Author: Meng-hu

A theory of linear succession or progress has been the premise of Western philosophy of history from the beginning of the Christian era and on through today. In the earlier form, taken from biblical sources, the line went from creation to fall to redemption to apocalypse: a straight-forward line exemplified by Augustine’s City of God but nascent in all the thinking of the era.

With the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the same point of view is merely secularized, and progress is recast as the evolving of reason, knowledge, discovery, and technological advancement. In the 19th century, Hegel established the framework for a philosophy of progress, and Darwin’s theory of evolution provided a scientific confirmation, especially for the nascent sociology of the time.

But one of the representative writings on the subject, The Idea of Progress by the British historian J. B. Bury, argues that the theory of progress was not possible until the 17th century — not in antiquity, the Middle Ages, nor even in the Renaissance, for three reasons: 1) the view that Greece and Rome had attained the apex of civilization, 2) a lack of acknowledgment of the value of mundane life and its contribution to society, and 3) the lack of a separation between science and philosophy which would free science for its revolutionary breakthroughs.

Hence, Bury would not link the Christian view to a formal theory of progress, nor to Hegel, probably, but to concrete material conditions resulting from the application of post-17th century thought. However, when this theory of progress is contrasted with an alternative such as the Eastern cyclical view or Nietzschean recurrence does it become clear that the theory of progress is distinctly Western, nor merely Christian, scientific, or modern.

The optimism of the West in the continued evolution of society on principles of social and technological progress is basic to Western thought, a faith in rational principles leading to universal improvements, to a best of possible worlds. But the pragmatic theory of progress is functionally contrived by those few who would benefit from the extension of the instruments and institutional structures of progress (economic, financial, political, military, educational, etc.). The average person is expected to accept the notion that society can undergo constant evolution and progress so long as that innate force within history (Spirit, Reason, Science, the “market”) is allowed to be interpreted by the authorities, much like the ancient Roman augurs.

Every once in a while, this acceptance is gainsaid in a particular part of the world, but like a natural seismic eruption or the cycle of tidal ebb and flow, conditions return to where they were, only with new faces replacing the old ones.

Only with the 20th century has faith in the theory of progress been shattered in the minds of many intellectuals, though the majority of the people stubbornly adhere to the augurs of progress. World War I had an enormous impact on a generation of writers, artists, and thinkers, but their work has been viewed by critics (under the rubric of “the academy”) as a subjective expression of mere stress, angst, and the hothouse behavior that results when a person is placed under unnerving conditions.

A theory of progress, decorum, and complementarianism (the view that creative efforts should be expressions of the social-political paradigm, what in the Soviet Union was called social realism) persists in media and popular expression. The coverage selected and the criticism applied has the function of keeping within bounds what the masses consume, what they must consume in order to maintain allegiance to the present paradigm of institutions and beliefs. Underlying these beliefs must be a theory of progress, implicit in the notion that security, order, and well-being are granted by power from above and not sought for or achieved by independent individual effort.

Progress can only be a product of individual consciousness defining health and well-being. No sage has ever advocated consulting the institutions of his age for wisdom but recommended plumbing the mind or heart within to derive direction. Only after the death of sages is the message seized by others for their aggrandizement, made to be a theory of power and domination, and set forth to undermine the spirit of the orginal sage, which always preferred individual effort and a philosophy of solitude and benevolence.

Solitude is inimical to power, shuns power, seeks its own progress. A progress that is an illusion, enhancing the few and fooling the masses, is for the solitary the opposite of progress, for it does not consult nature or quiet the mind in order to begin reconsturcting the self. But the theory of progress is an old device masking power, and concealing what the 20th century creative souls — and those brave 19th century figures like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche — unmasked as lies about human nature.

What is the alternative to progress for the grand institutions of today? It is a devolution to simplicity, to individuals and small social units, to natural industry and exchange, to a relationship to nature based on value and not exploitation or power. The alternative to progress is a devolution of artificial wealth, privilege, and legitimacy.

The “decline of the West” (to cite Spengler’s title) means not only the decline of the theory of progress but the decline of the artificial social and economic conditions that have propped up institutions and circles of wealth and power based on belief in that theory. Here is a beginning point for anyone who has not connected the experience of the 20th century “Age of Anxiety” with the present devolution of global systems of power. Here is the beginning point for a philosophy of solitude based on a realization that progress is a chimera, a fog that suppresses mind, spirit, and body.

Chapter 8 of the Lao-tzu Tao te ching presents water as that from which virtues can be derived by imitation of its characteristics. Water is an example of how nature (or an object of nature) teaches or presents models for human behavior that allow the individual to identify what is fruitful and harmonious for the self. While one may argue that other models of nature exist (“nature red in tooth and claw,” for example), they are out of context with the totality and often a priori. Taoism presents water as a universal object, at all times and in all contexts. The characteristics of water underlie the potentialities and actions of the myriad creatures, among them human beings.

(Here again we’ll use the D. C. Lau translation for its clarity and scholarship.)

Highest good is like water.
Because water excels in benefiting the myriad creatures
without contending with them
and settles where none would like to be,
water comes close to the Tao.

The opening paragraph describes water as not contending or striving with anyone or anything. This characteristic of water is a benefit to all. Water yields when confrontation looms, goes forward when opportunity is available, pulls back and waits patiently when obstacles arise. And water always seeks out the lowest place, that place where there will be no contention because nothing else wants to be so lowly.

Humility is a recurrent theme in the Tao te ching, but one does not necessarily associate water with humility. The characteristic is contextual: a booming ocean wave contrasted to a country ditch or a latrine. But it is water all the same.

The virtues of water are the virtues of sages and hermits. Obscurity is not literal. Water does not hide, flee, or disappear, but it is often hard to find and when found is hard to identify in its origin. So the sage is standing before us, or is one we never see or realize has wisdom. The hermit, too, is walking amongst us, in the city, the town, the countryside — not necessarily hidden away in a monastery or cave or distant hut.

