An earlier version of this article won second place in CBHD’s 2024 student paper competition and was presented at the Center’s annual conference.
People who speak of their experience in solitary confinement often call it a form of living death. Their bodies still live, breathe, eat, and sleep, but in virtue of their forced isolation, away from any social interaction and locked within an enclosure for up to twenty-three hours a day, their senses, feelings, cognition, and even their being seem to fall apart. Prolonged solitary confinement brings about not just a perceptual or cognitive but—as I argue—an ontological detachment from reality. Drawing on the phenomenological work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that solitary confinement deprives its victims of the everyday, embodied meaning-making activities, community, and world that compose what it means to be a human being. I then employ the work of Stanley Hauerwas to extend my argument to implications for contemporary bioethics and Christianity.
Between 70 to 90 percent of individuals undergoing solitary confinement experience problems that cannot be sufficiently explained in just cognitive or neurophysiological models.[1] These problems, such as phobias, anxiety, depression, mood swings, and schizophrenic symptoms, can manifest even long after incarceration and are exemplified in the testimony of an inmate held in solitary confinement in a “Supermax” unit measuring 1.8 m x 2.7 m in size:
I went to a standstill psychologically once—lapse of memory. I didn’t talk for 15 days. I couldn’t hear clearly. You can’t see—you’re blind—block everything out—disoriented, awareness is very bad. Did someone say he’s coming out of it? I think what I’m saying is true—not sure. I think I was drooling—a complete standstill.[2]
In many other testimonies from current and former prisoners undergoing solitary confinement, the experience is the same: the feeling of “nowhere else to go,” deteriorating senses, problems in affect, acute unfreedom in isolation, and a loss of reality.[3] From the deprivation of everyday encounters with other people, the prisoners feel that their senses betray them, and they feel detached from reality, unable to even reflect or think about their experiences; for as long as solitary confinement has been practiced, the symptoms—confusion, paranoia, hallucination, trembling, headaches, and so on—have been strikingly consistent.[4] Even with adequate food, drink, and medicine, prisoners sense that their being becomes unhinged. Solitary confinement deprives them of the concrete experience of relational intersubjectivity that used to make their world—phenomenologically speaking, the common sense of embodied phenomena, objects, space, and actions—livable enough for anyone to say that the table in front of me really is a solid, tangible thing. But solitary confinement collapses that embodied life-world. According to Guenther, their open-ended perception of the communal world and “intersubjective basis for their concrete personhood . . . is structurally undermined by the prolonged deprivation of a concrete, everyday experience of other people.”[5]
There is more to selfhood than individuality; to have an understanding of self and the sensual world, there must be other people who can implicitly confirm the everydayness of existence in a shared world of things, objects, concepts, ideas, and so on. When blocked from any meaningful interaction with an outside world, especially other people, prisoners’ sense of meaning collapses. One’s consciousness of their lifeworld thus deteriorates. Solitary confinement is therefore a form of social, intercorporeal death in which the plural experience of being in a shared perceptual world disappears. The overlapping intelligibility and commonsensicality of others’ perspectives gives one an assuredness of their perception of space, sound, and touch; it is an open-ended and secure understanding of multiple perspectives that effectively (and sometimes cognitively) secure a world.[6] Relationality is what gives the possibility of an entity’s sensuality in an openly shared space in which one can dwell. Thus, when solitary confinement removes a human being from such intersubjective meaning-making, one’s world becomes a disconnected, complex web of meanings—how far away the cup really is, what the sound of music is like, and so on. By this, that person is turned into a “solitary nightmare—a perfect Cartesian ego” devoid of life.[7] The everyday world of perceptions we take for granted dies, and what remains are often deep, long-lasting psychological traumas. There is nowhere to go, and the world is turned in against the person. There is no way to be, live, and act in possibly new, creatively open ways; sensory perception is exhausted in a lonely, bare cell.[8] There is something about what it means to “be” human that is lost in this social death-in-a-life experience of sheer isolation and monotony.
