Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 41, No.

1, 2007

Lessons of Solitude: The Awakening of

Aesthetic Sensibility

ANGELO CARANFA

This paper explores the contextual value of solitude in

learning; in so doing, it attempts to suggest an alternative
method of instruction that is based on aesthetics as the
reciprocal relationship between emotions and intellect, and
between action and contemplation. Such an aesthetic
education or method seeks to guide the student towards the
attainment of her own life: to perfect, as much as possible, her
human qualities in what she does by paying attention to the
things of Beauty. The method that the essay uses is both
historical and interdisciplinary: it draws from theology,
philosophy, the sciences and visual art; and, it is guided
by an explanatory perspective that is constructive.

[Solitude] should be his first lesson. It is the one he will most need to
learn. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1966, p. 32.

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis claims, ‘The final stage is come

when Man . . . by an education based on a perfect applied psychology, has
obtained full control over himself’ (Lewis, 1947, p. 72). Contemporary
education, C. S. Lewis further remarks, renders students ‘without chests’
(p. 54), in that it guides them to pursue truth ‘without the aid of sentiment’
(p. 35). But C. S. Lewis reminds us that ‘without the aid of trained
emotions the intellect is powerless’ (p. 33) in discovering ‘the first
principles’ (p. 91) of ethics or of moral action. The task of education is,
according to C. S. Lewis, not to ‘fortify the minds [of students] against
emotion’ (p. 24), but to cultivate their sensibility against ‘pure reasoning’
(p. 43) or ‘extreme rationalism’ (p. 79).
More significantly, C. S. Lewis notes, an education based on pure
reasoning or extreme rationalism does away with the space for solitude,
for creativity, and a space to become fully human; what then ties students
to what they learn, and to each other, is not ‘the mystery of humanity’
(p. 74), which arches over them, but an ‘abstract universal’ (p. 86)—as in
virtual reality, with its emphasis upon a fictitious space and time. Today’s
individual is alone or solitary, C. S. Lewis continues, but she is in touch
with no one, much less with herself; everyone has been reduced to an
explainable phenomenon, an artifact, and all traditional or objective values

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114 A. Caranfa

have been ‘debunked’ (p. 23) and replaced by real values in the practical
or the useful (p. 42).
Against this frightening image of the human person starved of emotions
or of sentiments by a scientific education, I wish to explore in this essay
the contextual value of solitude in learning; and, in so doing, to suggest an
alternative method of education, a method based on aesthetics as the
reciprocal relationship between emotions and intellect, and between
contemplation and action. Such a method seeks to guide the student, again
in the words of C. S. Lewis, ‘to the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss
that was before the Creator Himself’ (p. 28).
The perspective from which this essay is written is both historical and
interdisciplinary: it draws from theology, philosophy, the sciences and
visual art. It is guided and informed by an explanatory point of view that is
constructive. Hence the essay is philosophical; it attempts to base
instruction on the aesthetic ordering of human existence in its physical,
moral, intellectual and spiritual dimensions.

CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL FOUNDATIONS:

PLATO AND ST. AUGUSTINE
This interconnection of theory and practice, and of the real and the ideal or
the transcendent, which education should teach, is originally and vividly
illustrated by Plato in his ‘Allegory of the Cave’, Book VII of the
Republic. The context of this allegory is Plato’s contrast between the
illusory and dark nature of human existence in our material or earthly or
changeable world of shadows and the desire of a life lived in the clear
vision of the intelligible and unchangeable world of Forms where the
Good, the Form of Forms, rules like the sun which renders all things
visible. Prisoners find themselves in a cave chained from birth, so that they
can see mere images of shadows cast by the light of the fire as people pass
by it carrying various objects. One of the prisoners eventually learns to
ascend through the various levels of knowledge to finally gaze upon the
sun itself. Plato informs us that if the prisoner were to return to the cave,
he would be ridiculed and, perhaps, even put to death if he tried to instruct
those prisoners still in the cave as to the way of freeing themselves by
ascending to the light (Plato, 1937, sec. 514–518, pp. 773–777). The
whole purpose of the allegory, Plato tells us, is to show that such a return
is the business of the philosopher who must ‘descend again among the
prisoners in the den, and partake of [his] labours and honours, whether
they are worth having or not’ (sec. 519, p. 778).
This dialectic of ascending towards ‘divine contemplations’ and of
descending into the world of the ‘shadows of images of justice’ (sec. 519,
p. 778) constitutes the way of knowing. Some people think, Plato goes on
to say, that education is a matter of putting knowledge into a soul which
was not there before, as though they were putting ‘sight into blind eyes’
(sec. 518, p. 777). By contrast, Plato maintains that knowledge already
exists in the soul, as sight already exists in the eye. So that Plato sees

