Philosophies and Belonging

Hello and welcome to rewilding philosophy, your newsletter about ^ekophilosophical health for our times.

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In the process of finding your philosophy, you go through a similar process as you do in your teens when you try to find out who you are. It’s a process of creating your identity, choosing your belief system, and then living accordingly.

During your teens, your identity is greatly influenced by your friends or by those you want to befriend. Few of us create an identity that we feel fully aligned with; rather, we take the “next best thing” that either feels good enough or that we really just want to be because it seems cool. For many people, this meant they never quite felt like they fit in, always feeling somewhat like outsiders, like they didn’t belong in the same way others did.

What didn’t belong and what didn’t quite fit is the philosophy, and in our teens, this is neither made explicit nor does it become visible. And if it were to become visible, we’d likely try to hide it—because of all the trying to fit in and all.

When we become conscious of the fact that our dominant philosophies are not helping us to actually live a good life in our times - that means that they’d help us to be in right relation to reality, such as species extinction, injustice, how to handle bullshit jobs, or maintaining physical health etc. - we begin to re-form our identity by searching for new and alternative philosophies. Ideally, one of the outcomes is that we don’t hold our identity so tightly to begin with.

If wisdom has served us well up to that point, we realize that we can choose a philosophy that doesn’t have to fully align with other people. We see that there are nuances—big and small—in how we understand the world. If wisdom is not on our side, we use those differences to start arguments and culture wars. If it is, we acknowledge that each person differs, and that’s not just okay, but actually what keeps engaging with other people interesting.

You can either get offended and annoyed by other people’s philosophies, because you base your life on very different ideas, or you can remain open and curious to that other person. Karl Popper (1902–94) would call this an “open society,” which, according to him, is a society characterized by freedom of expression of one’s beliefs and values and the ability for pluralistic discourse. Rather than engaging in zero-sum culture wars, we can adopt a position of philosophical pluralism, recognizing the validity of multiple perspectives, which, I find, encourages intellectual humility and continual growth. By embracing this idea, every new philosophical insight or debate becomes an opportunity for personal and collective enrichment.

It seems like this  stands in stark contrast to today’s world, where each party tries to push their specific philosophy on others and annihilate everyone else’s. Internet wars are good examples of unwise engagement with different philosophies.

Admittedly, finding a philosophy is much more pleasant when we have people around us who share our values and beliefs. Luis de Miranda writes:

“People often talk of well-being, but much less so of ‘well-belonging’. In an open society, it should be possible to find a community of purpose based on a worldview that we have carved out of the ideologies that shape us. Perhaps this worldview we share with our group of interest is another ideology – for example, beach life and uncerebral fun in clean white sand – but at least it is, rather than imposed onto us, acted upon, somewhat self-determined, and ideally, evolving and open to critique.”

My experience is that this often happens automatically once we orient ourselves towards those new beliefs and values; people with similar beliefs and values show up.

At the same time, many argue that we live amid an epidemic of loneliness. One cause of this epidemic though is that we live grounded in philosophies of separation, which increase binary thinking and othering in race, culture, or politics, instead of acknowledging the co-constitution and entanglement between us. True belonging, though, means that you feel at home, even if you don’t fully fit in. One thing I hear from almost everyone I talk to is that they have always felt like they never quite fit in. We perceive others to be more alike than we are, which is natural because our inner workings are usually a lot more complex than what we present to the outside.

Ideally, philosophies are much more like ecosystems. To thrive, our individual philosophies form a diverse, entangled, intra-acting web of meaning. Each philosophy, like a distinct species, contributes to our collective wisdom. We can learn to appreciate the beauty in our differences and the strength in our shared humanity. That doesn’t mean that all philosophies are equally healthy for the ecosystem. That’s why ^ekophilosophical health matters. But more about that another time.