hermit's thatch

Robert Bly’s discursive book Iron John (Addison-Wesley, 1990) intended to identify a new mental and social model and updated myth for the modern male psychology, which Bly found confused and incoherent because of the degradation of traditional myths, social and technological changes, and shifting cultural values. Bly’s approach is through mythology, literature, and anthropological speculation; his explorations make a useful search for the place of people (in this case men) in the modern social world.

Bly concentrates on the Wild Man myths that have existed since antiquity (from Gilgamesh to Esau, to Persians and Greeks to Native Americans) and through the medieval Western mind (such as Merlin and the Fisher King) and up to the classic fairy tales as in Grimm, to modern poetry evoking symbols of sea, forest, walled garden, and to the literature of coming of age. The “Iron John” of the title is a classic fairy tale wherein a Wild Man instructs a boy in that which must be done in order to come of age. The Wild Man is distinct from the Savage Man of anthropology and modern urban disdain, and from the famous medieval Green Man who lived in the wild. And because the true Wild Man has examined the wound that is life and consciousness, he “resembles a Zen priest, a shaman, or a woodsman more than a savage,” says Bly.

In Bly, the Wild Man lives alone in the forest but emerges periodically to enliven village and social life with his moods, abandons, and freely expressed urges. In this respect, Bly’s Wild Man originates more in Pan and the satyrs than in Diogenes or the medieval forest hermits. But both the secular men of the village and the philosophers or religious men of the desert experienced the demons of sexual temptation, and learned how to address them. In the modern world, where the role of men as husbanders, farmers, craftsmen, and adventurers has been suppressed and channeled into urban, mechanized and institutionalized settings, men are robbed of nature, endure splitting families, and reduce their spirits to conventional channels of cultural expression culminating in violence, exploitation, pornography, and war — or its tamer media surrogates. (Bly concentrates on classical themes, however, not venturing into extrapolations like these.)

Bly does not pay much attention to the function of solitude, both in shaping the personality as a practice or in its expression as an avocation. Yet solitude, like the fabled walled garden, is a place of both respite and introversion. And because mythologically the garden is maintained by feminine deities such as Demeter but also seen as a fecund and fertile counterpart settings to the open lands of plains and valleyes, as nature circumscribed but crafted to complement the psychological needs of the individual, the garden is an appropriate symbol of solitude.

Bly translates a portion of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem wherein the world can be seen as that which is not the garden of self:

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough
to make every moment holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with
my will,
as it goes toward action,
and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.

“Meditation” is being popularized by media, but the technique is not meditation but “relaxation.” The distinction arose with the 1975 book The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson, a Harvard University cardiologist who had devised scientific criteria to account for stress and anxiety signs and presented a scientific method for overcoming them in average people. Today, the business, corporate, and institutional sectors of the modern economy are touting what they call “meditation” to its employees. Reducing stress and anxiety allows employees to work harder for less, ignore ethical complications, and simply cope. (One U.S. commenter on Amazon lauds the book’s techniques for their ability to reduce stress and anxiety when on military night patrols during his tour in a war zone in the Middle East.) The methodology is relaxation, decidedly not meditation.

Since nearly everyone in modern urban technological society suffers from stress, anxiety, and forms of depression due to wrong livelihood, environment, relationships, goals, values, and social problems, proposing and teaching relaxation can be lucrative. Medical approbation makes the relaxation industry even more likely to be successful financially and in terms of swaying public interest.

Here is a representative example of relaxation masquerading as meditation, taken from no less than the Mayo Clinic website (but this is just an example and not intended to specifically malign the entity; examples are everywhere). On one visit to the website, the video was accompanied by an ad for Abilify, a powerful anti-psychotic drug (the website disclaims the ad as advertising, not endorsement). The problematic title “Need to relax? Take a Break for Meditation” alerts the viewer/reader to a contradiction. In the first place, no one can meditate watching a video (perhaps they can relax). Staring at a candle flame is not a meditation technique, but an advanced yoga eye exercise. And the ongoing breathing patterns and self-affirmations, while popularized in some circles, is generally a great distraction to true meditation because it requires mental interruptions. The valediction saying “return to a peaceful day” exemplifies the institutionalized use of relaxation to get workers (or equivalent) back to their jobs and carry on as prescribed.

The conflation of relaxation and meditation, of a pragmatic psychological method and a spiritual practice undermines the goals of both methods, but relaxation remains the more problematic in not seeking the more fundamental roots of anxiety.

TRANSCRIPT:

Need a few minutes to relax?

