(January 4, 2019 at 4:57 am)bennyboy Wrote: I'm very interested in how it presents philosophically. Depression is fascinating, actually, because it isn't just a sense of sadness-- it's something much more profound than that.
If you get the chance, you might want to look at Ricoeur's book Freud and Philosophy. I know Freud is considered a thing of the past, but there is a lot in this book that's challenging.
We all know, intellectually, that we are not angels -- we are not divine sparks of reason entrapped in meat bodies temporarily. We think and feel as we do entirely because of physical processes. But fully grasping that and its implications is harder than it might seem.
No doubt you know the thesis of Civilization and its Discontents. Here Freud has a more clear-eyed look at things than a lot of the people who came after, because he describes unflinchingly how the fact that people are animals means their internal drives are not rational and cannot, in the end, be reconciled. The idea that we are "naturally" happy things and that depression is somehow a chemical malfunction is just not true. We are naturally conflicted things, made of chemicals, and there is no reason to think that balance is more standard than imbalance.
"Goals" is a tricky word, but we do have drives that push us onward. (This is the philosophy that Freud took from Schopenhauer, simultaneously with Nietzsche. It also seems biologically undeniable.) The trouble is that the drives we have conflict and are often not reconcilable.
It seems clear to me that depression is one expression of the conflict of certain drives.
