Author: Meng-hu

For many, night is the signal for conviviality and entertainment. As if the glare of daylight inhibits emotions, night is nearly everywhere viewed as a time of reverie and socializing.

For the solitary and the reflective, night closes the labored schemes and necessary relationships of society and daytime. Night closes another output of work, study, service, or necessity, temporarily withdrawing from relationship to a particular structure in the world of culture.

But night is traditionally different. Night is for summing up, assessing, for reflecting. Night offers the potential for depth and strength of thought that the glare of daytime resists, the opportunity for thought that is free to associate with other thoughts without the definitions of social conformity and structure.

Human beings are not nocturnal animals. Our best creations of reason and material things are contrived in daylight and the revelation of detail. Conversely, night allows impressions to assemble and rearrange themselves in the mind without reference to logic and reasonable functionality. We are not nocturnal animals in the sense of honing survival skills for that arena called night. Our worldly skills are for daylight; night is for a different set of skills, for our ability to reflect, imagine, and wonder.

With sleep, exploration and reflection can continue, as our mind plays imaginatively with the matter of the day or recycles older themes promoted by day’s subconscious murmurs. At the same time, night gives us the conscious opportunity to mitigate the harshness of the matters of the day, and render them harmless for our dreams.

Night is as subjective as it is silent. What happens in the mind at night is not final or absolute, only tentatively awaiting refinement overnight, a transition to wholeness. But silence must underlie the whole process in order for it to succeed. Silence and night wrap themselves round like two parts of the taiji, the yin-yang symbol.

How can the process of reflection undo the constrictions of daytime stresses and structures unless there is silence to dissolve them? More noise would only constrict the mind. Silence at night is enhanced by complementary music or scent or shadow or the absoluteness of no sound. Our silence should reflect our night: sometimes faintly illuminated, sometimes utterly dark.

As night and day are counterparts of illumination, so too are they counterparts of perspective. Day is objectivity and night is subjectivity. This complements social roles: in daytime we wear a mask, a persona of service, labor, and dedication to externals. At night the mask is laid aside. For many, the mask laid aside means abandonment of duty and therefore purposelessness, but for the solitary it is a welcome recuperation from a false persona, a constricting objectivity, a constriction of self.

And we can further assign objective and subjective to day and night as metaphors. What we must avoid, however, is equating night with darkness in the sense of impenetrability, ignorance, or turpitude. Better to anticipate night as an unfolding, a logical turning like the face of a moon or star, a resting from the strained attention of tired eyes.

As an addenda to reflections on the possibility of a mystic personality (previous post) is this photo of a Japanese macaca or snow monkey, made famous by the documentary film “Baraka.”

The film opens with the familiar shakuhachi melody “Honshirabe,” and the camera lingers on the facial expressions of this monkey as a profound portrait of meditation.

click image for larger view

Western mystics describe similar experiences, but there is no mystic personality type. Nor, strictly speaking, are they necessarily solitaries or even introverts.

For example: Hildegard of Bingen was a strong-willed and creative artist willing to confront bishops and bureaucrats. Meister Eckhart was a scholar who preached regularly to a parish of intellectually humble minds. Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross were consummate administrators. Angelus Silesius passed his best years in fruitless proselytizing. Jonathan Edwards, the New England preacher, is not remembered for his youthful experiences of mystic rapture but for his fire and brimstone. The list goes on.

With Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and perhaps the unknown author of “Cloud of Unknowing” we approach a parallel of mystical and hermit life. Solitude becomes a dominant theme, a priority for daily life, not merely a stage or setting for mystical experience. Including elaborations of imagery and symbolism in mystic experiences with descriptions of solitude and eremitism risks smothering simplicity. Those experiences which are especially controversial or hagiographical ought to be excluded at once from exploring a mystic personality. Otherwise, we verge toward the classic hysteria so repugnant to reason and authority.

As an antidote to mysticism as irrationality is the book titled “Quantum Questions” usefully assembled by Ken Wilber. It consists of “mystical” writings of 20th-century physicists. These are serious scientists, including Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Einstein, Planck, Eddington and others. They show that mysticism has little to do with epistemological frames of mind and even less to do with personality. They redefine and rescue mysticism.