Get comfortable in your chair. Loosen any tight, uncomfortable clothing. Let your arms rest loosely at your side. Allow yourself a few moments to relax.

If your thoughts wander, just let them while gently moving your attention back to the relaxation. If you become anxious or uncomfortable, stop the relaxation by clicking on the pause button.

To begin, focus your eyes on the candle flame. Notice its simplicity and its beauty.

Take time to notice your breathing, gradually slowing down the rate of inhaling and exhaling as you become more comfortable.

Now relax and enjoy the feeling.

Close your mouth and relax your shoulders, releasing any tension that’s built up.

Inhale slowly and deeply through your nose. Let the air you breathe in push your stomach out.

Hold your breath in as you slowly count to four.

Breathe out slowly through your mouth as you continue counting up to six.

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three and four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Continue breathing in (four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

And out (three, four, five, six).

Remember, if stray thoughts enter your mind, gently return your attention to the relaxation.

Now, as you breathe out, silently and calmly repeat to yourself:

My breathing is smooth and rhythmic.

My breathing is smooth and rhythmic.

My breathing is easy and calm.

My breathing is easy and calm.

It feels very pleasant.

If you’d like, you may close your eyes now and focus on the music, or continue to look at the flame.

Continue to repeat to yourself:

My breathing is smooth and rhythmic.

My breathing is smooth and rhythmic.

I am peaceful and calm.

I am peaceful and calm.

Continue to take deep, rhythmic breaths. Let the tension fade away each time you breathe out. Let the music soothe you.

If you’ve closed your eyes, gently open them and gaze at the candle flame.

Return to your day peaceful, more focused and relaxed.

Perhaps reflective of the cultural mentality and spiritual crisis of the turn of the 20th-century and earliest decades thereafter, all of Hermann Hesse’s fiction reflects an autobiographical exploration of self and destiny. The protagonist of each story and novel seeks, first, the limits of self, aesthetically, morally, and physically, in order to discover exactly what they are and what they should think.

This questing, with its mythical connotations, is what attracts readers to given works of Hesse, while his succession of works present protagonists in new and different settings using the same theme. Ultimately, each protagonist’s quest for self is not “out there” in the different physical settings of each story and novel but spiritually within the self. The self was always accessible had the character looked inwardly. But Hesse dramatizes the quest in the real world, in the circumstantial world that we all face by necessity, before resolving his hero’s dilemma. Each quest, like the mythic quest described by Joseph Campbell and others, must end in self, as it began, but in Hesse, the rediscovery of self is not the discovery of a new strength or a new awareness so much as what Hesse translator and editor Jack Zipes refers to as a return to “home.”

This aspect is particularly vivid in Hesse’s fairy tales, written in the first two decades of the 20th century. In “The Forest-Dweller,” a young man defies the prevarications of elders to venture outside of the tribal boundaries, and, discovering that he can survive after all, he never returns. In “The Painter” a man takes up painting as an avocation but while away from his apartment returns to discover crowds eagerly milling about his apartment to see the paintings of the now-famous artist. The crowd interprets the paintings wrongly, misunderstands their themes, even misidentifies the objects portrayed, but they bid and buy and trade them. The painter, in disgust, quits the place and does not return. And in “Faldum,” a stranger appears at the village fair performing magic that grants anyone whatever they wish, first arousing vanity but progressively stirring malice, greed, and violence among the townspeople who demand their wish. A young observer, deeply affected, wishes to be far away and lofty like a mountain, and he becomes exactly that, arising just outside the old town, dispassionately watching it grow and decline over the years, watching the forests and its denizens, and the river and clouds from his welcomed solitude and disengagement, finally sensing his numbing consciousness wane in the course of the sun, moon, and stars overhead.

These stories ranged from the early 20th-century to the end of World War I (which experience turned Hesse into a pacifist, another form of disengagement from the world, but that is another theme). In another story of that era (1907), titled “The Wolf,” Hesse presents the plight of the small group of misfits, a hated pack of wolves, eking out existence in a harsh mountain in winter with the whole of (human) society set against them, eager to exterminate them. Here, too, with the protagonist, is Hesse the writer, the solitary, the seeker after self, the seeker after a home. All of these stories have a contextual merit as literature but also a subtle appeal to the solitary, to anyone who seeks home in this world.

The history of religion charts the relationship between environment and culture. The natural environment or geography in which ancient peoples lived was the physical context of their culture and society.

