Depression and Philosophy (New ed.)

This work is, in the words of Dr. Norman Freed, a 'rich picture of an empty landscape, the depression that is to be engaged to maximally avoid it and its ramifications'.

This work explores the philosophical aspects of the plague of depression found throughout the modern world.

Depression, once called melancholy (as in "The Anatomy of Melancholy of Robert Burton", of 1621, or closer to us, that "Black Sun of Melancholy" of the suicide Nerval...), according to Robert Redeker - philosopher, teacher, author of half-a-dozen books and many articles and reviews, member of the 'comite' of Les Temps Modernes, and recently become a nomadic intellectual, or 'scholar-gypsy', subsequent to Jihadist 'fatwas' that were leveled against him after an article he published in the "Figaro" calling on a 'terrorist' Islam to establish its humanist credentials, if there were any to establish - has lost its aristocratic, aesthetic and elitist luster, which it once had in the epoch of Musset's "Confessions", Vigny's "Chatterton", Chateaubriand's "Rene", Nerval's "El Deschidado", and, of course, Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal". Redeker shrewdly, even uncannily, locates a prophetically watershed moment in Flaubert's contemporaneous Emma Bovary, the first of the 'desperate housewives', unprecedented in the fact that her melancholy had nothing to do with its typical etiology of an artist's alienation from a bourgeois world (say from Vigny's "Chatterton" to Artaud's "Van Gogh, Suicided by Society") but rather stemmed from the pressures and frustrations of living in society, as from "Civilization and Its Discontents" we all suffer from, artists or not (maybe nonartists even more, since they can't make art out of it), as Freud later was to conceptualize the issue. Equally if not more widespread and spreading than the 'manic' nervousness and stress limned above, melancholy or depression today, as conceived in Redeker's book, "Depression and Philosophy", may be the other side of this sad psychological seesaw of a syndrome (as in 'manic-depressive'), with its roots in the same soil, if the flagrant oxymoron may be allowed of a soil for rootlessness; depression rising from our being 'starved' of any meaningful tie, connection, bond to ourselves, a world or a cosmos, 'A malady attacking these ties renders human life impossible.

The ties which allow habitation are like ropes and cables in mountain climbing and at sea: when they're unloosened, we are loosened from ourselves, from others, and we're done for.

A feeling of falling is frequent in the collapse which is depression' (p. 11). Our pandemic depression is also conceived of here as having been accompanied and even facilitated by a corresponding derogation of philosophy from its traditional 'task' of providing a stable basis and essence for human existence. However, as with Love the one who inflicted the wound may be in the best position to heal it; or, in the words of the mad, but strangely sane Holderlin: 'there where the danger is greatest, rescue is nearest'.