In Our Time - The Philosophy of Solitude

Episode Date: June 19, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosophy of solitude. The state of being alone can arise for many different reasons: imprisonment, exile or personal choice. It can be prompted by religious belief, personal necessity or a philosophical need for solitary contemplation. Many thinkers have dealt with the subject, from Plato and Aristotle to Hannah Arendt. It's a philosophical tradition that takes in medieval religious mystics, the work of Montaigne and Adam Smith, and the great American poets of solitude Thoreau and Emerson.With:Melissa Lane Professor of Politics at Princeton UniversitySimon Blackburn Professor of Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities and Fellow of Trinity College, CambridgeJohn Haldane Professor of Philosophy at the University of St AndrewsProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1845, the American writer Henry David Thoreau moved into a small log cabinet built in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts. He remained there for two years, living simply and in close proximity to nature. But his remote existence had another advantage, as he wrote in his masterpiece Walden. I never found the companion that was so... companionable as solitude. Thorough is one of a long line of thinkers

who've sought solitude from Christian hermits to romantic poets. For some, it's been a place of refuge from the world, for others, an absolute necessity for deep contemplation or self-examination. Aldously suggested that solitude might offer greater moral benefits than organised religion. But some philosophers have seen solitude as self-indulgent or actively dangerous. With me to discuss the philosophy of solitude are

Melissa Lane, Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. And John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews. Melissa Lane, can we begin by clarifying what solitude means to a philosopher? Solitude isn't simply being alone. It's an active achievement, a distinctive condition of experience in which one can still the voices of society in the mind.

and that allows a form of authentic experience, and that might be keeping company with oneself, or it might be an experience of nature or of God. Are you distinguishing, are we in this program going to distinguish solitude from loneliness or solitude confinement? Absolutely. So I think solitude is not simply being alone. You might be alone and not be in solitude

if you're spending all your time thinking about society or engaging with social, questions. And I think solitude is normally something chosen, but it might be that if one were in solitary confinement, one might be able to nevertheless choose that inner experience. So I think that's an open question if one is forced into aloneness, whether one can actually still achieve solitude. And of course, some have in very difficult circumstances. Do you think there are several degrees of solitude or just one? No, I think there are. And there are different For example, as to whether one thinks that in reading one is experiencing solitude,

for some philosophers, that's been the case. And for others, even books are a form of society that has to be silenced in order to genuinely experience solitude. Starting near the beginning, as we often are starting his view, back to the Greeks. One of the first philosophers to give serious attention to the idea of solitude was Plato, who has been called the first poet of solitude. What was his view? For Plato, the key to solitude is that it's the condition in which we can think. So he even defines thought as an inner dialogue in the sophist.

And it's that ability to actually reflect to be with oneself in an inner conversation. And I think one of the things that's interesting about that is that we see there that solitude in a way is modeled on society. It's a form of dialogue, but it's an internal dialogue as opposed to an external one. And Plato shows us wonderful images of Socrates wrapped in that kind of contemplation on his way to a dinner party. And he stands on the porch for hours not going in because he's so absorbed in his solitary thinking. Did Plato go so far as to say that if you sought deep solitude, you had to cut yourself off from society? I think there is a real concern in the Greeks as to, you know, if you're only involved in solitude, is that even possible for human beings? And I think Plato didn't think it was.

So Socrates might be alone for several hours. He might even be alone for 24 hours. As once on campaign, on military campaign, he stands rap thinking. But ultimately you come back into conversation with others. And actually that relationship between solitude, a kind of dialectic between solitude and society is, I think, something very characteristic, both of the Greeks and later. Still mopping out the early ground, Simon Blackburn,

his pupil Aristotle seems to have had a different, and perhaps a more complex view of this. Yes, well, it's quite difficult to make Aristotle entirely consistent on this. Aristotle, of course, is very keen that we are political animals, or at least animals that live in a pollus. Human beings are social. Their practical reasoning is to do with the way the city, in other words, the society conducts itself.

And that all seems fine, and you hear him banging the drum for something like a political life, although, of course, a polis was a small city, state, not a big democracy like ours. But then, famously in book 10 of the Nicomachian ethics, the last book, he seems to renege on that and starts hymning the life of study and contemplation. He thinks that all the gods can do is study and contemplate because they don't have to bother about earning a living and things like that. And that the ideal theoretical reason, the highest part of the human soul has to be exercised.

