The problem is as old and well-known as Plato’s parable of the cave. Like Plato and more modern discussions of alienation, Hari believes that underlying the alienated state of depression is a proper state of natural needs and desires. So, like Socrates, Hari argues that knowledge bringing insight can work therapeutically as a “midwife of the soul,” reawakening consciousness to natural needs and thus rekindling natural desires. Hari takes his clues here from anthropology and evolutionary theory. One researcher asked rhetorically, “Why would loneliness cause depression and anxiety so much?” And he answered: “You and I exist for one reason – because those [early] humans figured out how to cooperate… They only made sense as a group… That they survived at all they owed to the dense web of social contacts and the vast number of reciprocal commitments they maintained. In this state of nature, connection and social cooperation did not have to be imposed… Nature is connection.” (77).
Psychologically, “nature is connection” indicates that depression is to be understood as an alienation, i.e. that underlying depression “certain innate needs persist” (98), a proper humanity that can be awoken to rise up consciously against the alienated state of depression to reacquire “a more natural state – one where we are embodied, we are animal, we are moving, our endorphins are rushing” (128). To be sure, Hari’s embrace of the body as the natural state sharply diverges from the Socratic rationalism.
Invocation here of the proper “state of nature” as the body might call to mind Rousseau with his myth of the “noble savage” and decadent civilization. But that would be misleading. More instructive is the difference between Hobbes and Locke, the seminal theorists of Anglo-Saxon modernity. Notoriously for Hobbes the state of nature is nasty, brutish and short, a war of all against all in which alpha males, so to speak, compete violently for gain and glory until enlightened reason calls a truce to the mayhem in a sacrifice of natural freedom to political sovereignty under a monarch who provides security and a share in the goods of a civil society. The cost of this social contract, however, is the paradox that political sovereignty establishes a rule of law and rough justice within its jurisdiction by simultaneously elevating itself above that rule of law so that it may maintain the regime by hook or by crook against enemies foreign and domestic. That is why Hobbes named the quintessence of civilized existence taking shape in the early modern state the “god incarnate,” the Leviathan.
Hobbes, be it noted, was quite intentionally undermining the canonical narrative from the book of Genesis about a “fall” from the state of innocence in paradise into a state of violence in exile from paradise. For Hobbes over against Genesis, human beings are rising beasts, not fallen angels. (The German theorist of National Socialism, by the way, Carl Schmitt, picked up on Hobbes’s theory in his argument for state authoritarianism as justified by the “state of exception” (from the rule of law) justified by the “perpetual emergency” of society on the brink of collapse back into a free-for-all of violence).
By contrast, John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government sought philosophically to restore the canonical narrative: the state of nature is paradisiacal just because it is a pre-political sociality: an innocent and natural obedience to the creative mandate that the human beings be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over it in partnership with their Creator (Genesis 1:26-29). Note how, in sharp distinction from Hobbes, the mandate of creation for human beings made in the image of God for likeness to God makes them essentially social, cooperative in the labor of gardening and in procreation, sharing dominion together as the partnership of male and female. From this idyllic state of nature, however, the human couple, motivated by envy of God as they imagine God to be (the serpent’s promise, “you shall be as God”) descends into violence. The violence which subsequently erupts physically in the story of the fratricide between their sons begins verbally: when confronted by their Creator, the envious man disowns the woman whom God gave to him and the disobedient woman scapegoats the lying serpent. Their society is thus ruptured and becomes a persisting problem for them as they have fatefully lost the original possibility of innocent obedience to the mandate of creation.
For Locke, then, human beings fall into violence. Nevertheless, the creative mandate of the state of nature for gardening, procreation and parenting persists and from this mandate continuously in force, Locke argues, all legitimate political authority is sanctioned. The state is a necessary expedient, given the fall into violence. It exists as a lawful monopoly on the means of violence by which lawless violence is roughly but justly suppressed. Even so, its purpose remains parental: to educate the young and inexperienced into a state of adult freedom and responsibility. Illustratively, Locke in the same treatise made the seminal case against slavery is a violation of “natural law,” as he conceived “nature” to be. To be sure, Locke’s account depends on a revelation just as much as Hobbes’ account depends on a retrojection of present experience of political sovereignty back into an imagined state of nature.
The foregoing foray into the tradition of political philosophy is in accord with Hari’s own realization that the source of the depression epidemic today lies in the way we live, i.e., anti-socially. Building upon Hari’s discovery of grief, and in accord with Locke’s correction of Hobbes, I will be urging that grief becomes depression just because – unlike the loss of a loved one acknowledged in the “grief exception” – the immediate social sources of alienation are hidden from consciousness. Liberating insight into one’s predicament, precipitated by intervention from outside the self which reveals what is really going on, is needed if one of the causes of snowballing depression is that the depressed cannot comprehend their own isolation nor see their own lost connections. Theologically, a break-in from outside the state of alienation (cf. Mark 3:7), a connection somehow breeching the prison walls erected in depression to assert itself redemptively is needed in order for its prisoner to break out.