The experiences of solitary confinement help deconstruct the common philosophical preconception that human being begins from absolute subjecthood: that the world is as representational phenomena primarily organized through the structures of human cognition.[9] For example, Kant claims that spatial perception of objects is possible for a person to introspect alone; space for Kant is a “pure intuition” from inner cognition and reason.[10] But experiences of solitary confinement show that this is far from the case. Instead, the philosophy of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty show that the opposite is true: that at a fundamental level, solely introspective cognition is not being-in-the-world.
Our ordinary encounter with the world is not so much as unitary subjects cognitively processing distinct objects, but it should be understood as an existential mode that Heidegger calls “being-in-the-world.”[11] The former ontological modality is the sort of being and experience in which scientific investigation, philosophical thinking, and context-free metaphysical theorizing occurs.[12] In this mode of being, the subject is a thinking substance whose object is the world as a categorized universe of physical objects and concrete ideas that are treated as “objectively present.”[13] There is nothing wrong with this mode of being; indeed, we can consider this mode of “being” as coterminous with acting. It is how we know the facts and properties of an object of study, and it is how we generate theories through which to investigate other objects.[14] This is what Heidegger calls the “objectively present orientation,” in which we try to care about facts of the matter in a disinterested, atemporal way; we stare intently at the hammer to conceptualize its parts and features.[15] We traditionally think of and enact science in this way, and when we “philosophically” or “psychologically” contemplate a case study, we usually try to consciously “think out” a problem in abstraction. But this ontological mode of existence is far from the full story of what human being is all about. It occurs when we are forced to take a step back from our almost automatic way of doing things—say, when one is driving a car “unconsciously,” notices an engine breakdown, and cognizes about its mechanisms and inner workings—when something in our everyday life feels amiss or uncanny and when we theorize about an event in a context-free manner of theoretical investigation.[16]
In fact, for Heidegger, our traditional privileging of objective presence as existence has concealed our understanding of a more primordial, basic way of how we handily cope with useful things: the ontology of being-in-the-world.[17] In short, human being as being-in-the-world reduces the distance between perceiver and perceived, such that one’s environment becomes a network of integrated meaning that shapes how we experience existence. What it means to be a human being is not just known through biology or neuropsychology or even philosophy, but also pre-conceptually through an attuned, innerworldly understanding that allows our being to show itself in a seemingly mundane, but meaningful, way. If objectively present being is about subjects’ disinterested, contemplative thinking that structures perceptions, the “natural” and “handy” feeling of being-in-the-world is all about how our context-sensitive tools reveal themselves as together constructing a relational environment.[18] One’s being-in-the-world is manifest in one’s care of the world.
The world is not a “who” (subject) or a “what” (object) but a “how” (relation) of how people become familiarized within their network of involvements. The world is the totality of inter-referential, meaningful entities that disclose the world in their “handiness” (automaticity in some context-sensitive encounter). Isolating some part as an object of ontic investigation partially conceals its meaning because every useful thing—every innerworldly being—is and is intelligible only in its relation to other useful things.[19] We just do things and find ourselves caught up skillfully dealing with the world we are bound up in, guided along our dealings by a non-cognitive but familiar, intuitive “common sense” whose intelligibility is constituted by other innerworldly observers.[20] Familiarity is the “in-ness” of being-in-the-world; we dwell “in” the world like how I feel “at home in” my usual engagement with (circumspection for) the world of a traffic jam and my concern for not bumping into other nearby drivers, whose swerving and honking partially constitute what the situational meaning of a traffic jam is all about.[21] Within a cultural world, certain actions gain meaning as commonsensical practices as such—not merely regular behaviors—only within a recursive network of other practices and interreferential background entities, or equipment, whose connections are reinforced by public norms. My body comports in a way that seems seamless with the traffic and in interaction with other bodies, even without my full cognitive intentionality directed towards them.
