TOMOKAZU BABA
Philosophy as Journey
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume II, Number 01 (2019): 09-19

Philosophy and Journey

PHILOSOPHY AS JOURNEY
Tomokazu Baba
Abstract
Inquiry into truth is often compared to the figure of journey. In this sense, there
should be certain affinity between philosophy and journey. This affinity seems to be
widely accepted, although the reason for it remains unclear. This paper explores
what makes this affinity possible as well as the subtle difference between philosophy
and journey. In order to do that, first, with the help of philosophers on philosophizing and of the phenomenological description of philosophy, I attempt to describe
what is happening in our mind when we are philosophizing. Second, I will endeavor
to describe phenomenologically the experience of journey in an effort to lay down
its essential features. Finally, based on these phenomenological descriptions ofboth philosophy and journey, I compare their characteristics in order to isolate
what they have in common and uncommon, aiming to throw light on what makes
their affinity possible.

Introduction
Affinity of Philosophy and Journey
Inquiry into truth is often compared to the figure of journey. In this comparison, the inquirer isassociated with a traveler who aspires to reach the truth, which is seen as destination of his/her
journey. In Plato’s allegory of the cave, one of the inhabitants of the cave, being used to seeing
only shadows projected on the wall enabled by the light of a torch, goes outside to see the realityof the sun, which very much illustrates the soul’s travels to the world of the ideas, where it lived
before, to recollect memories of truth. This image of philosophical inquiry as journey becomesthe central idea for Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, where Spirit travels from the certainty ofperception (of now, here, I), to the absolute Spirit. This is nothing other than a phenomenological description of the human mind aspiring for truth as a long travel from a certain starting
point to a final destination.
This would not be without connection with the first usage of the Greek word “philosophein” recorded in Herodotus. The usage was related to “traveling the world for the sake

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Philosophy as Journeyof seeing it.” In the first book of Herodotus’ Histories, Croesus, who had welcomed Greek
Athenian Legislator Solon at Sardis, asked him,
Our Athenian guest, we have heard much of you, by reason of your wisdom and your wanderings,
how that you have travelled far to seek knowledge [philosopheon] and to see the world.1

Here we can observe the verb “philosophein” standing for travel. That is, the idea of travel isexpressed by the word which literally means love (philia) for wisdom (sophia).2
In the history of philosophy, we find a lot of stories (some of them anecdotal) about
philosophers that have to do with traveling. Plato’s teacher, Socrates, was not traveler himself,
but often dialogued with Greek speaking travelers coming from other cities. Plato travelled
twice to Sicilia to help Dionysius the II. Born in Italy, Thomas Aquinas taught in Paris after
having studied in Germany. Moses Maimonides, a Cordovan Jew, travelled through the North
African countries to Egypt to flee from the persecution of Jews. The Catalan philosopher Raymond Lull travelled through many Mediterranean countries to promote dialogue between religions. The French philosopher Descartes traveled a lot in his youth and throughout his professional life lived in several countries. About one year before his visit to Sweden, and one year
and a half before his death, he wrote to the Swedish Queen Christina, “one foot in one country,
and the other in another country, I find my condition very happy, in that it is free.”3 ImmanuelKant, known for having remained in his hometown Konigsberg throughout his life, knew a lot
about foreign countries to such an extent that he gave lectures in geography “for almost his
entire career.”4 He was, so to say, “traveler” through books.
Based on the above essentially empirical observations, one might suppose that travel
promotes philosophy, or that the experience obtained in travel helps doing philosophy, whichsuggests a certain affinity between philosophy and journey. However, as it is not immediately
clear how traveling helps philosophizing, or how travel itself relates to philosophy, we need tofocus on the question of this peculiar affinity between these two distinct kinds of human actions
or experiences. Indeed, they seem to be even contraries in the sense that philosophizing itself
does not require moving from one place to the other, whereas journey is, by definition, movingfrom one site to the other.
To address this question, I will examine, in the first section, what is happening in our
mind when we are philosophizing. Likewise, in the second section, I will examine what is happening when we are traveling. Finally, based on the results of previous sections, I will assertthat philosophy is journey “in its existential sense,” even if there are differences between the
two. More specifically, I will argue that whereas philosophy begins with ‘nostalgia’, journey
1

