Depression and Existential Marxism

David Alexander

Depression, because of its intensely personal effects, as well as a long history of social stigmatization, is persistently diagnosed, treated, and analyzed as a private problem that each of its countless victims must struggle to overcome. However, as a condition that seems common in its chronic form, and nearly ubiquitous in its lesser manifestations, it deserves scrutiny as a social, rather than an individual, issue. Treatment of the condition on a case-by-case basis is not sufficient to combat this insidious condition whose tendrils lurk just beneath the surface of our social fabric. The roots of the problem must be addressed from the wider scope of philosophy, sociology, and other perspectives that examine society as a whole rather than merely a confused amalgam of disconsolate parts. Existentialism confronts the issues of depression and suicide from a purely philosophical standpoint, and in conjunction with Marxist social theory, suggests the potential for social and political movements to alleviate this widespread condition.

Existentialist philosophers, in opposition to mainstream cultural norms, adopt a view of life that does not take for granted its inherent value or desirability, instead basing their thought on the basic postulate that life is absurd and meaningless. Disregarding biological reasons for survival instincts, existentialists examine the worth of life from a rational perspective, a philosophical debate perhaps most succinctly captured in Albert Camus’ famous assertion that suicide is the “only… serious philosophical problem. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy” (Myth of Sisyphus, 3). This question takes a first step in distancing life, suicide, and by extent, depression from their individual and moral implications to reexamine them as social, philosophical, and rational puzzles.

Camus postulates two obvious, immediate responses to life’s absurdity—suicide or hope (Stanford, 3.2), for if there is no real reason to live, the simplest answer is either not to live, or to invent a reason. As Camus positions these two options, the former seems to be the rational recourse, while the latter is the irrational refuge of those who fear confronting reality. He does not attempt to refute the logic of suicide, acknowledging its rational validity in the face of absurdity, yet still treats it as an undesirable outcome that ought to be avoided if possible. However, he refuses to accept an avoidance of suicide that is not grounded in reason, namely hope for or devotion to a cause that transcends life, an external order imposed upon the chaos and absurdity of life. This hope can take the form of religion, rooted in belief in an afterlife to be earned via adherence to a moral code, or devotion to a political or moral cause thought to transcend life merely because it spans more than a single person and their limited lifetime. Camus acknowledges the temptation to resort to the security afforded by hope, but maintains that the fundamental falsehood of this invented and accepted meaning renders it untenable. He argues that the absurdity of life engenders an inherent strain and distress, and to attempt to transcend or ignore absurdity will ultimately lead to despair in the realization that such attempts are futile. Despair, the condition that Camus previously described as precursor to suicide, thus becomes an inevitable outcome of hope, so that “rejecting any hope of resolving the strain is also to reject despair” (Stanford, 3.4). Camus suggests that in accepting the strain intrinsic to life, in struggling with life’s absurdity without hoping to overcome it, we can find happiness, if not meaning. This is where his allusion to Sisyphus materializes. He “urges us to die unreconciled,” without having satisfied our desire for meaning, to imbue our life with vitality and find joy in its unavoidable strain. “The struggle towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Myth of Sisyphus, 123).

Where this solution falls short, however, is in its basis on the assumption that struggle is enough to fend off despair for everyone. Camus betrays his own dogmatic hope, his unwavering faith in reason and the joy that exercising it brings him. Perhaps he may put himself in Sisyphus’ shoes and relish the experience, invigorated by an existence of strain and struggle with no hope of relief, but this argument fails to take into account those for whom a life of struggle does not yield happiness. Camus reaches such a conclusion because he expresses depression as an ultimatum in its final extremity, suicide, confining the varied, changing psychological state to an isolated event. While he succeeds in approaching the issue from a universal, philosophical and social point of view, his complete divorce from the individually varied aspects of depression restricts his ability to provide a comprehensive account. In regarding depression from a purely rational and philosophical angle, Camus confronts the invocation of universal answers for the meaning of life, but is himself forced to compose a universal refutation of these insufficient solutions. In this regard, his argument for a struggle-ridden yet joyful existence is merely a novel argument for universal purpose, not a true acceptance of life’s meaninglessness.

Sartre, on the other hand, offers a more flexible, as well as a more optimistic, existential view of life. Rather than simply regarding despair as the inevitable response to absurdity, Sartre derives a certain freedom from life’s meaninglessness. He argues that in achieving the existential realization that life is meaningless, an individual is liberated from any presupposed or dictated rules, order, or meaning (Jakopovich, 196). Whereas Camus approaches the philosophical question as preceding religion or other proposed contradictions to absurdity, positing these false truths as results of the philosophical inquiry, Sartre grounds the existential question in a post-acculturation context, imagining the existentialist as one who realizes all at once that the order he has been taught or has assumed, is false (Existentialism Is a Humanism). Absurdity crashes down upon this individual, acting simultaneously as the destabilizing and distressing force that Camus illustrates and as a liberating force, the individual finally released from the shackles of conformity and blind faith. It is in this moment that the individual is enabled to take what Sartre terms the “existential act,” to confront the meaninglessness of life by inventing meaning and thereby inventing himself (Existentialism is a Humanism). The individual examines life as it is presently, imagines how he wishes it to be, and takes as his new purpose all actions that lead to that imagined future. This philosophy, as opposed to the cerebral and theoretical discussion by Camus, relies heavily on action, for as the individual confronting absurdity defines for himself a purpose, he must act upon it—failure to do so would imply some force greater than the self-generated purpose, and one who has made the existential realization cannot pretend to believe in a greater governing force than his own will. As Jakopovich explains,

