1 Introduction

Being, World, and Loneliness

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.

54

Being, World, and Loneliness

However, such considerations seem seriously far from complete. What is problematic about prior philosophical evaluations is that they investigate loneliness and its consequences while ignoring the implications that loneliness has on us as human beings, i.e., as beings who have the existential quality of Being-there (what Martin Heidegger calls Dasein). Philosophers have considered the potential totalitarian implications of widespread loneliness and the evolution of loneliness into a political tool, as well as its psychological and social consequences (in the case of Arendt); they have traced the roots of loneliness as a phenomenon to the particular class and material conditions under which we live (in the case of Gadamer). But in all cases, they have failed entirely to acknowledge what it means to feel “lonely” in the most originary sense, with regards to our Being. How does loneliness make us attuned; how does it determine the way in which we are in-the-world? These questions, unfortunately, go unanswered.

To hopefully mend this gap in the literature, I propose an alternative approach to accessing loneliness heavily inspired by the phenomenological methodology of Martin Heidegger.6 In taking such an approach, after Heidegger, I conceive of loneliness as an attunement or mood (Stimmung) as opposed to a mere affective state and utilize a Heideggerian framework to gain insight into the existentialphenomenal implications of loneliness on humans, i.e., how loneliness grounds our mode of Being-in-the-world. I shall approach these insights successively and gradually, providing a robust description of the phenomenon and its structural moments while remaining true to the phenomenological tradition. First, for the purpose of terminological clarity, I will construct a formal definition of loneliness in a more general sense. Next, I will explain Heideggerian mood and its relation to loneliness. After, I will further interrogate this phenomenological interpretation of loneliness as mood—which I call “Being-alone-in-the-world”—for its phenomenal content, revealing the way in which loneliness entails a flight in the face of Dasein’s

6. Although perhaps slightly unorthodox, I maintain that there is no better-suited method for philosophical inquiry into loneliness than phenomenology. I could very well spend this paper discussing and evaluating the assortment of already existing philosophical arguments regarding the nature of loneliness, weighing one against another, treating them in the critical abstract of passive and impersonal academic analysis—but the topic with which this paper is most immediately concerned is subjective human experience as relates to loneliness itself. To adopt any other investigative framework, then, would seem highly counterproductive. Though I of course intend to engage thoroughly with various philosophers’ conceptions of loneliness over the course of my essay, insofar as I strive to contribute something original to the literature, I am confident that the most promising results will come from an original application of Heideggerian phenomenological thought. Again, this may not be the most popular or conventional style of paper-writing, but I nonetheless argue that, for my purposes, it is the most appropriate.

55