have a sense for the sublime. Beauty itself, for which they also have a feeling, does not merely excite and lure them, but while it fills them with wonder, it moves them. . They care little about the opinions of others; they are not interested in what others hold to be good or true, resting purely on their own insight. . They are indifferent to changes of fashion, disdaining their glitter. . They will not tolerate any kind of vicious subjection, breathing in freedom with noble breast. For them chains of any kind are loathsome; the gilded chains that people wear at court just as much as the heavy iron shackles of galley slaves.
(Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, and Other Writings, 24–26)
Even those kinds of notions of melancholia, however, could not obscure the sense of insufficiency lying behind it. This sense of insufficiency might have been by then a positive, normal condition, but it still did not quench the dissatisfaction, the sense of lack, and the concomitant pain that a melancholic felt. It was precisely the striving for autonomy that exposed the world’s attempt to do away, at all costs, with such autonomy — and this was a matter not just of politics but of the most basic contradiction inseparable from human existence. Writing about concepts of pure reason, Kant showed that a sensory object and the conceptions formed about it never coincide, and that it is not the object that serves as basis of those conceptions, but rather a schema of the object: “The conception of a dog indicates a rule, according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in general, without being limited to any particular individual form which experience presents to me, or indeed to any possible image that I can represent to myself in concreto” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, bk. 2, pt. 1). The formation of concepts refers to an absurd situation: man is a concrete, sensory, individual being but at the same time, through the intellect, is also a subject of the realm of “generalities,” and it is not possible to construct a genuine passage or correspondence between the two spheres. The requirements of generality infringe on a person’s individuality, whereas the concrete, sensory individual cannot become of general validity, which in Kant’s opinion is an indispensable precondition of autonomy. The schematism that links the general and the unique, the intellectual and the sensory, as far as a melancholic is concerned, does not conceal but reveals the never-reconcilable antithesis between the two and bares the crevasse that reminds people of their mortality, at the bottom of which death can be glimpsed. A person is a person precisely through being a member of two worlds without being a citizen with full rights in either. Kant goes on to characterize this (inevitable) schematism as follows: “This schematism of our understanding in regard to phenomena and their mere form is an art, hidden in the depths of the human soul, whose true modes of action we shall only with difficulty discover and unveil” (ibid.).
Kant was unable to solve the ultimate riddle of the human soul. Autonomy, toward which a morally minded human should be striving, is not able to become omnipotence—and the inevitable schematism, which is a necessary concomitant of the human mind, is also a source of a melancholic’s despondency. On the one hand, everyone is a unique, irreplaceable, autonomous personality, but on the other hand, everyone is subject to the same destiny, a fate that pushes the personality toward a common death — do we need another reason for sorrow? In a treatise entitled Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of Melancholy (1780), Benjamin Fawcett wrote: “It is impossible for any one to ascertain his perpetual freedom from it; whether he be high or low, rich or poor, virtuous or vicious; no, not the most gay and cheerful. . As is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that sweareth an oath. This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all” (7). From the viewpoint of the modern conception of melancholia, the late eighteenth century brought a decisive change: a fateful drive for individuality and a growing uniformity, which were not just sociopolitical but also anthropological factors (for example, the fact that man dies and his individuality is irrevocably wiped out), confronted people who were sensitive to it with such an insoluble and distressing dilemma that they literally died of it. “I am an unspeakable person,” Heinrich von Kleist averred — an admission that directs attention to the most sensitive spot in the culture of the modern age. The development of individuality as it is now understood has meant freedom from metaphysical constraints, supposed liberation from powers “behind” man. The price of that freedom, however, has been “unspeakability”—after all, just as it is impossible to utter or imagine infinity without rendering it finite (people who speak with God are either gods themselves or about to die), so the personal freedom of the individual grows in direct proportion to the “invisible” representation of external constraints. The modern individual becomes increasingly free and infinite, yet he is bound more and more by obligations, by external constraints that make their appearance in the form of words designed to define his freedom. For the modern individual, complete freedom lies beyond words: in death, which no longer needs to be concerned with the antinomy of speakability and unspeakability. Kleist “realized” himself in death: he freed himself from the polarized contradiction of personal infinitude and social finitude, of indescribability and communicability.
It was no accident that it was in classical German philosophy, which, for all its antagonism, supported Romanticism most vigorously, that questions about individuality that had been posed in previous centuries were resuscitated. Faith in the magnificence of the evolving modern world perforce accentuated the faith in a harmonious relationship of the individual and the community (the singular and the general). Reviving a thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, Kant applied his own conceptual apparatus to sketch out the aforesaid question of autonomy, and he concluded that only a totally self-legislating will could be free. (Kleist’s heroes would later give full voice to Kant’s conviction; and if one takes those figures — together with Kleist himself — to be pathological, then one would also be obliged to discern pathological shades in a civilization that produced these kinds of excruciating conflicts.) Kant, however — although he never articulated this to himself — was led by his methodology to an antinomy and its unforeseeable attendant consequences. Proclaiming absolute freedom, and trusting in the boundlessness and unconditionality of the individual will, he hoped that a harmonious community of man could be established, but in the prosaic modern world, fraught with constraints, he was able to deliver only negative, indefinable, and unworkable proposals for the self-realization of the individual. When consistently thought through, the injunction of the categorical imperative and absolute autonomy leads to the conclusion that any earthly realization for an individual goes hand in hand with the acceptance of constraints, burdens, and self-mutilations. In proclaiming the freedom of the individual, Kant admittedly did try to resolve his aspirations for the individual in culture, that unspoken human community, but his methodology involved debunking the reality of the modern world and the inverted critique of all manner of this-worldly communities. As far as that goes, Kant was the most consistent critic of the modern bourgeois world; his epistemology, based as it was on als ob—on skepticism — contains a great deal more than that. The skepticism relates to the modern world, but the doubts about knowability and absolute certainty served, at the same time, as recognitions that life does not permit there to be definitive judgments about anything. With this postulation of the inconclusiveness of cognition, Kant raised the idea of man’s self-creation and eternal striving for perfection (to that extent, he prefigures Hegel’s philosophy and aims to lay the theoretical foundation of a fundamentally antimelancholic disposition);3 with his ethics, however, he questioned self-creation (despite having apparently reached the opposite conclusion on more than one occasion previously): the endlessness and unconditionality of individual freedom on the one hand, and associations (communities) brought into being by free individuals on the other, logically exclude each other (to that extent, he prepared the ground for Romanticism and recognized the legitimacy of the melancholic way of looking at the world).