Nishida on self-consciousness

Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945) was not only Japan’s foremost philosopher but remains a significant world philosopher of the 20th century. Though little known in Western circles, Nishida mastered the varieties of Western philosophical expression and promoted its encounter with Eastern thought, specifically Buddhism, in a manner beyond any Western thinker.

Nishida’s studies are wide-ranging, from Greek philosophers to Christian mystics, from rationalists and empiricists to Enlightenment thinkers, from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl to contemporary Christian thinkers — all are brought forth to an encounter with Eastern thought.

Nishida’s early venture begins with Aristotle and the entirely dominant role of logic and reason in the Western world. His analyses culminate in Kant and Husserl in attempting to explore the cognitive patterns in which logic discloses noetic and subjective needs. The range of human intent is necessarily self-expressive and therefore existential and concretely individual. Personal awareness and consciousness of internal contradiction reveals the ethical self — unresolvable, and paradoxical (in the world). The individual identifies the intuition of a historical existence. Yet it is a plunge into a bottomless contradiction, between existence and nothingness, with the concomitant awakening of what Nishida calls a religious awareness.

This religious awareness is not a conventional belief system but a realization of the nothingness behind the awareness of the world and its absolute presence in the historical — like a crossroad (if the individual is properly self-conscious) of the intersection of Absolute and Nothing.

It is to find this place, this space, this ground of consciousness, that embarked Nishida on an exploration of the semantic features of the religious and tapped the philosophy of Buddhism. Indeed, his final essay, in the year of his death, was titled “The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview.” It may be said that Nishida’s entire career, working doggedly on this central issue of ontology, culminated in this essay.

In this work, Nishida begins his journey with Kant. In his Critiques, Kant saw the existence of God and the immortality of the soul as logical postulates of the will. Kant capitulates (if not exhausts) Western philosophy’s dependence on reason, and logic’s defense of the preeminence of scientific logic. Kant updated Aristotle, grounding self-reflection and the a priori into human faculties of reason and the inevitability of logic. Elements outside of reason or deduced ethics are not legitimate in this tradition — namely moral will or religious consciousness, however these may be defined.

While appreciating the structure of Kant’s philosophical architecture, Nishida also notes its absence of consciousness individually, the absence of existential identity, of the ground of consciousness which is eschatological and therefore “religious” in Nishida’s more rarefied definition of the latter. It is this being-ness, this space, this matrix of the self-forming historical world that is immediately expressed in the self that Nishida wants to account for. To this process he brings an encounter between that absolute present and the nothingness of Buddhist tradition.

As Nishida translator and commentator David Dilworth notes:

Nishida argues that neither paradigm, Aristotelian or Kantian, can account for the historical self as an individual self-conscious being that knows of its own mortality. It is only when the self becomes aware of its own existential contradiction — of the fact that it is a unique living being that must die — that the religious problem arises.

By any definition, then, Nishida seems to be an existentialist, taking off directly from Kierkegaard in considering the final existential insight to be a religious one, or at least religious in the eschatological sense, the crisis sense, that Walter Kaufmann uses as a criterion for defining existentialism. But Nishida differs in the evolution of his thought. He stands out from phenomenology as the ground of existential thinking, and the stands clear from both the angst-ridden or the action-oriented philosophies that existentialism became in the mid-20th century West. Nor is Nishida speaking of practices or even dogmas of world religions, all of which are symbolic, he tells us.

Rather, our actions in the Kantian plane or realm of logic and intelligibility is unaware of historical existence. Morality itself is unaware, and death has no effect on this plane. Like Kierkegaard, Nishida states that only with self-consciousness does the self become aware of its own death. Death is not an event but a condition residing in the being, here and now, an absolute now, the “eternal now” of Dogen.
Nishida calls this point of consciousness the essential religious question because it generates a logic of contradictory identity, a logic of nothingness. The existential is the absolute, one dying in the other in absolute simultaneity and identity.

Nishida speaks further of a non-dualistic place of nothingness and a formless form. This vocabulary hearkens of Taoist, Buddhist, and Neo-Shinto thought. Mind arises, having no place to abide — a familiar Buddhist sentiment. Samsara and Nirvana are non-dual, co-originating, constituting an existential realization in enlightenment, or in transcendence in the terminology of Aristotle and Kant.

Nishida alludes to Nicolas of Cusa’s phrase: “The Absolute cannot be a One.” The Absolute is simultaneously absolute nothingness, absolute negation, maintains Nishida, further utilizing Plotinus, Eckhart, Boehme, and Cusa, but applying to this body of insight what Nishida calls “Asian nothingness” and a “logic of nothingness” to contrast both religious logic and Western “concrete” logic with the historically unencountered East. This encounter is the strength of Nishida, what makes him indispensable to philosophy, and what happily spills over into the culture of eremitism that already explores the commonalities of Eastern and Western expression.

