capacity for solitude

In the 20th century, the idea of solitude formed the centre of Hannah Arendt’s thought.

 A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States,

 Arendt spent much of her life studying the relationship between the

 individual and the polis. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – 

the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa.

 She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act

 spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think

 and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate

 her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – 

to finally hear herself think.

In our hyper-connected world, a world in which we can communicate 

constantly and instantly over the internet, we rarely remember

 to carve out spaces for solitary contemplation. 

 

We check our email hundreds of times per day; 

we shoot off thousands of text messages per month; 

we obsessively thumb through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram,

 aching to connect at all hours with close and casual acquaintances alike. 

We search for friends of friends, ex-lovers, people we barely know,

 people we have no business knowing. 

We crave constant companionship.

But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude,

 our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. 

We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’,

 as she put it, ‘by what everybody else does and believes in’ – 

no longer able, in the cage of thoughtless conformity, to distinguish 

‘right from wrong, beautiful from ugly’. Solitude is not only a state 

of mind essential to the development of an individual’s consciousness – 

and conscience – but also a practice that prepares one for participation

 in social and political life. Before we can keep company with others,

 we must learn to keep company with ourselves.

 

 

 

~ Hannah Arendt

from
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