But might as well be, for the hermit is a solitary in mind, heart, and spirit, and naturally seeks out the places where no one goes, indirectly benefiting everyone by lack of contention — by lifting up a heart full of nature and joy, but not as the world celebrates it. The hermit is flexible and a lifting of heart is contextual, as is a quiet or sad heart – booming wave or quiet trickle. The sage and hermit are flexible and easily live in simple or harsh conditions, demanding little, observant of the cycles of nature as they will benefit him or her, just as the sage and hermit will benefit nature and its creatures by not harming, abusing, or exploiting them.

The cycle of seasons instructs the sage and hermit, and water is an integral aspect of each. Not that the hermit is obliged to live in any given place. The taiga of Russia or the deserts of the Middle East were mono-seasonal, though they had subtle changes of season to which the hermit was attentive. Every change of season, even changes in cold or hot places, are brought about by water.

There are modern writers who say that water cures nearly all diseases, based on the premise that blood and tissue and electrical impulses are all based on uses of water and its elements in the body and in the atmosphere. The purity and simplicity of water is a metaphor for health and well-being.

Tao te ching 8 applies the notion of deriving virtues from nature to specific virtues that, like water, benefit all yet retain simplicity and obscurity in their non-contention. Following D. C. Lau, these are two sets of threes, skipping the interpolation of a reference to house-siting, which suggests a later feng-shui interest not appropriate to Lao-tzu:

In quality of mind it is depth that matters
In friendship it is benevolence
In speech it is good faith
In government it is order
In affairs it is ability
In action it is timeliness.

Alternatively, here is Red Pine’s more literal version:

thinking with depth
helping with kindness
speaking with truth
governing with peace
working with skill
moving with time

The first set of three applies to the individual: self, other, others; the second set applies to social interactions: government, business, world. The refrain (in Lau) about what matters in each case establishes, first, the reality confronted by the individual, and then the virtue that should be pursued in order to make the reality non-contentious.

Thus the quality of mind is best when deep, as in meditation, where idle thoughts and images not only do not disturb mind but further do not contribute to depth. The quality of friendship consists in the kindness or mutuality that is shared in non-contention, in the relationship of courtesy and openness that friends share. Communication beyond that is best characterized by “good faith,” or honesty, constructiveness, “truth” in Red Pine’s version — in words that are few but meaningful.

On the social level, government is best when its function is to maintain order. Order means peace internally and externally. Benevolence must first come from individuals in this scheme — if this prerequisite does not exist, government will be incapable of order. Likewise, business (“affairs” or “work”) must be characterized by mutual exchange of abilities, skills, and products of quality, functionality, and endurance. Without this virtue to business transactions, fraud and corruption result. But this fraud will have been the product of previous lack of virtue in this hierarchy from self, friends, society, and “government” or ordered interactions.

Thus, by “government” Lao-tzu refers to the convention of the emperor, but reduces it to order, ultimately a product of individuals. By “affairs” Lao-tzu refers to the convention of business, reducing it to exchanges of productivity and skill, as when a farmer sells his produce or a craftsman makes a tool. Reducing virtues to fundamentals brings us closer to visualizing the simplicity of personal relations, and brings us closer to the context of ancient China when the Tao te ching was composed.

Finally, the reference to action (or “moving”) means that only with these many preconditions does the virtuous person safely “act” or participate. At that point, the acting is to embrace a beneficent situation. The timing of action must be right because beneficence does not always manifest itself in all these factors from mind to friendships to business. If no one in the world is virtuous, the hermit will not act. Thus we extrapolate the Confucian advice to “recluse when the emperor is evil” and we anticipate Chuang-tzu’s philosophy of “non-action” in evil times.

The last sentence in this chapter probably belongs at the end of the paragraph on water:

It is because it does not contend that it is never at fault.

The sage or hermit of today can apply the virtues of water to life itself. These virtues are not mere metaphors or abstractions. The virtues show us how to find in non-contention a source of happiness and well-being.

Travel reveals the emptiness of time. Traveling from one point to another gives the process no purpose other than dependence on the points. Whether the points are themselves of value, the dependence on the process makes the traveling empty. Yet humans, being conscious of time in a literal way versus animals, are always sensitive to time passed in travel, and must “kill” time in order to shrink the distance between the points. One can get some things done, but it is always an expending rather than a taking-in.

Hegel said that time “presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition,” and that is why our expenditure of time without some intrinsic and palpable action (not end) associated with it tempts us to “kill” it. Time passed in travel is a succession of “nows,” as Heidegger says (though not about travel) but, oh, so many nows!

No one traveled less than the philosophers like Kant, Kierkegaard, Heidegger. Thoreau thought one ought to travel to give one’s intellect a freshening, but his travels, too, were circumscribed, primarily nature excursions. These are retreats of a sort, not travel of the modern type, to be amused, entertained, or awed, though nature travel certainly provides all of these. A spiritual retreat has a different goal, but, again, the interim of travel can easily define the end point.

In science fiction, travel across galaxies being of such huge distance, travelers are placed in an induced “cryosleep,” and awaken fresh at their destination, their point B. So even fiction recognizes the tediousness of travel. One step from acknowledging the tediousness of the end point, thus jeopardizing the whole point.

I am traveling and am away from my usual resources for a couple of weeks. The next entry will replace this one, or elaborate on the idea of time.

Kant’s famous little essay, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” offered a simple method for addressing every realm of human activity, from spiritual to mundane. Although published in 1784 — already anticipating considerable political tumult on the European continent — the essay represented the first foundation for an individualism that was not merely a revolt against something but an assertion for self.

“What is Enlightenment?” is full of memorable sayings.

