Misery and the Muses

There's been a flurry of recent news stories like this one on the positive effects that depression has on our ability to think critically, rigorously, and methodically. What's funny is that in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin critically, rigorously, and methodically explains how the link between depression and the intellect originates in Classical antiquity, with the figure of Saturn/Cronus. Cronus, the allegorical embodiment of depression in ancient Greece, was associated both with intensely absorbed contemplation and madness. Then, in the Renaissance, the image of Saturn/Cronus as ambivalently pensive/psychotic thinker was reinterpreted in a new conception of intellect -- what today we might call the absent-minded professor. And, in the baroque, this figure was again reread: the brilliant, hermetic, distanced-from-the-world monkish thinker was now the embodiment not of brilliance, but of the degenerate, fallen state of the world, in which even the loftiest heights of intellectual investigation would could only explore the manifest phenomenal realm of worldly things and never touch the transcendental, noumenal, Godly realm. Thus, in the 17th century, Robert Burton writes an "Anatomy of Melancholy", where he digresses into the inevitable tendency of scholars in his and every age to fall victim to fits of the most abject, pathetic, mental and physical feebleness -- i.e., depression. It's one of the greatest texts ever written in the English language, beloved of Samuel Johnson and Emily Dickenson. It's also a terrible thing to read while in grad school.

My point is that all the sophisticated technology and scientific advances of cognitive science over the course of centuries and centuries of human existence have simply succeeded in confirming the neurological mechanism for something that was already well-known to Pliny and Plato. Moreover, all the sophisticated technology and scientific advances of cognitive science over the course of centuries and centuries of human existence have figured out the effect, but not the cause, despite the fact that they're clearly part of one and the same vicious circle. Smart people get depressed because they realize the limits of their consciousness. Then, they hyperfocus on the limits of this consciousness, like self-harmers picking at the crust of their wounds. If they happen to be employed in academia, they harness their special powers of attention long enough to write a few monographs, maybe get tenure, and drink themselves to death (and, if they're really smart, they bypass the whole professional academic thing, write one brilliant book, and shoot themselves in the head on the Spanish-French border).

Congratulations, world! Once again, you've proven yourself to be an uninterrupted chain of more of the same, with no risk of transcendence is sight. Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.