The popularizer Evelyn Underhill wrote (in her “Practical Mysticism”) that

Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in a greater or less degree, or who aims at and believes in such attainment.

This description seems too literal, making mysticism an advocacy or station in life, an aspiration or goal like a vocation. Underhill describes the task of the simple reader turned want-to-be-mystic as a mundane one that merely requires an open mind or heart, as it were, toward Reality. If mysticism fits our personality, than we can safely pursue it.

These ambiguities are cultural and social. The Western world has little tolerance historically for hermits, anchorites, and solitaries, let alone mystics, most of whom were objects of suspicion of heresy. Inevitably, the subjective content of their experiences were bound to enrich their understanding of theological definitions, and therein confront ecclesiastical necessity of controlling dogma and teaching. Unwisely expressed, mysticism in the West was an intolerable projection of subjectivity. But so too was eremitism.

In contrast, Eastern cultures have not only tolerated hermits, solitaries, and mystics but fostered them. In the East the content of belief is fluid, not in the sense of relative but in being ultimately a matter of individual integration, with social and cultural latitude for this internalizing process and consequent expression.

Such a subjective process does no harm to culture and society in the East because it is viewed as a refinement of a personal gift cultivated individually and returned in a creative way to society at large.

In such a context, a mystic personality seems possible, even if stereotypical to critical Western onlookers. The life of the hermit, whether from historic India, China, Japan, Tibet, Thailand, or elsewhere in the East, does not threaten society or accepted beliefs. The lives of hermits are sources of edification in such social contexts. Where the lives of saints in the West serve to accommodate personality types and dispositions, this function is not taken literally but as a metaphor for expressions, carefully tempered. In the East, the saints are colorful, garrulous, even literal. It is hard to see them as merely mundane.

The famous photo of Ramakrishna in an ecstatic state confirms to every Western viewer the stereotype of the mystic. There are some equivalents in the West but they would not be allowed such a prominent influence in spiritual practice because mysticism is an uncontrolled element in the West. Yet this ecstatic state is not a norm, and is not expressed as a norm anywhere, for the East has a more carefully mapped study of enlightenment than exists elsewhere. Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen master, was always insistent that enlightenment was not a priority, a pursuit, or a conceit. For the mundane, it is all the same to just practice.

For the solitary in the West, the dominance of psychology and social conformity still permits a discrete pursuit of mystical themes, as even the great 20th-century physicists show. So, too, does solitude and silence have to underplay their presence in our public lives in order to safeguard themselves not from a past ecclesiastical authority but from the conformist society of the present.

Teleology is an Aristotelean and medieval scholastic term meaning “purpose.” In its simplest form, teleology is easily demonstrated by example: the purpose of a plow is to plow the soil; the purpose of a spoon is for eating one’s soup, and so forth. The uncontroversial premise in these mundane examples is that these objects were fashioned by human beings (technology) for their desired purpose.

The premise shifts, however, when purpose is ascribed to mere facticity. For example, petroleum exists to fuel our machines. Here purpose is contrived from creative scientific human effort, in short, technology — or from mere utility, desire, and convenience. Our technology can sound useful and benign, and hence the purpose remains more or less uncontroversial. As long as the results are equally benign — something that only time reveals.

We make these ascriptions all the time and without problem, even when we realize that they are not strictly true. A butterfly flits by in order to give pleasure to our eyes and a bird sings in order to please our ears. We carve nature into useful and less useful, by which criteria we mean purposeful or less purposeful. The purposeness can betray us, of course, as in the instinctive repulsion at a caterpillar without realizing that it is the butterfly that will soon delight our eyes. If we destroy the caterpillar out of repulsion we destroy the opportunity to ascribe purpose to the entire cycle. This is what we do when we destroy a rain forest and its many plant and animal species, only to wonder at the laboratory’s latest synthesis of a healing herb.

Or rather, that is purpose put at a scientific level. For my part, I would want to anticipate the resourcefulness and beauty of everything, making it an ethical concern, and not having to calculate the utility that can never be exhaustive of every parameter. But that gets ahead of the issues.

