With every step he takes, man tries to smuggle some goal into nothingness. The melancholic is skeptical of those goals, seeing aimlessness as life’s main motive force. Hence his bad conscience: after all, burdened with two thousand years of Christian culture, how else could he look on the collapse following aimlessness as anything but a sin? But he cannot be absolved of his sin: it does not have a definite location, but extends to everything, and like illness, it is not an external force. In sin, existence blossoms, as it were. “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man. But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then, when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (James 1:13–15). This is what prompts the melancholic to despair when looking at the human condition, and to consider existence hopeless. From the seventeenth century on, it was precisely in arguing with God or with the explanation of existence offered by Christian theology that numerous thinkers sank ever deeper into their own despair: it was only against the context of expediency and order that aimlessness and chaos appeared enticing (Browne, Donne, Pascal, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bataille). Kierkegaard saw very clearly that melancholia, which he called “the hysteria of spirit,” melts away as soon as the person “bows with genuine humility before the eternal Power” (Either/Or, trans. Swenson and Swenson, 193–94). He adds elsewhere: “The self is in sound health and free from despair only when, precisely by having been in despair, it is grounded transparently in God” (The Sickness unto Death, 28–29). Man, the unhappiest and most unfortunate animal (Nietzsche) is human precisely because he is unable to relate to God at every moment, and ultimately is incapable of rising above the limitations of his ego. That is why Kierkegaard says the following about despair: “The possibility of this sickness is man’s advantage over the beast, and this advantage distinguishes him far more essentially than the erect posture, for it implies the infinite erectness or loftiness of being spirit” (11). The capacity for despair distinguishes man from animals, whereas what separates him from God is that he is unable not to despair — one way or another, everyone despairs at some point. And one does not necessarily have to think of “ultimate” questions; shades of an ultimate confusion can be felt in the least vexation, the slightest bother: “It was through dead fashions that Lola perceived the passage of time,” Céline writes in connection with an insignificant prostitute. “The possibility that there would never again be races at Longchamp overwhelmed her. The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time” (Journey to the End of the Night, 56–57). Melancholic Kierkegaard tried to fight his melancholia, which is why he introduced a distinction between good and bad despondency: if the good variety settles on a person, he loses his illusions, but in return he regains himself; if the bad despondency overpowers him, he loses himself along with the illusions.19 Yet if the knowledge of nothingness relates to existence itself, and sin is an organic component of supposed innocence, then the melancholic is unable to find a way back from despair to the original unity but regards duality and discord as a natural basis of life. “All that comes to be,” Schelling writes in the unfinished fragment The Ages of the World, “can only do so in discontent; and as dread is the basic feeling of each living creature, so is everything that lives conceived and born only in violent conflict,” adding “dread is the basic material of every life and existence” (The Ages of the World, 211).20 The true melancholic never recovers from his condition, and if he notices that things have an unknown face as well, he will feel eternal nostalgia for the unknown landscape toward which that face is looking. From then on, sadness, that “enigmatic pleasure,” will not only catch hold of him every now and then,21 but will attach to him like a shadow. Sadness, the attraction to evil (ill humor), cannot be clarified with the aid of reason; it is inexplicable (on the basis of sociology, anthropology, theology, or the philosophy of history) because the enigma of evil, of nothingness, is precisely that it is elusive: if one were to force it into concepts, one would be doing violence to oneself. The melancholic is incapable of hanging on to anything; he feels that existence has cast him out, and he takes the view that his life is a fatal mistake,22 for which he condemns the whole of existence. The mysterious naïveté that separates him from everyone else is precisely what makes him incapable of distinguishing his self from existence. Whatever he touches, he is thrown back on himself; and if he looks into himself, he catches a glimpse of a miniature copy of the world. Endless deprivation makes his loneliness unbearable, but only he knows of what he had been deprived: for him, lack is a kind of fulfillment, just as in losing himself he arrives back at himself as an ever-more ephemeral imprint of his ego. As if we were looking through a telescope, bewildered, to see whether the outside world continued inside us, or as if we were looking back from outside at our ego, wielding the telescope in confusion. But let the telescope be reversed and aimed at the by-now barely discernible figure of the melancholic, letting our eye rest on him for a while — only then to reverse the perspective again and look out at the overpoweringly magnified world. Who is right? The melancholic or the world? It is no use swinging the telescope — like Nietzsche’s restless boatman, we will never be able to decide whether we should feel that infinity is a cage or, in fact, freedom.
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