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PASCAL AND MELANCHOLY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2017

CHAD A. CÓRDOVA
CHAD A. CÓRDOVA*
Affiliation:
Department of French and Italian, Princeton University E-mail: ccordova@princeton.edu
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Abstract

This article shows how two concepts for which Blaise Pascal's Pensées (1670) are best known—divertissement and ennui (often mistranslated as “boredom”)—inherited and transformed medical conceptions of melancholy along with one of melancholy's signature therapeutic protocols: diversion. Instead of limiting the genealogy of Pascal's concepts to more obvious textual sources (St Augustine, Montaigne, etc.), here they are read against the background of an epistemological paradigm dominant in his time: Galenic medicine. Drawing on a large corpus of early modern French medical texts, this article discloses how melancholy, stripped of its overt medical status, remerges in Pascal's analysis of subjectivity, which valorized melancholic ennui against the values of a nascent civil society subservient to the monarchic order. Once used to describe outlying temperaments and exceptional pathologies, the discourse on melancholy becomes fundamental to the human being per se in Pascal's theological and anthropological perspective. Thus transformed, the older forms of melancholy and its remedies ensured the possibility of their survival—disguised and unrecognized—in modern theories of subjectivity and psychology. Understanding melancholy's latent presence in the Pensées, in other words, sheds new light on the affective aspects of Pascal's social critique and invites us to investigate the modern afterlife of early modern melancholy.

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Articles
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , August 2019 , pp. 339 - 373
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

I am very grateful to Sophia Rosenfeld for her help and critical insights on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank three anonymous readers for Modern Intellectual History for their comments and suggestions.

References

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14 Fumaroli, “Nous serons guéris,” 94–101; Fumaroli, “Saturne et les remèdes,” 30–39. Seminal works on civility include Magendie, Maurice, La politesse mondaine et les théories de l'honnêteté, en France, au XVIIe siècle, de 1600 à 1660 (Paris, 1925)Google Scholar; and Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1978–82)Google Scholar. On linguistic norms, see Merlin, Hélène, “Langue et souveraineté en France au XVIIe siècle: La production autonome d'un corps de langage,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 49/2 (1994), 369–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fumaroli, “Le génie de la langue française,” in P. Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 3 (Paris, 1993), 911–73.

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17 Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. Osborne, J. (New York, 2009), 142–3Google Scholar. See Bjørnstad's, Hall excellent study: “‘Giving voice to the feeling of his age’: Benjamin, Pascal, and the Trauerspiel of the King without Diversion,” Yale French Studies 124 (2013), 23–35Google Scholar.

18 See Michon, Hélène, L'ordre du cœur: Philosophie, théologie et mystique dans les Pensées de Pascal (Paris, 2007), 173–210Google Scholar. On melancholy and Protestantism see Gowland, Angus, “The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy,” Past and Present 191 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 77–120, passim.

19 Fumaroli, “Nous serons guéris,” 93, 102; Fumaroli, “Saturne et les remèdes,” 38; Fumaroli, “La mélancolie et ses remèdes,” 220–21; Wilkin, Women, Imagination, 106–7; Peter Pormann, “Melancholy in the Medieval World: The Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Traditions,” in Rufus, On Melancholy, 179–96.

20 In Pascal's Oeuvres, ed. Lafuma, the word appears in Jesuit Père Noël's first letter on le vide (199) and as spoken by a fictional Jesuit in the Provinciales (409). Mélancolie thus appears under the sign of an obsolete Aristotelianism, a worldview Pascal critiqued scientifically, theologically, and morally.

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28 Gilberte Périer, “La vie de Monsieur Pascal,” in Pascal, Oeuvres, ed. Lafuma, 18–33, at 21.

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30 Mitton, Damien, “Description de l'honnête homme,” in Charles de Saint-Évremond, , Oeuvres meslées (Paris, 1690), 508–9, at 509Google Scholar.

31 See Paternoster, “Mesure,” passim; Courtine and Haroche, Histoire du visage, 103–5, 164. Compare Descartes, Les passions de l’âme (1649), in Oeuvres, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, 11 vols. (Paris, 1897–1910), 10: 327–488, esp. Articles 50, 156, 203, 212. “AT” is hereafter used for works cited in this edition.

32 Courtine and Haroche, Histoire du visage, 15.

33 Ibid., 20.

34 Mitton, “Description de l'honnête homme,” 508.

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50 Courtine and Haroche, Histoire du visage, 219.

