Historical philosophical, theological and secular views have often deemed melancholy as an obscure deviation of the human spirit, seen as a state of corruption, sinfulness and folly. These reductionist perspectives have coined melancholy with alter justifications, often treating it as a disease or venereal influence over the body, the senses and the intellect, as something to be expunged and remediated. In Plato’s Republic or today’s postmodern societies, melancholic states of being are perceived as socially condemned and often alerting symptoms, when happiness and enjoyment stand as the primary goals and concerns of one’s life, and represent ideal forms of existence and expression. Excessive preoccupations with health and lifestyle are characteristics of our contemporary and essentially solar and hedonistic societies. Recent scholarly concerns and psychological/psychiatric therapies have reflectively oriented their focus towards the achievement of happiness by eliding the importance of melancholy.

Alina Feld’s book Melancholy and the Otherness of God: A Study of the Hermeneutics of Depression compels us into a much needed reflection and reinterpretation of the role of melancholy, by assessing its ontological roots and pathological effects. The book offers with an exhaustive treatment of the historical fundaments of melancholy and its several nuances, establishing important conceptual definitions and clarifications. The intense terminological scrutiny that accompanies the chapters helps dismantling a rather fused and clumsy misusage of the term, such as the common homology attributed to melancholy, depression, boredom and acedia. There’s a richly comparative and mutually intertwined inquiry between readings of melancholy in science and medicine and those in philosophical and theological treatises that allow for the historical dialogue between several interpretations and solutions to dark moods.

Throughout Feld’s research melancholy is cumulatively defined as a basic human condition, pertaining to the genesis of one’s being, within a sense of inwardness and self-analysis, rather than being an oversimplified malady. It represents an extreme semiotic response to the dimension of absence, depletion of self and scarcity, sources of extemporal human disquietedness and existential inscrutability. It is precisely from this obscure ground, immediate Hegelian nature or Platonic Chora that the subtleties of human life and its limits can be brought to sound and light, or be revealed, in Böhme’s terminology.

The ten chapters of the book follow the evolution of the concept of melancholy, from the segregation of black phlegm in Hippocrates and Plato to Altizer’s death of God and the depressive undercurrents of modernity. Melancholy is recurrently understood as a shadow or groundlessness, or in Feld’s terms, the otherness, as an essentially apathetical condition, a painful and inner mourning of the self that can draw one to the extreme of self-forgetfulness and carelessness, by indifferently opposing creation, life and spirituality. Be it denounced in the theological asceticism of Evagrius and Cassian as a proof of human fallibility or as the complete absence of a Godly and graceful state in Burton, Pascal and Descartes, melancholy appears as impenetrable as it is inevitable. And though its sufferance is held synonymous to the metaphysical principle of negation, and thus as the opposite stance of fulfillment and totality, it is also a necessary stage of being.

Somber temperaments can also be analogous to the dark night of the soul, as elemental states that through perduring effort result in gratifying and abundant stimulus and even genius. This is the moving beauty of melancholy that we learn from Aristotle, Ficino, and the German Idealist notions of the natural and moral sublime, be it through the moderation of saturnine virtues, or as the understanding of the dimensions of finitude and pain necessary to a growth in character and ideas. The acknowledgment of sadness, anxiety and boredom as fundamental attunements of being, and of melancholy in its full subjectivity, are the starting point towards a fundamental labor of self-comprehension and transcendence as the thoughts of Heidegger and Henry modernly suggest. As the author concludes with Jasper and Binswager, melancholy can be a creative condition that allows for the paving of otherwise unattainable insights and development of exponential inspiration and depth of experience in the world, an exercise that can also be alleviating and self-therapeutic.

The considerations of this study are not intended at exalting and cultivating melancholy in oneself but at valuing its inherency, existence and importance, as a remote and often intangible contact with the complexity of our human nature. Mental and pathological efforts guided through melancholy, or Biran’s “effort to be”, that imply the suppression of our inner obstacles, are the rewards of contemplative obscurity, conducing to freedom and clarity, for as Alina Feld so rightly states, the self knows its light only by knowing its darkness (195).

© 2012 Helena Barbagelata Simões

Helena Barbagelata Simões is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Affairs (Major) and History of Philosophy (Minor) at Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas/Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She works as freelance translator and writer, with published poetry and prose in several anthologies.