Heidegger as Companion to a Depressive Episode
I won’t bore you with the reasons why, but earlier this year I started reading Heidegger’s Being and Time and listening to a lecture series by Hubert Dreyfus that helped me to decode it. While I thought I was reading this for more-or-less academic purposes, the book and the commentary also served as my companion through a fairly deep depressive episode — and the journey out of it. I found in Heidegger both a meaningful guide to navigate depression and a positive reinterpretation of what depression can be — namely, a state loaded with possibilities for a more authentic way of living.
Coping
Heidegger’s central concern in Being and Time is what he refers to as ‘the meaning of being.’ While this language makes it sound esoteric, at its core, I interpret this as ‘how is it that the things that exist for us exist for us?’ or more prosaically ‘how is it that anything becomes intelligible?’
His starting point is a ground-breaking critique of a cornerstone of modern philosophy: the distinction between subjects, objects, and world. For Heidegger, our uniquely human form of existence is defined by its always-already having been thrown into a world and forced to engage with it in some way. We are not imagined, from this perspective, to be primarily constituted as distinct thinking ‘subjects’ (Descartes’ cogito) with mental content, but primarily and in almost all situations, as being-in-the-world, engaging with the world.
Likewise, objects are not primarily encountered as most philosophy and science have conceived them. In the first instance, we don’t encounter objects as entities with distinct properties (what Heidegger calls being as ‘occurrentness’ or ‘present-at-hand’) but rather they are encountered in the ways that we engage (or, to use Dreyfus’ expression, ‘skilfully cope’) with them (what Heidegger calls being as ‘availableness’ or ‘ready-to-hand’).
To illustrate, let’s take one of Heidegger’s favourite examples — we might look at a hammer and, when asked what it is, describe its present-at-hand properties: that it has a certain volume or mass, that it is composed of certain materials. But here we would not be describing the primary mode in which we experience hammers and engage with them — which is, as something graspable, and something useful to varying degrees— for hammering in nails, or to break things, or as a weapon, and so on. Heidegger’s contention — and perhaps one of his key contributions to philosophy — is that the latter (the ready-to-hand characteristics of entities like hammers) is the primary basis from which our world becomes intelligible. All of the present-at-hand properties (which previous philosophy and science had taught us was what they ‘really are’) are derivative abstractions — at least for us, as beings-in-the-world.
An interesting correlate of this ontological primacy of the ready-to-hand over the present-at-hand, is that it implies that life is always-already meaningful. When we encounter being as ready-to-hand, we always do so assuming a kind of instrumental logic — we engage with things for some purpose. That purpose is given meaning within a cultural matrix, which Heidegger refers to as a ‘referential totality.’ One only engages with hammers as hammers because one lives within a cultural context that gives them a certain function. And when one hammers, it is always with some purpose in mind, which, in turn, presupposes other, superordinate purposes. Perhaps one hammers to drive in nails, and one does that to repair one’s house, and one does that to ensure a comfortable environment in which one’s family can live, and one does that because one invests meaning in being a provider for one’s family. The way we engage with (and thus apprehend and experience) being always assumes a ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ that animates all of our activity. The ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ might not be something we consciously adopt. The point is, rather, that our primary experience of reality as ready-to-hand manifests that which our life is in service to. Our activity is always-already manifesting the stance we have taken on our being.
I found something comforting about this lens for interpreting being and life’s meaning. The caricatured version of existential philosophy is that it assumes life to be meaningless, but here in Heidegger, that is clearly not the case. Heidegger seemed to be spelling out how life is encountered in the first instance as inescapably meaningful — though it may be a more modest standard of meaning than traditional religious and moral discourses have (perhaps unfairly) primed us to expect.
For a long time, I had felt a vague dissatisfaction with my life as a researcher. I felt concerned that it didn’t seem to add up to anything, and that it wasn’t giving me enough of a sense of purpose. But perhaps if I adjusted my expectations and accepted that just in ‘getting on with things’ I was always-already manifesting some standard of meaning, perhaps this could give me the courage to persist. It was meaningful enough to animate my life up until this point. Perhaps I could just keep going…
The One
Since we take a stand on our being through engagement with ready-to-hand entities that are ‘out there,’ our existence is, in a very fundamental sense, being-in-the-world. Within that world, the existence of others is presupposed. Our culture, other people, and their forms of engagement give meaning and coherence to equipment and to our modalities of getting on with things. Moreover, when we take up equipment and make use of it, it is almost always with some other person or people in mind — when I write this, for example, it presupposes you, a reader, however vaguely defined you may be for me.
