On English Melancholy | Hacker News Reader

On English Melancholy

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

29 pointsbreathnow11 comments

I don't think that the notion of melancholia need be an old thing to be picked over with modern tweezers. I have no idea what the current DSM (1) has to say about it, if anything.

Medical history has proven to be rather ... complicated ... Doctors/physicians/faith healers/shamans/druids etc have all featured at some point.

Here we are talking about mental health, which has only recently been granted the status of actually existing and the study of it moving away from hand waving nonsense and real science being employed.

etc etc

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Man...

Surprised that the article mentions the German origins of melancholy, and includes the famous Dürer Melancolia, but, neglects to mention Walter Benjamin's Origins of German Tragic Drama,

a critique of modernism positing the that "melancholy" and disaffection are inevitable end-states, moral relativism and existential crisis finding their origin in the (historical) moment that language comes to be understood as referential, and arbitrary.

To put that in HN crowd terms: it's a look at what happened when thinkers came to understand language as a set of pointers, not values. Benjamin was concerned about what happened to meaning when people understood language as arbitrary glyphs, rather than some kind of metaphysical "synecdoche" which partook literally of the thing referenced, like the Catholic host literally (sic) is the Body of Christ, etc.

https://german.berkeley.edu/news-events/events/on-walter-ben...

When postmodernists describe language as referential and arbitrary, they are moving headlong toward nihilism when an "uh oh" borne of caution and self-awareness is in order. Language comes from the human need to communicate, which need none of us can erase; and to be aware of this is a step toward proper humility in the face of our contingency as beings. "Melancholy" and disaffection are likely outcomes if instead you cling too hard to egotism and insist on seeing yourself as a utopian reshaper of entire worlds.

As Terry Pratchett once wrote:

   “... that you are nothing more than a lucky species of ape that is trying to understand the complexities of creation via a language that evolved in order to tell one another where the ripe fruit was.”

and as Terry Pratchett might have written but probably didn't, he himself is an ape convinced that the complexities of creation are necessarily more than telling a friend where the ripe fruit is, without much evidence.

> moving headlong toward nihilism

It's generally only after having arrived at nihilism that they can begin to make progress, so that's a positive entry in my books.

But that is refutable. You're not a true nihilist as long as you take advantage of the accoutrements of civilization, even down to the technology that enables you to make that post. You can avoid taking advantage of such technology in the spirit of "starting over" (even Pol Pot tried that) -- or you can say the technology around you admits of some advantages, which means limiting the nihilism/radicalism enough to pay credit to something around you. (To borrow from the postmodernists: "Not that there's anything wrong with that.") But for a nihilist that would be an unlikely reversal: the ego having stomped everything under its foot, is now making room for something outside of itself.

I think we've both got a hold of different patches of the elephant?

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism#Positions , you seem to be partaking of "Political Nihilism" (or at least Material Cultural Nihilism?), whereas my usual order is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_nihilism with a side of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mereological_nihilism and "Cosmic Nihilism" as dessert (all prepared in the active style).

[As to technologies I habitually use, they serve roughly as I choose them to serve — sometimes more or less. (but always under my intention of contributing to, rather than providing meaning for, my life) The question is, which is to be master — that’s all]

> a critique of modernism positing the that "melancholy" and disaffection are inevitable end-states, moral relativism and existential crisis finding their origin in the (historical) moment that language comes to be understood as referential, and arbitrary.

Excellent, I no longer need to plan on therapy. It's merely my understanding of language. Phew.

It's not at all surprising since Benjamin's tract was notoriously impenetrable, even to his original examiners, which resulted in his habilitation being rejected. Not to mention that the Origins of the German Trauerspiel only received an english translation in the 70s (and also in the past few years, as your link shows). I would expect someone of uncommon erudition to have read and understood that book, so it's not surprising that the author of the article doesn't mention it. Teaching Benjamin to the HN crowd is like teaching algebraic topology to MFA students, I applaud your effort but I don't think it will have much effect.

Melancholy was quite fashionable in early 17th century England, and many songs of John Dowland were heavily melancholic. This wasn't mentioned in the article, but since it is an extract from a longer book, maybe it appears elsewhere in the book.

All true, yet, I had a whole seminar on it (in English) last century, so, not entirely impenetrable! Few in the class were bilingual but did try to keep the original text up and my instructor was a passionate student and gave us enough context (and a lot of parallel reading) that it did not seem any harder than other opaque "continental" texts I read around the same time, e.g. Bakhtin on dialogism, Habermas, etc.

Looking for a relevant reference definitely confirms your point, I was surprised to find it remains relatively obscure. A tragedy in its own right!

Should have mentioned he's the author of the vastly more widely known The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction which justly has had a recurring turn in the spotlight in recent decades...

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