3 The Problem of Loneliness as Attunement or Mood (Stimmung

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.

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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Being, World, and Loneliness

way, and our particular orientation discloses it, i.e., renders it possible for discovery, accordingly. What I encounter in my environment, for instance, when I am content (e.g., when I am going for a walk, I might notice that the sky is especially clear, that the songs of the birds are particularly enjoyable, that the acorns at my feet are for cheerily kicking, that the squirrels scurrying across front yards of my neighbors are entertaining to sit and watch, etc. etc.) is much different when I am feeling unhappy or depressed (e.g., I pay no attention to the clarity of the sky or the weather, I have no interest in doing the activities or interacting with the equipment in which I am typically involved, I am generally unmotivated and shut myself off from noticing things that would otherwise strike me, and so on). Unlike the colloquial use of the term, Heideggerian mood is not psychical, nor does it originate from “within,” as in mere emotion. Rather, it determines what is available to us in our Being-in-the-world.

What, then, do I mean by “loneliness as attunement or mood”? Perhaps more importantly: what is it that we have missed regarding loneliness as a mood until now? Have we not already sufficiently characterized it? Have the elucidations provided to us by Arendt and Gadamer fallen short of loneliness as mood, in the Heideggerian sense?

As for this latter question, my answer is yes. We have thus far constructed a formal definition of loneliness on the basis of the philosophy of Arendt and Gadamer; this is a good and necessary start. But these two reveal through their respective analyses that they consider loneliness a social or psychological experience, as opposed to an existential experience that originates from a state of ontological Being (i.e., not just feeling or experiencing, but Being, lonely). Of course, loneliness as an affective type of “feeling” deriving from social conditions is entirely possible—but this, I suggest, is not the only form of it that we encounter. In this paper, we ultimately wish to apprehend loneliness not just as something that is experienced by humans, but as something that interacts with the fundamental structure of Dasein and constitutes human reality. In loneliness, one is disconnected from the context of the world and others; but this description alone does not explain how such disconnectedness grounds one’s Being-there in the world. We know what loneliness is, and how it feels, though nonetheless lack an explicit relationship between the Being of man and the Being of loneliness. Until now, our description of loneliness has been almost exclusively psychical, playing out on the stage of a distinctive type of Being (i.e., Dasein) that itself has not been properly thematized. It is not “profound,” not “deep,” enough. It is time to rectify this shortcoming.

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