Cheerfulness cannot be excessive, but is always good; melancholy, on the other hand, is always evil.
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (New York, 1996), IVP42.
Moraliste of the “misery of man,” Blaise Pascal (1623–62) seems both an obvious and an unlikely figure to include in the Western history of melancholy. For the early modern part of this history, the name that likely first comes to mind is Albrecht Dürer, and the work his Melencolia I (1514). Dürer's engraving condenses entire traditions of medical, theological, astrological, and philosophical discourses on melancholy, which reached an apogee in the Renaissance.Footnote 1 In this time, which self-styled melancholic Marsilio Ficino set under the sign of Saturn,Footnote 2 lovesick delusions were often lauded and Aristotle was commonly cited on the affinity between genius and “diseases arising from black bile.”Footnote 3 Intellection itself could be considered an atrabilious act on the thin line dividing reason from madness.Footnote 4 In short, Melencolia I “would be a good emblem for the whole sixteenth century.”Footnote 5
Unlike Dürer—or the other epitomist of early modern melancholy, Robert Burton—Pascal never used the term mélancolie in the hundreds of fragments known as the Pensées (1670). Read this text against the history of medical conceptions of melancholy and its treatments, however, and something incompatible with the term's absence emerges: the Pensées begin to seem as emblematic of melancholy as Dürer's engraving or Burton's Anatomy (1621). In signature concepts from the Pensées, I shall argue, medical discourse on melancholy and its treatments is latently present. I frame this presence in terms of Pascal's antagonism to certain seventeenth-century social norms, the Augustinian anthropology he uses to describe the human condition, and shifts in early modern medicine. Mélancolie is not in the Pensées, but melancholy profoundly shaped subjectivity as analyzed by Pascal.
If melancholy in the Pensées has gone unnoticed by scholars, this might not only be due to the term's absence, but to a notion of Pascal's time as one from which melancholy has been erased. Michel Foucault's History of Madness, which describes how madness lost its cosmic aura in seventeenth-century France, helped establish this notion. With madness demoted to a form of “Unreason” or “social uselessness,” the administration made short shrift of the insane, exiling them to internment. In philosophy, Reason itself was delimited by this exclusion, which in politics expressed the rise of an absolutist “monarchic order.”Footnote 6
Marc Fumaroli, one of the most influential historians of seventeenth-century French culture and letters, has studied cultural changes corresponding to the institutional phenomena Foucault studied.Footnote 7 One condition for the emergence, across the seventeenth century, of the culture and values that some scholars call classicisme français was what Fumaroli terms a “veritable war on negative passions.”Footnote 8 The nascent cultural sphere was formed in part through the exclusion of a melancholic “Other.”Footnote 9 With “the melancholic temperament's devalorization . . . over the seventeenth [century],” the “fascinating monster” was tamed and sacrificed to happier affects.Footnote 10 During the second half of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries—a time of religious schisms and civil wars in France—the terrible excesses and grandeur of black bile could still captivate and offer a mode for describing the crises of an ailing political body.Footnote 11 But with national order urgently desired and eventually reestablished, negative affects were critiqued, even considered politically suspect, while there emerged a “classical will to eutrapelia” (the healthy pleasantness of the soul).Footnote 12
To be sure, terms like classicisme or âge classique—and the values at once aesthetic, political, and moral they imply (reason, order, measure, clarity, etc.)—have been intensely scrutinized in recent decades.Footnote 13 The idea that, over the seventeenth century, comportment and discourse were increasingly subject to regularizing, rationalist, and sociable political and social norms, however, seems less controversial.Footnote 14 In step with absolute monarchy's development, there flourished ideals of civilité and honnêteté, discussed below. More than in the imperative to “love reason” from Nicolas Boileau's Art poétique (1674), then, the cultural ideology resounded in académicien Paul Pellisson's Discours (1656), which, as Alain Viala argues, defined the great writer as upholding the value of urbanité: that is, as striving to appeal across the social spectrum.Footnote 15 Melancholy spoke boldly before; she was silenced by a more civil seventeenth-century society.
A passage from Walter Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama is pertinent here. Benjamin saw the image or “paradigm” of melancholy in one of the Pensées, the “king without diversion [divertissement]” (137/169),Footnote 16 in which “Pascal gives voice to the feeling of his age.”Footnote 17 Though Benjamin's reading problematically assimilates Pascal into the Lutheran context of his book, some scholars have posited an affinity between Pascal's anti-Jesuit Augustinianism and Luther's.Footnote 18 Pascal wrote for a mostly Catholic France, whose immunization against melancholy partly reflected theological conflicts. Serving the Counter-Reformation, in their pastoral work and numerous collèges the Jesuits combated the negative affects once associated with the medieval sin of acedia, often compared to melancholy.Footnote 19 In Pascal's anti-Jesuit polemics, we will see, the issue of negative affects was a crucial front on which he led his attack.
But Benjamin gave no justification for seeing melancholy in Pascal. His insight presumes what requires demonstration: that fragment 137/169, for example, is an emblematic depiction of melancholy, which expresses a “feeling of [Pascal's] age.” Since mélancolie does not figure in the Pensées,Footnote 20 to discern melancholy there, more must be said on its history and on France's reaction to “negative passions.” Grasping this reaction will help delineate the latent form that melancholy assumes in the Pensées.
HONNÊTETÉ
Over Pascal's lifetime (1623–62), France underwent profound reorganizations of power and culture that influenced the valorization or repudiation of certain modes of social comportment. This can be studied in the development of civil society and its norms, in the consolidation of the nascent absolutist or monarchical state,Footnote 21 and in theological debates on the individual's autonomy in the economy of salvation and requisite attitude towards “worldly” life.Footnote 22 These axes—the culture of civility or honnêteté, absolutism's development from Richelieu through Louis XIV, and the conflicts between Jesuits and Jansenists—are inextricably tied to one another, and to the Pensées. Pascal was implicated in them all and an outlier to each. They form the context in which the political and philosophical force of Pascal's focus on melancholic affects becomes visible.
