Episode 148 - Loneliness

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to

[00:00:18] David: Overthink.

The Podcast, where two philosophers try and help you navigate the difficult waters of modern life.

[00:00:25] Ellie: I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:26] David: And I'm David Pena Guzman.

There is a myth out there about philosophers, Ellie, that I'm sure you and I are very familiar with, and that is the myth that philosophers are lonely hermits that spend most of their time in a room with no other people spinning their thoughts and generating novel and original ideas without any kind of social contact or social support.

The historian, Barbara Taylor says that this myth of the lonely philosopher runs throughout the history of Western philosophy, and it stems from an idea that we already find as early as Plato, which is the idea that philosophical thinking, maybe like thinking in general, is a kind of inner monologue.

It's like a voice inside your head saying things and developing thoughts, and that in order for that voice to work, you need to put yourself in a position of utter solitude.

[00:01:23] Ellie: Let's think about why philosophical work might have the reputation of being lonely, but don't worry for you non philosophers.

We're also gonna be talking about lonely loneliness in general, not just about ourselves, but I do think that there's an extent to which the kind of work we have to do as philosophers, which involves long periods of sustained reading, writing and thinking requires maybe not loneliness, but at least solitude, which is a distinction will be traumatizing in the episode.

I definitely find that I get my best work done in the morning, and so when I usually get up, I don't like to talk to anybody. There is a ban on speaking to me about logistics. I don't even check my email first thing in the morning.

[00:02:04] David: Except like your inner monologuer.

[00:02:06] Ellie: No, I have a self ban on logistics as well. No, I just use that time for those core practices of philosophical work, and if I feel disturbed during that period, like if there are interruptions, then it really throws me and so I build my schedule and have the luxury of building my schedule largely around that.

I never teach before 11:00 AM if I can help it. I like to teach in the afternoons and in large part, that's because the morning is my best time to do my work. Because it involves a sort of focus. And that focus is best sustained when I'm alone.

[00:02:45] David: We're the opposite of one another in this regard.

[00:02:47] Ellie: Yeah, one of us is a thinker and one of us is just an emailer.

[00:02:53] David: I am the emailer of overthink after all.

[00:02:56] Ellie: You actually are. Yeah. I never respond to, to you, you are the person who has the task in our division of labor. Yeah. I never responded to the emails. You do.

[00:03:05] David: No, but we're opposite in the sense that I always request morning classes because I feel like my morning time is also the time when my mind is sharpest, and I prefer to use that in interactions with other people, especially students. I really derive a lot of pleasure and a lot of gratification from that.

But I mean, aside from what you mentioned that, you know, we read, we research and that requires solitude. I think another aspect of philosophical work that contributes to this association between philosophers and loneliness is this expectation of originality, right?

A philosopher must say novel things, original things we must think things that other people haven't thought before. And in order to ensure that we have to break away from the doxa right, from the general public. And I think that also motivates this idea that the reason we have original insights is because we enact this retreat away from the community or from the social or from the public.

[00:04:08] Ellie: And Levinas argues the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argues in his book Otherwise than Being that intellectual solitude for those who have the freedom to engage others is already not real solitude. And so what we're describing as this kind of breaking away is contingent upon the community from which we are emerging.

So the intellectual solitude of this kind of subject is that of somebody who already belongs to a community and is thus in relation. So the structure of every question that's posed in research or in thought, even if it's just posed to oneself implies the existence of an interlocutor or a community of interlocutors.

And I think that's absolutely right. So it's not absolute solitude, but rather a solitude relative to actual interactions with other people. The questions that we pose are often ones that emerge in conversation with others.

[00:04:57] David: No, that's right. And another way of saying that is that every inner monologue is already a dialogue. Like there is a question and an answer kind of structure that makes it communicative.

[00:05:07] Ellie: I have been saying that for many years.

[00:05:08] David: And I mean, I'm really interested in this myth or trope of the lonely philosopher. It's something that I have published about in a book that I recently co-authored with our friend Rebekah Spera from Emory University called Professional Philosophy and its Myths, and it's a meta philosophical reflection like.

What is philosophy? How do we define it? What's the difference between it and the social sciences and the natural sciences, so on and so forth. And in it we have a chapter called The Philosopher as one where we focus on this myth that the philosopher is a lonely individual figure who generates by being alone.

And you know, we talk about the fact that this myth is false. And we notes that even the most lonely philosophers, if you think about Descartes like in his stove, heated room, or some other kind of hermity, philosophical figure,

[00:06:01] Ellie: Zarathushtra perhaps.

[00:06:03] David: They're always enmeshed in a community even when they think that they are not. And so we talk about how a lot of, especially male philosophers, for example, who were extremely prolific throughout the history of philosophy, were only able to be prolific on the backs of the labor of people around them, like their wives, their sisters, their siblings, their cousins, their mentors, their teachers, whatever you wanna say.

[00:06:30] Ellie: People love to dunk on Thoreau for his mom doing his laundry.

[00:06:34] David: Yeah, exactly. And even when you think about the spaces, the physical spaces where philosophical thinking is thought to happen, especially solitary spaces like a monastery , even those spaces are already social spaces with social norms.

Like a monastery is a social space with very particular social norms. And so it's never the case that philosophy ever really takes root or flourishes with only one individual.

Today we are talking about loneliness.

[00:07:12] Ellie: Why is the experience of loneliness so painful?

[00:07:15] David: What conditions might give rise to loneliness?

[00:07:18] Ellie: And what is the difference between loneliness and solitude?

[00:07:22] David: For an extended version of this episode, community discussion and More subscribed to Overthink on Substack.