51 Blaise Pascal, Provinciales, V, in Pascal, Oeuvres, ed. Lafuma, 387–8. See Ferreyrolles, Pascal, 51–71.

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56 See Wilkin, Women, Imagination, 107, for the similar neo-Stoic critique of melancholy found in Guillaume du Vair and Pierre Charron.

57 Pascal, Provinciales, IX, 409.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid. See Moyne, Le, Les peintures morales, où les passions sont représentées par tableaux, par charactères et par questions nouvelles et curieuses, vol. 1 (Paris, 1640)Google Scholar, 620–29. In the Provincial Letters, Pascal synthesizes this long text, in which the terms fou mélancolique do not appear: the gloss was Pascal's. Given the presence of traditional melancholic traits in Le Moyne's description and Pascal's gloss, he was likely familiar with traditional discourse on humors and temperaments. See n. 76 infra.

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70 See Jennifer Radden, “Introduction: From Melancholic States to Clinical Depression,” in Radden, ed., The Nature of Melancholy, 3–51; Jackson, Stanley, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, 1986), 65–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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74 See Furetière, “Diversion,” in Furetière, Dictionnaire.

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79 Starobinski, “Histoire du traitement de la mélancolie,” 39 (“la méthode de diversion”).

80 Jean Starobinski, “L'utopie de Robert Burton,” in Starobinski, L'encre de la mélancolie, 183–219.

81 Galenism was the French medical episteme, both vernacular and institutionalized: see Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World, part 1, esp. 85–169. Only around 1690 did Galenism begin to recede in French medical institutions, though not from the vocabulary of the iatromechanism that then reigned until about 1750, when Newtonian science encouraged a pluralist empiricism in medicine. Ibid., 411–32. See also Wear, Andrew, “Aspects of Seventeenth-Century French Medicine,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 4 (1982), 118–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Radden, “Introduction,” 8; Jean Starobinski, “Les sciences psychologiques à la Renaissance,” in Starobinski, L'encre de la mélancolie, 231–44, at 239.

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84 See Gowland, “Burton's Anatomy,” passim.

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86 See Starobinski, “L'utopie de Robert Burton,” 181–219; Feld, Melancholy and the Otherness of God, 64.

87 Burton, Anatomy, 374.

88 Ibid., 366–7.

89 Périer, “La vie de Monsieur Pascal,” 21. Descartes was likewise following custom in his letter to Princess Elizabeth from May–June 1645 (AT, 4: 218–22). On this therapeutic correspondence see Gaukroger, Stephen, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995), 18–20, 384–405Google Scholar. George Eliot modeled Causabon, who is also prescribed therapeutic diversion, on Pascal: Eliot, George, Middlemarch (London, 1871), part III, chap. 30Google Scholar.

90 du Laurens, André, “Second discours auquel est traicté des maladies melancholiques & du moyen de les guarir,” in du Laurens, , Discours sur la conservation de la vue . . . (Paris, 1597Google Scholar; first published 1594), 145r–v (55–6). Pages in parentheses refer to du Laurens, , Discours des maladies mélancoliques (1594), ed. Suciu, R. (Paris, 2012)Google Scholar.

91 See Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy, 248; Rivière, Lazare, Les observations de médecine (Lyon, 1680), 809Google Scholar. For this idea in ancient medicine see Starobinski, “Histoire du traitement de la mélancolie,” 34, 37–8.

92 Ferrand, Jacques, De la maladie d'amour ou Melancholie erotique (Paris, 1623)Google Scholar. Ferrand's text first appeared in 1610 and 1612 as Traicté de l'essence et guérison de l'Amour, ou De la Melancholie erotique (Colomiez, 1612). Condemned by the Inquisition in 1620, a reworked version appeared in 1623.

93 Ferrand, Jacques, De la maladie d'amour ou mélancolie érotique, ed. Beecher, Donald and Ciavolella, Massimo (Paris, 2010), 355–8Google Scholar.

94 Ibid., 307–22, 337; Ferrand, Jacques, Traité de l'essence et guérison de l'amour, ed. Jacquin, Gérard and Foulon, Éric (Paris, 2001), 139, 141–2Google Scholar.

95 Guyon, Louis, Cours de medicine théorique et pratique (Lyon, 1678), 75–6Google Scholar; de La Framboisière, Nicolas Abraham, “Comme les melancholics se doivent gouverner,” in Framboisière, La, Oeuvres, vol. 2 (Lyon, 1669), Part 2, chap. 2, 101–3Google Scholar; Rivière, Les observations de médecine, 812. On the increase of vernacular texts and “popularization of medical knowledge” after 1600, see Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World, 281–3.