Arising in Parisian salons around 1630 before establishing itself at court, from which it radiated through society at large, the model of honnêteté inherited courtly ideals of sixteenth-century Italy and became a criterion of social existence.Footnote 23 Among the aspects outlined in the numerous seventeenth-century treatises and manuals on the topic, honnêteté demanded infinite adaptability to social company and context; a mindset set on mutual pleasure, amusement, and the avoidance of negativity; and a discerning dilettantism insuring nonchalant brilliance in conversation—conversation being the essential activity for the interaction and self-cultivation of honnêtes gens.Footnote 24 To be pleasing—to have or display agrément—was the “master word” of this “worldly sociability.”Footnote 25
Pascal was no stranger to this culture. An ambitious mathematician and scientist, he participated in learned Parisian conversation circles.Footnote 26 During his so-called “worldly period” in the late 1640s and early 1650s, Pascal rubbed shoulders with two paragons of high society in the company of the Duc de Roannez: Damien Mitton and the Chevalier de Méré, the latter being the incarnation and theorist of honnêteté in Pascal's time.Footnote 27 But after a mystical conversion experience of November 1654, Pascal proved unforgiving towards the society in which he had found success so easy.Footnote 28 Honnêteté became a target: Pascal drew from his acquaintance with honnête culture and its theorists precisely the “value system to argue against.”Footnote 29 The emphasis on irrationality and despondency in the Pensées would fundamentally conflict with the norms voiced by de Méré or Mitton, whereby “the honnête homme never says nor does anything that is not pleasant, just, reasonable, and that does not strive to make everyone happy.”Footnote 30
The sine qua non for honnêteté was a capacity to dominate emotions, such that pleasant “moderation” or “measure” in behavior and mien were always maintained.Footnote 31 While honnête society emphasized visible exchanges of pleasure, it enjoined the rational control and repression of idiosyncratic inclinations and negative emotions.Footnote 32 This was a crucial moment in the development of a behavioral “type,” which scholars term l'homme sans passions: between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this ideal emerged through growing expectations for the constantly regulated expression and control of inner life, entailing the injunction to hide or silence what is displeasing and unfit for social view.Footnote 33
The honnête homme had to always “regulate” his behavior, eschewing any possible “disorder,” Mitton wrote.Footnote 34 This disciplinary language eerily evokes the political circumstances underlying the development of normative seventeenth-century French civil and court society. Amid broad reforms under Louis XIII, Richelieu set about bringing the French nobility, who largely controlled military power, in line with the interests of a single monarch and raison d’état.Footnote 35 The process was largely accomplished by the end of the Fronde (1648–53): in exchange for economic and social prestige, the nobles ceded, inter alia, certain codes of comportment and privileges enjoyed from feudal times.Footnote 36
Part of Richelieu's power play entailed the imposition or regulation of norms defining the proper conduct of subjects towards their state and king.Footnote 37 Over time, with the court increasingly the center of civility, honnêteté, and sociability in general, the monarchy's power to administer its subjects from within expanded;Footnote 38 the disempowered nobles willingly internalized social ideals that implicitly served the state's interests.Footnote 39 The social and courtly values of refined behavior inherited from Italy provided cultural compensation for their loss of political identity and power.Footnote 40 The result was a “shift from a valor-centered to a pleasure-centered society”: once defined by a relative, bellicose independence from the Crown, the nobles became court nobility.Footnote 41 A potentially disorderly class in tension with the royalty became, as it were, a group of self-controlled dancers, holding themselves and the others in step as they all turned around the king—a centralized hierarchy given symbolic form in Louis XIV's court ballets.Footnote 42 The ideals of honnêteté, and normative regulation of sociability in general, ran parallel to the consolidation of the monarchy's power over the nobility and the state.
But there is a theological component to this story of increasing homogenization, order, and repression of unruly negative passions. Following the Council of Trent and the Wars of Religion, the desire grew for emboldened devotion and a renewed Gallican Church.Footnote 43 Among the proponents was Cardinal de Bérulle, father of the Augustinian-leaning French School of Spirituality.Footnote 44 Bérulle animated the Catholic traditionalist dévot movement that clashed with Richelieu and included the main early figure of Jansenism, Saint-Cyran.Footnote 45 In tension with the Augustinianism that would lead, with Jansenius and his followers, to theological debates that famously implicated Pascal, between 1610 and 1650 there was a twofold increase in Jesuit collèges, which provided schooling to young bourgeois and nobles.Footnote 46 With their less somber outlook on human nature and more entertaining educational, pastoral, and missionary techniques, the Jesuits enjoyed great success with the elite.Footnote 47
Jesuit ascendancy derived in part from their palatable position on freedom and human agency in salvation, and their practice of casuistry, which, for Pascal and the Jansenists, overindulged human nature's concupiscence and moral shortcomings.Footnote 48 The Jesuits promoted a religious practice permissive enough for the social valorization of pleasure and the secular politics inaugurated by Richelieu in the Thirty Years War.Footnote 49 But the Jesuits were not only de jure in support of the civil norms of social life; they were active in their elaboration, “placing themselves deliberately in the domain of civil society and inculcating into it ‘civility’ and honnêteté.”Footnote 50
In casuistry and pastoral work, the Jesuits cultivated great flexibility in judging individual cases, a theological counterpart to the honnête homme’s infinite social plasticity. For Pascal, Jesuit agreeability was a religious abomination and a political ploy to gain power over every conscience.Footnote 51 With Jansenist encouragement, he wrote the Provincial Letters (1656–7), attacking Jesuit laxism on all fronts. Despite the abundant literature on the Letters,Footnote 52 the issue of melancholy, which appears at one point, has been neglected.
In the ninth letter, the fictional Jesuit priest reads from Easy Devotion (1652) and Moral Paintings (1640) by Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne, books likely for an honnête readership.Footnote 53 The priest cites the former in order to counter the notion that Montalte (Pascal's mouthpiece) has of the austerity of devout life: while some dévots are indeed “pale and melancholic in complexion, [and] adore silence and solitude . . . one finds many others who are of a happier complexion and have an abundance of the sweet and warm humor and of the benign and purified blood that produces joy.”Footnote 54 Le Moyne thus decouples devotion from affective disposition (melancholy or joy), reducing the latter to idiosyncratic bodily temperament (melancholic or sanguine). But his treatment is biased. Though he condemns “melancholy” as idiosyncratic and ordains that “true devotion cannot be melancholic,” joy gets reattached to devotion, becoming its necessary effect.Footnote 55 Melancholy is heretic; joy, dogmatic.Footnote 56
When people think of devout virtue, the priest reads from Le Moyne, they imagine a horrible creature that “loves solitude alone” and is “the enemy of diversions [divertissements] and games, which are the prime of joy and the spice of life.” Not to devotion, such austerity belongs to “the character of a savage, a ferocious man,” the priest says.Footnote 57 Hence, he continues, Le Moyne placed such characteristics not in some saint, but among “the ridiculous and brutish mores of a melancholic madman, in his description . . . from Moral Paintings.”Footnote 58 The priest reads the passage to Montalte, who quips ironically, “If that is not the image of someone utterly detached from precisely the sentiments the Gospel demands we renounce, I confess to not understand it at all.”Footnote 59
Another Jesuit work critiqued in the Provincial Letters, Étienne Binet's Consolation and Jubilance for the Sick and Afflicted (1616), attacked melancholy and, like Le Moyne, exiled it from devotion.Footnote 60 Binet exhorted his reader to not lose self-control or indulge in idle gloom, to show a pleasant mien when inwardly tormented. One must emulate the honnête homme who mocks what causes sadness, and melancholics should have mirrors to see their ugly faces. Alongside these bans on melancholy in religion and society, Binet lauds the politics of a (mythical) kingdom where a decree held that “never shall anyone show himself to be melancholic, nor speak of disagreeable things, on pain of death.”Footnote 61 In real society and court, failure to satisfy norms of cheery sociability did amount to exile. As de Méré wrote, “those who do not possess [honnêteté] are poorly received among people of good taste . . . one cannot bear them.”Footnote 62 Long before seventeenth-century authorities on civility described the melancholic's inferiority to a measured and cheery sanguine complexion,Footnote 63 Baldassare Castiglione, a major Italian source for honnêteté, forbade courtiers to appear “pensive or melancholic” in the king's presence.Footnote 64
Understanding the social and theological situations within which Pascal lived and, after 1654, against which he wrote, justifies the expectation that his opposition to the values of honnêteté, pleasure-focused court society, and the Jesuits, would resist the exclusion of melancholy and negative passions. The Pensées would entail a negation of the negation, whereby melancholy would find renewed value and form. Pascal's notorious way of critiquing the arbitrary nature of power while calling for submission to the political status quo disallowed overt political opposition.Footnote 65 But his emphasis on negative affects would be inherently subversive: it undermined social and theological codes of cheery, measured behavior and pursuit of mutual diversion—codes ultimately supporting the monarchic order.
Yet Pascal's combat on this affective front has not been explored.Footnote 66 When writing that Pascal's “king without diversion” fragment “gives voice to the feeling of his age,” then, Benjamin unwittingly evoked the confrontation between the isolated melancholy “feeling” in the Pensées and the grand siècle’s anti-melancholic ideology, an exclusion reflected in scholarship on Pascal. To counter this oversight, an analysis of the diversion that Pascal's king is lacking and the sadness that hounds him—an analysis of divertissement and ennui, as developed in the Pensées—will uncover the signature form and economy of melancholy as conceived and cured by classical and early modern medico-philosophical discourse and practice.
Delving into medical history, my approach evokes recent scholarship on medicine in seventeenth-century literary depictions of feminine melancholy, and Patrick Dandrey's seminal work on Molière.Footnote 67 Yet my conclusions will be crucially distinct, not only because they concern Pascal. While the old medico-philosophical melancholy haunts his portrayal of the existentially constitutive tension between divertissement and ennui, melancholy is transformed in Pascal. Stripped of its name and medical status, melancholy reappears, now essentialized, diagnosed of the human per se. Medical discourse is transferred: it becomes fundamental in an anthropological, philosophical analysis of the self, ensuring its masked survival in modern discourses on subjectivity.
Neglecting the development of a “pleasure-centered” culture, and the discursive medical paradigm in which divertissement and ennui are embedded, scholarship on these concepts foregrounds more manifest elements of Pascal's discourse: Augustinianism,Footnote 68 monastic and patristic traditions, or philosophy. Daniela Pălăşan, for example, reads acedia into Pascal's ennui.Footnote 69 But by Pascal's time, acedia had long been superseded by a more secular tradition: the medical, albeit heterogeneous, discourse on melancholy.Footnote 70 Based on the Galenic humoral model of body, health, and pathology, this discourse dominated early modern medicine and was so ingrained in vernacular understandings of the body that it prevailed for nearly a century after its refutation in discoveries by William Harvey (1628) and others.Footnote 71
For another example, Jean Mesnard sees Montaignian diversion in Pascal's divertissement. But Mesnard overlooks the medical idiom in Montaigne's essay “On Diversion,” and fails to investigate its persistence in Pascal.Footnote 72 Montaigne recounts his therapeutic use of diversion to “cure” grief, reminding readers that in such situations one is a “doctor” treating a “patient.” Yet the medical uses and idiom of diversion were not Montaigne's invention. He writes, “When physicians cannot purge off a catarrh, they divert it [divertissent] and turn it to [desvoyent] some other less dangerous part. And I am aware this is the most ordinary practice for diseases of the mind.”Footnote 73
These words display a familiarity with “ordinary” medical practices, which used diversion for bodily humoral problems and mental maladies. Overlooked by commentators on Pascal's divertissement, diversion’s curative uses appear together in Furetière's definition of diversion (1690).Footnote 74 If Pascal's divertissement is related to Montaigne's diversion, it belongs to the medico-philosophical discourse and practices to which Montaigne and Furetière bear witness. Melancholy is legible in the Pensées only against the backdrop of these traditions.
Avoiding biographical readings of Pascal's own melancholy,Footnote 75 and the seemingly insoluble problem of his relation to medicine as practiced and discussed at Port-Royal,Footnote 76 in what follows the Pensées are set into dialogue with numerous medical texts. This allows us to overhear resonances between his divertissement–ennui theory and medical concepts and treatments of melancholy: correspondences in content and underlying logic, which reveal, too, crucial shifts and changes. The medical model informed the critical hermeneutics Pascal applied to the worldly culture of his time, which unveiled the social, courtly, and Jesuit taste for amusements, business, and diversions—for divertissements—as a vain, even pathological, attempt to treat a melancholy both incurable and inexplicable in the realm of natural causes: ennui.
Revealing melancholy's survival and transformation in the Pensées has provocative ramifications. If the culture and “classical” ideology that emerged over Pascal's century—with its ideals of rationalism; honnêteté; and other corresponding political, social, and discursive norms—were born through “war” on a melancholic “Other,” Pascal shows deep, unnamable melancholy as this war's irreducible remainder. Its spectacular furors and abysses exiled, its disagreeable visage hidden from society, melancholy subsists within the space that this exclusion circumscribes: in affects of tedium and anxiety, when alone with ourselves, and in the drive to flee them into the ecstasy of divertissement, in society. Pascal posited melancholy not in the extremes, nor in a familiar medical object and term, but in selfhood's default condition, as constitutive of one's relation to oneself. And for that, save through death, or God, there is no cure.
DIVERTISSEMENT
In the Pensées, divertissement primarily carries an older sense of “distraction,” still held in Pascal's time by the word divertir (divertissement turns someone away from something); and a newer meaning: recréation, “amusement” (136/168).Footnote 77 This permitted Pascal's extraordinary extension of the concept to subsume “all occupations” (478/713), from dancing to hunting, scholarship to love: all social and worldly actions, pursuits, or values (139/171). The concept's equivocity has a critical edge. Pascal suggests that every recreation and occupation, usually considered simple amusement or business, fulfills a hidden function: distraction, turning away, from oneself.
When alone and unoccupied, people fall into a sorry state: they see or feel themselves, and meditate on their postlapsarian “wretched condition” (136/168). Dolorous self-presence or self-reflection is thus typically avoided; divertissement, to which we are driven by a “secret instinct” (ibid.), offers a cure, an escape. Against the heavy fixity of a lone, brooding self-relation, divertissement enlivens and pulses with variety, stirring the passions: “noise,” “commotion,” “violent occupation,” “ardor,” “agitation” (ibid.). Occupying the mind with concerns for people, things, and their acquisition, divertissement is salutary movement, variety, and plenitude. In this, the concept transposed a signature medical treatment for melancholy into the very element of secular existence and society.
Across the medico-philosophical literature on melancholy, from antiquity beyond Pascal's century, modes of distraction or recreation, especially social ones, were prescribed to treat both melancholic dispositions and afflictions caused by the heavy, cold, dry humor, or its burnt (aduste), volatile counterpart.Footnote 78 Scholars of melancholy—qua temperament, illness, or humor—know how common this “diversion method” is.Footnote 79 Authorities advising it listed Pascal's main examples of divertissement: games, hunting, dancing, conversation, theater, and courtship, even work.
Before turning to French medical texts, two influential English sources for concepts and treatments of melancholy should be mentioned: Timothy Bright's A Treatise of Melancholy (1586) and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). With neither translated into French until the 1990s,Footnote 80 the correspondences between English and French discourses on melancholy and remedial diversions testify to a European Galenic paradigm or episteme within which people and doctors conceived the atrabilious temperament and illness.Footnote 81
Bright inaugurated the early modern boom in treatises on melancholy.Footnote 82 Like Ficino, he considers “study,” “contemplation,” or “meditation”—“especially of difficult matters, and high misteries”—a potentially harmful separation of the mind from its embodiment in the world. Melancholic mental activity should be “above all” remedied by “recreation,” which releases vital “spirit” from its overinvestment in intellection.Footnote 83
Burton's Anatomy, the summa of medico-philosophical discourse on melancholy,Footnote 84 remains the best source for the range of traditional therapeutic divertissements. “Many and sundry are the means which philosophers and physicians have prescribed to exhilarate a sorrowful heart, to divert those fixed and intent cares and meditations, which in this malady so much offend,” writes Burton, in a section on a famed anti-melancholy remedy: music.Footnote 85 He cites numerous authorities on distracting activities to be undertaken by, even imposed upon, the melancholic:Footnote 86 “Let them use hunting, sports, playes, jests, merry company, which will not let the minde be molested, a cup of good drinke now and then, hear musick, and have such companions with whom they are especially delighted; merry tales or toyes, drinking, singing, dancing, and whatsoever else may procure mirth.”Footnote 87
The melancholic should “never be left alone or idle,” Burton writes; “set him about some business, exercise, or recreation, which may divert his thoughts . . . [If not] in perpetual action, ever employed, [his phantasy] will work upon it self, melancholize.” Friends must “alienate his mind by some artificial invention or some contrary passion . . . humor him, please him, divert him.”Footnote 88 His wayward mind should be engulfed in active, social life. When Pascal's doctors advised him to avoid serious intellectual pursuits and to seek relief in the divertissements of social conversation, they were simply following custom.Footnote 89 Pascal's “worldly period” was partly a medical affair.
Years before Burton, in a famous 1594 text on melancholy, André du Laurens (1558–1609) made the obligatory mention of the social therapeutics of divertissement, designed to oppose the melancholic's proverbial tendency to solitude:
Melancholics should never be left alone; they should always be surrounded by pleasant company. At times they should be flattered and granted some part of what they desire . . . [One must] entertain them with pleasant tales: one should not expose them to any cause of fear, or any unpleasant news. In short: one must divert [divertir] them as much as possible, and drive from their understanding all passions of the soul, especially anger, fear, and sadness.Footnote 90
This notion was common: melancholics should be drowned in positive feelings, their egos stroked and protected from sadness, anger, or fear—passions long associated with melancholy.Footnote 91
Another influential treatise, De la maladie d'amour, ou mélancholie érotique (1610–23) by Jacques Ferrand (c.1575–c.1630), sought to cure lovesick melancholics of their fixations.Footnote 92 Ferrand prescribes typical “recreational exercises” for curative “mental divertissement”: travel, socializing, exercise, games, conversations, music, and hunting.Footnote 93 His more ingenious techniques also draw their potency from diversion. They undo the dolorous attachment to the One via diversions into the Many: focus the lover's mind on other women, or, “by artifice,” transform him through beautifying procedures, fashionable clothing, eloquence, dancing, singing, and, especially if he is ugly, “intellectual beauty.”Footnote 94 The melancholic becomes a social actor, donning diverse roles and costumes. A spectacle, divertissement, for others, he sheds his unseemly melancholic self. In each technique, healing requires diversion: from (only) her or from (only) him.
Other popular vernacular medical texts, like those by Louis Guyon (c.1527–c.1617), Nicolas Abraham de La Framboisière (1560–1636), and Lazare Rivière (1589–1655), reedited across Pascal's century, corroborate the prevalence of distractions as privileged means for treating melancholics.Footnote 95 The idea was deeply ingrained: it reappears in the Encyclopédie (1765),Footnote 96 and later, hardly changed, in Freud's Civilization and its Discontents (1930).Footnote 97
Literary and philological evidence confirms the enduring conceptual connection between divertir or divertissement and melancholy. In Molière's Monsieur de Pouceaugnac (1669), the first doctor, specialist in Galenic medicine, ends a list of remedies for his bewildered patient by prescribing, “above all” (à la Bright) “to delight him by pleasant conversations, songs, and musical instruments,” and dance, to “rouse his deadened spirits from their indolence, which causes the thickness of his blood, whence arises the malady.”Footnote 98 We can also return to Furetière. In the sense of “to cheer up, delight,” divertir is defined over against melancholy: “Nothing diverts more than theater. It diverts even those who are the most melancholic.”Footnote 99 Theater, a dreadfully powerful divertissement for Pascal (764/630), works “even” on melancholics. They are, we infer, hardest to divert.
This reciprocal dependence between divertissement and melancholy is also manifest across an entire seventeenth-century genre: collections of facetious tales, their function proclaimed by their titles:Footnote 100 Le facétieux Réveille-matin des esprits melancholiques . . . conten[ant] les Meilleures Rencontres . . . capables de réjoüir toutes sortes de personnes, & de divertir les bonnes compagnies (1656); Recueil des pieces . . . ou, Divertissement curieux: pour chasser la mélancolie (1685); Les récréations françoises . . . Pour servir de divertissement aux Melancholiques, & de joyeux entretiens dans les Cours . . . (1681), and so on. We might also recall the subtitle of Molière's Pourceaugnac, as published in 1670: Comédie faite . . . pour le Divertissement du Roy—as if the spectator king, like Pourceaugnac in the play, were being treated for melancholy by divertissement.Footnote 101
As in this play, in Montaigne's essay, or in Furetière's definition of diversion, split between diversion of humors and diversion from negative passions, prescriptions for recreations often appeared alongside more somatic remedies.Footnote 102 But they were not merely “psychological.” Just as melancholic moods or temperaments, like pathological melancholia, were linked to an underlying morbid entity (excessive or corrupt black bile), the “psychological” effects of diversions could be explained physiologically by hypostatizing their qualities: their levity enlivened the blood and vital spirit, their mobile diversity brought diverse, salutary movements to bodily fluids, and so on.Footnote 103 Thus—following “the Golden rule of Galenic therapeutics: curing by opposites”Footnote 104—recreations countered the atrabilious humor, with its heaviness reflected in a lethargic mood, its darkness mirrored in the melancholic's sardonic mien, its obstructing thickness corresponding to the obsessive fixations it occasioned, and so on.
This logic, which, across and beyond the Galenic humoral paradigm, governed discourse on melancholy and its cures, was one of qualitative causality or “symbolic unity.”Footnote 105 One detects its presence in Pascal's divertissement fragments too, which display a split between sets of contrary qualities resembling those that structured the discourse of humoralism: qualities associated with ennui and solitary self-contemplation—single, solitary, stagnant, fixed, inward, deep, empty (form)—and those predicated on divertissement—multiple, social, light, mobile, agitated, outward, superficial, full (content). Pascal even imagines a noirceur (622/515) leaking into the unoccupied mind, pervading the self's self-relation: “blackness,” melancholy's quality par excellence, which doctor Jourdain Guibelet studied in another important text on melancholy.Footnote 106
ENNUI
Pascal's divertissement expands a category of treatments for melancholy to include all occupations, encompassing the entirety of civil and courtly life. This implied that worldly people—courtiers and honnêtes gens—were unwittingly medicating themselves for an ailment they did not know.Footnote 107 The Jesuits, by condoning worldly life and divertissements, exacerbated such ignorance.
In turn, there are grounds for seeing in divertissement’s contrary, ennui, the disorder or moods for which medical texts prescribed remedial diversions. Melancholy can be found in (1) Pascal's depiction of deep ennui, the affect of the solitary, unoccupied mind, as without apparent cause; (2) his Augustinian anthropology, which explains man's “misery” and true cause of mournfulness; and (3) the dichotomy or “contrariety” he finds in the self between solitary doldrums and social ecstasies, creaturely misery and kingly pride. The oscillation between default misery and instinctual strivings for happiness via divertissement describes a melancholy dualism.
