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
Read more at Aeon HERE

 

 

craving - aversion -> pain and sorrow

Every craving is tied to a definite object, 

and it takes this object to spark the craving itself, 

thus providing an aim for it. Craving is determined

 by the definitely given thing it seeks, just as a movement

 is set by the goal toward which it moves.

 For, as Augustine writes, love is

 "Once we have the object our desire ends, unless we are threatened

 with its loss. In that case the desire to have turns into a fear of losing."

So long as we desire temporal things, 

we are constantly under this threat, 

and our fear of losing always corresponds to our desire to have. 

Temporal goods originate and perish independently of man,

 who is tied to them by his desire. Constantly bound by craving

 and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each

 present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, 

which we are unable to enjoy. And so,

 the future destroys the present.

The present is not determined by the future as such… 

but by certain events which we hope for or fear from the future,

 and which we accordingly crave and pursue, or shun and avoid. 

Happiness consists in possession, in having and holding our good,

 and even more in being sure of not losing it.

 Sorrow consists in having lost our good and in enduring this loss.

 However, for Augustine the happiness of having 

is not contrasted by sorrow but by fear of losing.

 The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear.

 It is not the lack of possessing 

but the safety of possession that is at stake.

A love that seeks anything safe and disposable on earth 

is constantly frustrated, because everything is doomed to die.

 In this frustration love turns about and its object becomes a negation, 

so that nothing is to be desired except freedom from fear.

 Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm 

that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future.

Even if things should last, human life does not. 

We lose it daily. As we live the years pass through us 

and they wear us out into nothingness. It seems that only

 the present is real, for “things past and things to come are not”;

 but how can the present (which I cannot measure) be real

 since it has no “space”? Life is always either no more or not yet.

 Like time, life “comes from what is not yet, passes through what is

 without space, and disappears into what is no longer.” 

Can life be said to exist at all? Still the fact is that man 

does measure time. Perhaps man possesses a “space” 

where time can be conserved long enough to be measured,

 and would not this “space,” which man carries with himself, 

transcend both life and time?




~ Hannah Arendt 

from Love and Saint Augustine

 with thanks to brainpickings