Philosopher Ian Marcus Corbin first recalls feeling a deep sense of home when he watched the dawn unfold from a wild and overflowing backyard at his boyhood home in a rundown part of Kittery, Maine. Corbin felt in those moments like he was communing with a powerful creative force. But as he grew older, he was increasingly visited by a terror that we may be truly alone in the cosmos, a feeling that found echoes in the many thinkers he read in his 20s, such as Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and bell hooks. Their work suggested that a deep sense of homelessness is an essential part of modern life—that the materialism, individualism, and disregard for nature so fundamental to Western culture have made a sense of belonging structurally impossible.
Today, a rising panic seems to be spreading across the industrialized world, writes Corbin in his new book, To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World. We’re so disconnected from our home planet and estranged from each other that we can no longer function, and our spiritual impoverishment isn’t just ruining the Earth, it’s becoming a political emergency, the seedbed of totalitarianism, he writes.
Corbin contends that home-making and belonging are central features of all life forms, even at the cellular level. We all must adapt. And for humans, this process of adaptation requires connection with oneself, one another, nature, and the deepest forms of existence. He argues that we need to look to other cultural models to save ourselves, replacing our paranoid “ownership culture” with the “friendship cultures” of certain Native American, African, and even early American societies.
Corbin, a philosopher in the neurology faculty at Harvard Medical School, co-directs the Trust and Belonging Initiative at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program. I spoke with him about friendship culture, cell metabolism, the Lakota, Dostoyevsky, and how our material and spiritual predicaments are intertwined.
“To Arrive where we started” comes from a famous line in T.S. Eliot’s poem Little Gidding: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Why did you choose this line as the title of your book?
That line from T.S. Eliot has always jumped out to me. His Four Quartets has been probably my favorite poem for a decade or two now. That idea of coming to understand our world and coming to feel at home in the places we’re from, I think just on a personal level, resonates with me as a desire I have. As I built out the argument of the book, it came to seem more and more central. My editor at Yale grabbed it out and suggested we use it for the title, so that was her idea. But one of the cases I make in the book is that organisms in general, but humans in particular, have this deep desire to be at home in their worlds.
For humans, this is a lifelong process—to come to understand who we are and how we fit. Eliot says that home is where we start from. There’s a childhood, or adolescent, process of coming to understand reality in a provisional sense. But as we grow, the pattern becomes stranger. As you take up the responsibility of an adult acting in the world, you find out that actually things are very confusing, and the clear interpretation that you would’ve gotten as a child, there are holes in it. It doesn’t fully capture everything that you’re living through and being asked to do. You need to go through this lifelong process to wind your way back to understanding, to know where you’re from for the first time, in light of all the attitudes and confusions of adult life.
The exploring is just part of adult life. World literature is replete with stories of people leaving home and coming back. It’s a human pattern. With that line, I’m trying to express what seems to me is an extremely common or ubiquitous kind of life structure. The problem would be if in modernity, certain assumptions and customs have taken root together that prevent homecoming, that prevent us from being able to wind our way back to it, to the sense of who we are and how we fit and what this all means.
Read more: “Home Really Is Where the Heart Is”
I was a little surprised that you decided to take your arguments into the realm of cell metabolism, to get that elemental. Why did you feel the need to bring that level of biological detail into your wider philosophical argument?
A couple of reasons. One is that I think there is something universal and elemental about the human process of home-seeking and homemaking. It’s continuous with versions of home-seeking and making that happen at quote-unquote lower levels of biological life. It’s really interesting to see that continuity and ubiquity. I also find that setting them up side-by-side like that highlights some things that are very special and very demanding about the human mode of doing that.
One of the cases I make is that the unique demandingness of the human mode of homemaking requires that we be in constant feedback loops with other minds. It’s so demanding that we can’t do it alone, that our cognition doesn’t work when we’re trying to think alone. That’s the reason I made it explicit. And the other is that it’s an example of a current way that people have of understanding that there might be a subjectivity out in the world that’s not just human. The thinkers that I’m leaning on in that first chapter tend to advance what’s called the “strong continuity hypothesis,” that between human-mindedness and human cognition, there’s strong continuity running all the way to the lowest levels of biological life.
You open the book with some of your earliest experiences of feeling homesick, which in many ways are closely linked to feeling estranged from God. And one of the premises of the book, you write, is that the material and spiritual can’t be truly separated. Is your vision of belonging on some level a theological one?
