Excerpt from "A Philosophy of Belonging"

JAMES GREENAWAY

A Philosophy of Belonging Persons, Politics, Cosmos

Introduction

Everyone belongs somewhere or with someone. We know, for example, that we belong to places and to times, and we know that we belong to other people and to our communities. Indeed, they belong to us too. We buy or inherit or are gifted things and artifacts. We may even have a sense that we have found our niche in the great scheme of things, especially when things are going well for us. But even if that sounds like empty-headed mysticism, and even if we feel as though we do not belong anywhere and to anyone, then at the very least there are ways in which we can think about how we belong to ourselves. In this book, we set out to explore the meaning of belonging, allowing for the probability that much about belonging remains elusive. Involved in every inquiry is the personal concern that our own belonging has for us. It is no mere academic issue to love one’s children, to support one’s nation in an international sports tournament, to be moved to the bottom of one’s soul at the plight of innocent people suffering in a distant place or time, or to seek the forgiveness of neighbor or God or one’s own self after a gross act of inauthenticity, recklessness, or destruction. A cursory glance at this book’s table of contents reveals just how expansive the meaning of belonging is, and how bound up it is with one’s very existence.

However, we need to be careful since the concern with belonging has been co-opted by various partisans across the political spectrum at different times. After the ideological horrors of the twentieth century, our eyes are wide open. Nor are we naïve about the dangers that factions pose much closer to our own day and to our own polities. As a result, suspicion hangs over the very topic of belonging. After all, belonging to a particular group often involves a deliberate choice

not to belong to some other group. For many, it is not clear how belonging could mean anything other than narrow-minded prejudice, or how belonging could avoid becoming a means of inequitably excluding others for the sake of the favored in-group. Yet there is much more at stake than the political or cultural movements of the day. What is at stake in belonging is the subject of our study.

Let us briefly refer to the etymological derivation of the verb “to belong.” We note that while one can overestimate the value of etymology, one can underestimate it too. Etymology often uncovers subtle lines of meaning that have been operative in our thinking and discourse for a long time. It excavates the original core of meaning in the particular term, and its continuing adequacy as a term today indicates not only the endurance of that core but its course of development that proves instructive. The verb “to belong” is linked to the Old English word gelang 1 This word, gelang, suggests what we already recognize in our most fulfilling relationships. Firstly, lang, although of uncertain meaning, gives rise to the later term longen, whose meaning can be expressed as “to go along with.” Thus, the -long in our modern word “belong” bears an original meaning of relatedness, a sense of fitting, a proximity to what is right or good or proper. Secondly, the be- in “belong” does not derive from the verb “to be,” but is, rather, a modern linguistic rendition of the ge- in gelang. Ge- is an Old English intensifying prefix attached to the root word. Thus, be- intensifies the sense of relatedness in -long into being really related or being very fitted to what is proper and good. Indeed, the be- in “belonging” is evocative of what is at stake in belonging, in finding “a fit.” Etymologically speaking, when we genuinely belong, when we find that we are really related to what is right, we experience something like “the perfect fit,” a relation worthy of our time and effort, or even of our entire life. The term “belonging” then suggests a grasp of this sense of perfection as a fit suited to us.

So much for etymology! Back here in the messiness of our concretely lived relationships, surely we are entitled to ask, Where is that perfection? What would a perfect fit even feel like? In this study, I will treat belonging not primarily as a startling experience of fitting perfectly, like one’s waist in a pair of jeans, but as a familiarity that— because it is so familiar—is rarely an object of scrutiny until something is amiss or the fit becomes less fitting. Belonging is more like a

foundation that sets us up to go about our daily business. The people, places, times, and things of our belonging constitute something like a frame within which we live our lives. Whatever degree of perfection inheres in our belonging, we barely perceive it until the fit becomes noticeably imperfect. In addition, we know that we don’t belong everywhere or in every situation, and when we find that we don’t belong, not only is the lack of a fit obvious, but we may have lost or failed at the perfection that belonging seemed to promise. The death of a loved one, rejection or betrayal by a lover, social censure, faltering relationships with friends and family, our own choice to move on or to move away, the demolition of a home or a place that was held as sacred: belonging that fails or comes to an end can be so painful that it amounts to being personally undone. Our frame collapses. When we do not belong, we are adrift. Nothing holds us, nothing reaches us. It is not hard to discern the connection between despair and the experience of not-belonging.

