There is an insight embedded here about freedom and agency, but at this juncture Augustine focuses again on the role that others play in this downfall. Alypius “was not now the person who had come in, but just one of the crowd which he had joined.”24 No longer himself but just part of the mob, Alypius was lost to the “they,” his individual resolve melted. He was now “a true confederate of those who’d brought him along.”25 And they were no friends.
You can trace here the genealogy of Heidegger’s resolute “authentic” self, which then spawned Sartre’s authentic “free” self, which then bequeathed to us the generic cultural version of authenticity we drink up with our Disney Channel subscriptions: resist the crowd, rise above the masses, be true to yourself, forge your own path. “You do you!” they tell us. Of course, you need to Instagram your trailblazing path to self-discovery so everyone can see, and constantly check your likes to confirm that your authenticity has been validated. But others are there for adulation; the only “we” is the we competing for attention.
Does this recipe for authenticity explain why we are so lonely?
RESEARCHERS CREATED A banal scenario in which a group of people would play a frivolous game of catch, tossing the ball to one another to pass the time and trying to keep it aloft. But the scientists set up the game with one condition: unbeknownst to her, one member of the group would never have the ball tossed her way. Try to put yourself in her shoes: you’re in a group that starts a game of catch; the ball randomly popcorns around the group; giggling and frivolity ensue; you keep waiting for your chance to join in the fun, but the ball never comes your way. You’re patient at first. You smile when others smile. You inch a little further into the circle to try to draw attention. Your smile is becoming more forced now. There’s still a sliver of hope that your exclusion is random. Until eventually you conclude: the ball is never coming your way. This game isn’t for you. You pretend you didn’t want to play anyway. You stop trying.
But this isn’t a game. As the researchers discover, that ostracized person will testify to an increased sense that life is meaningless and devoid of purpose.26 The game is just a way to pull back the curtain on a fundamental human need.
Now imagine this isn’t an experiment but the shape of a life: instead of waiting for a ball to come your way in a silly game of catch, you’re waiting for anyone to call or drop by or speak your name. You can’t even express it, but you’re hungering for some sign that you are known. But no one calls. No one asks how you’re doing. No one listens to your thoughts about the morning news. You are alone. Except there are hundreds of thousands of you. You’re not alone in being lonely—not that that makes you any less lonely.
Loneliness—often a factor of social isolation—has become a societal epidemic in late capitalist societies. The Centre for Social Justice provides a succinct snapshot of loneliness in the UK, for example:
As many as 800,000 people in England are chronically lonely and many more experience some degree of loneliness. 17 per cent of older people interact with family, friends or neighbours less than once a week, while 11 per cent do so less than once a month.
It is linked to cardiovascular disease, dementia and depression and according to some researchers, its effect on mortality is similar to smoking and worse than obesity. One study revealed that it can increase the risk of an early death by as much as 30 percent.
In addition to this there is a strong link between isolation and poverty: having two or more close friends reduces the likelihood of poverty by nearly 20 percent.27
The repercussions are felt in bodies, physical and social. It’s not only the lonely who suffer because of this. It rends and destabilizes the commonweal. And there are costs. In response, the UK has now appointed a Minister for Loneliness to address the societal impact of this epidemic. The question is whether governments beholden to modernist narratives are willing to actually see the sources of the problem, such as family breakdown and even secularization itself. As the poet Franz Wright so powerfully captured in his poem “Flight,” written to his absentee father, “Since you left me at eight I have always been lonely / star-far from the person right next to me.”28 This is one of the reasons why, paradoxically, we can be lonely in a crowd.
But we have no one to blame but ourselves. We made this world. As Charles Taylor puts it, in modernity we remade the human person into a “buffered self,” protected and autonomous and independent, free to determine our own good and pursue our own “authentic” path. We shut out incursions of the divine and demonic to carve out a privatized space to be free on our own terms. We didn’t realize the extent to which we were shutting ourselves in. In liberating ourselves by locking out transcendence, the price we paid was sealing ourselves in a cell. We thought we were our own liberators; turns out we might be our own jailers.
