Being, World, and Loneliness as its they-self, wherein it is weighed down into the lonely mood by refusing others as such, and judging them instead as practically useful objects. In solitude, we acknowledge that others are there and that we are among them; in loneliness, we acknowledge that others are there and that we are apart from them; in the mood of loneliness, we do not acknowledge that others are there at all, because we are so completely submerged in the material (and digital) world of equipmental things. Others lose their “otherness” and manifest to us as hollow shells. This peculiar appearance of “otherless” others is a sign of Dasein’s fleeing from itself, because it is contradictory—Dasein is also always Mitsein, so can never really be alone.
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Conclusion and Considerations for Future Work
To finally bring our investigation of loneliness to a close: I posit that loneliness, perceived through such a lens and understood in the Heideggerian sense of attunement, is Dasein’s Being-alone-in-the-world, marked by a fleeing in the face of its own existential quality of Being-with that arises through dispersal into the “they.” This conceptualization differs starkly from that of both Hannah Arendt and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who describe loneliness as something that happens to the individual rather than something that the individual is. I feel as though there is considerable room for further clarifying some of the ideas I have presented in this paper. Most striking to me are two in particular: firstly, it seems that there is room for further interpretation of my conception of loneliness as attunement in the context of Heidegger’s notion of the ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), i.e., of the utility-oriented way in which Dasein proximally and for the most part discovers and relates to objects in the world. (In this view, we do not usually encounter objects in the mode of detached, scientific contemplation/observation, but instead as pieces of equipment for us to use alongside other equipment in order to achieve our goals.) It appears that, in loneliness, this readiness-to-hand is exaggerated to the point of compulsivity; it is no longer a point of description that human beings are involved in equipment for the carrying out of objectives, but an ideological norm that this ought to be the case with all things, including other humans. This coincidence between readiness-to-hand and the transformation of others into equipmental objects under loneliness is not something that has fully been fleshed out here, but the trappings of a more thematic connection are surely evident. Secondly, there is the apparent connection between the mood of loneliness and 64