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learning as a ‘conversion’ in vision, a turning of the mind’s eye from the

world of becoming towards the world of being, from the world of darkness
towards the world of light and from the world of opinion towards the
world of knowledge; ‘by this conversion’, Plato concludes, ‘wisdom . . . is
rendered useful and profitable’ (sec. 518, p. 777).
This ‘conversion’, however, is not an easy task; in some people, Plato
explains, the soul’s eye is entirely focused on bodily and changeable
things, so that to turn it in the opposite direction is very difficult indeed.
Conversely, people who have ascended to the highest good may find it
easy to remain there; ‘but this’, Plato warns, ‘must not be allowed’ (sec.
519, p. 778). And yet, those people who descend must remain essentially
solitary or contemplative; their soul’s eye must continue to gaze on the
beauty of heavenly things ‘framed by the Creator of them in the most
perfect manner’ (sec. 530, p. 789). In Plato, Nicholas Lobkowicz writes in
Theory and Practice, the individual who is ‘in contact with the divine . . .
knows what ought to be done in each case’ (Lobkowicz, 1967, p. 38).
Now, as the individual acts as he ought to act, his actions at the same time
lift themselves to the ‘contemplation of that which is best in existence’
(Plato, 1937, sec. 532, p. 792) through knowledge: that knowledge which
can be acquired by the study of the arts (music, which includes literature
and gymnastics), of the mathematical sciences (arithmetic, geometry and
astronomy) and of philosophy or dialectic (sec. 525–531, pp. 784–791).
Dialectic alone, Plato observes, lifts the eye of the soul ‘to the universal
light which lightens all things, and [the eye beholds] behold the absolute
good’ (sec. 540, p. 799).
When this final ‘conversion’ or vision has been attained, we will have
learned to live our life in solitude. This is to say that we are at one with
ourselves and commune with the other through our most authentic
thoughts and actions, as, for example, did Socrates. Socrates’ solitude is
nothing but the interiorised vision or knowledge of the Absolute Good or
Beauty: it is conversing alone with it when all discourse ceases
to apprehend or reveal it. Contemplative solitude raises Socrates’ actions
to the domain of goodness or of knowledge; to be cut off from solitude
is to fall into a life of pretense, of blindness and of egoism; ‘only solitude’,
writes Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958), ‘can become an
authentic way of life in the figure of [Socrates]’ (Arendt, p. 76). Indeed,
only solitude makes possible in Socrates the actual advent of the absolute
presence of Beauty, a presence that transcends all human words, thoughts
and actions: ‘Prayer, I think’, Socrates observes at the end of Phaedrus, ‘is
enough for me’ (Plato, 1937, sec. 279, p. 282).
A more intimate invocation of the necessity for prayer or for solitude
can be found in The Confessions of St. Augustine. In the solitude of one’s
own heart, Augustine reminds us, dwells true wisdom. Of his reading of
Cicero’s Hortensius, the Bishop of Hippo writes: ‘Every vain hope
suddenly became worthless to me; my spirit was filled with an
extraordinary and burning desire for the immortality of wisdom, and
now I began to rise, so that I might return to you’ (Augustine, 1963, book
3, chap. 4, p. 56). Cicero’s work changed Augustine’s direction in life

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from the pursuit of philosophical wisdom to the pursuit of knowledge

associated with prayer or contemplation. That Augustine might learn to
hear in his heart God’s silent Word, so that he could rise up to Him,
permeates the whole of The Confessions, as, for example, the following
text suggests: ‘And I will enter my chamber [heart] and sing to you songs
of love, groaning with groanings unutterable in my far pilgrimage,
remembering Jerusalem my country, Jerusalem my mother’ (book 12,
chap. 16, p. 297).
The inexpressible longing that Augustine experiences is fundamentally a
yearning to hear God, not in words, but in sounds of silence that would
lead him alone toward the hidden or the silent One: ‘And I heard you, Lord
my God . . . and I understood’ (book 13, chap. 30, p. 345), cries out
Augustine over and over again. In the silence of his heart, Augustine
understands that God is Wisdom by whom all things are made, but he
himself is not made, the Good that is unchanging, eternal and always
remaining the same, the Truth which we know not through philosophical
knowledge but through love and the Word made flesh by which our ascent
to the light is made possible. By contemplating the Word of God in Christ,
Augustine informs us, he rises up to the unchanging light ‘shining above
this eye of my soul and above my mind’; and, he goes on to say: ‘He who
knows truth knows that light, and he who knows that light knows eternity.
Love knows it . . . And from far away you cried out to me: ‘I am that I am.’
And I heard, as one hears things in the heart, and there was no longer any
reason at all for me to doubt’ (book 7, chap. 10, pp. 149–150).
That light of which Augustine speaks is nothing but faith; and faith is
the acting out of love towards others. As long as the spiritual life of faith is
preserved, Augustine instructs us in The City of God, a person can lead
any one of ‘these three modes of life, the contemplative, the active, and
the composite’ (Augustine, 1950, p. 697); and, he further states: ‘No man
has a right to lead such a life of contemplation as to forget in his own ease
the service due to his neighbour; nor has any man a right to be so
immersed in active life as to neglect the contemplation of God’ (p. 698).
Though Augustine considers the contemplative life superior to the
other two lives, because it is more directly related to the life of the
heavenly city in which ‘God shall be all and all in a secure eternity and
perfect peace’ (p. 699), still he regards the active life as good. In fact, he
tells us that as long as we are in this earthly city, we are always compelled
by the demands of love ‘to relinquish the sweets of contemplation’
(p. 698).

