Several years ago, I decided to attach myself to existence; to try and preserve some part of it.  I chose wilderness.  “Wilderness” was this name given to areas far removed, or at least somewhat far removed, from man’s intrusiveness.  It was a place that ideally had no roads, no buildings, not even outhouses.  It was a place to go to commune with what was left of nature.  The reason to go to such a place was an attempt at renewal; a putting back together that which had been torn loose by modern society.  Wilderness needed protection, badly.  Now the term “wilderness” is used as a metaphor more often than as a place - as I describe above.  Recently, to make the point that some politician wasn’t marching with the current of the times, the newspaper columnist said, “he must have been lost in some wilderness for the last 10 years.”

As these words - like wilderness - get watered down, misused, overused - they lose their meaning and thus have no meaning.  The philosopher Heidegger saw in Western man a lethal attitude - which he saw coming from their metaphysics and religions - that gave them some sort of permission to tame the jungles, cut down wilderness, build roads through it if they felt like it, conquer and subjugate peoples, and in general dissipate anything naturally beautiful - if it was in their interests.  They got from their religions the notion that they could remake nature in their own image - if they simply felt like it.  They, man, Western man in particular, was the highest life-form on earth because “God” gave it to them to “cultivate” - meaning to plow under or cut down or simply plunder - if that would benefit them in some way.  

And so when we drive the roads of Oregon and Washington there is this little thin strip of trees lining the roads, but walk just a hundred feet or so into those trees and suddenly you walk into a sea of stumps.  They’ve cut a swath from Portland to the coast of the Pacific Ocean (I have no objection to logging.  My objection is to over-logging.  Read my post Overstory: Zero).  There's a stench to that form of hypocrisy.  But apparently the people are satisfied with their little strips of trees on both sides of the road, for the forest activists who truly care, who are protectively attached to existence, are a small and poorly financed bunch at best.

Heidegger proposed the philosophy of letting things be, especially the natural things.  But he meant that notion for people as well.  There's a tinge of anarchy in both Nietzsche and Heidegger, and perhaps one day if enough people tire of poor government, an anarchical society may spring up.  At that time we'll discover whether it could work or not.  One thing is certain, everyone would suddenly be involved in the political process).  Still, society restricts and demands conformity as it always has.  The notion of individuality is still in seed form in America - allegedly the most advanced democracy on the planet.  As George Kateb puts it, “Human beings must learn to stop forcing or projecting or imposing themselves on otherness, rather they must preserve it, guard it, shepherd it.”

Americans are now suffering $4 a gallon gasoline and griping about it like little children who’ve had a toy taken away.  Few realize that Europeans have had to pay $6 or more for gasoline for years.  Like the forest wilderness, man seems to have to use things up before embarking on a real program to find a substitute (this single universal trait may prove more lethal than all the nuclear bombs combined).  But like almost every other breakthrough in the world of science or technology, it will come from some individual who has made great personal sacrifices to pursue an idea.  Some person who has, as Heidegger said 'died' to the world, and so is able to be in the world and not in some “fantastic simulacrum of it (Kateb).”  

The one’s who exist within their own ideas, must out of necessity, be no part of the world, that is they must not be a social being.  Why?  Because to be a social being is to be coerced into certain patterns of behavior.  All social beings' time is taken up with social affairs.  The ones who insist on attaching themselves to some protective pursuit must resist such coercion or fail to find the solution that protects that which attaches them to existence.  Everyone who has brought forth an idea that was truly transformational (Edison, Frick, Salk, etc.) was an antisocial being.  They're only attached to the world in some way, some particular way, that makes them want to preserve existence, even though they realize it's a precarious existence at best.  They must live to be protective of something.  That is the only philosophy that allows them to live in the world.  And that notion is what drives them to greater and greater sacrifice to bring forth the solutions that protect that which attaches them to existence in the first place.  

It doesn’t mean that the “horror and obscenities” (Kateb) don’t still crowd around them.  These ones today are fully aware of the impending war between Israel and Iran (which makes each day uneasy, but doesn’t deter them from their protective goals).  No one mind can fathom the horror of such a conflict - even if it doesn’t turn nuclear.  But in this horror-filled potential these ones continue to work positively and fruitfully to protect that which attaches them to existence, even as the fate of the earth remains precarious at best.  As that genius Wallace Stevens said in his poem “On the Road Home:”

    In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
    The world must be measured by eye.

As Kateb teaches, both Nietzsche and Heidegger were individualists.  They’re “individualists in the sense that they locate the highest human possibility in a philosophical relation to existence...If one is philosophical and also nonsocial and antisocial, one is therefore an individual.  Only socially detached individuals can care about existence as such, though they must act with others.