Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature

ReviewIndeed, a most impressive survey has been undertaken byProfessor Ben Mijuskovic in his fine book, Lonelinessin Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature. He shows most effectively howprominent the themes of literature and inwardness have been in creativeliterature from quite early times, in the myth of Prometheus, the Odyssey, in parts of Plato andAristophanes, and in the Upanishads, down to the most recent writers of fictionand philosophy. Robinson Crusoe recovers the importance it had for earlierspeculative thought (the History of Robinson and Friday as we have it inHegels Outlines of the Phenomenology of Mind) and is shown to be part of aconcern which continues through Proust to the British novelist Arthur Machenand his frightening portrayal, in his own words, of a Robinson Crusoe of thesoul and to Thomas Wolfes We walk the streets of life alone matched byConrads Heart of Darkness and Goldings Pincher Martin. Mijuskovicconcludes that, on the philosophical foundation of the ability of thought tocurl back on itself, the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and psychologyhave erected a significant and true insight into mans fundamental nature,namely that that each of us, separately exists in isolation, in a state ofdesolate loneliness, enclosed within the confines of a nomadic prison which wecontinually strive to escape.H. D. Lewis, editor ofReligious StudiesLoneliness as a Universal Prism. Epistemicloneliness is seen as innate. In the view of Ben Mijuskovic, all acts ofconsciousness and conduct are inevitably motivated by the wish to escape or evadeloneliness. However, to do so is impossible because consciousness is soconstituted that loneliness serves as its sovereign a priori. In other words, loneliness is an absolutely universal andnecessary principle. Because of this, loneliness is the prism through which manviews reality, without being aware that it is a prism. Mijuskovic believes thatthere can exist no theory through which one can rescue himself or others fromthis loneliness, as any action he takes is simply a result of the master motivator,loneliness itself.WikipediaExistential isolation cuts beneath other forms ofisolation. No matter how closely we relate to another individual, there remainsa final unbridgeable gap. Each of us enters into existence alone and must departfrom it alone. Each individual since the dawn of consciousness created aprimary self (transcendental ego) bypermitting consciousness to curl back upon itself and to differentiate a selffrom the remainder of the world. Only after that does the individual, nowselfconscious, begin to constitute other selves. Beneath this act,Mijuskovic (1979) notes, there is a fundamental loneliness; the individualcannot escape the knowledge that (1) he constitutes others and (2) he can neverfully share his consciousness with others.Rollo May and Irvin Yalom in Current Psychotherapies, edited by Raymond CorsiniLoneliness in its existential form was also furnished majormomentum by forerunners of existentialism itself, such as Kierkegaard andNietzsche, themselves two selfconfessed utterly lonely individuals. Far morerecently and in the United States, William Saddler (1978) and Ben Mijuskovic(1979; 2012) pioneered philosophical studies on, respectively, loneliness andwhat I reference as aloneliness and both did so from phenomenological andinterdisciplinary perspectives as well.John G. McGraw in Intimacyand IsolationThe most sustained and comprehensive attempt to argue theontological primacy of human aloneness is Professor Ben Lazare Mijuskovics Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, andLiterature. It is a boldly written book, one upon which any student ofsolitude will want to test his wits.Philip Koch, author of SolitudeThe scientific study of loneliness is new, little more thana halfcentury old, but loneliness has always been a dominant theme in literature,philosophy, and art. Loneliness forges its powerf