I don’t know, because I’m not totally sure what the word theological means. As a child, this was a very important part of how I understood reality myself. I do think that the reading I did, especially the cross-cultural reading that I did in preparation for the book, gave me the sense that the ability, or the tendency, to have a social relationship with reality, with nature especially, was a pretty ubiquitous thing for human beings. The German Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas, who’s a student of Martin Heidegger’s, is someone I lean on in the book. He’s doing historical-philosophical studies and cross-cultural studies. And he argues that the idea that nature is kind of dead, mechanical, purely cause and effect, having no purpose or inherent value, was an extremely novel innovation of modern Western thought over the past couple hundred years. Jonas says that this is the true abyss. He thinks that the idea that only humans care strands us and puts us into an exile that we can’t really live with. That attitude is going to keep giving rise to various explosions of nihilism.
The Christian tradition has a way of thinking about this that I find interesting. Some of the figures in that tradition figure prominently in the book. But I spent some time on the Lakota tribe as another way of understanding these matters. Their word for God is translated as “the great mystery.” God isn’t closely personified—in other words, not understood as a father in the sky or something. I see right now in science and philosophy little attempts to revert to the mean. There’s growing interest in things like panpsychism, or the idea that that mind is at the center of the cosmos in some sense. There are physicists like Frank Wilczek at MIT who argue this, and a lot of work being done in biology that’s increasingly attributing cognition and consciousness to quite low levels of biological life.
I don’t know if it needs to be theological per se, but I strongly suspect that Jonas is right that the ability to experience nature and the natural world as shot through with some sort of subjectivity is quite natural to us and maybe quite difficult to cope without.
Is it possible to learn from Indigenous cultures like the Lakota without appropriating them or distorting them?
I don’t think it’s possible to learn from anyone without doing those things. We’re confronting a kind of puzzling, large, and difficult reality as humans, and I’m not willing to say that I can only learn from people with my skin tone. It’s absolutely abominable to suggest that. Of course, you don’t want to fetishize, you don’t want to be shallow about it. I grew up in New England; I’m of European ancestry. The traditions I was educated into largely reflect that. I was taught Aristotle and Plato early in my education. Dostoyevsky looms very large for me. And I think it’s very fruitful to put those sorts of thinkers into conversation with thinkers from other traditions. There’s so much to learn there.
Yes, you mentioned that Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov can be understood as a straining toward the kind of friendship culture found in Native American societies. What is the lesson that book provides in relation to homecoming, specifically?
The Brothers Karamazov argues for a posture of being in the world that Dostoyevsky thinks will open your eyes to this fundamental embeddedness and relationality, an interweaving that characterizes our existence. He thinks that there’s this process of, I call it humiliation, which seems like a harsh word, but I think it’s right. There are these different ways that we can be liberated from stifling egoism and have our eyes opened to our broader cosmic existential situation, which dovetails nicely with some of what I try to learn from the Lakota and, for instance, their tradition of the vision quest, which is a ritualized process of something similar to humiliation. You engage in various bodily mortifications like fasting, dehydration, sleep deprivation, or intentionally causing pain, so that you rattle yourself loose from your day-to-day way of experiencing the world and come to take in a broader picture. The example I use of Black Elk, he sees this phenomenal fantastical vision that emphasizes the deep interconnectedness of all things, which seems harmonious with what Dostoyevsky’s trying to explore.
Do you think there are places in modern Western society where true friendship culture exists today? I’m thinking in part of like, the anti-ICE patrols in Minneapolis or mutual aid culture, or even maybe online communities? Or are these friendships mostly based on utility as opposed to virtue?
That would be horrible. I know families, I know groups of friends, I know neighborhoods that are deeply interconnected, where true friendship is flourishing. It is in some ways a bit countercultural. I’m speaking from a neighborhood outside of Harvard Square right now. Everyone I know in this neighborhood is part of the professional managerial class. They’ve achieved, and they’ve gone to good colleges. It’s possible that colors my understanding of our general predicament a bit. But here in Cambridge, I do find rich friendships and some healthy communities, but it seems like they’re not what is strongly encouraged by the frame in which we live, which I try to unpack with the idea of ownerism, in a chapter called “Buying Belonging in the Modern World.”
Read more: “Why Your Brain Hates Other People”
Is there any danger that the kind of friendship culture you’re endorsing could lead toward nationalism or ethnic identity politics or exclusion?
