An almost-serious piece on overcoming the urge to become a hermit

Two and a half thousand years ago, a man frowned up at the stars. So absorbed was he that the well under his feet went unnoticed. Needless to say, he fell in. A peasant began to laugh. The man turned to her and shrugged. ‘I worry more about what’s going on up there than down here,’ he smiled.

This man was Thales of Miletus, and he was looking for the truth. He must have thought the times were a bit truth-less. Pre-truth, to be exact. Two and a half thousand years later, some say we live in post-truth times. That the body of real things, events and facts is shapeshifting, like a body of water that tricks us with our own reflection. That truth is something we can live without, a luxury, a risky habit of looking too far in the distance that will, ultimately, trip us. Thales could have lived without truth, yet still he searched for it. Maybe he suspected that truth could do something for us that was worth the fallings.

Not to compare myself with Thales, but I’ve also had a few tumbles since my own search for truth began. In my case, more than what’s up there in the stars, I guess I’ve always tried to be open to what’s down here, to make sense of it. I search for truth to reconcile myself with a world that doesn’t always treat me good. I want to understand it so I can love it regardless. Well, lately, this hasn’t been easy, and I’ve felt tempted to isolate myself even more than I’m being asked to by closing my door to reality. I won’t lie: though at the beginning it seemed like a way to avoid more sorrow, soon it felt like the sorriest way of all. And so I did what I do best when the way is sorrowful: I went to my library and retraced the footsteps of a few wise souls in search of truth. Of people who, unlike me at that point, dared to face what was happening around them. 

I began reading about those who looked at the natural world, like the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus. Heraclitus was a melancholic guy. He looked for constancy and found nothing but change. Change as the result of tensions, change as a manifestation of a certain harmony. As I learnt more about Heraclitus, I started wondering why change is so scary. Perhaps it’s because it often involves loss. Maybe that’s what gave Heraclitus the blues. Turning our back to it doesn’t protect us from loss, though. If anything, it adds to it. 

Next, I turned to Charles Darwin, like some kind of tortoise suffering an existential crisis. Many centuries after Heraclitus faced the world, he did too and I guess he was the first one who noticed that change came with demands. Apparently this thing about being open to the world doesn’t end with facing it, doesn’t end with noticing its ever-changing nature. It urges a response. Change seemed to be the world’s will. Now, adapting to it, as Darwin saw things, was up to us.

Up to us… I continued reading about those who looked inwards. The Ancient Greeks knew that to find the truth, it wasn’t enough to stare at the stars. The aphorism ‘know thyself’ was a cornerstone of wisdom engraved in the portico of Apollo’s temple. This was to warn visitors that if they wanted to know something about the world, they should look inside first. Self knowledge was necessary to the search for truth. It makes perfect sense to me, since our talents and shortcomings determine how we see the world and a refusal to face them is a closing to reality. So if Socrates treated self-knowledge as fundamental to being able to know, I thought I should give it a go if I ever wanted to leave my room again. 

Just like the old truth-seekers, I spent a good while looking out and looking in. And just like the Temple of Apollo collapsed, so too did my pile of science and self-knowledge books. And just like the philosophers were still missing something, so was I. About to despair, I came across a few lines by the Hungarian psychiatrist Thomas Hora. To know himself, he realised, first he needed to be known by another person. This made sense to me: it’d be tricky to become aware of our flaws and potential without facing anybody that triggered them. 

I jumped out of the bed and made my Poirot face: it appeared that in this search for truth, in this staying open to reality, we enter into a peculiar chain of contingency. To access reality, we must face the world. But we can’t do that without facing ourselves, which in turn is impossible without facing others. I left my room and there I was, standing before another human being, ready for the great knowing to really get started. I quickly realised, though, that other people aren’t there for us to know ourselves and know the world, but for something entirely different...

Back in my library I found that thousands of years after Heraclitus, a holocaust survivor began to doubt the inherited ancient Greek understanding of philosophy as a dispensable love for wisdom, and started talking about the fundamental need for a wisdom of love. Emmanuel Levinas thought we are insofar as we are for others. His search for truth revealed to him that as our search for truth begins, so begins our responsibility towards the other. Like his friend, the contemporary philosopher and liberation theologist Enrique Dussel, says, ‘When the other suffers, from his pain he utters a howl, a cry, a plea that’s the original summons.’ 

The beauty of staying open is that it requires us to face the other, consider their needs and make them the subject of a new reality. A more just reality for all of us. When we open to the other in this way, understanding happens, compassion happens, and a radical transformation of the self and the world happens. When our will to find the truth leads us in front of another human being, we see that they aren’t there so we can know. They are there so we can love. 

Now, as I open my windows wide and start giving signs of life, Thales of Miletus and his stumble come to mind and I wonder if he suspected that truth was never dispensable. What if our survival – the down-here – actually depends on it? If a millennial search for truth leads us to love, it must be worth continuing that search. We might have fallen in a well, or something even darker, but hope lives on if we make the effort to stay open to the world in all its change and harmony; to ourselves, to our flaws and our capacities; and to others, for whom we are. And as a shared notion of reality seems in danger of disappearing, I step out of my room and remind myself that reality is not a trick: it is all we have, a collection of offers and absences, a demand to stay open and respond. The place where love is.