It didn't have to be H20 before it was named thus, but once someone used it as a name for water, it became a necessary truth "after the fact". — schopenhauer1

I think I follow so far. That's why, in my example, I talked about a specific village who named the substance in their pond.

That water is H₂O is something we discovered - it is a posteriori, and synthetic.

Kripke shows that, that water is H₂O is true in all possible situations; that is, if we discover or stipulate a substance that is phenomenologically the same as water, but with some alternate chemical structure, it is not water.

Since it water is H₂O is true in all possible situations, it is necessary.

So, that water is H₂O is a necessary, a posteriori fact. Necessary but synthetic.

Hence, not all necessary facts are synthetic. — Banno

I wonder to what extent this bears on Kant. You've had your hands full discussing Kripke with people who want to discuss Kripke, but not on Kripke's terms. In threads specifically discussing Kripke, their's seems like a bad approach. But once you leave Kripke's province....I've seen you say, elsewhere, that you think Kripke is confusing metaphysics and grammar. And so...

(the above being, largely, a self-serving apology for commenting on Kripke, without really knowing Kripke, just like everyone else, but...)

We've identified something as water. Then we learned some. And we learned that what we identified as water always has the structure H2O. Now:

if we discover or stipulate a substance that is phenomenologically the same as water, but with some alternate chemical structure, it is not water. — Banno

Here's a scenario that it seems like Kripke would admit is possible (seems that way to me anyway, correct me if wrong). Let's say some group of people coined the word 'water' talking about a pond in their town X. Visitors to this town (there's a trade route or something. the water people have silk, say, so people go there a lot, to get silk) ---but visitors to this town pick up this term. "water. That's like the stuff we have at home! We'll call it water too!." Years go by, science grows. Less syphilis, more television. People in town x learn chemistry etc. Water, in their pond, is H20. For whatever reason, though, what's called 'water' everywhere else has a different chemical structure. There is only one place with H20 water as far as we know, and its in the pond of town X. All the other 'water' is something else entirely.

What are we talking about when we talk about necessary, a-posteriori facts? And what does it have to do with Kant?

But a metaphysical system is not identical to reality, it's just a set of beliefs. The fact of the matter about whether reality is composed of one substance or not shouldn't depend on conceptualizations. — aporiap

I agree with this. The 'fact of the matter' is surely independent of conceptualization. But to determine whether our metaphysical ideas correspond with reality (if such a thing is possible), we have to figure out what we're saying. What does 'reality is composed of one substance' mean?

What I'm suggesting is that, if you break down the concept, you see that its not about the world at all. It's a conceptual operation that has overstepped its bounds. My interest in this topic corresponds exactly to my feeling 'the fact of the matter' shouldn't depend on conceptualization.

(We could also say the fact of the matter about whether reality is large shouldn't depend on conceptualization. That's true, I think. But it's not really clear what it would mean. It seems to be mixing something up. )

Also I am unsure why one can't simply 'fall' for pluralism by mistakenly raising a category or other distinction to the ontic level. An otherwise non-ontic distinction becomes a distinction between substances by face-value observation of difference. Why not it simply become apparent, upon analysis, that the face-value difference is not fundamental or ontic? — aporiap

What does 'fundamental' mean?
Is face-value difference fundamental?
Why or why not?

If there is such a thing as the 'set of everything', then, yes, in identifying anything, you would be identifying an element of that set.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

Are you able to identify "everything"? — Terrapin Station

I don't think so? I'm not sure what that would mean exactly though.

Nah. I think it's a result of bad framing. It's an interesting failure though, I think fundamentally it doesn't work very well because the operation which creates the fuckoff big object, just as in Spinoza, is a relatively unmoored conceptual operation taking little inspiration from more local problems. So in one breath I was criticising him for a focus on intellection in grasping an eternal and infinite substance, in another I derived a similarly inert and timeless material solely through reason. Sometimes it's fun to be a hypocrite. — fdrake

Hah, alright. I couldn't tell to what extent you were endorsing those ideas.

Badiou was in my mind when I was writing that post, I think the relevant distinction he has is between 'counts-as-one' and 'non-all'. Counts-as-one is a intellectual/practical operation which treats something as a unity; an intelligible whole; which stands out against the inconsistent/intelligibility resistant real; the non-all.

