Part 2.3  How depressing the subject of our corrupted human condition has been

With regard to the DEPRESSION, the following are some examples of how excruciatingly depressing it has been for virtually everyone if they allowed their minds to think truthfully about the world’s and their own soul-corrupted condition while it wasn’t able to be explained and understood—and therefore, as I will describe shortly, why, generation after generation, almost everyone during their early adolescence had no choice but to resign themselves to living in determined denial of the unbearably depressing issue of our species’ and of their own soul-destroyed condition.

This is a description of how depressed the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes became when he confronted the horror of his and the human race’s corrupted condition: ‘So serious are the doubts into which I have been thrown…​that I can neither put them out of my mind nor see any way of resolving them. It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top’ (Second Meditation, 1641; tr. J. Cottingham, 1984).

And this is a member of the public’s description of the extreme depression he experienced when he tried to confront the human condition: ‘I felt the worst fear I have ever known. Fear doesn’t even go close to expressing it. What do you suppose you do when you find the most fearful thing you’ll ever encounter is yourself’ (see par. 1185 of FREEDOM). Yes, when in a rare moment of perfect clarity a person sees the contrast between how all-loving, all-harmonious and all-sensitive our species once was, which our instinctive soul has the memory of, and how horrifically soul-corrupted, angry, egocentric and alienated they and virtually everyone else now is, the contrast is so great that, without the redeeming explanation for our corrupted condition, its revelation has been ‘fearful[ly]’, unbearably, even suicidally depressing.

Carl Jung (1875–1961)

And this is the deadly accurate description the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung gave of the ‘rare and shattering experience’ that could occur in moments when a person dropped their mental guard and saw their seemingly ‘absolute evil’ condition that they couldn’t explain and understand: ‘When it [the shadow of our corrupted condition] appears…​it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil’ (Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1959; tr. R. Hull, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9/2, p.10).

And the renowned German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s comment about the aphorism ‘Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away’ (Elective Affinities, 1809) is entirely understandable while we couldn’t understand ourself, explain the human condition, know why we corrupted our soul, know that we were actually good and not bad!

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘analysis on the nature of despair is one of the best accounts on the subject’ (Wikipedia; see www.wtmsources.com/137)—with ‘the nature of despair’ being as close as the reviewer could go in referring to the worse-than-death, suicidal depression that the subject of the human condition has historically caused humans, but which Kierkegaard managed to give such an honest account of in his aptly titled 1849 book, The Sickness Unto Death: ‘the torment of despair is precisely the inability to die [and end the torture of our previously unexplained human condition]…​that despair is the sickness unto death, this tormenting contradiction [of our ‘good and evil’, human condition-stricken lives], this sickness in the self; eternally to die, to die and yet not to die’ (tr. A. Hannay, 1989, p.48 of 179).

So when the great English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about the unbearably depressing subject of the human condition in his (also) aptly titled 1885 poem No Worst, There Is None, his words, ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’, did not exaggerate the depth of depression almost everyone faced if they allowed their mind to think about the human condition while it was still to be ‘fathomed’/​understood/​answered.

As mentioned earlier in paragraphs 28-29, in 1988 TIME magazine published a deeply reflective article about Alan Paton’s favourite pieces of literature in which Paton said, ‘I would like to have written one of the greatest poems in the English language—William Blake’s “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright”, with that verse that asks in the simplest words the question which has troubled the mind of man—both believing and non believing man—for centuries: “When the stars threw down their spears / And watered heaven with their tears / Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the lamb make thee?”’ (TIME, 25 Apr. 1988). As I pointed out, Blake’s poem (from his book Songs Of Innocence and Of Experience) raises that fundamental question involved in being human of how could the mean, cruel, indifferent, selfish and aggressive ‘dark side’ of human nature—represented by the ‘Tiger’—be both reconcilable with and derivative of the same force that created ‘the lamb’ in all its innocence?

The cover of William Blake’s 1794 Songs Of
Innocence and Of Experience: Shewing the
Two Contrary States of the Human Soul

The Tyger by William Blake, from
Songs Of Innocence and Of Experience

Having now explained the underlying depression in human life, it is appropriate to refer to Blake’s extraordinarily truthful poem again, in particular to the poem’s opening lines, ‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night’, because we can now understand that they refer to humans’ great fear and resulting determined denial of the unbearably depressing issue of our seemingly highly imperfect, ‘fallen’ or corrupted, soul-destroyed state or condition—a subject we have consciously repressed and yet one that has been ‘burning bright, in the forests of the night’ of our deepest awareness. As Blake so honestly described in his poem the horrific depression that the issue of the human condition has caused: ‘what’ ‘eye’ ‘could’ be expected to look at the ‘fearful’ subject, ‘what’ ‘hand’ would ‘dare seize the fire’ that ‘could twist the sinews of thy heart?’; the terrible ‘hammer’, the ‘furnace’ in ‘thy brain’, no one can possibly ‘dare its deadly terrors clasp!’ Again, the very heart of the unbearably depressing issue lies in the line, ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’—a rhetorical question disturbing in its insinuation that we monstrously mentally upset or neurotic, and horrifically soul or psyche-repressed or psychotic humans are wholly unrelated to ‘the lamb’ in all its innocence!

As Paton truthfully identified, the great, fundamental, underlying question that ‘has troubled the mind of man’ has always been, are humans part of God’s ‘work’, part of ‘his’ purpose and design, or aren’t we? As was explained earlier in paragraph 60, the Integrative Meaning of life is the Negative Entropy-driven development of order of matter where selfless consideration for the maintenance of the larger wholes is needed to hold the larger wholes together—which, as I pointed out is a critically important truth that hasn’t been able to be admitted while we couldn’t truthfully explain our divisively behaved, competitive, selfish and aggressive human condition. In fact, as I pointed out, Integrative Meaning has been so unbearably condemning of us divisively behaved humans that we made it part of a realm unrelated to our Earthly existence by deifying it as a ‘God’. So yes, underneath our brave facades has lurked the depression of being unable to answer the fundamental questions of why haven’t we lived in accordance with Integrative Meaning, why haven’t we been part of God’s ‘work’, are we good or are we evil?