Melancholy is the old name for a fundamental mood in which a person feels with the sorrow of the living: not an illness, but a way of perceiving the depth of the world. This mood has its philosophical home in Schelling. In the Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809) he writes of the veil of melancholy (Schleier der Schwermut) that is spread over the whole of nature, and calls it the deep, indestructible melancholy of all life (cf. Schelling, 1809).
The sentence claims something enormous. The heaviness does not sit in the head of the beholder, but in the things themselves. Whoever is melancholically attuned is not imagining anything; they perceive a ground note that nature actually holds. From this claim, the long history of the word and its strange rupture in the twentieth century open up.
#Black bile, Saturn and the gift of contemplation
When you speak of melancholy today, you are using a piece of ancient medicine. The humoral pathology of the Corpus Hippocraticum (c. 400 BCE) traced health and temperament back to the balance of four bodily fluids; black bile, in Greek melaina cholé, gave the melancholic their name. Even here, melancholy was first of all a temperament, a mixture, not a diagnosis in the modern sense.
The philosophical elevation followed early. The Problemata, a work attributed to Aristotle, asks in Book XXX why all extraordinary men in philosophy, statecraft and poetry have been melancholics. Schopenhauer took this passage at its word two thousand years later: in the Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit (1851) he cites it approvingly — Aristotle, he writes, had quite rightly observed that all exceptional and superior human beings are melancholic (cf. Schopenhauer, 1851).
This reading reached its greatest flowering in the Renaissance. Marsilio Ficino, himself born under Saturn, designed in De vita triplici (1489) a whole art of living for the saturnine temperament: the planet of slowness and depth governs the contemplative, the learned, the creative. Melancholy appears here as a gift that demands care, not as a flaw to be removed. Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514) gave this reading its lasting image: the winged figure among compass, scales and polyhedron, chin propped in hand — a mind pausing at the limit of what can be measured.
From the medieval acedia, the sloth of the heart that the monks regarded as a danger, this melancholy differs fundamentally: acedia turns away from the depth, melancholy turns toward it. What Romanticism later called Weltschmerz is a variety of the same fundamental mood: the suffering at the distance between what the world is and what it could be.
#The veil over nature: Böhme and Schelling
Two thinkers of the German tradition deepened melancholy from temperament into ontology. Jakob Böhme reports in the Aurora (1612) that he fell into a hard melancholy and sadness when he beheld the great depth of this world. Precisely this heaviness became his gate of knowledge: then, he writes, the spirit broke through (cf. Böhme, 1612). For Böhme the dark principle belongs to the ground of all things; without the darkness there would be no light to stand out against it.
Schelling thought this thought through to the end in the Freedom essay. Everything finite rests on a ground that it did not make itself and never fully penetrates: this, he writes, is the sadness that clings to all finite life (cf. Schelling, 1809). The heaviness over nature is therefore no error of mood in the beholder, but the audible ground note of the living itself; every being carries the trace of its dark origin with it. Yet Schelling’s sentence does not end in heaviness: joy must have sorrow, sorrow must be transfigured into joy (cf. Schelling, 1809). Melancholy does not want to be abolished; it wants to be transfigured.
In this line — the natural philosophy from Böhme through Schelling to Jochen Kirchhoff — the melancholic mood is a form of perception: it hears what the ear of good cheer overhears.
#What is the difference between melancholy and sadness?
Sadness has a cause. The sadness you feel at a grave knows its object, and it subsides when the loss has been mourned. Melancholy, by contrast, is a mood: it colours the whole without hanging on any single object. Schopenhauer describes in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819) the noble character with a certain tinge of quiet sadness — a sadness that stems not from personal misfortune but from the knowledge of the suffering that all life carries (cf. Schopenhauer, 1819).
Gwendolin Kirchhoff gives this distinction a relational turn: all feelings, she says, are the relations between two within a space. Behind a sadness that seemingly appears without an object stands a forgotten Thou: a counterpart that has slipped out of view while the feeling remained. Melancholy would then be no chemical accident, but a relationship whose counterpart has become invisible — the vastness itself, the whole, to which the longing is addressed. Whoever reads the melancholic mood this way asks a different question. No longer: how do you get rid of it? But: what does it know of?
