PART I
Loneliness can be analyzed from 2 different scenarios, one pleasant and the other unpleasant.
The pleasant or positive stage we can distinguish in our behavior seeking simply to develop certain activities in solitude, unrelated to any person, and in extreme cases outside the urban-city contact, which could refer to being alone in a remote place (with partial isolation), in the middle of nature. In this stage, the human being tries to use his free time to rest from social contact, social conditioning, social ties, and tries to take refuge many times in leisure, with no commitment, with anyone and sometimes, or with him same.
In this stage, we can enjoy solitude in several ways, in dialogue with oneself or else, simply in the absence of dialogue, without any thought, where our mind is inactive. Hardly the lazy human mind. There are occasions that one does not tolerate talking to anyone, nor to oneself, in which we are not able to address a single word, we do not want to talk to each other, and therefore we do not want to listen to each other. When we are in this circle of not wanting to say or wanting to listen, the walk in solitude, without people next to it, without books, without blocks of notes or drawing, is truly significant, revealing and decisive. Thus loneliness could become 1) Enjoy leisure, 2) Enjoy free time, doing something or doing nothing, 3) Simply waste time. But all these possibilities without company, in the dominant solitude.
The second stage of loneliness, I would like to raise it from the point of view of freedom, and not as a state of psychological disturbance or disorder, even if it contains it. It is a state where the human being feels physically and mentally immersed in an absorbing, overwhelming environment, which does not let him breathe, and of course, the person feels loneliness, makes her feel bad when having social contact, and this propels her to get away from people. It is a state of mind that forces him to stay away from everything and everyone. Many times the withdrawal takes him to an antisocial position, which takes him away from society and in some cases he encounters misanthropy.
I have used a dozen authors who have written works that explain precisely this binomial of “freedom-solitude”, with the aim of clarifying what is happening to the human being in modern times.
Besides the indeterminism, in the conception of J. P. Sartre, he thinks that the man, in the exercise of his freedom, drowns in a SOLITUDE and this allows him to rest in a total nihilism.
For existentialism, freedom implies nihilism, anguish, emptiness and a SOLITUDE of being, which defines and confirms a face contrary to the positive. The negative categorization corresponds to the “free-existence” of the human being.
For Dostoyevsky, freedom -as well as for existentialists- is being itself, within a void -nothing- uncertain, within an undefined and absolute contingency LONELINESS.
It is in the big cities, says Georg Simmel, where it is found that the freedom of prejudice enjoyed by the urbanite becomes a refuge in SOLITUDE and freedom is no longer linked to the vital feeling of happiness, as a synonym of well-being. That is, not always the greatest freedom will guarantee a higher level or degree of well-being, as LONELINESS awaits.
Erich Fromm comments that the enormous amount of factors -both internal and external to the individual- leads us to imagine that they potentiate and enrich the scenario in which freedom participates in the generation of various categories of crisis, observing that all of them have been mechanisms political, social and psychological that the human being has used to evade his own being of responsibility in freedom, what has prostrated him as an adaptable being, lacking in meaning and importance, accommodated in an existential solitude and isolation. Fromm tries to find the meaning of freedom for the modern being. Implicitly, throughout his psychological and sociological research, he asks himself and seeks the answer to: when and why was the search for the freedom of the human being abandoned? A search that is circumscribed, in part, to the fact that the being in SOLITUDE can not bear it and tries to escape from the responsibility that represents that freedom and that individuality reached. And although it does not conclude with a definitive proposition -as the author himself comments- we can envision it as a proposal, because it implicitly implies that we should look for another form of freedom that allows him -to be human- again not to be alone, with new relationships leading him to be together with their peers, with interdependent and psychologically sound relationships in a new reality; This new reality is characterized by a less oppressive social and productive system that guides it to develop in an integral way, accepting the consequences of its decisions and actions for having ceased to fear -and to have rejected- the consequences of the use of that freedom.
Zygmunt Bauman expresses that all kinds of freedom have both their costs and benefits. The desire for freedom of each individual being is a function of the social oppression it receives. The social relationship forces the individual, limiting their behavior and producing a loss of freedom, for which seeks privacy with the inherent costs of it, such as the loss in the sharing of desires and objectives, fears, security, protection, tastes, happiness, and others. The fear and rejection of oppression is balanced by the fear of SOLITUDE -isolation- that results from the achievement of obtaining privacy.
A permanent balance is achieved between the desire for freedom, for being in solitude, and the desire for social relationships; the degree of achievement of one, is balanced in a balanced way with the result or degree reached by the other, which could be understood as greater isolation -or loneliness- greater freedom, and vice versa. The degrees of one and the other change in different societies, as well as in different periods.