And the best possible life, if it's possible for a human being, is to wrap themselves in contemplation. And that would imply, I think, solitude. So in that sense, do you suggest that he is coming to agree with what Melissa said Plato was setting out? Well, I think it's quite close, because if you think of Socrates's finest moments as these ones where he communicated with his daemon or he stood wrapped alone in solitude, then Aristotle is in effect saying those are the finest moments. That's exactly what the summon, the summit of human perfection would be. Did Aristotle and Plato set out what they thought you were trying to do when you sought and achieved solitude? Well, I don't think. I don't

think Aristotle did. I think the word is variously translated as study or contemplation. If it's study, of course, that brings us back to the question that was raised, whether reading, communicating with another mind, would genuinely be solitude. If it's contemplation, then, of course, there's a question about what you're contemplating, and not all our contemplations show us at our best. So I think there's a real ambiguity or vagueness in Aristotle about quite what the excellence of exercising theoretical reason by yourself would come to. There is a jostling between society and solitude throughout the last two and a half thousand years. Does that jostling take place between the schools of the Epicureans and the Stoics?

Yes, the Stoics are, well, neither the Epicureans nor the Stoics particularly valorize or admire solitude. The Stoics especially consist on you having a political life again. you go and work for the community, the Epicureans were very keen on friendship. One of the catastrophic pleasures, the kind of pleasures they really liked, was the pleasures of friendship, pleasures of communication with other people in the garden.

That's the Epicurean kind of best pleasure, I think. He's right down on ordinary desires and ordinary lusts. he thinks that they provoke anxiety, whereas the life of tranquility, which all the Greeks valorized, or they all like tranquility, you get that basically by walking around your garden with friends. So does this suggest that the idea of solitude itself

wasn't a very strong idea in the early party of the ancient world, seeking after happiness, for instance, was a stronger idea? I'd say that, absolutely. I mean, it's clearly there for Aristotle, that eudaimonic life. life of happiness. For the Stoics, the principal object, seems to become self-sufficient,

which is why the exercise of reason, again, becomes very important, but it's really reason exercised into liberation for the Stoics. It's not contemplation. To cut yourself off from what you can't prevent happening, as it were? Yes, that's right. So you learn to be indifferent to, pains, the domination of a tyrant

particularly exercised them as well it might have and you learn to be indifferent to whatever the tyrant can do to you. This is a very pronounced theme in Epictetus of course who was a slave to begin with so he had to learn a certain amount of school of hard knocks. But then you've got Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, the emperor both of whom live very, very engaged political lives. John Holden, Solitude has been very important in the religious context.

So how did it first enter into the Judaic Christian tradition? No small topic, right? Well, I think probably, I mean, could I just pick up one thing to lead into that? I was just going to say, I mean, you began by asking about the difference between solitude and loneliness. I mean, one thing that hasn't been said but worth adding, of course, is, and this, I think, speaks to many people's own experience and condition, is that loneliness can be felt amid society. So the question of solitude, I mean, it's not sufficient to achieve solitude to be set apart. But equally, on the other side, one can be lonely in the midst of company.

So I think it's important, I think, to understand that. The other thing I was going to say is that obviously one's anthropology or one's psychology, wants account of what human beings are is going to be very important for understanding the nature of solitude and its role and so on and I think that's probably something we're going to return to as we make our way down the centuries.

With regard to sort of Judeo-Christianity But can you just develop that because it's such a strong central idea what you think life is about science, what you think about, can you just develop that? Yes, I mean I think, for example, just to take up the sort of field you've been discussing just now, I mean,

all the ancient schools of philosophy are concerned to try to determine what constitutes a good life for human being. And they've got different accounts of that. But those accounts differ precisely in part because of their different conception of the world of human nature and of humanity's place within the cosmos, the wider world and so on. And that's why we're going to get these differences coming out between Plato and Aristotle and some. Some are highly intellectualist, for example. so in that case the life of the mind is going to be the primary mode

and so whatever one says about solitude or community is going to be keyed to pursuing the life of the mind for others it may be that some form of social life is emphasised and so on all of this is going to be keyed to your account of what human beings are so in the background either expressed or implicit is if you like an anthropology an account of the human in some early Christian yeah of course well of course what I was going to say is I mean it seems

to me there are three figures here who are going to be very important for setting the terms of this later on when we talk about hermits and the monastic tradition perhaps later on. In Judaism the figure is Elijah, 9th century prophet who

at one point is sort of exiled into the desert. In fact he appears in the Quran as well and he's there described as a prophet of the desert and at one point I mean there's a sort of contrast here between as well, the wildness of the desert and the softness of the urban setting. And on the one hand, the contrast between the prophet and the people.