[00:07:33] Ellie: There have been a number of philosophers who've written about loneliness. Philosophers, as you probably know, if you've been listening to our show for the almost 150 episodes that we've been doing, usually have very diverging opinions on different topics that is philosophers usually disagree. And one thing that we found in researching this episode is that it seems to be the case a lot less with loneliness.

The literature generally agrees about the key descriptions and features of loneliness such that there were so many thinkers that were like basically saying the same thing as other thinkers, not to discount them. Maybe they're just like all really hitting on this essential central phenomenon. Right.

[00:08:13] David: They were not lonely enough when they were philosophising about loneliness. They were just echoing the crowd.

[00:08:18] Ellie: Right. Well, and it's just the kind of thing where every article basically begins by saying something to the effect of, everyone knows what loneliness feels like. We've all been lonely before.

It's a key part of the human experience. And so there's this kind of convergence on the prevalence of loneliness, perhaps even the ubiquity of it. And then most philosophers go on to say that loneliness is a negative state and specifically a negative subjective state. It's a state rather than an emotion, but of course it has emotional components, philosopher Lars Svendsen, for instance, a state that loneliness has both affective and cognitive dimension.

So let's start here in thinking about Svendsen's version of this claim.

[00:08:59] David: Yeah. And I think this moves us away from the idea that it's like a simple feeling. I wonder whether maybe we would say that it's a mood.

[00:09:06] Ellie: Okay. I don't think I would say it's a mood, but I do think it relates to moods in the same way that it relates to emotions and cognition.

But I would say that loneliness is a state. It's a state of relationality or an absence of relationality.

[00:09:21] David: Okay. Fair enough. And I think one definition that we often see, or at least one that I came to in my research is that it

[00:09:28] Ellie: Across.

[00:09:29] David: Yeah. I came across, thank you. I'm like, what is the preposition you need?

[00:09:32] Ellie: You need a little relationality. You couldn't get there alone.

[00:09:36] David: And it, it's the following and it's that it's a subjective state where there is a misalignment between someone's actual social relations. And the number or types of relationships that they desire. And so this is a misalignment that obviously has negative effects, which is why loneliness is never described as a positive state for anybody.

[00:09:58] Ellie: Well, virtually never.

[00:10:00] David: But the philosopher Bouke de Vries, who is the author of a paper on loneliness that shaped my thinking about this, specifically says that it's a state where there's a misalignment between what you have and what you wish you had, such that that state is disutility inducing.

So it brings about a negative state of affairs for you. So basically, yeah, loneliness means having fewer relationships than you wish you had, or feeling like the relationships you have are not as intimate or as close or as reliable or as reciprocal as you wish they were.

[00:10:38] Ellie: Man, I have definitely experienced both of those, but I think especially the latter, I've sometimes remarked in previous romantic relationships that I feel lonelier in those relationships than I do single.

And these aren't even like horrible relationships. It's just like, oh, there's a real mismatch here. I feel terribly lonely. So, I think that's super helpful to think about how it doesn't just mean Yeah, fewer relationships, but maybe also this misalignment I mentioned that we were gonna talk about Svendsen a little bit, and then we like went off in a different direction, which is totally fine.

This is super interesting what you just mentioned, but in his book, A Philosophy of Loneliness, Svendsen emphasizes that loneliness is not defined by a lack of social support. So this I think, really relates to what you were just saying from the de Vries after all. You can have social support and still be lonely.

And this is one way of getting at the distinction between loneliness or solitude and aloneness. You can't be alone in a crowd, but you can be lonely in a crowd.

[00:11:34] David: Yeah. I felt lonely in a crowd many times, but yeah, I think you're right about that.

[00:11:38] Ellie: In what crowds have you felt most lonely?

[00:11:40] David: I mean, I think in, places like bars for example, you know, they can be very lonely places if you go on your own, even if you're surrounded by a lot of other people who are bumping up to you, like shoulder to shoulder.

If you go, like in sporting events, I have felt lonely. Even in political demonstrations where I've shown up by myself without like my clique of friends

[00:11:59] Ellie: as a counter protestor?

[00:12:01] David: Yeah. I felt loneliness in those cases and another feature of the difference between loneliness and solitude is that loneliness has like a necessarily negative valence, or maybe like most of the time it's thought to have that negative valence, whereas solitude does not have that association. Loneliness involves discomfort, pain, suffering. It is disutility inducing, a s Svendsen points out, but when we think about solitude, it doesn't seem to have a particular valence attached.

Like solitude is being on your own and spending time with yourself. And that could be either neutral, I mean it could be negative, but it also could be neutral or it could be positive.

[00:12:47] Ellie: Yeah. And so you were sort of saying it has a necessary negative valence, and then you qualified that by saying, well, most of the time, and I just wanna be really, let's clarify that because I think that can lead to confusion. Otherwise, when we're talking about most philosophers converging on this view of loneliness, I don't think that we read anybody that said that loneliness did not have a negative subjective valence. There are occasionally people who will say, well, there's a silver lining in loneliness, one of those is Nietzche who we'll come back to a little bit later. But that doesn't mean that it's not uncomfortable or painful. And so I do think 2 0 1, in our research, we came across views that treat loneliness as a negative subjective state.

[00:13:29] David: Sure. Another clarification that I think is worth mentioning is that we are theorizing, following some thinkers, the distinction between loneliness and solitude, but philosophers who write about the experience of being by yourself don't always systematically differentiate between them. So sometimes people write about loneliness and it's positive and negative sides or solitude, and it's negative and positive sides. So it's not as systematic, especially because that distinction, you know, it's an English language distinction, loneliness versus solitude.

That doesn't exactly map onto the distinctions that other natural languages have. So that's also another source of this ambiguity.

[00:14:08] Ellie: Maybe this is the point at which you can raise the, I was gonna say the issue of Nietzsche, but that sounds very,

[00:14:14] David: Nietzsche had a lot of issues

[00:14:14] Ellie: Yeah, he sure did. But I knew you were gonna mention something from Nietzsche, and it seems relevant here.

[00:14:19] David: No. Okay, great. This is maybe a time to just jump directly into that, because one of the things that draws me to Nietzsche is his reflections on solitude. And I love my solitude. It's something that I cherish profoundly.

And Nietzsche talks about how important solitude is for philosophical originality and for literary and artistic creation more generally. And he's kind of tapping into that myth that I mentioned earlier of the lonely philosopher who recedes into this space where they are by themselves and then they start generating novel ideas.

But he has a couple of aphorisms in the gay science that really highlight his views on this point. He says at one point that all great works of art and poetry and literature are monological, that's the word that he uses. And so monologue refers to, I'm thinking with my inner voice by myself, without the distractions of other people and without the distractions of a social space.

And because they are monological, it means that in order to create them, I need to pull myself away and as he says, I need to forget the world. So I need to like bracket everything around me and recede into myself.

[00:15:35] Ellie: Yeah. That's me before I've had my coffee or while I'm having it in solitude and silence.

And I think that is a very powerful antidote to our culture's emphasis on just like constant connection. And so I think, you know, check out Nietzsche's Gay Science if you want a reason to not have screen time in the morning. But even if somebody like Nietzsche doesn't clearly distinguish between loneliness and solitude, I think the distinction is extremely helpful.

And it is most clearly thematized by the philosopher Hannah Arendt. She writes about loneliness and solitude in a way that I just think is like super, super interesting. It actually pertains to the dialogue point that you mentioned earlier. So, Arendt describes solitude as being in dialogue with oneself.

When we're alone, we're still in relation. We're just in relation with ourselves, and so it's not a withdrawal from relationality, it's simply a different kind of relationality, and she actually thinks that solitude is essential for thinking.

[00:16:40] David: Yeah. And the contrast here is loneliness then for our Arendt, because for Arendt, what happens with loneliness as opposed to solitude is that loneliness entails a disrupted or corrupted relationship to oneself and to others. As she describes it, she says, loneliness, this is a quote from Arendt, is a situation in which I as a person, feel myself deserted by all human companionship.

So yeah, it's feeling abandoned by others, I would say.

[00:17:13] Ellie: And this is a situation with which she would have been very familiar firsthand. She had to go into exile from Germany with the rise of the Nazis because she was Jewish. And one interesting thing that I learned from an article by Samantha Rose Hill, who's an Arendt scholar, I feel like I always go back and forth between Arendt and Arendt.

Usually it's like, it's just easier in English to say Arendt. But then there's like, you know, as with the pedantic people on our YouTube channel, there was somebody who was like, it's ent. And I'm like, well actually forgive my bad German accent. But it's like. It's actually Arendt, but Okay. Whatever. She also lived in the US for a really long time.

So whatever. I started off by saying Arendt, I might just move to Arendt 'cause it's easier. And Arendt scholar, Samantha Rose Hill, has this article where she describes how a rent actually felt particularly lonely while teaching at UC Berkeley in the 1950s. She was stuck out in California, horribly lonely place to be under the palm trees in the sun.

But she was away from her intellectual community. And by then she was also already well known and she found herself teaching to these giant crowds of adoring students. That was a really lonely experience for her. And so her loneliness was partly a function of being too much in the public eye.

[00:18:28] David: Yeah. I mean, it's lonely at the top.

And that's something that a lot of people who experience fame and who become celebrities in whatever domain report. That once you reach a certain level of notoriety. Your ability to form meaningful relationships with others kind of dissipates. Because you can have fans, you can have managers, you can have like adoring students, but you don't have peers.

 And so the absence of equality and reciprocity contributes to the sense that you are in the crowd, but also in a meaningful way, kind of separated from it giving rise to that negative experience of feeling like you've been abandoned, deserted, or like the kinds of relationships that you currently have are not the ones that you wish you had.

[00:19:14] Ellie: Well, I also think that one reason for that is that famous people have to question whether those they meet in social settings are just trying to use them for some reason. And I think that goes back to the point we discussed earlier about how loneliness isn't merely the absence of interaction, but may involve having relationships that are unsatisfying to you.

Right? And here the case would be that you're always having to. Ask whether there's an ulterior motive. That's terribly lonely. And I wanna say something here though, about what loneliness can give rise to for Arendt. Because as sad, as famous people's loneliness is, there are bigger problems in her view.

And for her, the main problem with loneliness is that it primes us for totalitarianism. When we're cut off from human companionship, we feel abandoned, like you said, and we start to lose our grip even on reality. So the difference between fact and fiction starts to become blurry, and we become susceptible to dangerous ideologies.

And as we become more and more isolated, we stop having new experiences and this means we get further caught up in the stories we tell ourselves about the world. We're not getting any feedback from the world that might push back against our interpretation. And so this is a sense in which loneliness breeds totalitarianism.

[00:20:29] David: Yeah. And I think it's in that gap that thinks like propaganda really operate. Right? They take advantage of this breakdown in our perception of what is real to take advantage of our affect, our feelings, our emotions. And I do think that the current rise of fascism in the United States can be explained at least partially through the fraying of social bonds.

The fact that people don't have a sense of community, they don't feel like they are part of a shared project. And that does leave us very vulnerable to the machinations of a strong man, who promises us unity in some way, in this case, through force and through the identification of scapegoats.

And you know, when we think about the rise of fascism, fascism comes from an Italian root, from an Italian term that means bundle of sticks. Like a number of sticks, like held together by like a string or by the hands. And so it's a promise of unity for individuals who feel disunified or who feel scattered.