RENAISSANCE REFLECTIONS: PICO, LEONARDO AND

MICHELANGELO
It is the hallmark of the Renaissance that the individual ‘relinquish the
sweets of contemplation’ for the things of this world. Yet though the
Renaissance focuses on action, contemplation still remains the way to
perfect oneself; only through retreating into ‘the [solitary] center of his

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own unity’, Pico della Mirandola writes in his Oration on the Dignity of
Man, can we fashion for ourselves a life that surpasses all finite things and
thus become ‘an angel and the son of God’ (Mirandola, 1948, p. 225). The
individual, according to Pico, is the only created being who is not tied to a
determinate nature; he/she can freely take on the form of the Creator, but
only if he/she wills it and only if he/she acts on it.
Eugenio Garin writes that Pico’s oration ‘is among the great works of all
time’ (Garin, 1963, p. 209). And, indeed, Pico’s work not only summarises
the whole Renaissance culture but gives us, again, in the words of Garin,
the modern image of the human person as master of her own works: ‘man
exists in the act that constitutes him, he exists in the possibility of
liberating himself’ (p. 209). At the same time, Garin also points out that
Pico’s emphasis on action does not dissolve ‘the mystery of life’ (p. 196);
rather, that life perfects itself only inasmuch as it is directed towards the
light of divine contemplation (p. 209). Pico’s (1948) own words attest to
this when he writes that as long as we contemplate ‘the solitary darkness
of God, who is set above all things’, we shall be able ‘to be reborn into the
higher forms, which are divine’ (p. 225). Failure to contemplate God as
the Greatest Artisan or Craftsman can lead, in Pico’s view, to ‘lower forms
of life’ (p. 225). In Pico, Ernst Cassirer writes in The Individual and the
Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, action is balanced by contemplation,
and ‘the difference between the two . . . is only possible and conceivable in
that it implies a reciprocal relationship between them’ (Cassirer, 1972,
p. 86).
It is thus that the artist brings to expression this reciprocal relationship
in the work; and it is thus that the artist, in the words of Leonardo da
Vinci, ‘must be solitary and consider what he sees. He must converse with
himself. He must select the quintessence of whatever he sees. He must act
as a mirror that changes into as many colors as there are things placed
before it’ (Leonardo, 1959, p. 56). For Leonardo, the purpose of solitude is
to facilitate the inner unity of vision; otherwise the painter is ‘like the
mirror which mechanically reflects everything placed before it’ (ibid.). In
Leonardo’s view, the creator is the eye in which the beauty of ‘artful
nature’ is mirrored; it is an eye that does not merely copy or record images
of things placed before it, but forms and shapes things in itself. So
Leonardo asks: ‘Who would believe that such a small space could retain
images of the whole universe? O great deeds, what mind can pervade
nature such as this? What tongue can unfold such a wonder? None. This
directs human reason to the contemplation of the divine’ (p. 49).
Nothing can unfold the wonder of the eye except silence, which unites
with the silence of nature to become one in the work of art. In Leonardo’s
works, René Huyghe writes in Art and the Spirit of Man, ‘we are
oppressed by an air of expectation, kept waiting for the opening measures
of some triumphant song that is forever about to begin’; and, he goes on to
say: ‘With him silence enters painting’ (Huyghe, 1962, p. 94). This silence
is nothing but God’s light shining in things, which light Leonardo wants to
make visible in his works: ‘Would the Lord, who is the light of all things’,
Leonardo beseeches, ‘deign to enlighten me, the describer of light’ (Garin,