And these are often set in tension. So what Elijah does is accuse a king of betrayal of apostasy and so on, of introducing false gods. And he's booted out on this account. But then he goes into the desert, and then the journey of 40 days and 40 nights. Now, leaping forward, 9th centuries, we get to the point of John the Baptist who appears on the scene.

Some people think John the Baptist is Elijah returned. He is some sort of, we would now say, ascetic figure. He lives in the desert, lives off locust and honey, he wears primitive clothing and so on. But he's a very important figure. And just as Elijah was sometimes seen by some as the Messiah, the promised one to the people of Israel, so people think John the Baptist may be. But no, the Baptist says he's not the one, he's going to induce another. He baptizes Jesus.

and what does Jesus do? He goes into the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. And there he's subject to temptation, which again is going to become a significant theme that in the solitude one is tempted. And then that takes us to the hermits and the anchorites and the huge development in the first few centuries of Christianity, the desert hermits, the desert hankerites. Yeah. So what we get at... So just first of all, John, the attraction of the desert,

you alluded to it, could you use it? just hit it on the head? Why did they go into the desert? Well, I think, as I say, the, first of all, it's a place of wilderness and escape, but it's also slightly paradoxical because it's also a place of punishment. So somebody might be exiled into the desert. And of course, because it's forbidding the conditions are very difficult, one might well not, one might well perish there. But equally in the desert, one is away from the temptations, the corruptions, the softness, the indulgence of comfort, uncomfortable society

and so on. So it can be a place of purgation. And I think we'll find within the Western spiritual tradition, a broadly speaking Christian tradition that it has an Eastern manifestation as well, that purgation is going to be very important. So sometimes there's this thing spoken of as a threefold way. It begins with purgation, it proceeds to illumination and it ends with unification or communion. But that first stage of purgation, getting rid of our desires, getting rid of our appetites, the desert is a place in which that can be done because life is pared down to the bone. One's removed from the comforts of society

and one is self-sufficient or dependent in a very primitive way on whatever is available. And it becomes a lot of people, quite a lot of people, we don't know how many, I don't know, going to the desert, the hermits, the anchorites. Can you be briskly distinct? Okay, very quickly. Well, this sort of monastic tradition

begins in the Eastern Church, in Egypt, Palestine, Syria and so on, Asia Minor. in the third and fourth centuries and partly as a response to persecutions of Christians and so there's a fleeing the oppression. But there is a debate breaks out really as to whether the best form of monastic life

is an erymitic one, a one on your own, or a synabitic one, which comes from the Greek from common life. So is it common life or is it solitary life? And that debate recurs actually within monastic tradition. in the West as well. But basically the idea of the anchorites, all of these in one sense are monastic forms

in which people are given to spiritual life in relative isolation, either from society at large or from one another. Anchorites are consecrated into that life by a community, and often they live beside a community, perhaps in a chapel attached or a sale attached and so on. Whereas hermits may simply go straight off

into that themselves. But basically to collapse all this down to a very brief point, what emerges is community life. And we'll see that with Augustine, perhaps. But the ideas that really we're, although we want to remove ourselves from society, we do not want to remove ourselves from community. Melissa Lane, one of the thinkers associated with the Desert Fathers

was St. John Cassian. What was his approach to solitude? So he's one of the amazing thinkers of this early movement that John was describing. And one of the things that I love in his description of conferences that he had with many of these hermit desert fathers. In fact, there were also a number of desert mothers, but he doesn't discuss them, but we know about them from other sources. And he describes this amazing story of particularly one of them, another man named John, who had gone into the desert as a hermit. And actually our word hermit comes from the Greek four wilderness or desert.

and then discovered that in the desert alone, actually he was more preoccupied, both with providing for his material needs and actually with mulling over things that had been said to him. People would come into the desert to kind of marvel at his spiritual achievement and then he would be all puffed up with pride. And so he goes back into a community and actually says, in the community, I'm better able to achieve contemplation because my material needs are provided and in fact I'm more humbled. So paradoxically, the solitude of contemplation is better achieved. in the monastic community than alone in the desert hermitage. But you're also an important point that the material difficulties of staying in solitude or interfering with the idea of solitude in the first place. Yeah, exactly.