Loeb Classical Library, Herodotus I, trans. A.D. Godley, London / Cambridge, 1946, Book I, 30, pp. 33–35.
See also Rossen Roussev, “Thinking and Philosophizing as the Journey of Waying and Homecoming: Heidegger,
Lao-tse, and Herodotus,” Global Conversations: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture, Vol. II, No. 01 (2019), especially pp. 38-40.
3« un pied en un pays; et l’autre en un autre, je trouve ma condition très heureuse, en ce qu’elle est libre. » Lettre
à Christine de Suède, juillet 1648, quoted in Barbara Cassin, Nostalgie (Fayard / Pluriel, 2015), p. 7.
4
Robert B. Louden, “The Last Frontier: Exploring Kant’s Geography”, in Robert R. Clews (Ed.), Reading Kant’s
Lectures (De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston, 2015), p. 505. The phrase is quoted by Louden from “the dust jacket for
Natural Science.”
2

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begins with ‘exodalgia’, and that whereas ‘being-moved’ (in Heideggerian sense Cf. 1.3) comes
first in philosophy, it comes second in journey.
1 Phenomenology of Philosophy
1.1 What is philosophy? – Two types of answers
What is happening when we are philosophizing? This is a version of the more common expression of the question: What is philosophy? Here, it is interesting to look at the answers thatphilosophers gave to that question, because their answers could help us answer our question.
There are generally two types of answers to the question “What is philosophy?” Thefirst type stresses the contents of philosophy as “courses taught in the schools of liberal arts orin the faculty of philosophy,” or “what you can read in the history of philosophy.” This is often
regarded as “doxa” by philosophers who emphasize the act of philosophizing as being essential
to philosophy. For them, philosophy does not consist in the answers it gives to the question, but
in the very inquiry into the truth. In other words, to these philosophers, the answer counts forless than the question. Kant’s statement on what we can learn from philosophy is a good example of this type of answer. In his Critique of Pure Reason, he says,
Among all rational sciences (a priori), therefore, only mathematics can be learned, never philosophy(except historically), rather, as far as reason is concerned, we can at best only learn to philosophize.
(B865)
One can only learn philosophize, i.e., to exercise the talent of reason in prosecuting its general principles in certain experiments that come to hand, but always with the reservation of the right of reason
to investigate the sources of these principles themselves and to confirm or reject them. (B 866) 5

Here, Kant makes distinction between philosophy as system (or history, with some contents)
and act of philosophizing. He gives even a definition of the act of philosophizing as using thetalent of reason in following the universal principles of reason always under the condition thatwhen reason passes a judgment on something for which it does not have a right to do so, thisjudgement must be rejected. In other words, philosophy is not what we can learn as knowledge,
it is just the act of philosophizing. Kant’s perspective allows us to orient ourselves to the second
type of answers, namely, that philosophy is an act, rather than a system of contents. We canthus continue to observe philosophers’ comments on the definition of philosophy and to identify
their answers pointing to philosophy as act, as well as to a close connection of intellectual action
to emotion.
1.2 Plato, Aristotle – philosophy and passion
From the ancient Greek thinkers, we have inherited the view that philosophy begins with asense of wonder. Thus, in Theaetetus, Plato says, “for this feeling (pathos) of wonder(thaumazein) shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning (archē) of

5

Immanuel Kant, Werke IV Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Wilhelm Weischedel (hrsg.) (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt
am Main, 1968), S.699-700. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood (Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge / New York / Melbourne, 1998), p. 694.

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Philosophy as Journeyphilosophy.” (155d)6 Similarly, Aristotle details this process of beginning of philosophy as follows,
It is through wonder (thaumazein) that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions
about the greater matters too, e.g. about the changes of the moon and of the sun, about the stars andabout the origin of the universe. Now he who wonders and is perplexed feels that he is ignorant (thusthe myth-lover is in a sense a philosopher, since myths are composed of wonders); therefore if it
was to escape ignorance that men studied philosophy, it is obvious that they pursued science for thesake of knowledge, and not for any practical utility. The actual course of events bears witness tothis; for speculation of this kind began with a view to recreation and pastime, at a time when practically all the necessities of life were already supplied.7