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1963, p. 260). For Leonardo, art provides access to the quintessence of

things, indeed, to the ultimate reasons or causes of nature. Leonardo
believes that art is just as necessary in understanding nature as are science
and philosophy, because art, he writes, is ‘the legitimate daughter of
nature’ (Leonardo, 1959, p. 55). Therefore, Leonardo concludes, ‘We can
rightly call painting the granddaughter of nature and the close relative of
God’ (ibid.).
Both as an artist and as a scientist, Leonardo, Erwin Panofsky asserts,
‘insists on the complementary relationship between theory and practice’
(Panofsky, 1953, p. 131, no. 9); and, we should add, Leonardo also insists
on the silent or creative eye, as does Michelangelo. In fact, a reading of
Michelangelo’s poems instructs us that as long as the eye is given to the
mere perception of outside things, beauty, like love and happiness, cannot
be born or created. Beauty, love and happiness, according to Michelange-
lo, can emerge only when we withdraw into our own heart where knowing
and doing, the visible and the invisible, the spiritual and the material, time
and eternity, life and death, suffering and joy are united. But Michelangelo
is also quick to point out that the birth of beauty, love and happiness
require that we die to ourselves. And even with that, beauty, love and
happiness can remain forever a fleeting shadow in the recesses of our
heart. Nothing looms larger in the life and work of Michelangelo than the
possibility of remaining forever a solitary. So he works and works in the
hope of completing himself, but to no avail. His life and his work remain
forever incomplete, unfinished. For isn’t one dead, Michelangelo asks, as
soon as one’s work is completed? And isn’t solitude, Michelangelo
wonders, the very thing that renders the work alive? Solitude, which ties
Michelangelo to his work, urges him to start over and over again in what is
for him a never-ending beginning, and this places him in the sphere of the
shadows of life, not in its reality, on the side of life that is conquered and
chained, not on the side of life that is free. In solitude, Michelangelo’s life
and work take form, coherence and meaning.
Let me, if I may, quote a few lines from some of Michelangelo’s poems,
so that you can get the drift of what I am saying: ‘If, to be happy, I must be
conquered and chained, / it is no wonder that, naked and alone, / . . . I
remain’ (Michelangelo, 1991, no. 98); and, ‘Alone, I seem as the moon is
by itself: / for our eyes are only able to see in heaven / as much of it as the
sun illuminates’ (no. 89); again, ‘I alone keep burning in the shadows /
when the sun strips the earth of its rays; / everyone else from pleasure, and
I from pain, / prostrate upon the ground, lament and weep’ (no. 2); and
still, ‘Love is a conception born of beauty / (that friend of virtue and of
graciousness) / that is imagined or seen within the heart’ (no. 38); and
more still, ‘Make my whole body nothing but an eye: / let there be no part
of me that can’t enjoy you’ (no. 166); and finally, ‘Within my soul / I feel
both death and life, though opposites, / together for a brief moment’
(no. 124).
For Michelangelo, then, as for Leonardo, Pico, Augustine and Plato,
solitude allows us not only to perfect ourselves in the image and likeness
of the Creator, but also to do so through the mutual relationship of action

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and contemplation. Therefore if, in giving ourselves to the active life, we

abandon the contemplative life, these figures teach us, we shall fail in
perfecting ourselves in the Divine Artisan. Now, we become in the like of
the Divine Creator or Artist through an encounter with, or through the
contemplation of, what Pico calls ‘higher forms, which are divine’.
‘Within [our] soul’, Michelangelo writes, we feel both the things that are
divine and those that are of earth, always struggling to achieve a balance
between them. But neither Michelangelo nor Leonardo achieves this inner
balance; their inner world, like that of Petrarch before them, seems divided
between God’s divine creative power and their own creative power, with
solitude as the only bridge between heaven and earth, between God and
them: ‘Naked and alone’ Michelangelo and Leonardo remain before the
beauty or the miracle of existence.

VOICES OF THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES:

PASCAL AND ROUSSEAU
It is not hard to see in Blaise Pascal the inner conflict that Michelangelo
and Leonardo experience. In fact, a reading of Pascal’s Pense´es reveals a
longing for God, on the one hand, and the silence of God, on the other
hand. His work, it seems to me, is not the work of a great mathematician,
but of someone who tries to fashion for himself a life of meaning. He
informs us that there is ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces’
(Pascal, 1958, no. 206) that separates us from God. Thus we are forever
alone in this universe. Yet, Pascal insists, we long to rediscover our
relationship with the Creator. Such a relationship cannot be discovered by
the reason of the intellect (l’esprit ge´ome´trique), according to Pascal, but
by the reasons of the heart (l’esprit de finesse) from which the human self
can verify the Creator concealed in the silence of the universe (no. 277).
Pascal asks us to withdraw into our own hearts, so that we may perceive
our own grandeur and our own nothingness or misery. The individual that
withdraws into his own heart can hear the silence of God speaking
throughout creation; for, in Pascal’s view, ‘It is the heart which
experiences God, and not reason’ (no. 278). Metaphysical proofs of
God, Pascal goes on to say, are so removed from the heart, and scientific
reasoning is so cold that even if they were true, no one would believe them
(no. 542). ‘We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart . . .
Principles are intuited, propositions are inferred, all with certainty, though
in different ways’ (no. 282).
In Jean-Jacques Rousseau one witnesses the full force of Pascal’s
reasons of the heart and of intuited principles or truths. From Rousseau’s
Emile we learn that the chief task of education is above all to teach
solitude. In fact, the first lesson Rousseau would teach his student, Emile,
is the endurance of solitude; ‘It is the one he will most need to learn’
(Rousseau, 1966, p. 32). This is not because Rousseau despises the way of
other people, or because he views the self as asocial, but because he wants
his student ‘to be the same in company as when he is alone’ (p. 122).

