Lonely, You Walk The Road To Yourself

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

"Lonely, you are walking the road to yourself!"

F. Nietzsche "Thus Speaks Zarathustra"

In works on philosophy and psychology, when considering the phenomenon of loneliness, along with this concept, the terms isolation, alienation, solitude, abandonment are used. Some researchers use these concepts as synonymous, others differentiate them. From the point of view of the author's position on the influence of loneliness on a person, one can speak of at least three different approaches. The first group consists of works in which the tragedy of loneliness, its connection with anxiety and helplessness are more emphasized. Another group unites works that unconditionally ascribe to loneliness, albeit painful, but still a creative function leading to personal growth and individuation. And, finally, the works, the authors of which distinguish loneliness, solitude and isolation according to the effects of these phenomena on a person.

In the view of the ancient philosopher Epictetus, "lonely in its concept means that someone is deprived of help and left to those who want to harm him." But at the same time, “if someone is alone, it does not mean that thereby he is alone, just as if someone is in a crowd, it does not mean that he is not alone” [16, p.243].

A prominent thinker of the twentieth century, Erich Fromm, among other existential dichotomies, distinguishes a person's isolation and, at the same time, his connection with his neighbors. At the same time, he emphasizes that loneliness arises from the awareness of one's own uniqueness, not identity to anyone [13, p.48]. “This is the awareness of oneself as a separate entity, the awareness of the brevity of his life path, the awareness that he was born regardless of his will and will die against his will; awareness of his loneliness and alienation, his helplessness in front of the forces of nature and society - all this turns his lonely, isolated existence into a real hard labor”[12, p. 144 - 145]. Fromm calls the deepest human need the need to overcome his alienation, which he associates with the inability to defend himself and actively influence the world. "The feeling of complete loneliness leads to mental destruction, just as physical hunger leads to death" - he writes [11, p. 40].

Arthur Schopenhauer is one of the brightest representatives of the philosophical position that defends the positive role of loneliness in human life: “A person can be completely himself only as long as he is alone …” [15, p. 286]. Tracing the age dynamics of the development of the need for solitude, the philosopher rightly notes that for an infant, and even a young man, loneliness is a punishment. In his opinion, the tendency to isolation and loneliness is the native element of a mature man and an old man, a consequence of the growth of their spiritual and intellectual powers. Schopenhauer is deeply convinced that loneliness burdens people who are empty and empty: “Alone with himself, the poor feel his squalor, and the great mind - all its depth: in a word, everyone then recognizes himself as what he is” [15, p. 286]. Schopenhauer considers the attraction to isolation and loneliness an aristocratic feeling and arrogantly remarks: "Every rabble is pityingly sociable" [15, p. 293]. Loneliness, according to the philosopher, is the lot of all outstanding minds and noble souls.

The German philosopher F. Nietzsche in Zarathustra's speech "The Return" sings the tragic hymn to loneliness: "O loneliness! You are my fatherland, loneliness! For too long I have lived wild in a wild foreign land, so as not to return with tears to you! " In the same place, he opposes two hypostases of loneliness: "One thing is abandonment, another is solitude …" [6, p.131].

A piercing note of loneliness is heard in the reflections of the Russian philosopher, writer VV Rozanov about the inappropriateness of man: “No matter what I do, whoever I see, I cannot merge with anything. The person is "solo" ". Rozanov's feeling of loneliness reaches such a degree of acuteness that he notes with bitterness: “… a strange feature of my psychology lies in such a strong feeling of emptiness around me - emptiness, silence and nothingness around and everywhere, - that I hardly know, I hardly believe, I hardly admit that other people are “contemporaneous” to me”[7, p.81]. Confessing his love of human unity, V. V. Rozanov, nevertheless, concludes: “But when I am alone, I am complete, and when with everyone I am not complete. I'm still better alone”[8, p.56].

From the point of view of the Russian religious philosopher N. A. Berdyaev, the problem of loneliness is the main problem of human existence. He believes that the source of loneliness is incipient consciousness and self-awareness. In his work "Self-knowledge" N. A. Berdyaev admits that loneliness was painful for him and just like Nietzsche adds: "Sometimes loneliness rejoiced, like a return from an alien world to his native world" [1, p.42]. And in reflections that “I felt loneliness most precisely in society, in communication with people”, “I am not in my homeland, not in the homeland of my spirit, in a world alien to me” Nietzsche's intonations are also heard. According to N. A. Berdyaev, loneliness is associated with rejection of the world given, with disharmony between "I" and "not-I": "In order not to be lonely, you need to say" we ", not" I ". Nevertheless, the thinker emphasizes that loneliness is valuable, and its value lies in the fact that it is “the moment of loneliness that gives rise to the personality, the self-awareness of the personality” [2, p.283]. In unison with Berdyaev, the lines of Ivan Ilyin, whom connoisseurs consider one of the most perceptive Russian thinkers, sound: “In solitude, a person finds himself, the strength of his character and the holy source of life” [5, p.86]. However, the experience of my personality, my peculiarity, uniqueness, my dissimilarity with anyone or anything in the world is acute and painful: “In my loneliness, in my existence in myself, I not only acutely experience and realize my personality, my peculiarity and uniqueness, but I also yearn for a way out of loneliness, longing for communication not with an object, but with another, with you, with us”[2, p.284].