[00:21:32] Ellie: Exactly. And that's also something that Arendt talks about in her description of the mass in totalitarianism. The mass is not a community, it is a collection of isolated individuals. And I should say, I mentioned earlier that loneliness primes us for totalitarianism, but then I said it breeds totalitarianism.

I just wanna disambiguate that point because she says it primes us for totalitarianism. But that's a little bit different. I think I, it was maybe impre when I said it breeds totalitarianism, because instead what's happening is it's just like allowing totalitarian forces to take root in us, but it's not itself causing totalitarianism.

I think what you are identifying here though, in terms of the potential relation to our current situation is absolutely something that I was thinking about. And anytime I teach Arendt on this point, students are really interested in its relevance to the present day. Because when you think about the kind of loneliness that we are seeing today, it's even so much more easy to experience than when a rent was writing this two thirds of a, or three quarter after quarters of a century ago almost now.

[00:22:45] David: Yeah. No, that's right. And I think what, okay, so what I like about our rent's writings on totalitarianism is the way she focuses on affect in her description of the masses and the population.

And if we think about loneliness as something that inclines us toward negative affect, it makes it such that fascist leaders and totalitarian ideologies have like a ready made hook to pick us up with, in order to carry on, to carry us on this, project of destruction and victim blaming. And I think this tells us something about the nature of totalitarianism and how it operates, which is that it's not about just like beliefs that people have about the way politics should be organized.

A lot of it is about letting dark energies, repressed energies and feelings exit. And that's what fascism and totalitarianism give us. They give us a release that make us feel as if we're kind of being unified again, but through the figure of the strong man or through the figure of the party, it's like an external unification of the self.

[00:23:50] Ellie: And it's so different from the solitude that she describes, because the loneliness as we have it here, and I would say especially in our current situation of people feeling really lonely and isolated from one another because they're just stuck on their screens all day, actually involves an absence of relation to the self, an inability to relate to oneself.

It's almost like we escape the dialogue with ourselves by finding a form of pseudo connection online. And so I think building up solitude as an art is actually a really important antidote to loneliness.

[00:24:25] David: We live in a lonely world, and in the origins of totalitarianism, Arendt says that loneliness used to be a rare experience for marginalized people like the elderly. Right. And even some, social science research today does associate the elderly with the experience of loneliness.

[00:24:47] Ellie: Oh yeah. It's a huge problem.

[00:24:49] David: But there's been this evolution in our collective experience of loneliness where it's now become an everyday experience for the majority of people in the 20th century. So it went from being rare and targeting particular people to being relatively widespread and quite common. We have reason to believe that that loneliness is becoming even more of a central feature of our everyday experience.

And it's become such a problem globally that some governments have started taking really intriguing steps to try to combat the collective problem of individual loneliness. So for example, even before the COVID pandemic, the UK launched this end loneliness campaign that got a lot of attention in the media.

And in 2021, Japan appointed a minister of loneliness, like an actual cabinet position of a minister whose job is to address loneliness in Japan.

[00:25:51] Ellie: Minister for Loneliness really sounds like something out of the novel. The reason that you're seeing these efforts at a national level is because we are beginning to realize how negatively loneliness affects people's lives.

In his book on loneliness, Svendsen points out that loneliness is not a disease in the technical sense, but that it is associated with negative health outcomes for many people. And so for one, loneliness is a strong predictor of mortality. The effect on mortality risk, he says, can be compared to smoking 10 to 15 cigarettes a day.

[00:26:25] David: Oh, wow.

[00:26:25] Ellie: Yes. And it is greater than the impact of obesity or physical inactivity. And I will also say he points out that loneliness can increase the risk of dementia, speed up aging, and decrease sleep quality. And I'll just say I have noticed that a lot with my dad, who recently moved from living alone to moving in home for the elderly.

And like we can critique homes for the elderly in our society on many different fronts. But he's in a great place and it has been so transformative for him just to see how he went from being really lonely to now having social interaction. And not just in that sort of mood or emotional level, but also for cognition.

I've witnessed huge improvements in his memory, in his ability to sustain conversations. Like, it's just incredible.

[00:27:16] David: Yeah. And I mean, you're alluding to physical and cognitive health here. We obviously also have to include mental health, you know, more generally.

[00:27:24] Ellie: Oh yeah.

[00:27:25] David: Like, depressive tendencies. It's something that hit me when I first did a postdoc. Remember after I finished my PhD, I moved to Canada, to Sudbury, Ontario to do a postdoc.

[00:27:37] Ellie: David, you were so lonely.

[00:27:39] David: I was extremely lonely in this very small Canadian town, and it was my first experience of what I now would call a mild depression.

And it was my partner who said, Hey, I think you are slightly depressed. We need to think about it in those terms. And it was due to the loneliness that I felt there. It was a loneliness, literally in the sense that I had no connections to the town, but also because it was so cold that I spent most of my time indoors doing academic work in my stove, heated room, you know, like Decartes.

[00:28:11] Ellie: Okay Descartes.

[00:28:12] David: Yeah, like Descartes. And it was. A really difficult time for me.

[00:28:17] Ellie: You didn't use that as an excuse to go through the whole course of the meditations that Descartes prescribes. He says we should all do it at least once in our lives.

[00:28:25] David: I did not do that. But, you know, independently of whether we're talking about mental health or physical health, I think if we do recognize that loneliness has these public health implications on a large scale, one question that we might ask is whether the state has not just like an opportunity to intervene, but a moral obligation to address the loneliness of its citizens.

[00:28:51] Ellie: Interesting.

[00:28:52] David: And so I was doing research about loneliness, for a couple of weeks before this episode. And then I ran into this literature of primarily analytic philosophers writing about this very question About whether the government has an obligation or incurs an obligation to take proactive steps against loneliness.

[00:29:13] Ellie: Yeah. That's so fascinating to me. I'm curious what you found. I don't know this literature at all.

[00:29:20] David: One view maintains that the state at the very least, so it's like a minimalist claim, at the very least, the state has an obligation to intervene against loneliness in situations where the state has enacted policies that directly contribute to the loneliness of its citizens.

[00:29:36] Ellie: Ooh. Such as?

[00:29:37] David: So the philosopher whom I mentioned book de Vries, he uses the example of COVID. Obviously during COVID states past regulations and policies that diminished our ability to travel. You know, we couldn't go to work. Even shopping was a very lonely experience, and of course the states were justified in doing that because we wanted to curb the spread of the virus.

But that doesn't deny the fact that the state directly contributed to the loneliness of the citizens. And so he says. States that imposed those limitations, incurred an obligation to address the problem, and he gives examples of what the states could have done but didn't do. Which includes things like funding widespread, maybe online, since we couldn't do it in person meditation sessions for people to deal with loneliness or offering free state funded family therapy and couples therapy sessions.

Because we know that during confinement, things like domestic abuse went through the roof 'cause the home became a pressure cooker. And it's not just like, it's not just COVID. That's a kind of easy example insofar as it's intuitive why that created loneliness. There's another example that I also find very compelling, and this comes from the Bioethicist Zohar Lederman, who is writing about the health of Palestinians, especially in Gaza.

And he was writing about this before the 2023 conflict. But also afterwards. And he says, look, we know that the Israeli state for a long time has been doing things that produce loneliness in the Palestinian population. And so he says the state of Israel has a debt, and that's a debt. You know, the state of Israel has a lot of debts to the Palestinians, but one of them, he says, is to deal with the loneliness that it is producing in this community.

[00:31:29] Ellie: Okay. So what comes to mind there for me immediately is the restricted travel and freedom of movement.

[00:31:37] David: Yeah that's what he's talking about.

[00:31:39] Ellie: Okay. So, yeah. Anything else? Or that's really his main focus here?

[00:31:43] David: Yeah, and just like the conditions of oppression in general.

[00:31:46] Ellie: Yeah. I wasn't sure about like right to gathering laws or anything like that.

[00:31:50] David: Yeah. Anything that prevents individuals from pursuing the social relationships that they wish they could would then be something that exacerbates and drives loneliness.

[00:32:00] Ellie: Okay.

[00:32:00] David: But then there is this other view this comes primarily from the philosopher Kimberley Brownley, who writes about this in her 2020 book, Being Sure of Each Other.

[00:32:10] Ellie: Ooh, I really like that title. I've heard of Brownley, but I don't know this book.

[00:32:14] David: She writes about how states always have a moral obligation to address loneliness because social connection, the kind that enables human flourishing is a fundamental human right. And so a number of people have picked up her view and ran with it and written about it in this literature.

And many of them point to some of the things that states could do to minimize loneliness in the population that are very practical. So, for example, people talk about funding spaces of connection, like funding, parks, libraries, community centers. Art fairs, ensuring that there is free, or at least very accessible public transport so that people can go and see their loved ones or their friends or just go out.

There are also proposals for encouraging and incentivizing intergenerational contacts. So that, especially the elderly who are especially impacted by loneliness have a way out of this. So I've seen some proposals that are really interesting about like, installing infant care facilities in elderly care facilities so that there is contact between elderly people and young people.

And it kind of kills two birds with one stone. You know, that kind of thing. But then there are all other kinds of proposals about like giving people access to pets, which I think is kind of cute and adorable and, and also a way to combat loneliness. Where I stopped following this literature is when people started talking about AI companions.

[00:33:50] Ellie: Okay. Okay. Well, so maybe I'm curious to hear a little bit more about that. But one thing that just comes to mind for me here is how the rights lead to correlative obligations for other people. So let's leave aside AI right now, and maybe states, because you know, it's one thing to create a public park, but I'm thinking about Amia Srinivasan's arguments around the right to sex and how, like if we say that people have a right to sex, then does that mean that other people have obligations to provide sex?

And that's kind of a horrifying conclusion, especially when we think about how that would look in practice from a gender perspective. So, yeah, I guess I'm curious about if there is a right not to be lonely. Does that mean that there is an obligation for other people to provide social connection and if so, to whom?

To how many people under what circumstances? It raises a lot of practical questions for me.

[00:34:49] David: If I have a right to sex, then do you have to give it to me?

The answer is no. In connection to loneliness, if I have a right to social connection, does that mean that you have to be my friend in order to fix my loneliness? The answer is also no for these thinkers, and the reason for that is because I have a right to the conditions for social connectivity, but not to social connection with any one particular person because my human right to social connectivity must be balanced against the right to privacy and also the right to isolation.

If somebody wants to live off of the grid, they have that right. And it would be a wrong to prevent them from that. And so here, I think we also can just like emphasize that this is an obligation on the part of the state. It's the state that discharges that, not particular citizens.

[00:35:41] Ellie: And then maybe that's an opportunity to think about AI because I think a question is whether AI, companionship would give us the kind of social support that would mitigate loneliness. I think our answer to that would likely be no. But thinking about Arendt's definition of loneliness as a situation in which I feel myself deserted by all human companionship.

So for Arendt it would be defined in terms of a human connection or absence thereof. And I guess you could come back and say, well, if we take. Arendt's claim. Seriously, that solitude is a dialogue with oneself. Could we say that we could have that through the medium of an AI? I'm not so sure about that.

I have to think about that more. I wouldn't wanna, yeah, maybe dismiss it outright because like for instance, if you do free writing in your journal and that provides a support for your thinking and a dialogue with yourself. Maybe we would wanna say that's not so different from using an AI mediator.

