MELANCHOLGY AND THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE

Laszlo F. Foldenyi, Melancholy, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, foreword by Alberto Manguel (New Haven & London: A Margellos World Republic of Letters Book/Yale U. Press, 2016) (From "Chapter 9, Trembling From Freedom": "Of course, no culture appreciates all kinds of understandings and modes of existence; moreover, the possibility is excluded theoretically, though the limits of tolerance vary from era to era. From this point of view, the tolerance of Western culture in most recent times has been low: the tolerance of which Western society is so proud limited to two respects. Any one can say or think anything, form an opinion--but society loses its patience if an ideology 'comes to the boil,' and is realized in practice, and it also loses its patience if ideology 'freezes' and degenerates into a private interpretation of existence going beyond the bounds of any sort of social collusion. Anarchists, terrorists, and revolutionaries (and often even reformers) are just as suspect as mystics, prophets, or merely despairing people: the label of mental illness (or deviance, to put it more elegantly) can just as easily be branded on both this group, and should the occasion raise the former and the desperate nihilist can be stuck in the same closed ward. That is not to say that there are no patients among the occupants of closed wards, but it depends on the tolerance of a society how far the limits of disease are stretched or narrowed down. This tolerance does to depend on medical attitudes: a physician's decision in so-called borderline cases is usually influenced from the outset by the cultural and political milieu, to which the medical practice is linked by a million invisible threads." Id at 293-294.).