What is interesting is that, in spite of what appears to be its centrality, belonging has not often appeared on the radar of philosophers. What has been discussed by a small handful of modern and contemporary thinkers is a notion of home appearing variously as Heimat, homeland, homestead, oikos, and hospitality. The social scientists, on the other hand, have been very busy. They have studied, analyzed, and discoursed at length about belonging under many names and rubrics for a long time. Therefore, it is not surprising to find that, within the field of philosophy, it is the political philosophers who have produced the most sustained consideration of themes related to belonging, for the most part in the course of tackling the problems that nationhood generates.

Yet the relative silence of philosophers in general has been offset by two centuries of concentration on the antonym of “belonging,” “alienation.” It is alienation that has commanded the imagination of philosophers, rather than belonging. This raises some interesting questions about the nature of modern and postmodern philosophy and about the predilections of those who become philosophers in our day. It is not my task to suggest answers to these questions about philosophy and philosophers, but to put the focus upon the meaning of belonging itself, in its own right. However, in doing so, I make one suggestion that relates to philosophy’s muteness on belonging

that the reader can think about as they proceed through the book: Belonging has not been a conspicuous theme in philosophy because philosophy moves intellectually within the horizons that the experience of belonging has opened.

Such an experience we can be confident in describing as primordial. “Primordiality” springs from two Latin terms, primus (first) and ordiri (to begin), and so, I venture to suggest that philosophers have not noticed the primordiality of belonging because they have overlooked the primordiality that gives rise to philosophy.2 The primordiality of belonging, I suggest, is the very condition of philosophy. It may be a controversial suggestion, one that I flesh out in the course of the book, but perhaps not more so than the claim of both Plato and Aristotle that philosophy begins in wonderment. Without wonderment at the cosmos, the conditions that give rise to philosophy in its reaching out to the cosmos simply do not exist for the philosopher. The awe and admiration that wonderment signifies are moments of experience when the soul was figuratively caught or suspended. Wonderment is the arresting of the soul, the Parmenidean glimpse of being, that goes on to seek its expression in the philosopher as a question in search of an answer. Philosophy, as the love of wisdom, is a tension that lives more in the question than in the answer, and my suggestion is that belonging, much like wonderment, is the condition for questioning.

The philosopher, then, responsive to the experience of wonderment, has already assumed belonging and begins from there. Only when we find ourselves in situations where the belonging we took for granted is in jeopardy does Hegel’s Owl of Minerva take flight. When what we have belonged to begins to fade away, when what we hold as our own is being steadily diminished by foolishness or thoughtlessness, or when the heights of what we took to be a form of perfection are being reduced to rubble, the dusk of alienation sets in. We begin to notice what we never really noticed because in slipping away, our foundations become unsteady. At times such as these, philosophy begins to grapple more consciously with the conditions of its own possibility. What we exist within is rarely a thing to be scrutinized because what we exist within is the very condition of scrutinizing. Often, it is only when our belonging has been debased or denied that it becomes visible. Thus, the modern philosophical concern with alienation is more deeply a grappling with the tensions of existence

by which we belong in being. Not to belong is to lose the cosmos, and there can be no greater alienation. Alienation is a horror because the bond and order of belonging that extend our lives into ever more meaningful relationships have been violated or lost. The philosophical concern with alienation has been well judged. Alienation points to a prior belonging that has been lost, and the loss can amount to losing the meaning of one’s personal existence. In many cases, philosophical works on alienation reveal themselves to be more deeply works that are haunted by belonging.