Groundless ennui
The Pensées depict solitary self-perception as a default activity, which occurs when one is alone and unoccupied. When bereft of things, the mind tends to turn on itself, or, as Burton said, to “work upon it self, [to] melancholize”:
Nothing is more unbearable to man than being entirely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without application for himself. He then feels his nothingness, his abandonment, his insufficiency, his dependence, his powerlessness, his emptiness. Immediately there wells up, from the depths of his soul, ennui, black gloom [noirceur], sadness, chagrin, rancor, despair. (622/515)
The nature of ennui, with its attendant negative affects, is complex. While it can be caused by the thought of discernible “miseries,” mysteriously, ennui can be a misery without cause:
rest becomes unbearable by the ennui it engenders. We have to get away, and plead for commotion. For we either think of miseries we have now or of those threatening us. And even if we could find ourselves utterly protected, ennui, of its own authority, would still emerge from the depths of the heart, where it has natural roots, to fill the mind with its venom . . . Thus man is so wretched, that he would feel ennui even without any cause for ennui, by the very nature of his complexion. And he is so vain that, though full of thousands of essential causes for ennui, the most frivolous thing, like a billiard cue and a ball to push with it, suffices to divert him. (136/168)
Acting on its “own authority,” ennui is a sovereign affect. Not only a familiar feeling, it can be a mysterious mood whose cause is unknown:Footnote 108 “But remove their diversion: you will see them wither with ennui. Then they feel their nothingness without knowing it. For this is truly unhappiness: to be unbearably sad the moment one is forced to consider oneself instead of being distracted from doing so” (36/70).
The omnipresent notion of “cause” in these fragments confirms that Pascalian ennui is not mere boredom, but carries the strong seventeenth-century sense of affliction, suffering, deep sadness.Footnote 109 Ennui, that is, should have a cause. But, while it often does (“essential causes”), a deeper, mysterious ennui arises in the absence of things, without apparent cause (“without any cause”). The latter is the mood of the self that faces or feels its essence, absent of all worldly content, as “emptiness” or “nothingness” with a negative affective hue. While a long iconographic tradition gave a set posture to melancholy's empty inward-turnedness,Footnote 110 Western medicine saw fathomless affects as its indubitable signs.
Beginning with Greek medicine, despondency and anxiety or fear, without “cause” or “occasion,” were signatures of melancholy.Footnote 111 In making groundless ennui—“a misery without cause, and, in that, deeper than those miseries whose origin is discernible”Footnote 112—the default state of human nature, Pascal universalized melancholy, making it the essence of selfhood understood as an empty, despondent self-relation. Suggestive in this respect is the term “complexion” (136/168), which still connoted humoralism in Pascal's time.Footnote 113 No longer one alongside three others (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic), melancholy becomes the “complexion,” the synonym, of “man.”Footnote 114
Augustinian anthropology
This universal pathologization is less surprising given Pascal's postlapsarian, Augustinian anthropology. The same anthropology allowed medieval and early modern thinkers—like Hildegard von Bingen and Burton—to explain human vulnerability to bodily and mental disorders, the corruption of prelapsarian healthy humor into postlapsarian black bile, and to hold a common early modern belief: that the era faced an unprecedented melancholy epidemic.Footnote 115 Theorizing the Fall often entailed considering the origin and power of passions and illnesses, melancholy especially.
Du Laurens, for example, began his discourse on melancholy with a humanist hymn to “man,” abruptly silenced, in chapter 2, with a fall into different illnesses. Like sin, illnesses lower man, “the most perfect of all animals,” to “the most frail and miserable animal in the world.”Footnote 116 The marginal title du Laurens gave these lines would resound throughout the Pensées: “Misery of Man.” So too would the theme of melancholy creatureliness, the flip side of humanity's prelapsarian kingly grandeur, which Benjamin detected in fragment 137/169. Combining Augustinianism and thematics of lost kingliness, Burton is even closer to Pascal. The Anatomy begins with man as “soveragn lord of the earth,” and his Fall: he “forfeited his estate . . . [is] now miserable and accursed.” No postlapsarian being is immune to melancholic tendencies: they belong to “mortality” itself.Footnote 117 For Pascal, too, original sin is the cause of man's “wretched condition,” the ground of ennui and divertissement. Universal melancholy follows from the Fall.
But Pascal is more extreme than his predecessors (like Montaigne) and implicit interlocutors (like du Laurens or Burton). For him, melancholy is no tendency, but a state, whereas divertissement names a tendency, which rises from and falls back into melancholy. Further, Pascal used postlapsarian anthropology to excavate the causes of apparently groundless melancholic feelings. This was to provide self-knowledge for readers who were unreflected given their “instinct” to flee, in divertissement, the feelings of undistracted self-presence, and reflection on them.Footnote 118
Ennui’s obscure causes are, first, revulsion at postlapsarian mortality (133/166): ennui is implicit mourning of all things and persons, including oneself, before their loss or death (122/166),Footnote 119 displaying the “paradox” of melancholy that Giorgio Agamben identified: “an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object.”Footnote 120 But ennui’s ultimate cause is deeper, more paradoxical. Groundless ennui or melancholy is unconscious mourning of something never possessed: a kingly, immortal self.
This prelapsarian ego is accessible to most only as a “secret instinct that remains from the grandeur of our original nature” (136/168); as an infinitely desirous lack: “the mark and trace, which is entirely empty, and that [one] vainly tries to fill with everything around” (148/181); and as groundless ennui, infinite desire's negative counterpart. What was lost remains, then, as unreflected affects, which only the Fall's lens clarifies and names. The Fall provides a hermeneutics for ennui, a technology of the self that transforms readers in their self-relation.Footnote 121 Through it, they might read the murky melancholy welling up in the lonely idle hours. Unveiling the mystery of their torment, they might recast their subjectivity in the Fall's claire-obscure light.Footnote 122
Read with this hermeneutics, feelings and moods take on meaning. Fathomless melancholy now signifies lost sovereignty; the enormity of our “miseries” means the enormity our loss: “They are miseries of a great lord, miseries of a dispossessed king” (116/148). Ennui’s depth betokens the height of the fall: “for we are the more miserable the greater the height from which we fell” (122/155). Our disgust with our creaturely mortality and vulnerability discloses royal aspirations, the negative trace of an original kingly state: “For who but a dispossessed king is unhappy about not being king?” (117/149).Footnote 123
Pascal reveals, then, unconscious loss at the heart of the melancholic condition. Though stripped of our sovereign selves long before birth, it befalls all to carry out the indefinite task of mourning a paradisal ego. Freud theorized melancholia as mourning for an unconscious loss from the ego itself, now impoverished and incapable of the work of mourning.Footnote 124 His perspective, which also strives to provide self-knowledge where none is available, is consonant with Pascal's, who attributed melancholic ennui to man's being a “dispossessed king,” only instinctually or affectively aware of his loss.
