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Ben Lazare Mijuskovic is a retired professor of philosophy and humanities at California State University at Dominguez Hills. He has also worked as a therapist and a licensed clinical social worker. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California at San Diego. In a long and distinguished career, he has published a number of major works on philosophy and loneliness such as Consciousness and Loneliness: Theoria and Praxis; Feeling Lonesome: The Philosophy and Psychology of Loneliness; The Philosophical Roots of Loneliness and Intimacy; and his forthcoming book entitled Plato’s Battle Between the Gods and the Giants and its Continuing Relevance in the Speculative Philosophy of History.
In this interview Mijuskovic speaks about his thoughts on loneliness, as well as his life and career. Readers can find out more about Dr. Mijuskovic and keep up with his latest works here.
Do you have a specific definition of loneliness that you use?
I wrote a book called The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments: The Simplicity, Unity and the Identity of Thought and Soul from the Cambridge Platonists to Kant: A Study in the History of Argument. That work is based on the premise that consciousness is self-consciousness; it’s reflexive. In other words, you know your own thoughts. This is directed against materialism, mechanism, determinism, and behaviorism.
I support the idealist philosophers; it starts with Plato and Plato’s theory of knowledge in The Theaetetus and The Sophist. From there it jumps to St Augustine, from Augustine to Descartes, either idealist philosophers or dualists, then to Leibniz. Leibniz is key because Leibniz creates the unconscious in The Monadology. From Leibniz it went to Kant. From Kant to Fichte and from Fichte to Hegel and Schopenhauer. Hegel is an objective idealist; Kant is a subjective idealist like Leibniz. What I’m tracing is the theory of self-consciousness as being reflexive. Whereas the empiricists look at consciousness as a result of sensations—they’re passively given—the idealist philosophers see self-consciousness as creative, as active.
I try to link that self-conscious activity, which is confined within yourself—I can’t read your thoughts; you can’t read mine—with loneliness. So, I follow the Kantian tradition.
How did you come to follow that tradition?
I was born in 1937 in Budapest, Hungary. My father was a diplomat with the Yugoslavian embassy there. I was an only child. Because my father was associated with the Yugoslavian embassy we traveled as the war advanced and were transferred from Palestine to Egypt and from Egypt to Turkey. I was always alone and didn’t know the language of the country I was in; I had to fend on my own.
My father joined the British Eighth Army in Cario and so he was gone for long periods. My mother was terrified that we would be killed. I grew up alone, in strange country and culture, and was a very shy child. After the war ended in 1945 my father was transferred to the Yugoslavian embassy in Washington DC. When Yugoslavia turned Communist, they tried to get my father back behind the Communist lines; he refused, and we became displaced persons. Because of this background, I became interested in loneliness and the philosophers that I was captivated by were the idealists; Leibniz, Kant, and so on.
You think loneliness is not a particularly modern phenomenon. Is that correct?
Yes. It’s not really a modern phenomenon. It’s in Plato’s Symposium. There’s a myth given by Aristophanes. It says that originally, we human beings were very different. We had four arms, four legs. We had two faces looking in opposite directions and two sets of genitals. These early humans were very powerful, and they were a threat to the Gods on Olympus, so Zeus split them in half and ever since then, we’ve been looking for that other half.
From there Augustine picks it up—he is religious, of course. The idea of mind—the soul—being lonely, alone, and related to God is carried on into Descartes. Descartes is an Augustinian—he belonged to the Augustinian Oratory—and he splits the mind from the body: the dualism of Descartes. But the Catholic religion, of course, is always following the idea that the soul of man and woman is solitary.
There are so many mass killings these days and people look for the motive. The motive much of the time is loneliness. The killers feel rejected, and they want to hurt others and often these teenagers who do these mass murders go back to their original school. What people don’t realize is that a lot of these mass murders arise from anger. They tend to think of lonely people as depressed—and they are depressed—but worse than that, they’re angry, and they want to punish others. They are willing to kill themselves even in retaliation.
I have a great admiration for Freud. I work with philosophy, but I also work with Freud and his books like The Ego and the Id, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Civilization and Its Discontents, and The Interpretation of Dreams. They all stress narcissism and sadism. Freud gets that idea from the philosopher Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation. You have to pay attention to anger, the dynamic of anger, not just depression. When I was a therapist and I also taught philosophy at the same time, it was easy to talk to individual patients about loneliness. But in that setting the loneliness continues and then it becomes about the support system—how are they supported? Those are interesting questions.
I participated in an international conference on loneliness in Poland a couple years ago, There I presented the “solution” to loneliness, which is empathy that leads to intimacy. Empathy is a mutual sharing between two people of their feelings, their understanding, and their affection. You’re not going to empathize with someone unless you feel what they’re experiencing, you understand what they’re experiencing and, also, you like them. That’s the road to intimacy.
Intimacy, as a solution to loneliness, is a mutual sharing between two human beings of trust. You will never be intimate with someone unless you trust them, and they trust you. You also need respect; you respect someone else, and they respect you. The third critical dynamic is a sharing of values. No other animal creates values and values depend on the spontaneity—the freedom—of consciousness.