The scale or depth of teleological complexities rise around us inexorably like a tide. Do the objects of our lives take on purpose or do we serendipitously ascribe purpose and therefore sentiment, attachment, and affection? It is not that the butterfly exists for our enjoyment, anymore than the petroleum in the ground for our convenience. Rather, we experience what things do, through observation or experimentation, and then cannot see them with neutral eyes. Even as we destroy them in our shortsightedness.

Sigmund Freud, whatever his excesses in psychoanalytical theory, wisely believed that existence was buffeted by two polarizing purposes, those of Eros (creativity, self-identification, potential) and Thanatos (aggression, destruction, violence, death). This Manichean scheme seems simplistic, but nevertheless forms the basis of all Western thinking, however configured. Regardless of how much good we assign to existence (to teleology), everything seems undermined by its opposite, whether we call this opposite sin or evil or fate or nature.

Practical examples always crystallize this problem of purpose. Remember the story of the child whose beloved pet has died? “Will I see my dog in heaven?” asks the child. What to reply? “Whatever made you happy on earth will make you happy in heaven” is all that parents or adults can respond. The child’s question, more profound than the adult’s dogmas, forces the question of teleology and collapses the belief-edifice of the adult into ignorance.

In childhood we become aware of purpose, especially in loss: the death of a butterfly or bird or pet animal, let alone in an elderly relative or someone even closer. Early childhood is the state of not-consciousness, which is to say the state of not demanding purpose (yet), that state of simply being. But this state does not last long. Dissipating, we are left with the awareness of mortality and the “knowledge of good and evil.” And we are never the same again. Purpose pales before existence and experience.

I am a little startled to read (though I guess I knew it) that butterflies live for a week or a month. What I see in the garden, so delighting my eyes, will soon be gone. The mournful chirp of the crickets in autumn reminded the Chinese and Japanese hermit poets of mortality. The purpose we assign to the butterfly, to please us, like the flowers and the birds and the pet animals and the forests, mountains, stars– and other people — also remind us of our mortality. Unlike the Roman emperor riding proudly in the chariot of his victory parade, we do not need a servant beside us to whisper in our ear: Remember that you are mortal. All of nature reminds us in its wistful and melancholic way.

We can enjoy the dark humor that pokes fun at this our weakest sentiment, this drollness that arises from the inadequacy of purpose, of humanly contrived teleology. Remember that popular saying intended to lift us out of the doldrums after making a big blunder or falling into a mood of depression? “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” I admit the wicked humor of that wag who rewrote the saying for the mayfly, the insect that lives for only 24 hours: “Today is the last day of the rest of your life.”

Actually, if we lived by that motto, we might find ourselves fiercely attached to the beautiful and the wistful in life without demanding for one moment anything from them.

The most cogent of prophetic statements are not those that lament the corruption of their generation. Every generation thinks itself to be cursed with the worst morals and the most profligate people. From antiquity onward, cultures have looked back longingly on a lost golden age or paradise, and lamented the present. These are not cogent insights but reflect the psychology of insecurity.

Characteristic of the modern era (versus the medieval and ancient eras) is the insistence on a progression into the future, whether social or intellectual or technological. The hallmark of modern thought is the boundless optimism of its captains and elites.

The ability to describe the unchanging status of human nature and the state of societies around us as realistically as possible, without the illusion of progress, and to project it into the future, is far more insightful than the wishes of past generations, because it is historical, philosophical and scientific. Have we reached that potential for accuracy?

With the grip of industrialism and complex technology, the modern illusion of indefinite progress, realizing no good change in human behavior or human nature, collapsed among insightful observers. Not exactly among the social critics of exploitation as disparate as Marx or Dickens, who still had faith in human destiny. Rather, among those who got to the core of history and human nature such as Nietzsche, who said that humans had only 200 years left to prove that they could survive. This he wrote in the 1880s.

Reflecting on the experiences of the 20th century, two other thinkers speak clearly on this very topic of human survival: Freud and Heidegger. There are many others, of course, as the decades rolled by, but considering what they did not see, and what has suddenly loomed before us, from the nuclear age to the last age of climate change, Freud and Heidegger speak as clearly as if they were our contemporaries.