Thus, the three scriptural religions of the Western world shaped cultures with a desert mentality, a desert religion. The vast horizontal land, arid and unpopulated, and the vast sky and unyielding sun, shaped the religion of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These religions demanded a huge god, an all-encompassing god, a god who must command and be obeyed if his followers are to be saved — just like the tribes in the desert, where no one could leave the group and survive. The individual only existed in terms of his smallness in the vastness, his dependence before God and his absolute loyalty to his absolutely unique tribe.

But in the Mediterranean, the landscape was different. Mountains descended to fertile valleys or temperate rocky crags, to meadows and streams, always bathed in dappled sunlight, down to the sea. Each village experienced variations of climate, soil, moisture, and what grew from the earth. Each geographical variations harbored a spirit of what it was (water or copse or mountain) but also of what it meant (fertility, foreboding, abundance, tranquility, color, grain, vine, woodlands). Gods and spirits in the rest of the world were bound to differ from the harsh and arid gods of the desert. Peoples were bound to differ, too, culturally, socially, and in terms of religion. And the variations only continued as history and time brought the confrontation of peoples and their cultural and environmental experiences into encounter, from north to south, east to and west.

When we study a set of religious beliefs, it is well to ponder where the beliefs came from, what experience the peoples had with their natural setting, and how these factors could evolve a particular way of looking at the universe, as much as a way of looking at their neighbors near and far. The xenophobia of the ancient Hebrews, based on desert survivalism, intrinsically affected Christianity and Islam. Christianity’s Jesus, an aberration from eastern religious influence, was quietly reabsorbed by the successive Judaic elements of the episcopates, with only the desert hermits escaping the larger rabbinical structure of Christianity. Islam’s Muhammed restores the primacy of prophet and desert imperium in the historical continuity of Abraham and Jacob.

In Europe, the Celtic spirits of rivers and trees are as alien to the dominant Western religions as are the Greek sprites and daemons, or the German forest view as haunted and deathly. The Indo-Europeans who brought Greek Mycenea its warriors and sky gods also brought India its horse sacrifices and holocausts, not to be overthrown but undermined, like Judaism, by the spiritual element of the Upanishads and Jesus respectively. In both cases, class, caste, and power elements eked their way back to the warrior and desert theologies of Indo-Europe and Hebrewism respectively.

The figure of Jesus looms so uniquely in the Western world because of its status as an aberration. But the influence of Jesus is well contained and neutralized by the dominant ecclesiastical structure. Not so such sage figures in the East, where no such religious structures existed due to the undermining of the brahmanic structure in Hindu spirituality, especially where sadhus embraced the forest environment as an alternative to the urban strongholds of the priest class. In China, a clear distinction arose between the Confucian collaboration with authority, and those circles outside this collaboration, specifically among Taoist and Buddhism circles, where, again, natural settings like forests were preferred to article environments such as cities.

Modern times set out to abolish natural settings because natural settings resist centralization of thought and control. The cathedral in a large city may retain the architectural inkling of a vast forest, but it has eliminated the analogy by restoring the inimical desert thinking and the necessary sense of dependence. The intimate chapel may retain the environmental inkling of the hermit’s cave or grotto, but connotes a refuge that cannot but be temporary and anomalous rather than the foundation of a body of thought. Ironically, Jesus advised praying in one’s room, away from crowds, away from other believers, away from authorities, and the desert hermits took this word to heart. Those hermits still lived in the desert, it is true, but their compatriots over the centuries learned how to reproduce their lives and insights in the hills, forests, and crags of Europe.

Eastern hermits were already perceptive of nuances, having lived among mountains and forests and rivers and witnessed the nurturing elements of these natural environments. While Confucius created a philosophical method for the authorities in urban areas, the Taoist and Buddhist hermits having discovered nature as a counterpart and alternative source of wisdom, created a spiritual method that could bypass the intellectualized and co-opted thinking of centralized authorities. Spirituality, and religion, was thus ascribed to the alternative sages and not to the official state religion. The West had no comparable movement. Jesus may have well have been reduced to the dry formulas of Confucianism, to the degree that his thought has largely disappeared within the folds of the ecclesiastical.

Just as hermits are often viewed stereotypically as eccentric wilderness recluses, so, too, the typical introduction to historical hermits is often to Antony the Great through the paintings of 19th- and early 20th century romantic and decadent painters, and fiction like Flaubert’s. Here the popular image of the hermit is a pusillanimous object of pity, mockery, or scorn, a weakling battered by sexual temptation, surrounded by the heated projections of the painters and writers themselves.

