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To live alone, Aristotle said, you must be a beast or a god — but he left out the truth that you must also learn to be both. This lecture from Academy of Ideas explores the forgotten power of solitude. Far from the same thing as loneliness, chosen solitude is a sanctuary for self-discovery, healing, and the building of real character. From Thoreau to Nietzsche to the rites of passage that sent boys alone into the wild, it shows how silence restores the inner voice. Pascal’s warning closes the arc: most of humanity’s problems come from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Full Video Transcript
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To live alone, one must be either a beast or a god, says Aristotle, leaving out the third case.
One must be both.
According to a 2010 study published in the journal PLOS Medicine, the health risks of
chronic loneliness are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. To mitigate the harms of
loneliness, we can increase our social connectedness, but we can also improve our
capacity to be alone. For not all who are alone are lonely. Regarding his extended time spent
alone at Walden Pond, the philosopher Henry David Thoreau proclaimed,
I am never lonely here. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
In this video, we explore the virtues of solitude and examine why, far from being damaging to
health, solitude promotes self-development, creates conditions of unparalleled freedom,
cures many mental health problems, and is necessary for the cultivation of a great character.
Loneliness is one thing, solitude another. You have learned that, now, wrote Nietzsche and thus
spoke Zarathustra. In his book Solitude, A Philosophical Encounter, the philosopher
Philip Kha defines solitude as, a stretch of experience disengaged from other people in
perception, thought, emotion, and action. Solitude is simply an experiential world in which other
people are absent. That is enough for solitude. That is constant through all solitudes. Many of
the towering figures of history ascended to their legendary status by harnessing the benefits found
in long stretches of solitude. The forty days and nights Jesus spent wrestling with the devil in
the desert spurred him to his spiritual heights. Lao Tzu, Buddha, and Moses found in solitude the
great moral visions which defined their lives. Marcus Aurelius, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Albert Camus, Henry David Thoreau, and many other philosophers sought in solitude a
sanctuary to cultivate their character and develop their philosophical insights away from the
corrupting influence of society. Nietzsche, for example, wrote that,
When I am among the many, I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think. After a time
it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself and rob me of my soul. I then require
the desert, so as to grow good again. Admiral Richard Byrd spent a winter alone in the Antarctic
where he endured brutal cold, long black nights, and in his words, an isolation which no power on
earth could lift for at least six months. But rather than being lonely, this intense period
of solitude was the most transformative of his life, for as he wrote in his book Alone,
Yes, solitude is greater than I anticipated. My sense of values is changing, and many things
which before were in solution in my mind now seem to be crystallizing. Why do some individuals
thrive in solitude, while others suffer under the weight of loneliness? Simply put, the lonely are
either ignorant of the great virtues of solitude, or do not know how to harness them. And foremost
among the virtues of solitude is the freedom to discover who we are and to become that person.
Or as the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed, a man can be himself only so long as he is alone,
and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone
that he is really free. Constraint is always present in society, like a companion of whom
there is no riddance. And in proportion to the greatness of a man’s individuality,
it will be hard for him to bear the sacrifices which all intercourse with others demands.
To grasp the freedom which solitude offers, we can dwell on the constraints present in social
engagements. Friends, family, and romantic partners are important ingredients in a good life,
but they also represent what Philip Koch called structures of demands.
Demands to be listened to with an interest commensurate with their expectations,
cared for according to their requirements,
followed or led along the trail at their own pace.
Moreover, the emotional state of others constrains our experience.
When others are cheerful, it lifts us up,
but a bad mood often brings us down.
In either case, our emotional state is not autonomous but dependent on the people around us.
Or as R.D. Lange writes,
They are not having fun. I can’t have fun if they don’t.
If I can get them to have fun, then I can have fun with them.
Getting them to have fun is not fun. It is hard work.
Even strangers constrain our experience.
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre tells us to imagine ourselves alone in a park.
We are enjoying our experience of the trees, the sun, and the birds.
They exist for us alone.
But then another individual sits on the bench across from us.
We become aware that we are now an object in someone else’s consciousness,
and this disrupts our idyllic communion with the environment.
In an analogous manner, the psychologist William James pointed out the disappointing feeling
that comes upon a solitary hiker when he sees another hiker approach in the distance.
He immediately feels more self-conscious and less free, less able to simply be.
This is what Sartre meant by the phrase, hell is other people.
Or as Sartre wrote,
By the mere appearance of the other, I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as an object,
for it is as an object that I appear to the other.
