To Arrive Where We Started

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.

“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