THE GREATEST of the great philosophers followed the solitary life, a life of relative simplicity, living alone, in that sense a hard life, just the candle on the table, whereas the founder of psychoanalysis and his disciples and rivals enjoyed married lives, children and gardens which provided the warmth and intimacy of the softer life. The philosopher is interested in silence. The psychoanalyst is drawn to the other person, to words strung out; they’re prepared to encourage the horizontal halting sentences, faint noise of traffic outside, someone on the street shouting. Spare a thought for these conduits in comfortable clothing: after listening at regular set intervals to a procession of people one by one thinking aloud about themselves, they return home in the evening to encounter more words, more cries for attention, where they are expected to apply not ordinary everyday understanding, but unusual additional understanding.
More and more Sydney has come to resemble a word-factory the way it produces extra, spoken words.
Psychoanalysts have not seen the need to set up rooms away from the city (Sydney). An overlay of voices and other distractions has separated city dwellers from their natural selves, in turn aggravating all manner of obstructions, confusions, the specifically named phobias, which cry out for treatment. It is the philosophers who have shown a penchant for pastoral areas, often up in the mountains. There’s been quite a history of it; many distinguished names hiding themselves away. And then what happened? The remoteness of the places the philosophers chose as their ‘work worlds’ drew curiosity and respect from the city dwellers who couldn’t help embroidering the distant uncomfortable huts, towers, the forests and lakes, until they became further isolated and frozen in the aura of myth.
The ‘comings and goings’ of the seasons, the firm statement of geology, above all the absence of voices, can provide a feeling of closeness to the original nature of things, the beginning from where an explanation can begin to be constructed. There – in the mountains especially – philosophy can be seen as a natural force.