March 30, 2003

It's raining softly on Peapod's roof today, and from my office window I can see the shorn and muddy bank where the creek has, finally, receded. For many days, the water table was at the level of our basement slab, and the little 9" by 9" not-quite-a-proper-sump hole filled with still water. A little utility pump, plugged into a basement light fixture so that it pumped whenever we turned on the lights, bravely sucked up the sump water and spat it out into the backyard through a length of cheap yellow hose. Whereupon the not-quite-a-proper-sump hole filled up again, and the cycle repeated. Yesterday the sump finally emptied, and stayed that way. I suppose this is what it means to live in a valley.

Modern anti-depressants must be true lifesavers for some. Now that I've stopped my own pharmaceutical regimen, I can appreciate what they can and can't do. First: they can't make you happy. Happiness is, I think, an additive quality, and by that I mean it comes from activity, and fulfillment of a personal, inner nature. If you sit on the couch and watch TV eighteen hours a day and drink beer and get fat and take anti-depressants, you won't be happy.

The positive action of anti-depressants, however, will keep you from killing yourself one day because you have realized that all you've done for fifteen years is sit on the couch and watch TV eighteen hours a day and drink beer and get fat. That positive action, I have discovered, is the muting of obsession and anxiety. The fat couch-sitter who suddenly contemplates the black hole of a wasted life can only do so if he retains a kind of conscience, which can instruct and admonish by preserving a set of standards for successful living. These standards are enforced by a wide range of internal psychological mechanisms, which include the aforementioned anxiety, but also guilt, fear, shame, and so forth.

Contrary to modern self-help dogma, anxiety, guilt, fear and shame do have their place in life. Sometimes they are signals from the deep soul, intended as motivation of sorts, an admonishment, or a corrective. These days, however, such signals are regarded as blasphemous by the cultic priests of self-esteem. Because You Are OK Just The Way You Are, these emotions and sensations have become a symptom of psychological ill health, and in keeping with our Western view of illness in general, we now have a multi-billion dollar industry devoted to quashing these symptoms in the most convenient manner possible. Thus, while you cannot truly achieve happiness sitting on the couch drinking beer and basking in the phosphorous glow of the television, you can avoid the creeping anxiety that comes from doing so...just by taking this little pill.

That's a generalization, of course...there are, no doubt, some people who aren't bothered by such inactivity, experience no anxiety as a result of it, and need no medicating beyond what they get from six- and twelve- packs or their equivalent. But I'm not one of those people.

Which is not to say that I don't have my own equivalent of couch-sitting and beer-swilling passivity...or that I haven't, in fact, spent a good deal of time doing exactly that. Unfortunately, such inactivity bothers me, and this, for a long time, provided the motivation for a great deal of self-medication. I have an excellent physiology for that sort of thing: every drug I've ever taken has done exactly what it was supposed to do. Good old dependable neurochemistry, trained from a very early Dexedrine-popping age to respond enthusiastically to whatever extra-fun chemicals are tossed into the soup.

Despite my blather about brain chemistry, I remain not entirely unconvinced of the reality of the human soul. For me this doesn't necessitate an eternal hierarchy of gods, angels, or places to put all of our souls between their uses here on earth. Of the soul, Aristotle said

. . . [it] does not exist without a body and yet is not itself a kind of body. For it is not a body, but something which belongs to a body, and for this reason exists in a body, and in a body of such-and-such a kind...

For him a soul is a causal agent, the capacity by which living things engage in the activities that are characteristic of living things. Furthermore, Aristotle's "soul" is intimately connected with potential and actuality. As analogies, consider the following: a child who does not speak English is an example of "first potentiality;" a silent adult who speaks English is an example of "second potentiality/first actuality;" and an adult speaking or actively understanding English is an example of "second actuality."

Aristotle defines a soul as

...the first actuality of a natural body that is potentially alive.

In other words, a soul is the capacity of a living thing to engage in the activities that are characteristic of its particular kind of living thing. Aristotle--being the sort of person who was keen on organization--further outlines three types of soul functions: growth and nutrition, (which includes reproduction); locomotion and perception; and intellect (or thought).