Nietzsche’s calendar ticks off the years like a terrible dripping water clock.

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. … Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two “Heavenly Powers,” eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert itself in the struggle with its equally immoral adversary [Thanatos, or Death]. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?
— Sigmund Freud

The darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative, have assumed such proportions throughout the earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long since become absurd.
— Martin Heidegger

In Hindu and Buddhist tradition, karma is the cumulative effect of past circumstances on the present moment. We may extend the concept to include one’s behavior, environment, genetic inheritance (or the traditional “past lives”), culture, upbringing, personality, beliefs, experiences, and responses. Karma is the momentum of being, at least being a product of time and circumstance.

In describing karma, one strains to avoid speaking in terms of good or bad effects, though our lives are filled with what we inevitably call good or bad, either morally or psychologically. And this inevitable judging of experiences and influences we quietly and without question ascribe to the world of nature around us: in terms of weather, for example, we have good days (sunny, warm, bright) versus bad days (stormy, angry, wicked). No wonder we pit our personal vision of karma against the cumulative circumstances that have brought us to this point in our lives and wonder: good? bad? … And how useful, after all, is rolling it all into a ball and labeling it with one or two words?

The traditions say that we can break the hold of karma in a single moment, in the flash of a lightning bolt. But psychology and culture don’t tend to confirm that. It’s never that easy. But it is true enough that karma is transformed for the “better” when we just get rid of it, forget it. That is the therapeutic function of solitude: to disengage us from pitting self against karma (society, culture, contrivance, foibles, nightmares) and instead reconciling us with the universe: the stars, the flowers, the forest, all of which have no karma.

John M. Oldham identifies several personality types related to or intersecting the solitary personality type. These include the self-confident, the serious, the conscientious, and the vigilant. He also counsels the solitary to avoid high-strung, emotionally needy, and highly social types such as the dramatic, mercurial, adventurous, devoted, idiosyncratic, and leisurely.

Because no individual is completely one type or another, such recommendations are practical advice concerning tendencies and characteristics. Degrees of interrelationships ought to be the functional rule. But some specifics are worth pursuing as to what the characteristic personality types or traits actually involve.

The Conscientious type is actually what Oldham calls the “backbone of America,” reflecting mainstream social dynamics of work, perseverance, order, detail, prudence, conscience, moral conformity, and emotional constraint. The solitary will pose no psychological challenge to the domain of the conscientious and so will find nominal compatibility as long as the conscientiousness does not veer off into obsessive-compulsive behavior or perfectionism that intrudes on the solitary’s preference for working alone or without excessive constraints.

The Self-confident will have strong self-esteem, be poised and sensitive to others, and tend to have a vision or dream of where they want to go with qualitative projects and relations. The self-confident person will have a high sense of tolerance, which is good for the solitary, and a high sense of competence, which will also usually be amiable to the solitary. Though the self-confident are skillful in politics and do display ambition, these are exactly what the solitary avoids, so that as long as the self-confident is not goading the solitary in the direction of competition, all is well. Of course, that is not what the self-confident would do anyway, being busy with themselves and usual perceptive of others’ style.

The Sensitive personality will value privacy and discretion. The sensitive remain reserved and diplomatic in all settings. But they carry concern as worry and unease due to a lack of if not curiosity then risk-taking. These traits suggest a strong need for security mingled with reticent distrust. As part of their avoidant style, the sensitive may seek a social role that is safe both intellectually and emotionally. These are all parallel to most Solitaries, although not necessarily because solitaries are sensitive.

The Vigilant share a strong sense of autonomy with the Solitary. Complimentary characteristics include being perceptive to what is going on around them, being cautious about relationships and entanglements, and having a keen awareness of authority relationships. An extreme of the vigilant (paranoid) may circumscribe the Solitary and overreact emotionally to stress. But the non-threatening nature of Solitary personalities makes them compatible with vigilants.

The Serious are realistic and have a strong sense of being responsible for their learning, mastering, and rationalizing of whatever they encounter. Serious people are good at thinking before acting, are skeptical of others, and plan carefully. They do not have illusions about themselves or others and are even-tempered and fair-minded. Serious personality types are sober, hard-working, pessimistic, and exhaust themselves at their task. A too-serious Serious type veers towards depression.

