Event today!
"On Loneliness"
Event Today: 11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK
“On Loneliness”: Kaitlyn Creasy in conversation with Kate Warlow-Corcoran
As social beings, loneliness is a common human experience, perhaps even an inevitable feature of the human condition. In this event, Kaitlyn Creasy offers an account of loneliness, arguing that experiences of loneliness make salient our fundamental vulnerability and powerlessness due to our reliance on others to fulfill our social needs. In this account, loneliness is a painful subjective feeling that results from an unfulfilled desire for recognition or connection. As these complex needs and desires vary in form from person to person, so too do the conditions required to alleviate such loneliness.
Kaitlyn invites us to consider the potential value of loneliness as a means to self-knowledge; an opportunity to identify the specific needs and desires we must seek to fulfil in order to live a life that is meaningful to us. Under the right circumstances, loneliness can function as an impetus for positive self-transformation. She cautions, however, that this is often not what happens; instead, loneliness results in despair and withdrawal, sadness, anger, shame, or resentment. In extreme cases, loneliness may play arole in catalysing vicious attitudes, such as a cruel hatred towards the community of people whose perceived failure to fulfill one’s unmet social needs is taken as a personal affront.
Kaitlyn’s writing on this topic draws on autobiographical material, creating rich accounts of personal experiences of loneliness. This event will also explore the value of autobiography, and life-writing more broadly, for developing a philosophical understanding of human emotional experience.
Kaitlyn Creasy is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, San Bernardino. She writes in the areas of nineteenth-century European philosophy, moral psychology, and ethics. Her work in these areas explores how our psychological lives are formed and sustained, as well as how various emotional experiences may facilitate or hinder agency, self-formation, and flourishing.
Kaitlyn’s article ‘Lessons in Loneliness’ is featured in the current issue of The Philosopher: Crossing the Floods.
Kate Warlow-Corcoran is a Managing Editor of The Philosopher.
