ABSTRACT
This chapter develops an original account of the traditional relation between melancholy and thinking. Why was melancholy so self-evidently associated with thinking? How does this connection between thinking and melancholy work? And how are we, as thinking beings, supposed to deal with it? This chapter provides an answer to these questions by building further on the idea – developed in Chapter 1 – that the notion of black bile functions as a kind of counterweight to the great aspirations of the human intellect. Drawing on a range of physicians and philosophers working in the ancient and medieval tradition (Galen, Rufus of Ephesus, Al-Rāzī, Isḥāq ibn ‘Imrān, and Ibn Sīnā, among others), as well as on three later authors inspired by that tradition (Marsilio Ficino, Robert Burton and David Hume, who were all self-professed melancholics), this chapter develops the concept of melancholy as the consequence of a tension between our natural human tendency to go beyond ourselves, on the one hand, and our factual and equally natural limitations, on the other.
