The other: my strength, my weakness, my everything.
“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.” This thought by Arthur Schopenhauer clearly indicates that man must absolutely ignore his fellow human beings if he wants to enjoy any form of freedom, and in turn, happiness.
However, this negative view of others is not unanimous in the eyes of all because for Emile Durkheim, man belongs to a universe made of relationships. In other words, we may momentarily want to live alone, to do without others, but we end up quickly coming back to our fellow human beings, a privileged setting for our realization.
This divergence of thoughts leads us to the following question: can we live without others? Here the problem arises of the importance of others in our existence. Examining this problem involves a number of avenues for reflection, including: to what extent is the rejection of others possible? However, are not others essential to our existence?
Arguably, the rejection of others is possible. In other words, it is possible to live without others for several reasons. First, others are very often critical and harmful towards us, hence the need to isolate yourself regularly in order to be happy. Indeed, jealousy and envy are very common faults in mankind. As a result, sociability is a dangerous and pernicious inclination, because it puts us in contact with people who are morally and intellectually limited or out of whack. Nietzsche writes on this subject in Beyond Good and Evil that: “Solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people, “society”, inevitably makes things unclean. Somewhere, sometime, every community makes people — “base.”.
In addition, isolation is desirable in that living with others implies making compromises, in a way you have to mourn your freedom. Indeed, if you are in a group, you have to follow the will and the rules that govern this group rather than your own. We must bury our selfish and individualistic inclinations to comply with the laws that govern this group, and which in most cases are a brake on our freedom. Seen from this angle, solitary life seems to be justified because it leaves man free. This is probably what makes the French writer and politician Simone Weil say that: “Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.”
(Image: © Leonardo da Vinci, ca. 1510–1515)
Finally, the rejection of others is possible because it allows the return to oneself, to reflection. Indeed, even without doubt, he who does not like solitude will never be able to be a great spirit. When any genius works hard, he needs solitude to find the inspiration he needs for his creations. For example, Arthur Rimbaud, a French surrealist poet, isolated himself for long hours during runaways from his teenage years to find poetic inspiration. Another example that we take from a philosophical and non-religious point of view, the Christ; Jesus Christ before having his public life isolated himself for forty days in the desert to meditate and face the temptation of his shadow that is to say what is called metaphorically the Devil who is none other than the temptation for Jesus to take his personal charisma as a selfish power over others.
In view of all of the above, it becomes clear that rejection of others is possible. However, shouldn’t this loneliness be temporary? Even better, are not others essential to our existence?
Others are essential to our existence. Otherwise expressed, wanting and being able to live permanently without others is illusory, and this assertion can be justified in more than one way.
First, sociability and contact with others are a psychic necessity for the human brain. Indeed, without contact or little contact with others, language learning would be impossible. And without language, there is no consciousness since the sounds articulated and organized in a given linguistic system are the support of human thought. An individual who has not really learned to speak cannot clearly state what he is feeling; and we know that this learning necessarily passes through another person. Thus, “late in the 16th century, the Mogul emperor Akbar the Great tested his hypothesis that babies raised without hearing speech would be unable to speak. He had twelve infants raised by mute nurses in a house where no speech could be heard. Several years later, he went to the house and found that none of the children spoke. Instead, they conversed only in signs. Akbar’s hypothesis seemed to be supported: no oral input, no oral language language learning.”
Then, the rejection of others is impossible because it is to them that we owe to be humans. Indeed, a child normally raised among and by his fellows does not behave at all in the same way as a feral child. That is, a child outside of society becomes strange and alien to humanity. Immanuel Kant writes on this subject in his book Immanuel Kant on Education that: “Man only becomes man through education”, and this education requires the presence of our fellow human beings.
Finally, life without others is impossible because the absence of others makes man’s happiness illusory. Indeed, it is thanks to others, that is to say in the relationship we have with our fellow human beings, that we can be happy. Thanks to others, we can cooperate and organize ourselves to improve our life together, share our work, our pleasures and our sorrows. Raoul Follereau will write explicitly that: “no one has the right to be happy on their own”.
At the end of this analysis, two contradictory points of view emerge. On the one hand, those who argue that rejection of others is possible in the sense that the other is a permanent danger in our quest for freedom and happiness. For them, the other asks too much of us, suffocates us and deprives us of our free transcendence; we must therefore ignore our fellow human beings in order to enjoy our freedom. And on the other hand, those who think that the other is essential to our existence in the sense that living with the other constitutes the privileged framework for all affirmation and realization of oneself. As far as we are concerned, although others are in certain circumstances a brake on our existence, this does not prevent them from remaining essential to our future.
