I have to understand man, the subject of my observation, as an observing subject. Just as my brain renders me capable of seeing, observing, and describing, so does his brain render my fellow human being capable of similar achievements. Behavior and experience are always my behavior and my experience, or yours or his, and that is how they come into relationship with my brain, or yours or his. Brain physiology does not much concern itself with this basic relationship. It takes no notice of the possessive relation: without its giving account of it even to itself,
a
or
the
brain substitutes for my brain, yours, and his. Physiology has no choice. Reference to the possessive relation, however, cannot be brushed aside as a sentimental requirement. It is important that we realize and recognize that that substitution entails an unavoidable limitation of the research results. For by the elimination of the possessive relation, we distort phenomena, we restrict the scope of problems, we tacitly anticipate a theoretical decision. If one substitutes my brain, yours or his for
the
brain, then we do not view the brain at all as the organ of a living being but as the control mechanism of a moving body. The observer executes a physical reduction in the world accessible to him through scientific experience: in this physical system, the brain is postulated to be a bodily formation on which other bodies have an action, and which can act back on those. In the end, the observer is surprised to notice that processes in the brain are occasionally accompanied by conscious processes. . If it is justified to substitute my brain, or yours or his, for
the
brain, then the two brains ought in principle to be exchangeable, independent of their nature, structure, and life story.
(Straus, Psychologie der menschlichen Welt, 381–82)
There is a discernible skepticism about systems made up of closed, impersonal units of disease. The gradual narrowing of the concept of melancholia to depression in medical science could not prevent the survival of the notion of melancholy in its everyday sense, yet as a result of the rift, melancholia, both medically and as ordinarily understood, lost its earlier comprehensive, existential-functional signification. The scientific worldview could not permit notions to have the degree of flexibility that had characterized the description of melancholia up until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it had to be narrowed down in order to be able to fit in. It speaks volumes that although for millennia medicine avowed that every illness was an unparalleled, unique phenomenon, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it began to talk about general, impersonal sicknesses (in London, in the seventeenth century, diseases were being studied statistically), and in the eighteenth century the first big systems and classifications of diseases saw the light of day (Sauvages,
12 Cullen), from whence an unbroken path leads to the current WHO International Classification of Diseases, which is reviewed periodically. Such systems were always closed and yet were never shut down: every revision necessitated fresh categorizations. In the demand for a closed system, it is not hard to discern the objectified, alienated medical view of man, along with the conviction of rationalism in the modern age that man can be “described” within the frame of a system. Every classification of diseases as a method tacitly assumes that it is sufficient to highlight a few (often arbitrarily selected) symptoms, compare these with the symptoms of other psychological and physical conditions, set up reference systems and units of sickness, and interpret all of it as a system. Accordingly, it should be possible to describe, work out, and cure all diseases, for if the system is closed, then there must be a finite number of diseases (as among the ancient Persians, according to whom there existed 99,999 diseases). A system of diseases is fallible, however. It follows from the historicity of human beings and their continuous transcendence of themselves that diseases are also existential and transcendental manifestations: human beings develop their own diseases, unlike any other living being, from their own life situations, and they render those diseases not only historically determined (insofar as diseases are eliminated over time and hitherto-unknown ones spring up), but also existentially determined. Illness is a function of my unique, irreplaceable life history, and my own being (not just my will and consciousness, but my existential-functional mode of living) is responsible for what illnesses I have a share in or when I fall ill. The classification of diseases (that is, their instrumental interpretation) is not only incapable of defining them as a form of being, but can also lead to a dead end in regard to defining man. This is particularly noticeable in the case of classifying mental diseases, where the majority of present-day textbooks — indeed, the practice of psychiatry itself — try to satisfy standards set by Kraepelin’s nineteenth-century taxonomy. The German psychiatrist, who had the professed goal of accomplishing a Linnaean-type “perfect scheme” (according to Linnaeus, there were as many species as God created at the beginning of the world), held three points of view to be fruitfuclass="underline" categorization on an anatomo-pathological basis (which, as he commented in 1896, was not yet possible); classification according to origin (this, he admitted, was likewise only at the start); and finally, arrangement on the basis of clinical symptoms. In ideal cases, those three points of view would match seamlessly, which is to say that diseases stemming from similar causes would be found to have the same symptoms, and the same changes would be observed in the cadavers (Kraepelin, Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, 314).13 The use of the conditional mode is telling: Kraepelin fixed his eyes on an ideal future in which every case would be closed and shut; framing the statement in the future tense refers to a utopia that lurks at the bottom of all systematizations. However, since history comes to an end in a utopia, living people have no business in it: the fact that Kraepelin should regard the anatomo-pathological examination of cadavers as an appropriate method for defining mental diseases showed that living man was left out of the classification of diseases, or rather that what was taken into account regarding man was no longer human.14 The human factor is unclassifiable: man cannot produce a system whose basis is not an open-ended understanding of being: every basis is supposed to conceal the gap, which, as it opens man’s eyes to his own nullity, defenselessness, and unfathomability, manifests as bottomlessness. Self-knowledge too is an open-ended system; its infinity is not the objective infinity of science but that of man looking for his own horizons — and the infinity of the human horizon is a warning of its ungraspability. Melancholia, since it overtly gives voice to failure and hopelessness, is necessarily ousted from the system of mental diseases (or is constricted) — it is a suspicious phenomenon inhibiting the supposedly rational arrangements of life, and therefore ought to be disenfranchised. Melancholia smuggles chaos into man’s well-ordered life; and yet there is no man without chaos, says Nietzsche. Chaos cannot be locked within borders, since it permeates the whole of existence. It has no definite place and cannot be tied to a definite time: it is always lying in wait, in everything. There is no telling from where it will swoop down on its victim, because it is invisible: it grows in the victim himself. The eyes of melancholics are met by chasms, covering all existence, from which, as from so many yawning gullets, an endless and unappeasable deficiency whistles. Chaos is an absence of existence, the absence that is wedged between the beginning and end of life; it is chaos, in the form of passing and death, that makes sure that life’s uniqueness, to which melancholics owe their birth, will remain genuinely unique and unrepeatable.