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. …

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (natura-liter maiorennes), nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. …

A public can only attain enlightenment slowly. Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass. … Nothing is required for this enlightenment, however, except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters. …

If it is now asked, “Do we presently live in an enlightened age?” the answer is, “No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.”

The weakness here is Kant’s abiding faith in reason and in the ability of people to enlighten themselves if they are given autonomy from contrivance and the tools of reason and discourse. It is a weakness of argument, not of values. One certainly wants his proposal to work, but history — and human psychology — has defeated this aspiration with sobering reality in the ensuing centuries.

Rather, it is for the intellectual that Kant pleads autonomy of thought, for he notes that in one’s business and in the public square, one necessarily conforms to the rules of order and civility, but as a scholar one should be free to explore, reflect, and critique. And that admits of the inevitability of enlightenment failing among the masses.

Not to mention those factors that militate against enlightenment of the masses: the enormous growth and centralization of power in institutions and organizations since Kant’s day, the application of science and technology to ends that further frustrate hoped-for health and well-being, and the discoveries of psychology that show reason to be only a small part of the human psyche.

Kant’s argument is best received as an individual seeking enlightenment. Enlightenment is a process from immaturity to understanding, but as Kant says, the process involves resolve and courage — meaning not merely intellect but will and discipline. These latter factors were incompletely understood in the Age of Enlightenment, awaiting the psychology of the 20th century. But the political individual, from Aristotle to Kant, was much the object of attention as an abstraction, and Kant’s individual here is poised to move from legal individual acting reasonably to selfhood.

The philosophy of solitude will ever point to the necessity of examining not the abstract individual as political entity or social animal, but to the self understood as the unique being with consciousness. Consciousness is not an irrelevant by-product to be downplayed in the construction of society, viewed as the only functional context for an individual. Consciousness, will, and the characteristics that lie below the surface of Kant’s “scholar” are common to everyone, everyone in those unruly and immature masses, with the potential to achieve self-realization. That is the driving ethos of the freedom Kant speaks of, not merely the civility and tolerance for discourse among the learned and powerful.

Given the era, Kant’s works do establish philosophical methods that are prerequisites to social functionality, even if that functionality will ultimately be used to stifle the individual into a conformity designed by the powerful as a norm.

Reason is a first and necessary tool, but more complex tasks require more complex tools, and that is where reason ends. Houses are assembled and disassembled, but in history they are never repaired, never made whole again. The hammer of Nietzsche was to be as equally constructive as the refined tool of reason, for culture and society are always full of violence and power, not mere immaturity. The contradictory tools of swords and plowshares are made of the same metal. Immature humanity has overturned its toolbox, emptied itself of both reason and spirit. If we want to exercise reason, we must walk alone.

The late Japanese Zen master Dainin Katagiri wrote a small essay entitled “Walking Alone, As All Beings,” commenting on the paradox in Buddhism of living solitary versus living with the group or sangha.

The conventional response to this paradox is to affirm that the sense of “living alone” is meant as a mature and free person, while life in the body of believers is associative and social. Thus:

There are two discourses on the sangha by the Buddha that appear to be contradictory. In one he speaks of the virtues of living in solitude. In the other he says we should find a wise and good friend with whom we can walk through life.

Without getting into the history of Buddhism (the early emphasis on the individual, the later on the group), we can conclude that these two statements are talking about the same experience, as Katagiri realizes.

But these teachings aren’t actually contradictory. Both refer to the spirit of self-discovery, of coming to the realization that you live with all beings and that your life is inseparable from those of others.

That our lives intersect, overlap, and parallel those of others is inevitably true. And for many solitaries, finding a friend for life, be it a sibling, a loved one, a spouse, or just a friend, is not an absolute contradiction to the eremitic life. Many Asian masters, from Brahmanic householders to Zen teachers, have been married. On the other hand, many Western non-hermits such as monks, priests, and nuns, have been unmarried and celibate but lived their lives within communities. Eremtism moves an entire sets of people from the notion of “social” life conventionaly understood as discourse, interrelations, and shared effort, to the notion of individual life lived internally, introvertly, or subjectively, regardless of physical and social context.

Again, Katagiri:

Strictly speaking, no matter what situation you are in, happy or sad, you live alone, and your practice is to walk steadily and alone.

The depth of this walking alone is reflected in the path, sometimes complex and elaborate, that we set before us. Only the one who trods it can envision this path, and sometimes even that one does not know where it leads. Subjective emotions, the depth of inner intuition and insight, are unique products of individuals, and do not necessarily contradict life in society. They are not competitive experiences, only parallel, seemingly overlapping the world but more like the asymptote that never really intersects with the line seen as norm by society.

The eremitic experience of one living in the world is to be engaged in work or communicating clearly and productively with others, yet never fully “there,” never fully delivered of self to some outward thing. Outward things are relational to the self, not real entities. Real enough, of course, but only taken into account by us when they need to be. Our relationship to the world, to people, to sentient beings, and to nature, defines and shapes our consciousness but can never fully “be” in us, never fully absorbing or be absorbed by us.

Instead, this function of monitoring one’s consciousness, one’s mind and its reactions when in the world, takes on a particular quality or value or “taste.” This experience then shapes our daily lives. Again, Katagiri:

Learning to live alone means that, whatever the situation you have to live quietly. All you have to do is just walk, step-by-step. It’s not so easy, but it’s very important for us. And if we are not too greedy, the good friend will appear.

The appearance of a good friend alludes to the old refrain about the appearance of a good teacher (“When the student is ready the teacher will appear”). But the latter saying is more receptive to a hopeful relationship of authority and mentorship. The solitary senses early on that no such teacher will ever be adequate, and that the best teacher will demure, sending his student away as soon as possible. How many stories of Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan masters, for example, tell of a student who clings to a master a long time, apparently making no progress, apparently wasting time in tedious and unproductive tasks (Milarepa is an example), until one day the teacher opens up with a few teachings that overwhelm the student in self-realization. Or the student comes to a sudden enlightenment. And then the student can go away.