The departure point of my account creates a ghostly intelligibility where in fact there is none; to be real becomes equated with membership in a gigantic constructed set; precisely what Badiou uses Russel's paradox to highlight the flaw in. Moreover, the distinction between counts-as-one and non-all is roughly a distinction between intelligibility and the real; the former an operation which synthesises unities given a circumscribed context (and indeed circumscribes those contexts), and the latter that which disperses all such syntheses. — fdrake

I think this is more or less how I'm thinking of things at the moment. I think its close to what Street is saying too.

@fdrake

I guess there's also a silent presence here. I tried, over a half-decade ago, to understand Badiou, and I didn't. I know you've read him. When we bring set theory, oneness, novelty, Spinoza etc together, that makes me think of Being and Event, and that the inconsistency of the 'giant set' is somehow relevant. I wish I understood Badiou better but the feeling in my bones is that B&E is dealing with something problematic in the account you presented.

I just mean: how ok are you with a metaphysics that means nothing new can come into existence?

Off of this

This might be a naive question, or else betray my misunderstanding, but how does this work time-wise? If we have relational closure tout court isn't that a kind of 'freeze' - as in, doesn't that preclude, by definition, the coming-into-existence of anything new? — me

yep — fdrake

I am curious -to what extent are you willing to take that hit ( the lack of novelty) ?

Triadicism has won. — apokrisis

Hats off to Triadicism then.

As a monist, the correct response to the claim that "everything is mind, or matter" is "So what?" Why do we have to name the "everything" anything at all? — Harry Hindu

That's fair. I should have been saying 'substance monism' or 'substance monist' not 'monism' and 'monist'

Think of it this way. You hand someone a deck of cards. They say, "Ah, you've given me a deck of cards interspersed with spludgemuffikins!" The mere fact that they've said this doesn't imply that it's not just a deck of cards, and especially if you can get no coherent account of what spludgemuffikins are and how you also handed them to the person, you'd probably say, "No, it's just a deck of cards." — Terrapin Station

This analogy doesn't work because cards are a very small subset of everything. If we weren't able to differentiate cards from other things, we wouldn't be able to identify them. Fortunately, for us card-enthusiasts, both differentiation and identification, in this case, is easy. No need to countenance the objections of spludgemuffikin-holders.

:lol:

Thanks, I think I understand what you're saying now, and it does seem to bypass the problem I was trying to identify in the OP.

This might be a naive question, or else betray my misunderstanding, but how does this work time-wise? If we have relational closure tout court isn't that a kind of 'freeze' - as in, doesn't that preclude, by definition, the coming-into-existence of anything new? Since, if something new did come into existence, it would have to be the case either that the 'giant set' did not have relational closure or else that something had been left out?

One way to make sense of 'everything' claims is to treat those claims not as substantive, but as formal. That is, to say something like 'everything is X' is to say that whatever 'there is', 'it' abides by such and such rules, or exhibits such and such properties, and not others. I say this is 'formal' and not 'substantive' because 'everything' here does not designate some kind of positive substance (res cogitans vs. res extensa), but a set of constraints or limits that are operative regardless of the 'stuff' in question. — StreetlightX

This makes sense to me, especially the emphasis on constraints and limits. I still have a reflexive distrust of the idea that any positive claim can be made that would apply to all things outside of some circumscribed domain.

Like all that can be done, on the 'everything' level is an indefinite 'carving' out of reality, chiseling away through statements of the type 'there is no x such that...'


Though maybe you could have a positive claim along the lines of what fdrake's saying, if I understand him. Like maybe the one thing that you could say is that everything that is is capable of having an effect.

So, I don't see monism's peculiarity. It seems like every position, except for silence or "everything is as everything is", is a correction and a "a cognitive project driven by some sort of need". — Πετροκότσυφας

Drawing from Streelight's post. I think what I was trying to say, before losing the plot, is that silence or 'everything is as everything is' is really all you can do at the 'everything' level. Ideas like monism, dualism, pluralism etc are products of the mind's capacity to totalize gone haywire, metastasizing.

Reversing the order makes sense. Spinoza never quite clicked for me, and I've never finished the Ethics, but I've thought, rightly or wrongly, that there seemed to be an issue with how we get from formal proofs of one eternal substance to the existence of some determinate set of modes. (Is there anything in the Ethics analogous to Lebniz's best of all possible worlds thing?)

