THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LIVING AN ISOLATED EXISTENCE: METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS

Abstract

Man has since his evolution grown one stage of his socio-economic and socio-political existence to another. Through the ages of man’s development, one thing has remained sacrosanct; that is man’s interaction with one another. The existence of man has shown that in the nature of man, man has unlimited wants or insatiable needs, howbeit, his limited resources cannot proffer all that man may want or need at any given time, place and circumstances. The fact that man has limited resources which are unequally distributed by nature, invention and innovation, it follows that what one man has but does not need it, another man lacks, and needs it. This became the inception of trade, exchange and eventual confirmation of the impossibility of living an isolated existence. From the foregoing; it is ideal to assert that ‘no man is an island’, which implies that no man can exist on his own, providing all he may need and want and still survives in the average expectation of survival. The statement that ‘no man can exist on his own’ should rather be read as “it is impossible for a man to exist on his own”. This is to say, although one may live an isolated existence, it is impossible for one to live in an isolated existence and even in situations where it happens, it is accompanied with serious metaphysical implications. Therefore, this paper tends to make a discourse on the impossibility of living an isolated existence, with peculiar attention on the metaphysical implications of such.