Skip to main content
Log in

A developed nature: a phenomenological account of the experience of home

  • Published:
Continental Philosophy Review Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Though “dwelling” is more commonly associated with Heidegger’s philosophy than with that of Merleau-Ponty, “being-at-home” is in fact integral to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. I consider the notion of home as it relates to Merleau-Ponty’s more familiar notions of the “lived body” and the “level,” and, in particular, I consider how the unique intertwining of activity and passivity that characterizes our being-at-home is essential to our nature as free beings. I argue that while being-at-home is essentially an experience of passivity—i.e., one that rests in the background of our experience and provides a support and structure for our life that goes largely unnoticed and that is significantly beyond our “conscious” control—being-at-home is also a way of being to which we attain. This analysis of home reveals important psychological insights into the nature of our freedom as well as into the nature of the development of our adult ways of coping and behaving.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. The limit to this would occur in a person who never has the experience of feeling at home. Such a situation would amount to a complete lack of worldly “connection” and of worldly functionality, and would, one might argue, be the situation of persons who have been diagnosed as “insane.”

  2. It is important to note here that what is “alien” for some is “our own” for another. For example, it is the case that for some people to be most “at home” involves interacting extensively with “unfamiliar” others—such is perhaps the case with a corner store owner, a traveling sales person, or those living on a kibbutzim. For an extensive literature review of conceptions of the home and related ideas, see the chapter “Home: A Landscape of the Heart” in Porteous and Smith’s (2001) Domicide. In her article “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature,” Mallett also provides an interdisciplinary review of analyses and ideas about home. In my following discussion of home, I attempt to provide an analysis of the human experience of home. I acknowledge, however, that the shape of people’s homes (both privately and culturally) have different forms—many of which pointedly lack the typical sense we may have of “comfort,” “security,” and “stability.” For instance, many people are literally “homeless,” and some are nomads; for some, the home is a place of abuse and rejection; in some cases, homes include multiple generations of a family or may be made up of many people unrelated by blood, but instead by occupation, while in other cases, a home may belong to just one person; the home in some cultures and families is a place with strictly defined roles (both customarily and legally based roles), and in others is a place of largely undefined or perhaps changing roles; and so forth. The wide range of these possible “expressions” of home may seem to imply that something constant or consistent cannot be said about the experience of home, but I wish to challenge this notion at some level. While I by no means wish to say that we all have or have had an unproblematic experience of being-at-home or that we would define the particular character of our homes in the same way, I do wish to maintain that there is a fundamental human experience of home that, although it may find different expressions, is a human experience. For support for this position, see Porteous and Smith’s cross-cultural and situationally-diverse review of research into the experience of home, and especially their conclusion on pp. 61–63 of Domicide. Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein as a dwelling being is, of course, making a related philosophical claim; see especially Heidegger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” See too Steinbock’s Home and Beyond for a philosophical argument on this point, especially Chapter 13 (1995, pp. 220–235).

  3. In a place of work, we may have a private office, but it is typically a place for engagement with others, a place where we expect others to enter or at least to have the right to enter. The office is a place of exchange, a place where the outside world expects to find and deal with you.

  4. Casey (1993, p. 268).

  5. Though the house in this sculpture continues by means of its opacity to conceal its imagined dwellers from our view, the sculpture also suggests an experience of violation as well as of discomfort, as if the original walls of the house both served to deflect the attention of others that the sculpture pointedly invites, and also, in spite of their rigidity, offered a certain comfort and identification for the house’s inhabitants that the uniform concrete of the sculpture defies. This feeling is magnified by the sculpture’s physical location in an otherwise commonplace London neighborhood; the houses around the piece are suddenly brought to the viewer’s attention and, thereby, lose some of their outward-deflecting character. The houses of the neighborhood take on a certain vulnerability in the face of this artwork. This sense is arguably further amplified by Whiteread’s original (and fulfilled) plan to destroy the sculpture after a mere three months. This planned destruction reminds us that there is in fact a tenuous character—that is, a developed and, therefore, contingent character—to the privacy, security, and comfort that our home experience allows us to feel as so unshakeable. Whatever specific interpretation one makes of Whiteread’s sculpture, there is no doubt that the sculpture forces one to question the nature of being-at-home, and does so by removing the “shell” of a house—that which many may most readily identify as securing our experience of home, but that, as Whiteread’s sculpture and our present analysis suggest, is far from being the only constitutive element of home (2001).

  6. This is one of the most important reasons why the impoverished dwelling spots of “homeless” people or those living in troubled domestic situations of some people are problems: Freedom from invasion cannot be wholly relied upon here.

