Author Topic: horror loci (and mal du siècle)  (Read 544 times)

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horror loci (and mal du siècle)
« on: January 19, 2019, 11:37:28 am »
I had read somewhere that depression is a very philosophical emotion. While researching the relationship between depression and philosophy, I discovered the term horror loci in Some Ancient Notions of Boredom, a 14 page chapter written by a Peter Toohey.

Other sources found:  Experiences of Depression: Studies in Phenomenology which may be the outcome of Emotional Experience in Depression: A Philosophical Study, which could also be of interest to us, we negative types who suspect that our genuine and valid response to existence has been pathologized and even medicalized.

A book that may be of greater interest to me is by Robert Redeker called Depression and Philosophy: From Mal du siècle to Malady of the Century, published by Academica Press in 2008. 

There is just no tracking a digital copy of this book down, and even books DOT google lacks a table of contents and gives false information about number of pages (it lists as 49 pages there, when it is closer to 200, I suspect).  Anyway, with some stubborn willfulness and luck, I did find a Library Binding hard copy for less than half the price of other listings (on Amazon, Abebooks, ebay, etc).   I have not had to purchase a book of this kind for quite awhile, thanks to Library Genesis, and normally only spend "cash" on math or programming hard copies, with the exception of the Cartwright biography on Schopenhauer that Holden recommended (and was worth the purchase since I have noticed I read hard print copies more carefully than on a screen) or Keeping Ourselves in the Dark by Colin Feltham which is on Depressive Realism.  So, I am going to take a chance with Depression and Philosophy, even though all I know about it is the following:

Quote
This work is, in the words of Dr Norman Freed, a “rich picture of an empty landscape, the depression that is to be engaged to maximally avoid it and its ramifications.” This work explores the philosophical aspects of the plague of depression found throughout the modern world.

Depression, once called melancholy (as in The Anatomy of Melancholy of Robert Burton, of 1621, or closer to us, that “Black Sun of Melancholy” of the suicide Nerval...), according to Robert Redeker — philosopher, teacher, author of half-a-dozen books and many articles and reviews, member of the ‘comité’ of Les Temps Modernes, and recently become a nomadic intellectual, or “scholar-gypsy,” subsequent to Jihadist ‘fatwas’ that were leveled against him after an article he published in the Figaro calling on a ‘terrorist’ Islam to establish its humanist credentials, if there were any to establish — has lost its aristocratic, aesthetic and elitist luster, which it once had in the epoch of Musset’s Confessions, Vigny’s Chatterton, Chateaubriand’s René, Nerval’s El Deschidado, and, of course, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.   Redeker shrewdly, even uncannily, locates a prophetically watershed moment in Flaubert’s contemporaneous Emma Bovary, the first of the “desperate housewives”, unprecedented in the fact that her melancholy had nothing to do with its typical etiology of an artist’s alienation from a bourgeois world (say from Vigny’s Chatterton to Artaud’s “Van Gogh, Suicided by Society”) but rather stemmed from the pressures and frustrations of living in society, as from Civilization and Its Discontents we all suffer from, artists or not (maybe nonartists even more, since they can’t make art out of it), as Freud later was to conceptualize the issue...

As a matter of fact in a previous book (Les Nouvelles figures de l’homme, 2004, Le Bord de l’eau; Eng. trans.: The New Face of Humanity, 2007, Academica Press) Redeker had explored the etiology of such common conditions of today as stress and nervousness (divorced from any reasonable cause, or, visibly, any cause at all, as in anxiety as opposed to fear), connecting them with a general ambiance of dysphoria or asthenia fostered by a cultural and political climate of derogation and meaninglessness — for instance one that made mere biological survival (shades of Agamben!), lamentably the only purpose left: life only for the sake of living; we like the slaves, famously of Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic” who have chosen living on over living with dignity, if at risk of death; this providing: “...a soil fertile for nervousness....Everywhere we meet men and women on hot coals, as if being shocked by wires and batteries....The nervous person of today is...representative of dehumanization” (p. 56)

Equally if not more widespread and spreading than the ‘manic’ nervousness and stress outlined above, melancholy or depression today, as conceived in Redeker’s book, Depression and Philosophy, may be the other side of this sad psychological seesaw of a syndrome (as in ‘manic-depressive’), with its roots in the same soil, if the flagrant oxymoron may be allowed of a soil for rootlessness; depression rising from our being ‘starved’ of any meaningful tie, connection, bond to ourselves, a world or a cosmos, “A malady attacking these ties renders human life impossible. The ties which allow habitation are like ropes and cables in mountain climbing and at sea: when they’re unloosened, we are loosened from ourselves, from others, and we’re done for.  A feeling of falling is frequent in the collapse which is depression.” (p. 11). Our pandemic depression is also conceived of here as having been accompanied and even facilitated by a corresponding derogation of philosophy from its traditional ‘task’ of providing a stable basis and essence for human existence. However, as with Love the one who inflicted the wound may be in the best position to heal it; or, in the words of the mad, but strangely sane Hölderlin: “there where the danger is greatest, rescue is nearest.”