I'm not sure.

[00:36:49] David: Yeah. Maybe I as you know, I do tend to be very suspicious of AI in general, but the case that I find really interesting here is the case of pets, not surprisingly, since I work on animal studies.

[00:37:02] Ellie: Oh yeah. Okay. Tell us about that.

[00:37:03] David: A lot of these thinkers recognize that in some cases, human connection is very difficult to build, right?

Like making friends can be hard if you're alone, if you're in a big city, whatever the case might be. And for better or worse, non-human companions are companions that satisfy deep emotional needs that we have. You know, we, we know from a sociological research that people are unwilling to trade their pets.

People are unwilling to sell their pets for like $3 million if you were to offer it to them because there's a genuine connection. And so I do draw a distinction between our relationship to AIs and our relationship to non-human living organisms. And so just the idea of like a state owned pet providing facility is wonderful to me.

It's like, oh, I wanna pet, let me go see what the state has in store. I love the idea.

[00:38:02] Ellie: I sometimes lean towards pet abolitionism, but maybe that's a different discussion. So I will say, you know, on the face of it, that seems cute, but I think the question is, would more parks and pets address the root causes of loneliness? Because I think if we're talking about the kinds of features of our societies that lead to loneliness, we need to be looking pretty deeply.

And couple of things that I would focus on here. One is the nature of work under capitalism. I mean, one of Marx's central claims is that capitalism alienates worker from worker and also worker from capitalists. And so there are distinctions both between classes and within classes that emerge with the nature of the work that we do.

I also think. As much as I love working from home, and that was actually one of the reasons that I went into academia to begin with. I think entirely working from home can absolutely produce more loneliness as well. And when we treat work as simply about the bottom line of productivity that is a recipe for loneliness.

And another thing beyond the nature of work under capitalism that I would think about here is what's sometimes known as the male loneliness epidemic. And that was one of the reasons I was interested in doing this episode, actually, is to probe the male loneliness epidemic a little bit. But what we found from a Pew report is that the male loneliness epidemic might not even be a thing, like it might not exist because men don't report loneliness at higher rates than women do.

16% of Americans who vary greatly by age, but not by gender report being lonely. However, I would say that self-report data is not enough to say that the male loneliness epidemic doesn't exist, because I think if you think about the actual communication that's at work in different kinds of gendered relationships, you can see how absolutely the sorts of relationships that men have would tend to lead to loneliness. Of course, something we've discussed about in previous episodes, and that I've worked on in my research, is very relatively low levels of self-disclosure among men compared to women. Men very often treat romantic partners, especially if those partners are women as their main and even only source of emotional support.

They're not talking to each other enough about their problems. They're not confiding in each other asking for advice very much. That same report also showed, you know, in this vein, that men and women have close friends at the same rate, although I really have questions about how that's defined. But men communicate with their close friends less than women do.

And so I think we can think about both the frequency and the depth of men's communication with one another producing what we might call loneliness epidemic.

[00:40:44] David: Yeah. And you've talked also about male alexithymia. So it's like, do men not report loneliness because they don't know that they are lonely?

[00:40:52] Ellie: Yeah. Yeah. Because they like, don't tend to have a very good connection to their own feelings and be able to name them, which is really sad. But yes.

[00:41:00] David: And, and it is a real problem, very well documented one. And so I like that you're bringing up this question of the root causes, right? Yeah.

Maybe a cat or a dog is not gonna solve these deeper problems tied to capitalism, tied to the gender system that dominates our way of life. I would say there are other structural causes that also we need to think about that make the problem even more intractable. I think here about the nuclear family, I did not grow up in a nuclear family.

I grew up being raised by a group of aunts and uncles and grandparents and no father figure. And so from my perspective, the nuclear family was very scary because it seemed relative to my experience of childhood, like a shrinking of my peers world. And so the value that we place in like blood and family and, never leaving your family, no matter how difficult or toxic the relationships might be, it can conduce to feelings of loneliness, especially if you don't want to or if you don't feel like you can disclose things to your family members that are essential to your wellbeing.

Yeah. Or if you just can't have the kind of relationship that you wish you could for a number of reasons, right? Like if your family is your whole world. It's possible that you feel like you are alone in that little crowd. You know, like the family as a small crowd or as a small mess. in the Arendtian sense.

Aside from that, I would also add as a structural problem, urban planning.

[00:42:31] Ellie: Oh my God, yes.

[00:42:33] David: It's something that we talked about, or at least we touched upon in our episode on neighbors that, you know, the city sometimes feels like this.

[00:42:40] Ellie: I'm like, okay. Yeah. I forgot. No kidding. I do remember that. That was really recent.

I thought you were gonna talk about our city's episode.

[00:42:45] David: Oh yeah. Maybe there are two. But the idea that the city, because of the way it is designed feels like a big hotel. You know, where our only interactions with other people tend to be either transitional or ephemeral or transactional, or we experience interactions as nuisances and as bothersome.

Right. Like when you hear your neighbors in a hotel making noise and you wish they weren't. So all of these things really raise the question. How do you fix something structural without deeper changes that go beyon maybe these more surface slash cosmetic proposals?

[00:43:24] Ellie: Absolutely. And urban planning is such a key feature here.

I think in LA where I live, people who move to the city very often find that the structure of the city is like truly set up for loneliness. We could talk about suburbs as, you know, being an aspect of that too. LA is very suburban with the rise of suburbs in the 1950s, which is related both to the rise of the nuclear family, or let's say the consolidation of the nuclear family as ideology.

And also to increasingly alienated work under capitalism. There's, you know, the conditions being set up for loneliness. And so I think what we see here is that. Although the parks and pets and some of the other solutions on offer might help a bit. The problem is much deeper than just individuals having tools to connect with each other.

