A Philosophy Of Loneliness – Lars Svendsen

The Kantian friendship of intimacy, on the other hand, is perhaps a little too limiting. Is not a friendship typically about something more than sharing thoughts and emotions not meant for the broader public? Friends usually have one or more common interest – something such as sport, or a form of cultural expression. That is to say, there is generally some third component in the friendship’s structure, and that third element helps bind friends together.

One can ask, of course, whether or not this fact actually makes a friendship more vulnerable, for it is reasonable to expect one of the friends to lose interest in that sport or cultural form. That being the case, however, it can also be argued that this third element would help to create a certain permanence, where an individual would continue to have that common interest, even if many other life circumstances changed. When it comes to friendship, however, a certain amount of unselfishness must be involved.30 A true friendship or love demands that you, in Aristotle’s words, desire to do what is good for others with respect to the other, and not to yourself.

And in order for the relationship to be genuine, reciprocity is required, such that the other also has the desire to do what is good for you with respect to you, and not to themselves. Friendship, furthermore, involves an objectivity that does not exist in the same way in love. We have no trouble imagining unrequited love – most of us have been in the situation where we have loved someone who has not loved us back – but unrequited friendship is more difficult to imagine.

A person can love another, and the fact that the object does not return that love does not make the love illusory. A friendship without reciprocity, however, is no friendship at all. According to Simmel, modern individualization leads to a differentiation of friendship, whereby a person no longer has one or two friends that cover the entire register, but rather a variety of friends for different needs and purposes.31 Still, there is not much to indicate that friendship today is substantially more divided than it was in the past.

First published in English 2017 English-language translation © Reaktion Books 2017 English translation by Kerri Pierce This book was first published in 2015 by Universitetsforlaget, Oslo under the title Ensomhetens Filosofi by Lars Fr. H. Svendsen Copyright © Universitetsforlaget 2015 This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library eISBN: 9781780237930 1kitap1.com/en Contents Introduction ONE The Essence of Loneliness TWO Loneliness as Emotion THREE Who are the Lonely?

FOUR Loneliness and Trust FIVE Loneliness, Friendship and Love SIX Individualism and Loneliness SEVEN Solitude EIGHT Loneliness and Responsibility REFERENCES BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1kitap1.com/en Introduction All is loneliness here for me Loneliness here for me . . . Loneliness MOONDOG Almost all I thought I knew about loneliness proved false. I thought more men than women were lonely, and that lonely people were more isolated than others. I assumed that the significant increase in the number of single dwellers would notably impact the number of lonely individuals.

I thought social media generated more loneliness by displacing ordinary sociability. I also believed that loneliness, despite being a subjective phenomenon, could be better understood in the context of social surroundings than individual disposition. I believed the Scandinavian countries had higher degrees of loneliness, and that these numbers were increasing. Furthermore, I assumed that this increase was connected to late modern individualism, and that individualistic societies had higher rates of loneliness than collective societies.

Never have I worked with a subject that overturned to such an extent all the assumptions I brought to the table. And these preconceptions are quite widespread. Indeed, they can be considered the standard picture given to us by the mass media, where expressions such as ‘loneliness epidemic’ are common: at the moment I am writing this, a Google search of ‘loneliness + epidemic’ returns almost 400,000 hits. Yet when it comes to the problem of loneliness, the image created by all these assumptions is severely misleading.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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