Philosophy was born from the alienation engendered by the feeling and awareness of distance. This distance could also be described as a form of banishment or exile. Exile takes many forms. The first comes in the change from childhood to adulthood. It’s the subject of Wordsworth’s poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; —
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
Another comes when one first feels love for another person, bringing with it the realization that one is alone, incomplete, separate from the object of desire. It’s a source of intense pain. But the worst form of distance, or exile, is to be banished from oneself.
It’s natural that philosophy would be most comfortable in cities where nature is all but removed. It’s difficult to imagine someone directly in contact with the earth, say a nomadic farmer, needing to come up with explanations about the reality or essence of his being. The world would make sense, for their connection to it wouldn’t be broken, not observed at a distance, but directly. I’ve often wondered, seeing the Rom’s (once called Gypsys) who come to Paris each year, if, despite their often-unhealthy outward appearance, they aren’t living more fully human lives than the people in whose cities they’ve entered.
It’s inevitable that a man, divorced from a life lived in rhythm with nature, would feel alienation and a need to explain or justify his condition. Human intellectual history is that of our successive attempts to understand that situation.
Consider the various theories about life that’ve come and gone. Between, say Heraclitean “Flux” and the recent “End of History,” there are hundreds.
Successive historical periods can be defined by how their philosophical school explained reality. It’s like a parlor game, “Who can come up with the new slant on life to explain why we are where we are and what it all means?” For many, the explanations provided by philosophers and social theoreticians are more real than reality itself.
The distance man feels from nature is a form of alienation which no argument, no matter how clever or well-reasoned, can ever breach. Imagine if a fish learned to exist outside the water. It’d be eternally in the position of distance from its natural reality. Looking at those fish still in the water he could think with superiority they were missing out on truth, not knowing that the world is bigger than just swimming in a pond. But, that same fish, if he was honest, would know there was something artificial in his outlook. He’d have to know that he was a liar.
We’ve entered a time when, thanks to modern medicine and technology, the interest in speculative philosophy has taken a backseat to concrete action. Concurrent with this is the redefinition and codifying of self as a non-naturally determined entity. Its axiom is: Life is only tolerable when it’s what I want it to be.
One could say that those people who reject nature in themselves are more in tune with the philosophical reality of the present moment, that they feel the pain of their distance most acutely. But there’s a danger—rejecting one’s nature leads to alienation from life in general. The ultimate solution to this problem can only be death. This may offer a key to the current state of the world.