And I think it's not just the material, though. It's also the psychological that paradoxically, if you become completely isolated, you might inflate yourself. You inflate your ego in a way, potentially. That's a kind of danger, a recurrent danger of that kind of spiritual practice. and living in a kind of community actually tempers that and allows us to keep the ego in its checks

so that, particularly for a religious ideal, you can be in communion with God. Simon Blackburn, and a philosopher gets to grips with that with Botheus, the consolation of philosophy about that time. We're talking about the desertism, which runs right through for the next several hundred, even a thousand years.

Could you tell us how significant that was and what he was saying about solitude? Well, Boethius starts off the consolations of philosophy by lamenting his solitude. He's in a terrible state. He's been a major senator, a major minister of state, as it were. He's been in the king's favor. The king was Theodoric and Ostrogoth, who took over Rome and ruled there until about 525, 526. And Boetheus was the top of the pile.

He was sort of David Cameron. and then it all went pear-shaped. His enemies got him accused of betraying Theodoric and generally communicating with Theodoric's enemies. He was chucked into Jugg, and in Jugg he starts to write the consolations. He has nothing, as far as I remember, favourable to say about solitude.

The problem is that it's absolutely vile and he's lamenting his lot and then philosophia or wisdom appears to him and the consolations are a dialogue between this forlorn boethius and philosophy who personifies the sort of consolation, the wisdom, the recognition that the world is full of vanity, that he should never have bothered about his fame and his riches, that everything comes to an end and so on and so on and so on. And then the text turns to the place of evil in the good world,

and you get a fairly standard theodicy. He's trying to reconcile these bad things happening with the providence that guides all things. Is philosophy time trying to persuade him of the importance of solitude? No, not particularly. philosophy is busier trying to persuade him that he can rise to be indifferent to his state and I think as far as that goes

it wouldn't matter whether his state was certainly one of being in solitary confinement or one of being in the courts of kings that is it should be a matter of indifference to him there's a very pronounced platonic element a very pronounced stoic element in boethius there's very little Christianity funnyly enough So how does he link on to what we've been saying about Plato, for instance?

I think the main sort of platonic themes come from the Temaeus and to some extent the Gorgias. The idea that somehow there's a providence in all things. There's a governing providence. There's a sort of certainty of a religious metaphysics. That's for sure. but there's no certainty, I think, of, there's no mention of Jesus, there's no mention of resurrection, there's no mention of any specifically Christian doctrines.

So being solitary has given him no taste whatsoever for solitude. Not as far as I read it. John Holden. Well, I agree with Simon about this. I mean, this is, he's in forced solitude, or, I should say solitary confined, but really what this is a tribute to is the life of philosophy. I mean, that's really what it's about. Everything has fallen apart for him.

He's enjoyed greatness in the eyes of the world and now he's stuck in a prison cell and he's facing death which in fact comes to him. And really the debate is about as it were the comforts, the consolations that philosophy provides and the book is very important because it explores as Simon said, questions of evil for example, time is an issue there,

determinism and so on. And the question is are we trapped? Are we victims at some sense of circumstance and time? And the answer is at the end of the day, no, because we can transcend all of that. and where we go to is a place in a platonic place in which you contemplate truth and so on. So these sufferings

are nothing, as a were, by comparison. Can I just add one thing briefly to say it used to be thought precisely because of the absence of religion in this that the author of this work was distinct from another boethias who's a Christian. But actually that's, I think, been resolved now. It is one

in the same person and he does write religious writings as well. In fact, in Pavia in Italy, he and St. Augustin are entombed in the same church. and he's there venerated as a saint. But the point about this is this is an exploration of philosophy and the comforts of philosophy. Can we go back to things said about solitude?

You mentioned St Augustine. Could you develop anything he said in this context? Well, Augustine, I think, is very important. Not so much as well for what he has to say about solitude and the confessions. I'll just mention that very briefly in a second. But he is the author really of the first monastic rule. I mean, the one that is the most famous is practically the rule of St. Benedict, but that comes about a century after Augustine.

Augustine sets out the rules for a community, for a monastic community. I'm sorry to be so persistent, but how is this connecting with solitude? Okay, so what happens is this. There's a famous chapter in his confessions, chapter 8, in which he recounts really the stages that led to his conversion to Christianity. And in the first of those, he has an encounter with one group of philoholod. First of all, he begins by reading Cicero and there's renunciation and so on, but he feels he can't renounce the life of pleasure. Then he tussles with the question of evil, but eventually he comes to an understanding that is a combination of Platonism and Christianity.