The effort to establish how we belong, and what we belong to, is surely a philosophy of belonging, and it is worth suggesting here that there have been philosophies more clearly discernible as “philosophies of belonging” in the Western oeuvre. Largely consonant with the efflorescence of Neoplatonism from the early medieval period onward, “philosophies of belonging” typically did not lose sight of the mystery that holds all things.3 Many of the most well-known thinkers and mystics of this era—Plotinus, the Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth of Schönau, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Meister Eckhart, Marguerite Porete, Bridget of Sweden, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Sienna, and so on—evince a deep yearning for an ineffable, primordial, transcendent-divine unity, of which we are already part. The sense of intimacy in and beyond the cosmos is almost palpable in their works. They are mystics because they are drawn to the mystery of existence in which they, and all persons and things, belong. Certainly not every medieval mystic can be considered a Neoplatonist; still less can every Neoplatonist be considered Christian; but early medieval philosophy developed dominantly among the Neoplatonists, even as the christological and Trinitarian debates in Christianity were being settled. Painting Neoplatonism with a broad brush, we might say that what generally characterizes it as a pattern of thought is an intimacy of presence of things to one another in the cosmos that, together, have emerged into existence as partners in cosmological communion, together in the great exitus of divine substance from the simplicity and unsullied divinity of “The One,” and in its reditus back toward Oneness at the end of all things. The relentless driving flow of being from the Alpha to the Omega is a great flow of belonging. It is the life of the cosmos that implicates everyone and everything in its bond and order.

On the smaller scale of individual persons, Neoplatonist thought concerns itself with the attunement of the soul toward the divine flow in which we already exist. Neoplatonism may have had its moment in early and middle centuries of the medieval era—the whiff of pantheism lingering in the air—and this moment may well have been superseded by other moments and schools and dominant concerns within the career of both philosophy and theology, but the mysteriousness of existence and the yearning for perfection, presence, and communion remain as threads of meaning that do not pass away. Belonging is as important to us today as it ever was.

In continuity with our ancient predecessors, we can symbolize the experience of belonging within the cosmos in terms of a fourfold relationality, or a primordial orientation toward four fields of reality that constitute the Whole: there are persons and communities, there is the natural world, there is one’s own self, and there is the mystery of being we routinely name as God. We are (1) in relation to other human beings, of course, and it is this relation that usually jumps to mind when we think about belonging. However, as mentioned above, there are also times and places and things that we belong to, or that belong to us. This means that (2) we are also in relation to the astrophysical reality of the world around us. One of the most overlooked relations is (3) the relation we have with ourselves. Self-belonging, like belonging in general, seems rarely to become conspicuous until we find that we are out of sync with ourselves, in need of therapy, in need of taking ourselves in hand, in need of self-recovery. Self-forgiveness, deep-seated traumas, willed forgetfulness of dimensions of the self are all facets of brokenness in the self-relation. Clearly, when our selfrelation is unstable, this can impact the integrity of other relations. There is (4) another relation that is abidingly present but that is too often ignored or rationalized as something that can be set aside when inconvenient. This is the relation with mystery—or, better said, with the mystery that we encounter in the fact of our existence: we exist, but are not the foundation or explanation of our own existence; and nothing exists from itself. Existence is intrinsically mysterious, and the intrinsicality of mystery pervades every aspect of life, simmering below the surface of things only to erupt at times in its consoling divine height or in its troubling abyssal depths. The givenness of one’s own existence, and the inevitability and unforeseeableness of one’s

own death, remind us that existence is not a commodity and never free of mystery. The source of this mystery, which has been grasped as both impersonal and personal, has many names, the most familiar of which is “God.” Each person is a hub of these four elemental axes of relationality. As personal existence extends in these four directions, so does belonging emerge from these four relations: others, world, self, and mystery. The enhancement of our personhood involves the enrichment of belonging; and the enrichment of belonging implicates each of the four, while the disintegration of personhood always involves the dissipation of oneself as the hub that makes sense of their interconnectedness.