Or, returning to Taylor, we might suggest that the construal of the self as buffered doesn’t actually overwrite its nature as porous, as open and vulnerable, longing for connection. Indeed, the disastrous effects of social isolation put the lie to the modern spin on the self as autonomous and self-sufficient. Even when we believe that spin, the hunger of the soul proves otherwise. As Clay Routledge observes in the National Review, “Since social connections and love are so central to the human experience, we are vulnerable to great social suffering.”29 As even Heidegger recognized, loneliness is a mode of being-with.30
In her famous posthumous essay “The Opposite of Loneliness,” Marina Keegan expressed this fundamental human longing and the fear of losing it. One might be tempted to dismiss this as privileged and coddled, except that it names a hunger (and fear) of every human heart.
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place. It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table.31
What if authenticity is the source of our loneliness? What if it’s precisely this unquestioned, unrecognized construal of others as threats to my freedom and autonomy that has sequestered us? Is authenticity worth it? Or could we imagine authenticity otherwise?
Maybe the fact that every road movie is a buddy movie points to some other fundamental hunger of human nature, some ineffaceable impulse to communion. What if the opposite of loneliness is finding ourselves together? What if friends aren’t threats or competitors but gifts? In the deepest corners of our hearts, we all want the person next to us to turn, with a smile, and shout: “Catch!”
HEIDEGGER MISSED THE rest of the story. He heard Augustine say, “Alone I would not have done it” but missed it when Augustine confessed, “I couldn’t be happy without friends.”32 If friendship can be a dangerous enemy, for Augustine it is also the conduit of grace. The problem isn’t other people but what they love, and how they love me.
Heidegger fixated on Augustine’s portraits of inauthentic friendship, the camaraderie of the gang, the solidarity of the mob that, in the end, doesn’t care about me and only loans me a sense of belonging as long as I perform, “join in,” conform. This faux friendship provides thin gruel that pretends to feed what is a creaturely hunger: “to love and to be loved.”33 It’s the infomercial form of friendship that feeds on my weakness and despair, with grand promises and big stories and people who have talked themselves into thinking they’ve discovered the good life. And because all Heidegger saw in Augustine was this disordered mode of fake friendship, to him it looked like others were always a distraction from myself, as if “friendship” was how you lose yourself. Authenticity, then, is a private project of individuation. Forget all the haters (and, for Heidegger, everybody else is a hater): you do you.
But that’s inheriting a stunted Augustine, and it misses the end of the story. Augustine has his own renditi
on of what we might call “authenticity.” Like Heidegger’s version, it involves answering a call, hearkening to an appeal, responding to a summons to become who I’m made to be. But that call doesn’t come from an echo chamber; it comes from the One who made me, a “friend who is closer than a brother,” who laid his life down for his friends. And who calls to me through others, through friends.
Friends, in fact, are at the heart of Augustine’s conversion narrative. Book 8 of the Confessions is a series of episodes where other people keep showing up in Augustine’s life, refusing to let him remain where he is, prodding and prompting him to answer the call. This climax of the narrative is a kaleidoscope of friends and exemplars—friends who point to exemplars for Augustine to imitate. In this frame, others are not a threat to his authenticity; they’re the lure drawing him toward it.
Book 8 opens with Augustine in a waffling despondency, “attracted to the way, the Savior himself, but . . . still reluctant.”34 So God makes a kind of divine suggestion to him: maybe go visit Simplicianus, an older Christian who circulated in Ambrose’s orbit (and who, in fact, had baptized Ambrose). When Augustine shares his struggles, both intellectual and spiritual, mentioning his wrestling with Platonism, Simplicianus sees an opening to tell him a story about someone else, an exemplar. Marius Victorinus had been a learned, well-regarded orator in Rome. In many ways, Victorinus had achieved everything that Augustine would have hoped to achieve, even being honored with a statue in the Roman forum. And he was the translator of the “books of the Platonists” that had just transformed Augustine’s philosophical imagination.