96 Anon., “Melancholie,” in Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, vol. 10 (Neuchâtel, 1765), 310. See Pinel, “Mélancolie,” 591, 595–7.

97 Freud, Sigmund, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, in Freud, , Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14 (London, 1948), 419–506, at 431–2Google Scholar.

98 Molière, Monsieur de Pouceaugnac (Paris, 1670), I, viii, 53. See Dandrey, Molière et la maladie imaginaire, 156–8, 170–71. Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World, 336–44, offer a corrective to Molière's medical parodies.

99 Furetière, “divertir,” in Furetière, Dictionnaire.

100 See Mercier, Alain, Le tombeau de la mélancolie: Littérature et facétie sous Louis XIII (Paris, 2005)Google Scholar.

101 See Fumaroli, “La mélancolie et ses remèdes,” 223. On royal divertissements see Caude, Élisabeth, de La Gorce, Jérôme, and Saule, Béatrix, eds., Fêtes et divertissements à la cour (Paris, 2016)Google Scholar.

102 Such seems to have been true of Pascal's own treatment: Périer, “La vie de Monsieur Pascal,” 21. Compare Descartes's letter to Princess Elizabeth from May or June 1645 (AT, 4: 220).

103 See Foucault, Histoire de la folie, 402–12, 427.

104 Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World, 114.

105 Foucault, Histoire de la folie, 333–41, 383–4; Starobinski, “Histoire du traitement de la mélancolie,” 70–71; Wear, “Popularized Ideas of Health and Illness,” 231.

106 Guibelet, Jourdain, Trois discours philosophiques (Évreux, 1603), 223–9Google Scholar.

107 Some of them did know it, in fact. See Saint-Évremond, , “Sur les plaisirs, à Monsieur le comte d'Olonne,” in Charles de Saint-Évremond, , Oeuvres choisies, ed. Jacques Prévot (Paris, 2016), 34–40Google Scholar; Barnwell, H. T., “Saint-Évremond and Pascal: A Note on the Question of ‘Le divertissement,” Studies in Philology 53/1 (1956), 35–50Google Scholar; Potts, D. C, “Pascal's Contemporaries and ‘Le divertissement,’” Modern Language Review 57/1 (1962), 31–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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109 Mesnard, Les Pensées de Pascal, 191, 213; Furetière, “Ennui,” in Furetière, Dictionnaire.

110 See Pigeaud, Melancholia, 11; Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, passim; Clair, Mélancolie, passim.

111 Radden, “Introduction,” 10–12, 37–8; Dandrey, Molière et la maladie imaginaire, 138; Guibelet, Trois discours philosophiques, 245v; du Laurens, “Second discours,” 117r (23–4).

112 Mesnard, Les Pensées de Pascal, 213.

113 See Furetière, “Complexion,” in Furetière, Dictionnaire.

114 On “complexion” see Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 43; Siraisi, Nancy G., Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago, 1990), 79–85, 101–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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116 Du Laurens, “Second discours,” 108r–v (15).

117 Burton, Anatomy, 81, 90. See Gowland “The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy,” 97–8; Starobinski, “L'utopie de Robert Burton,” 188.

118 See Dubreucq, Éric, “L'intériorité désertée et le fond du coeur: Le rapport à soi dans la liasse de Pascal sur le divertissement,” Méthodos 5 (2005), at http://methodos.revues.org/381Google Scholar.

119 Compare Blaise Pascal, “Sur la conversion,” in Pascal, Pensées, ed. Sellier, 717.

120 Agamben, Giorgio, Stanzas: Phantasm and Word in Western Culture, trans. Martinez, R. L. (Minneapolis, 1993), 20Google Scholar. See also Foucault, Histoire de la folie, 31. Morbid obsessions were proverbial symptoms of melancholy.

121 Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 2, L'usage des plaisirs (Paris, 1984), 18–19.

122 Augustinian discourse is a mode de subjectivation in Foucault's two senses: it entails emergence of a certain type of subject via subjection to a certain moral discourse. Ibid., 40–45.

123 Compare “Mélancolie,” in Diderot and d'Alembert, Encyclopédie, 307.

124 Freud, Sigmund, “Trauer und Melancholie”, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10 (London, 1946), 428–46Google Scholar.

125 See Ferreyrolles, Les reines du monde: L'imagination et la coutume chez Pascal (Paris, 1995), 260.

126 Pierre Nicole, Compare, “De la connaissance de soi-même,” in Nicole, , Essais de morale, in Nicole, Oeuvres, ed. Charles Jourdain (Paris, 1845), 11–69Google Scholar.

