Being, World, and Loneliness
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Introduction
Insofar as our shared social world has profoundly and increasingly been marked by an irresistible pull towards digitalization, bureaucratic depersonalization, and generalized social alienation, the strength and stability of relationships between human beings have suffered to a tremendous degree. The accuracy of this assessment is nowhere so evident as in the everyday content of our personal lives: many of us find our time filled more and more by social media, work, and entertainment, with little room left over for friends, family, and dialogue. We are so caught up in what is digital, material, and financial that we entirely overlook community and human warmth—so much so that we often do not detect our own social privations as our own. Such first-personal observations, though certainly sufficient by themselves, are further corroborated when we turn from ourselves to others, i.e., to empirical evidence: a recent report by the Harvard-based project Making Caring Common found that 36% of all Americans experience “serious loneliness.”1 These concrete findings, in conjunction with our own subjective reflections, highlight the need for a serious treatment of loneliness as it appears in modern times. Among the viable avenues of scrutinizing the nature of loneliness, philosophical analysis stands out as a particularly promising methodological strategy. Of course, philosophical considerations of loneliness are nothing new: many prominent figures in modern philosophy have turned their attention toward this phenomenon. Hannah Arendt, in her seminal book The Origins of Totalitarianism, finds that loneliness was an essential prerequisite to the construction of Nazi- and Soviet-style totalitarian government.2 In his essay titled “Isolation as a Symptom of Self-Alienation,” Hans-Georg Gadamer understands loneliness as our no longer belonging to ourselves as a result of a sophisticated capitalist division of labor and rationalization of society.3 In contemporary times, philosophers such as Lars Svendsen4 and Ben Lazare Mijuskovic5 have written extensively about the topic. Needless to say, considerations of loneliness take up substantive philosophical space. 1. Weissbourd, Richard, Milena Batanova, Virginia Lovison, and Eric Torres. Rep. Loneliness in America, February 8, 2021. https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america. 2. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego, NY, London : Harcourt Brace, 1985. 3. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, and Chris Dawson. “Isolation as a Symptom of Self-Alienation.” Essay. In Praise of Theory Speeches and Essays, 101–13. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 4. Svendsen, Lars, Lars Svendsen, and Kerri A. Pierce. A Philosophy of Loneliness. London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2017. 5. Mijuskovic, Ben Lazare. Feeling Lonesome: The Philosophy and Psychology of Loneliness. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015.
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