Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Aristotle on melancholy 155difficult to assess his dependence on sources in general and his attitudetowards the Hippocratic writings in particular. For this reason, and in viewof our limited knowledge of fourth-century medicine in general, it is virtuallyimpossible to say anything with certainty on the sources of Aristotle’sconcept of melancholy. At any rate, there is no indication that Aristotlemade a connection between the ‘constitutional type’ of the melancholic,well-known from the early writings of the Hippocratic Corpus, and thelater, similarly Hippocratic embedding of black bile in the theory of thefour humours of On the Nature of Man (which, after all, does not mentionthe melancholic type). In fact, the notion of melancholy as an abnormalpredisposition and a disease, and the fact that black bile is considered aperittōma, makes any possible Hippocratic influence rather unlikely. Theconcept of the melancholic, with the associated psycho-physical and ethicalcharacteristics seems to be a predominantly independent and genuineinvention of Aristotelian philosophy.5 the theory on melancholy inproblemata 30.1Let us proceed with the theory on melancholy and ‘genius’ in Pr. 30.1mentioned at the beginning. In view of the extensive scholarly literatureon this chapter 60 I will, rather than giving a summary, start with someinterpretative observations that I consider of paramount importance forassessing the Aristotelian character of the theory. First of all, it should be saidthat I certainly do not intend to reinstate Aristotle as the author of this text:as far as the issue of the authorship of the Problemata is concerned I concurentirely with Hellmut Flashar’s view (1962, 303–16) that the Problemataare most probably not the same as the Problemata that Aristotle wrote (orplanned to write). What matters is to define the relationship between thetheory elaborated in Pr. 30.1 and Aristotle’s own views on melancholy moreprecisely, and to examine any possible reasons for ruling out Aristotle’sviews as a source for the selection made by the author of the Problemata.With regard to the opening question, ‘Why is it that all men who havemade extraordinary achievements in the fields of philosophy or politicsor poetry or the arts turn out to be melancholics?’, scholars have longobserved that this question contains part of its answer, for it states as a fact60 The works quoted in n. 1 above form the basis for the interpretation of the text, in particularthe works by Flashar (1962), Klibansky et al. (1964) and Pigeaud (1988a). However, there are stillnumerous passages in this text that have not been fully explained in the existing interpretations. Iwill make some remarks on these in the footnotes.