There’s an ever-present danger. I rhapsodize about the Lakota and their incredible holistic understanding of self and cosmos and community, but they could be tremendously cruel to outsiders or to members of rival tribes. A sense of deep friendship and belonging that’s organized around characteristics that aren’t universally shared, organized around ethnicity, religious identity, and practical interests, that’s the easiest spot to find belonging. And it doesn’t require tremendous cruelty or chauvinism toward others who are outside of the group, but it’s not at all uncommon to see those sorts of enmities and cruelties rise up.
What I’m pushing for in the book is a sense of solidarity with all living things, which I realize is totally utopian. But there are ways that vision can be realized. And it’s not possible for us to safely eschew friendship and belonging. There’s a pattern you see a lot in the past 150 years, where modern cultures become thinned out and the sense of solidarity starts to evaporate. People come to feel like it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and it’s every man for himself, and that they’re alone. That’s an extremely fertile seedbed for the rise of hyper-toxic forms of tribalism.
Hannah Arendt, another German-Jewish philosopher who also studied with Heidegger, famously said that loneliness is the most important seedbed of totalitarianism. If you have a lonely, atomized populace, they’re going to jump at whatever proposal they can get their hands on. If you say, “Look, you’re lonely, you feel naked and exposed, you feel vulnerable to forces preying upon you that you can’t understand or respond to, but hey, you’re not alone because you’re part of the German Volk ... You’re part of this spiritual unity that also is going to involve material provision and mutual aid for one another …” That’s going to be almost irresistible. You might be willing to swallow some pretty ugly parts of it in order to have that sense of belonging. That’s why pushing for healthy forms of belonging is absolutely non-negotiable.
And how do we do that?
As I say in the intro, material and spiritual things can’t ever be cleanly teased apart. What I mean is that the ways that we provide for ourselves and feed ourselves are going to shape our view of our fundamental predicament in the world. Am I alone here? Am I surrounded by friends? Am I part of something bigger than myself, or am I on an atomized island?
If you want to change the spiritual predicament of people around you, you need to change the material predicament. But also if you want to change the material predicament, you need to change the spiritual predicament. There’s all sorts of common-sense political programs that would provide for us and our neighbors in a better way than we’re currently being provided for, but we seem unable to move on them as a society. We seem unable to execute on this stuff that is just like: Should people have healthcare? Should people be going bankrupt and becoming homeless because they got sick? It seems pretty naturally obvious that, “No, we shouldn’t allow our countrymen and women to become homeless because they got sick.” But we seem politically and culturally unable to make steps to correct that.
Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard, who famously wrote the book Bowling Alone about the decline of American community in the second half of the 20th century, wrote a subsequent book called The Upswing about the rise of solidarity and belonging that happened through the first half of the 20th century. He’s an empirical, materially-oriented kind of guy, and he was surprised to see that what seems to have happened during that upswing, as he calls it, was that there was a moral and spiritual renaissance that started to happen. Then institutions, policies, and customs changed to come into line with that renaissance. I’m a philosopher. I do some work with politicians. At the end of the last chapter, I toss out what I think are likely the kinds of reforms that we’d need to make. But it’s not a policy brief, and I’m not an elected official. What I’m arguing for is a spiritual, philosophical, and cultural change that I think in time would also change the material realities.
What role can arts and literature play in this spiritual, philosophical shift?
Arts and humanities and literature have the capacity to help us see things anew. I argue in the book that any really significant work of art is a result of some kind of direct naked confrontation with reality. You have Beethoven, Nietzsche, and all these very creative figures talking about how somehow the world spoke to them and spoke their creations into existence. Beethoven would take a walk, and the music would come to him on the wind. You have certain figures who are out on the front edges and living in a more raw confrontation with our existential realities. And from time to time, they’re blessed with some picture that helps them to make a renewed sense of how we stand here in reality. If they’re skilled craftsmen and craftswomen, then they can put that into audio vibrations or paint on canvas or words on a page. And you and I, at a secondhand remove, can connect with them through the piece and try to see something of what they see.
It’s absolutely an important conduit for renewed confrontation. And it’s not the only one. A less mediated contact with the natural world is very important. For those of us who live in cities and live a lot of our lives on screens, art and literature can have a jarring effect that can wake us up and make us see something where if we’ve just walked past the trees in our neighborhood, we might not see it. But if an artist has tried to crystallize some illumination they’ve had, sometimes that can get you in a different way. 
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Lead image: Mary Long / Adobe Stock
