While Heidegger never explicitly addressed the question of loneliness in Being and Time, commentators on loneliness appropriate his concern with death and see it as the ultimate source of loneliness; similarly, some identify loneliness with the authentic mode of existence. Notwithstanding Heidegger’s patent neglect of any formal treatment of loneliness, we can turn towards the work of other existentialists — notable among them: Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, and Ludwig Binswanger — and in those other thinkers, we see the political, psychological, and theological dimensions of loneliness explored. The Heideggerian perspective on loneliness concerns itself with death.
I start with a quotation from the opening paragraph from Clark Moustakas’ book Loneliness, published in 1961.
The basic message in this book is that loneliness is a condition of human life, an experience of being human which enables the individual to sustain, extend, and deepen his humanity. Man is ultimately and forever lonely whether his loneliness is the exquisite pain of the individual living in isolation or illness, the sense of absence caused by a loved one’s death, or the piercing joy experienced in triumphant creation. I believe it is necessary for every person to recognize his loneliness, to become intensely aware that, ultimately, in every fibre of his being, man is alone — terribly, utterly alone. Efforts to overcome or escape the existential experience of loneliness can result only in self-alienation.
Moustakas departs from Heidegger later in his work in one important respect. For Heidegger, we are not fundamentally alone. In Heideggerian parlance, Being-with is co-primordial with Being-in-the-world. In other words, we are born into a world with others already in it. It isn’t that we infer the existence of others: our existential constitution as human beings dictates that in every sense we are social creatures. Hence, the old (albeit sexist) adage: Man is a social being. Moustakas says we are alone from birth, but Heidegger would say other selves are presupposed in the ontology of the Dasein. To quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Heidegger,
And it’s because Dasein has Being-with as one of its essential modes of Being that everyday Dasein can experience being alone. Being-with is thus the a priori transcendental condition for loneliness.
If we weren’t already social to begin with, loneliness would have nothing with which it could be contrasted. It is because others exist in this world with us — and that we are not alone — that loneliness becomes possible.
We aren’t in the world alone by default; rather, it is in resolute anticipation of our own death as annihilation of all possibilities that we are alone. For Heidegger, we aren’t born alone: we die alone. On the other hand, Moustakas shows that loneliness is connected not to the inevitability of our own death, but the death of others. In this book, he shares part of his own brush with loneliness in his deliberation over the health of his daughter.
The alternative to owning up to our loneliness is self-alienation. We are alienated from our true selves insofar as we avoid it. Self-alienation is a mark of inauthentic existence, or in his terms, “loneliness anxiety.”
Insidious fears of loneliness exist everywhere, nourished and fed by a sense of values and standards, by a way of life, which centers on acquisition and control. The emphasis on conformity, following directions, imitation, being like others, striving for power and status, increasingly alienates man from himself. The search for safety, order, and lack of anxiety through prediction and mastery eventually arouses inward feelings of despair and fears of loneliness. Unable to experience life in a genuine way, unable to relate authentically to his own nature and to other selves, the individual in Western culture often suffers from a dread of nothingness.
Like the existential analyst Ludwig Binswanger who says that it is the death of the loved one that is significant, Moustakas emphasizes the death of others. In the book Dreadful Freedom, A Critique of Existentialism, Margerie Grene criticizes Heidegger on his own terms.
Now he is liberated from the many by binding himself to a true one, that is, to his own solitary projection of himself into the future, a future shaped by the fearful realization of his mortal destiny. Here no one can follow him; he creates a world and a history out of the very fact of their inevitable cessation-and in that world or that history, as there is room for only one catastrophe, so there is room for only one solitary soliloquizing actor. Others are stage properties, placed perhaps by chance, but manipulated as he will by this strange virtuoso, playing, without author or audience, as his own sense of tragic fitness may direct.
The existential theologian Paul Tillich also recognizes the loneliness of death. I believe loneliness necessarily takes on a theological context insofar as it is connected to death, since the anticipation of death as experienced by the believer is different than it is by the non-believer. Tillich’s remarks on the throes of death and loneliness are chilling.
Then there is the ultimate loneliness of having to die. In the anticipation of our death we remain alone. No communication with others can remove it, as no other’s presence in the actual hour of our dying can conceal the fact it is our death, and our death alone. In the hour of our death we are cut off from the whole universe and everything in it. We are deprived of all the things and beings that made us forget our being alone. Who can endure this loneliness?
I believe Heidegger’s philosophy can be most rightly criticized as a lonely philosophy when examined by his statements on death. Maybe we aren’t born alone, and maybe we don’t go through life alone; but we die alone.
