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• February 11th, 2021

  It seems interesting to consider the relationship between Depression and meditation from this perspective, the way they can both be internalizing, "alienating" in a sense, detaching.

  Actually this book has a take on Depression that I found fascinating, because it's formulated as a sympathetic critique of David Foster Wallace's philosophy, as expressed most clearly in his commencement speech This Is Water.

  I loved DFW very much since I was in high school. Then in university, while I myself knew struggles with Depression, I read his short story The Depressed Person which is remarkably bleak and honest, especially about how the depressed person can know that they are burdening their friends, that they are in some way being very selfish, and how this deepens the Depression even further: this recursion of dark self-centered alienation.

  Then DFW develops a kind of philosophy of becoming happy by deciding to see everything as sacred, in a way... which didn't help against his own clinical Depression. And Dreyfus sees this philosophy as fatally flawed, for basically phenomenological reasons related to the perception of salience.

  If the phenomenal aspect is damaged, like in Depression, effort and training in virtue will be difficult and unrewarding.

• February 25th, 2021

  Then there's the book 📙 Experiences of Depression by Matthew Ratcliffe, which seems to show Depression as a phenomenological condition that's in a way the opposite of the playful naïve distinctiveness that I've described as the essential quality of open-world fantasy games.

• March 1st, 2021

  Depression involves a change in the kinds of possibility that are integral to experience, amounting to a diminishment of freedom. *

• 📙 Experiences of Depression

  You are sitting in front of your computer with the aim of writing something. You need to get it done soon, and you also want to get it done. So you prepare to start writing, but it doesn’t happen. Instead, you check your email, attend to other less pressing tasks, or resort to distracting yourself with the Internet. On one account, you lack motivation; loss of enticing possibilities in relation to task x is loss of the motivation to perform task x. Nevertheless, you really do want to complete the paper, you envisage a future state of affairs where it is complete as better than one where it is not, and you experience an increasingly pronounced sense of bodily agitation as you waste hour after hour. Sometimes, it just does not happen—the situation does not draw you in. Without any enticement, what remains of motivation is insufficient to spur you into action. Now, think of a world that offers only this kind of experience—an appreciation that things need to be done, a sense of being unable to act, and an unpleasant, bodily feeling of tension and urgency. It would amount to a kind of ‘agitated’ Depression.

  I will offer a tentative account of another kind of Narrative disturbance, one that I think occurs in at least some cases of Depression. Here, the person needs a Narrative, principally one about where she is going and how she is going to tackle various tasks, but she cannot formulate one because there is no sense that the future could be any different. However, what results is not an absence of Narrative thought. Instead, there is a cacophony of disordered thoughts as she struggles to form a coherent Story that cannot take shape. Thoughts go round and round without any efficacy, like a car engine that is out of gear.

  Depression involves a change in the kinds of possibility that are integral to experience, amounting to a diminishment of freedom.

  Although this ‘world’ or ‘sense of reality and belonging’ is not completely lost in Depression, I will argue in the following chapters that it is profoundly altered—the person does not feel fully ‘part of the world’ and everything seems somehow different.

• 📙 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

  Depression, likewise, can rob our affordances of their worth: to be depressed is to no longer see a wide range of actions as worth pursuing.