Perhaps the strangest thing about loneliness is that, despite the fact that we all know what it is because, at some point in our lives, we’ve all experienced its cutting pain, it remains taboo.
It comes fully loaded with shame.
Indeed, often, the shame is worse than the loneliness itself. We deem our loneliness a social failure, perhaps never more so in this superficially hyper-connected world.
However, a glance back at our history shows us it is not a personal failure but rather a cultural and philosophical one.
The term 'loneliness' first made an appearance in the English language around 1800. This begs the question, why was such a term needed back then?
There’s one obvious candidate.
The Industrial Revolution had started just forty years earlier. From connecting to the land in small close-knit communities we went to automatons in factories. Disconnected from nature (and our nature) we gradually became machine-like and dehumanised.
But was this start or an inevitable progression of something that began 150 years earlier, by René Descartes, the seventeenth-century philosopher who famously concluded ‘I think therefore I am’?
Descartes formulated a worldview that took hold, ushering in the age of the scientist and the intellectual. It invited the intellectual to deal in logic and concepts and science to objectify the universe and break it down into its component parts, something that could be dominated and manipulated.
Indeed, the Indo-European root from which the word ‘science’ eventually descends is SEK, or in an extended form SKEI, meaning to cut.* From this emerged the Westernised model of the divided mind, body and spirit. And that was the birth of loneliness. The body was seen as the sum of its constituent parts, machine-like and capable of being mastered, along with the world and nature. The factory work of the industrial revolution was an expression of that.
This shift to the rational leaves us in the lurch when it comes to our emotional and spiritual needs, separating us from each other and nature.
Descartes promoted the idea that our feelings and emotions happen to us and should be ignored or dominated. The net effect of this was to delegitimise them. We shifted from a belief that dispassionate thought was a useful addition to our feelings and intuitions to a belief that reason trumped them.
The knock-on effect of this is quietly devastating. Once we no longer trust our feelings, we become a stranger to ourselves. Consequently, we become isolated and disembodied. Feeling allows us to have a conversation with ourselves which is critical to being unified at the most basic level. Without this, we feel alone, fragmented and lonely.
*Jeffrey Aronson
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