Yet Athanasius’s Life of Antony barely dwells on sexual temptation, mentioning one incident early in the biography wherein one of the devil’s guises is as a seductive woman. For Athanasius, as with the standard collections of desert hermit sayings, sexual temptations are simply part of a range of temptations. Despite the absence of formal psychology or psychoanalysis, the hermits understood the power of the natural instincts of the body, specifically in survival, which are constantly asserting their presence through biological drives. Thus the drives for reproduction, food, water, shelter, temperature intervention (homeostasis), are fundamentally maintained by hormones (to simplify the science), which troll through the body as inevitable constituents of life.

Elder hermits regularly warn younger hermits not to despair of temptations. Antony is quoted by the Apophthegmata Patrum, for example, as saying that a brother must expect temptation “to his last breath,” and that from the body rises heat, movement, and energy, fed by food, by the will, and, externally, by demons. (Here food abets sources of greater temptation, while itself being a necessity).

Antony’s saying understands the necessary processes of the body and how they affect the will. Antony does not say that thoughts arise from temptations but rather that thoughts arise from the essential constituents of the body. Thoughts may be considered epiphenomena of the body’s heat and energy. But in order to become temptations, thoughts must be sustained, entertained, extended, and extrapolated, supported by the will, or, rather, supported by a subordinated will.

By viewing temptations as such a fundamental process, Poemen could thus argue that no one is saved if they have not suffered temptations. In short, being human means to suffer temptations because we are intrinsically bodies, even if bodies with will, mind, spirit, and soul.

The number of references to sexual temptations in written sources we have on the desert hermits and desert fathers and mothers is not many. Among worldly temptations, they had already confronted or had to confront family, property, money, fame, comfort, possessions, knowledge, power, social esteem, friendships, the proximity of people and objects common to daily life in the world. Among what was renounced was the potential for “more and better” in personal life, an aggrandizement or implied improvement for self, versus a diminution or effacement of self. For many this was assuaged by monasteries, where community still existed, though in modern times cenobitic settings have been problematic. For hermits, who did not want social interaction, there was Sunday as a ritual social encounter — and the occasional personal contact for the brutal purposes of confirming health and well-being.

Sexual temptations have been considered stronger than other temptations because pride and vanity are largely mental and social aberrations more readily broken down by social circumstances, nature, and solitude, while sloth and gluttony are cloying personality factors outwitted by vigorous physical pursuit, exertion, or regular exercise. Drives intended to preserve the species by propelling the behavior of individuals are more dogged in youth, which is more fluid in will and more readily affected by culture. But maturity is never exempt, especially as science and technology abet the vanity of age.

Meanwhile, society and culture respond by creating restricting codes while inevitably permitting the powerful and the disenfranchised to break them, secretly or otherwise. This tension has existed as long as society has existed, and no social mechanism can address this tension comprehensively — behavior and thought are only in the control of the individual. The sexual scandals of those in either church or state over history show the inadequacy of both institutions and individuals in addressing grand psychological and biological issues.

Violent punishment and shaming has been one historical response. Accommodation and hypocrisy has been another. Neither are solutions. Another response, presented in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World points to a more likely response in the future. The analogy to how society responds to ideology or political control and unrest is telling. In a letter of Huxley to George Orwell, author of 1984, Huxley wonders if totalitarian authorities in the future will not simply take the easy road to control via selective tolerance of drug-controlled drives versus the obsessive and constant policing of Orwell’s scenario. Ultimately, the sexual drive is seen as humanity’s greatest stumbling block.

But only the solitary understands that the response to nature’s mechanisms for reproduction is dichotomous: benign and constructive participation in the given culture’s mores and behaviors, or outwitting society, nature, and time — not by transcending the drives but by sidestepping them into a different perception of humanity and self. A practical wisdom for the hermit was to disengage from society. A practical wisdom for the lay person allows the drives to dissipate with age, to allow wisdom to overtake biology, a life-long process but one understood by the desert hermits as just as appropriate to themselves in the realm of temptations — all temptations. The hermits ultimately had to take up a lofty — and lonely — perch from which to view human existence and its many foibles.

Neurologist and popular writer Oliver Sacks has long chronicled the oddities of neurology. His most striking anecdotes involve hallucinations, both visual and auditory. In Musicophilia, Sacks describes patients who experience musical hallucinations as instances of unwanted music breaking into “hearing,” arising by controlling auditory functions. The noise is fired off by offending brain activities that heighten the forced hearing of nursery rhymes, old patriotic and religious songs from childhood, pop tunes, and other unwanted auditory detritus. From low incessant murmurs these tunes become excruciating maladies.

