Loneliness is a feeling that every human being has experienced in his or her life. It has been stated that even in our modern world, when we are surrounded by a crowd or connected by technology to virtual friends, the experience of being alone remains one of our basic sensations. It is presupposed, very often, that aloneness is something that can be avoided, or can be alleviated, if the social or subjective conditions that provoke it are modified. We would then recover a feeling of togetherness, realizing that we are part of a community, without facing the ‘void’ that solitude entails.
Ben Lazare Mijuskovic offers in his book a very different approach to loneliness. According to him, far from being an occasional or temporary phenomenon, loneliness – or better, the fear of loneliness – is the strongest motivational drive in human beings. He argues that ‘following the replenishment of air, liquid, nourishment, and sleep, the most insistent and immediate necessity is man's desire to escape loneliness’, to avoid the feeling of existential, human isolation (p. xxx). The Leibnizian image of the monad – as a self-enclosed, ‘windowless’ being – gives an acute portrait of this oppressive prison. To support his thesis, Mijuskovic uses an interdisciplinary approach – philosophy, psychology, and literature – through which ‘the picture of man as continually fighting to escape the quasi-solipsistic prison of his frightening solitude’ reverberates.
Besides insisting on the primacy of our human concern to struggle with the spectre of loneliness, Mijuskovic has sought to account for the reasons why this is the case. The core of his argumentation relies on a theory of consciousness. In Western thought three dominant models of consciousness can be distinguished: (a) the self-consciousness or reflexive model; (b) the empirical or behavioural model; and (c) the intentional or phenomenological model. According to the last two models it is difficult, if not inconceivable, to understand how loneliness is even possible. Only the theory that attributes a reflexive nature to the powers of the mind can adequately explain loneliness. The very constitution of our consciousness determines our confinement: ‘When a human being successfully “reflects” on his self, reflexively captures his own intrinsically unique situation, he grasps (self-consciously) the nothingness of his existence as a “transcendental condition” – universal, necessary (a priori) – structuring his entire conscious-being-in-the-world. This originary level of recognition is the ground-source for his acute sensory-cognitive awareness of loneliness’ (p. 13).
The book is divided in eight chapters that develop the argumentation. The first chapter resumes the thesis of the book: the portrait of man as ‘intrinsically alone and irredeemably lost’ and the model of consciousness as an existential ‘nothingness’ that constitutes, and consequently explains, the phenomenon of loneliness. The second and third chapters establish parallels between philosophy and literature. While the second correlates the Cartesian reflexive model of consciousness with the introspective narrative form of three 20th-century novelists – Marcel Proust, Arthur Machen, Thomas Wolfe – the third links the inner time-consciousness as it is developed in the theories of Leibniz, Kant, Bergson, and Husserl on the one hand, and the stream of consciousness style characteristic of modernism on the other.
Chapter 4 questions Gotesky's claim that there are four distinguishable types of loneliness and even a positive variety. In contrast, Mijuskovic argues that loneliness is always ultimately reducible to the one basic – and negative – form of despairing isolation. Drawing on Fichte and Hegel, Chapter 5 discusses the origin of the monadic ego and its ‘creation’ of the consciousness of the ‘other’, showing the similarity of this construct to Freud's conception of ‘oceanic feeling’ as the sense of individual human isolation. He moves on to engage with a complex exploration of phenomenology – Husserl and Hegel. The final chapter once again puts Descartes in the centre, refusing Laing's perspective of Descartes as a ‘distortive’ conception, responsible for determining schizoid and schizophrenic states of mind. It implies a discussion against Heidegger's Dasein and a reaffirmation of the Cartesian perspective as the ‘correct’ one. Three appendices (‘Loneliness: an Interdisciplinary Approach’, ‘Loneliness and Personal Identity’ and ‘The Sociology and Psychology of Loneliness’) close the book.
The interdisciplinary approach that Mijuskovic chooses to illustrate his hypothesis implies an extended trip through philosophy, psychology and literature, with a discussion of a broad range of authors that includes Plato, Augustine, Marx, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Descartes, Fichte, Leibniz, Freud, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, From-Reichmann, Proust, Wolfe, Defoe, ancient Greek myths, Malraux, T.S. Eliot and Dostoyevsky, among others. While the amount of sources is impressive, the analysis of them is not always convincing. When the authors commented upon are there to support Mijuskovic's arguments, the dialogue with them appears to be solid and exhaustive; however, the other way around is quite different: he refutes Marx, for example, by simply saying that ‘I wish to contend that man's consciousness of his condition precedes the ‘material conditions’, or at least overshadows them, and that it is exactly this awareness which makes man's alienated state so intolerable. As Marx would have it, in the German Ideology, “life determines consciousness”; as I conceive it, (self-) consciousness conditions and structures life’ (p. 9). On Freud, he asserts: ‘Had Freud recognized this [that loneliness, as opposed to sexual instinct, dominates] I think it is conceivable to imagine that he might have formulated an entire psychological system grounded in the principle of human loneliness instead of the one he actually did go on to establish, founded on the primordiality of the sexual drive’ (p. 4).
Particularly with regard to literature, we are left with the impression that the synopsis of how the theme of loneliness has dominated the literary writings of the West fails to show the differences between the diverse contexts. If we agree that the theme of loneliness can be found in Shakespeare or Proust, it is difficult to agree with the idea that different conceptions of subjectivity or cultural states would not reveal some crucial differences in the way aloneness is experienced as a feeling, and that these differences matter in order to understand the topic. Moreover, these differences are the domain of literature. There is a gap between the epistemological fact that we are ‘trapped within our own sphere of awareness’ and the statement that our primary psychological state is necessarily loneliness.
The argumentation appears somewhat repetitive and circular instead of showing a logical progression. This probably also has to do with the structure of the book – a collection of articles previously published in journals – in which some topics dealt with early on in the book reappear in the final appendices, adding to the effect of ‘circularity’.
But finally, the most important objection one could make against this book has to do with the rejection of the idea of togetherness as a significant human experience. The author acknowledges that intimacy exists but he denies it all relevance. The positive feelings of being with others, enjoying the proximity of intimate friends, sharing a ‘cause’ or any form of togetherness appear only as futile efforts to avoid the primary feeling of loneliness. In Mijuskovic's view, they are always secondary and pale experiences when compared with the omnipresent sensation of being trapped within ourselves. But does not the suffering of loneliness necessarily and logically imply that the experience of intimacy has been, at least once, a meaningful experience? If not, it is difficult to understand or explain where the suffering comes from. In this context, an ontological or epistemological approach seems not to be the best one to account for these psychological or cultural phenomena. This denial of any significance of companionship as an important experience of human life indicates both the strength and the weakness of Mijuskovic's thesis regarding the place solitude occupies in our life.