But if you start from the modes, and work back to substance - this whole issue (if there is one) vanishes.

I think I understand your broader picture, but I'm not totally sure because I'm not familiar with the term 'relational closure.' Googling it is bringing me to a lot of math-y articles I'm not sure I'm capable of understanding without a lot of work. Is it possible to summarize the concept?

Of course there's differentiation everywhere. And monism is peculiar w/r/t differentiation - a baked-in peculiarity.

Yes, because once you accept the irreducibility, you've come to a place where any rational fixed-point has to be jettisoned. You don't leave monism for a monistic-y anti-monism. You leave the very idea of a rational fixed-point.

Hah!

As opposed to being a final, settled reflection of reality as it is.

But I don't think this repeats the same confusion I was trying to highlight.

Re: Seibo, agreed. Reading his China travelogue (tho its more than that), Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens helped me make some sense of it. It was translated after Seibo but was written four years before. His fascination - and deep familiarity with- despair is the flipside of his desire for transcendence, I think (he's a lot like Dostoevsky in that way). And his desire for transcendence is tightly bound up with his respect for craft and discipline. He didn't really find what he was looking for in China. But I feel like part of that was this inertia thing. He kind of didn't want to. He was ambivalent. Seibo lets that part free a little more.

Isn't he great? My favorite is War&War which I'm guessing you're close to getting around to - but I haven't read Melancholy (I own it, but I'm on a self-imposed no-dark-or-overly-theoretical-book regimen at the moment. One day.)

How do you like Krasznahorkai?

sorry, if I've offended. My answer was not intended to be dismissive. I'm not sure how else to answer your question.

I'm not sure in your case, everyone has their own.

I guess I'd just exclude these philosophers from the narrow idea of philosophy that I was working with or include them as late philosophers who determine that which determines to be indeterminate--a critique of pure reason or of language on holiday or of the primacy of the theoretical. The key here for me is that [synonym for rationality] is the authority appealed to in order to distinguish philosophy from mere opinion. It's because philosophers don't accept 'well, God told me so' and instead demand an argument or an elaboration that (only) the rational is real. The philosopher I have in mind doesn't believe irrational claims He refuses them as descriptions of reality.

Note that this includes the rejection of claims about the 'thing-in-itself.' So even if philosophy admits its blind-spot, it does so to deny access to this blind spot to others. It 'knows that it does not know' in order to reject 'inhuman' or 'theological' claims of direct access. Kant knows that pre-critical philosophy is wrong precisely by insisting on a kind of absolute ignorance of things in themselves. Absolute knowledge in the Kantian style is knowledge of absolute ignorance or ignorance of the absolute. It's this tangle that Hegel wrestled with, it seems to me. It left humans at an infinite distance from Truth, offending Hegel's intuition that the human mind was divine. — sign

Yes, I agree with your picture. I think philosophy's wrong to think it knows more about the function of the 'thing-in-itself' than others. A lobsterman knows more about the 'thing-in-itself' than Kant. A fortiori he knows more than Hegel. There are maybe some things Hegel knows more about. But Hegel is still the privileged boy, protected by his position. Every stab at knowledge is limited by its stance. FIshermen are less likely to miss this than philosophers. But its true for both. Its not a matter of knowledge at this point. Its a matter of balancing pride and humility. Its knowing what one knows, and knowing the right stance to take towards what one doesn't know. Philosophy can give the illusion of knowing more than one does.

Indeed. And I am more ironist or mystic than philosopher. But to clarify my point, let me ask you a hypothetical question. How would you react if a philosopher insisted that he understood everything? He claims that he is a fisherman who somehow caught the ocean itself on his hook? I expect that you'd be skeptical indeed. My point is that 'that which exceeds rationality' or 'the ocean' plays an important role in the game. It can function as an 'absent' center. 'I know that I don't know --and yet I know that you can't know.' This humble 'not knowing' is itself a 'vision of God' held fixed. — sign

why fixed?

Maybe there is. Philosophers accept rationality because it's rational. If you're obliged to accept something and you're irrational, then you're obliged to accept everything. Or, another way, if the rational man accepts reason because it's reason, what reason, what "because" does he have for accepting the non-rational? — tim wood

Because it's there.