All these constraints are absent in solitude,
For solitude is characterized by unrestraint and a freedom that is inaccessible in social
engagement. In solitude we are free to enjoy our surroundings without the disrupting awareness
that we are an object in someone else’s perceptual field. We are free to do what we want when we
want. We can think or feel anything and follow our passions with no concern for what others
will think of us or whether we are meeting their expectations or demands. Free. It feels
strange at first. No one bounding you on any side. The English philosopher William Hazlitt
made a habit of going on long walks alone, simply to enjoy the freedom of solitude. And
as he noted, the soul of a solitary journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel,
do, just as one pleases. For once, I like to have it all my own way, and this is impossible
unless you are alone. Or as Philip Kha observed, Thoreau remarked,
I go and come with a strange liberty in nature. So true, but why? An obvious point is the escape
from the social controls which govern all interpersonal life. In solitude you can cry
fire anytime you like, and you can do it stark naked. Certainly freedom of movement is a universal
metaphor for the spiritual freedom of solitude, where our spirits wander or ramble or leap or
soar. The freedom of solitude is valuable for its own sake but also as a means to self-discovery
and personal growth. For when alone and absent the social constraints that bound our experience,
we can engage in what Philip Caugh called attunement to self. Or as he explained,
Attunement to self is best characterized by the image of free flow, the flowing into awareness
of thoughts, desires, and emotions with no sense of censorship or management, together
with a free-flowing access backwards towards their origins.
Opening ourselves up to the full range of our emotions, thoughts, desires, and inner
images puts us in touch with aspects of our selfhood that we bury beneath the social masks
we wear when around others.
But in solitude we are free to take off these masks, as there is no one to listen to or
answer to but the voice of our conscience.
After a long and difficult relationship, the novelist Mae Sarton spent extended time in
total solitude, and as she wrote in Journal of a Solitude,
I begin to have intimations now of a return to some deep self that has been too absorbed
and too battered to function for a long time.
Or as the American philosopher Thomas Merton echoed in The Silent Life,
Not all men are called to be hermits.
But all men need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice
of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally.
When that inner voice is not heard, life is always miserable and exhausting.
If man is constantly exiled from his own home, locked out of his own spiritual solitude,
he ceases to be a true person.
He no longer lives as a man.
The voices we hear in solitude, however, are not always pleasant.
Sometimes an attunement to self involves the reliving of past traumas and the emergence
of painful emotions, fears, and anxieties we have been avoiding by immersing ourselves
in the distractions of society.
This state of inner attunement is not always joyful or serene.
Sometimes it involves feeling with devastating intensity the conflicts, the rages, and the
intimations of mortality we have been trying to deny. Yearnings, rages, jealousies, dependencies,
and estrangements can be safely lived through when the persons upon whom we might wrongly,
or dangerously, or foolishly, unleash them are absent. While the conflicts and emotions
that emerge in solitude can cause suffering, their surfacing gives us the chance to consciously
confront them. And if we use this opportunity to sit in silence and allow our anxieties
and distressing emotions to wash over us, we can process, resolve, release them, and
heal the chronic mental health problems they were generating.
And as Albert Camus observed, when a man has learned, and not on paper, how to remain alone
with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, then he has little left to learn.
This healing power of solitude is not hyperbole.
The Japanese physician Shoma Morita developed a form of psychotherapy based on the principles
of Zen Buddhism, which forgoes therapeutic and pharmaceutical intervention in favor of
providing the patient an environment of solitude where he is forced to confront the suffering
he has been avoiding.
Or as Ilse Vieth explains, upon his arrival at the hospital, the neurotic patient must
have complete bed rest for up to a week. During this time he is not permitted to associate
with anyone else. He must not read or write, smoke, telephone, listen to the radio, or
watch television. The patient is left alone with his illness until he and his illness
become one. He has to accept his illness in complete solitude.
Most cultures of the past were aware of the great virtues of solitude, and in some solitude
Solitude was valued even more than sociality.
Among the Tarahumara Indians of the Sierra Madre in Mexico, the professor J. Ralph Audi
noted almost a cult of solitude, and as he continues,
A little boy of six may take his ration of pinole and disappear with the sheep for one
or two weeks without seeing a single other person before he returns.
These Indians are so accustomed to leading solitary lives that they feel embarrassed
and at a loss when called on to converse with others.
Even in cultures where the living was more communal, individuals went into extended periods
of solitude to facilitate major life transitions.
For example, solitary quests were an integral part of the rites of passage through which
an adolescent boy transitioned into manhood.
In a rite of passage, a boy was taken to a secluded camp in the wilderness.
There he remained alone, sometimes for months.
Anything he needed to survive he made or found himself.
He hunted, foraged, protected himself from predators, and faced his fear of the unknown
and of the darkness.
He underwent an attunement to self and confronted and surmounted his loneliness, anxieties,
dependencies, and transformed his mind from an unruly enemy into a trusted friend.
Only those who succeeded in this solitary quest were considered by the community to
be real men.
And as James Hollis writes, Ritual isolation is an introduction to a central truth, that
no matter how tribal our social life, we are on the journey alone and must learn to draw
strength and solace from within.
The boy learned to depend on his wits, his courage, and his weapons, or he perished.
Culturally sanctioned solitary quests have been common in every known culture throughout
history except ours.
This reflects our society’s deep aversion to solitude.
Instead of being seen as a precious gift, many see solitude as something to be endured
in between social engagements or relationships.
Or worse, solitude is seen as something to be evaded.
When other people are not present, most of us stare at screens to distract ourselves
from our aloneness and the voices we might hear in the silence.
Perhaps this collective flight from solitude is the reason why mental illness and weakness
are the new norm.
For as the 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal observed,
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
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Source: Academy of Ideas