For Merleau-Ponty, a shared, intercorporeal space is the medium through which things are made perceptibly intelligible. It is the body and the mind—not just the latter—that is the site of understanding, sensing, and interpreting a world of objects and perceptions.[22] It is not just one thing or object towards which one’s body is attuned, but a whole assemblage of many different objects whose relationships make other intelligible and sensual (for example, how 2D and 3D optical illusions play on this gestalt relationship). The body is a pivot between a possible “interior” mind and “exterior world,” and embodied activity is how space itself is kinesthetically felt as a medium through which entities in the world are disclosed as objects of experience, cognitively or not.[23]
Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty critiques traditional philosophical perspectives of the mind as the sole site of experience: that human being begins with conscious cognition structuring a perceived object’s raw sense-data into some representational content. Instead, experience is often “felt” and external to an inside-brain “mind.” What connects us to the world (say, for instance, what helps me get a good grip on a steering wheel) is not always internal mind-directed perception of an object through cognitive structures but my embodied action within a whole nexus of other things—like the driver’s seat, my grip, and the sounds of the vehicle—that make perception and action seamless.
Response to a situation is deeply contextual and embodied; one does not just think about the world, but the totality of significations, things, and concerns that are “dealt with” and seem to disappear from the mind. The body—and more accurately, interactions with other people to have shared perceptions—makes communication with other things possible such that one can (non-cognitively) recognize, attune itself to, and care for a world; the body is the prior condition as being-in-the-world.[24] The body is the perceptual site where multiple perspectives intertwine into an intelligible totality; it is nexus of living meanings that surrounds a person and makes a knot of significations allowing for the body’s disclosure to a handy world and vice-versa.[25] It is what makes the appropriate space of privacy for sitting down on a bus with other people seem so commonsensically easy to manage. In its habilitation of new skills, interactions, and dispositions, the body openly projects itself into new ways of being that exceed simplistic and closed feedback loops or behaviorist models.
Our world is inherently social, and many of the entities we encounter are not just physical objects but immaterial tools as well, including perceptions about space and time. Being-in-the-world is possible only as being-with, and one’s sense of selfhood—and the perceptual agency bound to it—is co-constituted in relation among other people. The world is not a static given or production of human subjectivity; rather, we are thrown into our worlds and find ourselves always already as caring for its world and concerned for being-with others, who together dwell and share worlds in shared projects.[26] Indeed, the publicity of being-with gives common sense its commonality, and the handiness in everyday being-in-the-world gives common sense its sensuality.
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty reveal that human experience is first as a not-so-theoretical engagement with the world: not as cognition, but as handy intuitions and dispositions implicitly confirmed by other people’s responses, gestures, and dispositions that together structure our common sense about how we and others are to make sense of life. We find familiarity in the handiness of our everyday world about how one normally acts. That comfortable world is common sense, which includes a complex web of dispositions, intuitions, and comportments that allow us to deal with complex contexts and situations without much thought. Then, from practice, comes theory. The world, and the objects and perceptions that constitute it, are not simply a projection of the brain or soul to it but are things that show themselves when we have others to implicitly validate our experience of things or apparitions into real phenomena.
Even the most mundane actions and cues undergird the world. When our being-in-the-world is in the mode of familiar handiness, our involvements in our world are “guided” by unreflective intuitions rather than conscious thinking. This is far from a behaviorist explanation of action and perception, since environmental conditions alone cannot fully justify creative behavior, meaningful relations, complex interactions, understanding and interpretation, and even a “switch” into a more cognitive mode of “deep thought” that a phenomenological account can.[27] Human being is more than inputs-to-outputs or pure reason; it is full of meaningful (or sensual) comportment to a surrounding environment of useful things—from physical objects to implicit/gestalt concepts—that make everyday dealings with the world seem so commonsensically simple. These interactions are dynamic interactions among many interrelated entities, which are meaningful only in their totality of shared intelligibility, which is verified and reinforced via social interactivity with other people.