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Rousseau explains that there is a gap between what we are in society and
what we are in our natural state. To erase this gap, Rousseau instructs
Emile to journey into the world of human affections or desires, not away
from them. Hence ‘They should . . . be the first to be cultivated. They are
generally the ones most neglected’ (p. 55). To cultivate them, Rousseau
recommends that we should learn to feel. Nothing can be more corrupting
or injurious to the perfection or growth of his student, according to
Rousseau, than for his student to confuse or to substitute affections for
virtuous actions. Emile should be taught that love of the self (amour de
soi) is a natural desire or sentiment that tends towards self-preservation;
and, therefore, there is nothing corrupting in it. But he should also be
taught that when this love of the self compares itself with the needs or
desires of others, it degenerates into pride or self-glorification or self-love
(amour-propre), which, in Rousseau’s view, is the source of evil in human
society. So ‘to prevent the human heart [from] being depraved by . . .
social life’ (p. 97), Rousseau finds it necessary to teach Emile to retreat
from society—at least for a while, until he becomes self-sufficient or
virtuous—so that he can then return to it in order to enhance the general
well-being or the good of all. Rousseau writes: ‘Emile is not destined to
remain a solitary for ever. He is a member of society and must fulfill its
obligations’ (p. 120).
Rousseau discovers his model of teaching in the solitary life of
Robinson Crusoe. He claims:

Robinson Crusoe alone on his island, without the help of his fellows and
the tools of the various arts, yet managing to produce food and safety, and
even a measure of well-being. . . . I want him [Emile] to learn, not from
books but from experience, all things he would need to know in such a
situation. I want him to think he is Robinson and imagine himself . . . like
Crusoe (pp. 84–85).

To imagine oneself as Crusoe is to be educated in ‘the principle of utility’,

or in ‘the law of necessity’, from which the practice of foresight emerges;
‘and from foresight’, Rousseau goes on to say, ‘comes all the wisdom or
all the unhappiness of mankind’ (p. 80). According to the French
philosopher, solitude imprints itself on the imagination of the student and
directs him towards the pursuit of industrial or professional arts. In
solitude, Emile learns to use ‘his senses, his inventive mind, his foresight’
(p. 87), as well as the very foundation of social relations. As Rousseau
puts it: ‘Emile sees that in order to have things for his own use he must
have some he can exchange with other people’ (p. 88).
Thus, Rousseau ranks all those advantages that our senses and our
minds owe to nature—land, water, stones, fire and wood—under ‘the law
of necessity’, or ‘the principle of utility’, so as to serve self-preservation.
The island is at once the student’s home, his workshop, his classroom, his
playground, his garden and, indeed, his true friend; everything here exists
for the benefit or general well-being of the student. In this situation,
Rousseau explains, it never crosses the student’s mind to regard all of

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nature with indifference; and, therefore, he will never look upon it as his
own for the purpose of making a profit beyond what he needs. Once Emile
learns to be self-sufficient, he is ready to enter society; he, according to
Rousseau, has become not only ‘an efficient thinking being’, but also
‘a loving, sensitive being’ (p. 91). In fact, he has perfected the art of being
a solitary. ‘In a word, Emile has every personal virtue’, says Rousseau.

To add the social virtues he only needs to know the relations which call
them into being. That knowledge his mind is now quite ready to receive
. . . He asks nothing from other people and does not believe that he owes
anything to them. Thus far he stands alone in human society. He is self-
dependent . . . he has no mistaken ideas and no vices . . . he has a healthy
body, agile limbs, a true mind free from prejudice, a free heart devoid of
passion. Self-esteem . . . has still to awaken in him (pp. 93–94).

