Isolation and connection

We are thrown into the world with no rhyme or reason, say Martin Heidegger (Being and Time) and the existentialists. Presumably, this arbitrary and inscrutable “thrownness” is a big source of the anxiety and isolation that condition our existence. Gloomy lot, these existentialists.

But is there an antidote to the gloom? If so, maybe it comes from hippie philosopher par excellence, Alan Watts. The idea that we “come into the world” as “isolated egos .. who confront an external world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange” — all of that is a hallucination, says Watts. And we can dissolve the hallucination with one simple fact: “We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree” (The Book).

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