Where this all becomes a little more unsettling, however, is in Heidegger’s discussions of ‘the one’ (in German, das Man, also translated as ‘the they’). When we comport our activity in relation to others, Heidegger suggests we always do so with some awareness of how our activity differs from others’. In the most general sense, this concern for our distance from normal, average behaviour, is expressed as ‘the one’: that is, for the most part, our everyday activity (and its instrumental logics, its ‘for-the-sake-ofs’) expresses what is normal within our culture — we simply ‘do what one does,’ in service to goals that ‘one should’ pursue. Even when our behaviour might be considered exceptional (which for most people, in their most everyday, ordinary activity, it isn’t), this exceptional behaviour is only understood as such through comparison to ‘what one ordinarily does.’
‘The one’ is regarded as an existential structure for Heidegger. Unescapable, it renders all of our activity coherent. If we lacked any reference to the normal mode of engagement and the normal standards to strive for, nothing could make sense to us: our activity would dissolve into a kind of schizophrenic miasma of meaningless gestures. Cultural norms are thus part of what makes things intelligible to us.
The problem, which is fairly easy to discern, is that in its extreme form, taking up ‘the one’ as the basis for our action, as what provides us our ‘for-the-sake-of-which’, appears as a kind of inauthentic conformity — a fleeing from possibilities to express our unique potential and a retreat into the most banal form of averageness.
I found these references to ‘the one’ daunting. Yes, I could just get on with my work — and perhaps it could be meaningful, if only I accepted a fairly lesser standard of what it means for work to have meaning. But was this meaning really my own? I’ve always had a nagging sense that my work is not for me — that I have only persisted in my career because it’s what other people told me I was supposed to want (and nothing better had presented itself). But as Deleuze says, ‘when you’re trapped inside the dreams of the Other, you’re fucked.’ Isn’t there something remarkably unacceptable about just going along with things and never really deciding what it is you want your life to be? Or does the existential status of ‘the one’ (the fact that it grants being its intelligibility) make this inescapable?
Anxiety
Heidegger thinks the answer to this second question is no. There is something within the structure of our existence that makes it possible to forge a different relationship with ‘the one’ and live a more authentic life. This possibility is made visible to us in breakdowns in the functioning of ‘the one’ and our ‘for-the-sake-of-which,’ which Heidegger discusses initially in relation to anxiety.
To be clear, Heidegger’s use of the term anxiety doesn’t closely align with that of modern psychology. To me, it sounds a lot more like depression. It describes a state in which one might be able to get on with things — one can see the links of instrumentality that make being as ready-to-hand intelligible (the hammer exists in order to drive in nails, for example). But one has lost a clear for-the-sake-of-which — a sense of what it’s all in service to, why it matters, why one should bother.
Heidegger isn’t entirely clear about what precipitates a state of anxiety, but he is clear about what anxiety does. In that moment, the referential totality (organised by ‘the one’) that gives the world its coherence appears to us like broken equipment. We perceive it now, as if for the first time, precisely because we are no longer fully immersed in it. Life, which was always-already implicitly meaningful suddenly has its meaning called into question: and in questioning it, we start to see the structures that make meaning and ‘mattering’ possible.
Depression is often described as the inability to see a future for oneself — and in Heideggerian anxiety this sense of a dislodged future certainly comes to the fore. In anxiety (and a related state, which Heidegger refers to as being-towards-death), we become aware that the futures we strive towards are ungrounded (being based in no rational or religious necessity), are vulnerable (potentially unsettled by a host of events that might take our possibilities away), and never fully arrive since they are ultimately oriented towards unattainable identities (and if they ever did arrive, we’d have lost our possibilities anyway — we’d have gotten what we wanted — so what next?). Moreover, the finality of death means that all of the possibilities we push into are finite — we don’t get an infinite number of chances to be whatever we want. We have to engage with an awareness that we operate within a limited temporal horizon.
