"Birth from the maternal womb - as the moment one sets out on one's journey through life - presents a telling image of the initial condition of humanity: a state of separation....The miracle of the subject is born. The secret of the 'I.' The awareness of self. The awareness of the world. The mystery of freedom and responsibility. Man as a being that has fallen out of Being and therefore continually reaches towards it, as the only entity by which and to which Being has revealed itself as a question, as a secret and as meaning.
It seems to me that the notion of separation as humanity's starting point helps us establish our bearings when we explore the stage on which human existence is constituted and its drama unfolded.
Separation creates a deeply contradictory situation: mans is not what he has set out into, or rather, he is not his experience of what he has set out into. To him, this terrain - the world - is an alien land. Every step of the way, he comes up against his own "otherness" in the world and his otherness vis-à-vis himself. This terrain is essentially unintelligible to man. He feels unsettled and threatened by it. We experience the world as something not our own, something from which meaning must first be wrested and which, on the contrary, is constantly taking meaning away from us....it is in fact a part of what we have been thrown into or what we have fallen into and what drives us - in the alienness of the world - into situations we do not fully understand, which we suffer but cannot avoid."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
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