The Tension of Belonging

Alienation has been a central concern for philosophers since at least the early nineteenth century. But the thinker who gives us perhaps the most compelling account of modern alienation is Friedrich Nietzsche. Those who make an honest effort to read him on his terms catch an inside glimpse of what has been called “the crisis of modernity.” Nietzsche expressed as well as any other thinker the depths of the existential abyss that had been festering at the core of Western experience for centuries. With frightening pathos, Nietzsche placed his thumb on the pressure points of modern cultural and spiritual inauthenticity and pressed with all his fiendish might.

What is perhaps even more frightening is the realization that what he has to say might apply with equal force to our “postmodern” world. He seems to show us that, despite all our efforts to alleviate alienation, despite everything we learned from the horrors of the twentieth century, in too many ways we remain right where he left us. As we increasingly come to dominate nature, as technology solves ever more of our problems, we become more acutely aware of the ineradicable mysteries of existence. Nietzsche engaged in a Herculean struggle with this mystery, yet it seems to have played a role in leading him down the path to madness. He gives voice to the vital darkness that animates the bitter, consumptive contempt for the givenness of things: whose fault is it that I don’t feel at home? This still seems to be among the misguided existential questions driving our politics today.

Although Nietzsche’s expression of this problem is unique in its compelling force, he is not distinct in the way he frames it. Using alienation as the starting point for an inquiry into how to address the questions posed by modernity forecasts a certain approach to finding solutions. Many others like Rousseau, Comte, Feuerbach, and Marx, to name a few, have taken a similar path. Their project seems to have been more to snap what was later called the “bourgeois man” out of his comfortable, self-satisfied slumber. They all ask, “How can alienation be overcome?” rather than “What would it mean to belong?” Today, however, the signs of alienation are so ubiquitous as to be impossible to ignore. One only has to open the newspaper on any given day to read about “deaths of despair,” the mental health crisis, increases in suicide.

Accordingly, James Greenaway’s new book A Philosophy of Belonging: Persons, Politics, Cosmos sets about asking the latter question. He provides a solid philosophical foundation for those who would ask the question of alienation in a new way. The result is a stunningly rich master class on the resources Western philosophy might bring to bear on this problem. It will be essential reading for those searching for a philosophical expression of how we might avoid both the Scylla of innovationist progressivism and the Charybdis of overly dogmatic conservatism in addressing our increasingly acute spiritual homelessness.

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The Scylla and Charybdis metaphor serves as a perfect jumping-off point into Greenaway’s philosophy of belonging. The golden thread tying the project together is the idea of the metaxy, a philosophical term of art describing a metaphorical state of being-in-tension between two static states. The term originates in Plato’s Symposium, but was also a central theme in Eric Voegelin’s theory of consciousness. For Plato, it describes the nature of love as a daimon or spirit existing between need and plenty, knowledge and ignorance, divinity and mortality. In this sense, love is the driving force that propels the philosopher forward in his or her inquiries after truth, goodness, and beauty. Voegelin extends the concept: for him, it is a way of understanding the nature of human consciousness. Metaxic consciousness is a perpetual motion or tension between the poles of transcendence and immanence, abstraction and particularity, love and death, eternity and time. The human person as consciousness in this sense is drawn by each pole in the existential search (zetesis). It is the tension itself that constitutes consciousness; to stop the movement, to stop that existential search, is to cease to exist in an important sense.

Greenaway applies the idea in what he calls the “hermeneutic of belonging.” Belonging is essentially marked by the existence-in-tension of the metaxy. There are many levels and contexts in which this plays out, but Greenaway defines the hermeneutic of belonging fundamentally as the tension between “existence-from” and “existence-toward.” Existence-toward is an intentionality, a consciousness of “someone or something with whom I am experiencing some kind of an affinity.” It is the “where” or “with whom” I desire to be. Existence-from is an awareness of the other already within myself: persons, communities, places, times that are “so significant that I cannot be who I am without them.”

What kinds of things do we exist-toward and from? Answering this question is the project of the second section of the book. Greenaway explains: “What is needed to make sense of the predicament of existence and belonging as tension in the metaxy is a shift of perspective that comprehends persons (and derivatively, societies and history) as participants in an encompassing cosmos, rather than atomized modern egos floating in an arbitrary universe.” Accordingly, this middle section examines the nature of “presence” in the cosmos, in an individual person, and in love. Once we understand the hermeneutic of belonging on this stratum of meaning we can move up to the level of belonging in community.

The presence of the cosmos only becomes available as a concept once one recognizes one’s own mortality: “by cosmological presence, we discern our mortality as what unfolds against a backdrop that is not itself mortal.” It is the “totality of all things in which we exist,” and that which endures even though we ourselves are destined to pass from it. But the cosmos for Greenaway is not just an indifferent material universe. It is “emphatically” not exhausted by the totality of things, though the universe makes a part. Rather, he conceives it as wrapped up with the existence of persons. That is, by properly belonging in the cosmos, each person participates “in the grand, continual emergence of reality in all of its variety,” a process which by its nature must acknowledge that the cosmos includes the impenetrable depths of mystery that shroud that from which we emerge and that toward which we are moving.