It is hard to imagine that happiness and a meaningful life could be possible in the absence of belonging and relationality. Aristotle, we remember, famously argues that the highest good is eudaimonia, translated typically into English as “happiness.” However, eudaimonia also connotes flourishing, well-being, and meaningfulness in life. The term itself captures a spread of meaning that can be clunkily symbolized as “happiness-meaningfulness.” Coming to know oneself as a person, or to know one’s society, to grasp how things work, or to grasp one’s place or purpose within the mystery of the cosmos is also to know what constitutes eudaimonia for us. For Aristotle, this knowledge renders us metaphorical archers who now have a target to aim at.4 Happiness-meaningfulness is the good everyone wants for its own sake, and all other goods for the sake of it. We want wealth when we are poor because we want to be happy, he writes. We want health when we are sick because we want to be happy. The reason anyone wants a friend is because everyone wants to have a happy, meaningful life. I suggest that another hermeneutical accent that is already implicit in the search for meaning and happiness is belonging. For the purposes of this study, let us acknowledge eudaimonia as a complex that encompasses belonging: happiness-meaningfulnessbelonging. Evidence for this claim by Aristotle can be found in book 19 of St. Augustine’s City of God. Augustine begins, “Anyone who joins me in an examination, however slight, of human affairs, and the human nature we all share, recognizes that just as there is no man who does not wish for joy, so there is no man who does not wish for peace.”5 Joy and peace, for Augustine, seem to be the primary desires operative in the soul of every person. Joy and peace are what everyone

desires for their own sake, and everything else for the sake of these. Augustine is employing a more differentiated symbolization of the range of meaning in Aristotle’s more compact eudaimonia. He presents many diverse examples of human activity, at different levels of moral worthiness, and proceeds to demonstrate that all of these activities are manifestations of the eudaimonic desire for joy and peace. The unjust man, like the just man, is ultimately seeking peace, albeit through ignoble or nefarious means. Augustine then takes the analysis a step further when he writes that there is an encompassing bond and order, synonymous with an order of peace, that all things exist within: “It comes to this, then: a man who has learnt to prefer right to wrong and the rightly ordered to the perverted, sees that the peace of the unjust, compared to the peace of the just, is not worthy even of the name of peace. Yet even what is perverted must of necessity be in, or derived from, or associated with—that is, in a sense, at peace with—some part of the order of things among which it has its being or of which it consists. Otherwise it would not exist at all.”6

In seeking peace, everyone seeks the good of existence: their own and others. Everyone and everything is seeking peace because existence is wrought within the encompassing order of peace. Everything—parts of bodies and parts of souls, the whole of a creature, all creatures, the entirety of the cosmos—is engaged for its very existence in the pursuit of the underlying order of peace that holds it and sustains it. At this point in Augustine’s narrative, it is evident that “peace” is no longer the most adequate symbol, and he makes a final clarification in chapter 13. Peace is more deeply articulated as one’s own place in the cosmos, and Augustine formulates this as tranquillitas ordinis. “The peace of the whole universe is the tranquillity of order—and order is the arrangement of things equal and unequal in a pattern which assigns to each its proper position.”7 Tranquillitas ordinis is a symbol equivalent to belonging. It raises an existential ambiguity that can only be resolved in the personal living of life: we owe our existence to the emergence of the astrophysical universe because we are embodied and therefore subject to suffering and to the mortal predicament of death; yet we also seem to exist in something more, which we name the cosmos, understood as the primordial, abiding communion of all things whose undergirding “peace” endures, and in which we participate for the fullest realization of eudaimonia. The

meanings of “universe” and “cosmos” overlap in every person, but these are not the same. This book explores the existential ambiguity of the “in-between.” To exist in between a universe and a cosmos is a way to think about belonging.

I propose to discuss belonging under two titles: “Presence” and “Communion.” Presence, of course, means more than mere physical (or “positional”) proximity. It is the word we give to the possibility of belonging. The section “Presence” is composed of three chapters, each of which discusses a type of presence fundamental to belonging. What presence brings out is that human existence is an “in-between” reality. I have just mentioned the universe and the cosmos, but we can also think about human existence in between the immanent dimension of things and the transcendent dimension of things. By “transcendence” is intended an intelligible meaningfulness of what remains beyond any capacity we have for final knowing or mastering. The origin of the universe, the fact of the intelligibility of the universe, the divine ground of being, life after death, and so forth are all sources of meaning and wonderment that draw us in wonderment and questioning but elude final answers that would bring to an end our desire to know. Correlatively then, immanence is what is amenable to our understanding, knowing, valuing, and making. Both immanence and transcendence constitute the proper domain of the human person, who exists as an in-between reality, gathering both dimensions of reality into their own personhood. That is, the person is both transcendence and immanence, not as a duality but as an immanence-in-transcendence and transcendence-in-immanence. Such is the in-between reality of the person that I discuss below. Thus, “Presence” is the section that is concerned with the existence of individual persons and what renders us inherently in search of belonging. “Communion” is the second major section of the book. Also composed of three chapters, “Communion” examines belonging as it manifests itself among persons in community. It is the section that considers the manner of existing in communion in both more and less intimate sets of relations.