And in this, he says that, you know, we have to go into our souls and discover in ourselves the presence of God. There's a line in the confessions is very famous, you made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until the come to rest in you. So the thought is, is the diagnosis of human restlessness. But you only come to recognise the presence of God when you, as it were, set aside the world and turned in an interior way. So that's his description, as it were, that's his take, as we're on solidity. Yeah, he says, you turn me as a mirror to myself, and in there, I find myself, and so on. But can I just say what's important is that actually he comes out of that into community. The thing that he does is, he goes into solitude in the garden, he steps away.

He breaks down into tears, he retreats further in the garden, and then famously hears these words over the garden wall, take up and read toli legge, and this is a moment of conversion. But what I was going to say is what he immediately, shortly thereafter, does, is establishes a community. And then he writes a rule for this community

about how they should entract, and it is about sharing their spiritual lives together. It is finding that one is best, when together, in the spiritual life and so on, and that becomes very important. So we're talking about solitude and society. Melissa Lane, we come to Montaigne, as we often do when we're talking about thinking, 16th century philosopher. He had various things to say about solitude. Could you tell us what they were and whether you thought they had resonance?

One comment first on what we've been saying so far, which is I think that what we're seeing is that in the classical tradition, solitude is very important in this idea of philosophical contemplation and things. But you can do that while still physically being present in the city. And that is a great contrast from the desert father tradition, that strain of Christianity, which says you have to go into the wilderness, leave the city physically in order also to leave it mentally, even though as we saw, now in a way, that brings us to Montaigne, because what's interesting in Montaigne is that he does retreat into his country estate. He's a landed gentleman who goes on serving in as a sort of local magistrate. But he suggests that you need to have solitude.

You retreat into your estate. You retreat into your bookroom, into your library. And that becomes for him a model of what he calls the back shop of the mind. So you need to have in your own mind a place of solitude. Although, again, it's not that you live there all the time. You live there in a way that enables you to prepare yourself to be in society in the right way. So again, solitude is a preparation for society, but society in some ways might also be a preparation. and a model for solitude.

He talks about living in solitude, but he's living with his family, and all of his books is about friendship. So what about that? Yeah, well, this is what's so interesting, I think, is that solitude is very rarely a kind of complete, all-encompassing ideal. Except it is in the Christian tradition.

Well, even there, as John says, for most, if you're living in a monastic community, you spend many hours a day in solitude praying, but then you're eating in a community, even if in silence, So it's again, you're moving in and out of solitude. And I think for Montaigne, again, it wasn't a contradiction for him to love friendship, to love his family, but to find that he needed these hours in his library.

Where, again, though, paradoxically, he said what I'm doing is conversing with the great minds of the past through books. I'm in solitude, but in conversation in my own mind with them. Simon Blackburn, do you think that Descartes gave a, put philosophy, put solitude back into the philosophical arena? Yes, if I could just say something about Montaigne quickly. I mean, Montaigne, I think, was also very keen that you didn't retire into solitude unless you'd prepared your mind in advance. You'd actually got sort of well-stocked, a well-stocked mind. And that, I think, is important because otherwise philosophical contemplation can just be sort of,

well, as Hegel called it, it's like burning incense and listening to music. It's not actually thinking. So I think we'll come to Hegel and more social philosophers, socially minded philosophers in time. With luck. Oh, with luck. Okay. Descartes, yes.

Well, the thing every beginner in philosophy knows about Descartes is that in the meditations, he's sitting there alone in his stove-heated room, and he starts to wonder about the foundations of knowledge, and he tries to strip away everything that he thinks he knows. The usual gloss on this for beginners in philosophy is that they should ask themselves the question, how do I know I'm not dreaming?

And indeed Descartes is preoccupied by the possibility of universal deception, of living in a virtual reality, as we might put it. I think actually the context is much more historical than that, but the essential thing that he did do was say you've got to do it for yourself. You've got to get out of your own head the apparatus for gaining confidence in the external world, confidence in the testimony of others, confidence that things are as your mind tells you they'll be. And to do that, you've got to get rid of the tyranny of the senses. He's living at a time when sense experience suddenly began to feel a little wobble,

Copernicus had told us that the earth goes around the sun, not as it appears the sun goes around the earth. People were beginning to discover the microscope and the telescope, more or less simultaneously, and everything could appear very different, depending on how you looked at it. So the arrival of perspective is very important. And Descartes is very definite that you've got to do it for yourself.