Solitaries will find it hard to get along with others, though.

Dramatic and Mercurial people are unpredictable for the even-tempered and disengaged Solitary. The Dramatic blows everything out of proportion and the cloying Mercurial blows up unpredictably in energy, emotions, and lack of inhibitions.

Leisurely types are hopelessly pleasure-oriented, slothful, egoistic, and indifferent for the likes of the Solitary. The Adventurous is too reckless and unfocused for the Solitary, substituting risk for irresponsibility. Similarly, the Idiosyncratic are too concerned with their own reality to accommodate the solitary. The Self-Sacrificing personality type is naive and tolerant to the point of not luring the Solitary out of their self-initiated perceptions of the world. The Solitary will not admire the lack of self in the self-sacrificing. Finally, the Aggressive type is automatically shunned by the Solitary for their impulsiveness and desire to command.

Reading The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War, by David Livingstone Smith. The author is a philosopher but here incorporates cognitive social sciences and neurology to assemble a compelling presentation about human aggression and violence. Smith’s perspective is evolutionary biology but his control of the literature from philosophy to anthropology to history and beyond makes the book very cogent, organized, informative, and compelling.

As a premise, Smith states that “it is both possible and desirable to understand our capacity for war scientifically,” which he sees as an “innate biologically-based potential” and not strictly cultural. War and aggression have neurological bases in both evolution and observed evidence in primate group behavior. (Humans share nearly 98.77 percent of our genes with chimpanzees.) The emergence of territorial groups in chimpanzees culminated in raids and mass killing, even atrocities and mutilations of non-group individuals, as Jane Goodall first observed. Smith correctly notes that humans are not part of the Carnivora family but the Primates, and thus aggression and violence has nothing to do with the behavior of lions, tigers, or wolves but rather with the behavior of chimpanzee and their brain functions, genetics, and social behavior as hunter-gatherers.

One can appreciate Smith’s points here because so much New Age thought blames human violence on the emergence of civilization, agriculture, and cities. All the evidence from anthropology shows that hunter-gatherers (human and primate) were fiercely territorial and xenophobic. The transition from hunter-gatherer to hierarchical did not introduce new behavioral instincts but only exacerbated them.

In their famous correspondence titled Why War?, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud identified three factors or triggers to war:

1. resources: territory, food, fertility, expansion — and in humans — the idea of resources and the creation of intangible ideals
2. evolution of behavior that fosters reproductive success, and
3. evolutionary transformation of motive (provided by biology) into pretexts contrived by humans in appropriate or opportune circumstances.

One mistake made concerning evolution is the notion that evolution represents progress or improvement rather than merely adaptive change across generations. As Smith puts it, “change is horizontal nor vertical.” The expectation that humans ought to be moving into an ethical paradigm that separates them from chimpanzee behavior is itself an assumption. But in fact the development of intellect has merely provided sophisticated justifications for aggression and war.

Even before these justifications enter human social behavior, the vestiges of primate social behavior remain quite strong. Smith offers examples such as male dominance in war, the endorsement of war by women, the genetic sexual attraction of soldiers to women and groups, and the proliferation of rape and atrocities as instinctual reproductive success are all vestiges of primate behavior that goes unquestioned in human society. But furthermore, the development of self-deception, of “coalitionary violence,” as Smith calls it, and of reciprocity makes morality itself a justification rather than a curb on violence and war.

Morality becomes the justification for three central expressions of aggression: ethnocentric, xenophobic, and nepotistic. Society exacerbates these by fostering competition at every social and age level, emphasizing group over individual, and exploiting mirror neurons (the existence of which, however, few people are even aware). Unlike chimpanzees, humans contrive a “web of beliefs” overlaid on social behavior concerning “good, evil, pride, humiliation, friends, heroes, villains and martyrs.”

Smith concludes that chimpanzee warfare transitioned to primitive human warfare, which then was systematized with concepts of sufficient cognitive sophistication that the concepts attained ideological dimension. The social and cultural process seeks out channels of aggression and war and exacerbates them further through dehumanization, demonization, and predator imagery. These are fascinating chapters that Smith amply illustrates with clear examples from history.