Throughout both sections, I highlight the lodestone of belonging: sacredness. I am concerned to discuss how it is that our belonging brings us into encounter with sacredness and how it is that by belonging we participate in what is sacred. By sacredness, I do not necessarily intend divinity; still less am I divinizing what is not

A Philosophy of Belonging

divine. But that which is sacred to the human heart is what is given as, received as, and held to be of absolute value. Our spouses, children, parents, friends; our neighborhoods, cities, nations; houses, schools, churches; memories, histories, and shrines; humanity and existence itself: in our belonging, we already know quite a lot about absolute value and about what it asks of us if we would properly belong. This is the sacredness that I will pay attention to. I am concerned to differentiate between the things that are experienced as sacred and things as profane, and between what can be known in itself and what can be known only heuristically as mystery at the border of transcendence. Our claims of sacredness and perfection are not ontological claims, but dimensions of meaning that manifest themselves in our relationships. In the apparent ordinariness of raising a family, for example, what is the value of this child to the parent? In the apparent ordinariness of married life, what is the value of our marital covenant? In the apparent ordinariness of friendship, what is the value of my friend, he who, with me, talks and laughs, but must age and suffer and pass away, irreplaceable in his uniqueness, yet subject to the common fate of all things? Intrinsic to presence and communion is an absolute value, a flash of perfection in our midst that our belonging always strains for, yet remains centered in. In this study we will see that “sacredness” is a term that pivots easily between human and divine, immanent and transcendent, time and eternity. The ease of pivoting is explicable in that our belonging extends to the cosmos itself, where not only do we find our place and role within the cosmos, but we find that the cosmos, in a significant sense, inheres in us.

The reader should be aware that I have “picked” my way through a vast field of symbolism and thought in order to render the experience of belonging intelligible in a single volume in a way that made sense. No doubt, any reader of this book could think of other important philosophers and works and relevant areas of development that do not appear here. What I have offered is intended merely as a contribution, drawn from my professional and existential background, and delimited by my own limitations. Clearly, there is scope for further selections and further thought, refinement, and adaptation. Moreover, there is always the risk in discussing so broad a topic as a whole that the various “parts” may appear somewhat insubstantial in comparison with a scholarly monograph on a single thinker, work, school, or era.

Mine, however, is intended as a study of a central human experience— perhaps the central experience—whose breadth and multifariousness are participated in by every human being. I have taken what I consider to be pertinent soundings from some of the most significant thinkers, primarily from modern and contemporary philosophy. I am exploring as many aspects of belonging as seem crucial to me, and I inevitably have had to spread my net widely. However, I hope that the reader will not be disappointed at the extent to which each of various philosophers’ thoughts are discussed in relation to belonging. I have aimed to do justice to the topic in a single volume. I have found it to be a worthy topic, and as the book moves forward, the reader will notice that my viewpoint moves with it. Therefore, I will return occasionally to various aspects of belonging from the perspective of later discussions in order to shed further, hopefully richer, meaning on those aspects that was not available in the earlier discussions.

The first chapter is a survey of contemporary philosophical work directly relevant to belonging: Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, René Girard, and Linn Miller’s adaptation of Søren Kierkegaard. Here, much of what is important in the meaning of belonging is presented through considering the works of these thinkers. In the shadow of the Third Reich, the controversial effort of Heidegger to think through the existential significance of Heimat is one that is discussed in light of Levinas’s response to Heidegger. The tension between Heidegger’s “enclosure” and the openness of Levinas’s “threshold” is one that is rich for the meaning and potential of belonging and one that just about everybody will already have experienced. Girard’s work on belonging moves mostly on a sociological level as he explores power dynamics within and between groups, and this is heightened by Miller’s work as she considers the meaning of both belonging and “misrelation” in the context of the nonindigenous population of postcolonial Australia. Inevitably, given the nature of the study, only a clipped account of each of these thinkers’ work is presented inasmuch as it bears on the theme of belonging. But in some ways, I have aimed to extend their insights through the rest of the book.