Those “solutions”, do you think that they remove loneliness, or do you think that they transform into something else, or they just reduce the impact of loneliness?
The problem with loneliness is the sense of isolation. No one cares, you’re rejected, you have no one. So, the dynamic of empathy and intimacy is a cure or solution. For example, that’s my relationship to my wife, Ruth. I share my problems, she shares her thoughts and trusts me, and vice versa. This was a late discovery for me as a conceptual realization.
How would you link loneliness to our current crises in politics?
I think right now what’s wrong particularly in the United States is narcissism. My last two books deal with political narcissism in the United States. It’s really dangerous. In World War Two when you look at Nazism, it’s narcissistic.
Narcissism is natural to human beings. We all try to do better or be recognized, but it can turn into sadism. In Freud’s books, The Ego and the Id, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, etc. he connects sadism and narcissism. You have someone like Trump who’s a narcissist and basically also a sadist, and so that situation is dangerous right now. That presents a crisis in the US. It’s diplomatically dangerous and globally dangerous.
One of the things noted in sociology is that the world is much more transient now. People can leave and go to different countries or different places. Before the 1920s you were born in a village, lived in a community, and lived there the rest of your life. You were grounded in the extended family. You lived and died in it. Now human beings are terribly lonely because they can travel. People feel alone and desperate, and so that’s why it’s such a big problem when you have these migrations of people from one country to another. It makes a lot of lonely people. Loneliness is the main thing. Some countries have recognized this. For example, The United Kingdom has a Minister of Loneliness, but its goal seems to be to attempt to help these lonely people by offering them to come to clinics, offering them substances, or money to live, and that doesn’t work.
Do you think that there can be a government solution to loneliness?
No. They want to heal or beat loneliness by integrating as a country and preventing others from coming in. It’s narcissism; it’s political narcissism. It’s social narcissism. They think they’re better than anyone else. Look what the United States is going through with people coming over the border. Trump is a sadist, plain and simple, and he has support because men are very violent. Men are violent as a characteristic. This is something you find in Schopenhauer’s book The World as Will and Representation. Women are more on the nurturing side. They have children who are part of them. You won’t find many mass murderers as women.
There’s an author who wanted to alert people of this—Thomas Hardy. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge—and again note it’s a male. Men are dangerous, they’re narcissistic. Not all men—of course not—otherwise we wouldn’t survive. So, it is a battle between good and evil and that’s in the title of my last book: The Battle between the Gods and the Giant.
I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about the connection between narcissism and loneliness.
Again, if we go back to The Symposium, individuals are narcissistic. Part of being human is being a narcissist. I was a therapist and hitting on loneliness was the first thing I did. I would get people to talk about loneliness. That’s why I know that loneliness can produce hatred and anger as well as an attempt to fall in love. Psychoanalytically, the first documents on loneliness were from René Spitz. It happened in England during World War One. They decided a woman who had just delivered a child should put her child in an institution for a year while she worked in the factories of the war effort. What René Spitz and others found out is that the child, not nurtured, started to withdraw within itself and developed serious cognitive problems. At a certain point, the child would stop wanting to eat. Essentially the world didn’t matter, no one was going to pick them up, no one was going to nurture them, no one was going to even talk to them, that’s where it starts.
Would you say you’re optimistic about the future?
My latest book is pessimistic. In Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, he attacked Leibniz who believes in self-consciousness. And he says (which is true) that Leibniz believed this was the best of all possible worlds. He says this because Leibniz was a Christian and thought God was the greatest thing. Schopenhauer’s theme is that this is the worst of all possible worlds. The very worst. This was carried out in his philosophy and in the mid-19th century there was this huge movement of Leibniz against Schopenhauer. It’s tied in with Schopenhauer and philosopher Eduard von Hartmann who said, like Schopenhauer, that this was the worst of all possible worlds.
A lot of the work I do is based in Henri Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. The critical question is: can empiricists, materialists, and determinists claim that we’re reduced to sensations that are passively given? The sensation of the five senses? The idealists, rationalists, and so on, claim there’s a spontaneous quality within self-consciousness. It’s creative; it can put sensations together into concepts. It’s active. You’ll find it in art, you’ll find it in ethics, and you’ll find it in cognition. What scientists deny is the freedom of the will and its creative spontaneity.
Ben Lazare Mijuskovic
Ben did his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. He also has an M.A. in Literature also from UCSD. He began teaching philosophy, and received tenure, at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois and he has been teaching philosophy and the humanities as a professor at various universities, including California State University at Dominguez Hills where he retired in 2018. Ben is a licensed clinical therapist, and he has worked in San Diego and Los Angeles for the Department Mental Health as a licensed therapist at Fairview State Hospital and at Harbor-UCLA Hospital. He has worked intensely with psychiatrically diagnosed children, adolescents, and adults.
Huw Davies holds an MA in History of Political Thought and Intellectual History from University College London, and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford. He currently works as a schoolteacher in London, having previously worked as a Police Officer in the Metropolitan Police Service. His areas of interest include the concepts of republican liberty and relational equality, as well as the works of Hannah Arendt.