While the solitary will not reject the “good friend” who may appear, the hermit is skeptical about a teacher appearing serendipitously. For a reason, the spirit has led the solitary into the desert, the mountain, the forest. Here, having already progressed beyond word or example, the hermit encounters all beings. And sometimes, this wilderness is still within the world, the city, society.

Katagiri follows up this idea:

In ancient times in India, people would look to find such a good friend meditating in the forest. If they found such a person, they would sit with him. This is how it was with Buddha. As people began to gather around him, he called them shravakas, which means “listeners.” The relationship between the Buddha and those who came to listen to his teaching was not like that of a boss and an employee or a parent and child. It was more like that of a master and an apprentice. If you go to see and listen to such a wise friend, you are not a student, exactly; you are just a listener. The idea of being called a student came about in a later age.

This point is very important: that we must free ourselves from an authority relationship even when seeking wisdom from another, because we are listening and exploring how the application of what we have heard relates to the intuitive path we have perceived, and to the adjustment we can make to increase the efficacy of our path, in short, to add insight and enlightenment to what is a mere intuition in our hearts at the moment we go off seeking advice. The analogy of master and apprentice, where we learn a skill that will later sustain us, differs from the analogy of master and student, where the latter imbibes a doctrine or teaching but cannot assimilate it because it is too much the path of another and not the components or aspects of a potential path of self for the listener.

Katagiri concludes by pointing out that the social dimension of Buddhism only came later: non-solitaries coalesced into groups or sanghas. This later era basically institutionalized paths, a phenomenon closer to contradiction than paradox, as the work of Stephen Batchelor, for example, shows. We must adhere to the original inspiration for striking out in search of wisdom, not adhere to the byproduct of too many bureaucrats and administrators who ossify the inspiration by turning it into an institution.

Finally, too, we must acknowledge, as does Katagiri in this little essay, that we are not different than all the myriad beings before, with, and after us. All of them exist, but are intrinsically alone. The paradox of solitude is that living alone yet finding a friend “both refer to the spirit of self-discovery, of coming to the realization that you live with all beings and that your life is inseparable from those of others. To live in solitude is to live with the understanding that there is nothing to depend on.” We come to realize best when in solitude that we are not separate from anything else, and that “suffering occurs only because we see ourselves separate in the first place.” Seeing this interdependence, yet experiencing this profound sense of solitude, brings us to both grandeur and humility.

Writing in the 1840’s, Kierkegaard had already defined the psychology of the personality long before the the 20th century.

In Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard describes the depressed and the schizophrenic as the two extremes of personality (of course, not using those terms). The touchstone of his insight is not so much dysfunctional behaviors as the existential response of individuals to the realization of finitude, of death and decay. Freud placed this discovery and its accompanying repression early in life, to undermine the self into adulthood. In Kierkegaard’s case, the approach is philosophical, but he does not lack insight into behavior, including repression, as will be seen.

These themes pick up on previous blog entries: Society and the world define a rational norm for its members. W are socialized to function within that norm — or else be deemed mad.

On the first part of the spectrum of dysfunction, a person experiences “too much necessity” to his or her life, a crushing weight of obligations, desires, situations, people, conflicts, and entanglements — while at the same time feeling that there is “too little possibility,” too few options or solutions, that there is no escape, no exit, no way to get out with the self intact. This is a classical description of depression.

Kiekegaard sees depression as a philosophical notion as much as psychological, wherein the person sees no solution to death, finitude, the inexorable dissolution of meaning and purpose. These are fundamental observations of what would become existentialism.

On the other end of the spectrum is the person who sees through the deceptive veil of society and its norms, and is not willing or capable of conforming to basic modifications and civilities. For such a person there is “too little necessity,” for nothing is very compelling or convincing, nothing rivals their private concept of reality and the way things can be. There is “too much possibility,” too much that can and must be pursued, too much that calls for investigation, pursuit, attachment, a ready ear or eye. There are too many visions of and too many calls from what is hidden or manifest below the surface of the vast sea of what is irrelevant and unnecessary. Yet this universe overwhelms their resources. The self is shattered to the core of identity. This is a classical description of schizophrenia.

And in the middle of the spectrum lies the grand majority of society’s normal, those whom Kierkegaard calls the “philistines.”

The philistines are those whom one observer calls the “normal neurotics,” whom Freud considered repressed by their psyches for their own good because they are not capable of too much reality. They are easily duped by the powerful to do their bidding in relative silence, to pursue their pleasures in stupefying doses, to contribute to society, that great edifice of somnolence and enslavement about which Nietzsche railed. The philistines walk about in “fictitious health,” says Kierkegaard, alluding to their contentment with conventional norms, tastes, and values. They suffer “neuroses of health,” as Nietzsche wrote. The vast majority are “tranquilized with the trivial,” to quote Kierkegaard’s excellent phrase. Freud described philistinism (but not with that term) as a “pathology of whole cultural communities.”

Ultimately, philistines are living the “lie of character,” says Kierkegaard. They are presenting the false mask of self in everyday life and playing at this or that style or behavior but without conviction, without belief, ever justifying the social fiction that the lives they lead are the best possible lives. And perhaps they are the best possible given what depth of consciousness they carry in their hearts and minds, for otherwise they would be depressed or schizophrenic if they but reflected a bit. But they will not, are not capable of it. The social experience is nothing but the anesthetizing of true reflection. T.S. Eliot describes the philistine’s “sky” in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table …

So we have this:

Kierkegaard then proposes methods of breaking through philistinism without becoming dysfunctional (depressed or schizophrenic). He warns that these involve a severe disengagement from what human society values and employs its time and energy in pursuing. It cannot mimic the tranquilizing or anesthetizing solution that calms the self and permits him or her to go on with the lie of character.