The second chapter brings together the foundational insights from the first chapter with a proposed phenomenological hermeneutic in order to propel the discussion forward in the more explicit direction of belonging itself. The aim is to understand what

A Philosophy of Belonging

the experience of belonging means, to be able to point out what the conditions of belonging are, and how we know when those conditions have been met. Here a preliminary interpretive framework is offered: we belong when we both exist-from someone or something and exist-toward that someone or something. To exist-from is to find that someone or something is already a constitutive part of one’s own self, that, living or dead, present or absent, that person, community, time, place, or object has already become part of who we take ourselves to be, is the one by whom or that by which we have come to know ourselves—as a spouse, as a parent, as a friend; as a colleague, a neighbor, a citizen; as a fellow human being who shares in the universal predicament of human flourishing and suffering; as participants in the process of the cosmos. Yet existing-from someone or something else is not sufficient for belonging. There is always the possibility of indifference, of falling out of love, of prideful ambition, and all that would bar the way to finding oneself at home and that would impact belonging. To belong is also dependent upon existing-toward that someone or something. This is fundamentally an attitude of care, of loving attentiveness, of desire to share in the life or being of another and to have them share in one’s own. Existence-toward is not sufficient by itself for belonging. When we yearn for what will not receive us or we face rejection or betrayal, we undergo the bitter experience of heartbreak. Existence-from and existence-toward comprise the first two structures of belonging, but I also discuss an inherent tension, which Eric Voegelin has elucidated in his theory of consciousness: metaxy. Metaxy is the Greek term for the “in-between” mentioned above, existence as participation in both the immanent dimensions of the cosmos and the transcendent dimension of the cosmos. In the presence of the cosmos, which holds both transcendence and immanence as dimensions of itself, it is the human being as metaxy who can mediate an abiding sacredness in the midst of depravity, disintegration, and death.

Chapter 3 begins the sequence of three chapters on presence. It is concerned with the cosmos as primordial presence. The cosmos was experienced by the ancients as an enchanted place, compactly containing within itself immortal gods, mortal humans, and the world. The distinction of all things from all other things within that experience of the cosmos was less clear than their sameness. This

sameness is called “compact” because the rivers, trees, fields, mountains, oceans, and skies, as well as animals, individuals, societies, and the gods all share in a sameness of substance together. Indeed, the cosmos of the ancients was a world “full of gods.” The cosmos is discussed as a form of presence because each of us exists in the presence of the conditions that govern all things. In the epochal process of differentiation of that compactness from sameness to distinction or autonomy, cosmological presence does not disappear, even when the myths of “intracosmic” existence and belonging give way to both spiritual revelation and the intellectual theoria of philosophy and science, whose horizons have been opened by the opening of immanence and transcendence as dimensions of meaning. Since this differentiation occurs nowhere but in human consciousness, I focus on the presence of the cosmos in personhood. Certainly, we exist in the cosmos, but there is an important sense in which we exist as the cosmos; or indeed, as embassies of the cosmos. Chapter 4 takes on the discussion of personhood more directly. The traditional language includes the terms “subject” and “self.” While both of these terms are taken seriously, I argue that the term “person” gathers the respective shades of meaning of “subject” and “self” within its own meaning. We are subjects because the cosmos is what remains abidingly present to persons in respect of their consciousness and bodiliness. Cosmological presence is what we remain subject to, and it fortifies the notion of person as a subject in a primordial way: our lives are lived in the in-between of mortal time and the immortal timelessness of the truth of truths, the good of goods, and the beauty of beautiful things. Cosmological presence is the infinite surplus beyond what can be experienced, the source of possibilities impossible to count. The person is also a self—self-determining and autonomous—who must choose their way and the pattern of their own life. The subject-self is present in the cosmos and to others by way of consciousness and the flesh. The chapter then first considers presence and belonging by way of consciousness. I consider selfpresence, intentional presence, and luminous presence by engaging the work of Bernard Lonergan and Eric Voegelin. The chapter then turns to embodiment, and to the originality of Maurice MerleauPonty’s thought on “the flesh of the world.” There are themes of intersecting immanence and transcendence within the works discussed

A Philosophy of Belonging

in this chapter, all of which indicate the crucial importance of conscious and incarnate presence for the belonging of persons.