You've got to do it out of your own contemplative and rational resources. And that's the turn to the self, which dominated philosophy, really until probably Hegel. Did the return to the self nudge people back into the idea of solitude, solitude and the self being related? I don't think they did particularly. Descartes himself was a bit of a solitary. He lived an awful lot of his life sort of concealing himself, actually, from other people. But I think in the end, he's not been seen as a paragon or a paradigm of the solitary life in the way that some of the people John's been talking about were.

He's been seen as leaving an intellectual problem. And it was a big intellectual problem. It was basically what we call reconciling the normal worldview with the scientific worldview. I'll just say one thing. I was going to say, as Simon rightly says, we have Descartes. He comes to us as the founder of epistemology or the theory of knowledge, or at least of a certain kind of theory of knowledge. But in fact, it's worth saying that there's another respect in which he's continuous

with these spiritual traditions and these ancient traditions, because as the title meditations already takes us back to ancient titles. But also he is a product of the Jesuit Royal College of La Flesche. And the Jesuits were founded by Ignatius Loyola, the author of the spiritual exercises. and the spiritual exercises are concerned with the practice of discernment, of discerning within one's own soul

and within the soul of others and so on. So in fact, there is in Descartes an echo of which he was fully aware of this spiritual tradition and I don't just necessarily mean a religious tradition but of this idea that philosophy is actually a form of practice. Yes. Well, there are a couple of things to say there. One is, of course, that famously his climb out

from this sort of nightmare that we might be living in a virtual reality does go via the goodness of God. He remembered that and he was very anxious that his work should appeal to the Orthodox. The other is I think it's not so much called a meditation

because of its spiritual side, as John perhaps hinted. I think it's called a meditation because it's going to take you time. It's going to take you time to climb out from under the domination of unimensional. interpreted sense experience and learn just to trust your clear and distinct ideas, which is what Descartes's banging the drum for at this point. So it's a meditation because you can't just read it

in an afternoon. You've got to let it marinate. Melissa, can we talk about what's happening in a more secular area, although religious persons might be involved? Do we talk about Adam Smith's notion of this subject, which we're going around and round. the edges. I don't know what we've got to the heart of here. Did he think about solitude? If so, what did he think about solitude? Well, I think Smith is interesting because he's very much opposed to solitude. So he's one of the figures of the 18th century enlightenment who really are suspicious of solitude. Hume, who's his great friend, attack solitude as one of the monkish virtues, and we've heard that it is a monkish virtue. But Smith and Hume both think that actually the problem

is that in solitude, again, we may inflate our own egos. We may not be able to judge rightly either of the world or other ourselves. So there's a real contrast, I mean, between someone like Rousseau, for example, who would say just a bit before Smith, you know, it's only in solitude that we can really restore ourselves to health. And Smith says, actually the most powerful remedy, what will take us to tranquility, is not solitude. It's actually society. And so that's a very interesting moment where both the classical and, And the religious kind of adulation for solitude and contemplation really hits the Enlightenment concern for sociability and the value of sociability.

But the Enlightenment, especially Hume, is hammering solitude and celibacy. Very hard indeed. It's useless. It takes you nowhere. What have you to think about if you're thinking only about yours and so on and so forth? You might almost call it a secular, but certainly an empirical view of solitude. Where does it get you? What does it put you?

what does it end up as? Exactly. And so that's really beginning, in a way, even before Hegel, that it's beginning the turn toward a more social idea of the self, whereas the solitude traditions in classical and Christian ideas were very much that solitude was the authentic self, that it's only in solitude that you can find your true voice, that you can still the false voices of society.

And now for the Enlightenment is saying, actually, no, it's in conversation with others in real external conversation, the kind of conversation we're having here, not in our own minds, that we can actually find truth. Please, Simon, you come on and answer and say something. I just thought it's a pleasant thing to remember

that this is one of the few things that Johnson and Hume would have agreed about. There's a wonderful statement from Johnson. Solitude, he added one day, is dangerous to reason without being favourable to virtue. For the solicitations of sense are always at hand. The solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious and possibly mad.

the mine stagnates for want of employment grows morbid and is extinguished like a candle in foul air. Yeah, they have good lines and there's a wonderful thing by whom I haven't got time to read up. I'll pop it in a newsletter or something. It's absolutely true. But at the same time, you had Rousseau turning to nature and having an enormous effect which has rippled through ever since then Worsworth,

