“The nocturnal point of the contraction” : Hegel and melancholia

As a fundamental feature of our existence, melancholy is an inescapable characteristic of our ontological constitution. However, there is a distance between the clinical condition of melancholia and the human feeling, the capacity to feel sorrow and nostalgia. In this sense, melancholy and melancholia are similar but different. During the 19th century only few among philosophers had tried to describe melancholy in terms of disorder, using philosophical tools rather than clinical definitions, drifting the accent from melancholy to melancholia. Hegel was one of them, one that had seen inside the depth of human being in order to understand and describe what is the “the nocturnal point of the contraction:” melancholia, in terms of clinical condition. The philosophical exploration of madness and its parameters is essentially an ontological project: this is how Hegel addressed “the Concept of derangement in general” and melancholia in particular, anticipating most of Freud’s consideration of the topic.