Solitary animals (and some humor)

According to scientists, solitary animals are those animals which — with the exception of the evolutionary necessities of feeding and reproduction, including migratory habits — do not live in groups. A significant number of animals are , in fact, solitary. Among mammals are big cats and bears — pet owners of cats will notice their characteristic “indifference” as a remnant solitary behavior. Such solitary behavior presumably originated from territorial necessity, given that the roaming pattern for feeding required a large habitat per individual, but the behavior lingered even when such a necessity was not in play.

A second category of solitary animal is so defined because the animal eludes human and other animal observation, hiding, as it were, from potential predators but, in effect, from everyone. These may seem to elude humans, such as reptiles, when it is just a matter of observation. Others, like the famous hermit thrush, simply blends into their environment well or, like owls, are nocturnal. We call them solitary by default, which makes a significant portion of the world’s animals solitary, or as far as human observation is concerned.

At least three reclusive creatures have been dubbed “hermits”for their solitary behavior or for their penchant for concealment: 1) the hermit crab, 2) the hermit thrush, and 3) the hermit ibis. Other animals could have earned the hermit sobriquet, but a little humor shows why these three have earned the title, at least to this observer.

hermit crab hermit thrush hermit ibis

1. The lowly hermit crab is the digambara of the solitary animals, sky-clad and entirely vulnerable. This crustacean is without shell and takes a covering as it finds it, typically from deceased crustaceans, the garb ill-fitting and object of human derision. Scientists have identified rare accumulations of hermit crabs (analogous to the vast Kumbh Mela festival of India held every 12 years, attracting sadhus and holy pilgrims) wherein the crabs shed their garb and find larger, more suitable garb from their brothers.

2. The hermit thrush delights listeners of its “somewhat melancholy” song, which emanates from deep hidden forests. Scientists have recently confirmed (“Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US),” Nov. 2014) that the hermit thrush approximates the mathematical structures of human music. Science News reported that

In its somewhat melancholy songs, North America’s Catharus guttatus thrushes mix in strings of short, non-wavering tones. In 54 out of 71 thrush songs, two statistical methods showed those tones related to each other much as notes in human musical scales do, researchers report November 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The hermit thrushes “have a strong preference for the same simple ratios [such as 3:2] that humans seem to like,” says paper coauthor Tecumseh Fitch of the University of Vienna.

When recordings of the hermit thrush song are slowed down, the sound is distinctly like that of a flute, so the next question is whether the sound approximates the Japanese shakuhachi, the Indian Carnatic flute, or Mozart. Our preference, especially with the description of “melancholic,” is for the first. Not pursued by distinguished panel was whether humans somehow inherited this capacity from birds as part of evolution or if they imitated the hermit thrush, which is not familiar with Pythagorean mathematical principles. Also to be determined is whether all this singing (bird or human) is simply to attract a mate, much like human behavior in adolescent rock bands, interminably outliving both their youth and reproductive needs.

3. The hermit ibis is also called, less diplomatically, the northern bald ibis, though it winters in southern Africa and flies north along East Africa to Turkey (or, more romantically, East Asia, Anatolia, etc.) The hermit ibis looks like a vulture, and thus lives up to the hermit characteristic of wandering, feeding indiscriminately, and retaining a certain ugliness by worldly standards. (The hermit thrush wisely conceals its good looks to retain its hermit identity.) Like the early desert hermits, the hermit ibis lives in rocky arid places, and achieved a religious respectability with report that it guided Muslim pilgrims to Mecca during the Hajj. Indeed, a 16th-cetury Austrian bishop declared the hermit ibis a protected species, but the species died out in Europe (not unlike thriving eremitism) around the same time. Today, the hermit ibis continues to haunt arid places from Syria to Morocco, indifferent to the conflicts of human populations, their religions, and their disdain for hermits.

Montaigne on how to die

Montaigne’s essay “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die” is filled with quotations of the ancient Romans because they reflect Montaigne’s own interests and personality — slightly bemused by the affectations of others, skeptical of their motives and foolishness, and reconciled to the folly of worldly endeavors. In the essay, Montaigne strives, with the gentle assistance of Horace, Lucretius, Catullus, Seneca, plus Cicero, who provides the essay title, to keep a sober perspective on our aspirations, to root the self to a simple sense of virtue. With the Romans, he takes the view that nature exercises a great wisdom in refusing to spare living things of death. “Our mother Nature” speaks thus, he says:

Chiron refused immortality when informed of its conditions by the very god of time and duration, his father Saturn. Imagine honestly how much less bearable and more painful to man would be an everlasting life than the life I have given him. If you did not have death, you would curse me incessantly for having deprived you of it. I have deliberately mixed with it a little bitterness to keep you seeing the convenience of it, from embracing it too greedily and intemperately. To lodge you in that moderate state that I ask of you, of neither fleeing life nor fleeing back from death, I have tempered both of them between sweetness and bitterness.