Sacks’ patients were usually in their seventies and had suffered hearing loss, so the explanation for these musical hallucinations is over-stimulation of nerves and synapses, still an as yet unknown process. The patients may feel that they are experiencing psychotic episodes, but Sacks assures them that they are auditory but not psychotic.

Of course, hearing music, or voices, has historically been defined as psychotic by science, or either demonic or spiritual by religion. Neither is correct in Sacks’ case studies, but the issue suggests that events are always internal, and that others may never understand unless they, too, experience the same phenomenon — yet why would we want them to?

Most of Sacks’ patients learned to live with their malady. But perhaps the malady is in part the product of auditory functions themselves and the ability to discern sound, even when the sound is potentially music but, in these cases, offensive. A sector of humanity is disabled in its ability to appreciate music anyway, and one may wonder if they have enured themselves from potential degeneration through musical hallucination. Another sector, the deaf or near deaf, will not hear sound at all, and one can wonder if that is the only way to avoid musical hallucinations.

But is any music intrinsically benign? Can any music not potentially become a hallucination? The structure of music, specifically melody, what makes a piece “catchy,” seems to be the chief factor for memory, storage, and reproduction. Sacks’ patients all regurgitated childhood pieces, long interred in the subconscious brain, not extirpated, overwritten, or even replaced by better music. (Some patients actively played instruments and listened to the “best” classical music, just to end this way!)

Such facts suggest that only a deep, calming meditative silence can gradually extirpate not only bad music but bad memories, habits, thoughts, intentions, or desires. The recovery of primordial silence is the return to home, to peace, to originating state that tradition refers to in speaking of the mind. Meanwhile, simple sounds like predawn birdsong break the silence of night may be enough to solidify the benign effects of silence in the mind. Similarly, some ambient music, too, has the effect of addressing vulnerable parts of the brain with regard to sound, even though ambient music is modern and synthetic.

But the world militates against such silence, such simplicity of sound, even when composed and played on muting nontraditional instruments or when, by design, the music intends to evoke a spiritual purpose. In Huxley’s Brave New World, for example, the authority’s use of suggestive repetitions, like songs, condition children from infancy to childhood to form social values. Adults are further conditioned by, among other things, music both loud and rhythmic, deliberately charged with erotic and violent energy in their purpose — in fact, not unlike nearly all of society’s music from earliest times to today!

As Nietzsche quipped, only sick music makes money, but in the brave new world, only sick music need exist. Music is a social phenomenon, susceptible to manipulation, whether of the weak body and spirit or the collective industry that manufactures it. Plato understood this, but did not know enough about music to do anything with it. What to do with music is up to ourselves, but realizing its potential effects, both individual and social, ought to alert us to what we do when we dismiss silence.

Popular media today, including book popularizations, describe the atomization of people in modern urban technological culture, lamenting a lost — perhaps conjured — community and conviviality of the past. The image of young people burying their faces into their smartphones while ignoring peers and others around them is common — as if young people made the world of today what it is and somehow steer its authorities and powers. But stereotypes of alienation cannot be so recent. Any close reading of history and culture will suggest otherwise.

Loneliness is social alienation, a more specialized product of modern culture, but not just historically modern. Sue Halpern, in her book Migrations to Solitude, described lonely people as suffering “involuntary solitude.” The emphasis must be on volition; most will understand solitude as being away from people or unable to connect authentically with others. Truly lonely people are made, not self-willed. Lonely people suffer imprisonment, bereavement, grief, disease, abuse, addiction, mental illness. These factors alienate them from others and themselves, creating their cycle of psychological entrapment, which is also social. Foucault remarked that “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” Society and its powers build the structures of loneliness for their own purposes of control and impose “involuntary solitude” upon as many as it can.

This is why individuals who prefer solitude are described, even by sympathetic media, as lonely and in need of friendship and socialization, if not rehabilitation. The popular route for recovery is simply to imitate how others carry on a social life, engage in social activities, consume the products of society in order to feel part of society, in order not to feel alienated. Other approaches, more serious psychological approaches to rehabilitating lonely people, may attempt to mainstream lonely people or sufferers of mental illness by using pharmaceuticals to suppress their depression. Usually no authority will recommend a transition to what may be called “voluntary” solitude because such a state does not or should not, in their estimation, exist. Loneliness is conflated with solitude in order to stigmatize historical solitaries and their modern versions. Those who fail to rehabilitate themselves from loneliness are returned by society, in one way or another, to involuntary institutionalization, a built-in social recidivism.