A melancholy dualism
As an escape into the social sphere away from the ennui in which a true but lost kingliness might be glimpsed, divertissement provides an ersatz kingliness of vain pride. Like diversions in medical treatises, divertissement is fundamentally social, naming what is done with or in reference to others and their esteem. Not merely distraction from a wounded self, divertissement piques our desire for imaginary objects, whose possession we anticipate, exalting an imaginary ego (136/168).Footnote 125 Avoiding solitude and indulging the imagination, we form an imaginary, kingly moi, forged from the idea that others have of us: “We are unsatisfied with the life that we have in ourselves and in our own being: we want to lead an imaginary life in the idea of others, and for that we work on our appearance. Tirelessly we labor to embellish and maintain our imaginary being, neglecting the real one” (806/653).Footnote 126
But divertissement’s flight is Icarian: ennui always ensues (136/168). Within this oscillation between imaginary exaltation and real despondency, which, for Pascal, describes the rhythm of secular existence and often structures fragments on divertissement, another signature aspect of melancholy surfaces.
Across and beyond the humoral paradigm, melancholia was often seen as an erratic wandering between extremes, sometimes explained by its proximity to mania.Footnote 127 The humor subsumes diverse contraries—a notion of manifest significance to Pascal, who brooded on the contrariétés of human experience (131/168)—apparently challenging all logic, as Guibelet noted.Footnote 128 Though it is an escape from ennui, divertissement, as social ecstasy and self-delusion, remains within the binary economy of the human melancholic “complexion,” just as ecstatic exuberance, imaginary delusions, and raving madness remained within melancholia. Divertissement and ennui are opposites in a melancholy dualism, the “cure” a moment of the sickness itself.
Following du Laurens, melancholics should be protected from negative passions. For Pascal, all social life, divertissement’s sphere, is conventionalized swaddling. Society ensures the delusions of universal melancholy:
human life is nothing but a perpetual illusion; we do nothing but deceive and flatter each other . . . The union that exists between men is based only on this mutual deception . . . Man is hence nothing but disguise, lies, and hypocrisy, both within himself and for others. He does not want to hear the truth. He avoids telling it to others. (978/743)
Divertissement is self-alienation as distraction and as the social contract, binding people to distract each other from the thought of death and to mutually entertain delusions of grandeur.Footnote 129 Acculturated from birth as society's ideological basis (139/171), divertissement is the rival technology of the self to the Augustinian doctrine of the Fall. An ideology pervading society and selfhood, present only as an obscure “instinct,” its rule is passively endured, its rationale invisible. Ennui’s sovereignty over the heart is grounded in unconscious loss; divertissement, the social king, reigns as cure for universal melancholy. This unquestioned social prestige and occult volitional power, in Pascal, corresponded to its conventional medical status as treatment.
KINGLINESS
Divertissement provides an ersatz kingliness. Only a fallen, melancholy king strives after a kingdom, be it mere illusion. The concepts of divertissement, ennui, and kingliness are clearly related in the Pensées, and understanding their link is essential to grasping Pascal's implicit dialogue with medical discourse on melancholic delusions. Multiple fragments display this conceptual constellation, for example, the famous “king without divertissement” (137/169), which Benjamin cited:
Leave a king entirely alone, without any satisfaction for his senses, without a care in his mind, without company, with leisure to think about himself, and you will see that a king without diversion is a man full of miseries. So that is carefully avoided: never is there a moment when kings are not accompanied by a large number of people who make sure that diversion ensues upon business, and who survey every moment of the kings’ leisure time, to procure them pleasures and games, so that there is never any emptiness [vide]. That is, kings are surrounded by people who take incredible care that the king should never be alone and in a state where he might think about himself, knowing that he will be miserable, king though he is, if he thinks about that. (137/169)
Pascal's concept of kingliness is dual, subsuming the extremes of fallen selfhood. While, negatively, each person is a “dispossessed king” and, “without divertissement,” is subject to creaturely misery, positively, kingliness denotes total absorption in ecstatic divertissement. Since “the foremost cause of the bliss of the kingly condition [is] that one continually strives to divert them” (136/168), the king should be constantly distracted from his fallen “condition.” While his “misery” is common, so is his life the common goal: enjoying an imaginary grandiosity and great social esteem, he coincides remainderlessly with his “imaginary being.”Footnote 130 On the world's stage, the actor playing the king becomes what acts, identifying with what others play at taking him to be.Footnote 131
This depiction of kingliness was obviously subversive against the backdrop of “the leisured society of the French court, [where] being entertained was one of the highest privileges, and the ability to produce entertainment was one of the highest signifiers of power.”Footnote 132 The king of Pascal's youth, Louis XIII, had a notoriously saturnine temperament and, for diversion, often binged on hunting—a signature royal recreation analyzed by Pascal (136/168).Footnote 133 But Louis XIII was no king of courtly entertainments, and paled in comparison to the sixteenth-century Valois courts and their largesse: he was frugal, socially awkward, and liked to eat alone. When he died in 1643, the court sighed in relief and more freely indulged in divertissements.Footnote 134 Whereas the first Fronde (1648–9) stymied this renewal of aristocratic entertainment under the regent Anne of Austria, the second Fronde (1650–53), though dispersing the courtiers, was less disruptive to courtly pleasures.Footnote 135 After all, Louis XIV first showed the court his dancing talents in ballets performed in 1651, while he and Anne were more or less imprisoned at the Palais-Royal.Footnote 136 Following the Fronde, the gallant and lively king became even more the center of the renewed culture of entertainments that brought together, and symbolically subjugated, a once fractious court.Footnote 137 The summer stay at Fontainebleau in 1661, during which Louis XIV offered his courtiers a suite of impressive divertissements, signaled that a new era of courtly life, structured around the king, had definitively begun.Footnote 138 Pascal died the following year.
Arguably, then, the glistening court of this young monarch is most relevant to Pascal's critique: “At the court of Louis XIV, leisure and pleasure informed a way of life including activities such as promenades, the hunt, boating, feasting, gambling, and the arts of dance and music making. In addition, a constant round of festive entertainments regularly punctuated the life of the court.”Footnote 139 Pascal thought he had uncovered the empty center of this whirl of courtiers and divertissements. By leveling the king and his court to an all too common affliction, he flipped the hierarchy, making the most entertained the most miserable and furthest from real grandeur.
Kingliness appears in another Pascal text, the First Discourse on the Condition of the Great, under the same guise, as the “dispossessed king” of despondency and, its obverse, as the risk and privilege of coinciding with an imaginary ego. The Discourse equates royalty with an arbitrary usurpation of power that forgets its contingency and, from masquerading as authentic, deludes itself into believing it is so. The text calls this “madness,” a diagnosis that falls on all, like the rich and powerful, who believe in the reality of their exalted “imaginary being.”Footnote 140
When denoting delusions of grandeur, the regal trope thus performed a major function in Pascal's critique of pride or self-love, the vice of postlapsarian nature. For Pascal, like Spinoza or Luther, pride is a sort of delirium:Footnote 141 people fancy themselves monarchs, twiddling away their lives in divertissement, “the pleasure even of kings” (39/73):
The order of thought is to begin with oneself and with one's author and one's end. Yet what does the world think about? Never that! But about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring, etc., about fighting, about being king [se faire roi], without thinking about what it is to be king, or to be human. (920/513)
Given this general condition, politics is the art of governing a society of prideful madmen, of running institutions for the insane:
If [Plato and Aristotle] wrote on politics, they did so as if drafting rules for a madhouse [hôpital de fous]. And if they pretended to speak about this as though it were hugely important, it was because they knew that the madmen they were addressing fancy themselves kings and emperors. They entertained these whims so as to moderate the madness to the least pernicious possible. (533/457)Footnote 142
Pascal tacitly drew upon the melancholy tradition here, too. At least from Avicenna (980–1037) on, the delusion of being king was one of the set types of derangement—carrying the world on one's shoulders; being an animal, dead, or made of glass; fearing that urinating will drown the town, and so on—listed in texts on melancholy.Footnote 143 As if it were the literal correlate of Pascal's metaphor of pride as usurped regal self-estimation, this delusion was said to afflict people “ambitious by nature” especially.Footnote 144 Ardent desires for greatness could become literal delusions of grandeur.