Smith’s conclusion is simple and sober: “Taking my cues from the past, I am far from optimistic about the future.” He continues: “We will never stop men from enjoying wars, and trying to do so is a fool’s errand. … The most that we can hope for in the end, is for men to detest it more than enjoy it, and the only way to shift that balance is to expose the self-deception that makes killing bearable.”

Exposing the self-deception is exposing the entire conceptual construct that drives cultures: beliefs, social identity, and all the mechanisms Smith enumerates, such as xenophobia, territoriality, and the whole apparatus of good and evil conjured to bolster what are base neurological instincts.

All of this is pressingly relevant to the issue of what the individual derives from society and the group. Group behavior overrides the potential behavior of the individual, especially constructed to override the behavior of the individual who is thoughtful, serious, reflective, and solitary. Coalitionary violence in chimpanzees is instinctual, but in humans it is manufactured and refined to override common sense and reflection. Smith even refers to social animals in general as xenophobic, versus “loner” animals that do not reflect such instincts. Humans are “hierarchical, ethnocentric animals” as Smith puts it, social rather than individual in its instinctual characteristics.

Of course, no individual escapes socialization and the inevitable identification with groups, nor the inevitable tagging of that individual with group labels. But the potential for not going in that direction, for honestly examining what we do as instinctual or provoked potential, is real and available. Can Smith’s pessimistic conclusion be addressed? Only in the individual.

For the individual, the way to address instincts or potentials is in ways of thinking and working with nature, people, and self. In part, this work calls for an understanding of the brain as a kind of material condition. The neurosciences are increasingly helpful in that regard. We are also pressed to address the status of those parts of the brain (those parts of our lives and personalities) that harbor the most primitive instincts or potentials. What motivates our lives? What behaviors and thoughts mimic the causes of aggression enumerated by Einstein and Freud? What characteristics of society do we see reproduced in ourselves?

As mentioned we are pressed for a method or process, and the neurosciences can help by showing where to work and how. This is also why the Dalai Lama’s frequent meetings with neuroscientists is so helpful. The wisdom traditions of the world can help us in this work by providing archetypal models of how to work with the brain, the self, and all that is around us.

Eustace Conway has all of the physical skills necessary to be an American hermit. He has lived for years in the Appalachian Mountains in a tepee, without running water or electricity. He can assemble and maintain his own clothing and tools. He can survive from edible plants and forest animals. He can make a fire from scratch. He has survived the rugged terrains of southwestern desert and Alaskan winter.

Eustace could easily be a hermit, but he is “the last American man,” in the estimation of his biographer Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote a book about Eustace Conway by that title.

That title refines the hermit possibility in Eustace with the frontier imagery of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, undoubtedly established survivalists but also shrewd politicians and entrepreneurs in their own right. Eustace is no bumpkin, either, with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and English, and long a meticulous keeper of a personal journal.

Eustace had ambition, and focused it on creating the thousand acres he calls Turtle Island Preserve, dwelling on a mere sliver of it (now with working farm and solar power) to highlight simplicity and ecological wholeness to a paying public that manages to support him a little and to maintain his wilderness near Boone, North Carolina.

So Eustace Conway is not a solitary in the strict sense, but this is probably the result of the horrible psychological abuse he suffered as a child from his father. Ambition comes, then, from his grandfather, who ran a wilderness skills summer camp, and from the compensation of achieving success to refute his father. Eustace’s benign mother encouraged his acquisition of native American skills but could not rescue him from psychological abuse. And as Gilbert’s book painfully shows, Eustace has had a hard time getting along with people up close. The grand irony is that Eustace was undoubtedly driven by this psychological baggage to create the environmental vision of Turtle Island Preserve.

At the preserve, Eustace teaches simplicity, self-sufficiency, and an alternative to modern life. He runs kids camps, survival workshops for adults, horse-training, and friendly small group tours and open houses.