Montaigne embraced the Stoicism of the Greeks and Romans as the reconciling philosophy of a chaotic age. The Greeks had lost faith in democracy with the Peloponnesian War and the Hellenism of empire, just as the Romans had witnessed the disappearance of their republic. Only dramatists and philosophers could resolve the contradictions of worldly affairs and tragedy, which includes death. The ancient eras of chaos were reproduced in the France of Montaigne’s era, bloody civil wars of religion, with, again, only dramatists and philosophers — but not the clergy — to reconcile the contradictions of religion and the world.

Catholic writer Richard John Neuhaus does not take this context into account when he avers (in his As I Lay Dying, p. 127) that

Montaigne wrote a famous essay, “To Philosophize Is To Learn To Die.” I do not believe that. I believe that one learns to die not by philosophizing, but by dying.

But did Neuhaus read the essay? Or did he read the rest of Montaigne? For Montaigne did indeed learn a great deal — from the deaths of his father, his brother, his best friend, five of his six children — but especially from his own near-death, which he describes in the essay “Practice” written only a year or two after the previously mentioned essay.

Montaigne’s near-death experience resulted from a fall from his horse. He lost consciousness and his retainers hauled him back to his chateau, where he wavered from half-lucid awareness to unconsciousness, on the brink of dying. Eventually he recovered, concluding that death was no terror, did not even require philosophical inquiry, but only required one to cede to nature, which has arranged a simple and unremarkable passing.

Of course, the cumulative lessons of life, plus Montaigne’s own personality, brought him to a mature state of mind that nevertheless did not contradict his original philosophical observations, only broadened them to a more secularizing sensibility suited to fideism, not just fatalism. Understandably, Neuhaus demurs here, but the wonders of modern technology that saved him from cancer should not override a philosophical or natural point of view about death, inevitable even for the initially saved. Montaigne is both philosophical about death and did indeed learn to die by dying. He embraced contradiction, and the life of contradiction that necessarily seeks tranquility in a chaotic world.

Authenticity

The Stoic philosopher Seneca displays Roman ignorance when he blithely reports (Epistle 108) that he is acetic because he abstains from mushrooms and oysters — not wine, however, because it is easier to consume it moderately than to abstain altogether. A similar misconception about ascetic practice can be found in the historical Catholic practice of abstaining from meat on Fridays, a practice deftly abused by certain medieval monks who devised exemptions for travelers arriving on their grounds on Friday, and took walks to qualify themselves as travelers exempted from the ban on meat consumption.

Perhaps these practices were mere moral shortcomings. Or perhaps these failed practices are distinctly Western failures, as Heidegger suggests in a larger context in “The Origins of the Work of Art.” They represent the Western failure to comprehend the original motivating experience behind practices. The failed practices (Heidegger begins by suggesting words and concepts) only bring a version of translation, an inorganic appropriation, to an uncomprehending culture.

This translation of Greek names into Latin is in no way the innocent process it is considered to this day. Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful translation there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally authentic experience of what they say, without the Greek words. The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation.

Thus, asceticism in the Christian Greek world — based on not only the language but the authentic experience of Syriac and Egyptian practices — is not a translation in the degree that Latin Roman practice, distant in time but also in spirit — not to say culture and language — inevitably remained. Western asceticism begins not in practice but in thought, in thoughtful reconstruction of what the desert experience was, now filtered through the Roman mentality of codes, hierarchies, and rituals.

Perhaps embedded in this issue, too, is what Buddhism scholar Robert Thurman refers to when he describes his personal search for authenticity in world religious tradition. Sanskrit and Tibetan alphabets are comprised of polysyllables, essentially words, but Western alphabets are comprised of contrived symbols that not only mean nothing but cannot be sounded without conjoining with other letters. What is the sound of “b” without adding “a” or “e”, for example? Hence reason and logic are applied to contrived symbols rather than to lived experience expressed. The Western form of translation, here, too, is “without a corresponding, equally authentic experience,” to return to Heidegger’s observation.

Without this lived experience, asceticism remains a set of contrived rules, an artificiality. No wonder the West must endlessly dabble in imported pieces of religion and spiritual practices that must be packaged for meaning because the pieces are not lived experience.

This phenomenon overtakes yoga, tai-chi chuan, meditation, prayer, belief, philosophizing, asceticism — any non-Western experience, any historical phenomenon that only individual practice at the heart of meaning, prior to culture and translation, can hope to address. As Heidegger says elsewhere, the East has “no thought” but the West, steeped in reason and logic, can only use thought to try to go beyond thought. And this can only be accomplished by the solitary individual.