You're 'obliged' to accept what's there.

You don't really have a choice. You can take any sort of attitude toward those aspects of 'what's there' that you don't like. Still, it's there. And it will keep being there. It will keep lapping at your doorstep. If you want to make it a principled thing of what to accept - rational or irrational - then go ahead. the irrational will keep appearing. So, eventually, for anyone, its a matter of how you deal with it. Maybe you only 'accept' the rational. ok. so how do you deal with the stuff you don't 'accept'? Because it will still be there.

What is 'acceptance?'

in the same way the fisherman accepts that there is something beyond fish, or methods for catching fish. theres the ocean.

bc im out i dont have time to respond in detail and in a way adequate to this thread : but id want to note that there is a robust philosophical tradition that accepts that which exceeds rationality - and instead sets up camp at the limit. its like catching parts of the stream that are amenable to rationality. sifting for gold. deleuze and the 'plane of immanence' come to mind.

theres no performative paradox in asking that philosophers be rational and also asking that they accept something outside rationalitys limit.

So much to say. I resonate with almost all of what you've said, including:

. At least for me the mood was just so thick and physical that it was all going on below ideology, even if an icy logic of suicide was a symptom. Indeed, I'd often get a little risky with substances in such states. While this isn't ideal, it often helped.

Though for me it was - and occasionally still is - alcohol. And sometimes adderall. But it was very much about doing whatever was necessary to get to a state where I could try to connect with others, at whatever cost. It does sometimes work, is the thing. I'm of two minds here.

Yeah, this is tricky. I'm not good at living in the middle. I'm not at all claiming that I live in a state of ecstasy. I mean I usually really approve of myself or I am really disgusted with myself. While there is a healthy or unhealthy-but-enjoyable narcissism involved, there is also a genuine lust/curiosity that directs me beyond myself when I am happy. (I assume this is pretty common: happiness as being on the hopeful chase.) — sign

As I've mentioned, I've been cautiously approaching St John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul. In a very different mode than how I used to approach it (which was: I'm having a Dark Night. St. John talked about a dark night, and then talked about a higher joy. Therefore I'm close to that higher joy.) I also tend to oscillate between self-propelling self-joy and self-disgust. It's only becoming clear to me now that the real gem of the book is how it deals with the art(?) of integrating ecstatic and nonecstatic states. Of balancing being-close and being-far-away. He provides, in the very first chapters, an astounding typology of the vices that arrest spiritual progression. (Not the vices that prevent people from seeking the path of spirituality. The vices that attend those who have already decided to take that path.)

One of my favorite quotes so far in my rereading

There are others who are vexed with themselves when they observe their own imperfectness, and display an impatience that is not humility; so impatient are they about this that they would fain be saints in a day. Many of these persons purpose to accomplish a great deal and make grand resolutions; yet, as they are not humble and have no misgivings about themselves, the more resolutions they make, the greater is their fall and the greater their annoyance, since they have not the patience to wait for that which God will give them when it pleases Him.

I've been toying with another idea that the point of nonecstatic interludes is to fashion a soul or self that is able to retain the insights of the ecstatic moments without being disintegrated

Keats, again:
"The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is ‘a vale of
tears’ from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitary interposition of God and taken to
Heaven – What a little circumscribe[d] straightened notion! Call the world if you Please ‘”The
vale of Soul-making” Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the
highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for
the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say ‘Soul making’ Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence – There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions – but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.
I[n]telligences are atoms of perception – they know and they see and they are pure, in short they
are God – how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have
identity given them – so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence?
How, but by the medium of a world like this?"

I'm really glad some of my posts have been therapeutic for you. It's been good for me to write them out, but I've also worried about how helpful they are for others.

I'm happy to hear you're finding a way to make it work, and that you've had the good fortune to find someone understanding. That gives me some hope.

It's funny though. I've been reading Kalsched's book - there's a common theme in the therapeutic process where sufferers of trauma, just as they begin to open up, begin to have dreams of persecutory figures. These can be really dark. They usually involve a sadistic and powerful figure somehow hurting an innocent victim. The interpretation is that the psyche is staging a drama of vulnerability and its betrayal in order to set the patient's unconscious in line, to prevent that betrayal happening again in real life.

