To Arrive Where We Started

A sweeping meditation on the human search for home, drawing on the works of philosophers, poets, novelists, scientists, anthropologists, and theologians

Why do so many people in modern societies feel not at home in their worlds? How have they become so alienated from one another, the natural environment, and even themselves? In this ambitious book, Ian Marcus Corbin engages the fundamental questions surrounding friendship with oneself, one’s family, friends, community, nation, and species.

Corbin begins with a deep humanistic and scientific dive into how humans inherit and refine their picture of the world in community, including what makes this process more or less successful. He goes on to examine some human cultures―Native American, African, and early American―that seem to have excelled at making their people feel at home. He contrasts these cultures with contemporary America in particular, a society characterized by a facsimile of belonging that substitutes a paranoid, self-protective culture of ownership for the self-opening practice of friendship. The book’s coda is a call to abandon the illusion of ownership and to reopen ourselves to friendship with each other, nature, and even the deepest sources of existence.

Ian Marcus Corbin is a philosopher on faculty at Harvard Medical School and founding director of Harvard’s Public Culture Project. He lives in Cambridge, MA.