Kubler-Ross on stages

Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1926-2004) defined five mental or behavioral stages of dying in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying. The stages are:

  1. Denial and isolation
  2. Anger
  3. Bargaining
  4. Depression
  5. Acceptance

The stages were later extrapolated to grief in general. Opponents argued that the stages are not necessarily ordered, depending on the subject, and not necessarily experienced at all in situations where social environment is healthy and individuals are resilient. But the objections come late compared to Kubler-Ross’ work in the fifties and sixties when death, dying, and grief were still experienced by most Americans (those are the subjects she interviewed) in a traditional fashion. Medical personnel was aloof and hospitals were themselves intended to be a last stage for dying patients. Kubler-Ross recounts her childhood in Switzerland and the forms of dying centered in family and village life, the absence of medical technology and hospitals, and the centrality of religious and cultural expression — none of which are constructive factors today, with the larger exception of the hospice movement that Kubler-Ross inspired.

Kubler-Ross notes that hope of recovery was consistently high, even to the end, not only in religious-minded patients but in firmly non-religious. Perhaps it was culture-based, personality-dependent, or simply a survival mechanism. Otherwise, psychology and personality may alone have formed the attitudes of those harboring degrees of anger and resentment. Kubler-Ross’ gentle methods of eliciting a consciousness of these feelings in her patients shows that, indeed, she was aware of variables in individual temperament and resilience.

In retrospect, depression is not as dominant a stage as one might guess. Deriving grief from depression, in turn, suggests a backward application of depression in dying. While real, depression and grief are nevertheless experienced very subjectively. Not surprisingly, they early were targets of the medical and pharmaceutical industries to which Kubler-Ross referred negatively and which preempt the dying process decisively today.

The dying process best culminates in voluntary and conscious decathexis, the withdrawal from people, objects, environments. One might apply the term philosophically in order to approximate the eremitical and sage traditions that have always suggested that life is a process of dying, and that withdrawal and simplicity best nourish this course.

Later in life, Kubler-Ross took a serious interest in near-death studies, tangential but somewhat more speculative, to be sure, versus the psychology of dying. In meditative traditions, the phenomenology of near-death experience is parallel to the pursuit of esoteric powers, to be looked upon with suspicion as a distraction from the true goal of living, and dying.

Less noticed but effective in On Death and Dying is how Kubler-Ross links poetic lines from Rabindranath Tagore to the various attitudes and mindsets typical in the emotional life and in the dying process. This poetic context enriches the somewhat clinical observations in the book, which are, after all, largely transcripts of dying people’s feelings. By developing this poetic and philosophical sense of life and nature, death and dying, the question of resilience and environment can give way to a sensibility that is whole and complete, as should be the dying process itself.

  1. Denial and isolation.
    “Man barricades against himself.” (Stray Birds, 79)
  2. Anger.
    “We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.” (Stray Birds, 75)
  3. Bargaining.
    “The woodcutter’s axe begged for its handle from the tree. The tree gave it.” (Stray Birds, 71)
  4. Depression.
    “The world rushes on over the strings of the lingering heart making the music of sadness.” (Stray Birds, 44)
  5. Acceptance.
    “I have got my leave, Bid me farewell, my brothers! I bow to you all and take my departure.
    Here I give back the keys of my door — and I give up all claims to my house, I only ask for last kind words from you.
    We were neighbours for long, but I received more than I could give. Now the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A summons has come and I am ready for my journey.” (Gitanjali, 93)

Pro-introvert

The “pro-introvert” advice of writings like Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking risks manufacturing a class of aberrant individuals with special needs. Cain herself compares introverts to women in a patriarchal world, calling introverts “second-class citizens.” But the intent to help introverts succeed in an insane world is inevitably paralleled by advice to authorities, managers, and bosses on how to best tap the skills and insights of introverts — for the former’s use.

But the mature introvert doesn’t want to succeed in an insane world, and powerful people only want to employ, direct, and socialize with others useful to themselves.

Introversion is a personality characteristic that exists across all cultural and social groups, and largely created by heredity, family, psychological, and social environment in children (especially to age 5 years). Introversion is not pursued consciously as a style but within the persona as integral to the psyche. Other factors in their early lives include treatment by parents, haphazard evolution of self-esteem, slower emergence of social skills, and the development of solitary self-sufficiency in routine pursuits of play and interest in environment.

Introverts understand instinctively the role of these factors in their upbringing and how it limits them in social contexts. But while many introverts may find frustrating their inability to operate smoothly in social contexts, they quickly learn from discomfort that they can survive with a minimum or no such settings. They discover that they can be reconciled to their personality, and, indeed, find strong and fruitful resources to sustain themselves.