When the senses kindle in Emile ‘the fire of imagination’ (p. 102), and he
begins to feel himself in the other and to share the other’s suffering, then,
Rousseau explains, Emile experiences compassion in his heart. ‘So is born
pity, the first social sentiment that affects the human heart according to the
order of nature’ (p. 103). This is the time when Rousseau wants his student
to study the liberal arts; for they benefit others, not the self. Rousseau
believes that nowhere does compassion or pity touch the human heart
more deeply than in the study of history: by means of it, Rousseau
concludes, Emile ‘will read the hearts of men’ (p. 107); and from it, he
will learn the principles of good or bad actions. No action can be
considered good, in Rousseau’s view, unless it flows from our own
sensitivity to beauty. ‘My main object in teaching him [Emile] to feel and
love beauty’, Rousseau writes, ‘is to fix his affections and his tastes on it
and prevent his natural appetites from deteriorating so that he comes to
look for the means of happiness . . . in little things. . . . It is by means of
them that we come to enrich our lives with the good things at our disposal’
(pp. 127–128).

MODERN LESSONS: MILL AND WHITEHEAD

This lesson—which teaches us to feel and to love beauty—is also taught
by John Stuart Mill. ‘He who has learnt what beauty is’, Mill writes, ‘will
desire to realise it in his own life—will keep before himself a type of
perfect beauty in human character, to light his attempts at self-culture’
(Mill, 1979, p. 195). For Mill, only an artistic-aesthetic education can
cultivate this sense of perfection in us and in what we do; only works of
art, Mill says, can teach us how to perfect our own works. Thus, ‘If I were
to define Art’, Mill declares, ‘I should be inclined to call it, the endeavour
after perfection in execution. If we meet with even a piece of mechanical
work which bears the marks of being done in this spirit—which is done as
if the workman loved it, and tried to make it as good as possible . . . we say
that he has worked like an artist’ (pp. 195–196).

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To work like an artist: this is a doing by which we perfect the work in

the solitude of our own inner feelings and thoughts. This is the solitude
that Mill himself experienced at the age of twenty when he suffered a
‘mental crisis’, which made him journey into his own heart. There, Mill
discovered the deficiencies of his ‘bookish’ education, which, as he says,
‘was more fitted for training me to know than to do’ (p. 100). As he is
alone with himself, Mill realises that education had failed him by
neglecting the artistic-aesthetic side of his life—the habits of sensibility.
‘I needed to be made to feel’, Mill writes, ‘that there was real, permanent
happiness in tranquil contemplation’ (p. 130). Of all the philosophers, the
scientists, the economists, the mathematicians, the historians and the
literary figures he read, none, Mill tells us, could restore him to mental and
physical wholeness. It was from his reading of Wordsworth’s poetry that
Mill came to understand what he lacked. Mill recounts that Wordsworth’s
poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of his
pleasurable susceptibilities: ‘they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but
states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement
of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was
in quest of’ (pp. 129–130). In short, what Mill learned from Wordsworth’s
poems was the very ‘sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life
shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as
I came under their influence’ (p. 130).
So when Mill accepted the presidency of St. Andrew’s University, he
made certain that professional or science students received not only a
liberal arts education, but also that the arts and the sciences were unified
under the aesthetic method of learning. ‘No other human productions
come so near to perfection as works of pure Art’, Mill states in his
inaugural address.

Art, when really cultivated, and not merely practised empirically,

maintains, what it first gave the conception of, an ideal Beauty, to be
eternally aimed at, though surpassing what can be actually attained; and
by this idea it trains us never to be completely satisfied with imperfection
in what we ourselves do and are: to idealize, as much as possible, every
work we do, and most of all, our own characters and lives (pp. 195–196).

Alfred North Whitehead is at one with Mill in giving art or aesthetics a

central place in education. Like Mill, Whitehead in The Aims of Education
roots his vision of education in ‘the aesthetic sense of realized perfection’
(Whitehead, 1967, p. 40), and, therefore, in the reciprocal exchange
between the active and the contemplative life. That relationship, according
to Whitehead, was the foundation of the Benedictine ideal of instruction,
which, in his own words, links together ‘knowledge, labour, and moral
energy’ (p. 53) into a unified vision of the human person. But Whitehead
maintains that this Benedictine ideal of work and contemplation has been
ignored in today’s education by the widespread use of technical
instruction (p. 45). To recover the Benedictine ideal of learning,
Whitehead recommends that we cultivate reverence for the present as