The core answer is solitude and reflection. It may be a gift, or a pursued avocation, or a small and occasional withdrawal or disengagement, even while living life in society and living the lie of character. But the introvert (understanding introvert as one who looks within and not just one who avoids others) is the one who will succeed in the breakthrough. Reflection is a prerequisite to detaching the self and really examining what the world does and says and values and expends lives and energy on.

With introversion or introspection, Kierkegaard has set the stage for two responses. He does not name them but we know them from Nietzsche: one is the self-created path Kierkegaard calls the “demonic rage,” and which Nietzsche generally calls “Promethean.” The other is the deepening of the introversion to a spiritual level that Nietzsche would call Apollonian if he accepted the possibilities of a dogged and disciplined transcendence.

For Kierkegaard, transcendence (and what he will call the “leap”) will finally permit the self to understand the grand lie of character, the lie of society, and become a self-realized person.

A friend of Hermitary points out an interesting article on solitary confinement titled “Hellhole” by Atul Gawande in the March 30 issue of The New Yorker. The article focuses on involuntary solitude, but some physiological results of voluntary solitude are similar. The article describes hostages, prisoners of war, detained terror suspects, and high security prison inmates as involuntary sufferers of solitary confinement and its physiological and psychological effects. The dubious history of solitary confinement and its recent resurrection as a practice elicits reflection on why the practice is torture.

What is the relationship of the effects of involuntary solitude to voluntary solitude?

Voluntary versus non-voluntary solitude is the first consideration. While the physiology of voluntary and involuntary solitude is similar, the psychology of the individual involved is not. In both cases, the person is disengaging from time, space, and environment. Sue Halpern, in her book Migrations to Solitude, has a chapter on a penitentiary inmate in solitary confinement that compliments the article in The New Yorker.

But even for “normal” people, disengagement is necessary if we are to understand things, necessary for enlightenment. Post-Freudian psychology and existentialists (from Kierkegaard forward) offer unique insight on the human condition. According to these sources, society and socialization, beginning in childhood, have fashioned people to conform to an arbitrary and inherited social world that does not squarely face its own nature and situation in the universe. Rationality is defined as conformity, subordination, repression, in a world constructed around power, authority, and the political and economic mechanisms for enforcing desired behavior.

Society is not simply enforcing repression of dangerous instincts but enforcing repression of autonomy, individuality, creativity, self-actualization, and a genuine relationship with other sentient beings, nature, and the universe. Such repression makes us “rational” in the sense of being functional in society, as the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the famous DSM) defines it. Conversely, the misfit, the critic, the dissident, the outsider or stranger (as Camus calls him/her), the non-conformist, the socially- or economically-deprived, is a thorn in society’s flesh and teeters on being punished by the system.

Ultimately, the “crazy” person (such as the creative schizophrenic) has seen through the repressions and glimpsed the yawning chasm of self and impermanence — and so gone mad. This is the origin of suicide, what Freudians would call Thanatos, the Death Wish. But isn’t our society and its powerful elites always pursuing Death — and dragging us along?

Solitude unrepresses. Since repression begins in the infantile stage, we don’t realize the depth involved. Jung would say that we don’t have to go back into childhood and can move forward as adults, but, of course, his method requires a great deal of enlightenment work.

Solitude brings the unconscious to consciousness. We either go mad or we navigate. We navigate with a spiritual master, a trusted loved one, a community of like-minded, our own introverted personality, lots of reading and reflection, lots of physical work, lots of solo nature adventures, lots of spiritual practice, or just plain tenacity.

We navigate to balance with social reality, or to accommodate with reality. Mystics and others may navigate further, to the edge, to peak experiences. But that is not necessary.

Solitude is not for everyone. It is not something that should be recommended or encouraged in others without evidence of the prerequisite navigating. People do need solitude if they are ever going to break out of illusion, but it is a powerful thing, too powerful for most without a lot of depth. Ideology may substitute the break-out navigating, but it does not address the deep psychological factors that motivate or propel human beings. So there is no substitute for solitude. And no hurrying of it for those who are not ready. When they are ready they will discover it.

Solitary confinement is a forced situation that loosens the physiology first (sensory deprivation) and then the mind. James Austin, in his monumental book Zen and the Brain, describes this whole process in infinite (and fascinating) detail. As torture, however, this process inflicted on inmates leaves them nothing to fall back on. The result is the disintegration of their mental world.

The physiology for meditators is never so extreme, nor their lives so socially isolated. If the latter, they have sought out nature, and learned to see and hear the universe expressed in it, like a voice in the wind or rain. They know the voice is not human, but they need not pursue the difference. Only the world in its insistence on conforming to a single narrow-minded view of rationality and of what should be done everyday is going to call the voice-hearing madness.

But for inmates and detainees, this process, forced upon them, is torture. The voices are hellish, not enlightening.

Post-Freudian thought and existentialism do not, of course, talk about eremitism — though Nietzsche presented solitude as a remedial state for soul-seekers. There are, of course, other ways to approach the subject in terms of the dangers of solitude, the necessary cautions.

That the world is mad (violence, war, consumption, destruction, hatred, rivalry, envy, anger, fear) makes sense. And that the world wants us to be “mad” with it by acting the way it shows us, by conforming to its social norms, is the madness itself. In that sense, the “mad” (poets, sages, saints, mystics, solitaries, hermits, et al.) are the only people who know what the world is really like.

An earlier entry described the emergence of the individual, culminating in the 19th-century views of two disparate personalities, Max Stirner and Josiah Warren. The former was a German schoolteacher proposing egoism as a philosophy of life; Warren was an American Utopian writer experimenting with the notions of “individuality” and “self-sovereignty.”