Simplicianus knew that Augustine could see something of himself in Victorinus: an orator, a scholar, a philosopher with political connections. Simplicianus was a friend to Augustine in the way that he pointed to Victorinus in order to press Augustine to become the self he was called to be and to imitate the courage of Victorinus, who had been willing to give up all his achievements to become a Christian. What made Simplicianus a friend was his willingness to be a conduit of the call to authenticity and to be wise enough to know that this was the perfect example to jar Augustine with a wake-up call. He was a “true” friend, Augustine would say, because he was spurring Augustine to become himself. Not every Other is the “they.”
The encounter had its desired effect: “As soon as your servant Simplicianus told me this story about Victorinus, I was ardent to follow his example.”35 In this case, the influence of the Other is not diminishing but revivifying. The Other isn’t stealing the oxygen of my individuality and authenticity; he’s breathing new life into a self on the verge of resurrection.
The road to conversion for Augustine—the road to finding himself—is lined with these sorts of friends. Shortly after his visit with Simplicianus, Augustine has another “chance” encounter. As already noted in our discussion of ambition, Simplicianus proves himself a friend to Augustine by stoking an ambition for better things. And he does so by pointing him toward exemplars who answered such a call in their own encounter with The Life of Antony, a book that extols the example of someone who gave up worldly ambition to pursue the kingdom of God. Again, the example of another makes it possible for them to imagine themselves answering a similar call. Resolved to follow, the first turns to his friend and tells him of his decision. And now the friend will be an example for his friend. “If it costs you too much to follow my example, do not turn against me,” he pleads.36 But his friend is ready to follow. They set upon this new path together, friends and exemplars motivated and moved by friends and exemplars. Rather than the leveling effect of the “they,” this drama unfolds through a cast of solicitous friends who are prompting Augustine to become who he’s meant to be.
The result is a Dorian Gray–like encounter with himself. These examples are like portraits of who Augustine is called to be, which then show him himself in negative. The exemplars held up by Simplicianus and Ponticianus become a kind of carnival mirror for Augustine to see himself from a new angle. “While he was speaking, Lord, you turned my attention back to myself. You took me up from behind my own back where I had placed myself because I did not wish to observe myself, and you set me before my face so that I should see how vile I was, how twisted and filthy, covered in sores and ulcers. And I looked and was appalled, but there was no way of escaping from myself.”37 These friends are friends to Augustine, not because they come with affirming praise, but because they love Augustine enough to bring him face-to-face with himself, with who he is not, and unapologetically hold up a substantive vision of who he is called to be. A friend is not an enabler; love doesn’t always look like agreement.
I’m reminded of a scene near the end of Good Will Hunting, the breakout hit for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, featuring Robin Williams in one of his first dramatic roles. Will Hunting, you may recall, is a math prodigy with the bad luck of being born in the bombed-out, working-class wasteland of south Boston, a place where ambition is a sin. Despite being courted by Harvard academics and think tanks, Will has decided that it would be more true to himself to stay put and slug it out in dirty, backbreaking jobs, whiling away his life in dilapidated bars.
One afternoon when their shift at a demolition site is over, Will and his friend Chuckie are slurping cheap beer, leaning on a pickup. Chuckie asks whether Will is going to take one of the lucrative job offers on the table.
“Yeah, sit in some office doin’ long division,” he replies with disdain.
“Make some bank though,” Chuckie reminds him. “Better’n this s——. It’s a way outta here.”
“What do I want a way outta here for?” Will replies, hoping Chuckie sees and values his loyalty. “I’m gonna f—— live here the rest of my life. You know, be neighbors, we’ll have little kids, take ‘em to Little League together.”