Solitude, the Bacon from the Beacon down, the bliss of solitude, and so on. You have the whole romantic. movement, the nature movement, which is taking solitude, solitude in nature, as seriously they think as everybody took solitude with God. Now, where does that take us? Is that a philosophy? Is that what's going on, John? Well, I think part of what's going on is a return to an antecedent state. So the thought is that over the centuries we've developed in certain ways that have actually distanced us from our authentic, true, real nature. And one way of trying to get back to that is by

speculating about our origins and that's why Russo, the idea of the state of nature in Russo is important and another thinkers as well, to try to work out how we got here and what was it like originally and many who move in that direction think, well how it was originally was we were individuals, we were on our

own and we weren't in competition for resources because we were few and there were plenty of resources. We just picked the apples from the trees and so on. But there's a story to be told about how we move from that condition of relative ease as it were, at oneness, with the world, to one in which we're in conflict with one another,

and perhaps we moved to the 19th century and on, you know, where Hopkins talks about, you know, the world trod, speared and one thing and another, that we've alienated from one another and alienated from the world. So there is this big movement to try to recover what is authentic and original in human beings. And nature comes on to the scene there because that is where is our original home, our original place of origin, set against. Again, it's a bit like the desert and the town. I mean, nature is set against the urban setting.

And I think a lot of these figures. And then, of course, nature itself becomes a substitute for God. Just one thing if I could say very quickly is, I think in the Eastern traditions, a lot of talk about meditation. In the Western traditions, it's about contemplation. And contemplation takes an object. There's something you are contemplating. And whether it's God, whether it's the soul, whether it's nature and so on.

So I think nature has taken the place for some of these people of God. You want to come in, Melissa. Yeah, so I think there's a real contrast. between the Greeks for whom you can be solitary, but even within the Paulus, and then for the Christians where you flee into the desert as a place of purgation, as John said earlier. And now for Rousseau, and then leading into the Romantics and the American Transcendentalists, nature is actually speaking to us. Nature actually, either God is speaking to us through nature or nature alone is speaking to us. Nature is now a positive place where we can experience authenticity rather than

simply a place of self-mortification. Could you develop Emerson and Thorough a little more, please? Yeah, so. So we're talking about 19th century America, transcendentalist and so on, and actually going in living the life, going into the woods and being on that sort of thing. Exactly. So for Emerson, it's important that he says society is best when you actually, when it comes closest to being in solitude.

And he talks about, so in contrast to Montaigne, for whom when you're reading books, you're solitary. Emerson says, no, you have to leave your books. you have to go out and look at the stars. That's actually the way that you can genuinely experience solitude. You can hear the authentic voice of nature. And then, of course, Thoreau, as you mentioned in the introduction, is Emerson's younger disciple. And he follows, he actually goes and lives for two years, as you said. Now, of course, he's only a mile from the nearest other people. So it's a very interesting thing that it's about kind of for him, the solitude, it's about the deliberateness

with which he chooses solitude and choosing to live in an independent life to be. build his own house with his own hands. So solitude becomes for him a kind of an image of independence. And of course, that's a very deeply American ideal. Simon, I know you want to talk about Hegel and Kant. I didn't think we were going to get that.

I really didn't. But could you tell us about how Wittgenstein seemed to resolve it as far some philosophers of a concern? Just briefly. Yes, very... I want to hear this. I know, I know, I know. Well, I think for Hegel, I mean, it's patterns of

mutual recognition that constitute our self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is essentially a matter of seeing yourself in another person's eyes. And there's a whole so-called master-slave dialectic in the phenomenology, which tries to elaborate on this idea. And I think that really became very important. It became important to Bradley, to Hegel's followers in Britain, to Collingwood and to Wittgenstein. This is the social identity of the self. Melissa mentioned Thoreau or Emerson trying to get away from language. Well, you can't do any thinking without language.

And yet language is a social gift. It's something you're given by your mother or father or your community. It's not something you do for yourself. And Hagell, I think, saw the capacity of ourselves to hold each other to meanings, to hold each other to the norms governing our language, to the semantics governing our terms, that constitutes our identity.

Without that, we wouldn't even be thinkers. And Wittgenstein picks that up and runs with it in the later philosophy. Of course, the later philosophy is a minefield of interpretation. I think it's another program as well. I think it's another program, yes. But finally... But I think it's very important that this social identity

becomes a drumbeat of Hegel Marx, the entire late 19th and early. 20th century. Therefore, finally John, John Holden, is the idea of the Christian notion, Judeic notion, does any of that remain in philosophical discourse? Well, I think the pattern, as it were,

replays itself, as I said. I mean, there may be a substitution of a different object, whether the object is truth for some, it's God, but I think that we can, in a way, become full circle, because we began with the idea that thought is a conversation, interior conversation in the soul, and we've just heard the emphasis on language

and the necessity of language and so on. Thank you very much. Well, thank you, Minister Lane, Simon Blackburn, John Holden. Next week we were talking about the 12th century medieval writer and composer Hildegarde Bingen. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. It was a bit daft trying to do all that one program with Tom Morris.

