Loneliness as a Way of Life

by Thomas Dumm

Overview

“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds.

A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower.

Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674047884
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2010
Pages:	193
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Thomas Dumm is William H. Hastie ’25 Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the author of Loneliness as a Way of Life (Harvard), A Politics of the Ordinary, and Democracy and Punishment: Disciplinary Origins of the United States.

Table of Contents

• Preface

• Prologue: Cordelia’s Calculus
• I. Being
• II. Having
• III. Loving
• IV. Grieving
• Epilogue: Writing

• Notes
• Index

What People are Saying About This

William E. Connolly

Loneliness as a Way of Life is a book about coming to believe in this world, a world in which loneliness is inevitable and connections are still possible. It is also a risky book, because of the way Dumm weaves the personal into the literary and both into politics. The risk is well run: Dumm's is an untimely piece, essential for the time in which we live.

Cornel West

Thomas Dumm is a wise guide and learned counselor for the great Socratic question: How to live? We are deeply enriched owing to his wisdom and compassion.

Robert Gooding-Williams

Avoiding cynicism and sentimentality alike, Thomas Dumm's penetrating and painfully personal meditations on the modern condition of loneliness may show us more about ourselves than we can easily bear. Through subtle and provocative readings of Shakespeare, Melville, Arendt, and other thinkers, Dumm finds terms for acknowledging and inhabiting his own loneliness, and perhaps ours as well. His calm yet insistently disarming voice claims and challenges us, even when we resist it.
— Robert Gooding-Williams, author of Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics

Editorial Reviews

This is a fascinating book. Dumm articulates the intuition that many of the ways in which we understand our communal existence within a polity, ranging from the distinction between the public and the private spheres to the weakness of our interpersonal attachments, stem from the loneliness that is manifested within the modern world. Believing that loneliness is resistant to the traditional philosophical approach of describing the phenomenon at hand, then analyzing and critiquing it, Dumm draws on several important artistic works (from King Lear, to Moby-Dick, to the film Paris, Texas) to explore this issue and to illuminate his intuitions concerning it. Just as this volume is not a traditional philosophical treatise, it is not a traditional volume of literary criticism, for Dumm is deeply and personally involved with the subject of loneliness, and he reaches into his own experiences of it to explore it more fully.

Choice - J. S. Taylor

Thomas Dumm is a wise guide and learned counselor for the great Socratic question: How to live? We are deeply enriched owing to his wisdom and compassion.

Cornel West

For Dumm, loneliness is really about loss. He argues that we have to be willing to reflect on the tragic dimensions of human existence, including the inevitability of our own deaths, to face and ameliorate our loneliness...Only through earnest reflection and a willingness to examine how we live our lives can the ache of loneliness be transformed into its less painful companion: solitude.

Salon - Katharine Mieszkowski

Avoiding cynicism and sentimentality alike, Thomas Dumm's penetrating and painfully personal meditations on the modern condition of loneliness may show us more about ourselves than we can easily bear. Through subtle and provocative readings of Shakespeare, Melville, Arendt, and other thinkers, Dumm finds terms for acknowledging and inhabiting his own loneliness, and perhaps ours as well. His calm yet insistently disarming voice claims and challenges us, even when we resist it.

Robert Gooding-Williams

Loneliness as a Way of Life is a book about coming to believe in this world, a world in which loneliness is inevitable and connections are still possible. It is also a risky book, because of the way Dumm weaves the personal into the literary and both into politics. The risk is well run: Dumm's is an untimely piece, essential for the time in which we live.

William E. Connolly

An intriguing volume...This modern world may be the "way of loneliness," but readers should not shy away from the state. In fact, Dumm asserts that loneliness is the impetus that gives us autonomy, the ability to make decisions on our own terms. Although the feeling may be painful, it is only through loneliness that we become true individuals able to make rational decisions and able to interact with others as rational beings. And, in an odd twist, it is this true sense of self-awareness that leads us to seek the community of others.

Los Angeles Times - Orli Low

Loneliness as a Way of Life doesn't try to be cut-and-dried. It is quizzical, often deeply skeptical, about our intentions as a species. It recognizes that society—and sociability—are messy affairs that bring mixed blessings. Especially in his last, rousing chapter on Emerson, freedom, and responsibility, Mr. Dumm offers a way out of the morass he has described. He makes no false claims that we can vanquish loneliness or fix our thinking in a fresh groove. Instead, he proposes the tempered idea that friendship and group accountability can—indeed, must—live together with our existential solitude.

New York Sun - Christopher Lane

The greatest writers may have shown how language itself is inadequate to the experience of loneliness. But we have written our experience of loneliness deeply into the language. That too, though, goes to underscore the point that Mr. Dumm's honest book makes: While the "lonely self will always be with us," we can at least come together in search of imaginative ways of expressing that loneliness. We can "write and read to tell each other how we are to be lonely together."

Wall Street Journal - Andrew Stark

[A] meditative and intensely personal volume.

Toronto Star - Sarah Barmak

This is a fascinating book. Dumm articulates the intuition that many of the ways in which we understand our communal existence within a polity, ranging from the distinction between the public and the private spheres to the weakness of our interpersonal attachments, stem from the loneliness that is manifested within the modern world. Believing that loneliness is resistant to the traditional philosophical approach of describing the phenomenon at hand, then analyzing and critiquing it, Dumm draws on several important artistic works (from King Lear, to Moby-Dick, to the film Paris, Texas) to explore this issue and to illuminate his intuitions concerning it. Just as this volume is not a traditional philosophical treatise, it is not a traditional volume of literary criticism, for Dumm is deeply and personally involved with the subject of loneliness, and he reaches into his own experiences of it to explore it more fully.
— J. S. Taylor

Choice

For Dumm, loneliness is really about loss. He argues that we have to be willing to reflect on the tragic dimensions of human existence, including the inevitability of our own deaths, to face and ameliorate our loneliness...Only through earnest reflection and a willingness to examine how we live our lives can the ache of loneliness be transformed into its less painful companion: solitude.
— Katharine Mieszkowski

Salon

An intriguing volume...This modern world may be the "way of loneliness," but readers should not shy away from the state. In fact, Dumm asserts that loneliness is the impetus that gives us autonomy, the ability to make decisions on our own terms. Although the feeling may be painful, it is only through loneliness that we become true individuals able to make rational decisions and able to interact with others as rational beings. And, in an odd twist, it is this true sense of self-awareness that leads us to seek the community of others.
— Orli Low

Los Angeles Times

[A] meditative and intensely personal volume.
— Sarah Barmak

Toronto Star

The greatest writers may have shown how language itself is inadequate to the experience of loneliness. But we have written our experience of loneliness deeply into the language. That too, though, goes to underscore the point that Mr. Dumm's honest book makes: While the "lonely self will always be with us," we can at least come together in search of imaginative ways of expressing that loneliness. We can "write and read to tell each other how we are to be lonely together."
— Andrew Stark

Wall Street Journal

Loneliness as a Way of Life doesn't try to be cut-and-dried. It is quizzical, often deeply skeptical, about our intentions as a species. It recognizes that society—and sociability—are messy affairs that bring mixed blessings. Especially in his last, rousing chapter on Emerson, freedom, and responsibility, Mr. Dumm offers a way out of the morass he has described. He makes no false claims that we can vanquish loneliness or fix our thinking in a fresh groove. Instead, he proposes the tempered idea that friendship and group accountability can—indeed, must—live together with our existential solitude.
— Christopher Lane

New York Sun