“Blissfully free of jargon, neo-Marxist cant and crepuscular morbidity rather clean and hard and intellectually bracing… I truly recommend this study.” Professor Louis Glober, AUCAD

Other notes:

Mal Du Siecle “sickness of the century” 

Happiness at being sad ("bonheur d'être triste")

related to Weltschmerz (world-weariness)

also, the sort of thing which an assembly line worker may suffer ...

In a psychological sense, depression (or melancholy) may resemble boredom or ennui. But they are not really the same thing.  Depression and melancholy, since they are to be distinguished from boredom, are not to be the subject of this paper.
(Some Ancient Notions of Boredom)

I am wondering just how much of what we "moderns" describe as "depression" is really just the basic "boredom" which Schopenhauer refers to when he speaks of the pendulum swinging to and fro between pain and boredom.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2019, 05:03:38 pm by Kaspar the Jaded »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Nation of One

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The Eradication of Fear Through Philosophy
« Reply #1 on: January 19, 2019, 09:04:25 pm »
A couple notes from Some Ancient Notions of Boredom:

Novelty can distract from this fear, but the real cure rests in the eradication of fear through philosophy. Boredom can spoil a whole life.  The invasive taedium [from taedeō (“I am disgusted”)] which produced the horror loci outlined above is one example.  The emotion outlined in Ep. Mor. 24 seems stronger again.  It can be so powerful as to lead to suicide.

The passage, Moral Letters to Lucilius : Letter 24 : Passage 26, which Peter Toohey quotes in Latin, translated into English in full:

Others also are moved by a satiety of doing and seeing the same things, and not so much by a hatred of life as because they are cloyed with it. We slip into this condition, while philosophy itself pushes us on, and we say; "How long must I endure the same things? Shall I continue to wake and sleep, be hungry and be cloyed, shiver and perspire? There is an end to nothing; all things are connected in a sort of circle; they flee and they are pursued. Night is close at the heels of day, day at the heels of night; summer ends in autumn, winter rushes after autumn, and winter softens into spring; all nature in this way passes, only to return. I do nothing new; I see nothing new; sooner or later one sickens of this, also." There are many who think that living is not painful, but superfluous. Farewell.


Horror loci has become so severe that it influences all portions of life.  The victim is left with but one alternative: There are many who think that living is not painful, but superfluous. Farewell.

Peter Toohey writes that this can only be suicide.


*** cloy = "distasteful through overabundance" ***
« Last Edit: January 19, 2019, 09:18:26 pm by Kaspar the Jaded »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Re: horror loci (and mal du siècle)
« Reply #2 on: March 21, 2019, 07:23:07 pm »
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It’s a disconcerting concept. It’s certainly easier to think of the mentally disordered as lunatics running about with bizarre, inexplicable beliefs than to imagine them coping with a piece of reality that a “normal” person can’t handle. The notion that we routinely hide from the truth about ourselves and our world is not an appealing one, though it may help to explain the human tendency to ostracize the abnormal. Perhaps the reason we are so eager to reject any departure from this fiction we call “normality” is because we have grown dependent on our comfortable delusions; without them, there is nothing to insulate us from the harsh cold of reality.

from The Total Perspective Vortex by Christopher S. Putnam
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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Re: horror loci (and mal du siècle)
« Reply #3 on: April 11, 2020, 08:23:41 pm »
RESEARCH:  This may be related to the discourse of the subjective experience variously called "boredom," "ennui," "acedia," "melancholia," "mal du siècle" and "horror loci."

With the work of philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Martin Heidegger forming the theoretical basis, and Ludwig Tieck’s Romantic novel, William Lovell, as the literary source, this paper addresses the following questions: What is boredom and what functions does it perform for those who experience it? Is time spent in boredom always a waste of time or can it be existentially significant? Can the mood of boredom become habit forming or addictive? The argument presented here suggests that the answer is yes, boredom can become an addiction, for a number of reasons. Boredom is a distraction from deeper sources of suffering. Boredom can function ideologically, providing a rationalization for human behaviors that seem to have no meaning. Boredom is similar to nostalgia, since it often functions as a means to escape from the present. Remaining in states of shallow boredom can prevent slipping into the more existentially significant form of profound boredom. Profound boredom is the type of boredom that can awaken us to our lives and force us to reckon with ourselves. This is a challenge, and to avoid that challenge we can become subconsciously addicted to the shallower form of boredom ...


Addiction to Boredom in Arthur Schopenhauer, Martin Heidegger and William Lovell, an Epistolary Novel by Ludwig Tieck by Tony Lack

____________________________________________
Another related observation from In coronavirus quarantine, use boredom as a window to wisdom:

All the canonical philosophers of boredom have believed that boredom was eventually edifying – a painful experience that, like mortality itself, educates and enhances the mind. Because we’re all addicts of our own desires for stimulation, the therapy here may be hard. There may be withdrawal, and the DSM and medical models of clinical addiction won’t help. This is philosophical work.
« Last Edit: April 11, 2020, 08:47:12 pm by mike »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~