Among the numerous sources for the regal delusion,Footnote 145 the most intriguing are two “stories of melancholics” transmitted by Guibelet in 1603:
There is a story of another man from the town of Dieppe, who firmly believed himself King: all day he remained sitting at the port near the ocean shore, where those passing by, aware of his humor and his madness, greeted him and, mockingly, paid him as much respect as if he had really been King, taking pleasure in encouraging him and maintaining him in his madness. He considered all the ships that approached as his own, and enjoyed a rare pleasure in their arriving safely at port. When some flooded, he, with Royal constancy, showed himself capable of patiently enduring their loss. The story of Thrasilaüs in Athenaeus is just the same: for, being at Port of Piraeus in Athens, he found great contentment in watching the vessels he esteemed his own arrive from all directions, and in the taxes levied on the peoples he considered his lowly tributaries. But a great misfortune befell him: his brother had him cured by Doctors. For he insisted they had done him a horrible wrong in stripping him of his delusion, in which he had been the happiest man on earth. The recovery of his health caused the loss of his Kingdom.Footnote 146
These delusional melancholics strikingly anticipate Pascal's society as un hôpital de fous: the social as a space for entertaining delusions of grandeur, the split between imaginary and real “conditions,” and the preference of mental alienation to sanity's humbling clarity.
Before the Pensées, the same regal delusion had been crucial to a famous passage from René Descartes's Meditations (1641):
how could it be denied that these hands or this whole body are mine? Unless perhaps I were to liken myself to madmen, whose brains are so damaged by the persistent vapor of black bile that they firmly maintain they are kings when they are paupers, or say that they are dressed in purple when they are naked, or that their heads are made of earthenware, or that they are pumpkins, or made of glass. But such people are insane, and I would be thought equally mad if I took anything from them as a model for myself.Footnote 147
These lines, which Foucault and Derrida quarreled over,Footnote 148 clearly riff on the medical tradition. What Foucault and Derrida called “madness” was, more accurately, a condition caused by deranging vapor ex atrâ bile.Footnote 149 The regal delusion appears as the paradigm of melancholy and madness, the first and lengthiest of the melancholic delusions that Descartes invokes.
And the most extreme: Descartes portrays the delusion as a move between contraries, echoing the bipolar conception of melancholy. In the passage, “when” (cùm) pivots between real and imaginary conditions, underlining their absurd simultaneity. The melancholic madmen are not delusional noblemen, but pauperrimi—not “paupers,” as translated above, but “the poorest,” the furthest from kingly riches; and they are not poorly dressed, but nudi, “naked.”Footnote 150 They are almost animal in their lack of possessions and clothing, in their bare life.Footnote 151 Their melancholic delusion is a conjunction of creaturely indigence and imaginary sovereignty.
Pascal considered this tension, an absurdity for Descartes, to be the core of fallen selfhood. In divertissement, people flee their dejected animality (117/149) and believe themselves kings, reversing in imagination the movement of the Fall. Still, when denuded of divertissement’s phantasmagoria, even kings tumble back down to creaturely misère. Omnipresent in the Pensées, Jansenists used this term to render paupertatem from the Vulgate's Lamentations 3:1: “I am the man that sees my poverty [paupertatem]” (cf. 437/689).Footnote 152 Thus preserving some sense of the utter miserliness from the Mediations, Pascal's misère is utmost poverty of being, dignity, and sovereignty.
CURE
Like Guibelet's Thrasilaüs, who contemplated his royal fleet until doctors brought him the misfortune of a cure, people abhor treatment for their delusions. The reasonable envy the deranged: imagination “makes madmen happy, rivaling reason, which makes her friends only miserable; the first envelops men in glory, the second, in shame” (44/78). Conscious aversion to cure and desire for madness display the akrasia that Augustine placed at the center of moral experience.Footnote 153 It became an anthropological principle for Augustinians like Pascal, Nicole, and La Rochefoucauld.
Pascal thus seeks to cure the impulse to divertissement, using a critical dialectics to reveal it as an inauthentic cure.Footnote 154 While divertissement is rational insofar as the banal worries that it produces are less negative than the existential ennui of self-contemplation (139/171), divertissement is irrational, for the “happiness” that it procures is inauthentic, fleeting, and would be unnecessary if the self knew true happiness (132/165). Despite its failure, we are subjects to Lord Divertissement, libidinally bound by its “instinct” and ideology, its lure of imaginary joy. Striving to grab it, we reap only sadness.
Pascal's resolution to this dialectical dilemma was to privilege the melancholy of self-contemplation contra the remedial protocol of the traditional and humanist medico-philosophical tradition, and the Jesuits.Footnote 155 Not that one can find happiness in oneself, as some ancient philosophers and their modern epigones thought (407/26). Rather, only by resisting the divertissement “instinct” and facing the deep “emptiness” of ennui can a true cure present itself (414/33). There, in a melancholy relation to nothing but oneself, where the social and sensible world disappears and the imagination's theater drops its curtain, in the black abyss of ennui one might intuit the infinity of lack and desire, an “infinite pit” that can be filled by no-thing but “an infinite and immutable object; that is, by God” (148/181).Footnote 156 Cure begins by recognizing and naming the infinity of loss.
Pascalian ennui is hence extraordinarily potent, and politically subversive. Ennui is implicit brooding on the ephemerality and inauthenticity of all things. The arbitrary, empty core of worldly values and roles is disclosed as a negative feeling of emptiness, to which the Augustinian discourse of vanity gives critical, discursive form.Footnote 157 Insofar as it contains the potential for a rejection of worldly society, ennui is the affective counterpart to Jansenist “ideology,” which posited “the radical impossibility of living a justified life in secular society,” prompting suspicion from those, like Richelieu and Louis XIV, eager to protect the values that ensured a society ultimately subservient to the monarchy.Footnote 158 For if one can bear and interpret ennui, there is a cure, pointing beyond the “world.” As a cycle of maniacal exaltation and unfathomable debasement, melancholy comes to rest only by going so deep into its banal depths that they become otherworldly heights. Our “emptiness,” if only we let it become infinite, becomes infinite plenitude, and ennui flips over into “Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy,” as Pascal scrawled in his night of illumination, November 1654 (913/72). The authentic cure is neither outside nor within, but “in God, both outside and within us” (407/26).
CONCLUSION: THE NAMELESS AFTERLIFE OF MELANCHOLY
Melancholy pervades the Pensées. This is likely why it has proved imperceptible to commentators: it saturates Pascal's discourse on fallen selfhood, to the point of invisibility. His social critique took an affective epiphenomenon and medical pathology and, through the lens of Augustinian anthropology, made it the substance of selfhood.