#Is melancholy a depression?
No — the equation is younger than it seems. The psychiatry of the nineteenth century already carried melancholy as a clinical category; with Sigmund Freud’s essay Trauer und Melancholie (1917) this reading finally hardened, and the long history of the word as temperament and form of knowing receded into the background. Since then, depression has inherited the place the mood once held. With the place, the knowledge disappeared that heavy-heartedness could mean something.
The distinction remains necessary in both directions. Melancholy is not an illness; but where heavy-heartedness passes over into persistent listlessness and hopelessness, it belongs in professional hands.
#How to deal with melancholy?
Philosophical work sets in at a different point. It does not treat melancholy, it questions it: to which forgotten Thou is this sorrow addressed? What depth is announcing itself that has no place in everyday life? Whoever brings a melancholic fundamental mood usually also brings the questions others fend off: about the meaning of life, about death, about one’s own place in the whole. In the work, the heaviness then proves to be what Ficino saw in it: the disposition of those who are open to contemplation.
The first step in dealing with melancholy is therefore an omission. Whoever is melancholically attuned today reaches almost reflexively for the vocabulary of treatment: lift the mood, balance it out, get rid of it. But a mood that perceives something cannot be fixed like a malfunction — it can only be overheard. Melancholy does not want to be fought, it wants to be inhabited. Inhabiting does not mean settling into it like a room whose curtains never open again. It means granting it the rank Schelling gives it: that of an organ of perception for the ground note of the living. Whoever listens to the heaviness instead of drowning it out asks a different question of their own day — not what is missing so that good cheer returns, but what wants to show itself, for which the bright hour has no ear.
The tradition gives this attitude a precise word: care. Ficino designed for the saturnine temperament not a therapy but an art of living — times of contemplation, a measure, an order of the days that gives the depth room without handing it the whole house. That remains the practical core: the melancholic mood needs forms in which it can speak itself out — thinking, writing, the long conversation, music. A gift that finds no form dams up into mere heaviness; the same gift, cared for, becomes contemplation. Herein also lies the difference from brooding: brooding circles around one’s own insufficiency, cared-for melancholy turns toward the world whose sorrow it feels with.
And finally the step Böhme demonstrated: taking the heaviness as a gate. He fell into a hard melancholy — and precisely there the spirit broke through. What seemed to press him down became an organ of knowledge, because he did not look away from it but through it. Schelling’s sentence points in the same direction: joy must have sorrow, sorrow must be transfigured into joy. Transfiguration is no flip into good cheer and no consolation that paints over the sadness; it is taking the sadness seriously up to the point where it shows itself to spring from a love — the turning toward the living, which passes away. Whoever deals with their melancholy this way does not therapize it away. They let it become what it is according to the long tradition: the beginning of contemplation.
Melancholy thus belongs to the moods that know more than they say. It is the human being’s resonating-with the veil that, according to Schelling, lies over the whole of nature — and at the same time the beginning of its transfiguration. For whoever feels the sorrow of the living has already begun to take the living seriously.
#Sources
- Corpus Hippocraticum (c. 400 BCE). Collection of writings of Hippocratic medicine.
- Aristotle (attributed, c. 3rd century BCE). Problemata, Book XXX.
- Ficino, M. (1489). De vita triplici. Florence.
- Dürer, A. (1514). Melencolia I. Engraving.
- Böhme, J. (1612). Aurora oder Morgenröte im Aufgang.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1809). Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Landshut.
- Schopenhauer, A. (1819). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig: Brockhaus.
- Schopenhauer, A. (1851). Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit. In: Parerga und Paralipomena. Berlin.
- Freud, S. (1917). Trauer und Melancholie. In: Internationale Zeitschrift für Ärztliche Psychoanalyse, 4 (6).