Being, World, and Loneliness separated from, others. Gadamer, too, apprehends this dismal character of true loneliness: the lonely person “can no longer extricate himself from [loneliness] and approach other people, but instead seems to have drowned in it.” They have not renounced, but have lost.12 The path back to public life has been obstructed, and the hell of perpetual privacy is all that remains. The split of the self into the two has been affected, but the half of the self with which correspondence in thought and introspection is possible, and in which others reside, is obfuscated. There is only, truly, the one—the lonely subject, robbed of any semblance of belonging to the common, social world. Synthesizing Arendt’s and Gadamer’s conceptualizations of loneliness as a distinctive phenomenon, I define loneliness in terms of a confining, coercive severance from himself by way of being severed from others. In her phenomenological study entitled “The Enigmatic Phenomenon of Loneliness,” Karin Dahlberg echoes my findings when she describes involuntary loneliness13 as a keen sense of “not belonging to anyone” in the form of “lack[ing] . . . context and connectedness” and “participation in the world.”14 To put it as simply as possible: loneliness is disconnection from the world, a mode of “being alone” in which there is no contact with others and one is by oneself —not as two-in-one, but as one and only.
3 The Problem of Loneliness as Attunement or Mood (Stimmung) Now that we have successfully articulated a formal signification of loneliness, we may begin to understand loneliness as attunement or mood (Stimmung). In Being and Time15 , Martin Heidegger conceives of attunement as “a basic existential way in which Dasein [the quality of Being that belongs distinctly to humans] is its ‘there’” which “implies a disclosive submission to the world, out of which we can encounter something that matters to us.”16 According to Heidegger, human beings can never exist neutrally in the world: we are always oriented towards it in some 12. Gadamer, “Isolation as a Symptom of Self-Alienation,” 104-5. 13. Dahlberg’s understanding of “voluntary loneliness” is roughly equivalent to how Arendt, Gadamer, and I understand solitude. Thus, I take her distinction between voluntary and involuntary loneliness to follow my demarcation between solitude and loneliness. In other words, according to Arendt and Gadamer, there is no “voluntary loneliness,” only solitude. 14. Dahlberg, Karin. “The Enigmatic Phenomenon of Loneliness.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being 2, no. 4 (2007): 195–207. https://doi.org/10.3402/qhw.v2i4.4960. 15. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2019. 16. Heidegger, Being and Time, 177-8.
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