“every act… is the projection of the being for itself toward what is not. The workers’ resignation and conformism, failure to imagine what is presently not and refusal to make a clear choice and stick by it are seen by Sartre as constituting bad faith, which is characterized by the individual lying to him- or herself.” (Jakopovich, 196)

This resignation that Sartre describes in the failure to commit the existential act speaks to the existentialist notion of depression. While true that Sartre labels absurdity a liberating force, both he and Camus recognize its destabilizing and distressing potential, a characteristic that, for Camus, leads directly to despair. It is easy to understand why, upon the erasure of meaning and purpose from the consciousness, an individual may sink to this despair. William Styron describes this feeling as “loss,” first in regard to the proximate cause of a depressive state such as the loss of a loved one, of a job, of a relationship (Styron, 56)—any one of these events can be a destabilizing factor, a loss of order similar to the one experienced in Sartre’s “existential realization.” Styron also mentions loss in allusion to Dante’s Inferno (“I found myself in a dark wood,/For I had lost the right path.”), lauding this account as the most faithful representation of depression (Styron, 82). This feeling of loss, described alternatively as despair by Camus and resignation by Sartre, is what we might recognize as depression, and it is significant that in the existentialist idiom it occurs in the critical juncture between existential realization and existential act. Cognizance of life’s absurdity destroys all pre-conceived notions, leaving in its wake a void where once there was meaning, order, and purpose. Sartre’s belief in the liberating aspect of absurdity and its implications for the power of free will offer relief from this depressed state through the existential act. The reinstatement of purpose, this time all the more legitimate and powerful for its origins in free choice and self-determination, fills that void, lifting the suffering existentialist out of their depression and into an enlightened state of freedom and action. Thus, for Sartre, depression is a transitory state that can be resolved by the existential act, explaining why failure to make this final step is an act of self-betrayal constituting bad faith.

However, Jakopovich’s Marxist principles demonstrate that while Sartre improved upon Camus’ universal framework by relating it to individually varied contexts and encouraging action, he remains too far removed from praxis to provide an effective means of combatting depression and coping with absurdity. Sartre’s liberalism is ignorant of the practical impediments of material conditions, revealing his unavoidably bourgeois perspective, which ascribes complete agency to the individual, both in asserting that the existential realization affords them absolute freedom from conformity, and in assigning them the responsibility of escaping this conformity and devising new meaning, and thereby escaping the depressed state of existentialism without action. What this voluntarist argument fails to acknowledge, Jakopovich points out, is that material conditions, such as the socioeconomic pressures of capitalism, may “effectively force us to consider things in a certain way, to reject autoregulative morality and fail to commit the existential act” (Jakopovich, 197). In other words, when the worker, having realized the absurdity of his existence and imagining a future where he might revolt against it, still chooses to conform, it is not an act of bad faith, but of self-preservation. In the future he imagined, in which he rejected the demands placed upon him by his capitalist society, he is dead. Poverty, starvation, homelessness—these are powerful incentives to resign oneself to an unhappy existence. The biological survival instincts that the existentialists choose to ignore in their philosophical question of life’s worth are all too real. Thus, the worker, while “abstractly free,” is nonetheless incapable of escaping his conformity (Jakopovich, 198). This alienation of agency means that individuals who have experienced the existential realization are barred from making the leap to the existential act, suspending them in limbo between these two steps and prolonging the resultant depression.

Thus the almost universal conditions of modern capitalism apply socioeconomic pressures to enforce conformity, demanding of the people perpetual subscription to the hierarchical order that is integral to the system. Beyond the various detriments to social relations, living conditions, and equality most frequently cited by its opponents, capitalism stifles the possibility for committing the existential act, contributing to the widespread depression that plagues society via the repression of agency. Sartre’s grand proposal of the liberation of absurdity is immaterial given that socioeconomic conditions negate his initial philosophical assignment of complete agency to the individual.

This account is not meant to deter action, to imply that conformity is inevitable. Rather, it suggests that instead of individuals casting off their shackles to conformity and transcending absurdity, the collective must do the same. Popular treatment of depression, from therapy to medication, is no doubt effective, but these are mere ministrations, not true solutions for a problem rooted in social and economic foundations. Of course, the elimination of these universal factors does not constitute an immediate cure for the condition, either, but it facilitates the individual’s process of confronting and escaping depression by removing a serious obstacle to committing the existential act and consummating Sartre’s liberation of absurdity. Modern society must choose to recognize the imposed system of capitalism as a false order, an assignment of universal meaning whose demands of conformity are intolerable. For individuals to have the freedom and the ability to address the absurdity of life, to invent new meaning for their existence and in so doing invent themselves, social change is essential. But for this social change to be possible, a balance of realistic observation and proactive change is necessary. Camus’ diagnosis of life’s absurdity is indispensable, but so is Sartre’s imagination and enactment of a desired future, as well as a Marxist assessment of the material obstacles that lie in the way of that goal.

Works Cited

Aronson, Ronald. “Albert Camus.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 10 Apr. 2017, plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O'Brien, Penguin Books, 2013.

Jakopovich, Daniel. “Sartre's Existential Marxism and the Quest for Humanistic Authenticity.” Hrcak Portal, 21 Sept. 2010, hrcak.srce.hr/file/107921.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” Marxists.org, Meridian Publishing Company, 1989, .marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm.

Styron, William. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. Vintage Books, 1992.