Melancholy and the Otherness of God by Alina Feld

Author:Alina Feld [Feld, Alina N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780739166055
Publisher: Lexington Books

KANT: MELANCHOLIC ATTUNEMENT TO THE SUBLIMITY OF MORAL VOCATION

With Burke as a background for the Kantian discussion of the sublime and the melancholic, three different texts in which Kant reflects on the subject will be adduced: the precritical Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), the postcritical late collection of lectures on Anthropology (1798), which contains overt references to the melancholic and phlegmatic temperaments; and lastly the Critique of Judgment (1790), in which the problematic of the categories of the beautiful and the sublime are taken up.11 Neither the Observations nor the Anthropology contribute substantially to the analytic of the sublime as it appears in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (97–140, §23–29). Both instead belong to empirical anthropology and contain reflections on the four temperaments and their correlations with corresponding dispositions, aesthetic and moral feelings, epistemological and critical attitudes.12 In Observations, Kant considers the melancholic frame of mind to be most fitted to the sublime and the moral due to its specific mental attunement (Stimmung)—a notion that will be adopted and adapted by Heidegger in his Dasein analysis.

Kant notes that the finer feelings of the sublime and the beautiful are apt to conjoin more easily with certain of these temperaments than with the others. Kant excludes from the investigation the exceptional extremes, both the mel-ancholic’s characteristic high intellectual insights, such as the “thrill that was possible to a Kepler” (Observations 46), and the phlegmatic’s great deficiency of moral feeling, “with no ingredients of the sublime or beautiful” (Observations 62, 70). Hence, of the four temperaments, only three are considered, in the order of importance that Kant assigns them: the melancholic, the sanguine, and the choleric. The reason for the preeminence of the melancholic temperament is Kant’s high appreciation for the quality of the moral dispositions that, he believes, can be actualized by this temperament. Kant writes:

A profound feeling for the beauty and dignity of human nature and a firmness and determination of the mind to refer all one’s actions to this as to a universal ground is earnest, and does not at all join with a changeable gaiety nor with the inconstancy of a frivolous person. It even approaches melancholy, a gentle and noble feeling so far as it is grounded upon the awe that a hard pressed-soul feels when, full of some great purpose, he sees the danger he will have to overcome, and has before his eyes the difficult but great victory of self-conquest. Thus genuine virtue based on principles has something about it which seems to harmonize most with the melancholy frame of mind in the moderated understanding. (Observations 62–63)

The Kantian melancholic is a remarkable individual, to be added to Pseudo-Aristotle’s list, a worthy inhabitant of the Saturnine seventh sphere in Dante’s Paradise, a perfect child of Saturn in Ficino’s De Vita. His defining characteristic is the paradoxical high ground. This “high ground,” an oxymoron perfectly expressing the coincidentia oppositorum that characterizes melancholy, is responsible both for the elevation and depth of the principles it fosters.

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