I've had many dreams like this. The one I remember most from childhood involves shadowy figures in a kind of police interrogation room forcing me to sit and watch a movie. In the movie, a person is being beaten, with chains. At the moment the person dies, the shadowy figure tells that me that his ghost is in the room watching me watch him die. I can feel the ghost come up behind me as I watch a video of his body dying. I must've been 9 or 10, but I can still remember this dream vividly. There's something to it of making me complicit in the murder.

So: very much in the vein of the other dreams Kalsched mentions. I wish I could remember what was going on in my life at the time.

Buut anyway, recently, I had another variant of this 'genre' of dream. And the way in which it varied gives me hope.

In the dream, I was talking to my therapist. I got really excited about some video I wanted to show him. We went over to his computer and both sat there as I pulled it up. I remember looking over at him, and seeing him brooding and thinking. Then, with a sort of clumsy deliberation, he reached over and grabbed me. He held me firmly and aggressively. And then he groped me. There was something comic about the groping. It was almost phoned in. A reach over and one quick squeeze. I was less scared than bewildered. The dream-therapist looked at me and said something like 'how are you ever going to trust me anymore?'

It was almost like that technique in parody where you sketch a scene that draws on a grand 'tradition' but you do it so literally and so free of nuance that it becomes absurd. Almost like the dream-figure was someone poorly cast in a role going : "ok, I know I'm supposed to do something like this, umm, was that good enough?"

My dreamself responded with a kind of shrug.

First as tragedy, then as farce?

Excellent read.

The part that haunts me the most is this :

"The irony of trauma is that even though it happens so deeply inside a single person, so quietly and close to the bone, it is never personal. It is shared, and it is collective. You cannot keep it to yourself. It is handed from one person to the next like a strain of herpes or, if you like, a fruit cake gifted and regifted every year during the holidays. My father’s trauma becomes my mother’s trauma. My mother’s trauma becomes mine. Whose will mine become?"

That rings true to me. And it's scary. I read a book by a retired psychoanalyst who told the stories of various patients in a way that was a little bit like a collection of Chekhov stories (I have some mild ethical qualms about this, even with the secure identity-protection, but that's another topic.) One thing he talked about is how, when someone is unable to tell their story, they will (usually unconsciously) behave in ways that make other people relive it.

I'm as disturbed by this idea as I am convinced of its truth. The story will be told, despite one's best laid plans and good intentions. The two outlets I see are art and community (of conscious fellow-sufferers). Or both, as with the choir.

The tough thing is, as always : The fear of not really being able to do either ---the fear that the 'false self' will take the reins. And that I'll be the bloodied woman in a 1970s slasher flick running down the road, escaped, desperately flagging down a truck --- only to recognize, with horror, the driver.

I always get hung up on this last image or metaphor. It's been with me for a long time.

but im realizing I've still left unsaid the point about contempt folding back on itself. I guess I haven't figured that out yet

I think one of the most difficult things about extreme mood swings is that the really bad part is always appraised in light of the really good state. So the really good state wants to dance and exult and see the bad state as 'blindness' or 'confusion' that is over now that the truth is revealed. And the really bad state wants to see the good state as deluded and sugarcoating.

idk, moodtracking helps tap into the part of you that remains constant throughout all those states. A kind of neutral anchor. I'm not the type to dismiss ecstatic states, but I have been trying to figure out how to integrate them into my life.

(Now I maybe have turned that mockery on itself, weaponized that contempt against the contempt for all things gentle. ) — sign

I've been thinking a lot about this. This kind of goes back to the stuff about repetition compulsion, and the same psychological or affective impulse renewing itself, camoflauged, in new forms.

On the one hand, I think that's sure progress. Like - being contemptuous of contempt for all things gentle is a better way of navigating the world than being contemptuous of all things gentle.

But, at the same time, that same contempt-muscle is being flexed and strengthened.

It seems somehow related to this:

All of this somewhat candifies the experience. If I am ever thrown back into that state, I will want to vomit at the idea that something could be made of it.

Which I also get. And I like the clear-eyed appreciation of how that state works. I've succumbed, in the past, to the feeling that I'd overcome once and for all that state, and that I'd never think in that way again.