Being-in-the-world is thus not dull and dumb; instead, it is richly meaningful in virtue of a complex, holistic network of objects, ideas, and things in general. These things are always understood in their relationship to one another, and the world (as common sense), into which we are already thrown and socialized, is the unity of the difference of them.[28] The world makes sense to us because its inter-related entities are revealed as in relation to a whole system of intuitions and ideas about how people can be and act. For instance, an outside observer—say an alien scientist who has hitherto had no contact with humans—would have an initially difficult time understanding the deeply implicit and sometimes contradictory rules that seem to disappear from view when humans handily cope with driving, conversing, and following social customs like lining up. We can consider common sense as a familiar toolbox or home in which the noncognitive dispositions we use to interpret, judge, and act make much of life handily automatic. We dwell in the world in that we “just do it” and skillfully cope with situations.
Life is interpretative through and through, and our experiences “make sense” not just “in the mind” but also through our bodies and among others in our ordinary, but deeply attuned, engagements within the world—including the spatial one.[29] But when one is isolated for years from the sensual, richly perceptual, and open world with other people, that shared world—its handiness, and the possibilities onto which one can project—falls apart. Being-in-the-world is about finding possibly new ways to be and act, often after feeling assailed by a “mood” of (not always psychological) anxiety/shock into the second-order mode of objectively present being. We are always ahead of ourselves and attempt to project ourselves onto new possible ways of existing, but this is not possible if those possibilities are cut off.[30]
However, when one is in long-term isolation, one is away from the possible openness of finding oneself thrown into the mundanely rich world of everyday being-with other human beings. As Guenther argues, solitary confinement deprives persons from the concrete social interactions necessary for world-making and thus “have the very structure of their Being-in-the-world turned against them and used to exploit their fundamental relationality.”[31] The prevention of such projects and ways of being within one’s community and life-world indeed appear as a loss of meaning and purpose, overcoming individuals with what Svenaeus describes as an “alienating mood” from painful experiences of not-being-at-home (specifically in his account of ill patients) at the levels of embodiment, engaging with one’s community, and values.[32]
The juxtaposition of an infirm patient, away from their community by the force of illness and pain, with the person in solitary confinement is apt. This is because, as Frush argues in his interpretation of Hauerwas, the experience of illness “threatens our identity as beings-in-community” through (1) “isolation and incommunicability that suffering imposes on the sufferer,” generating a history of foreignness in one’s own body and away from one’s everyday community, and by (2) the sufferer’s embodying a discomforting reminder of finitude and vulnerability to nonsuffering members of the community.[33] Indeed, as Hauerwas argues, the infirm patient’s identity and humanity are realized by their physician’s faithful bearing witness to the patient’s suffering, which leads to both members’ grasping of vulnerability, finitude, and mortality. In doing so, the physician’s empathetic stance bridges the infirm patient with their shared moral communities, which like a church provide rich context and understanding of their identities and normative commitments.[34]
The church, as a body of faithful persons who remind each other of both shared virtues and burdens, offers a counternarrative to the experience of isolation: not by avoidance but rather by sharing suffering through remembrance and hospitality.[35] The church, as community, constitutes and affirms the world of its members. Practices from the scriptures they recite to heart, to the ritual Sunday gospels and dances, and to the more mundane, everyday acts of self-and-other recognition at the church dinner constitute a shared identity as fellow sufferers and friends in Christ who live, act, and serve as part of a greater purpose. Unique to other communities, it also calls on its members to a higher commitment: to faithfully follow Christ and to love one another. We return to a familiar theme: like how care for being-in-the-world is as an absorbed, context-dependent, meaning-driven way of doing everyday things, to love one another in Christ is to affirm the everyday character of their belonging in the church through action. To care for the world (as church community) is to recognize the humanity of others in kindness and service, bringing them towards a higher calling. Such love is incompatible with the notion of solitary confinement because it denies the potential to share and create identity as familiarity in a world constructed by the meaning-making activities tied to a holy commitment. It strips the human being of faithful Christ-following as a member of a community, and it must be opposed by Christians.