Aristotle provides here elements for a phenomenology of philosophy, or of how we begin tophilosophize in our mind. According to him, philosophizing begins with wonder, stimulated by
the perplexities of not knowing. Knowledge is thus seen as pursuit for itself, without extrinsic
advantage, but with the help of “recreation and pastime.”
Here Aristotle seems to suppose that the pursuit of knowledge has an intrinsic advantage. Now Aristotle himself does not state what this intrinsic advantage might be, but wecan guess that it has something to do with a certain first emotion which is the cause of realization of our ignorance and subsequently of the pursuit of knowledge. The pursuit here indicatesa desire for the object of pursuit, whereas the need of it presupposes a non-possession of thisobject. It is indeed the awareness on the non-possession that arises a need, which is a state ofmind demanding satisfaction as in the cases of hunger or thirst. The need is a kind of passionin its original sense, which, as derived from the Greek pathein, is ‘suffering’). For its part, thisstate of suffering needs to be cured by the pursuit of knowledge, which, if successful, results in
an intrinsic advantage, namely, the satisfaction of the need of knowledge, which is also an
intellectual pleasure.
Aristotle’s description of the act of philosophizing can be compared to Husserl’s
phenomenological approach to consciousness, Because his description of “gradual progression”
of consciousness (along wonder, perplexities, realization of ignorance, pursuit of knowledge)
allows us to see what is happening in our minds when we begin to philosophize, although,unlike Husserl, Aristotle does not go through a process of epoche (by putting things in parenthesis to let things (Sache) appear themselves). For him, it involves a suffering from ignorance
and the ensuing need to relieve its pain through the pursuit of knowledge.
1.3 Heidegger and the Philosophy as Nostalgia
As for Heidegger, he says philosophy is originally pain. In a lecture on winter semester of
1929/30, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics – World – Finitude – Solitude, quoting Novalis, he defines philosophy as nostalgia, in German Heimweh, literally, “home pain.”

6

Plato II Theaetetus Sophist, trans. Harold North Flower (The Loeb Classical Library, London / New York, 1928),
p. 55.
7
Aristotle, Metaphysics Books I-IX, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge / London, 1933), I.II, 6-11, 982b 12-25, p. 13.

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But what is the human, [what does it means] that at the core of his essence he philosophizes, andwhat is this philosophizing? What are we in it? Whither do we want to go? […] Novalis said oncein a fragment: ‘Philosophy is originally nostalgia (Heimweh), a desire to be home everywhere’. A
wonderful definition, of course romantic.8

This statement is similar to those of Plato’s and Aristotle’s in that it also points to the aspect ofpassion in philosophizing. He makes clearer this passive aspect, and puts it in relation to theverb greifen, ‘grasp’ in English. Philosophy is not something a teacher can teach by letting
students repeat after him or applying it, but needs, first of all, being moved (ergriffen) by what
the concepts (Begriffe) shall grasp (begreifen).9
Philosophy begins with being grasped by what the concept will grasp but has not yet
grasped. Being grasped (ergriffen) in German means being moved in an emotional sense, whichcorresponds to the state of passion (wonder and desire to know) that was discussed above. Here,
what Heidegger calls ‘nostalgia’ is just the desire to know, whereas its object of knowledge is‘home’ (Heim). In this sense, for him, very much as for Plato, the truth is something that we
knew before but subsequently forgot, and now we aim to discover again. That is, the pursuit ofknowledge (here the ontological truth of being) is to return to the home place which we left
before. As in the pursuit of ideas by the soul in the anamnesis of Plato, in this pursuit the act ofknowing is a recovery through discovery.
Regardless of other differences with Plato and Aristotle, for Heidegger the beginningof philosophy was also a passion, which is now called being-moved (Ergriffenheit). This state
comes from the fundamental mood (Grundstimmung) of Dasein, which he calls Anxiety(Angst).10 Thus, for Heidegger, philosophizing has its roots in the existential structure of thehuman being, and here, by using the word Heimweh, deliberately or not, he puts forward the
aspect of suffering.11
This aspect can be made more conspicuous with a note on the etymology the word
‘nostalgia’. The word is composed of two Greek words; nostos (return) and algos (pain). Thereis no such word in ancient Greek. It is a modern coinage which is used to describe medically a“home sick” person. There are two theories on its origin. According to the first one, the word
was invented by Jean-Jacques Haader of Switzerland in 1678 as a medical term equivalent to
the German Heimweh. According to the second, it was coined by the Alsatian Jean Hofer in1688 but again with the same designation, namely, a state of suffering associated with being far
from home. According to a medical report from that time, this sickness can be cured by returning to their home or even by hearing the cow bell of home village.12

8

Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit, Gesamtausgabe Bd. 29/30(Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1983), S. 7. My translation.
9
Op.cit., S.9.
10
Op.cit., S.10.
11
On Heidegger’s perspective on Novalis’ Heimweh, see also Rossen Roussev, “Thinking and Philosophizing as
the Journey of Waying and Homecoming: Heidegger, Lao-tse, and Herodotus,” pp. 33ff.
12
Barbara Cassin proposes a succinct report on the history and a reflection of the term. La Nostalgie – Quand donc
est-on chez soi ?, Pluriel, 2015, pp. 16-23.

