the art of being alone

boundaries and self-care, revisited

We grow more solitary — and we do so because the whole flood of humanity is surging around us. The fire within us, which is for all that is human, grows brighter and brighter — and that is why we gaze upon that which immediately surrounds us as though it had grown more shadowy and we had grown more indifferent to it. — But the coldness of our glance gives offence!

Nietzsche, Daybreak §441

We all crave positive human connections, a community we can belong to - both so that we can be supported and also so that we can make a meaningful contribution to each other’s lives. Human beings are social creatures.

One of the effects of our social nature is that other people exert an extraordinary influence on us as individuals. Their thoughts, feelings, commitments, and constructs shape our own. Is it possible to get away from all of these influences and discover ourselves apart from them?

Many people would say “no” - it is not possible to disentangle yourself from the society and relationships that shape you. Some go even further - the “self”, they say, is entirely constructed. If you remove the contributions of all of the people around you - you simply disappear. For these folks, a person is what their relationships make them, take away those relationships - and there is no-one there.

But Nietzsche says “yes” - not only can you take yourself away from all of those social influences, you must. In striving to untangle yourself from customary morality and to create a life that is designed specifically for you, it is essential to discover who you are when everybody else is taken away.

This is the practice of solitude - a deliberate attempt to get away from the polluting voices of others and to find out who you are in yourself.

In what follows I’m going to outline just two of the benefits of solitude from this Nietzschean perspective. The first benefit of solitude is that it creates the space for you to develop your own sovereignty; space to determine your boundaries and constraints, apart from the influence of others. The second benefit of solitude is that it allows you to become more self-sufficient. The word I’m going to use for this is autarky. It is normally used to describe communities, states or economies that are self-sufficient as self-perpetuating closed systems. But let’s use it to think about an individual and the possibility of a certain kind of self-sufficiency.

Sovereignty