Chapter 5 is anchored in the role that love plays in presence. A helpful image here is to consider love as the engine of belonging, the energeia that joins existence-from and existence-toward and that drives the opening within our own limitedness heuristically toward unlimitedness. As with the emotion that carries concern for belonging and with the intelligibility that knows belonging, love has an affective-intelligent character. Presence in love brings feeling and knowing together in a unity of belonging in between lover and beloved. To love is to acknowledge what exists already as a good, and yet to strain toward that good in desire. The chapter begins with Plato’s Symposium and in particular with Socrates’s speech in honor of Eros, the in-between reality that bridges the gulf between god and mortal man. In love gods and mortals are present to one another, and in love do mortals attain to the immortality that is no stranger to them, but lives within them as love. Love is metaxy, a meaning that resonates in Aristotle’s work. I look at two areas in Aristotle’s thought that tell us about love as presence: friendship and the reaching out for knowledge. I bring the focus back to contemporary thought with Levinas’s thought on love, desire, sex, and the good, as well as with David Walsh’s renovation of personalism that embraces persons human and persons divine.

The part entitled “Communion” begins with chapter 6 and runs through chapters 7 and 8. Presence is not yet belonging, but by presence, we anticipate the communion that is the accomplishment of belonging. Belonging is always oriented toward the communion from which it emerges and by which it is sustained. Chapter 6 sets out to establish what constitutes genuine community, which I signify by the term communitas. Communitas points toward the communion at its heart. The types of community are as diverse as the people whose communion constitutes them. They range from the intimacy of the family to the less than intimate communitas that is a society. This chapter is thus organized around the meaning of communitas and the meaning of communion. I enlist the philosophical services of Lonergan once again. That a communitas exists at all is testament to the communion that it lives by. Lonergan—sober, competent, and

wide-eyed—draws us into a consideration of the difficulties and genuine accomplishment that he calls common meaning, but he also gives an account of the permanent fracture lines that every communitas must attend to, caught as it is in the dialectic between intelligence on the one hand and the spontaneous intersubjectivity of social groups on the other. The great twentieth-century thinkers on communion are Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel, but I have been able to draw on only a fragment of their work that rolls the task of the study forward. Primarily recognized by his work on I-Thou relations, Buber’s I-It is what I have chosen to adapt for the purposes of the chapter, developing a meaning that is latent within the symbol and its social—rather than interpersonal—context. Combining this with a discussion of his work on the nature of citizenship and social relations, the chapter suggests that Buber provides us the tools we need to talk meaningfully about the social communitas as a communion that respects distance rather than proximity. Marcel’s work connects well with earlier chapters on the cosmos and embodiment, but with an added emphasis on communion, while Jacques Maritain’s thought on persons and the common good remains a touchstone for any study of communion and human dignity in the concrete context of persons in communitas. Chapter 7 turns toward specifically political communitas in order to think about the meaning of political communion. This inevitably engages us in thinking about more than intersubjective groups and enterprise associations (as Michael Oakeshott names them, in contrast to civil associations), and brings us into the field of thought on what constitutes the political communitas. There are three main parts to this chapter. The first part deals with politics in the mode of the ancient, cosmological myth where politics is the name given to the imitation of the gods’ provision for mortals. Thus, cosmological politics sees the political role as divinely representative and salvific, the lines between political and divine obligations not yet drawn. I draw upon two cosmological myths to elaborate the compact primordiality that the political role must respond to. The overall point in this part of the chapter that charts accomplishments in the development from compactness to differentiation is the establishing of order as the first, most fundamental political good. The second part of the chapter takes this further. The differentiation of order as the foundational

