孤独是什么?

Loneliness isn't written about much by analytic philosophers. Solipsism is, of course—whether it's possible for us to have knowledge of the mind of others or indeed of anything outside of our individual minds.The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophydoesn't have an entry for loneliness, and nearly all of the entries in recent years in the Philosopher's Index for loneliness are theological (dealing with the loneliness of the spirit), existentialist (dealing with the independence of radical choice), or social psychological (dealing Hannah Arendt's portrait of loneliness as the ground for terror).The Shape of Wateris a lovely movie for reflecting on loneliness and how it can be overcome in the lives of ordinary people.

Many forms of loneliness appear inThe Shape of Water. Critics of the United States of the 1950s viewed the company man and his family life as the paradigm of loneliness—in the film, this kind of loneliness appears in the caricature of the government official charged with figuring out how a strange amphibian creature functions so the US can take advantage of its capacities in the space race with Russia. There's the loneliness of the spy who cannot reveal his real identity. There's the loneliness of an unidentified passenger on a bus, clutching a birthday cake from which only one slice has been cut out; as a viewer, you wonder whether he gave the missing slice to someone else or whether he just couldn't wait until he got home to bite into a cake he was going to eat all by himself. There's the loneliness of Giles, fired from his job as a commercial artist because he cannot keep up with current fashion—and because of his sexual orientation. There's the loneliness of night custodial workers, stuck in jobs in which they are invisible to those around them. There's the loneliness of the amphibian creature chained in an unfamiliar environment in which no one understand his needs or his capabilities. And there's the loneliness of Elisa herself who communicates only by sign because she became mute after an unexplained trauma in early childhood.

But Elisa does communicate through sign, and others communicate with her as well.The Shape of Water让我们思考生命之间真正相互联系的本质和潜力谁关心彼此。根据我对这部电影的理解，沟通需要信任。And, as Annette Baier argued many years ago in"Trust and Antitrust,"信任假设脆弱性。Trust使我们处于危险之中;它让我们意识到别人可能会利用我们或背叛我们。如果我们不合理地指望我们信任的人会帮我们度过难关，那么信任可能就不值得了。

Since Baier wrote, there has been significant philosophical discussion of the nature of trust. Some hold that trust is rooted in self-interest: we trust each other when we have reason to believe that acting as we expect will be mutually beneficial to those we trust. Others argue that trust is grounded through mutually accepted constraints, as in contracts. Still others argue that warranted trust depends on good intentions to one another or dispositions to care for each other. Still others argue that trustworthiness is a virtue. There's a great deal of discussion as well among social scientists about social contexts of trust. Robert Putnam'sBowling Alone, for example, argued that the United States is beset by a decline in social capital—participation in activities in which people bond with those like them or in activities in which people connect across what otherwise might be separate identities. More recently, Putnam and others have debated whether the evidence indicates thatdiversity erodes social capital, and with that erosion, social trust.