The Philosophy of Creative Solitudes

David Jones, David Jones

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350077874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia sociale

What is solitude, why do we crave and fear it, and how do we distinguish it properly from loneliness? It lies at the core of the lives of philosophers and their self-reflective contemplations, and it is the enabling (and disabling) condition that allows us to seriously question how to live creatively and meaningfully. David Farrell Krell is one of the decisive philosophical voices on how philosophers can creatively engage their solitudes. The scale and range of his understanding of solitudes are taken up in this book by some of the most distinguished Continental philosophers. Authors address the problem of solitude from different angles, and imagine how to face and respond creatively to it. Blending philosophical narrative and straightforward philosophical treatises, this book provides inspiration for contemplation of our own versions of solitude and their creative potentials. Some authors focus on the work of historical figures in philosophy or poetry, such as Heidegger and Hölderlin, while others deal more directly with Krell's work as exemplary of their own imaginings of creative solitudes. Other authors respond more personally and creatively in their demonstrations of how we can, and must, seek our solitudes. Including an original chapter by David Farrell Krell, this book is an invigorating meditation on the possibility of being philosophical about a life through solitude, and the meaning of this powerfully resonant and universal human experience.

Part One

Creative Solitudes

1

Creative Solitudes

David Farrell Krell

When David Jones first proposed this volume to me I was both grateful and surprised. He had heard me deliver a lecture entitled “Creative Solitudes” at Kennesaw State University in 2005. The lecture was originally written for the Cortelyou-Lowery Award ceremony at DePaul University in 1997, then revised and presented at a number of colleges and universities over the next few years. Wherever I have given the lecture the reaction has been the same: faculty and students seem to agree with much of what I am saying, and some are enthusiastic about it, whereas administrators generally hate the whole thing. I take that as a good sign.

A number of years ago, David sent this paper to a group of philosophers with the request that they respond with an essay on their own experiences of creative solitudes. Some chose to examine various books and essays of mine, while others went in the direction of their own research and reflection. In both cases, the theme was solitude in our creative and scholarly lives, and not my own work. Not even Paul Auster claims to have “invented” solitude. Everyone who reads and writes does so under the auspices of solitude. Is it safe to say that both reading and writing are endangered species in a culture whose very first axiom when it comes to “mental health” and “social adjustment” is that solitude be assiduously avoided? If that seems too alarmist, we may nevertheless agree that ours is a good time to think about the pains and the gains of solitude, and not by way of “tweets.”

I have taken the liberty of cutting portions of the original lecture in order to make space for some remarks on more recent work of mine. I regret the resulting patchwork and the autobiography, but it seemed necessary to say what I am using or abusing my “creative solitudes” for these days. My gratitude to all the contributors to this volume and to David Jones. And I am still surprised.

“Creative solitudes.” What a splendid title! Both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and perhaps even William James, would have written stirring essays on it. Well, then, that makes it a quaint nineteenth-century topic, both edifying and obsolete. Besides, no one has ever cracked the code of creativity, although much empirical-psychological ink has been spilled over it. And solitude? No one has ever been able to distinguish it properly from aloneness or loneliness, even though we know that these states or conditions are far from identical. Clearly, by “creative solitudes” I do not mean isolation and self-absorption. To languish in narcissism, whether dreamily or wretchedly, is not creative but destructive—we all know that. Yet I suspect that aloneness and loneliness are essential components of creative solitudes. They may be self-inflicted wounds, but they are not accidents.

I have two questions to pose concerning creative solitudes. First, what is the relation of such solitudes to teaching and learning, especially in our colleges and universities? Second, what will be the fate of creative solitudes in the age of information technology, electronic mass communication, and social media? Are there any resources that may help us to avoid the worst potholes on the information highway down which we are tearing, roaring along so confidently in the direction of ignorance, ugliness, and mean-spiritedness? My complaints about information technology (and, believe it or not, my main example will be email) are three: first, that it invades our creative solitudes in a particularly pernicious way; second, that it subverts our language and our thought processes; and third, that it encourages our most rancorous side—the side that loves gossip and slander. What I am worried about, in a word, is that information technology is invidious to both creativity and civility, both solitude and community. The celebrated global village is a village stripped of its sense of creativity and fair play. Perhaps it is silly of me to be nostalgic about these things, and perhaps I am merely being paranoid about what is everywhere touted as an exciting and useful tool of communication and community. We shall see.

