Xinyi Angela Zhao

Current works on loneliness as a phenomenon mostly explore its social causes and consequences. Scholars are often interested in such things as examining of the kinds of social setting that engender one’s feeling or experience of loneliness, the health and moral hazards that come with such an experience, and the ways in which loneliness could be remedied. The angle at which these works approach loneliness indicates a particular way of framing this experience – that loneliness is an undesirable experience of an individual who is often in a deprived or isolated state in relation to others. Or to put it more explicitly, an individual’s loneliness experience is considered as being caused by a certain undesirable interactive type of social relationship that neglects the significance of the individual as a person. There are two aspects – metaphysical and phenomenological - to be highlighted under this framework. First, the metaphysical aspect points to the explanatory nature of the framework for one’s experience of loneliness. Specifically, scholars attempt to understand loneliness by seeking what (mainly) causes it. Given that what was found as the main cause was the deprivation or the non-existence of social assistance or interpersonal goods, scholars often understand loneliness as such. Second, the phenomenological aspect of the existing framework is that, based on the explanatory aspect, the experience of loneliness is thus often understood or theorized as that of absence given the resultant actual or perceived deprivation or loss of those goods. In the paper, I will focus on the second aspect that loneliness is understood with the concept of absence, and I argue that this concept is phenomenologically inadequate. I propose to replace it with the concept of emptiness, and I argue that loneliness should be understood as the intentional experience of (the presence of) emptiness. The advantage in choosing this term, as I see it, is that it is experientially richer in that it captures the affective and bodily nature of our being in dealing with or making sense of things and the space in which they occupy.

Philosophical discussions of loneliness have primarily characterized the experience as involving a feeling of absence. In this paper, I offer a phenomenological account of the embodied-spatial dimension of loneliness that aims to concretize this absence. Drawing on a set of first-person, literary, and cinematic descriptions, I argue that loneliness can involve the experience of a concrete empty space that separates one’s bodily self from the world and from other people. This absence, I argue, is not merely an affective lack but a spatially embodied field between oneself and others. To illuminate this structure, I draw on Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō’s notion of aidagara (間柄), the spatial in-betweenness of human beings that he takes to be an essential feature of our bodily self. Where Western phenomenological accounts of embodied spatiality tend to leave it in the background, aidagara places the embodied-spatial and ontological primacy of in-betweenness at the centre, making explicit that our embodied spatiality is not merely contingently but constitutively intersubjective. Where loneliness takes this form, it is the lived disruption of that in-betweenness.

This article offers a phenomenological-aesthetic account of loneliness through the Japanese aesthetic concept of sabi (寂), the aesthetic appreciation of desolateness, weathering, and the quiet passage of time. I argue that sabi can transform how loneliness is lived by loosening its rigidified experiential structure. I begin from a phenomenological account of loneliness as an embodied-spatial experience in which, in its more persistent forms, one’s being-in-the-world becomes rigidified as separation, such that loneliness presents itself as the only available reality. Drawing on Japanese aesthetician Ōnishi Yoshinori, I read sabi as constituted by a recursive oscillation between the personal and the impersonal, articulated spatially as the real and the unreal (kyojitsu・虚実) and temporally as the unmoving and the flowing (fueki ryūkō・不易流行). Through close readings of three haiku, I argue that there is a structural fit between this oscillation and loneliness’s totalization. In particular, sabi ambiguates the boundaries of loneliness’s experiential horizon, such that an alternative becomes available to be lived. The result is not the elimination of loneliness but a transformation in the mode in which it is inhabited, a restoration, however partial, of one’s experiential freedom.

Among various views concerning the nature of womanhood, one kind of divergence between the materialist and the pluralist account centres on whether a woman should be defined or identified based on her typical female biological features. The former treats “woman” as the social meaning of the biological female, while the latter insists that one can be a woman in virtue of their internal identity without also having the normatively associated biological features. In this paper, I argue against the latter view that the inclusion or demarginalization of transwomen requires more than self-identification and that it demands the recognition of the role of “misogyny”.