A Developed Nature: A Phenomenological Account of the Experience of Home (original) (raw)

Feeling at Home Reflections on a Theme in Human Existence

ESPES. The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics, 2022

This essay is about the significance of the body for dwelling. Considering the body implies considering a concrete body, i.e. asking for the experiences embedded in it. Consequently, the body in consideration is, for example, gendered. The topic of dwelling takes Martin Heidegger's work on the hand as the point of departure and uses philosophical anthropology and Jacques Derrida's comments on Heidegger as inspiration to suggest that the relationship between the hand and thinking implies asking whose hands build places of dwelling. When dwelling is related to the body, we must also consider what concrete body is involved in building and dwelling.

Being at home among things: Heidegger's reflections on dwelling

is article examines Heidegger's account of dwelling while placing it in the broad context of a wide array of his lectures and the constellation of his collected writings. e focus on this question is primarily ontological in character, in spite of the spatial signi cance of the phenomenon of dwelling, and the bearings it has on a variety of disciplines that interrogate its essence, be it in architectural humanities and design or in geography, which probe the various elements of its architectonic and topological underpinnings. e investigation of Heidegger's re ections on dwelling will be connected in this line of inquiry with his consideration of what he refers to as "the gathering of the fourfold," namely as "earth, sky, mortals and divinities," and the manner they are admitted and installed into "things," all to be set against the background of his meditations on the origins of the work of art, and on the unfolding of the essence of modern technology as en-framing.

The Paradox of Home in Heidegger's Philosophy

AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, 2023

Heidegger's philosophy has influenced largely the humanities and arts and has also been a source of interest in architecture. Although Heidegger has written on architecture, this paper will argue that one of the key topics in his philosophy, intertwined with architecture, is the concept of home (das Heim). In Heidegger's philosophy, the homely (das Heimische) was intertwined with its opposition, the uncanny (das Unheimliche). This paper discusses the different understandings of home in Heidegger's seminal works. The paradoxical structure of home in Heidegger's philosophy is discussed, as home in Heidegger's philosophy is impossible for modern man with his horrifying nature, perpetuated by the uncanny.

Becoming at Home in the Natural World

2007

Summary Modernity has impacted on the very sense of ourselves, that is, on the sense of what it means to be a human being and on our role and place on this planet. How to find meaning in a world that often appears stripped of meaning and purpose is a problem implicated in the resistance encountered to the taking of personal environmental responsibility. An ethic of environmental accountability cannot simply be prescribed; it needs to arise from something more fundamental. I suggest that the deficient relationship between humans and the natural world arises out of a loss of a sense of a fundamental earthly ground out of which humans derive significance and a personal sense of wellbeing. I contend that, as it involves an essential feature of human existence, the retrieval of this experience is a critical issue for modern western culture. The experience of ‘Being as such’ is not an ‘everyday’ experience, but a particular kind of experience that nurtures the wholeness of human beings. It tends to engage an experience of astonishment, awe and wonder at existence itself. Its absence, implicating deeper questions of existential homelessness, is a factor in mechanistic, indifferent and negative attitudes towards the environment and nihilistic worldviews. I propose that the philosophy of Martin Heidegger may throw light on how such an experience might be reawakened and thereby open up fresh possibilities of perceiving the human place and role within nature. Within his work, particularly in his Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) , there is a transitory, transitional and transformative pathway of thinking that may well be engaged in the retrieval of a way of being whereby thinking is less influenced by everyday familiarity, indifference or negativity and the changeability of feelings, but, as it grounds the human essence, is more enduring in its worth. I propose that it becomes a manner of thinking, within a deeper sense of what it means to be, that imparts significance to the experience of relating to the world; an experience in which environmental responsibility then becomes an authentic and coherent outcome. I explore the unfamiliar pathway of thinking, enacted in Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), which provides both the inspiration and the structural underpinnings for my questioning and reflections. As a central foundation of this ‘post-philosophical turn’ this work, together with other works of this period, demonstrates Heidegger’s own ‘crossing’, which was for him a transformation of thinking, necessary when metaphysical questioning reaches the limit of articulation and such thinking must transform itself in order to enable its continuation. Yet, rather than being an exegesis of this work as a whole, it grasps, clarifies, develops and applies the particular unique kind of thinking that arises there within a framework of identifiable, yet ineffable, connections and relationships. I examine this as a region of passage or transition of thinking, which I describe as the ‘threshold’. Here the emergence of a different way of being and thinking ‘displaces’ or ‘interrupts’ the familiarity of ‘everyday’ thinking and experience, thereby allowing the possibilities of more meaningful ways of being and doing. The pathway itself is not chronologically and spatially sequential; therefore its nature does not make this thesis amenable to an exclusively linear progressive structure. Instead, it is approached as a developmental and tentative pathway which builds upon an emerging awareness and a different conception of truth (to empirical correctness) as a form of translation or encounter with thought. From a broadly Heideggerian perspective, I introduce the everyday ways modernity diminishes the essential experience of human existence as dwellers of the earth. This involves a forgetting or concealing of the unique experience of Being and the human essence, which restricts the manner of relating to the world and tends to see the things and interconnectedness of the earth, and even ourselves, as mere stockpiles of resources, objects for examination or equipment. The thinking of the “crossing” in Beiträge is then taken up, firstly by an examination of Heidegger’s conception of the primordial experience of nature by pre-Socratic thinkers. Features of the joining moments in the crossing between what Heidegger describes as the ‘beginnings’, are then introduced via the metaphor of the threshold. The threshold is engaged as fundamental to the ongoing journey of ‘coming to be at home’ in the world. I express the indefinable ‘dimensionality’ of the threshold, its features and strata, as a transitional, transitory and transformative region of thinking, where there is an ‘interplay’ between different spheres and dimensions. It is an ‘in-between region’ where there is an ‘overflowing’ of everyday thinking beyond purely calculative, objective postures, to a thinking that is both underway and aware of what is happening to it in its transformation. Venturing the threshold requires a posture of ‘openness’ to the uncertain ground of our being, to the ‘abyss-like beyond’ of the threshold and the manner of its revealing. Seeking the source, that which is originary and emerging, shelters the inner home of human dwelling. The nature of the human being in its essence (a non-metaphysical understanding of what we may call ‘soul’) is one of a wanderer, a seeker of Earth, which is the strange ground of human dwelling. It must always be underway towards where its nature draws it, towards an authentic homeliness and not fleeing from it. Thereby, in this seeking, the wandering soul’s being is fulfilled. Here the ‘awesome’ beholding of nature involves a greater discernment of the essential belonging together of Being and beings and of a kind of truth that is usually hidden in the everyday. In the disposition of the threshold we find hints and possibilities for a more deeply engaged encounter with all beings of the earth, and a less belligerent and self-protective way of being that retrieves and shelters what is most precious in earthly dwelling.