The transposition of a literal delusion—believing oneself king—into a more figural sort—prideful delusion of grandeur—is thus exemplary of the melancholy episteme's latent presence in the Pensées. The qualities and forms, shapes and characteristics, of melancholy endure, along with the “symbolic unity” or qualitative “causal system,” which governed discourse on melancholy, its etiologies, and its therapeutic protocols, into the nineteenth century.Footnote 159 But the ontological commitments, and etiological analyses, of this discourse are suspended in Pascal, and replaced by a descriptive analysis of human nature not epiphenomenally but constitutively melancholic.Footnote 160 Pascal is thus at the forefront of his age—in offering a more metaphorical than ontological depiction of melancholyFootnote 161—while being deeply opposed to certain constitutive ideals of his day—in privileging melancholic ennui in an era that increasingly found it unseemly and suspicious, and, above all, in transposing melancholy from passing tendency into the human condition, origin and end of all states and actions.
Thus might we understand the absence of the term mélancolie in the Pensées: melancholy lost its name as it became a normalized pathology, a mysterious sadness whose origin lies in no discernible cause, but beyond this world and secular time. Changes in medical theory perhaps helped render this shift possible. While Harvey's anti-Galenic discovery (1628) was known, and slowly becoming accepted, in France “melancholy” connoted Galenic humoralism and its etiological, ontological commitments.Footnote 162 But although—or because—the medical paradigm was shifting, a now nameless, mysterious melancholy remained. Puncturing the new mechanist view promulgated by Harvey and Descartes, which made the human body into a body among others in a seamless fabric of causality, and which saw madness as some functional mishap of the corporeal machine,Footnote 163 Pascal removed melancholic ennui from the network of natural causes.Footnote 164 Showing it recalcitrant to worldly remedies and medical etiologies, he sought to provoke his readers, likely honnêtes gens, to believe in its supernatural cause and cure.
This is more provocative when seen against the history of medicine after Pascal. With the Galenic paradigm slowly giving way to mechanism and, around 1750, to the model of Newtonian science, the Enlightenment was a time of great medical optimism. Having long been the science whose meager results offered a constant reminder of human submission to nature and to God,Footnote 165 medicine began to embody human potential to lord over the world, even over death itself. The new models of observation and experimentation promised to exhaustively disclose the causes of illnesses, mental and physical, a cheery horizon already delineated by Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637).Footnote 166 It was precisely this sort of optimism that Pascal found delusional, even symptomatic. Groundless ennui would continue to cast a shadow over such humanism, which Pascal saw as one side of a Janus-faced selfhood.
Benjamin was right: the “king without divertissement” (136/169) is a paradigm of melancholy. But the person who, though sovereign, is the poorest creature when deprived of the pomp of diversion, represents just one side of the melancholy “complexion” that Pascal universalized. Fragment 136/169 portrays the other one, too: always with divertissement, the king is the most delusional of men. Pascal's “king” is an allegory of fallen selfhood and its melancholic extremes or contrariétés, its intestinal war of heart and mind, imagination and reason.
Fragment 136/169 “gives voice to the feeling of [Pascal's] age.” Benjamin's phrase now evokes the inscrutability of nameless melancholic moods and drives, which the Pensées interpreted and expressed. Melancholy's voicelessness suggests that it was too prevalent to be seen, reflected on, or named; or that melancholy needed a voice, because it had been silenced.
On some accounts, it had been. In the enterprises of Reason and of an increasingly modern science, from Descartes through the Enlightenment, and in seventeenth-century France's attack on potentially unruly “negative passions” in the spheres of politics and society, melancholy was silenced, even repressed. This was Foucault's argument, implicitly at least, since what he called “madness” in the Meditations was actually melancholic delusion. Descartes silences and excludes this, thereby circumscribing Reason's domain, Foucault said,Footnote 167 just as, for Fumaroli, the culture of classicisme emerged from the “war on negative passions.” In turn, medical science began to offer the prospect of a world free of maladies, mental and somatic.
Against these trends, Pascal's universalization of melancholy reintroduces the exiled “Other” into the very form of the Same. The culture and ideology of classicisme excludes melancholy's violent heights and depths, Quixote's madness and Hamlet's despair. Yet melancholy remains as selfhood itself at its most banal: pervading unoccupied hours, driving occupations, fueling petty delusions of grandeur. The opposition that Fumaroli saw in seventeenth-century French culture—(baroque) melancholy versus (classical) health of the soul—is superficial: not expunged, melancholy shifts from epiphenomenon to essence, tendency to default “complexion,” figure to ground. The culture of classicisme itself—its civility and urbanity, and the scientific, rationalist spirit that it passed on to the Enlightenment—becomes, at best, divertissement; at worst, melancholic delusion.
This might enrich our view of Pascal's anti-Cartesianism.Footnote 168 Constitutive melancholy opposed Descartes's image of sovereign selfhood, its joyous solitude and confidence in Reason to see through delusions and passions in its march towards self-understanding and advances in the sciences. With melancholy fundamental to selfhood, Reason's task is carried out only in vain, as a fiction in books: Reason becomes another of Imagination's grandiose reveries. Adopting a postlapsarian epistemology prominent in the early modern period, one might say that only Adam in Eden could philosophize à la Descartes.Footnote 169 For fallen creatures, there is little hope of seeing clearly and distinctly: melancholic vapor clouds our minds, and we instinctually abhor the solitary, reflective scene of philosophy. As a scientist, Pascal countered Descartes by proving “the vacuum” in Nature. He later found “emptiness” in the heart, a discovery equally anti-Cartesian.Footnote 170
But tracing the Pascalian figure of melancholy has implications beyond his century. First, it encourages exploration of how the image of melancholic selfhood, with its infinite lack or desire—this mixture of theological anthropology and medicine—once secularized and de-medicalized, endured in modern notions of subjectivity.Footnote 171 Pascal removed ennui from the sphere of natural causes. For him, this referred it to God; for us, the metaphysical ante amounted to a shift from a medical or biological to a psychological and anthropological frame for melancholy, announcing modern philosophical and psychological understandings of the subject, progressively shorn of theology.
Second, viewed through the ennui–divertissement dichotomy, melancholy's tension with the ideals of classicisme discloses a melancholic oscillation of historical scale.Footnote 172 Divertissement fights Ennui in a Pascalian “Dialectic of Enlightenment”:Footnote 173 secular History becomes a circuit between self-reflexive doldrums and delusional exaltations, between melancholy and diversions against its unseemly political criticism and social uselessness. This ideological movement is clear in Pascal's reception history: the cheery Voltaire and the saturnine Chateaubriand, Enlightenment and Romanticism, were at loggerheads about the value of his personal melancholy, its ethical and epistemic significance.Footnote 174 But this movement is arguably also palpable in Heidegger's antihumanism, which granted an existentially essential status to boredom and anxiety.Footnote 175
Do histories of attitudes towards affects and illnesses disclose deep cultural changes? Do shifts in the value and intelligibility of affects—melancholy, ennui, anxiety—across epochs, cultures, and authors, express fundamental divides: between optimism and pessimism, humanism and antihumanism, idealism and critique? In any case, the Pensées suggest that such contraries belong to a single “complexion.” Reason's cure is superficial. The wheel turns, the bile cools, and Melancholy reappears: Dürer's fallen angel, the crown of Pascal's king on her head.