A Philosophy of Belonging

political good is the discovery of the further political goods, and it is precisely these that bring an aggregate of individuals together as a people. The study follows St. Augustine’s political insight that agreement on political goods, as objects loved in common, is the communion that forms a communitas. I finish the chapter by thinking about the approaches in political theory to an understanding of the nation as the modern political communitas. The two main camps— perennialists and modernists—focus on different, but occasionally complementary aspects of nations, their development, and the unique dynamism of national belonging. The discussion points toward the continuing importance of nationhood at a time when supranational bodies appear to carry greater moral, if not political, authority. While the nation continues to be the best guarantor of the specifically political existence of the communitas, forgetfulness of the political goods that bring about communion is the danger that does not pass away.

Chapter 8 formally concludes the study on belonging by attempting to illuminate a horizon of meaning that is seldom mentioned, but has already made itself felt as a sacredness, by way of presence and communion. Belonging reaches out for its consummation, its completion, its perfection. Belonging strains toward the perfection that lives within it. We want to realize the good of our marriages and our family units, of our friendships, communities, and of humanity. Few of us are tempted to think we can capture perfection, which would be to perform an apocalypse. Yet we do value the perfection we glimpse and love as present in those we belong to and who belong to us. I have named the movement of our belonging from and toward the good of that belonging as sacramental. Everyone who knows the immeasurable value of those whom we belong to, and of the places and things and times that chronicle the sacredness of love and life together, also knows the limitless value that belonging occasions in our lives and relationships. Indeed, sacramentality is the name we have given to the bond and order that sustains us in communion and that commissions us to think, speak, and act in communion with those we belong to: children, lovers, neighbors, compatriots; homesteads, localities, nations; eras, times, and timelessness. We experience and know ourselves partly from these, and toward these are our affection and prudential liberty directed. The chapter begins with an account of sacramentality from Thomas Aquinas, and his thought on the meaning of the Eucharist

as the exemplar of a communion consummated and consummating sharpens the point. The meaning of wisdom, according to Aristotle, and the meaning of the philosopher’s death, according to Plato, metaphysically extend our insights on sacramentality. Matrimony gives us in another exemplar, a familiar instance of a communion with its own unique consummation that is simultaneously bounded in immanence by the flesh and consciousness of two spouses yet, precisely because of flesh and consciousness, also participates in the timeless, transcendent mystery of being and the begetting of beings. I follow along with Kierkegaard from his philosophical commentary on marriage in Either/Or. Again, what is ordinary is revealed to be a sacramental extraordinariness in our midst. The intimacy of matrimonial belonging is a clear example of a consummation, but less intimate types of communion drive toward their own kind of consummation too. I choose to complete this meditation on belonging as sacramental by briefly considering the meaning of human existence as historical and pointing toward what is genuinely universal and sacramental about a humanity of persons and communities in history.

Finally, our study concludes with a short epilogue about alienation. It is my contention that experiencing, understanding, and judging that we do not belong, while wanting to belong, is not the same as a repudiation of the very possibility of belonging; and the outcomes are very different. The former I simply call not-belonging, and the latter, unbelonging. Both are forms of alienation, of course, but there is a need for some delineation. If not-belonging can lead to despair, its remedy is to find another avenue toward belonging. Not-belonging is, by its desire, an affirmation of belonging. On the contrary, it is unbelonging that tends to become ideological, make grand sociological claims against genuine belonging, history, and the cosmos, and can deteriorate into nihilistic destruction whose primary victims are unsurprisingly individual persons and their communities—the bearers of belonging, history, and the cosmos. The term “alienation” then is not particularly helpful since it compactly encompasses a spectrum of meaning that brings not-belonging and unbelonging together under one title. It is this that often gives ideology an apparently moral cover, up to and including the justification of violence. The epilogue briefly discusses the problems associated with alienation in the context of the insights on belonging that have arisen in the course of the

book, relying upon Voegelin again, but also Albert Camus and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Levinas once wrote that philosophy, as “love of wisdom,” is better comprehended as the “wisdom of love.”8 Let the reader judge whether the wisdom that is love, the wisdom that is driven by love in its movement in the direction of perfection, is not the tranquillity of order that brings us into a belonging that is worth our very lives.