The problem is really in terms of the very underpinnings and institutions of the society in which we live.

[00:44:16] David: No, that's right. And I think we make a mistake when we individualize the problem of loneliness or we pathologize it and see it as something that people need to pull themselves out of by their own bootstraps.

But I have to say that if we identify these structural problems, you know, like gender, capitalism, the nuclear family, what was the other one that we talked about?

[00:44:36] Ellie: Urban Planning.

[00:44:37] David: Urban Planning. Thank you. And we recognize that all of those are maintained by the state, that they are support, like the ideology of the family is supported by the state.

Maybe it brings us to that view where, hey, the state is implicated here, the state is responsible. So at the very least, it gives us a little bit more ammunition to motivate an argument as to why large scale state solutions need to be implemented. Because this still falls on the hands of the state.

[00:45:13] Ellie: Loneliness can have a lot of causes and a number of forms as we've already discussed, but the philosopher of Jill Stauffer argues that there's a form of loneliness, more extreme than what we experience when we lack strong relationships or satisfaction. The relationships that we have or the kinds of loneliness that we might experience in a capitalist world. Stauffer points out that those kinds of loneliness still have a world and access to some kind of social support, even if that is insufficient.

She contrasts this with situations of dehumanization and oppression where the very existence of a world and ourselves are destroyed or under threat.

[00:45:56] David: This is what Stauffer calls ethical loneliness to differentiate it maybe from that everyday sense of loneliness that we've been talking about up until now.

And she says in this book that ethical loneliness, this is her definition, is the experience of being abandoned by humanity. So it's similar to the Arendtian definition of loneliness that has to do with feeling deserted, but she adds compounded by the experience of not being heard. So ethical loneliness is when you feel like nobody in the world is there for you and nobody can hear even your calls for help or whatever it is that you might wanna say to other people.

And that kind of loneliness, I think we have to be very clear about, this isn't just about a perceived relationship to other people. Like, oh, I don't have the kinds of relationships that I wish I had. It's a deeper denial of the very possibility of interdependence and human connection.

[00:46:55] Ellie: And it's premised on human violence.

It pertains to those people whose world has been destroyed by human violence. And she says, therefore, it would be a category mistake to conflate it with the kinds of loneliness that we've been talking about so far. And for Stauffer, we tend to view dehumanization through the lens of the liberal subject.

But when we do that, we're wrong. We tend to think about violence and oppression as violating our basic human rights or our bodily autonomy. And of course, we're autonomous. We make decisions for ourselves and our personhood that nobody can make for us. But Stauffer thinks, and here she is drawing on her background in continental philosophy.

[00:47:36] David: Oh my God.

[00:47:37] Ellie: We love a contemporary continental philosopher.

[00:47:39] David: She's a peer.

[00:47:39] Ellie: Yeah, she's a peer.

[00:47:41] David: She's not alone in our presence.

[00:47:43] Ellie: I've actually met her. She has amazing shoe game and she's truly wonderful. Anyway. Would love to hang with her more. It was only one time at a conference. But anyway, she thinks that we shouldn't make the liberal subject the core defining feature of humanity because then we ignore our simultaneous condition as dependent and vulnerable.

So the idea is not like. Well, let's start off with this liberal, independent subject, but rather, let's start off with our human condition as both being autonomous and dependent at the same time. She even goes so far as to say that sovereignty is dependent, and I think, you know, this is a somewhat familiar idea, the starting point that she's coming from in our subfield of continental philosophy, which is in many ways critical of the liberal idea of the autonomous individual.

[00:48:30] David: Yeah. But I think this speaks to the role that loneliness plays in that liberal conception because if we take the concept of the liberal subject kind of literally, and take it to its most rational conclusion of like literally the sovereign, like the person who is above the rest as a sovereign ruler.

We said earlier in connection to our end, it's lonely at the top. To truly be sovereign means to cut connections of dependence to everybody else and only relate to others in a kind one way, asymmetrical, imbalanced way that leaves you completely bereft of community.

[00:49:07] Ellie: Although at the same time, the sovereign is dependent on the community for recognition of their own sovereignty.

And so I think even if we take the sovereign as a sort of exception or the, you know, figure that is alone at the top, they're only at the top because other people have helped place them there and maintain their position there.

[00:49:27] David: And, for Stauffer, who is really interested in situations of dehumanization and very extreme violence, beginning from a philosophy of relationality, codependence, or interdependence.

[00:49:39] Ellie: Yeah. Codependence is not quite the same as interdependent.

[00:49:41] David: Let's say interdependent selfhood and just intersubjectivity in general, if we begin from that perspective, we are better able to understand how it is that human beings go about destroying the selves and the worlds of other people, because we do do that.

Right? There are situations. And you know, we're all familiar with what those are. Where there is a kind of ontological violence that we perpetrate against others and for understanding that violence, you know, we have some language available to us from that liberal project through the language of rights.

Rights discourse allows us to say, my rights have been violated because somebody has done something to me that violates my bodily autonomy or whatever. Even the language of human rights, which is developed in the wake of the Holocaust in the 1940s and then the 1950s is kind of meant to give us language to talk about this, but Stauffer makes the claim that.

The kinds of dehumanization that she's interested in, you can't capture the reality of that using the language of rights discourse. Even human rights, even universal human rights don't really help all that much.

[00:50:56] Ellie: Yeah. Well, and let me just say that also makes me wonder about our previous conversation about rights and obligations from states.

Not that that conversation was moot, but rather that I think maybe for Stauffer that would be at least just a part of the story and at most maybe completely misguided and you know, the wrong framework to apply.