Chuckie is incredulous but will have none of it. “Look, you’re my best friend, so don’t take this the wrong way. But in twenty years, if you’re still livin’ here, comin’ over to my house watchin’ Patriots games, still working construction, I’ll f—— kill you.”
Will is surprised and defends himself, telling Chuckie he’s spouting psychobabble about “being true to yourself” that he’s heard from all the pricks at Harvard.
“You don’t owe it to yourself,” Chuckie retorts. “You owe it to me. Because tomorrow I’ll wake up and I’ll be fifty and still doin’ this s——. You’re sitting on a winning lottery ticket and [not willing] to cash it in.”
“Ah, what do you know!” Will responds, the retort of someone without a reply.
“Let me tell you what I know,” says Chuckie. “Every day I come by your house and I pick you up. You know what the best part of my day is? For about ten seconds, when I pull up to the curb and when I get up to your door, because I think maybe I’ll get there and I’ll knock on the door and you won’t be there.”
The true friend is the other who hopes you’ll answer the call, who’s willing to challenge you and upset you in order to get you to look at yourself and ask yourself: What am I doing? What do I love? Who am I? The true friend is the other who has the courage to impose a conviction, who paints a substantive picture of the good, who prods and prompts you to change course and chase it—and promises to join you on the way.
THERE’S AN INTRIGUING passage in Heidegger’s Being and Time where he entertains two very different modes of intersubjectivity, two different ways that others might influence me, two different forms of what he calls “solicitude.” The first is an inauthentic relation he calls “leaping in.” When others leap in to my life, they relate to me in a way that takes over. It’s an influence from others that robs me of agency, makes my decisions for me, turns me into a kind of puppet of the “they.” Often this will look like making things easier for me, alleviating me of the burden, “protecting” me from having to face up to existential anxiety. “This kind of solicitude takes over for the Other that with which he is to concern himself,” Heidegger says. “In such solicitude the Other can become one who is domi
nated and dependent, even if this domination is a tacit one and remains hidden from him.”38 Friends who leap in imagine they’re helping by preventing you from facing the question: Who am I?
Heidegger contrasts this with a mode of other-regarding concern he describes as “leaping ahead.” The friend who leaps ahead isn’t trying to fix things, or alleviate the burden, or disburden me of the choice I need to make. Such a friend leaps ahead “not in order to take away his ‘care’ but rather to give it back to him authentically as such for the first time.” This, says Heidegger, is “authentic care.” “It helps the Other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it.”39 The friend who leaps ahead is one who’s glimpsed what you’re called to be and is willing to let you be uncomfortable as you wrestle with the call, who loves you enough to let you struggle for your soul but is standing by with a bandage and a map.
It’s hard for me to imagine that Heidegger wasn’t thinking about Augustine and Alypius when he came up with this distinction. The climax of the drama of the Confessions, and book 8 in particular, builds to Augustine’s decision in the garden—but Alypius is there the whole time. There is no lone-wolf, individuated resolve in this picture of authenticity. When Augustine answers the call, finds himself, he is finding himself in relation to the One who made him, and he is finding himself alongside a friend who loves him.
In a fit of anxiety, his old self duking it out with the self he knows he’s called to be, he steps into the garden to get some fresh air and elbow room. “Alypius followed me step after step,” he points out. “Although he was present, I felt no intrusion on my solitude. How could he abandon me in such a state?”40 Alypius doesn’t leap in, but neither does he step aside. He is both present and absent, a comfort without being an intrusion, a co-pilgrim without pretending to take over the reins of the journey Augustine has to take. “This debate in my heart was a struggle of myself against myself,” Augustine recalls. “Alypius stood quite still at my side, and waited in silence for the outcome of my unprecedented state of agitation.”41 It can be a horrible thing to watch someone in such an existential struggle. But alleviating the burden is not a way to love them. Friendship is staying close enough to put a hand on their shoulder while giving them enough room to feel the weight.
On the Road with Saint Augustine Page 14