However, on the way to the question concerning the effect of information technology on creative solitudes, let me not forget to ask about the importance of such solitudes for college and university teachers—indeed, for teachers and learners generally. Important they are, and yet in some way they are also menacing. Part of the poignancy of solitary reading and writing is the momentary realization of how much of life we are missing. Thoreau says of the act of writing, “I know not whether it was the dumps or a budding ecstasy.”¹ We do have to be comfortable (if not ecstatic) when we work, but a terrible aloneness also has to subtend the comfort. Such isolation is hard on the others who are close to us—this need for aloneness, this need to forego something of life—and it is hard on us. If there were an easier and more gregarious path, we would walk it and talk it. Creative solitudes may not have to be mournful, but whenever we are caught up in them we do have to notice that something is missing, something is in default. Time may seem to stop in such solitudes, but it stops merely in order to gesture toward the transience of things, the very passing of time, the deaths of parents and friends and lovers—along with the demise of ideas, feelings, and sensations—as we write. We must clear a space at the writing table for ghosts, if only because specters too are vulnerable, ephemeral, and, if the ancients are to be believed, wretchedly lonely. The French playwright Hélène Cixous tells her students that when they write plays they must bring the dead onto the stage, since otherwise—apart from our dreams about them—the dead do not stand a chance. Perhaps, then, every creative solitude entertains ghosts. We are always writing with them and for them, even when we are writing against them. No matter how joyous and exhilarating our solitudes may be, they are always haunted. We may feel at home in them, yet our being-at-home is riddled with uncanny, unhomelike sensations.²

It may be objected that the haunted solitude demanded by philosophical or literary work is too taxing a standard for our everyday academic work. Yet the populations of the night—that is, of both our everyday sorts of nights and of what Maurice Blanchot calls the “other” night³—probably do touch our work of the day, at least if there is anything at all creative about it. And our desire to forget or turn a deaf ear to those populations (for who wants to entertain ghosts, who wants to be lugubrious?) perhaps explains our willingness to surrender creative solitudes to just about anything. Without creative solitudes, however, we cannot read or write or teach, and to a college or university professor, and to teachers in general, that is a disadvantage.

I cannot say, as Thoreau does, that I have “never felt lonesome or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude” (W 99). Emerson’s journal entry for October 27, 1851, makes more sense to me, and it exposes Thoreau’s braggadocio for what it is. Emerson writes: “It would be hard to recall the rambles of last night’s talk with H. T. [i.e., Henry Thoreau]. But we stated over again, to sadness, almost, the eternal loneliness . . . How insular and pathetically solitary, are all the people we know.”⁴ Pathetically solitary? Perhaps. Yet sometimes also heroically so. Herman Melville, in Pierre or The Ambiguities, describes the blank sheet of paper on which his hero is trying to write in the following way: “If man must wrestle, perhaps it is well that it should be on the nakedest possible plain.”⁵

Something else about creative solitudes, however, something more mundane than ghosts, frightens us. A university administrator once said to me, “You know, creative solitudes are wasted on some people,” and all I could reply was that often I am one of them. I ought to have added that I am in good company. When Gustav Mahler was at his summer cottage in Maiernigg, working on the Adagietto movement of his Fifth Symphony, he felt he might be one of them; so did the young W. E. B. Du Bois while he was studying economics in Berlin, if only because he was aiming so high on behalf of so many; so did Hannah Arendt feel it when she was writing a lecture in New York and Ticino on what she called, with some trepidation and even embarrassment, thoughtfulness, mere thoughtfulness, as the only effective response to the banality of evil. To be thoughtful, to be creative in thinking, is to be never cocksure. When the German poet Hölderlin was twenty-five, he wrote to Schiller, who at that time was a kind of foster-father to him: “I am living a very solitary life, and I believe it is good for me.”⁶ Six incredibly creative years later, he was less sure. He wrote to his friend Christian Landauer: “Tell me, this being solitary—is it a blessing or a curse? My nature determines me to it, and the more purposefully I choose my state with a view to finding out who I am, the more irresistibly I am forced back into it again and again—this being lonely” (CHV 2:896).

