When we brood about loneliness in the holiday season, we may picture those who are solitary or isolated, perhaps the elderly, bereft of family and friends. Or we think about unloving or abusive families. But it’s possible to feel lonely not just in a crowd, but in a crowd of loved ones who return your love—but from whom you feel estranged or alienated. “You don’t understand me” is not just the clichéd cry of teenagers to parents but the inner monologue of those for whom uncomprehending distance coexists with unconditional love.
The philosopher Kaitlyn Creasy writes about her own experience of being lonely, bur loved, in an essay that begins with a return to friends from a semester in Florence:
there was so much I wanted to share with them. I wanted to talk to my boyfriend about how aesthetically interesting but intellectually dull I found Italian futurism; I wanted to communicate to my closest friends how deeply those Italian love sonnets moved me … I felt not only unable to engage with others in ways that met my newly developed needs, but also unrecognised for who I had become since I left. And I felt deeply, painfully lonely.
Creasy describes her experience as a kind of “reverse culture shock,” but she notes that the dawn of loneliness may be gradual: people simply drift apart.
What can we learn from Creasy about the nature of our needs as social beings? A lot, I think. But there’s an upshot I resist. In her illuminating essay, Creasy argues that the vision of love and loneliness I sketched in Life is Hard cannot be right.
She’s not wrong to complain that my account was incomplete and that it did not focus on experiences like hers. If “loneliness” names the pain of frustrated social need, I argued that we need the love of those we love. But the basis of that love—what justifies it; the value it registers—is not meritocratic. It’s not our special excellence that makes us worthy of love, as Aristotle claimed, but the dignity we share with everyone else. This dignity calls for moral respect. To paraphrase David Velleman, respect is a “required minimum” and love an “optional” but apt response to a unitary value: the irreplaceable worth of a human being. (I set aside love for non-human animals as a complicated case.)
This account predicts a continuity between respectful recognition, compassion, and love, a continuity confirmed by social science; it explains how even superficial interactions scratch the itch of loneliness, how difficult and how liberating it can be to take the first step towards love by attending to the worth of others.
Yet the account applies most readily to those who are lonely because they are unloved. How can it make sense of what happened to Creasy when she came back from Florence? How can it explain the loneliness we feel when we spend the holiday season with loving families who do not see us as the people we’ve become?
I think these questions can be answered by extending the account: the problem is one of omission, not error. What love adds to respect is, in part, appreciation—and appreciation takes work.
An analogy may help. Consider the value of music you don’t enjoy: death metal, orchestral minimalism, acid jazz. You should still treat this music with respect. It would be wrong for me to destroy an acid jazz archive just because it’s not my thing; in fact, there’s reason to protect the archive, if I can. One way to make sense of this is to remind myself that others are right to love the music that leaves me cold: respect is a “required minimum” and love an “optional” but apt response to acid jazz.
What defines the optional response that constitutes love? Not just that it’s more intense than mere respect, but that it is appreciative: love for acid jazz is impossible to separate from understanding. To love a form of music well is to appreciate it, to want to appreciate it, and so to realize its value.
The same thing goes for loving you or me: the response that constitutes love involves appreciation, and we can do that better or worse. When we want to be loved, we want to be loved well—where this means being understood. To be estranged or alienated in a loving relationship is to experiences one’s value as unrealized, in part.
This is all compatible with—although it goes beyond—the account of love and loneliness in Life is Hard. You could consider it a friendly amendment. So why does Creasy sense a deeper tension?
On views like mine, she writes, “loving friendships allow us to avoid loneliness because the loving friend provides a form of recognition we require as social beings.” Which is true but potentially misleading, since “recognition” suggests the “required minimum” of respect, which is distinct from the appreciative “form of recognition” that is love.
Creasy’s deeper objection is that “the feature affirmed by the friend here—my unconditional value—is radically depersonalised.”
The property the friend recognises and affirms in me is the same property she recognises and affirms in her other friendships. Otherwise put, the recognition that allegedly mitigates loneliness in Setiya’s view is the friend’s recognition of an impersonal, abstract feature of oneself, a quality one shares with every other human being: her unconditional worth as a human being. … While I knew my friends loved me and affirmed my unconditional value, I did not feel upon my return home that they were able to see and affirm my individuality.
There is a subtle conflation in this argument, I think. It’s one thing to ask: what is the value to which love responds, i.e. what justifies it? It’s another to ask: what does one appreciate when one responds to this value with love?
The answer to the first question, on my view, is: the dignity of an individual human being. Dignity is not a value unique to me, or you, or any of us. But that is consistent with saying, in answer to the second question, that an appreciative response to this value in you turns on attention to your quirks and interests, taste and character. The language of “affirmation” above obscures this point. True, Creasy’s friends affirm her unconditional value—but they don’t appreciate her in the way we do when we love well.
The issue here may seem too subtle to carry much weight. But I believe it does. If the value to which love responds—what justifies love—is peculiar to you, then as you change, the justification may fade. It follows that love may cease to be justified. Now, I don’t think it’s irrational for love to fade, sometimes—but I don’t believe we are ever required by reason not to love someone. Love is justified, even if—as when we love someone who is morally flawed—our love may not involve the desire to be with them, but for them to mend their ways.
It matters, too, that love responds to a value that demands respect: not the qualities of an individual, which we may or may not admire, but the dignity we share. There is room to argue that, since everyone is worthy of love, and anyone worthy of such profound appreciation has a value that demands respect, the requirements of morality are real.
What is at stake in my dispute with Creasy is not just how we can be lonely but loved, but how to understand—and why we should accept—the claims of mutual respect.
BONUS CONTENT: I wrote about love, loneliness, and metaphysics here.
This essay touches something important. And something tricky. Love at its fullest looks like affection plus understanding working together. But we seem to always have those who can only offer one out of the two. This was how I put it sometime ago:
"People thinking interesting things—at least things they find interesting—are common. The only scarce thing is a simultaneously interested and intimate audience. You either have intimate people who are not interested—family and friends. Or you have interested people who are not intimate—like readers on the internet. "
But it gets trickier when you delve into love, respect, justifying the love, and so on. It is really an interesting topic. Thank you for writing it. I enjoyed reading it. You have given me something to mull over and I hope to get back to you with a good view of things.