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To sum up, philosophizing presupposes a peculiar type of suffering – the need to go
back ‘home’. ‘Home’ here represents a philosophical truth, which for Plato was associated withthe world of ideas, whereas for Heidegger with the “forgotten” truth of Being. In this sense, we
can associate our reaching the truth in our pursuits of it with a relief of our suffering. We need
to note, though, that these philosophers do not explicitly point to such a therapeutic effect ofphilosophy. Thus, we might as well say that such an effect could be equally felt by non-professional “philosophers” whose inquiry germinates in a discussion in a philosophical café.
1.4 Observations from a Philosophical café
Philosophical cafés are everywhere around the world. I also organize a philosophical café in
my town once a month. Participants would frequently say that the conversation was interesting
to them because they learned something (an idea) they did not know before the discussion. They
often pointed that through this kind of learning they were relieved from a peculiar type of suffering which they associated with individual or cultural values but lacked a necessary clarity
on it. Here is an example.
In 2018, we had a philosophical café in which we discussed personal “dreams” andtheir possible fulfilment in life in the future. As we began, some participants talked about theirown dreams, but others said that they do not have such dreams and appeared to be sufferingfrom the fact that they do not have what to fulfil in life. To be sure, this peculiar suffering
presupposes that they thought that they should have such a dream. Later on, as the conversation
went on, some participants began to notice this presupposition and to raise the question of how
we came to have such a feeling of obligation. In search of an answer, they reflected on the
education they had received in school and began to realize how their teachers or the way ofeducation imprinted on their mind a message like “it is better to have a dream to realize in one’s
life.”
This is how they understood the cause of this peculiar suffering they had, and we canrelate here that at the moment of uncovering this previously unkonwn part of their own selves,participants felt free.13 They felt emancipated from what oppressed them, their own assumed
values, which were originally foreign to them but became their own unwittingly. In his introductory book on philosophical dialogue, the Japanese philosopher and philosophical13

This process may at first appear to be similar to the experience of patients in the psychoanalytic practice, where
when analyzed via the methods of the psychoanalyst, they discover what is practically unknown to them in theirpersonal life history, which has been suppressed by an immemorable traumatic experience. However, psychoanalytic experience of this kind (discovery of trauma) and the experience in philosophical café are different in two
points. First, the facilitator in philosophical café does not play the same role as psychoanalyst. Second, the discovery of something forgotten in one’s personal life may not necessarily relate to a traumatic experience suppressedin one’s unconscious. With regard to the medical practice in psychiatry, I think that philosophical café is rather
closer, besides differences, to the so-called “open dialogue,” a psychiatric method which was developed in Finland
for patients with mental illnesses. This difference needs a more detailed exploration, though, and we would rather
reserve it for another study.