127 Radden, “Introduction,” 15–16; Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 249–73; Pormann, “Melancholy in the Medieval World,” 187; Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie,” 440–42; Benjamin, Origin, 128–51; Starobinski, “Les sciences psychologiques à la Renaissance,” 238.

128 Guibelet, Trois discours philosophiques, 223r–v.

129 See Ferreyrolles, Pascal, 126–30.

130 See Nicole, “De la connaissance de soi-même,” 17.

131 On theatrum mundi see Vuillemin, Épistémè baroque, 263–336.

132 Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, xvi.

133 Moote, A. Lloyd, Louis XIII, The Just (Berkeley, 1989), 105–7Google Scholar; Pagès, Georges, Les institutions monarchiques sous Louis XIII et Louis XIV (Paris, 1961), 26–7Google Scholar. On hunting see Philippe Dulac, “La vénerie royale au temps de Versailles,” in Caude, La Gorce, and Saule, Fêtes et divertissements à la cour, 27–38; Leferme-Falguières, Frédérique, Les courtisans: Une société du spectacle sous l'Ancien Régime (Paris, 2007), 254CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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135 Ibid., 183–4.

136 Ibid., 184; Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, 1–5.

137 See Moine, Marie-Christine, Les fêtes à la cour du Roi Soleil: 1653–1715 (Paris: 1984), esp. 128–9Google Scholar.

138 Solnon, La cour de France, 184–5, 254–5. See de Motteville, Madame, Mémoires, ed. Riaux, M. F., vol. 4 (Paris, 1911), 257–61Google Scholar.

139 Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, 6.

140 Blaise Pascal, “Ier discours de la condition des grands,” in Pascal, Pensées, ed. Sellier, 747–50, at 749.

141 Bras, Gérard, “Divertissement et servitude: Deux pensées de l'aliénation,” in Bove, L., Bras, G., and Méchoulan, E., eds., Pascal et Spinoza (Paris, 2007), 229–41, at 237Google Scholar; Midelfort, H. C. Erik, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford, 1999), 98–9Google Scholar.

142 The fragment recalls Charles Beys's tragicomedy, L'hospital des fous (1635) (Lyon, 1653), whose melancholics are “fous, en ce qu'ils s'estiment plus qu'ils ne sont” (ibid., 3–4). On institutions see Foucault, Histoire de la folie; Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World, 709–11.

143 Avicenna, “On the Signs of Melancholy's Appearance,” in Radden, Nature of Melancholy, 77–8. Avicenna's Canon was the centerpiece of French medical theory in the late Middle Ages. Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World, 90–93.

144 Guibelet, Trois discours philosophiques, 239v; du Laurens, “Second discours,” 132v (40).

145 Paré, Ambroise, Oeuvres, vol. 1 (Paris, 1585), 51Google Scholar; du Laurens, “Second discours,” 132v, 140v–141r (40, 49); Taillepied, Noël, Psichologie (Rouen, 1588), 30Google Scholar; Guyon, Cours de medicine théorique et pratique, 74; Duncan, Marc, Discours de la possession des Religieuses Ursulines de Lodun (Saumur, 1634), 49–50Google Scholar; Burton, Anatomy, 168; Meyssonnier, Lazare, Traité des maladies extraordinaires (Lyon, 1643), 54–5Google Scholar; Furetière, “Mélancolie,” in Furetière, Dictionnaire; “Melancholie,” in Diderot and d'Alembert, Encyclopédie, 308r. See also Pinel, “Mélancolie,” 592; Foucault, Histoire de la folie, 617–18; Sartre, Jean-Paul, L'imaginaire (Paris, 1940), 189Google Scholar.

146 Guibelet, Trois discours philosophiques, 240r–v. Thrasilaüs appears in Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essais, II, xii, 495–6; and, unnamed, in “Melancholie,” in Diderot and d'Alembert, Encyclopédie, 309r.

147 Descartes, René, Meditations, trans. Cottingham, J. (Cambridge, 1996), 13 (modified); AT, 8: 18–19Google Scholar.

148 See Kambouchner, “Descartes,” passim.

149 See Meditationes, AT, 7: 19. See Darriulat, Jacques, “Descartes et la mélancolie,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 186/4 (1996), 465–86Google Scholar; Weber, Dominique, Hobbes et le désir des fous: Rationalité, prévision et politique (Paris, 2007), 153Google Scholar. See also René Descartes, La recherche de la vérité (AT, 10: 511) and Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii (AT, 10: 423). Every delusion Descartes mentions figures in the lists of melancholic “reveries” from the medical literature.