Thus, the presence of the cosmos means that we must both exist-from and exist-toward it in its fullness. To borrow Voegelin’s terminology, we emerge (exist-from) from the lasting cosmos, but we engage in (exist-toward) that which passes. Greenaway eloquently expresses what this means in a mundane sense: “We live our lives aware that suffering and flourishing are real and that life is short, and yet somehow we know we must get up, greet the day, and go into the world to edify and beautify, as we speak the truth to one another, and to enact the good that seeks thriving and the alleviation of unnecessary misery.” This is the meaning of the sacredness that indelibly marks the presence of the cosmos: those who fully embrace the cosmos as a whole, including its mystery, are a living testimony to such sacredness.

But it is important to note that the presence of the cosmos is not solely a turning toward what lies outside ourselves. “More primordially” Greenaway explains, it is “a turning toward one’s own existence, or an opening into one’s own interiority, where the luminosity of mystery abides.” The presence of persons is thus an essential aspect of belonging. Greenaway explains this through his study of the person as a complex of “consciousness” and “flesh.” He creatively employs concepts from Bernard Lonergan and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in describing the meanings behind these two essential sides of personality.

These two aspects lead to Greenaway’s conception of a person as a “subject-self.” Each of us is simultaneously a subject insofar as we are “subject to other persons, times and places, things and events in our proximity, locally, socioculturally, politically, and historically.” Borrowing from Emmanuel Levinas, Greenaway avers that each of us is “under the weight of the universe.” As subjects, we exist-from the cosmos. By the same token, however, each of us is also an autonomous bearer of choice. We are to some extent self-determining beings as we exist-toward that which will lead to our own flourishing. Neither of these aspects of personhood can be taken to extremes: we are neither determinate beings wholly subject to contingency and natural laws; nor are we wholly independent, atomistic self-creators.

In Greenaway’s exploration of the meaning of love, however, we start to see how belonging is necessarily bound up with our engagement with the other. Returning to the ancient Greeks, Greenaway shows how the metaxy is at play in each person’s loving pursuit of the beautiful and the true. Aristotle adds to Plato’s understanding of love the realization that it emerges from the divine nous or intuitive reason that resides in the intellect. To love is thus to partake in the divine within oneself. But the insights of the ancients are unpacked further by Emmanuel Levinas and David Walsh.

For Levinas, the Other whom I encounter face-to-face comes to me from beyond being. This encounter involves the realization that this person, prior to anything I might exist-from, makes a claim on me. The meeting of the Other is utterly exterior to anything that came before in my experience and is thus transcendent. The Other is “otherwise than being” because there is an infinity of possibility, a cloud of unknowing that shrouds our encounter. It is a primordial and palpable experience of infinity. Levinas seems to be suggesting that those who assert that the concept of infinity cannot be encountered in concrete experience simply need to examine what happens when they meet a complete stranger. The same goes for transcendence: my sense that this Other, prior to any reasons, places a moral claim on me is a primordial experience of transcendence.

It is to Walsh that Greenaway turns to make the connection between this encounter with infinite transcendence and its basis in love. For Walsh, love is that which makes the encounter possible. Each encounter is already framed by it. In love, we begin to understand what mystery really is: it “is not meaninglessness. It is the name we give to what is present in the mode of absence, like the memory of a deceased parent . . . or the trace of God.” In love, divinity is made present to us in the sacred space between lover and beloved. But this presence is actually a non-presence, the uncanny abyss of mystery that enshrouds the event. Love is what makes the presence of the other possible in his or her fullness: without the non-presence of mystery in this sense, the tension of the metaxy between the immanent and transcendent breaks down.

Having explained how belonging works within a person, that is, between oneself, the cosmos and an other, Greenaway turns to explaining how belonging works in community. This requires him to differentiate between the communion or “bond and order” of community and communitas, the “shoulder-to-shoulder stance” that characterizes a political life of belonging. Drawing on the work of Bernard Lonergan, Greenaway explains that communitas is the “achievement of common meaning” that arises from a dialectic between human intelligence (i.e., universal reason) and intersubjective modes of knowing (e.g., custom, language, culture). Communion, on the other hand, is a thinner manifestation of presence as outlined above within the political. As Gabriel Marcel has argued, communion is an availability to the whole of the cosmos, including and especially others in community.

The most important insight here is that communitas, in its achievement of common meaning, must rely on an openness to the presence of the cosmos, to myself, to the other in love. Without this grounding, communitas, even in a utilitarian or “common interest” sense, becomes impossible. This results in a common good that is, again, in tension between the particular goods of the person and the good of the whole. Communion then, becomes a higher manifestation of the common good, insofar as it “bears the dimensions of the sacred good of the cosmos by virtue of the existence of its constituting persons from age to age.”