Next time we divided up into six programs and had. Absolutely, I blame the producer. I'm very proud of getting through two centuries. I don't know. Do you think there's anything to be got out of doing that kind of sweep? I think we did get some big themes. So this contrast between solitude is really about thinking you can do it anywhere to, no, you have to be in the desert,

you have to really leave society behind physically, to, okay, no, you have to be in the wilderness, but you want to be in nature in order to hear the voice of it. I think we did get that. And that is something that comes out only with the... And I think it also came out that nearly everybody has a dialectic between solitude and community. So that I think came over very well. I mean, structurally it seems to me you don't have two-part programs,

but it seems to me this would be a case for one. I mean, you could do it something like solitude in the pre-modern world and then solitude in the modern world because we didn't get round... I mean, you touched upon wordsworth and such like, but the whole sort of the role of solitude in art, for example. creativity. Yeah, I mean, had to Camus has this little in exile in the kingdom

he has a short story, what's a collection of short stories, but one is called the artist at work. And in that, some chap whose head is a rather limited and unsuccessful artistic career then finds a patron, becomes successful, but then all these hangers on attached to him and he retreats by stages.

And finally a canvas is found in which there's a word inscribed and it's not clear, is it solitary or is it solidary? Now, for a Camus, I mean, this is partly a sort of satire on success and so on, but it's also meant to be an exploration of the human condition. And so the whole existentialist concern about a loneliness in a world, not of our making and so on, I think is important. In another case, I just was looking at the work of British artist Richard Long,

his work you might know, he walks in the landscape, he produces lines and so on. But some of these are thousand mile walks, and he's been doing this for 40 years. It's been a solitary life. But again, it's to bring it back. I mean, it's to share the fruits of solitude. I mean, I think one of the other really interesting questions is what happens now when we all are on our phones all the time. And so even when you're alone, you're very often in real dialogue with others, exactly. And so actually, but I think that's a real, it's a real thing to think about because if the tradition,

the philosophical and religious traditions are right that you have to train yourself in solitude to even be in society in a fruitful way, and then you're never really in solitude now, I think there are real questions to be asked there about, you know, how do we continue to cultivate solitude in these conditions? I wish we'd mentioned that Thorough, I mean, he makes this parade of his independence and his solitude. He went to have dinner with his mom every week. But I think that's in a way, but that's the point is that solitude doesn't, it's not just a matter of how many hours do you spend alone. It's actually this question of what's the content and quality of the hours in which you are alone.

And that's really the fundamental question. But I agree. I mean, so it's easy to kind of poke fun at him and, you know, there is something. And more and more begin to do with John Holden that we should have done two programs. But there's masses to come back to him. We've nibble at the end of various big changes. Well, Byronic solitude, of course, as well.

I mean, it's not just Wordsworth and say Coleridge, the nature poets, but byronic solitude, the solitude of the outcast, the hero who sort of walks alone because he can't stand what's around him. And yet again, you see one thing we didn't get, to, but I think it's, you know, for philosophers we're interested in Kant and autonomy and self-governance, but a more important theme for many of these figures is not autonomy to authenticity. I mean, being really oneself.

And to be really oneself, one first of all, has to know what oneself is, as it were. Well, that would be a great program, authenticity. Authenticity. Or indeed, autonomy and authenticity. Polonious, onwards. But notice in all of these authors, actually, or not all of the authors, but in general there's convergence. it's actually very few people who say that the right life for human beings is simply to be alone or to be utterly immersed in society.

What they all return to us the idea that what you want here is a balance. And that's why I think, say, Augustine's rule is very interesting. And the monastic settlement in general is very interesting because you go off to your cell, but you come back to common life. So you eat together, there's some solitary prayer, but there's also communal prayer. And then, of course, what has also happened within the monastery is the spiritual reading.

as you sit around your tables, there's somebody up there who's reading you the rule of St Benedict, the rule of whatever. So it's a common life as well. Would you like some tea, coffee? Tom Morris is here to deliver. Either of our two wishes. I'm fine. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.com.com.