Both writers lacked the keen psychological insight that would have described the individual fully, instead relying on external material factors such as property and commercial relations to define the individual in contrast to others, to institutions and to associations. They are counted as individualist anarchists in proposing social systems that would revolve around autonomous individuals — though not offering theories of society. This was inevitably the nature of their philosophies of life, and why they were labeled individualist anarchists rather than social or communitarian anarchists, who outnumber them and reflect a deeper level of reflection, for example, Kropotkin, Prudhon, or Bakunin.

In the United States especially, the writings and ruminations of 19th century individualist thinkers like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and John Chapman (“Johnny Appleseed”) hardly address society in terms of change or reform, ignoring this avenue of thought to more fully develop the individual, especially intellectually and creatively. A common threat has been identification with nature as an organizing philosophical principle, influenced by those unique American factors as secularism, wilderness, frontier, and the egalitarianism of the movement west. These writers extrapolate the absence of an inherited class system into an individual encounter with nature. Wordsworth would have been astonished at their autonomy from society, though he would have missed Tintern Abbey.

In the 20th century, the relationship to nature continues to dominate individualist thinking: John Muir, Robinson Jeffers, Jack Kerouac, Edward Abbey. A streak of individualist anarchism continues to underlie their thought, but the capitalism of Josiah Warren was left behind for a more authentic appreciation of nature. Where Muir was a formal naturalist, Jeffers uses nature as a confirmation of his individualist ethos expressed in poetry, what he called Inhumanism. Kerouac and Abbey are the closest to social radicalism, but they are conscious of nature as the backdrop to anything successful in thought and lifestyle. Nature curbs the intellectualisms of politics. All these American writers are close to solitaries but not hermits. They are busy exploring the boundaries of individualism but need to do so with others. At the same time, especially with Keruoac and Abbey, an absence of asceticism prevents them from true solitude — not that they seek it.

As a political and social doctrine, individualism in the 20th century United States is easily dominated by Ayn Rand, with her particular emphasis on what she calls the “virtue of selfishness.” Though as a fiction writer she echoes familiar themes about heroes battling tyranny and future worlds gripped by authoritarianism, her background as a Russian emigre of Jewish descent — and the fact of being a woman — makes her work divert from a relationship to nature to a strict ideology that consciously exhilarates the self, the ego. Where the previous American individualist writers project a relaxed and open perspective of life, Rand left fiction behind and established rigid philosophy she called Objectivism. As Leonard Peikoff, Rand’s closest disciple and her heir, notes:

Man’s self, Ayn Rand held, is his mind or conceptual faculty, the faculty of reason. All man’s spiritually distinctive attributes derive from this faculty. For instance, it is reason (man’s value judgments) that leads to man’s emotions. And it is reason which possesses volition, the ability to make choices.

But reason is a property of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain.

The term ego combines the above points into a single concept: it designates the mind (and its attributes) considered as an individual possession. The ego, therefore, is that which constitutes the essential identity of a human being. …

It is obvious why Ayn Rand exalts man’s ego. In doing so, she is (implicitly) upholding the central principles of her philosophy and her heroes: reason, values, volition, individualism. …

But all of these premises are bad exaggerations of rationalism and scientism. Human beings are not mental beings first and afterwards physical or emotional. It is the other way around: physical beings who have acquired a mind, have evolved a rational faculty, but who are still dominated by drives and instincts, emotions and feelings, which clearly precede reason and are emphatically not products of reason. Reason does lead to emotion, but emotion precedes reason. Reason does not possess volition, which is as much an expression of drives, instincts, and emotions as anything resembling reason. In short, ego is not mind.

Not ego but reason is enshrined by Rand’s individualism, for there is no collective ego anymore than a collective brain — though socialization and culture suggest a collective pattern of human behavior nevertheless. Reason separated from the self is both an abstraction and a broken tool. Ego is one of many composite pieces in the human psyche, and even the totality of pieces is not the sum of a human being, not the abstract “ego” that Rand proposes as an ideal. Even that ideal has a country, parents, shadows, fears, loves, hatreds, desires, and instincts. Better to be conscious of them than to suppress or deny them with “reason.”

An absence of philosophy and psychology in these tortuous arguments creates a determined path to a politics and economics that helps justify the “virtue of selfishness” that Rand calls capitalism but which in fact is corporatism. This was evident from her lifetime’s fierce defense of the status quo and the power of conventional and suppressive elites.

Rand lost the writers’ inspiration for mythic archetypes in embracing non-fiction and couching individualism as egoism, which was unheard of in other American individualisms and only remotely developed in Europe. Indeed, Rand could not stand individualisms of any but the most conventional sorts, dismissing as thugs, hippies, and degenerates any whom — along with her generation and class — smacked of the wrong sort of individualism. Her potential rivals she viewed as more inimical than Communists, liberals, and religious (whom she hated); those she singled out were libertarian or individualist anarchists and libertarian socialists or communitarian anarchists. What she must have thought of Eastern philosophy or of hermits in general!

The politics of eremitism is a patient process of sifting through the historical philosophies and spiritualities to identify where they stand with respect to nature, thought, self, creativity, and virtue, to their larger sense of identity with the myriad beings of the universe. Not taking these complexities into account — the great contests of living thought, the great forces and cycles of history and power, the breakthroughs of thinkers East and West — is bound to constrict the individual to a single frame of mind, and, worse, to bind the individual to a worldly philosophy of life.

The psychology of the prophet originates in the shaman’s insight for healing the sick. The notion of predicting the future was simply the application of a remedy or change of behavior that would change the future. The sick could be physically ill or suffer a psychological modality. The function of the shaman as healer, which would be refined or sophisticated by herbalists, midwives, and wise elders, was not so much to change the future as to make one away of what the future would be without change in the present. On a mundane level, the function of problem-solving was a matter of experience; finding herbs, for example, called upon the shaman’s perception of where to optimize gathering. Perception, experience, reflection, integration, synthesis: the hallmarks of dealing with crisis and the future, be it one’s own or another’s.