Like the classic introvert, the solitary personality derives its self-image from intuition and perception, not from external people and events. The ability to tolerate the erratic values of society through a crafted self-discipline that is blessed in part by an innate or congenital center of calm allows the solitary to become a keen observer of self and others, at least to the point of a self-knowledge that alerts the individual to danger, hostility, guile, deception, or unsavory motive.

As Oldham’s personality scale shows, the solitary faculty can deteriorate to dysfunctional paranoia. But, then, all personality types have a dysfunctional counterpart on a spectrum. Thus, indubitably, the solitary who is guided by a religious, spiritual, or philosophical motive remains most balanced or focused, as does the wilderness solitary who closely identifies with nature and larger natural cycles, rhythms, and harmonies. Historically, most hermits were so characterized. People suffering from mental illness and exaggerated or exacerbated their solitary intuitions with visions and mad behaviors were often made to be representative of all solitaries, whether by church, state, or other authorities. This was a useful device for generalization: to make all solitary behavior suspect and dangerous. The medieval church as much as the Enlightenment rationalist opposed unregulated solitaries, who symbolized the opposition to the barracks, prisons, hospitals, and institutions mentioned.

Despite media attention to the virtues of solitude and silence, the goal of such pieces is often to co-opt the power of authentic solitude and silence in order to further hone the skills of defeating rivals, overthrowing groups, and grasping more power for self and organization. Such presentations are made to those who otherwise belittle too much solitude and too much silence — the caveat revives, signalling bad motives. The exploitation of solitude and silence parallels the business and corporate uses of meditation, yoga, and other spiritual-mental practices in the way that athletes and soldiers cultivate the body and mind to more effectively harm others.

There can be no substitute for the authenticate wellsprings of solitude and silence found in the historical hermits East and West. There can be no transition from involuntary solitude but to a rehabilitation or reconciliation with a mad society. Lacking original malice, lacking no loss of original volition, the true solitary can bypass the devices of society and reach a self-discipline that is not compatible with those devious arts derived from social and commercial products and promises.

Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945) was not only Japan’s foremost philosopher but remains a significant world philosopher of the 20th century. Though little known in Western circles, Nishida mastered the varieties of Western philosophical expression and promoted its encounter with Eastern thought, specifically Buddhism, in a manner beyond any Western thinker.

Nishida’s studies are wide-ranging, from Greek philosophers to Christian mystics, from rationalists and empiricists to Enlightenment thinkers, from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl to contemporary Christian thinkers — all are brought forth to an encounter with Eastern thought.

Nishida’s early venture begins with Aristotle and the entirely dominant role of logic and reason in the Western world. His analyses culminate in Kant and Husserl in attempting to explore the cognitive patterns in which logic discloses noetic and subjective needs. The range of human intent is necessarily self-expressive and therefore existential and concretely individual. Personal awareness and consciousness of internal contradiction reveals the ethical self — unresolvable, and paradoxical (in the world). The individual identifies the intuition of a historical existence. Yet it is a plunge into a bottomless contradiction, between existence and nothingness, with the concomitant awakening of what Nishida calls a religious awareness.

This religious awareness is not a conventional belief system but a realization of the nothingness behind the awareness of the world and its absolute presence in the historical — like a crossroad (if the individual is properly self-conscious) of the intersection of Absolute and Nothing.

It is to find this place, this space, this ground of consciousness, that embarked Nishida on an exploration of the semantic features of the religious and tapped the philosophy of Buddhism. Indeed, his final essay, in the year of his death, was titled “The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview.” It may be said that Nishida’s entire career, working doggedly on this central issue of ontology, culminated in this essay.

In this work, Nishida begins his journey with Kant. In his Critiques, Kant saw the existence of God and the immortality of the soul as logical postulates of the will. Kant capitulates (if not exhausts) Western philosophy’s dependence on reason, and logic’s defense of the preeminence of scientific logic. Kant updated Aristotle, grounding self-reflection and the a priori into human faculties of reason and the inevitability of logic. Elements outside of reason or deduced ethics are not legitimate in this tradition — namely moral will or religious consciousness, however these may be defined.

While appreciating the structure of Kant’s philosophical architecture, Nishida also notes its absence of consciousness individually, the absence of existential identity, of the ground of consciousness which is eschatological and therefore “religious” in Nishida’s more rarefied definition of the latter. It is this being-ness, this space, this matrix of the self-forming historical world that is immediately expressed in the self that Nishida wants to account for. To this process he brings an encounter between that absolute present and the nothingness of Buddhist tradition.