This, in turn, gives us three corresponding degrees of soul: the nutritive soul (plants); the sensitive soul (all animals); and the rational soul (human beings).

These degrees of soul are all nested, so that each higher level of soul contains the ones below it. Thus, a plant's soul fulfills its function by enabling the growth and reproduction of the plant; the animal's soul by this and physical motion from place to place and the perception of its surroundings; the human soul by all these things and engaging in all of those activities which are the product of the uniquely human capabilities of intellect and thought.

Elsewhere, Aristotle defines the ideal of happiness as

...a bringing of the soul to the act according to the habit of the best and most perfect virtue, that is, the virtue of the speculative intellect, borne out by easy surroundings and enduring to the length of days.

In other words, he felt that happiness was best achieved by pure, uninterrupted use of the unique faculties of humanity, that is, reason, or intellect. Which is very nice if you're Aristotle, who could afford to sit around all day thinking about things. Most humans, however, don't have that luxury, and for them Aristotle prescribes living in accordance with "the moral virtues" as a route to a less perfect but still acceptable sort of happiness. There is also the matter of having sufficient external prosperity--such as health, good birth, satisfactory children, food, shelter, and freedom from suffering--which is also very conducive to happiness.

All of that, along with the "moral virtues" (of which there are many, all very cleverly organized by The Philosopher), is beside my particular point, which is simply this: just as Aristotle felt that the human soul was the potential motivating force that leads to actual fulfillment, so, too, do I believe that thwarted potential has the capacity to produce actual misery in the individual.

What anti-depressants do, I believe, is short-circuit the mechanism by which the soul "tells" us that its potential activities are being thwarted. The problem is that our modern culture has very little room for this kind of self-communication, because our definitions of happiness have come to be based upon the things that Aristotle posited as mere prerequisites for happiness. Health, good birth, satisfactory children, food, shelter, and freedom from suffering may be necessary for happiness, but are not happiness itself. Therefore, when well-off, successful people are depressed, we posit a condition of ill-health called "depression," and treat the symptoms of soul communication--anxiety, guilt, shame--as symptoms of an illness. Instead of listening to the soul, we chemically gag it.

My generalized anxiety is almost entirely due to the persistent, undeniable feeling that my potential is not being actualized. My fear also comes from this knowledge, and shame follows close on its heels, in the form of a sense of failure, the feeling that I should be able to actualize myself more fully, and that I spend too much time wasting time that could be better spent.

This has been true for my entire life. And while I won't go so far as to suggest that every person suffering from "depression" suffers for the same reasons as I do, I suspect that large numbers of the diagnosed do. We have reached a level of technology unprecedented in human history. Until now, when society was sufficiently intolerable, society changed. A group of human souls can only be thwarted for so long before something gives, and that something has always been the constricting social structures or traditions that were impeding its natural activities.

No longer. Now we have the capacity to remove the unpleasant symptoms of a thwarted soul, to mute the internal clamor of oppression that expresses itself as obsession and anxiety. We have the capacity to allow people to tolerate the intolerable simply by taking a pill. Therefore: society forces its change upon the individual, instead of the other way around. We have soul-medications for all stages of life: stimulants for "hyperactive" children, so that they conform to the school system; anti-depressants for those of every other age group, allowing them to conform more fully to the demands of the workweek, information overload, and the other stresses that are now characteristic of modern life.

Obviously, I don't think that this is a good thing at all. The peculiar intersection of secularity, high technology, and capitalism has produced a new mechanism for dealing with the dissatisfactions of the soul by suppression, rather than motivated introspection. I fear that it will prove to be a poor substitute.

It's still raining...a slow, steady, light downpour that's somewhere between mist and real droplets, so that it almosts floats to the ground, gently soaking the leaves that got buried under snow in December before I could rake them. Soon leaf mold will sprout with humid enthusiasm, which is just fabulous for me and the overactive histamine factory on my face that I call a nose. I'm going to go into the basement now, and see if I need to plug the little utility pump back in. I must keep the water outside, where it belongs.