Being, World, and Loneliness immutable structure of Being. Finally, I will reflect on possibilities for future work. Piece-by-piece, I aim to construct a holistic picture of the mood of loneliness, namely how it conditions Being and world. Our first step is to consider a formal definition of loneliness in its more general signification, so as to contrast it with loneliness as mood. I will begin with this leg of our project below.
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A Formal Definition of Loneliness in General: Loneliness as Opposed to Solitude
In order to properly grasp loneliness, it will be helpful to distinguish it from another phenomenon with which it is likely to be confused: solitude. This definitional rift is what I shall use as the starting point for our investigation. Of the philosophers already mentioned, Hannah Arendt and Hans-Georg Gadamer are careful to make an explicit distinction between these two concepts.7 By understanding this difference between loneliness and solitude, insights into the nature of the former will hopefully become evident. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt describes solitude as something quite apart from loneliness. To her, solitude is essentially a being by oneself together with oneself. She explains, “The solitary man . . . is alone and therefore ‘can be together with himself’ since men have the capacity of ‘talking with themselves.’ In solitude, in other words, I am ‘by myself,’ together with myself, and therefore two-in-one. . . .”8 Arendt’s conception of solitude is strikingly discordant with what comes to mind when we imagine being alone. However, this sort of “being alone,” she contends, is 7. The absence of Heidegger’s voice in the discussion to follow might initially strike the reader as curious: if I purport to undertake a Heideggerian analysis of loneliness, then why would I leave Heidegger’s own contributions to the phenomenology of loneliness undiscussed? I offer the underwhelming reply that Heidegger simply does not have an explicit phenomenology of loneliness anywhere in his work: the closest he gets to this is in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, where he considers the phenomenon of solitude (but not loneliness) at length (Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Indiana University Press, 2012). Why not, then, at least include his remarks on solitude (especially since, as is about to become evident, a close reading of the solitary experience constitutes a significant move in my own investigation into loneliness)? This in turn is because, when Heidegger refers to “solitude,” he and I have far from the same thing in mind: while he would characterize solitude as a man’s individuation with respect to Dasein (i.e., man’s constitution as a unique, determinate individual), I—in the company of Arendt and Gadamer—conceive of normal loneliness as an affective (in the sense of psychical or psychological “feeling”) social experience. But this distinction is to be properly elaborated in the considerations that proceed. 8. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 476.
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