As Nishida translator and commentator David Dilworth notes:

Nishida argues that neither paradigm, Aristotelian or Kantian, can account for the historical self as an individual self-conscious being that knows of its own mortality. It is only when the self becomes aware of its own existential contradiction — of the fact that it is a unique living being that must die — that the religious problem arises.

By any definition, then, Nishida seems to be an existentialist, taking off directly from Kierkegaard in considering the final existential insight to be a religious one, or at least religious in the eschatological sense, the crisis sense, that Walter Kaufmann uses as a criterion for defining existentialism. But Nishida differs in the evolution of his thought. He stands out from phenomenology as the ground of existential thinking, and the stands clear from both the angst-ridden or the action-oriented philosophies that existentialism became in the mid-20th century West. Nor is Nishida speaking of practices or even dogmas of world religions, all of which are symbolic, he tells us.

Rather, our actions in the Kantian plane or realm of logic and intelligibility is unaware of historical existence. Morality itself is unaware, and death has no effect on this plane. Like Kierkegaard, Nishida states that only with self-consciousness does the self become aware of its own death. Death is not an event but a condition residing in the being, here and now, an absolute now, the “eternal now” of Dogen.
Nishida calls this point of consciousness the essential religious question because it generates a logic of contradictory identity, a logic of nothingness. The existential is the absolute, one dying in the other in absolute simultaneity and identity.

Nishida speaks further of a non-dualistic place of nothingness and a formless form. This vocabulary hearkens of Taoist, Buddhist, and Neo-Shinto thought. Mind arises, having no place to abide — a familiar Buddhist sentiment. Samsara and Nirvana are non-dual, co-originating, constituting an existential realization in enlightenment, or in transcendence in the terminology of Aristotle and Kant.

Nishida alludes to Nicolas of Cusa’s phrase: “The Absolute cannot be a One.” The Absolute is simultaneously absolute nothingness, absolute negation, maintains Nishida, further utilizing Plotinus, Eckhart, Boehme, and Cusa, but applying to this body of insight what Nishida calls “Asian nothingness” and a “logic of nothingness” to contrast both religious logic and Western “concrete” logic with the historically unencountered East. This encounter is the strength of Nishida, what makes him indispensable to philosophy, and what happily spills over into the culture of eremitism that already explores the commonalities of Eastern and Western expression.

According to scientists, solitary animals are those animals which — with the exception of the evolutionary necessities of feeding and reproduction, including migratory habits — do not live in groups. A significant number of animals are , in fact, solitary. Among mammals are big cats and bears — pet owners of cats will notice their characteristic “indifference” as a remnant solitary behavior. Such solitary behavior presumably originated from territorial necessity, given that the roaming pattern for feeding required a large habitat per individual, but the behavior lingered even when such a necessity was not in play.

A second category of solitary animal is so defined because the animal eludes human and other animal observation, hiding, as it were, from potential predators but, in effect, from everyone. These may seem to elude humans, such as reptiles, when it is just a matter of observation. Others, like the famous hermit thrush, simply blends into their environment well or, like owls, are nocturnal. We call them solitary by default, which makes a significant portion of the world’s animals solitary, or as far as human observation is concerned.

At least three reclusive creatures have been dubbed “hermits”for their solitary behavior or for their penchant for concealment: 1) the hermit crab, 2) the hermit thrush, and 3) the hermit ibis. Other animals could have earned the hermit sobriquet, but a little humor shows why these three have earned the title, at least to this observer.

1. The lowly hermit crab is the digambara of the solitary animals, sky-clad and entirely vulnerable. This crustacean is without shell and takes a covering as it finds it, typically from deceased crustaceans, the garb ill-fitting and object of human derision. Scientists have identified rare accumulations of hermit crabs (analogous to the vast Kumbh Mela festival of India held every 12 years, attracting sadhus and holy pilgrims) wherein the crabs shed their garb and find larger, more suitable garb from their brothers.

2. The hermit thrush delights listeners of its “somewhat melancholy” song, which emanates from deep hidden forests. Scientists have recently confirmed (“Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US),” Nov. 2014) that the hermit thrush approximates the mathematical structures of human music. Science News reported that

In its somewhat melancholy songs, North America’s Catharus guttatus thrushes mix in strings of short, non-wavering tones. In 54 out of 71 thrush songs, two statistical methods showed those tones related to each other much as notes in human musical scales do, researchers report November 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The hermit thrushes “have a strong preference for the same simple ratios [such as 3:2] that humans seem to like,” says paper coauthor Tecumseh Fitch of the University of Vienna.