Non-introverts sympathetic with the marginalization of introverts in corporate or institutional settings need not fret that introverts are slighted, even punished. Knowing that they cannot coach introverts into behaving like extroverts or even balanced personalities, much well-intentioned advice instead ends up counseling corporate and institutional managers on how to elicit participation from introverts. Much of the practical advice is fair and do-able, and for managers and authorities to realize techniques for eliciting introvert input on group projects and “teamwork” is not unreasonable given the boss’s job. But an important insight is being overlooked in these relationships.

Introverts are frequently excellent critics of what goes on around them. They do not usually voice their views — not only because they are socially uneasy but often because they are not going to accede to group thinking, to organizational goals and objectives to which they ultimately may not subscribe.

Introverts develop their self-image from their own insights, imaginations, and vision — not from their work-for-money efforts or social circles of insiders, intimates, or buddies. In the corporate and work world, introvert know that the efforts are put on for vague social conventions, while workplace maneuvering is often just for private gain. Introverts simply don’t identify with these social methods or private gains. Simply put, smart introverts already know (or are on the way to knowing) themselves and their vision of how things should be, at least for themselves, whether in creative, natural, psychological, or spiritual senses. In nearly every way, these senses or intimations of how things should be in the world (but are not) differ from what a collective social group of any sort can attain, or, further, is even aware.

The appearance of distraction, alienation, lack of cooperation, or just an apparent “attitude” attributed to the introvert when in a social context is not directed against anyone or anything. It is just that introverts are actively tending their gardens while others either think they are ready to harvest or haven’t even planted a seed. Introverts have a low tolerance for small talk.

Pro-introvert advice that cheer-leads the hapless introvert is self-defeating. What can be more frustrating to the introvert in the world than the intransigence of authorities running institutions and organizations is realizing that his or her fate is in the realm of their worse skill, their least interest, namely, of pretending to be other than what one is.

Metta Sutta

The Metta Sutta or Metta prayer, petition, recitation or wish-granting aspiration, is a traditional Buddhist prayer originating in Theravada practice as the Karaniya Metta Sutta but popular in Mahayana practice as well in its association with the bodhisattva. More elaborate versions exist but here is a short, specific version:

May all beings be peaceful.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be safe.
May all beings awaken to the light of their true nature.
May all beings be free.

The prayer has an external philosophical meaning, an epistemological premise about the nature of things. Our wish or desire is a sentiment or aspiration (“may this, may that …” ), but with an understanding that no one can change intrinsic reality. We may throw up our hands at wishful thinking.

But internally the prayer transforms the reciter towards a motivation for enlightenment. All beings ought to be at peace in this universe. They ought to be happy. They ought to be safe. So while humans might claim this desirable state for themselves because we theoretically are capable of it, we now affirm the desirability on behalf of all creatures, something that not all religions incorporate in their aspirations.

May all beings be peaceful.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be safe.

And we affirm it for ourselves and all creatures not as a Kantian imperative from elsewhere — beings are not capable of it — but in the universal empathetic sense of responding to the question of why there is suffering. It ought not to be such, we say to ourselves on behalf of other creatures. And from that moment, we no longer think of ourselves but enter into communion with nature and all beings.

How is it possible to make a state of being for all beings that is peaceful, happy, and safe? Just as the bodhisattva vows to work indefinitely for this goal in an active way, the reciter of the Metta Sutta does so more modestly but positively nevertheless. It is done by changing personal actions, behaviors, and habits that promote this set of conditions in the self and indirectly promote these states for all beings. An ethical agenda emerges from an aspiration that now transforms self. How one lives, consumes, spends, eats, drinks, acts, speaks, lives — everything takes on an ethical dimension. What best promotes the well-being of plants, animals, people, even inanimate beings, promotes our own well-being.

Yet this progress of thought, which has the potential for progress towards enlightenment, is brought to one’s consciousness from outside of ourselves but emerges from deep thought about the nature of things. Thus it is not found outside the self ultimately, not coerced or compelled at this stage but grown by oneself, within oneself, often against society, social conventions and habits, and societal consciousness.

May all beings awaken to the light of their true nature.

Finally comes the essential part tying in with Buddhist metaphysics. The true nature of all beings is interdependence, prescribing a necessary empathy or consciousness, confirming the previous affirmations. But also true of the awakening to true nature is the reality of impermanence, of transience, which all beings seem to harbor. This reality gives even more urgency to the delicate interdependence and the first three aspirations. To realize impermanence, to awake to this truth, is to awaken to true nature, unalterably reality.

May all beings be free.