With the evolution of shamanism into priesthood in complex societies, the augurs were arranged to reflect the values of the class in authority. Healing the sick was confined to healing the powerful, and predicting the success of crops or the outcome of battles was more relevant to the powerful than to the lowborn. Cicero argued, nevertheless, that augurs were demanded by the populace and were of “great advantage” to the state, and so should be retained (though he clearly was skeptical).

Today we have financial forecasters — though they have been dissipated from the temple by the global economic downturn — and sports, television, political elections, lotteries. Though the augurs have been otherwise banished, the games of fortune as augurs are still found to be in demand by the populace and of “great advantage” to the state.

All this is augury based on whim and amusement. But religious sentiment often borders on the fine line between what Cicero called superstition and religion. We might consider crass a prayer to get rich or get even, but that line is crossed when what is desired is reasonable, like rain during a drought. Even so, as the famous story of the two hillsides shows, there is contradiction in circumstance. The story is of two farmers on either side of a hill. On one side the farmer needed rain and on the other side, where the rain was ruinous, the farmer needed dryness. Who was God (or the gods) to satisfy? Both, perhaps?

The wisdom of shamanism, and forms of proactive future-changing rather than future-predicting, is in identifying the potential for positive change and pulling out for inspection all the factors involved. There is an empirical objectivity to the process, a high degree of vigilance and fact-gathering, all done with intuition as much as reason. For example, to cure a disease, the natural approach is to identify all the relevant factors, then make an estimate based on the conditions brought about by the factors. Modern medicine proceeds in the opposite way. After compiling a list of symptoms, the list is compared to a list of diseases, and a match made. Then the list of diseases is matched to a list of pharmaceuticals. Seldom are the organic factors of diet, exercise, energy, and frame of mind taken into account. Medicine, except in its grossest mechanical sense, is a reading of augurs, as superstitious as augur-reading in antiquity.

A perspicacious approach is what marks modern tarot as well. The cards are not supposed to predict the future but to identify underlying factors that the person is supposed to take into account. Or, more precisely, the cards stimulate the unconscious of the person to reflect on archetypes so that these factors begin to reveal patterns and issues in their lives to take into account. Taking these into account, the people can see what is coming in their lives. This is not divination or augury because the reader can change that probable future — if he or she addresses the underlying issues. (Of course, not all tarot users think of tarot this way.)

Another form of prophecy, actually closer to something like tarot, is religious prophecy. The shift from religions of sacrifice to religions of ethics is a substantial maturation of the relation of individual to nature, God, and self. The Old Testament Yahweh was satisfied with the “sweet savor” of burnt animal sacrifices, but by the time of Isaiah, it was a sacrifice of the heart and not of an animal that was pleasing to God, of course representing a spiritual advance. The same process took place in Aryan India with the transition from Vedic Brahmanism to Vedanta. The individual remarkably improves their ability to understand their future when taking into account more of the fundamental aspects of nature and spirit than when relying on others to interpret or predict the future.

Most religious prophecy however, intends to predict specific events, such as the Fatima prophecies, ignoring the Gospel injunction of Jesus (Mark:13:32) that no one knows the day nor hour — by which is meant a myriad of events from the mundane to death itself, which is what should matter, rather than political, economic, catastrophic, or apocalyptic events over which individuals have no control.

Similarly, cryptic prophecies declared by witches or Nostradamus or the like also pander the the desire to control not just the future but to control others, to have them live and respond in the same way as oneself, to remake the environement of time and space into a chaos, with oneself sufficiently compelled to react. An entire psychology of the occult prefers these nebulous forces to those of enlightenment and self-realization. Their augurs tend to overlap religion as much as politics.

There are more benign religious prophecies, such as the fictional Celestine prophecies, or the New Age prophecies about the winter solstice of 2012. These fall into similar categories, distinguished only by their sentiment of secular piety or presumed authenticity.

We do not control our lives in an absolute fashion, of course, but we have substantial input about how we spend our time and energy, and it is essential to control these in order to carve out a future that is in harmony with our values. Our knowledge of forthcoming catastrophe should be entirely in order to amend our lives — not as repentance or revelation but as will to power, power over ourselves.

We must be wary of the tone and structure we adopt in our speculations about the future. Forecasts about material and social conditions easily adopt a biblical phraseology that puts one on a godly plain, judging the world in terms of good and evil. The concern of sages everywhere has always been to transcend good and evil, to see good and evil as subjective intervention in the interests of human desires.

By transcending good and evil, we approximate to a harmony with nature and the universe that is not possible when we are concerned only about future outcomes of present deeds. Such a concern betrays our petty motives. If what we are doing here and now is right, then the future does not matter. The future unfolds according to the nature of its causes and effects, but our individual future is guided by what we identify as values and incorporate into our lives. How could events matter in this ultimate sense?

It is in this sense the sage would say: “Love God and do what you will.” But only in this sense.

Part of the temptation of prediction is the assurance it gives us, the power it seems to bestow on secular events. This is a false path, but understandable because modern society and culture are constructed on material achievement and cannot measure themselves in ways other than those. The modern world has constructed its values on this material plain and ignores the more subtle aspects of life, nature, self, spirit, and being.

Lao-tzu offers a different presentation of reality: as mystery. Note especially the off-hand advice of the last stanza about the future.

Looked at but unseen – it is beneath form;
Listened to but unheard – it is beneath sound;
Held but not touched – it is beneath feeling;
These depthless things evade definition,
And blend into a single mystery.

In its rising there is no light,
In its falling there is no darkness,
A continuous thread beyond description,
Lining what cannot occur;
Its form formless,
Its image nothing,
Its name silence;
Follow it, it has no back,
Meet it, it has no front.