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Philosophy as Journeypractitioner Shinji Kajitani describes this feeling of relief and emancipation as intellectual but
also as “almost physical” one.14
This is a peculiar therapeutic effect of philosophy. Here, we need to ask, with regard
to the ‘truth’ of the professional philosophers’, what is the truth for participants in philosophicalcafés and whether this truth can be considered to be same one as Plato’s truth of the ideas or
Heidegger’s truth of Being. The ‘truth’ in the above-mentioned case of the participants in thephilosophical café would be, to be short, a discovery of a certain veiled part of the self. It is
identical neither with the Platonic idea nor with the Heideggerian Being. However, it can be
identified as ‘truth’ because it was pursued by inquirers; it was something hidden in thememory, forgotten secret of the self, which was discovered after inquiry.
Now we can briefly sum up our findings on the question of this first section; namely,
what is happening when we are philosophizing? First, we linked philosophizing to a sufferingfrom sickness, a sickness of knowing, which presupposes an awareness of a certain ignoranceof the knowledge that we pursue. Second, we also linked philosophizing to an attempt to curethis sickness through inquiry. And third, we associated the discovery of the ‘truth’ with therecovery from this sickness.
The next question we consider is If philosophy is this kind of therapeutic process,how does it relate to journey?
2. Phenomenology of Journey
2.1 Empirical observations
To answer this question, we need to ask first what is happening when we are traveling. This
will be a key element of our investigation of the experience of journey in this section. We willthen finalize our discussion on what philosophy and journey have in common.
In the ordinary English language, the word ‘travel’ is more widely used than the word‘journey’. ‘Journey’ can be used to mean ‘long travel’, but I do not see an essential difference
between the two terms here. There are in fact a number of English words meaning journey or
travel with regard to a specific destination or purpose, such as pilgrimage, sight-seeing, mission,
relocation, migration, etc.
Historically speaking, human beings have never stopped changing their places ofliving. In many myths or religious stories, various characters have been said to have traveled
for very long periods of time (including Abraham, Moses, Ulysses, Aeneas, etc). Sometimes
they travel for a war in foreign countries (Ulysses, Alexander the Great, crusaders, Napoleon,
U.S. army, “Blue Helmets,” etc); or they travel to propagate their teaching or ideology (Jesus,
St. Paul, Jesuits, Revolutionists, etc.); or they set out on a journey to visit some sacred place(Jerusalem, Mecca, Santiago de Compostela, Ise shrine etc.). People also travel for commerce,
which sometimes creates roads for travel like “silk road,” railway, highway, or low-cost airlines; and sometimes they are made to set out on a risky journey of immigration.
What these examples have in common is the aspect of moving from one place toanother, but the variations in its sense can be immense. We may assume that we travel from
14

Shinji Kajitani, What is thinking? – Introduction to philosophy from 0 to 100 years old [in Japanese], 2018. Here
we use the term philosophical practitioner for a person who engages in a philosophical practice such as philosophical café, philosophical dialogue in school, philosophical consulting, philosophical counseling, etc.

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home to another place and vice versa. But we, as homo sapience, have never returned to theplace where we were born, supposedly somewhere on the African continent. Likewise, some
immigrants have never gone back to their country of origin, which has transformed their identity to such an extent that, for instance, some Japanese immigrants in Hawai’i or in Latin America have forgotten their mother tongue. Whereas in the case of the nomads, for whom travelingis a part of their everyday life, journey itself has become a kind of home.
Amidst this motley mosaic of traveling examples, one can easily get lost without thehelp of elucidating concepts. We are therefore fully justified to search for phenomena of affinity
between philosophy and journey, and we will now focus, first, on travel from home, and second,on the experience of moving from one home place to another.
2.2 What is happening when we are traveling? – Phenomenology of Journey
To answer the question of what is happening when we are traveling, we need to clarify whathome is, as well as the experience of leaving home and arriving to another place. ‘Home’ canbe understood in wider than ordinary sense. For instance, when we get out of home to go toworkplace or school, we have in a sense not left it, as this is not actually traveling but commuting. That is, we understand ‘home’ in a wider sense that is not confined to the building we live
in. Instead, home represents the sphere of our everyday life, the world with which we are familiar, which is what in Being and Time Heidegger called being-in-the-world (In-der-Weltsein). It should be noted, though, that this sense of ‘home’ is different from what he called Heimin his above- mentioned lecture. Here, being-in-the-world does not have the sense of a geometrical or geographical space but that of the human being’s existential structure. The ‘home’ inthis existential sense is where we live and feel at ease. On the opposite side, when we are in thestate of anxiety, we are out of home (unheimlich). The world in this state becomes foreign tous, very much as when we get lost in a town, we feel anxious and the world appears as foreign
to us. On Heidegger’s view, anxiety (Angst) is the fundamental mood of Dasein.
In journey, we tend to feel this fundamental mood. This means that existentially weleave our everyday life world and our being-in-the-world becomes a world that is foreign to us.
This observation allows us to distinguish a mere travel from an existential travel. Traveling inan empirical sense can be either existential or non-existential. For example, even if we travel tothe other side of the earth, it is possible that we do not at all travel in an existential sense if wefeel at home throughout. Traveling becomes existential only when we are outside the ‘home’of our being-in-the-world. That is, we can travel existentially even when we remain in a house
we are living in, so long as we are in the fundamental mood of being solitarily separated fromthe world in anxiety.
It will not be an exaggeration to say that today we are living in a world where ‘mere
traveling’ has become easier whereas existential traveling more difficult. In many cities aroundthe globe, we find the same coffee shops, the same fast food or fashion chains, the same resort
hotel chains and free WIFI internet, which makes it possible for us to flee from our solitude,
for instance, by connecting to the same social networks. We can say that all these function as akind of shelter in the unfamiliar world we dwell during travel. Indeed, such a sheltering experience presupposes that the traveler is out of his or her familiar world. And yet, this is also what
the traveler wants – to exit his or her everyday existence and obtain some special experience

