Radical Solitude
Solitude is a common state of withdrawal among the mystics. Third century mystic Plotinus describes the mystical journey as a “flight from solitude into the solitary.” Solitude for the Buddhists is similar for it is both the discipline and the ideal; the withdrawal of meditation achieves solitude in nonattachment; the self, without qualities or ego, spilling into the vertices of cosmic flux. The desert mystics pursued solitude exclusively—among other strange habits, like living on poles, or wearing hair shirts. Terence Mckenna would do 5 grams of mushrooms in silent darkness. Jesus lived alone in the desert for 40 days. St Teresa finds both torment and refuge in solitude, separation and union. Laruelle treats solitude as degree-zero of the human-subject; incommunicable experience as radical immanence; what might be exemplified by the basic solitude of pain. I go to the doctor for cracked ribs. “How much pain are you in on a scale of one to ten.” I say three but I should have said seven. She gives me some Tylenol.
Solitude in psychoanalysis remains ambivalent and conflicted: on the one hand there is the solitude of affect (Laruelle’s solitude) and on the other there is the solipsism of narcissism; a retreat into the self, as superman retreats to his arctic stronghold, the Fortress of Solitude (the ego). The solitude of sleep, for middle-Freud, is (like oceanic feeling) a state of “absolute narcissism;”—I don’t think I buy this. It will also be argued that psychoanalysis is a means by which one may be drawn out of solitude by the address to the analyst: “I can’t sleep because my ribs hurt so much because I lied to the doctor about how much pain I am in.”
We deserve a good psychoanalytic paper disambiguating solitude and solipsism (or a book for that matter), for it would appear, from only a very cursory view of global mysticism, that a peculiar solitude is necessary for mystical experience. This kind of solitude would be the point at which the interior-world is turned inside out into the non-dual: the ecstatic universe of no self and no other—a universe, by-the-by, that remains incoherent to the all-self world of narcissism. This non-dual is what the psychoanalyst will refer to as extimacy: a dynamic loop where private affect becomes the uncanny other—always already.
But solitude is not only a withdrawal from the world for, as Laruelle maintains, solitude is a discontinuity common to the ordinary human who “never coincides with the world, not even ‘with’ himself.” What does not coincide are the flows of affect pulsing from the unconscious (instigated in infancy by the alien and unconscious sexuality of the parent) and the cute little ego, neatly organized in worldly garb, but who does not yet know how to talk. Or, to be basic again, my pain and the communication of said pain do not coincide, not even to myself.
Freud ends his essay on the uncanny by claiming that “the factors of silence, solitude and darkness… are elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings never become quite free.”
Does the mystic use the elements silence/solitude/darkness in order to transmute the old pain of infantile loneliness into ecstatic experience?
Monk by the Sea (1810) Caspar David Friedrich