Maurice Blanchot writes of the “essential solitude” of the work of art or literature. His model solitary is Franz Kafka.⁷ Blanchot describes essential solitude in terms of a night that is more nocturnal than the nights of all our days. The fruits of such a night, in which we are intimate with writing and reading alone, while intoxicating, are meager. For both writer and reader are fascinated and are on automatic pilot, as it were, rapt to mere words—to what Sartre, in Les mots, calls “the rigorous succession of words.”⁸ Rapt, seized, and very much alone. Blanchot writes: “To write is to enter into the affirmation of solitude, where fascination menaces us” (EL 27). Why should fascination menace? Blanchot is thinking of a letter Kafka writes to Milena Jesenská. (Twenty years after Kafka’s death in Prague due to tuberculosis, Milena died of kidney failure at the concentration camp in Ravensbrück; she had been imprisoned there because she was a socialist and had married a Jew.) One can hear in this letter to Milena echoes of Kafka’s subversive tale of desperate loneliness, Der Bau, “The Burrow.” On September 14, 1920, Kafka writes to Milena:

It is something like this: I, an animal of the forest, was at that time barely in the forest; I lay somewhere in a muddy hollow (muddy only as a consequence of my being there, naturally); and then I saw you out there in the open, the most wonderful thing I had ever seen; I forgot everything, forgot myself totally; I got up, came closer, anxious to be secure in this freedom that was new though familiar; I approached even closer, came to you, you were so good, I huddled near you, as though I had the right, I placed my face in your hand; I was so happy, so proud, so free, so powerful, so much at home; always and again it was this: so much at home;—and yet, at bottom, I was only the animal; I had always belonged to the forest alone, and if I was living here in the open it was only by your grace; without knowing it (because of course I had forgotten everything), I read my destiny in your eyes. It could not last. Even if you stroked me with your favoring hand, it was inevitable that you would observe my singularities, all of which bespoke the forest, this origin of mine, my real homeland; the necessary words ensued, about my “anxiety,” necessarily they were repeated, about the anxiety that tormented me (as it did you, albeit innocently), until my nerves screeched; the realization grew in me, I saw more and more clearly what a sordid pest, what a clumsy obstacle I was for you in every respect . . . I recalled who I was; in your eyes I read the end of illusion; I experienced the fright that is in dreams (acting as though one were at home in a place where one did not belong); I had that fright in reality itself; I had to return to the darkness, could not bear the sun any longer; I was desperate, really, like a stray animal, I began to run breathlessly; constantly the thought, “If only I could take her with me!” and the counterthought, “Is it ever dark where she is?”

You ask how I live: that is how I live.⁹

The loneliness of the love life and of the life of writing mirror one another. Kafka pictures himself writing through the night “in the innermost space of a vast, sealed cellar,” a place underground where it is always night, Blanchot’s “other” night. He pauses only long enough to rise and shuffle “beneath all the vaults of the cellar” to the “outermost portal,” where some unidentified keeper has left some food for him. Why live this way? Because, he writes, one “cannot be sufficiently alone when writing; . . . never enough silence around oneself when writing; the night itself is still too little night. . . .”¹⁰

What I would add to Kafka’s and Blanchot’s haunting descriptions of essential solitude is an ignominious and perhaps banal consequence of the fascination with words: one cannot dedicate oneself to reading and writing without also committing oneself to what will be an extravagant waste of time, or, at the very least, a maddening inefficiency. Perhaps that explains why we are losing the capacity and the courage to read and write. And even if we are not wasting time when we engage with words, time is wasting us. No piety of the sub specie aeternitatis type will rescue us any longer from this squandering. It will be clear not only to outsiders, nor merely to managers and efficiency experts, nor only to those for whom the fascination has flagged, but also to those who find themselves on the crest of the creative wave, that time is a-wasting. It is at best a desperate sort of feeling, the sense that one belongs to a very foolish subspecies of mortality. During the winter, Melville used to begin his days—before striking out for the nakedest possible plain of writing—by feeding pumpkins to his cow. As the cow began to ruminate, so did he. No doubt he was grateful that the cow blessed his silence and absurdity. She gave him the time he needed to waste.

—Now go and write, she said to him after a few mouthfuls. I’...