Abstract
In this paper, I pursue two main goals. The first is to raise three objections against Tom Roberts and Joel Krueger’s recent account of loneliness (2021). The second is to sketch an alternative, receptive account.
Roberts and Krueger focus on loneliness conceived of as an occurrent emotion. According to their account, loneliness involves two components: (1) a pro-attitude (e.g., a desire) towards certain social goods and (2) an awareness that such goods “are missing and out of reach, either temporarily or permanently” (p. 186). My first objection is that having a pair of pro-attitudes and cognitive states of the sort that Roberts and Krueger have in mind is neither sufficient nor necessary for an individual to experience loneliness. The second is that Roberts and Krueger’s account has trouble accounting for the unpleasant phenomenology of loneliness. The third is that their account has trouble demarcating loneliness from other negative emotions that one may experience within romantic, friendship or social relationships.
Next, I sketch my own account of loneliness. According to the receptive theory (Tappolet 2022) to which I adhere, emotions are receptive experiences that non-conceptually represent their intentional objects as possessing specific evaluative properties. Accordingly, I argue that loneliness consists in a receptive experience that represents the absence of certain relational goods as bad in a particular way. I draw a distinction between the intentional object and the intentional locus of loneliness, and clarify the role that some of the individual’s pro-attitudes play in loneliness. I also show how a receptive account can explain the phenomenology of loneliness and demarcate it from other emotion types, and offer an account of degrees of loneliness, which distinguishes between the intensity and the centrality of episodes of loneliness.
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Notes
Svendsen (2017) is another example.
More specifically, R&K hold that to be lonely is to be in a dispositional state that manifests itself in conscious feelings of loneliness. Like R&K, I am interested in episodes of loneliness. Unlike them, however, I will leave open the question of whether occurrent loneliness is always accompanied by conscious feelings or whether it can sometimes be unconscious.
Of course, the individual might eventually feel lonely, if his relationship does not improve in the way he wishes. However, the point remains that the individual does not seem to experience loneliness at the time when he first undergoes the pro-attitude and the cognitive state that, according to R&K, are constitutive of the occurrent emotion of loneliness.
Incidentally, I think that none of the standard accounts of valuings is correct. Christine Tappolet and I have offered our own account of valuings in Rossi and Tappolet (manuscript). Like us, Seidman (2009) and Kubala (2017) also deny that valuing something requires judging that item to be valuable.
It is, of course, possible to reject the claim that emotions are evaluative states, for example by saying that emotions are based on evaluations but are not evaluations themselves. (For a position of this sort, see, amongst others, Müller (2019), Massin (2021), Naar (2022). On this understanding, loneliness would still have an evaluative aspect insofar as it is based on an evaluative pro-attitude towards a social good. However, the evaluative component of loneliness would be external (and indeed prior) to the episode of loneliness. I will leave this option aside in what follows and explore, in Sect. 3, an account that construes loneliness as a genuine evaluative state.
As an example, when I felt lonely in London at the beginning of my PhD for lacking friends, it was not because I perceived friendship to be completely unattainable, either permanently or temporarily, or because I had no hope of making friends. I felt lonely because (I perceived that) I did not have any friends at that time in that city.
At some point in their paper, R&K talk about ‘social needs’. This may be a way to restrict the category ‘social goods’. But I think that the category ‘social needs’ is still too broad to be unifying. Furthermore, this qualification does not help address the second problem.
This claim is only approximately correct. As we will see in subsection 3.3, I think that loneliness can sometimes be directed towards relational bads (e.g., social exclusion) that involve the absence of relational goods, but are not entirely reducible to the absence of the corresponding relational goods (e.g., social inclusion). In these cases, loneliness consists in an evaluation of a relational bad that is partly constituted by the absence of a relational good as bad for the subject in a specific way.
Of course, it is possible that the individual in the example might have simply been mistaken about his valuings. He thought that he did not value being in a relationship, but he was wrong about that. This scenario is certainly possible. What I am denying is that cases like the one described in the example are always of this sort.
In fact, I think that far from being a mere possibility, this is how things are in reality. More specifically, my view is that what distinguishes loneliness from other emotions is its formal object, but that we normally recognize or form the belief that an emotional token is an instance of loneliness based on other factors, including its phenomenology as well as the expressive reactions, beliefs, and actions that it causes. For reasons of space, however, I will not defend this epistemological claim here.
Note that, because emotions are taken to represent evaluative properties non-conceptually, these conceptual accounts do not raise a problem for the receptive theory. More specifically, it does not follow that emotions have a problematic self-reflexive content.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for inviting me to clarify this aspect of my account.
See Tappolet and Rossi (2016). Note that one does not need to endorse our own account of evaluative properties to be able to demarcate loneliness from other emotion types. The only claim that one needs to accept for this purpose is that admirability is independent from admiration. This claim is compatible with a variety of naturalistic, non-naturalistic, and constructivist accounts of evaluative properties.
This requires a qualification. In some cases (e.g., belonging – unbelonging), the relational bads coincide with the absence of the corresponding goods (e.g., unbelonging is simply not belonging). In other cases (e.g., inclusion – exclusion), the relation between relational goods and bads is more complex, but the relational bads still seem to involve, amongst other things, the absence of the corresponding goods (e.g., exclusion is not simply the absence of inclusion, but it involves this absence, amongst other things). As anticipated in fn 9, it follows from this that in some cases the intentional object of loneliness involves, but is not entirely reducible to, the absence of a relational good.
All the relational bads in the list appear to have corresponding relational goods, which the subject can experience by undergoing the relevant ‘feelings’, e.g., feeling of inclusion, feeling of closeness, and so on. This suggests that loneliness has an opposite, i.e., a corresponding positive emotion type, which can be experienced in different ways depending on the specific kind of relational good with which its tokens are concerned.
The underlying explanation of how the evaluative content of loneliness determines its phenomenological character is a standard representationalist explanation.
For this understanding of centrality, see also Haybron (2008).
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Andrée-Anne Cormier, Rodrigo Diaz, Joel Krueger, Max Lewis, Fernanda Pérez Gay Juárez, Louise Richardson, Tom Roberts, Jules Salomone-Sehr, Axel Seemann, Christine Tappolet and two anonymous referees for this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions on previous drafts or presentations of this paper.
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This work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Grant # 435-2016-0711; Project: “Well-Being: A Philosophical Exploration”). No other conflicts of interest to report.
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Rossi, M. What is Loneliness? Towards a Receptive Account. Topoi 42, 1109–1122 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09950-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09950-1