The French philosopher and writer J.-P. Sartre, taking as the starting point of existentialism the idea that "if there is no God, then everything is permitted", put forward by F. M. Dostoevsky in the mouth of one of the brothers Karamazov, connects the concepts of loneliness and freedom: “… if God does not exist, and therefore a person is abandoned, he has nothing to rely on either in himself or outside. We are alone and there is no excuse for us. This is what I express in words: a person is condemned to be free”[9, p.327].

The famous American psychotherapist Irwin Yalom uses the concepts of isolation and loneliness interchangeably and highlights interpersonal, intrapersonal and existential isolation. “Interpersonal isolation, usually experienced as loneliness, is isolation from other individuals,” writes I. Yalom [17, p.398]. The reasons for interpersonal isolation, he considers a wide range of phenomena from geographical and cultural factors to the characteristics of a person experiencing conflict feelings in relation to loved ones. Intrapersonal isolation, according to Yalom, is “a process by which a person separates parts of himself from each other” [17, p.399]. This happens as a result of an excessive orientation towards various kinds of obligations and distrust of one's own feelings, desires, and judgments. Yalom figuratively calls existential isolation the valley of loneliness, believing it to be the separation of the individual from the world. Following the existential philosophers, he connects this type of loneliness with the phenomena of freedom, responsibility and death.

Heidegger's "The world of presence is a joint-world" [14, p.118] inspires optimism and encourages. But literally a few paragraphs later, you stumble over lines that sound paradoxical at first perception, dissonant with the previous thesis: “The loneliness of presence is also an event in the world” [14, p.120]. It puts everything in its place of Heidegger's attribution of the phenomenon of loneliness to a defective mode of co-existence. Without a shadow of regret, sorrow or reproach, the philosopher states that “presence usually and most often is kept in defective modes of care. To be for-, against-, without a friend, to pass by each other, not to have anything to do with each other are the possible ways of caring”[14, p.121]. The fact that “a second instance of a person or perhaps ten such happened next to me” is by no means a guarantee of salvation from loneliness, Heidegger believes. Nietzsche wrote about it this way: "… in the crowd you were more forsaken than ever alone with me" [6, p.159]. Thoreau literally echoes both authors: “We are often more alone among people than in the quiet of our rooms” [10, p. 161]. It seems self-evident that "loneliness in the crowd" becomes possible precisely because co-presence occurs "in a mode of indifference and foreignness." “This is loneliness in the world of objects, in the objectified world,” writes N. Berdyaev about this [2, p.286]. Indifference or defectiveness of everyday life with each other becomes an obstacle to eliminating loneliness. However, the basis of presence according to Heidegger is still the everyday being-in-the-world of people [14, p.177].

In the view of M. Buber "there are two kinds of loneliness, in accordance with what it is directed to." There is loneliness, which Buber calls a place of purification and believes that a person cannot do without it. But loneliness can also be “a stronghold of separation, where a person conducts a dialogue with himself not for the sake of checking himself and examining himself before meeting what awaits him, but in self-intoxication contemplates the formation of his soul, then this is a real fall of spirit, his sliding into spirituality”[4, p.75]. To be lonely means to feel “one on one with the world, which has become … alien and uncomfortable,” M. Buber believes. In his opinion, “in every epoch, loneliness is colder and more severe, and it is harder and harder to escape from it” [3, p.200].

Describing the current state of man, Buber poetically characterizes it "as an unprecedented fusion of social and cosmic homelessness, worldly and life-fear in the sense of life of unparalleled loneliness" [3, p.228]. Salvation from the despair of loneliness, overcoming the tearing sensation of both a "foundling of nature" and "an outcast among the noisy human world" Buber thinks in a special vision of the world on which the concept "Between" is based - "the true place and bearer of interhuman being." “When a loner recognizes the Other in all his otherness as himself, that is, as a person, and will break through to this Other from the outside, only then will he break through in this direct and transforming meeting and his loneliness”[3, p.229].

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