Attend the present to deal with the past;
Thus will you grasp the continuity of the Way,
Which is its essence.

The future? It does not exist. You are an accumulation of the past. Deal with the past. Then attend the present. Thus will you enter the Way. There is no other way to deal with the future.

On first impression, philosophical Individualisms seem to be linked to eremitism. Both represent the individual following his or her own will, deciding for themselves that an interior or subjective view of the world is more important than an institutional or cultural consensus about how to live and think.

Although everyone is an “individual,” individuals did not emerge as social phenomena until after the devolution of the Western medieval world view, where a social model unraveled and identification with social and class roles began to blur.

There have always been “heroes” of one sort or another, assertive individuals efforts presented as historical and unique products of individual consciousness and will, but even heroic deeds were not individual deeds but carefully prescribed methods and channels of social expression. A knight was not heroic because he engaged in battle. A monk was not heroic because he spent hours in prayer. A woman was not heroic because she renounced her autonomy to the family.

The heroic archetype was understood in antiquity and the Middle Ages, but it was reserved to those already defined as “heroic” in capacity – hence the knight could go further, but not the monk, the peasant, or the housewife. The discovery of the individual, it may be said, was discovered early on in the East, as in Buddhism, rebelling as it did against the caste system, but the psychological and political implications were not drawn.

In the Western world, those implications were drawn, and the result was the emergence of the individual over succeeding centuries. This meant wars of nobles against nobles, wars of religion, wars of middle against upper, low against upper and middle, etc.

Indeed, war may be thought of as a pivotal factor in social jumps or shocks that set off new cycles, whether material or social. Even when war destroys the rebels, war nevertheless also destroys in the conscience of sensitive observers the moral legitimacy of the victors — and of the existing social and moral system. Wars represent a devolution of the moral “capital” of the powerful, further alienating from dominant culture that set of individuals who are thinkers, creators, and reflective personalities.

In times of crisis, alternative social expressions emerge, among them individuals, at least in modern times.

In 17th century England (and probably in mercantile Flanders, Holland, Italy, France, and other places throughout Europe where Protestantism was followed or accompanied by philosophical skepticism), the extrapolation of individualism to the economic order emerged, even before a full-blown philosophy of individualism. The notion that individuals should have autonomy in their social and economic lives was a product of devolution, opposed by the powerful who would control the new mercantilism. The autonomous economic activity came to be called “capitalism,” but it never flourished because the kings and nobles still owned land, food, shipping, credit, goods — and no individual could enter this field without the traditional social privileges of birth, rank, and social connections.

The hermit Roger Crabb is representative of an “English Protestant” form of individualism in this era, but his eremitism was partly derived from Christian tradition and his own personality, hardly to be imitated. The 19th century United States presented the optimum social conditions for the development of a unique secular individualism, from Dickinson, Thoreau, and Whitman to Muir. This intellectualized eremitism, mingled with the influence of transcendentalism and nature as a motive, reveals an individualism not dependent on the economic or philosophical theories of egoism that emerged from Europe.

The chief emergence of egoism in Europe was in the work of Max Stirner. Of Stirner, here is a Thatch entry of several years ago:

In his The Ego and Its Own, Max Stirner (1806-1856) proposed “egoism” as a model for society and individuals. His rejection of state and religion in favor of property and the will strikes a familiar chord in his successor Nietzsche. But egoism is a model for ruthless hedonism, not watchful solitude.

One can temper the identification of egoism with hedonism but the point is that Stirner was not motivated by solitude or interest in solitude.

Stirner was first to boldly proclaim that society is not an entity for the promotion of the individual but for the subordination of the individual to whatever people, institutions, or conventions were in power. As he argues it, the common weal is not his weal. Leave it to successors to state more explicitly that they will not accept the dream of a common weal or society that is altruistic, or even accommodating the pleasure of anyone. Stirner insists that anything one does must, after all, satisfy or fit the values of the self. He knows that this is the ego, and calls himself an egoist, and conversely dreams of a “union of egoists” that would be the counterpart to the union of powerful or altruistic forces in the world. This would be the only acceptable way for the individual to pursue commerce, trade, or social conviviality.

The pursuit of economic autonomy was what came to be called “capitalism,” as in the writings of American Josiah Warren (1798-1874). Warren announces his overall theory thusly:

Society must be so constructed as to preserve the sovereignty of every individual inviolate. That it must avoid all combinations and connections of persons and interests, and all other arrangements, which will not leave every individual at all times at liberty to dispose of his or her person, and time, and property, in any manner in which his or her feelings or judgment may dictate, without involving the persons or interests of others. That there must be individuality of interests, individuality of responsibilities, individuality in the deciding powers, and sense, [and] individuality of action.

Stirner had already argued that without property, the individual is nondescript and meaningless. Warren extended this theme, with an emphasis characteristic of the American experience, into a reduction of culture and society to economic and material relationships based on the individual’s production of wealth. In his essay on “equitable commerce,” Warren gets bogged down in the minutiae of a curmudgeonly storekeeper pricing his items, basically quarreling with any who haggle as equivalent to challenging his very well-being as an individual.

When Warren applies his individualism to principles of “true civilization,” he presents an ideal scenario in which each enlightened individual respects, tolerates, and cooperates with every other individual, a scenario based in part on the experience Warren had hoped would emerge from the utopian social commune of New Harmony, in which he had participated. How often do individuals overreact to disappointments and resentments!

Stirner and Warren are 19th-century representatives of what would be called anarchism, specifically individualistic anarchism, which would differ from European models based on social and political engagement, and thus called social or communitarian anarchism. One can see the vague similarities in individualistic anarchism to forms of eremitism, especially in the United States — but there is a significant psychological difference.

A future entry will explore 20th-century American expressions of individualism, and how they differ from a theory or philosophy of eremitism.