What is ethical loneliness?

In her book Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard, scholar Jill Stauffer looks beyond social isolation.

Ethical loneliness does not come from being alone, from losing love or a loved one, or from feeling out of step with one’s surroundings. All of that is an inevitable part of human life.

And that kind of loneliness, Stauffer writes, still has a world. Others can recognize it and offer help. Social support might help compensate for loss.

Worse is the loneliness of feeling abandoned by those who have the power to help.

For Stauffer, “ethical loneliness” is the horrifying experience of having been abandoned by humanity compounded by the silence and inaction of others.

Ethical loneliness is the isolation one feels when one, as a violated person or as one member of a persecuted group, has been abandoned by humanity, or by those who have power over one’s life’s possibilities. It is a condition undergone by persons who have been unjustly treated and dehumanized by human beings and political structures, who emerge from that injustice only to find that the surrounding world will not listen to or cannot properly hear their testimony—their claims about what they suffered and about what is now owed them—on their own terms.

Testimony

Stauffer illuminates testimony delivered in diverse settings, from South Africa, Argentina, Holocaust archives, Native American dealings with U.S. legal proceedings, American prisons, to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Think also of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada, #MeToo, #Black Lives Matter, and teens against gun violence.

Think of the plight of refugees the world over.

Jean Améry

Stauffer begins with the testimony of Jean Améry (1912-78).

Améry was born in Vienna to a Jewish father and Catholic mother. At university Améry studied literature and philosophy. He fled Austria in 1938 for France and then Belgium where he joined the Belgian Resistance. Then came his arrest, torture, and years in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen.

Améry wrote many books, including At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities.

Jean Améry died by suicide in 1978.

Was ethical loneliness a factor in Améry’s life and death? Surely. As Stauffer said, “Some might not remember that there was a time after World War II when the Holocaust was not yet named or widely acknowledged for what it was.”

Injunction to hear

Stauffer draws on the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas—on his compelling ethics of responsibility to the Other, of inescapable intersubjectivity.

“Selves are formed intersubjectively, in the presence of others,” she writes, “for better and worse and regardless of whether any of us would have willed it to be this way.”

Consider also Arthur Frank’s (2013) narrative typology of the mute suffering imposed by the chaos narrative, its untellable horror. And of Frank’s ethical imperative for listeners to have the emotional fortitude to hear the mute suffering told in the silences between speech, to listen more closely to those who are otherwise disenfranchised by their distress, and “how not to steer the storyteller away from her feelings” or out of his pain until they are ready to do so, until it has been sufficiently witnessed, and heard.

As one reviewer, Linda Ross Meyer, said of Stauffer’s Ethical Loneliness,

The critical insight of the book is that we are all responsible to attentively hear these stories of atrocity. This injunction to hear is the core of the work, and it performs that imperative as well as asserting it.

The experience of listening that went into writing this book was itself a harrowing one, as it took Stauffer to the ICC, to holocaust video archives, and to the South African Truth and Reconciliation transcripts and recordings.

In that sense, the book itself is a heroic act of listening, as well as a call to listen.

Yes!

As Thomas Merton wrote in 1964, in a letter to Ernesto Sandoval about the indigenous peoples of Nicaragua’s Solentiname Islands,

We begin already to heal those to whom we listen. The confusion, hatred, violence, misinformation, blindness of whole populations come from having no one hear them.

Listen to my podcast about the healing power of listening and what it feels like to be heard.

Yet practices of hearing often fail

Stauffer is careful to show not only how ethical loneliness is a widespread problem and how being heard can help, but also how practices of hearing often fail, “even in institutions designed to hear and be staffed by persons who want to hear well.”

The opportunity to be heard is just the first step towards hopefully feeling heard.

But the problem is more complicated than being and feeling heard.

In a new review of A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa, by Alexis Okeowo, Kristen Roupenian (2018) says,

Many of the book’s subjects were grappling with the question of how to tell the story of what they had experienced: not only to Okeowo, but to their partners, families and friends.

Even when a traumatic event affects a community as a whole, there will inevitably be people closer to the center, and those who are farther away; some who desperately need to talk about what happened, and some who would prefer to forget.

Roupenian asks,

• How can survivors talk about trauma with those who haven’t experienced it?
• How can we properly receive these traumatic stories from others?
• Is empathy an unadulterated good?
• What are the costs of such storytelling, for both the listener and the teller?

And sometimes listening doesn’t help

And as Fred Alford (2013) sees it, 

The problem is not that survivors cannot put their experience into narrative; the problem is that doing so, often called working-through, does little to heal them.

This is the problem for survivors:

Not the inability to put words to their experience.

But an inability to conceive of their own experience as something that could happen to a human being in this world.

That is ethical loneliness: Isolation from others who can never understand even if they try, and uncanny separation and isolation even from oneself. Maybe being and feeling heard helps repair it. Maybe not.

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Alford, C. F. (2013) Trauma and forgiveness: Consequences and Communities. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University press.

Améry, J. (1980) At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Frank, A. (2013) The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Second edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Meyer, L. Review of Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard, by Jill Stauffer. http://www.helsinki.fi/nofo/NoFo13_Meyer.pdf

Okeowo, A. (2017). A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa. New York: Hachette.

Roupenian, K. (2018) ‘The pain of story-telling.’ Times Literary Supplement, May 29, 2018. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/the-pain-of-story-telling-okeowo/

Stauffer, J. (2015/18) Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard. New York: Columbia.