When recordings of the hermit thrush song are slowed down, the sound is distinctly like that of a flute, so the next question is whether the sound approximates the Japanese shakuhachi, the Indian Carnatic flute, or Mozart. Our preference, especially with the description of “melancholic,” is for the first. Not pursued by distinguished panel was whether humans somehow inherited this capacity from birds as part of evolution or if they imitated the hermit thrush, which is not familiar with Pythagorean mathematical principles. Also to be determined is whether all this singing (bird or human) is simply to attract a mate, much like human behavior in adolescent rock bands, interminably outliving both their youth and reproductive needs.

3. The hermit ibis is also called, less diplomatically, the northern bald ibis, though it winters in southern Africa and flies north along East Africa to Turkey (or, more romantically, East Asia, Anatolia, etc.) The hermit ibis looks like a vulture, and thus lives up to the hermit characteristic of wandering, feeding indiscriminately, and retaining a certain ugliness by worldly standards. (The hermit thrush wisely conceals its good looks to retain its hermit identity.) Like the early desert hermits, the hermit ibis lives in rocky arid places, and achieved a religious respectability with report that it guided Muslim pilgrims to Mecca during the Hajj. Indeed, a 16th-cetury Austrian bishop declared the hermit ibis a protected species, but the species died out in Europe (not unlike thriving eremitism) around the same time. Today, the hermit ibis continues to haunt arid places from Syria to Morocco, indifferent to the conflicts of human populations, their religions, and their disdain for hermits.

Montaigne’s essay “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die” is filled with quotations of the ancient Romans because they reflect Montaigne’s own interests and personality — slightly bemused by the affectations of others, skeptical of their motives and foolishness, and reconciled to the folly of worldly endeavors. In the essay, Montaigne strives, with the gentle assistance of Horace, Lucretius, Catullus, Seneca, plus Cicero, who provides the essay title, to keep a sober perspective on our aspirations, to root the self to a simple sense of virtue. With the Romans, he takes the view that nature exercises a great wisdom in refusing to spare living things of death. “Our mother Nature” speaks thus, he says:

Chiron refused immortality when informed of its conditions by the very god of time and duration, his father Saturn. Imagine honestly how much less bearable and more painful to man would be an everlasting life than the life I have given him. If you did not have death, you would curse me incessantly for having deprived you of it. I have deliberately mixed with it a little bitterness to keep you seeing the convenience of it, from embracing it too greedily and intemperately. To lodge you in that moderate state that I ask of you, of neither fleeing life nor fleeing back from death, I have tempered both of them between sweetness and bitterness.

Montaigne embraced the Stoicism of the Greeks and Romans as the reconciling philosophy of a chaotic age. The Greeks had lost faith in democracy with the Peloponnesian War and the Hellenism of empire, just as the Romans had witnessed the disappearance of their republic. Only dramatists and philosophers could resolve the contradictions of worldly affairs and tragedy, which includes death. The ancient eras of chaos were reproduced in the France of Montaigne’s era, bloody civil wars of religion, with, again, only dramatists and philosophers — but not the clergy — to reconcile the contradictions of religion and the world.

Catholic writer Richard John Neuhaus does not take this context into account when he avers (in his As I Lay Dying, p. 127) that

Montaigne wrote a famous essay, “To Philosophize Is To Learn To Die.” I do not believe that. I believe that one learns to die not by philosophizing, but by dying.

But did Neuhaus read the essay? Or did he read the rest of Montaigne? For Montaigne did indeed learn a great deal — from the deaths of his father, his brother, his best friend, five of his six children — but especially from his own near-death, which he describes in the essay “Practice” written only a year or two after the previously mentioned essay.

Montaigne’s near-death experience resulted from a fall from his horse. He lost consciousness and his retainers hauled him back to his chateau, where he wavered from half-lucid awareness to unconsciousness, on the brink of dying. Eventually he recovered, concluding that death was no terror, did not even require philosophical inquiry, but only required one to cede to nature, which has arranged a simple and unremarkable passing.

Of course, the cumulative lessons of life, plus Montaigne’s own personality, brought him to a mature state of mind that nevertheless did not contradict his original philosophical observations, only broadened them to a more secularizing sensibility suited to fideism, not just fatalism. Understandably, Neuhaus demurs here, but the wonders of modern technology that saved him from cancer should not override a philosophical or natural point of view about death, inevitable even for the initially saved. Montaigne is both philosophical about death and did indeed learn to die by dying. He embraced contradiction, and the life of contradiction that necessarily seeks tranquility in a chaotic world.