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 Lessons of Solitude 123

‘the complete sum of existence’ and duty as ‘control over the course of
events’ (p. 14).
Reverence for the present, Whitehead explains, acknowledges the
eternity of existence: ‘the present contains all that there is. It is holy
ground; for it is the past, and it is the future’ (p. 3). The present, in its
continuity and interaction with the past and future, provides the condition
of duty by which we can control and direct our lives. Whitehead notes that
reverence and duty are cultivated by ‘attention to the rhythmic law of
growth’ (p. 39). He is convinced that failure in education is due to the
neglect of ‘attention’ to the rhythms of life: education, Whitehead
observes, is the guidance of the individual towards a comprehension of the
art of life. By the art of life Whitehead means ‘the most complete
achievement of varied activity expressing the potentialities of that living
creature in the face of its actual environment . . . Each individual embodies
an adventure of existence. The art of life is the guidance of this adventure’
(p. 39).
For Whitehead, then, attention encompasses the expression of one’s
potentialities in their relationship with the concrete or actual environment.
In other words, expression of such potentialities fully discloses how a
living creature pursues or guides or directs and controls his life, thus
demonstrating the need for attention, for knowing or understanding the
direction in which one wishes to take his life. So attention means that
one’s mind should be focused on the present, and to use that knowledge of
the present for the complete achievement of one’s own potentialities. This
complete achievement takes the form of art: an attention to, or an eye for,
the whole, an aspiration to weave contemplation or knowledge into the
tapestry of our daily life, as did St. Benedict.
As with St. Benedict, we must be attentive in order to integrate
knowledge, work and moral energy into our journey toward self-
completion. And, as with St. Benedict, who teaches us to pay attention
to the rhythms of existence—both natural and spiritual, both the rhythms
of the body and those of the soul—we, too, Whitehead insists, must learn
to listen to the rhythms of our every day life in order to transform it. Life,
Whitehead writes, ‘comprises daily periods, with their alternations of
work and play, of activity and of sleep, and seasonal periods, which dictate
our terms and our holidays; and also it is composed of well-marked yearly
periods’ (p. 17). These periods seem obvious, and no one can overlook
them. But Whitehead claims that there are also more subtle periods of
mental growth—‘with their cyclic recurrences, yet always different as we
pass from cycle to cycle, though the subordinate stages are reproduced in
each cycle’ (ibid.)—which, if not attended to, can become a main source
of futility in education. In relation to mental growth, Whitehead describes
the successive stages as the stage of romance, the stage of precision, and
the stage of generalisation: unless there is romantic feeling in the
acquisition of knowledge, leading to the final stage of general knowledge,
mental growth is empty or sterile. ‘Romance is the flood which bears [the
student] on towards the life of the spirit . . . Its essence is browsing and the
encouragement of vivid freshness’ (p. 22).

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124 A. Caranfa

Nothing in the life of the spirit is as essential as the rhythmic claims of

freedom and discipline, according to Whitehead. ‘The only avenue
towards wisdom is by freedom in the presence of knowledge. But the only
avenue towards knowledge is by discipline in the acquirement of ordered
fact’ (p. 30). Hence the orderly acquisition of knowledge should establish
space for the free development of the mind. Contrary to some who have
emphasised that freedom and discipline are antithetical to each other,
Whitehead believes that ‘they correspond to a natural sway, to and fro, of
the developing personality’ (pp. 30–31). It is here that Whitehead’s three
stages of romance, of precision and of generalisation play out their
practical consequences: mental development in each and every stage is
composed of and is directed by the dialectical unity of freedom and
discipline, leading to what Whitehead calls ‘self-discipline’ (p. 35).
The secret to self-discipline is the practice of attention, of a mind so
focused on, or so disciplined in, both the concrete and the abstract, that it
enables the self to transcend itself. True attention or a true disciplined
mind is, according to Whitehead, totally absorbed in beauty; it is, in the
final analysis, aesthetic action, and Whitehead identifies it with style.
Style, he writes, is the last acquisition of the mind, and it is also the most
useful: ‘It pervades the whole being. The administrator with a sense for
style hates waste; the engineer with a sense for style economises his
material; the artisan with a sense for a style prefers good work. Style is the
ultimate morality of the mind’ (p. 12). Consequently, Whitehead believes
that style helps us in the following ways: it makes it possible to attain our
own end; it gives us foresight; it makes us attentive to our own activities;
and it does not distract the mind with irrelevancies, thus rendering the
attainment of our object more likely to be realised (p. 13). For some,
Whitehead concludes, style involves the study of the liberal arts; for
others, it requires scientific study. But for him, style is the marriage of
thought to action—a marriage equally attainable by the scientist as by the
artist (p. 48).
Therefore, Whitehead concludes that the antithesis between the arts and
science, or between a technical and a liberal arts education, is fallacious.
He maintains that an education that strives to divorce knowing from
doing—as does today’s education—carries with it the decadence of
society. Society decays, in Whitehead’s view, when work ceases to be the
expression of the worker’s aesthetic sense of realised perfection; and,
therefore, when education fails to train students in artistic efforts.
Whitehead puts the point this way: ‘In the contest of races which in its
final issues will be decided in the workshops and not on the battlefield, the
victory will belong to those who are masters of stores of trained nervous
energy, working under conditions favourable to growth. One such
essential condition is Art’ (p. 58).
In Adventures of Ideas (1961), Whitehead explains that art exists so that
we may know the deliverance of our senses and of our thoughts as the
good, the true and the beautiful. ‘The perfection of art has only one end,’
Whitehead observes, ‘which is Truthful Beauty’ (Whitehead, 1961,
p. 344). In the absence of truth, he goes on to say, beauty is brought to a