Eustace is not optimistic that people will put his ideas and model life into practice. His optimism has waned over time. Daily reports about climate change, peak oil, and consumerism only confirm Eustace. Though biographer Gilbert describes enough painful experiences in the social turns of Eustace’s life, one can still see the original hermit in his longings.

In a celebrated passage of his Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud describes the various methods by which people address the essential problem of suffering and the unattainability of happiness. Freud observes that the extinction of the perception of suffering is the most ambitious goal.

The crudest approach is the chemical one — intoxication. Here the end is the suppression of sensation in the relevant parts of the brain that perceive suffering and pain. While chemical suppression works for a while, it’s injurious repercussions are notorious. Yet culture has given intoxication a rather celebrated place, as if there must be some merit there, despite the hazards. Given this ironic cultural approbation, Freud notes with characteristic irony that intoxicants are largely responsible “for the useless waste of a large quota of energy which might have been employed for the improvement of the human lot.”

Freud then refines the issue by concentrating on the regulation (or suppression) of instinctual impulses or drives. The ultimate example is “prescribed by the worldly wisdom of the East and practiced by Yoga.” This succeeds at the expense of the expression or satisfaction of other drives which are renounced or suppressed as well. Freud implies that since the practitioner understands this trade-off and is in fact successful in regulating the drives, then the option is viable — for those who can master the discipline.

That Freud is willing to accommodate the above option is suggested by his discussion of aesthetics.

At this next level there is first the displacement of the drives, which is best seen in the artist, scientist, and creative person wholly given over to creativity, discovery, and investigation. This is a refined method but not, Freud suggests, a guarantee against suffering.

The next level is that of the aesthete, who may not enjoy the talent of creativity as much as the artist but who makes art, the contemplation of beauty, and the life of the imagination a method for managing suffering and unhappiness.

Freud first describes the aesthetic method by presenting the extinction of the mechanism of suffering. This extinction is accomplished by a transcendence typified by the aesthete who takes up the contemplation of art and beauty. However, Freud notes that:

People who are receptive to the influence of art cannot set too high a value on it as a source of pleasure and consolation in life. Nevertheless the mild narcosis induced in us by art can do no more than bring about a transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs, and it is not strong enough to make us forget real misery.

Freud then introduces the method of the hermit.

Another procedure operates more energetically and more thoroughly. It regards reality as the sole enemy and as the source of all suffering, with which it is impossible to live, so that one must break off all relations with it if one is to be in any way happy. The hermit turns his back on the world and will have no truck with it.

It is not clear if the hermit is really Freud’s term for what follows or if he considers the hermit simply the extreme of the continuum of the one who refuses reality introduced in the same paragraph. For the continuum is the solitary who identifies a world-set or reality-set and simply eliminates the objectionable (as much as possible) from this world:

But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one’s own wishes.

In a sense, Freud is giving the hermit helpful advice. Don’t just reject the world, he suggests, but reject it selectively. This appears to be what the historical hermits have always done: physically isolate themselves from that which impinges upon their priorities and values, and progressively refine this “world.” Granted, however, that Freud excludes religion from the success of any mental process, so that the motive of the hermit or solitary must remain a psychological and mental one, which is a clear and “scientific” way of safeguarding the method.

However, Freud has not excluded “the worldly wisdom of the East and practiced by Yoga” from his options, so perhaps his notion of hermit was only the literal one who recluses from the world and other people.

Still, Freud is not optimistic. For most historical hermits have been religious, in his judgment, and therefore have been delusional and mad. But that is not the main objection to the ambitions of the hermit. The hermit can be entirely secular and still, in rejecting the world and other people, risk everything.

Whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness will as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He becomes a madman, who for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his delusion. It is asserted, however, that each one of us behaves in some one respect like a paranoiac, corrects some aspect of the world which is unbearable to the construction of a wish and introduces this delusion into reality. A special importance attaches to the case in which this attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remolding of reality is made by a considerable number of people in common.

Freud does not enumerate any more “extreme” methods in this section of his essay. He emphasizes the trade-off between any given solution and what it renounces, suppresses, or loses. But of great value is the fact that Freud provided a context for considering the psychology of the solitary outside of its traditional historical context of religious vocation, seeing it as what today is usually considered a personality type.