Fear and loneliness is very real. Loneliness is the common ground for terror. Fear is always connected with isolation—which can be either its result or its origin—and the concomitant experiences of impotence and helplessness. You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love? But what happens when trust and love evaporate? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is seen feasting. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It advances as the fire enclosing and engulfing.

Solitude and loneliness are not the same. In solitude we are never alone, but are together with ourselves. In solitude we are always two-in-one; we become one whole individual, in the richness as well as the limitations of definite characteristics, are always asked in solitude, when man is alone with himself and therefore potentially together with everybody. Solitude is not loneliness, but can easily become loneliness and can even more easily be confused with it. Nothing is more difficult and rarer than people who, out of the desperate need of loneliness, find the strength to escape into solitude, into company with themselves, thereby mending the brokenness which link them to other men. This is what happened in one happy moment to Nietzsche, when he concluded his great and desperate poem of loneliness with the words: “It was noon, one became two, and I was done with Zarathustra.” The lonely are out of the common sense of human family. They try to get out of the human house. They stand out with their own thought, which is never tested with the common sense. They do not agree with the rest, they are buried in their own thought, and they adamantly sure of themselves. Because they are not only mathematically but dangerously logical. They are logical against the rest.

Logicality is what appeals to isolated human beings, for man—in complete solitude, without any contact with his fellow-men and therefore reasoning. The intimate connection between logicality and isolation was stressed in Martin Luther’s little known interpretation of the biblical passage that says that God created Man, male and female, because “it is not good for man to be alone.” Luther says: “A lonely man always deduces one thing from another and carries everything to its worst conclusion.” Logicality, mere reasoning without regard for facts and experience, is the true vice of solitude. But the vices of solitude grow only out of the despair of loneliness. Loneliness, as the concomitant of homelessness and up rootedness, is, humanly speaking, the very disease of our time. To be sure, you may still see people—but they get to be fewer and fewer—who cling to each other as if in mid-air.

They have only escaped the despair of loneliness by becoming addicted to the vices of solitude. They are angry and arrogant and become fanatical. The danger in solitude is of losing one’s own self, so that, instead of being together with everybody, one is literally deserted by everybody. The birds of the same feather get together. They are fundamentalist groups and gangs. They are taking revenge against the human family. Modern terrorists and fundamentalists are of this mentality. Their experience in solitude has given them extraordinary insight into all those relationships which cannot be realized without this being alone with one’s own self, but has led them to forget the perhaps even more primary relationships between men and the realm they constitute, springing simply from the fact of human plurality. This phenomenon, which is clearly not only a specificity of the region of East or West, has been termed a growing tribalism, the greatest threat to our survival . . in the world or, simply, the new tribalism. Not the exacerbated national sentiments but more concretely to the ethnification of politics is killing us. Even the experience of the merely materially and sensually given world depends, in the last analysis, upon the fact that not one man but men in the plural inhabit the earth. It is a form of praxis. Human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings. Speech and action reveal this unique distinctness. Through them, men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects but qua men. With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance.