Loneliness: an interdisciplinary approach.

Abstract

Psychological motivations, reasons why human nature is what it is, principles by which we may 'explain', understand, sympathize, or empathize with other human beings--and ourselves--what a variety of possible principles has been offered by philosophers and psychologists! All men seek happiness, announces Aristotle (Ethics). Just as all men delight in imitation (Poetics), and human beings universally take pleasure in knowing (Metaphysics), in that same sense it may be said that the arche of human conduct or action derives from the self-evident fact that all men desire to be happy. According to Hobbes, each human atom is motivated by self-interest, not to say selfishness, and every individual strives for his own 'good' through power over others. Bentham, on the other hand, regards man as under the sovereign twin masters of pleasure and pain, whose dominion extends over the entirety of human conduct. Freud retraces the path of our problematic symptoms to a fund of repressed sexual and libidinal energy, whose fettered strivings results in overt neuroses. Adler employs a Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean 'will to power' as a model for understanding a universal feeling of inferiority, whose ultimate origin is grounded in the inadequacy of the infant. And Jung cavalierly splits the human race into the extrovertish and the introvertish, the cosmopolitans and the islanders. What I have chosen as my concern, in the foregoing, is not a rough survey of conceptions of human nature--whether man is good, bad, or indifferent; a rational creature or essentially a sentient one; whether man's nature has ever been the same' or whether 'man makes himself', creatively. Rather, I am interested in what 'motivates' man, I am searching for a universal principle through which we may 'understand' why man does what he does, why man is what he is. Obviously, however, the commitment we make in regard to a theory of human motivation will itself necessarily be found to entail a corresponding view of human nature. Confronted with this impressive variety of interpretations, I don't know if I am able to offer a comparable general principle, but I shall try. In a word, that principle is loneliness. Thus, I wish to hold that once man has satisfied his more obviously physiological and biologic drives and comfortably secured the necessities of air, water, and food, he then strives to alleviate his desperate loneliness. It is not so much, then, a fact--correcting Jung, for instance--that we are to be dichotomized into extroverts and introverts, but rather that we all begin by aspiring toward human communion and affection and friendship but that, unfortunately, many of us fail; we who fail are the frustrated extroverts, the retreating introverts; if we cannot enjoy the company of others and command from them the recognition we (abnormally) feel for ourselves, well, then we shall cultivate our own company.