Three Frames of Modern Politics by Daniel J. McCool

Author:Daniel J. McCool
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319956480
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Thoreau avoids loneliness, which is the complete abandonment of everyone and everything, by getting outside himself, and finding company with the different parts of himself. He avoids going down a dark hole of loneliness, in which the wholeness of the self envelops him, and he cannot escape. At work here is the disengaged reason of the Lockean subject, who can observe oneself from the outside, along with Arendt and Whitman’s self, who can understand and find solace in the fact that one contains multitudes, and is not, in fact, a one-dimensional being that is a product of outside forces, or existential loneliness.

Thoreau goes on in this chapter to detail an allegory that denotes the madness that can ensue in states of loneliness and the illusions that can follow. He tells the story of “a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion … whose loneliness was relieved by grotesque visions … which he believed to be real.” He links this experience to our illusions about “normal and natural society” which falsely makes us “come to know that we are never alone.”21 Thoreau’s story of the madman relates to Arendt’s vision of totalitarianism, in which lonely and mad individuals are lured into illusory visions of togetherness and organic unity despite our fundamental reality of separateness and opaqueness in the public realm. For both Arendt and Thoreau, overcoming loneliness involves recovery of the self, but not the authentic Rousseauist self embedded in a community. Rather, the pre-political self in solitude is a “scene” upon which one can playfully converse with oneself.

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