Paradoxically, then, the Buddhist (and Hindu) notion of rebirth, springing from a more primordial, less philosophical religious tradition, seems to contradict impermanence, transience. Like rebirth, or fear of rebirth, the awareness of impermanence is a profound source of suffering. The poignancy of transience, of “mono no aware,” ought to frustrate the goal of aspiration. So in either case, we want, and all creatures want, to be free — free from suffering, free from rebirth, even free from transience. And this is nirvana.

Nietzsche’s anti-hermit

Every search for a philosophy of solitude runs into Nietzsche, especially the clever aphoristic Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The ancient argument of whether or not an author’s writing is projected autobiography immediately arises. For in Zarathustra is a prime representative of the issue, and the mask of Nietzsche rises to confuse a clear appreciation of solitude. Zarathustra celebrates solitude with a reluctant reconciliation, while at the same time disparaging not only his potential disciples but even hermits, particularly the mad desert hermits (as Nietzsche assessed them).

Zarathustra’s failures as a worldly prophet of eremitism (or, in this case, a brand of egoism under the umbrella of solitude, of the anti-societal) are absolved by his conscience. He returns, failing in his speeches in the marketplace and the byways, to his warm and friendly cave:

O solitude! O my home, solitude! Too long have I lived wildly in wild places not to return home to you in tears. … How happily and tenderly your voice speaks to me. We do not question each other, we do not complain to each other, we often walk together though open doors. … To be forsaken is one thing, to be lonely another. … You will always among others seem wild and strange.

Here Nietzsche is speaking of himself — wild and strange. The psychoanalyst will see complex feelings and emotional imbalances in Nietzsche’s personal life as the source of panegyrics like the one quoted. Similarly, too, are his praises of the “courage of hermits and eagles” and his reference to “my hermit’s heart.” But personally, Zarathustra-Nietzsche was not really reconciled to his solitude, and the contradictions, clever or contrived as may be, confirm this.

Nietzsche held a special venom towards those who successfully embraced eremitism or discovered a workable formula from their solitude:

In solitude, whatever one has brought into it grows. … Therefore solitude is inadvisable for the many. Has there been anything filthier on earth so far than desert saints? Around them not only was the devil loose but also the swine.

Here is the intellectualization, the abstraction, of lived eremitism, but not the reconciliation to it. Like the Enlightenment-era historian Edward Gibbon, very much a solitary not from philosophy but from personality, Nietzsche reacts vituperatively towards successful solitaries. Does he deduce that beliefs include and absorb solitude, or is a solitude capable that is not subordinate to belief? In short, is Nietzsche’s objection (like Gibbon’s) only to Christian hermits? What about his own atheist or secular hermits as solitaries, the latter represented by himself as Zarathustra?

Nietzsche had by this time already rejected Wagner’s romantic solitary as a reconstruction of Romanticism rather than a transcendence. And he had already rejected Schopenhauer’s admiration for Buddhism — and by extension its long tradition of eremitism — because it was not life-affirming, in his words. So perhaps the hermit or solitary in Nietzsche anticipates the Camus-like outsider or stranger, in both cases affirming not mere atheism but epicureanism or sensualism, as in Dionysus. Camus’ early works celebrate sun and sea and senses in a pagan rather than Enlightenment way; Nietzsche’s Dionysus would fit that mode of expression, the solitary (or ego) whom nothing reconciles.

Indeed, the Nieztschean solitary would evolve into the Ubermensch or Overman, leaving behind even the juxtapositions of Dionysus not Diogenes, and certainly of Zarathustra not the bikkhu or eremite. Even a secularized hermit, dwelling in wilderness or obscurity, was not good enough for Nietzsche. A Thoreau would be dismissed for his mildness and Stoicism.

In the end, Nietzsche’s solitude is an interim step to egoism, a skin to be shed, a mask to be abandoned.

Relatedness

Creation stories around the world have presented the same structure, the same basic narrative: a male and a female human being are created (or engendered or fashioned, produced) — after or before everything else that exists — by a deity or natural force or primordial process. Then the male and the female reproduce and their offspring disseminate throughout the world, with the fate of the original humans soon overshadowed, though their character has indelibly marked the nature of human beings ever after.

Science has employed the same motif — not with a primordial couple, of course — describing generation, reproduction, and distribution across the planet, reflecting adaptation to various habitats, and accounting for the “nature” of human beings genetically and environmentally. The engendering force is not described but assumed. The notion of chaos or a succession of chaotic events as evolution parallels the attempted logic tenuously explaining all outcomes.

