To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World

About the Book

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.

About the Author :

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.

Review :
“In his densely argued debut book, philosopher Corbin draws on cultural anthropology, cognitive science, economic history, literature, and philosophy to explore themes of belonging, loneliness, and alienation. . . . An erudite analysis of contemporary angst.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Ian Marcus Corbin’s book is a brilliantly eloquent plea, at once rigorously argued and ambitiously visionary, for the lost habits of attention, belonging, gratitude, and humility. Corbin calls these various habits ‘world-tending,’ and he makes a vivid case that if we do not begin this task now, there may be no meaningful world left to tend. A passionate and necessary book.”—James Wood, author of How Fiction Works

“Ian Marcus Corbin has written a searching, erudite, and provocative meditation on—well, what it means to be human. He insists that we return to fundamental questions: What sort of world are we living in, and how should our politics and morality align with that world? For his part, Corbin contends that this is a world where the everyday beauty and divinity of the cosmos—and of human beings—must be our starting point.”—Eugene McCarraher, Villanova University

“To Arrive Where We Started is a deeply thoughtful examination of the human search for home. Ian Marcus Corbin argues that the need to feel at home in the world is not a sentimental longing but a condition of agency itself. By tracing how modern ideas of the self have eroded our ability to inhabit a shared world, he offers a powerful diagnosis of contemporary alienation. Corbin’s call to place belonging and participation back at the center of our self-understanding poses a profound and timely challenge to the modern imagination.”—Sean Dorrance Kelly, coauthor of All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

“This is a fascinating and beautifully crafted account of the human quest for home and belonging. Given the increasing levels of loneliness, alienation, and anomie in the US, Europe, and beyond, this is a very significant intellectual intervention.”—Adrian Pabst, University of Kent

“Social philosophers are those who, in any society, ask: ‘What is it to flourish? And how can we do so?’ Ian Corbin is a social philosopher for twenty-first-century America. His answers are well worth attending to.”—George Scialabba, author of The Sealed Envelope and Only a Voice