Krishnamurti recommends, repeatedly, that the individual must take an attitude -for himself- decidedly responsible, in order to free himself from the external constraints, themes that are innumerable and among which stand out: the absorbing and oppressive society, the ignorance of oneself same, beliefs, fear, desires, isolation and loneliness, thought and knowledge, self-deception, self-centeredness, power, patriotism and nationalism, competition and suffering, war, boredom and interest, hatred, criticism and self-criticism, religions and belief in God, memory, sexuality, lying, death; but above all, look for inner strength to free yourself from your conscious self, an entity that is conditioned from the first day of birth. That inner power refers to the understanding of “myself”.
Benjamin Gibbs gives special emphasis to the ideas of J.S. Mill, which encompasses the “romantic liberalism” that “is the doctrine that the restrictions and repressions imposed by society prevent the individual to develop and exercise their dispositions and skills innate professes that man has been solitary and independent by nature, only that he has been handcuffed and enslaved through the ruse of laws, customs and economic systems “His opinions are focused on the study he did in the essay of this author” On liberty “, written in 1859. The analysis of Mill’s thought leads him to examine other concepts related to freedom, as well as necessity and responsibility, such as SOLITUDE, tolerance, utility, autonomy and therefore heteronomy, moral skepticism, Comteano positivism, ethical values, etc.
Paul Eluard in one of his verses of his poem “Freedom”, addressing freedom, expresses:
- In the absence without desire
- in nude LONELINESS
- on the stairs of death
- I write your name.
Llano Cifuentes, with respect to freedom and individuality, affirms that life as well as massifying man also frustrates him by the profound SOLITUDE that characterizes him within the mass. Michel Foucault expresses us: Penitentiary architecture is developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, throughout Europe, as part of the state system to punish, and with the firm purpose of manifesting the strength of the sovereign. There were three forms of detention: the prison, as a simple confinement; la gêne, restricting food and light, and increasing the LONELINESS index; and the dungeon, where these measures increased extraordinarily. The author describes the functional system and the basic principles of several of the prisons that were built in Europe, models such as the one of Rasphuis and the Spinhuis of Amsterdam, the correctional one of Ghent and the one of Philadelphia. It exposes the different principles that founded these prison institutions: compulsory work, the duration of sentences, idleness as a fundamental cause of crime, etc., which aroused a concern to promote a certain pedagogy of work in prison systems. In any of the models, it was -with certain variants- to correct and modify the form of behavior they had, a correction that always involved producing subject subjects “reconstitute the legal subject of the social pact, or form a subject of obedience …”
Anthony de Mello proposes us to put aside fears and fantasies in order to live the reality that is presented to us and to be able to develop ourselves integrally as free and complete people. De Mello agrees with the opinion of other psychologists and sociologists that man is afraid of freedom, as well as of LONELINESS and happiness, and prefers to become a slave of ideologies and mental schemes rather than take the “risk of flying” “On their own, that is, with personal ideas and without ties. And even points out: “we bind ourselves voluntarily, filling us with heavy chains and then we complain about not being free […] We have become accustomed to the prison of the old and we prefer to sleep so as not to discover the freedom that is the new. […] Who has to free you if you are not aware of your chains? “
De Mello believes that being awake is the requirement to be able to achieve freedom, but also to be able to exercise it and transmit it, asserting that the only experience that is truly worthwhile in life is to achieve awakening. Likewise, it identifies, congruent with Buddhist ideas, that the source of suffering is in the desires, which within the Eastern tradition are called attachments. That is, sterile desires that end up obfuscating the conscience and producing obsessions that lead to nothing positive, but to keep us asleep. By definition, when an unimportant desire becomes compulsive and all forces are directed to achieve it, because it is believed that doing it will achieve happiness, it is in reality an attachment, which is not wanted or can not be done to the side , because it is believed that without it you will never be able to conquer happiness. But, as the author reminds us, that happiness is a function of inner freedom (in SOLITUDE and society) and truth, in reality, living with those attachments, leads us to suffering, because “insecure people do not want Real happiness, because he fears the risk of freedom and, therefore, prefers the drug of desires “, which keeps them asleep.
Carlos Loya in his poem Liberéstula, in one of his strophe, addressing Freedom, expresses:
- Defeated by time
- emancipated by the same pain
- accompanied by the shaft,
- you are the objectified expression
- with narrowed eyes
- -looking without seeing-
- &
- Nymph in elevation
- you are the Greek ode
- the smiling proclamation
- you inebriate in SOLITUDE;
- the architrave gives you continuity
- epistyl of sustenance that extracts
- those versifications of the sunset,
- even with your diluted silhouette
- there is no confusion in you.
We will continue in a few days with Part II, as we walk firmly grasping the solitude of the hand, to feel another perspective of the world and of life.