Thinking in Solitude

“I am one thing,” writes Nietzsche, “my writings are another.” I have never fully understood this claim. Are we led to believe that Nietzsche the man is even more “dynamite” than his writings, or, is the man a more “humane” counterpart to the dynamite? Either way, this apparent divorce between the “one thing” of the self and the otherness of writing is somehow peculiar to philosophy. Quite unlike any other, philosophy is a form of writing that engenders itself toward a special form of awkwardness. This is the awkwardness of philosophy itself: of the grand gesture to turn inwards (Heraclitus: “I searched my nature”), breaking down all that culture and life has imposed upon the pre-reflective self, only to produce concepts with nothing more than a contingent relation to the everyday world. The lack of material evidence in philosophy remains a vulgar problem: consequentially, philosophy is a highly self-conscious discipline (see this discussion of Heidegger by way of an example).

“I am one thing, my writings are another.” Yes, it is for this reason of awkwardness with regard to oneself, that the association between thought and solitude has such a deeply engrained bond. The Kantian “nobility” of human thought (and more so aesthetic experience) is predicated on the idea of the subject cultivating a detachment from his own self (And solitude is invariably the domain of "his" solitude). The same could also be said of Husserl – both thinkers invent a mode of solitude, in which access to the external world is at the assent of the lone subject. And yet Kant was social, “he liked a drink”. Immersion in the world of social affairs did not undermine the unity of his thought, at least not until the very end. Schopenhauer’s solitude becomes more problematic, however. Accusations that he is one thing, but his writings are another become ammunition for those who think that writing and self ought to be formless, and that without this passage, conceptual uncertainty follows.

I am one thing with my writings. That would be the call of solitude, the impervious shield constructed to ward off all imposters. Graham Harman, in one of his insightful advice posts, points that the solitude of the graduate student in his 20s becomes undignified by his mid-30s, he writes: “There are many self-defeating alternatives, one of which was recently mocked by a very intelligent friend as “the idea of great, heroic, conceptual labor which can only be undertaken by rugged males in conditions of terrible solitude.” Yeah, I remember that phase too, at about age 25. It’s respectable then, but becomes ridiculous and self-defeating if you’re still there at 35.” Irrespective of whether or not this is true —and I suspect it is true —what is interesting is the idea of a temporal threshold, in which solitude suddenly becomes unacceptable, and all such “morbid” tendencies overcome. Does such a point demarcate the transformation of philosophical awkwardness to philosophical legitimacy?

As an endnote, Paul Auster writing on the death of his father: “Never before have I been so aware of the rift between thinking and writing.” Auster stands before a man shrouded in solitude and his thought is stopped in its tracks: the solitude has taken flight in Auster’s refusal to write. But here Auster gives us a clue: the father is a man of solitude, but it is a solitude not borne of a need to produce – as it is so often cited in the philosophical hero – but present as a force which resists all temporal thresholds: “Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not have to see himself being seen by anyone else.”