In the realm of mundane politics, this results in the aforementioned “shoulder-to-shoulder” stance. This is Greenaway’s term for the jostling movement of the discernment and attainment of common political goods conceived with Augustine as objects of common love. Greenaway conceives of these political goods in a thicker sense than is usually the case, particularly in American politics. They include political manifestations of meaning, mortality, and “the human predicament in the cosmos.” These common goods are sought in the political arena, which though not always the most pleasant place to be, is marked by a commitment to achieving those goods while always maintaining awareness of our neighbors as fellow bearers of the fullness of meaning that resides in the cosmos.

This picture of everyday politics, though, always carries within it a vestige of what Greenaway calls “sacramentality.” Any communitas bears communion in two senses: first, insofar as it is a striving toward achieving the aforementioned political goods; and second, insofar as it is always aiming toward its own self-sufficient, transcendent perfection. Although the concept is difficult to grasp in the abstract, Greenaway helpfully illustrates his meaning through an exposition of Søren Kierkegaard’s conception of matrimony from his book Either/Or. For Kierkegaard, the perfection toward which marriage aims can never be explained before its lived experience. For Kierkegaard, the mystery of spousal love is its unification “of freedom and necessity. The individual feels drawn to the other with an irresistible power but precisely in this feels his freedom. It is a unity of the universal and the singular, it has the universal as the singular, even to the verge of the contingent.” Matrimony manifests a palpable sense of how all the tensions inherent to belonging in general are resolved in the mystery of their transcendent perfection. The seeming antitheses of freedom and determinacy, universality and particularity, self and other are shown to be the manifestations of the eternal within time. We bear the tension between these poles as essential aspects of existence and belonging.

Similarly, the political is sealed with seeming contradictions that, far from being irresolvable paradoxes, illustrate its basis in mystery. Our concept of a universal humanity is one such manifestation. We are all necessarily situated within a particular place or country or community, but we are always aware of the basic humanity shared by all. Even though our politics is secular, it carries within it this appreciation of the sacred. The idea of a universal humanity must be approached through an appreciation of each discrete communitas standing shoulder-to-shoulder in its own situatedness. Only by understanding our own belonging as the tension between existence-from and existence-toward can we penetrate through the particular to the universal which stands beyond, shrouded by mystery.

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What does this philosophy of belonging, in the end, have to tell us about alienation? In his epilogue, Greenaway points out that the usual approach to eradicating modern (and postmodern) man’s isolation, since at least Karl Marx, has been to “innovate,” that is, build a new house from scratch through revolution. To this day, one can hear shouts of “Vive la Révolution!” on the streets of Paris. Americans similarly have a hard time refraining from calling any major turning point in political life a revolution. While it is historically an open question whether our nation was in fact conceived by a revolution properly understood, it would be hard to argue, given our ever-burgeoning “protest culture,” that revolutionary politics is not a part of the popular consciousness (Tea Party, anyone?). But centuries of experience have repeatedly shown the profound difficulties inherent to radical politics.

In fact, it is not clear whether our attempts at overcoming alienation have done anything to address the core issues associated with alienation. Hence the uncanny feeling we often get when reading Nietzsche who wrote nearly 150 years ago. It seems that the more problems we “solve” the more starkly we face ourselves and the more unbearable is the image reflected back.

So the question remains: are we approaching all this the wrong way? If we take on board Greenaway’s understanding of alienation as “not-belonging,” then the answer seems to be a resounding yes. To assert that the alienated masses need to rise up to build something completely new, heedless of our ineradicable situatedness, both in the cosmos and in our relations with each other, is to assert what Greenaway calls “unbelonging”: a total departure from the tensions inherent to the hermeneutic of belonging. This is by definition to destroy belonging for Greenaway and would seem a plausible explanation for the problems I’ve been describing. To be sure, neither Greenaway nor I are arguing that there have been many genuine improvements made since the advent of modernity. Greenaway’s key assertion, however, is that these advances will never overcome the tension inherent to existence. In fact, they are essential aspects of human being.

For some, the book may rely too much on theological categories and language to be convincing. But anyone who has ever tried to explain something like universal human rights using purely abstract philosophical language can at least sympathize with Greenaway’s reliance on them. The emergence of what some are calling a “post-secular” age further attests to the problem. It has become increasingly evident that theological categories are the only way to approach many (if not all) of the core issues that plague us. Just ask a recovering alcoholic.

In this, and so many other senses, then, Greenaway’s study constitutes its own tension: it is a new approach to the problem of alienation that is, at its core, a recovery of the belonging which was often taken for granted by premodern persons. Greenaway’s philosophy of belonging lays the philosophical foundation for a new approach that is really an old approach. It is an honest engagement with the limits of philosophy that shows that politics ought to have its limits, too. We are, in the end, enfolded by mystery; this results in a tension which can only be ignored at our own peril.

A Philosophy of Belonging: Persons, Politics, Cosmos
By James Greenaway
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023; 338pp

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