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| My favourite painter of solitude, Edward Hopper Hotel Room, 1931 |
I'm reading On Solitude by French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne. Thus far, I have concluded that is a treatise on free-will. And, since I have ceased to be an academic (for the time being), I feel no shame for making this sweeping assumption 29 pages into this 120 page book. (Well, maybe I feel a little shame since I felt the need to qualify my conclusions).
In his first chapter "On Solitude" Montaigne weaves his decades' long research of philosophy (he says he prefers the Ancients - Romans rather than Greeks) to build an argument for the fact that solitude is not being alone but, instead, the result of being a part of society. To support this he cites a question from Persius:
Does knowing mean nothing to you, unless someone else knows that you know it?
In other words, does the knowledge you acquire mean anything if you do not share it? Well, yes and no. Knowledge informs and reshapes how you see the world. Knowledge either becomes a direct statement or an unconscious trigger of actions/reactions therefore, it is always shared with someone else.
Perhaps more critically, this question relates to our current state of social media. If we don't share our experience/our knowledge, does it exist? We see something interesting on the street: we tweet it, we Instagram it, we "status" it. Does this mean that we seek approval from others in order to believe that we know?
It may seem frightening to think of social media plays this role in our knowledge: in order to prove that we know anything we have to make it publicly known and affirmed ("liked" "favourited"). But, it points directly back to Montaigne's title: On Solitude. The act of knowledge, something that seems so intimate and subjective, is actually dependent on the act of the communal experience. Knowledge is a feedback loop and points to our place as social beings, rather than beings existing in an imaginary solitude.
With just this one question I paused from reading - trying to figure it out before I continue, sharing my knowledge in an attempt to prove that I know something about knowing and maybe that I am not alone.
Perhaps more critically, this question relates to our current state of social media. If we don't share our experience/our knowledge, does it exist? We see something interesting on the street: we tweet it, we Instagram it, we "status" it. Does this mean that we seek approval from others in order to believe that we know?
It may seem frightening to think of social media plays this role in our knowledge: in order to prove that we know anything we have to make it publicly known and affirmed ("liked" "favourited"). But, it points directly back to Montaigne's title: On Solitude. The act of knowledge, something that seems so intimate and subjective, is actually dependent on the act of the communal experience. Knowledge is a feedback loop and points to our place as social beings, rather than beings existing in an imaginary solitude.
With just this one question I paused from reading - trying to figure it out before I continue, sharing my knowledge in an attempt to prove that I know something about knowing and maybe that I am not alone.
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