When one is in an acutely limited space, with no exploration and no interaction with another person or outside world, the possibility for true agency, one in which a person can assuredly distinguish reality from non-reality and phenomena from mere apparitions, disappears. So far, I have tried to investigate how solitary confinement undermines people’s ability for perceiving, understanding, and otherwise being-in-the-world (i.e., commonsensical, non-cognitively intuitive but skillful “grasping” on situations at hand). The practice of forced isolation in a single enclosure, often for years at a time, leads to traumas not just at a psychological level but at an existential one, such that prisoners find it difficult to distinguish what is spatially real. There is something lost at a primordial level when no one else can help uphold the everyday dispositions and intuitions about interrelatedly meaningful, useful things that constitute a shared world. Our commonsensical understanding of space, objects, and even our own identities are possible only when we are among others. How we can understand the world—how we perceive things as phenomena, distinguish unreal hallucinations from the real—is possible only insofar as we are among other people whose attuned presence, words, and actions make the world itself.
The task of phenomenology is to reveal how our everyday, often non-cognitive, interactions and interpretations of the world around us constitute the meaning of human shared experience: not just as isolated instances of cognition or reflexes of behavior but as parts of an interrelated, whole, and meaningful network of objects, dispositions, intuitions, and perceptions. Such an analysis illuminates that, because of its deeply and existentially dehumanizing effects, solitary confinement is indeed a form of cruel and unusual punishment.
[1] Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
[2] Stuart Grassian, “Psychopathological Effects of Solitary Confinement,” American Journal of Psychiatry 140 no. 11 (1983): 1452, https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.140.11.1450.
[3] Edward Casey, “Skin-Deep: Bodies Edging into Place,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (Fordham University Press, 2015), 159–72.
[4] Lisa Guenther, “Subjects Without a World? An Husserlian Analysis of Solitary Confinement,” Human Studies, 34 (2011): 257–76, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9182-0.
[5] Guenther, Solitary Confinement, 35.
[6] Guenther, Solitary Confinement, 23–38.
[7] Guenther, Solitary Confinement, xv–xxx.
[8] Casey, “Skin-Deep.”
[9] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (1781; repr., Cambridge University Press, 1998).
[10] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.
[11] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (1927; repr., SUNY Press, 2010).
[12] Hubert Drefyus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (MIT Press, 1991), 20.
[13] Heidegger, Being and Time, 26–35, 144–49.
[14] Drefyus, Being-in-the-World.
[15] Heidegger, Being and Time, 26–35, 144–49.
[16] Heidegger, Being and Time, 26–35, 144–49.
[17] Heidegger, Being and Time, 26–35, 144–49.
[18] Heidegger, Being and Time, 66–76, 138–48.
[19] Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court, 2002), 22–24.
[20] Stephan Fuchs, Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society (Harvard University Press, 2005).
[21] Joseph Rouse, Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image (The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 445–48.
[22] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Routledge (1945; repr., Routledge, 2012), 50–57.
[23] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 207–27.
[24] Guenther, “Subjects Without a World?”
[25] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 102–37.
[26] Heidegger, Being and Time, 76–80, 184–188.
[27] Drefyus, Being-in-the-World, 253–55, 261–62.
[28] Stephan Fuchs, “Observing Facts and Values: A Brief Theory and History,” Canadian Review of Sociology 54, no. 4 (2017): 456–67, https://doi.org/10.1111/cars.12171.
[29] Casey, “Skin-Deep,” 159–72.
[30] Casey, “Skin-Deep,” 159–72.
[31] Guenther, Solitary Confinement, 155.
[32] Fredrik Svenaeus, “The Phenomenology of Suffering in Medicine and Bioethics,” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 35, no. 6 (2014): 407–20, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-014-9315-3.
[33] Benjamin Frush, “Suffering Absence: Hauerwas and the Challenges to Faithful Presence in Contemporary Medical Training,” The Linacre Quarterly 87, no. 4 (2020): 464–70, https://doi.org/10.1177/0024363920937626.
[34] Stanley Hauerwas, Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church (University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).
[35] Frush, “Suffering Absence.”
John Han, "Solitary Confinement: A Social Death of Being-in-the-World," Dignitas 31, no. 3-4 (2024): 10–14, www.cbhd.org/dignitas-articles/solitary-confinement-a-social-death-of-being-in-the-world.