Essays on the Condition of Inwardness

Inwardness is the condition of being inside. However, this can mean many things: one can be inside himself – dealing with his emotions, his projections, his fantasies – or with other people who become part of him as he deals with himself. One can be inside his social environment, letting himself be part of the tissue of values, reciprocations, and personal interventions that compose one’s social existence. These are two quite different kinds of being inside, both of them different from being in a box or being in a prison cell, and yet each of them, in a recognizable sense, inside something. This book is concerned with inwardness in two different senses, the first as being in the center of existence, and the second as being a quest for the meaning of the center of one’s existence, that is two different kinds of profoundly ‘within’ states. The book culminates with tales of searching for the meaning of interiority, as it self-characterizes in the inner brain of a lizard, or in the mineral constitution of the earth from which we take our lives.