Aindreas Dounyng, graduate student in the Department of Philosophy, will present his paper, "Loneliness Before Knowledge: Existential Separation as a Motivator for Epistemic Inquiry" at the "Loneliness" 8th International Interdisciplinary Conference, being held online on October 8-9.
From the abstract:
"Loneliness has been considered a psychological condition, social deficit, or consequence of isolation. While these considerations have generated interdisciplinary research, the philosophical question of whether loneliness may possess an epistemically productive dimension is overlooked.
"This paper argues that existential loneliness isn’t simply the absence of others, but a phenomenological condition through which the limits of subjective self-sufficiency become apparent. One can’t know oneself as a totalized existent. To know oneself requires being-for-others as well as being-for-itself (Sartre, 1956). Encounters with others and new horizons of meaning reveal an existential insufficiency: the recognition that the self can’t fully understand itself, others, or the world within its existing horizon. This insufficiency can motivate epistemic inquiry.
"Drawing from contemporary existential and phenomenological philosophy, a framework for epistemic existentialism can be dev! eloped through Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alphonso Lingis, and Charles Taylor. Levinas demonstrates how the irreducibility of the Other disrupts self-sufficient understanding. Nancy demonstrates the constitutive relation between singular existence and being with others. Lingis emphasizes embodied encounters with strangers and unfamiliar worlds as experiences capable of transforming horizons of meaning. Finally, Taylor demonstrates how identity and self-understanding depend upon dialogical relations and horizons of significance beyond the isolated individual.
"Considered together, these perspectives suggest that loneliness doesn’t simply precede relational existence or result from the absence of community. Rather, loneliness emerges through tension between subjective singularity and humanity's dependence upon others for meaning, recognition, and understanding.
"This paper proposes that loneliness can function as a distinctive motivator for epistemic activity. Although loneliness can produce withdrawal, alienation, and disengagement, these consequences don’t exhaust its existential significance. Existential loneliness can initiate movement beyond existing horizons in the search for meaning, self-understanding, knowledge of others, and community. Loneliness is thus philosophically significant not only because it reveals what human beings lack, but because it discloses the limits of epistemic self-sufficiency and helps explain why human beings seek knowledge and community."
References
- Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press.
- Lingis, A. (1994). Foreign bodies. Routledge.
- Nancy, J.-L. (2000). Being singular plural (R. D. Richardson & A. O’Byrne, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
- Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). Philosophical Library.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press."