[00:51:16] David: Well, and it, it's because it minimizes or misunderstands perhaps the nature of the violence in question.

So what goes wrong in cases of dehumanization? She says, it's not that somebody's rights have been violated, although we might also say that it's something much more profound, which is that we have failed to respond to somebody else's very status as an other. Right. So we have failed to respond to the humanity of the other.

So it's not just, it's not just that we violate their human rights, it's that we fail to bring them into a common world, and in fact, we destroy their world.

[00:51:53] Ellie: Well, and that's why the subtitle of the book is The Injustice of Not Being Heard, right?

[00:51:58] David: Yeah, exactly. And so the injury is both, it's the destruction of the world and then the not hearing what the other tells us about the destruction of their world, which is why the proper response must include addressing the original harm.

But it can't stop there. You also have to address the subsequent silencing that grows out of that original harm. And she writes a lot, for example, about, truth and reconciliation, commissions. Where she says that they do important work because of the lasting nature of that need to be heard.

And that's something that you cannot address if you just focus on the original moment of that breach of a shared trust.

[00:52:42] Ellie: Yeah. And if you have been hearing, our listeners, a little of resonance with Emmanuel Levinas on the notion of the other, you are right to hear that indeed she's drawing this from the work of Emmanuel Lenos and Jean Amery, who are two philosophers who survived and wrote about intense experiences of oppression and incarceration during the Holocaust.

And Amery is not somebody that I don't think we've, I don't think we've ever talked about him. I don't know his work well, but it's really interesting to, to hear staffer write about him. And now I wanna read more, but Amery was a half Jewish writer, philosopher, and member of the Belgian resistance, and he was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for years in Nazi concentration camps.

And he describes these experiences in visceral and often poetic deal detail in his essays. Including one on torture specifically.

[00:53:38] David: Yeah. And I've read Amery. In fact, the first paper I wrote as an undergrad that I was ever proud of was on Amery and Fanon on violence.

[00:53:48] Ellie: Oh, cool.

[00:53:49] David: Yeah. Thanks to my mentor from undergrad, Deborah Achtenberg, who specializes on Jewish thought.

[00:53:54] Ellie: Yeah, also met her at conferences.

[00:53:56] David: Yeah, and we read Amery and yeah, the descriptions are unsettling. They are transformative. And he talks about his experience living under Nazi rule. He makes a point to draw attention to this, even though his own relationship to his Jewish identity was very ambiguous.

Like he never really claimed it. He didn't think much of it. Like his mom was a Catholic, his father was a Jew, but he was just like not really that invested in that. And yet he suffered the most intense shattering of his world by virtue of it. And he writes a lot about the loss of trust in the world that happens in the wake of these forms of ontological violence that we've been talking about.

And he focuses, especially on what he calls the first blow, like the first attack that you receive. That could mean literally the first like physical punch if you're a prisoner or if you're in an internment camp. But it also just could mean your first run in with power that seeks to oppress you.

Like the first time you're arrested or the first time your family members are targeted. And it, he says that while the experience of ethical loneliness, although he doesn't use that term, he doesn't say ethical loneliness, but he's thinking about it.

[00:55:15] Ellie: Yeah. It's Stauffer's term, which she's drawing in part from his work.

[00:55:18] David: He says that that breach, that ethical sense that the world is falling to pieces occurs from the very beginning, from that first blow. So it's not something that comes about gradually and takes a long time. It's just there from the beginning. And I wanna read a quote where he writes about this blow. He says, simple blows, which really are entirely incommensurable with actual torture, may almost never create a far reaching echo among the public.

But for the person who suffers them, they are still experiences that leave deep marks. The first blow brings home to the prisoner that he is helpless, and thus it already contains in the bud everything that is to come.

[00:56:06] Ellie: And that breach of trust that's involved here is really central to his understanding as Stauffer describes it, because the violence of police brutality and torture, first and foremost violates your trust in the world.

And that is the expectation that other people will follow social contracts and respect your wellbeing. And so when you see that first blow, that being disrupted, yeah, there is this sense of shattering that emerges. And the trust that we usually have includes the certainty that we might receive help as a fundamental experience of humanity.

And you can see how that loss of trust would lead to such intense loneliness. And so that's also really interesting to think about here. The relationship between trust and loneliness and the less social trust we have, the more loneliness we have. And for Amery, he describes this trust in the world as ultimately leading to a form of death where he says that when violence is inflicted with no hope of health and no defense against it, a part of our life ends and it can never be revived.

And so this is not a literal death, but a kind of abandonment by humanity.

[00:57:19] David: Well, and he writes a lot about the importance of thinking about the individual. Like there's a lot in his writing about the I that is the site of this violence in these conditions of emergency, like the Holocaust, and thinking about.

How the attack of an individual is the loss of a universe and how limiting legalistic discourse is for thinking about the trauma that that brings about. And your comment or your illusion to the social contract makes me think about this because if we think in legalistic terms, we often think about violence as a violation of one of the terms of the social contract, but we still expect the system of law as a whole to kind of give us the right reparation or to give us the right retribution for that.

What Amery is talking about are situations where the social contract itself has been put out of play. And so in those cases, the language of rights and entitlements and obligations and rights and duties from a legal political perspective. No longer seem to apply because we're in a state of lawlessness where it's about the most brutal forms of violence and the destruction of worlds.

[00:58:35] Ellie: You're not even an individual who might get bundled together with a bunch of in other individuals. You're rather an individual stuck out there completely alone.

[00:58:43] David: And who will become nothing.

[00:58:48] Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode.

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[00:59:11] Ellie: We'd like to thank our student employees, Aaron Morgan, Kristen Taylor Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene, and Yuhang Xie, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

[00:59:20] David: And to our listeners, thank you so much for overthinking with us.