Practical Discourse of Consumptions, and Hypochondriak Melancholy, and in 1733 from the pen of a physician by the name of George Cheyne appeared The English Malady; or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distempers.
25. It speaks volumes that the first version of the title was “Das Bürgerlied” (“Song of the Citizen”).
26. Rêverie would become a key word for Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Julie, or the New Heloise and Reveries of the Solitary Walker.
27. It was promulgated by the novels of Pierre de Marivaux and Abbé Antoine Prévost, and by a statue titled Sweet Melancholy (1763) by Étienne Maurice Falconet.
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1. The title of one of Kant’s books, containing his characteristic anthropological analyses, is Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764).
2. Kant, however, did not dispute that melancholia had negative overtones of rapture and fanaticism.
3. Which explains why Kant sometimes wrote disapprovingly about melancholia.
4. One of the most dogged undertakings in his life was to study Swedenborg, whom he wished to refute at all costs and under all circumstances. But can passion really draw a line between attraction and denial, one wonders.
5. In writing about Kant, the French writer and philosopher Albert Caraco noted appositely that “Kant was consumed by being thought highly of, and like others of a similar background (that is, middle-class people) he needed to have moral fiber, simply moral fiber. . That might explain the bad temper of that ugly, virtuous and sickly man, who dreamed of subjugating the ruling classes by spontaneity that they favored much more than the exertion flaunted by the bourgeoisie (Caraco, Bréviaire du chaos, 134). In a work entitled Nachrichten an das Publikum in Absicht der Hypochondrie (Information for the public on the intent of hypochondria), which appeared in 1767, the Berlin physician and surgeon Johann Ulrich Bilguer listed the causes of spleen, to which all burghers of his day would have given an approving nod: early marriage (but also celibacy), prolonged sitting, luxury, bad upbringing, consumption of sweets, enjoyment of tobacco, mimicry of the upper classes, urban life, disdain of religion, freethinking, philosophical indifference, naturalism, and hypersexuality.
6. By then the term “ideology” had been minted: Destutt de Tracy devised the term for the title of his work Éléments d’idéologie, the four volumes of which were published between 1801 and 1815.
7. Genius is an illness, avowed the likes of Cesare Lombroso, Moreau de Tours, Alphonse de Lamartine, and, in the twentieth century, Lionel Trilling; genius is an embodiment of health, stated Charles Lamb in the essay “Sanity of True Genius.”
8. These included Carl Gustav Carus, a significant person in the history of German medicine, who concerned himself intensively with psychiatry and was not negligible as a painter either.
9. As it would also be considered nowadays, and called neurasthenia.
10. Novalis’s or Schleiermacher’s subjective religiosity did little to change this: that was “merely” a special variety of nihilism.
11. A book by the German physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland entitled Macrobiotik, oder die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlängern (Macrobiotics, or The Art of Prolonging Human Life, 1796) greatly influenced Immanuel Kant, according to whom advanced years could be considered a great moral credit.
12. The failure of Romanticism’s attempts at mythopoeia (Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel) was likewise proof of that.
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1. The dictate regarding the celibacy of the priesthood was a result not so much of theological as of political deliberation: in the eleventh century, Pope Gregory VII sought by this means to guard against the development of a feudal priestly caste for which (because of the inheritance of wealth and rank) the election of the pope would lose its validity.
2. De amore (1484) by Marsilio Ficino is a notable example of the reevaluation of love intertwined with melancholia.
~ ~ ~1. Philippe Pinel, the most celebrated neurologist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, called melancholia a “false diagnosis” and regarded the ideas of melancholics as idées fixes.
2. According to Wilhelm Griesinger, a German neurologist and psychiatrist, all mental illnesses were manifestations of one and the same madness, the stages of which were melancholia, mania, confusion, and dementia. In 1764, Karl von Linné classified melancholia, along with delirium, dementia, and mania, as one of the “ideal mental illnesses.”
3. In his work Darkness Visible (1990), the American writer William Styron was loath to have his own depression confined within the conceptual framework of an illness called “depression”:
When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word “depression.”
Depression, as most people know, used to be termed “melancholia,” a word which crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to be more aware of its pathological nuances.
“Melancholia” would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blackest forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated — the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer — had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering “depression” as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.
(36–37)
4. The Daseinsanalysis school, however, was also obliged to make use of the same language as other schools of thought, and if those who endure their condition as a burden are looked at from a medical standpoint, then despite the use of the word “melancholia,” it is a matter of depression. That is just as much a trap of language as that of the present setup of the world: in talking about melancholia, it is not possible to be unambiguous. In this case, the ambiguity is not proof of the richness of the topic, but of its not having been clarified. A good example of this is the attempt by Julia Kristeva, who wanted to deepen the meaning of melancholia by introducing the category “melancolio-dépressif,” though in reality she only concealed the obscurity of its relationship to depression.