The concurrence of myth and science on fundamentals of human origins reinforces the notion that all human beings are related to one another in some essential way, even if that way is crudely material. All human beings are familial. Such a notion is not odd or irrational projection, not idealism, but a matter of biology and logic, observable today through countless observations. The separation of human beings into many cultures, languages, customs, beliefs, and habits is a matter of climate, geography, and circumstances. It, too, is the subject of many folk and mythological tales and scenarios, for primitive peoples universally sought to describe the phenomena around them, however colorfully. Indeed, do we not vainly try to describe the phenomena around us as avidly, if not with much more insight or success?

The history of animal populations from aquatic to reptile, insect, bird, and mammal, all evidence simple and basic patterns of behavior that are merely amplified in humans, extended by a diversity of common factors of social behavior. Perhaps the unwelcome (to some) notion of kindredship among all human beings is only less welcome (to others) than the auxiliary notion that animals and all sentient beings are intrinsically related to us.

Ironically, the very tool exercised by human beings in their evolution from other species (or from the moment of their creation, it does not matter which) is consciousness. Consciousness is what separates human beings from the sense of unity among all beings. This separation is not simply the separation of natural units but a profound alienation that is the cause of our misery, restlessness, and destructiveness.

Consciousness is not alienation; reflection on separation is alienation. Anxiety arising from separation is the root of the sense of obligation to transform the totality of environment from physical to mental in order to assuage the wound, the source of misery that consciousness unattended lays heavily upon human beings.

This urge to transform becomes an urge to deform: to deform landscape, space, time, relations between humans (society) and relations with all living and non-sentient things. Ultimately, this condition or sense of separation from nature and creation is woven into the narratives of myth and explanation, rule and value, law and order, society and person.

The narrative affirms the separation and indeed celebrates it, for it can then project the possibility, the necessity, of transcending it and transforming society into an all-encompassing super- or over-humanity (to use the Nietzschean notion more loosely). However, where Nietzsche sees the ubermensch as a necessity of the modern era to safeguard the individual, society as a whole (and its elites) extended this notion to itself and spreads it over selected parts of itself, such that Nietzsche’s dreaded State was not only not transcended but actually strengthened through various transformations reaching to an over- or super- status, chiefly through technology and consolidation of social infrastructure.

The co-opting by society of the notion of a transcendence intended for the individual was inevitable. What are the virtues of the individual? Whatever they are, they can be isolated into concepts and blocks of behavior and applied to society, or, rather, by society for the control of society. The ruthless severing from tradition, values, cultural mores, the whole package of a “genealogy of morals” boldly proclaimed against the dominant elites and their docile classes was one more device to be turned against the critic and the aspirant.

The inversion of life is death, of Eros is Thanatos (as Freud said). The same inversion was applied to the alienation of human beings from nature, and rather than resolve or reconcile consciousness and nature, society removes individual consciousness from autonomy and subordinates or amalgamates the individual into society at large. The individual’s tenuous link to originating culture is severed for dependence on artificial culture manufactured by modern elites and modern factors of environment, habit, and socialization. This is characteristic of modern times, achieved with meticulous design by war, economic change, psychology, and technology. The sense of individual triumph and freedom expressed by a Nietzsche (however theoretical) is today an illusion of autonomy and a sublimation of fears that are now addressed through social devices like technology and propaganda.

Yet, since primordial history, different cultures learned to address consciousness in different ways. The torment of consciousness and its consequential rending into Eastern and Western cultural spheres reflects, in part, a different cultural anthropology East and West. Historically, this divergence was sealed by rejection of a deeper comprehension of consciousness by the Western world. The West has, over millennia, devolved into cultivating the misery of consciousness through its own violence, aggression, internecine conflict, authority and control — and spread this eastward and world-wide. For the Western world, the resolution of consciousness was not to be left to the philosophers and sages, for it is useful to the generals and the elites.

All wars are internecine wars, civil wars, because all human beings are part of the same origins, the same family, despite their long-term yet anecdotal differences. Each group defends circumstantial habitat and fiercely clings to mythologies of origins and distinctiveness. The early Nietzsche himself, in Human, All Too Human, noted that the State will always argue the necessity of its arsenal as defensive, implying that its neighbors are untrustworthy and harboring malicious thoughts and designs against it. This thought is a self-fulfillment of an already festering instinct to aggression. No peace can arise gradually, Nietzsche continues. A State must rid itself of all its weapons in order to demonstrate its best motives, and this will be unilateral, and unlikely, but provides the only way out for humanity.

Given the nature of groups, society, and geopolitics, only individuals can solve societal ills, by addressing them within themselves. Thus, by analogy, we disarm our self, we rid ourselves of all vices and impurities and all torment of consciousness and unaddressed instincts. The larger group evolved from the solitary individuals, according to every culture’s creation stories. These primordial expressions lie at the heart of all of us as models of being. Every culture carries a primordial design in its core, but never looks deeply at the inkling or insight it reveals, namely, the basic understanding that we are all, for better or worse, related.