All of this came to a head for me this year, when a series of personal setbacks pummelled me into one depressive episode after another. Long-term doubts I’d already harboured about my career trajectory became impossible to ignore. My research fellowship ended, and I was forced to start exploring other options. Yet, every time I applied for a new job — one that I felt I could at least live with — I was rejected, often on the grounds that I wasn’t a good fit. I began to wonder whether I could be a good fit anywhere. Perhaps my possibilities were exhausted? I could imagine no future for myself that could give any order to my everyday activity. I’d try to get on with things, but had no idea why. I’d feel vaguely called towards something, yet my past provided no basis for whatever it was I was called for. Ready-to-hand possibilities seemed protracted and my future was so vaguely defined as to be meaningless. I felt like I was drifting on still open waters, seeing only more horizon whichever way I’d turn and however far I’d go.
Authenticity
Yet, for Heidegger, anxiety (for us, depression) is not hopeless. In fact, he suggests it has the potential to be joyful. The pain in anxiety occurs mostly when we flee from it — try to cover it up, seek refuge in ‘the one’, or grip at things in the hope that they might provide us the meaning that we feel slipping away between our fingers. If we can embrace anxiety, Heidegger suggests it holds out the possibility of a more authentic mode of being.
In anxiety, we get a hint of what we fundamentally are — which is a temporal being defined by its nullity.
Our being is temporal because it has a tripartite structure that maps onto the structure of time. We are always actively engaged with what is ready-to-hand (present); we do so on the basis of equipment, skills, and meanings that are always inherited from our cultural context (past); and we does so for-the-sake-of taking some stand on our being — working towards some named or unnamed identity (future).
Whether we examine our past, present, or future, our existence never has the definite structure of some fixed entity — which is what Heidegger means by describing it as a nullity. Our present involves picking up a finite set of options and nullifying other possibilities; the past we take up in our engagement we cannot choose, has no rational or theological basis, and cannot be comprehended in its totality (there’s always too much background to ‘get behind’); and the future we work towards with our for-the-sake-of-which never finally arrives.
In recognizing and embracing this nullity, Heidegger holds out the promise of authenticity and perhaps even joy. In embracing nullity we find possibilities to manifest in our activity that which we are — that is, a being whose identity is not fixed. After having our worlds fall apart in the state of anxiety, we recognise that we can be more than what ‘the one’ hands down to us. Instead of just ‘doing what one does’ in a state of dull conformity, one can attend to the unique features of their present situation and explore its novel possibilities.
If our for-the-sake-of has been dislodged (as the state of anxiety/depression implies), we can explore new ones — taking up the youthful enthusiasm for a world that has not been pinned down once and for all. This is not to say that we simply float around without any identity at all, but rather that when we recognise our nullity, we become open to the possibility that we can let go of identities that are no longer bringing us joy, and press into new possibilities. Since the structure of our being is such that it has no fixed content, our being is not exhausted when our projects are — as long as we continue to live, there will always be new possibilities in the world for us.
When we take up something new, we do have to commit to it in order to explore its possibilities in all of their richness. But with the experience of having let go of our for-the-sake-of in the moment of anxiety/depression, we do so with a new lightness — a recognition that we might have to give it all up again at some point in the future.
It’s never easy to find joy during times of uncertainty. Losing my sense of direction in life (or perhaps becoming more aware of the fact that I never really had one) means every day is full of ups and downs. But reading Heidegger during this time has been surprisingly refreshing. It has opened me up to engaging more fully with the unique features of my present situation. I become a little more aware of my social conditioning and try to challenge it where I can, in the interests of exploring new possible ways of being (in that way, even chance everyday events — a random conversation with a stranger — seem ripe with possibilities). Now, when I explore possible new career trajectories, I’m less filled with the dread of an incoherent pathway, and more with the excitement of being something that I have not been before.
I also find myself diving into my past. I seek to uncover what I have tried to be, often at levels than run deeper than ‘my career.’ Even though I may have failed until now, I see in those strivings fragments of possible futures that are worth salvaging. I pick up those values and dispersed for-the-sake-ofs — those things that have animated my life — and think about what they might mean now, in this situation, and what new futures they might push me towards.
Some might question the merits of taking life advice from a card-carrying Nazi (yes, it’s complicated, but Heidegger was this, too). But there’s something unshakably hopeful in a philosophy that can see generative potential in the very depths of depression. It offers a corrective to a society where everything is oriented towards covering depression up (whether by pills, diet, exercise, or challenging ‘negative’ thoughts). What if depression, although strictly speaking ‘negative,’ is not necessarily a state to be avoided, but one that prompts us to deeply question our conditioning, our values, and goals — the very meaning of our lives — and in the process opens up new ways of being? What if it’s only the winter that precedes the spring? And what if in covering it up we miss out on something fundamental about what it means to be human?