On Home (das Heim) and the Uncanny (das Unheimliche) in Heidegger

PHAINOMENA, 2022

The paper aims to argue that the question of home (das Heim) is one of the crucial elements of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, which has been tackled by the German philosopher throughout his lifework in close connection to its opposition, namely the uncanny (das Unheimliche). The paper discusses the different understandings of home in Heidegger’s philosophy starting from the seminal works, such as Being and Time (1927) and Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), as well as Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” On Home (das Heim) and the (1942) and “Letter on Humanism” (1946) including “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951). In his argumentation on the topic from 1935 onwards, Heidegger developed the question of home within the hermeneutical analysis of Sophocles’s Antigone, specifically the first verse of the famous choral song and the term δεινόν. In the conclusion, the standpoints of Jacques Derrida and David Farrell Krell on the subject are confronted, in order to discuss the paradoxical structure of the topic of home in Heidegger’s philosophy and, more generally, within philosophy of architecture. Keywords: home (das Heim), Martin Heidegger, das Unheimliche, uncanny, Antigone

Work and Play: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on Being-in-the-World

Phenomenology of Perception, each take a notion of being-in-the-world as their fundamental concept of what it means for humans to be. In each case, the character of this structure of being involves an analysis of equipmentality, or the way in which we interact with the kinds of beings we encounter most proximately in the world. However, the two accounts are quite different, both in the starting point for analysis and in the role that each sees equipment playing toward the recognition of the structure our being. For Heidegger, the ontological character of equipment serves as the fundamental in-road to an inquiry of being-in-the-world precisely when it breaks down, leaves us stranded or confounded in our projects, while for Merleau-Ponty, this character of equipment is encountered through the breakdown of the perceptual and motor capacities of the body in patients with brain-damage. That is, Merleau-Ponty thinks equipment shows up for us, not when it fails us, but rather when the body's breakdown diminishes our capacity to encounter it as equipment. In this way, what is taken as most proximate in our experience for Heidegger is only achieved in Merleau-Ponty's writings through the phenomenological construction of an entire body schema into which equipment can be absorbed as an extension. We might, therefore, initially take Merleau-Ponty's account as somehow more fundamental insofar as it seeks a foundation for equipmentality in the structure of bodily comportment-i.e. as that only through which equipmentality is possible as a mode of interaction with beings-as the 'medium' of equipmentality and of

Dwelling-mobility": An existential theory of well-being

International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being, 2010

In this article we offer an existential theory of well-being that is guided by Heidegger's later writings on "homecoming". We approach the question of what it is about the essence of well-being that makes all kinds of well-being possible. Consistent with a phenomenological approach, well-being is both a way of being-in-the-world, as well as a felt sense of what this is like as an experience. Drawing on Heidegger's notion of Gegnet (abiding expanse), we characterise the deepest possibility of existential well-being as "dwelling-mobility". This term indicates both the "adventure" of being called into expansive existential possibilities, as well as "being-at-home-with" what has been given. This deepest possibility of well-being carries with it a feeling of rootedness and flow, peace and possibility. However, we also consider how the separate notions of existential mobility and existential dwelling as discrete emphases can be developed to ...