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which cannot be found in the familiar surrounding world, regardless of the uncertainty that it
can be found in this way.
We find one of the classical criticisms of the traveler in a passage in Augustin’s Confessions, to which the Italian poet of 14 century Petrarch paid special attention,
Great is this force of memory, excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! who eversounded the bottom thereof? yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself
comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself. And where should thatbe, which it containeth not of itself? Is it without it, and not within? how then doth it not comprehend
itself? A wonderful admiration surprises me, amazement seizes me upon this. And men go abroad
to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, thecompass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by [et relinquunt se ipsos]…15

Travelers go out to find something wonderful in the great nature, and by doing so, they miss toheed at what is wonderful inside their own nature. For the author of the Confessions, the quest
for the truth of the mind is to unfold within our own self, not outside it. Petrarch went up to the
top of the mount Ventoux in 1335 with his favorite book Confessions. He sought to compare
the climbing of the mountain and the exaltation of the soul to the beatitude promised by the
Christian religion; at the top, he opened the book and read this passage in surprise.
The German philosopher Joachim Ritter gives an interpretation of this episode fromthe viewpoint of the history of ideas, considering it as one of the sources of the concept oflandscape.16 According to him, great landscapes will become destinations for travelers in thecourse of time. People then will go to foreign lands to see something wonderful in the great
nature, just as Petrarch did in the 14th century. This is surely the case in our time, and Augustine’s critical viewpoint, namely, that in traveling one turn one’s back on what is wonderful,
mysterious, foreign, or uncanny in the self, may still come to mind.
Taken together, Petrarch’s travel and Augustine’s critique are indicative that the notion of traveling is open to the possibilities to become a mere traveling or an existential traveling. But if travelers are not forced to travel (unlike refugees), they essentially aim at moving
away from their everyday life. They need to leave their everyday world and, in this sense, toreinvent their own being-in-the-world in order to satisfy this need. Still, this need is not just amere need of pastime and recreation – even if travel helps and, as Aristotle said,17 begins “withview of pastime and recreation”– as it has something more than that. Emmanuel Levinas called
it the “need to escape” – the need to flee from our own being when we feel shame or nausea.18
For him, this is not a simple state of mind. The need to flee my own being is not just a fact that
I am in a certain state of mind, but that this fact has a special weight for me. When we feel
15

Augustine, Confessions, Book Ten, Chapter VIII, translated by E.B. Pusey, (Project Gutenberg eBook, 2002)
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3296/3296-h/3296-h.htm#link2H_4_0010 (2019.11.29)
16
Joachim Ritter „Landschaft“, Subjektivität ; sechs Aufsätze (1974), Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980, p. 144. Cf. Tomokazu Baba, “Déconstruction du paysage : Esquisse d’une problématique chez Jean-Luc Nancy” in Danielle CohenLevinas, Gisèle Berkman (eds.), Figures du dehors - Autour de Jean-Luc Nancy, Éditions Nouvelles Cécile Defaut,2012, pp. 311-326.
17
Cf. supra 1.2.
18
Emmnauel Levinas, De l’évasion, Le Livre de poche, 1998, pp. 96-123.

