Positive and negative Loneliness

Question

In his book A Philosophy of Loneliness author Lars Svendsen describes two different types of "being alone".

Loneliness is used to name the feeling that you are alone, and you feel desperate about this (i.e. you crave some kind of connection with others, and cannot get it, either because you are actually alone, or because you cannot somehow reach out to others).

Solitude is instead the "positive" side of the same condition: you are alone because you like being alone (it could just be time you use to pursuit a hobby, for example, the classical "me time") but you are content if not downright happy being alone.

Question: is it possible to express these two different types of "being alone" (one negative, one positive) in Japanese?

(If at all possible I'd prefer to use Kanji for this: most of my questions here are for possible use of the words in my Shodo practice, but I am also just curious about how this can be expressed in the language, no matter how it is written).

Answer 1

孤高{ここう} seems the best for solitude, but it sounds a little bit stoical, and formal as ErikaO says in the comment.
How about 悠々{ゆうゆう}自適{じてき} / 悠悠{ゆうゆう}自適{じてき}?
I know it is not an exact translation for solitude, but it could possibly be the second best. It has not enough nuance of being alone explicitly than 孤高{ここう}, but it sounds more gentle than 孤高.

悠々自適 means living by oneself free from worldly cares. It could be used in a phrase like:
悠々自適の生活{せいかつ}を送{おく}る or 悠々自適に暮{く}らす to lead a life by oneself free from worldly cares.

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There is an article on your topic. The writer says there is not an exact Japanese term equivalent to solitude except 孤高 which is not necessarily exact. In this article he shows us a very interesting fact that the combination of "enjoy solitude" hit far more than that of "enjoy loneliness" when he searched them on the Internet. I think this search result shows us the essential difference between them.

Don't you think to enjoy solitude goes hand in hand with 悠々｛ゆうゆう｝自適｛じてき｝ living by oneself free from worldly cares?

Answer 2

A few thoughts come to mind. Alan Sillitoe's short story "The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner" (which is about the sense of freedom and peace a young delinquent has when he is allowed out of the reformatory to go cross-country running, so I'd say it was a positive emotion) is called 「[長距離]{ちょうきょり}[走者]{そうしゃ}の[孤独]{こどく}」 in Japanese. In Wordsworth's poem "The Daffodils", the phrase "the bliss of solitude" (clearly positive) is translated both as [孤独]{こどく}の[至福]{しふく} and 一人きりの至福. The phrase 一人ぼっちの夜 in Sakamoto Kyu's song 「上を向いて歩こう(涙がこぼれないように)」 is clearly negative. "Carson McCullers's "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter", about the ultimate impossibility of complete understanding between human beings, is 「愛すれど心さびしく」. I think さびしい/さびしさ is always negative.