150 Meyssonnier, who corresponded with Descartes, depicted the atrabilious delusion under the same guise: Meyssonnier, Lazare, Traité des maladies extraordinaires et nouvelles (Lyon, 1643), 54Google Scholar.

151 See Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Heller-Roazen, D. (Stanford, 1998)Google Scholar.

152 See Dubreucq, “L'intériorité désertée,” 75–7.

153 Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, 1989), 138Google Scholar.

154 Périer, “Vie de Monsieur Pascal,” 21, uses similar rhetoric to describe Pascal's decision to renounce worldly life after having engaged in divertissements at the behest of his doctors.

155 Compare Pascal's valorization of physical illness: Blaise Pascal, Prière pour demander à Dieu le bon usage des maladies, in Pascal, Oeuvres, ed., Lafuma, 362–5. On this typically Christian attitude see Lebrun, Se soigner autrefois, 8–13.

156 On Pascal and the mystical tradition in which desolation (siccitas) was the last step in the ascent to God see Kuhn, Reinhard, “Le roi dépossédé: Pascal et l'ennui,” French Review 42/5 (1969), 657–64, at 662Google Scholar; Dubreucq, “L'intériorité désertée,” 70; Pălăşan, L'ennui chez Pascal, 160.

157 See Pascal, “Sur la conversion,” 717–18; Foucault, Histoire de la folie, 31–2.

158 Goldmann, Le dieu caché, 117.

159 Pascal forebodes a transformation in discourses on melancholy and mania across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: though certain substances, like humors, are abandoned as theories change, the qualitative logic remains. Foucault, Histoire de la folie, 243, 340, 345, 383–4; Starobinski, “Histoire du traitement de la mélancolie,” 70; Dandrey, Patrick, “L'amour est un mal; Le guérir est un bien,” Littératures classiques 17 (1992), 275–94, at 276–8, 284Google Scholar.

160 For etiological versus non-etiological see Radden, “Introduction,” 36.

161 On this shift towards metaphorical depictions see Dandrey, “L'amour est un mal,” 276–8, 284.

162 Pascal knew of Harvey (Pensées 736/617), whose 1628 De motu cordis undermined the Galenic view of sanguification underpinning traditional understandings of melancholy. The circulation debate was settled in France by 1673, but “traditionalist doctors” predominated, since circulation immediately entailed no new therapeutic program. Claire Crignon, “La découverte de la circulation sanguine: Révolution ou refonte?” Gesnerus 68/1 (2011), 5–25, at 10, 20; Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World, 138–50, 338. On the disjunction of medical thought and practice see Foucault, Histoire de la folie, 375.

163 See Courtine and Haroche, Histoire du visage, 89; and Thiher, Revels in Madness, 92–130.

164 See Goldmann, Le dieu caché. 42–3. Jones, The Good life, 152–3, similarly argues that Pascal called the human a monster to counter rational explanations of human experience.

165 See Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World, 37–83.

166 Gay, Peter, “The Enlightenment as Medicine and as Cure,” in Barber, W. H., Brumfitt, J. H., Leigh, R. A., Shackleton, R., and Taylor, S. S. B., eds., The Age of Enlightenment (London, 1967), 375–86Google Scholar; Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World, chap. 7; Schouls, Peter A., Descartes and the Enlightenment (Montreal, 1989)Google Scholar.

167 Foucault, Histoire de la folie, 67–70.

168 See Carraud, Vincent, Pascal et la philosophie (Paris, 1992), 217–86Google Scholar.

169 On the Augustinian view of Adam's intellect see Harrison, Peter, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

170 See Rodis-Lewis, Geneviève, “La rencontre de Descartes et Pascal: Réalité et fiction,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 75/1 (1991), 6–18Google Scholar; Jones, Matthew, “Writing and Sentiment: Blaise Pascal, the Vacuum, and the Pensées,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32/1 (2001), 139–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nonnoi, Giancarlo, “Against Emptiness: Descartes's Physics and Metaphysics of Plenitude,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 25/1 (1994), 81–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

171 For one take on the afterlife of Pascal's understanding of the self see Dubreucq, “L'intériorité désertée,” passim.

172 Dandrey, Sganarelle et la médecine, lxxii, approaches similar speculations, without reference to Pascal.

173 See Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W., Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Jephcott, E. (Stanford, 2002)Google Scholar.

174 See Gheeraert, “‘Les accidents de la vie,’” 295–302.

175 See Hammer, Espen, “Being Bored: Heidegger on Patience and Melancholy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 12/2 (2004), 277–295CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One could also invoke Lacan's theory of desire here. See Copjec, Joan, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (New York, 2015)Google Scholar.