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lower level; and, in the absence of beauty, truth and goodness sink to mere
triviality. Beauty matters, Whitehead writes, because the moment when
we touch beauty, we touch ‘the supernatural . . . the Unseen’ (pp. 348–49).
As revelation of the Unseen or of the Supernatural, art thus preserves the
spiritual character of our existence—what Whitehead calls ‘the sense of
Peace’ (p. 380), and apart from peace, Whitehead believes that human
existence has no meaning, all other purposes being primarily auxiliary or
merely superfluous. Peace, in Whitehead’s view, is the ultimate
irreducible touchstone of existence and of the world; it is the ‘Harmony
of Harmonies’ (p. 381). Therefore it is the consummation of Beauty;
Beauty opens the way to faith, ‘where reason fails to reveal the details’
(p. 368).

THE PEDAGOGICAL VALUE OF SOLITUDE:

LEARNING TO BE SILENT
The figures we have discussed endeavour to integrate the verbal with the
silent. They teach us to be silent so that we may listen and open ourselves
to the voices of the world around us. They remind us that to be quiet is to
embrace a world that is indescribable and beyond thought. In these figures,
to be silent is a means by which the senses and the faculties are brought
into a harmonious unity with the transcendent Other and then sink into that
blessed state of what Whitehead calls ‘the sense of Peace’. Without a
sense of peace, learning takes on only its external dimension, becoming
noisy or loud and self-centred. On the other hand, learning that arises out
of the sense of peace is quiet and selfless. This learning has nothing to do
with rational knowledge. Rather, it has to do with an aesthetic and a
spiritual experience—an experience of attention to the things of Beauty.
And when we come into the presence of Beauty, our knowledge and our
capacity for discourse are useless: ‘Prayer’, Socrates says at the end of the
Phaedrus, ‘I think, is enough for me’ (Plato, 1937, sec. 279, p. 282). In
Prayer, philosophy or the verbal yields its innermost meaning and its most
instructive lesson; and, in Prayer alone Socrates fulfils his pilgrimage
heavenward, ready to live a life ‘in light always’ (sec. 256, p. 260)—that
is, in the love of True Beauty.
Then and only then Socrates learns to live eternity within time, or the
invisible within the visible, or the unchangeable within the changeable, or
the silent within the word, or the intuitive or the poetic or the imaginary
within the philosophical or the dialectical or the rational. At this moment,
being and doing are one: it is a life lived in the silence of being, as in
St. Benedict, in whose life Whitehead discovers the true model for today’s
educational reforms.
Nothing is more important today than to restore this unity of solitude
and work to education. The whole philosophy of education has, for too
long, ignored the silent dimension of learning. Indeed, it prides itself on its
achievements in the fields of the practical and of communication. Yet, it
fails to recognise that we suffer from solitude, precisely because there is a

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126 A. Caranfa

lack of true practice and true communication among us. It seems to me

that we can only be of use to our community if we withdraw into solitude
and begin, first, a pilgrimage of self-discovery, and then, re-enter the
community to serve it selflessly and with silent integrity. To learn to be
silent is to open ourselves to the other; and, by our works, we lead the
other into solitude. Solitude helps to awaken in us the sense of beauty as
practised and as contemplated or idealised. This is the pedagogical value
of solitude, of which is born the life of wholeness. Here the end of
Phaedrus is quite precise: ‘Beloved Pan,’ Socrates concludes, ‘give me
beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one’
(Plato, 1937, sec. 279, p. 282).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper is a revised version of a presentation delivered at the Misher
Symposium on the campus of The University of the Sciences in
Philadelphia on 13 and 14 April 2004. I would like to thank Professor
Bill Reinsmith for reading the original version of this paper and for
making helpful suggestions. I also wish to thank Professor Robert
Boughner, Chairperson of the Humanities, for his kind and warm
reception.

Correspondence: Angelo Caranfa, 27 Sprague Avenue, Brockton, MA

02302, USA.
E-mail: acaranfa@netscape.net

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