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shame or nausea, we feel this “weight of being” [poids de l’être],19 from which we want to flee.
To contrast the aforementinoned notion of ‘nostalgia’ as the need of homecoming, I would liketo call the Levinasian need of exit ‘exodalgia’. The word is composed by ‘exodus’ (exit) and‘algos’ (pain). Thus, nostalgia is the need to come back home, whereas exodalgia is the need togo out of home.
Travelers have this need of exit, exodalgia, before they start their journey. As exodalgia pushes people to travel, to recover from this “sickness,” they become travelers. In travelingin an existential sense, the world appears different from the one in our everyday life. The world
becomes first wonderful but foreign, strange, uncanny, and then the traveler feels isolated andestranged. This makes it possible to distance from, observe, and inquire into oneself in an existential sense, not to “pass oneself by” as Augustin said in his criticism of the traveler.
2.3 Answer to the Question of the Section
In this section, we tried to answer the question, what is happening when we are traveling? Aftersome empirical observations of traveling and various modes of travel in human history, we
focused on the very experience of traveling in the sense of leaving ‘home’. We made distinction
between mere traveling and existential traveling. The latter traveling can be understood as apeculiar kind of journey in which the world appears foreign to the travelers who feel out of their
existential ‘home’ in Heideggerian sense. In this sense, they feel isolated and find themselvesin a position of facing their own being. And yet, they needed this strange experience, as theyneeded a peculiar exit from their own existential home. We called this need ‘exodalgia’ anddescribed it as the opposite to nostalgia, which is the need to come back at home.
Throughout the process of this existential journey (exodalgia, travel, inquiry into theself), the travelers can rediscover their own individual and cultural values, as well as theirworldviews. This process is somewhat similar to what appears to take place in a philosophicalcafé.20 The participants in it can be seen as existential travelers. We can call this experience aphilosophical meta-cognition,21 which we can attain by virtue of a journey as existential traveling. This experience can be prompted also by a ‘mere traveling’ (to go abroad, for example),but it can also do without it. For instance, in his Persian Letters, Montaigne takes the readers
outside their “home,” which is the world of their Eurocentric and Christian values, by putting
them in the perspective of a Persian traveler in Europe. In this way, the European readers can
get out of their “home” by way of an existential traveling without actually moving in reality.
From our viewpoint, in this story, the reader, as an existential traveler, can be understood as
emancipated from his or her own ‘home’. That is, if they had exodalgia before reading it, they
could recover from this peculiar “sickness” upon reading it.

19

Levinas, op.cit, p. 121
Cf. supra, 1.4
21
On the notion of ‘metacognition’ and its relation to philosophy and self-knowledge, see Rossen Roussev, “Philosophy and the Transition from Theory to Practice: A Response to Recent Concerns for Critical Thinking, in
Telos, Vol.148, 2009, especially pp. 88-90, 93-94, 104-108.
20

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TOMOKAZU BABA
Philosophy as Journey

Conclusion
In this paper, I tried to answer the question What does the affinity between philosophy andjourney consists in? In order to find the answer, I undertook phenomenological descriptions ofboth philosophy and journey with the help of some notions of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, (1.2, 1.3), Augustin, Levinas, and Montaigne, (2.2). I also approached in thesame way the experience of the discussions in the philosophical cafés (1.4), as well as that ofjourney again (2.1).
As a result, we can now identify three characteristics that philosophy and journey havein common: 1) a “sickness of the soul” (Nostalgia and Exodalgia); 2) the act of relieving the
sickness (inquiry into the truth, getting out of “home”); 3) a therapeutic effect (discovery of
truth, finding something wonderful outside our everyday life or in a foreign world). This is why
we can assert that philosophy is a journey in an existential sense.
At the same time, our inquiry shows two differences between the experiences of philosophy and journey. First, philosophy begins out of nostalgia, whereas journey out of exodalgia. Second, the feeling of being-moved comes first in philosophy, whereas it comes second injourney. Philosophy is said to begin with wonder, 22 whereas in journey this feeling comes upon
the encounter with the foreignness of the world and of the self. In this sense, however, theprocess of journey appears to come before the feeling of wonder, which would enact any philosophizing (see the figure below).

Journey12exodalgia

traveling

Philosophy

3
4
foreignness/wonderwonderignorance/nostalgia

56inquiry

truth

Thus, in our sense, journey begins before philosophy. As can be seen in the figure above, there
is nothing in the 1st and 2nd columns for philosophy. This accords with Aristotle’s view that
we can do philosophy when all our other necessities (than philosophizing) are satisfied, i.e.,
when we have pastime.23 And, in reality, we cannot travel, if we have no time for it, if we are
not free from the obligations of our everyday life. In our view, the exodalgia, as the motivation
to leave our home and search for the foreignness of the world and of the self, precedes thenostalgia, which motivates philosophy. In this sense, we can say that journey promotes philosophy, whereas a mere traveling ends up in step 3, in just encountering what is foreign. The
figure also suggests that journey can become existential only when it goes through the steps 4,
5, 6 of philosophy. Whereas the initial need to get out of home can be prompted by a hunch ofphilosophical wonder. Otherwise put, exodalgia can be the precursor of nostalgia.

22
23

Cf. Supra 1.2, see the statements of Plato and Aristotle.
Cf. Supra 1.2, see the end of the quote from Aristotle.

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