Home

In his recent book The Homing Instinct: Meaning & Mystery in Animal Migration, biologist Bernd Heinrich explores the capacity of animals to define “home,” either in the fascinating treks of birds, butterflies, moths, turtles, whales, and salmon that may travel thousands of miles from their birthplace homes to live out a season or a lifetime, then to return to the exact place of birth, whether by magnetic or solar navigation or other still mysterious to science mechanism.

As compellingly interesting is Heinrich’s discussion of animal homes themselves. While the descriptions are entertaining and informative, an important and notable fact is that homes are typical of social animals, while solitary animals typically seek makeshift shelter. Thus, eusocial animals, those with the most complex stratification of labor such as termites, bees, and naked mole rats, construct the most complex of homes. The chief characteristic of these homes is not merely shelter for rearing progeny safely. Indeed, in such complex society, reproduction is restricted to one female (“queen” among the insects). Eusociality = gregariousness, although the degree of voluntarism is not knowable. However social, such as birds, which diligently build nests and defend homes or home grounds entire lifetimes, the eusocial species construct large communal multi-dwelling structures to accommodate colonies, not just families. Heinrich sees a suggestive if imperfect analogy with (human) monastic orders.

But humans were lower then even birds in the hierarchy of home-construction and the evolution of this function. Where birds and lower mammals (rabbits, beavers, rodents) construct nests, warrens, and burrows, later mammals opportunistically used makeshift or found structures. Thus, the larger mammals like lions, hyenas, bears and the like, and simian evolutionary ancestors of humans, did not construct homes at all — nor did the earliest humans.

However, human newborns are decidedly altricial. They are born helpless and remain effectively dependent for years, unlike other species, including most mammals. The need for male humans to seek out food, leaving females alone and physically vulnerable, demanded the requirement of shelter, and earliest human groupings presumably used caves before constructing makeshift structures equivalent to huts and evolving into multiple occupancy structures. In all this home construction, however, humans had been forced by sheer necessity to innovate shelter, and not necessarily skillfully. They had advanced from cave-dwelling to inverted nests to group structures not unlike those of weaver birds.

Once safely ensconced in a safe home, humans could specialize and multitask. With the exception of the occasional natural disaster like plague or famine, or societal disasters like war, humans launched the course of infinite growth and acquisitiveness that is the chief characteristic of the species in society.

Curiously complementing this discussion is Kazi K. Ashraf’s book The Hermit’s Hut: Architecture and Asceticism in Ancient India, which shows that the concept of home as the primordial bastion of reproduction and survival evolved into the bastion of family life and safeguarding of material well-being. However, this foundational structure of society was challenged in ancient India by the late Vedic era ascetic movements rejecting the primacy of the role of the home. With this rejection — to parallel Heinrich’s discussion — is rejection of reproduction and subordination to the group survival instinct. In short, the hermit, or hermit-ascetic, represents the rejection of the concept of home, a radical metaphysical and psychological mindset but not novel in the evolutionary history of homo sapiens.

The hermit’s reversion to primitiveness and makeshift shelter is akin to solitary animals, for as Heinrich demonstrates, nest-building and home-creation is the product of reproductive behavior, in turn the expression of the survival instinct. The hermit of this era reverts to dwelling in caves, in huts, under trees — not unlike solitary (versus gregarious, let alone eusocial) animals.

Divergent disciplines — biology, architecture, sociology — suggest the depths that an anthropology of solitude and eremitism needs. Ancient India provides an excellent model because the IndoEuropeans who swept eastward from Europe, to be known as Aryans in India, established a religion of sky gods and animal sacrifice not unlike other nomadic peoples, such as the Hebrews. Fire was at the heart of the Aryan ritual, deriving in part from the necessity of sacrifice, but ultimately expressive of a deity form. Scripture (in this case the Rig Veda) became the intellectual expression of that peoples’ religion and the source of social codes and stratification. Here, too, are analogies with the founding religion of the Western world, with scriptures, social codes, and a priesthood equivalent of Brahmins.

Finally, the lateVedic era, of the Upanishads and the rise of eremitism and asceticism culminating in multiple contemporary ascetic groups (especially Hindu sadhus, Jains, and Buddhists), represents what Gavin Flood has called the “internalization of tradition.” The fire of the external ritual became the spiritual fire within, what the historical Jesus intended in teaching that the kingdom of God is within the self. In this train of thought, the kingdom of God is not with the temple-worshipers. It is not unlike the view of the Indian hermit-ascetics who argued that the kingdom of God was not in the Brahmin’s temples.

All the implications for what we consider home and society, versus solitude, dwellings, simplicity, and disengagement, are resting at the core of a deep anthropology of eremitism.