L’HÉRITAGE CULTUREL DES ÉMOTIONS : L’ENTHOUSIASME ET LA MÉLANCOLIE DE l’ANTIQUITÉ AU XIXe SIÈCLE

Abstract

The Cultural Heritage of Emotions: Enthusiasm and Melancholy from Antiquity to the 19th Century. As most modern emotions and feelings, enthusiasm and melancholy undergo multiple cultural variations throughout history mirroring paradigmatic shifts in European thinking (C. Geertz, C. Lutz, U. Frevert, A. Corbin, G. Vigarello, J.-J. Courtine). Plato’s enthusiastic drives interpreted as mystical trances and examples of oneness with the gods end up in the early modern period as bodily and rational disfunctions under the influence of both humoral tradition and Christian psychology wheras the Romantics reevaluate them as a way of bridging the finite and the infinite (Übereinstimmung). Despite its different meanings, melancholy follows the same sinuous line as enthusiasm: originally seen as the asthenic double of fervour in the early modern period (R. Burton, H. More, J. Locke) and, as it follows, as a major source of imbalance of the humors, the atrabilious temperament gradually develops into a sign of spiritual elevation at the beginning of the 19th century (W. H. Wackenroder, L. Tieck, Fr. Schleiermacher, Fr. Hölderlin, Madame de Staël). Using an interdisciplinary approach which includes both the history of ideas and of emotions, this article aims to recuperate these conceptual variations and to show their exemplarity for different paradigms of European thought as well as their way of forming and contesting tradition ; an example in this sense would be Romantic enthusiasm and melancholy which show the preeminence given to affectivity and its newly assigned role to reach the sacred; contesting tradition, they point to the birth of the modern self and of a highly nuanced, democratic world (I. Berlin).

Article history: Received 24 March 2025; Revised 08 October 2025; Accepted 03 November 2025; Available online 30 June 2026; Available print 30 June 2026.