What I want to say is that the depressive state has to be met on its own terms. That doesn't say much of anything but. I've been using a moodtracker for half a year now. It helps to 'objectify' both positive and negative states. I can say, for sure, that its helped me through negative times. Not because it shows the negative as a 'delusion' but because it just kind of...naturalizes the process? Like It makes it easier to see it as an affective wave, a natural and normal process. and that, in turn, makes it easier to do things like: clean the apartment, make food - little stuff that draws me slowly out. Which is harder to do, if it seems smothering and absolute.

That's a pretty great description of Hell. I've been there. In some ways not being able to say it is the very heart of its darkness. The flow outward is damned up. One understands oneself as a disease that should not be spread in the worst phase. But one believes in this darkness, that one has seen the truth. So one protects others from this terrible truth. Or (maybe at the heart of the heart of the darkness) one thinks of oneself as purely crazy, afflicted not by the truth but the fantasy of a dark truth. I'm almost afraid to summon it to memory. Let's just say that it's amazing how disgusting and obscene existence can seem or be for certain states of mind. One maybe ever experiences a wonder along with it, that it could all be so disgusting and perverse. 'Implosion' and black holes come to mind. The world becomes a hollowed-out stupid skit, oblivious to its own nullity. Of course death appears as a sweet release. Suicide beckons to such a state of mind as the only heroic and/or rational act available.

To me one of the strange things is that a person can be mostly happy and yet still unexpectedly dragged into this darkness, surviving it and returning to be happier than most even. This helps me make sense of the some of the great musicians who committed suicide. Good music comes from ecstasy, from being happier than most. But probably sensitivity is two-edged. Heights and depths come together perhaps. — sign

yeah, this is it. I can especially relate to the feeling of having to 'protect others' from yourself and your ideas.

I'm almost afraid to summon it to memory. Let's just say that it's amazing how disgusting and obscene existence can seem or be for certain states of mind.

To keep the Dante theme going, I think he got this feeling exactly:

"Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear."

Seems melodramatic until you know what he's talking about. Which, yet another poet said better

"even a proverb is no proverb to you until your life has illustrated it."

Beautiful. What comes to my mind is something like authenticity as being in touch with always being still a sinner and a fool to some degree. God has to be a sinner and a fool to understand. Only a sinner and a fool can understand a sinner and a fool from the inside. A friend as true friend is an unfinished sinner-fool or only half-wise listening. Love-trust-hope builds a bridge from the undecided to the undecided. I feel that you know what I'm getting at, but I will add for others that I don't understand all this 'love' talk in terms of determinate metaphysical entities arranged in some quasi-geometric proof. The 'opened-ness' I have in mind is 'behind' or 'beneath' the signs, near the place of their genesis and reception (which I nevertheless can only point to with signs.) — sign

Yes exactly. The 'hiding' of 'sin' creates this weird symmetrical structure. The more I hide my indiscretions from myself and others, the more I suspect others of harboring equally unforgivable abuses. And If I act shallowly and falsely, maintaining an aura of innocence - then, at the same time, I'm soliciting the other person to play along. And when they play along, its easy to see them as shallow and false. If I can see them as equal to me in their capacity for losing the path, or plot - that's the only time I can actually breathe.

But more than anything, I like this:

Only a sinner and a fool can understand a sinner and a fool from the inside. A friend as true friend is an unfinished sinner-fool or only half-wise listening.

I like this, because what many of us see as unforgivable is often, for our friends, a tenth as important as we ourselves have made it out to be. And flipped - I've had friends open up to me about dark stuff - and it's like - dude, you're killing yourself over that? It's not always clear to me, as listener, that we've entered the 'serious' atmosphere of self-recrimination - the atmosphere I feel is obvious and palpable when I'm the one confessing. There's often a delayed effect, when I only realize the significance partway through.

And then even when friends open up about the stuff that is a little darker. I don't know. It's still dark, but it usually doesn't diminish my affection and sympathy - especially when I can see the other person is truly torn up about it.

This is verrry cheesy. BUT one of my most cherished memories is at a xmas party, with a group of friends - linked arms, heads bowed down, eyes closed, gently swaying, singing 'bridge over troubled water' together in unison. That was probably the closest I've been to a shared religious experience. Or at least a certain type of shared religious experience. The experience of it welled up and overcame the sappiness I would've been put-off by were the critical observer part of me more in control.

Yep! I've heard of ketamine and studies about its efficacy for treating depression. It seems like a very interesting and hopeful avenue.