Erected to keep the pain at bay but at the terrible, self-defeating cost of numbing all feeling, the prison wall of depression is, to be sure, a self-defeating strategy in the end; it is nonetheless real for that. Seeing that clearly, as those outsiders who would help do see, they urge that the state of depression is not a fixed destiny, that wholesome change is possible. A key concept in this connection for Hari lies in the notion of “neuroplasticity,” the adaptability of the brain to environmental changes. Neuroplasticity is a two-way street: the brain adapts badly to a world perceived as hostile, anesthetizing the unbearable pain that only increases in turn the deadly isolation. Depression is such a bad adaptation. Yet by virtue of neuroplasticity the same brain can in principle break out of this self-imposed prison by renewing or developing new connections, thus altering its relationship to the environment and even altering environment itself. So it is possible to become healthier physically and happier mentally. Because of neuroplasticity, the prison wall of depression is porous. It can be broken into and its redeemed prisoner can break out.
In discussing such possible solutions for breakout in a passage near the end of the book, Hari acknowledges that some people find healing reconnection in prayer. He comments that this would not work for him because he is an atheist. When I read this, I said to myself, “Not so fast!” Not that I would issue Hari an altar call, but rather I would recall contemporary Christians who would help the depressed to the truth expressed by Nietzsche. An atheist moment is integral to critical theology in the Christian tradition, as already the second century apologist Justin Martyr acknowledged in his critique of Roman imperium and its religious sacralization: “With respect to those whom you call gods,” he wrote to Emperor Marcus Aurelius in an open letter, “we are indeed atheists!” Later figures as important in the theological tradition as Martin Luther and Karl Barth also understood that to believe God is to disbelieve pretenders who hold demoralized humanity in thrall within a prison-system of mendacity. As Christopher Morse has taught us, “to believe God is to disbelieve the idols.” In other words, while depression certainly crystallizes and concentrates in afflicted individuals, it is first of all a sickness of culture which has become particularly evident today in the present death throes of the Western world.
In fact, then, much of what Hari exposes in his search for solutions can be seen as a contemporary “nothings,” theologically, idols (1 Corinthians 8:4-6) preferred to no meaning at all. These “nothings,” being exposed as vacuous include much vocationally meaningless contemporary labor, predatory relations in mass society, junk as, family life no haven in the heartless world, the artifices of urban existence as severing the human relationship to nature, and above all the myth of the atomized individual as sovereign master, captain of its own ship. All of these contemporary “nothings,” praised ideologically as liberating achievements of the contemporary Western world, share a common lineage. It is egotism in the philosophical sense of the modern project of the Cartesian-Kantian subject whose transcendent “thinking thing” ontologically subordinates its “extended thing” (its own body) in space and time as master to slave. Just this dualistic egotism is the root “broken connection,” if in reality the brain too is ontologically an extended thing in space and time where its actual relationships as creature to Creator, to other creatures and to the ecological web of life have physical effects for good or for ill.
To see how this is so, let us consider the experience of the sublime. In his third critique, Immanuel Kant discussed the human experience of the sublime precipitated by the overwhelming experience of the gigantic forces of nature: earthquake, volcanic corruption, tornado, hurricane and tsunami. All of these appear as physical threats overwhelming the human ego, stuck as it is in the puny, vulnerable body. What is apparently sublime in its natural majesty amounts to a humiliating display of the modern self’s physical impotence over against such natural forces. But what is truly sublime, Kant counters, is the power of mind. These physical forces can kill the body but not the soul, Kant retorts in effect, as if echoing a thought of Jesus with a quite different sense; for by virtue of the Faculty of Reason, Kant’s transcendental subject towers over the merely physical.
If I may indulge here in a little bit of parody: I may assert my human superiority and defiantly shake my fist at the avalanche as it descends on me because, unlike the avalanche, I know what is happening to me as I am crushed. Such retooling the thought of Jesus (which instructs believers to fear the judgment of God more than the death threats of the Empire) is the quintessence of the Christian Platonism which Nietzsche pilloried; idealism subtly but fatefully relocates the source of inalienable human dignity away from the vocational mandate of the Creator (Genesis 1:26-28) to his human image and to the possession and exercise of a faculty of intelligence – a faculty, be it noted, which is unequally exercised among human creatures and which serves ideologically therefore to sanction the rule of experts, Kant’s so-called Tribunal of Reason, over base commoners motivated by lesser, merely bodily “inclinations.”
Contrast Kant’s sublime egotism and its political implications to Hari’s account of the sublime with its trajectory towards democratic egalitarianism. When you are depressed, he writes, “you become trapped in your own story, in your own thoughts, and they rattle around in your head with the dull, bitter insistence. Becoming depressed or anxious is a process of becoming a prisoner of your ego, where no air from the outside can get in. But a range of scientists have shown that a common reaction to being out in the natural world is the precise opposite of this sensation – a feeling of awe. Faced with the natural landscape you have a sense that you and your concerns are very small, and the world is very big – and that sensation can shrink the ego down to a manageable size… And this helps you see the deeper and wider ways in which you are connected to everything around you” (129) in the web of life.
But the still depressed Hari had objected to this insight into the sublime’s salutary decentering of the self, “I want my ego. I want to cling to it” (130). In a profound sense, it was all that he had left in his depressed state of mind, his only remaining connection. Two things are to be noticed in Hari’s protest from within his still depressed state, clinging to ego as the sole remaining dignity. First, it is a statement of “want,” of desire. Desire, whether as eros formed carnallly or intellectuallly (so Plato), or alternately, as the lust for domination or charity (so Augustine), is the root motive in all that we do as essentially embodied beings. And so, second, desire as such is a profound indication that no creature has life in and of itself. At the root of its biological being, the living creature is referred to what is outside of the self: to breathe the air, to eat one’s daily bread, to love and be loved and procreate. Thus to come to want one’s own ego represents a self-defeating alienation, because even the proper, healthy self, let alone the distressed and depressed self, cannot bear the burden of such unending desire. It is remains essentially needy so long as it lives; self-desire, the “glory” (so Hobbes) or “recognition” (so Hegel) sought, is a god that will fail. Unsurprisingly, upon failure, desire curved into itself spirals down in defeat onto a suicidal path. But it does a lot of social and ecological damage on the way down.