  7. For Bachelard, this ability to daydream in the safe haven of the home is not simply a mark of the home’s ultimate sheltering character. Daydreaming, he argues, is along with thought and experience one of the activities that “sanction human values” (1964, p. 6). He observes that daydreaming is an activity unique to the human being, and that in the daydream, we are able to feel what thought and analysis so often cover over. For Bachelard, then, daydreaming is an essential part to a phenomenological investigation (1964, pp. 3–8).

  8. This is not true of any of our engagements in public places. Even if there are places that we think of as “ours”—e.g., a favorite park bench, a chair in a music club, a vacation spot—these are places that we cannot reserve as our own, or expect to be our own. Someone else may be using the bench when we arrive at the park; a “full house” may mean that we have to stand for the night when we go to the club; we may have to make reservations far in advance even to gain access to “our” cherished vacation spot. Even if we can “secure” our place in these destinations, we are not free to do as we wish in them. We must abide by the customs and regulations that these environments give to us, and that we may even give to ourselves according to what we think is proper public behavior. In either case, we are regulated by our surroundings in these situations in a way that we need not be in the home. This is not principally true when we are in our public “homes”; here, the demands of others are upon us.

  9. Many concur with this point. Russon, for instance, writes in Human Experience: “We are embodied. It is our living body which is the dynamic process of our establishing contact with the world. It is in this process, through this process, and as this process that both what the world is and who we are come into being for us” (2003, p. 293). Barral agrees: “Man’s body is precisely the condition for his relations to the world and to others, because, as an incarnate spirit, man reveals himself through his bodily being” (1969, p. 171); and regarding our ability to experience space, she writes: “Again, it is because of the body that man can speak of space at all. … It is always through the body that I make contacts, either with the world and things in the world or with other subjects in the world” (1969, p. 175). See also “Part II: The Body in Place” in Casey’s Getting Back Into Place for an extended discussion of the body’s “intimate interinvolvement” in direction and dimension.

  10. Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 340).

  11. See Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of our body as allowing for a world in the Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 101, 146, and 320.

  12. See Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the body’s relevance to the figure-background structure of perception in the Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 101, 102.

  13. Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 101).

  14. Tuan makes a similar point by noting the trauma that would occur if a house were taken away from us: “To be forcibly evicted from one’s home and neighborhood is to be stripped of a sheathing, which in its familiarity protects the human being from the bewilderments of the outside world” (1974, p. 99).

  15. The crack in Matta-Clark’s sculpture not only makes a precarious gap in the floors of the house, it also admits the outside weather and views into the house. Moreover, unlike a door or a window, the crack cannot be closed or covered; it allows no say in what enters or, for that matter, what leaves the home (in a gust of wind or beam of light, for instance) (1974).

  16. Leder (1990, p. 34).

  17. To the end of stimulating this self-expression, Hundertwasser established window rights—i.e., “…the freedom for the resident to recreate the prefabricated space of the apartment he is to live in” (1997, p. 258). Hundertwasser stipulated in his building contracts that those occupying offices or apartments in his constructions must have the right to alter anything on the exterior of the building within arm’s reach of the window casements. Hundertwasser’s acknowledgment of the window and the outside of the house as a visible skin of the human skin—and one that we should attend to by means of personal “decoration”—makes yet another connection between the home and the body—namely, an aesthetic connection. Just as we spend time on (or sometimes neglect) the appearance of our bodies, so too do we do things to make our houses outwardly attractive to us and, we often hope, to others. One could also argue that our acts of cleaning mimic exercising, just as fixing a broken pipe is like mending a bone, throwing the trash out like excreting bodily wastes, rearranging or replacing the furniture like trying new clothes, and so forth.

  18. Heidegger supports this claim in “Building Dwelling Thinking”: “The real plight of dwelling [far from being a shortage of houses] lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell” (1971, p. 161). Heidegger examines the nature of this dwelling in this essay, and argues that there is no guarantee that we will come to know how to dwell.

  19. Again, while various descriptions will follow that most immediately relate to an explicit house-based experience of home, my argument should be read as including childhood experiences of home in which no fixed structure existed, in which change was more prevalent than any overt sense of stability, in which persons beyond immediate blood relatives were regular presences, and so forth. Though such homes may seem more irregular or even chaotic compared to a private household, they are nonetheless the ways of finding a place in the world that become familiar, become home, for these children.

  20. Marcus writes of this point: “If our dwellings in adulthood are those settings where we are most at liberty to be ourselves, where we don’t have to put up any facades, then this process clearly begins in childhood” (1995, p. 26).

  21. Heidegger writes of the importance of a home that is built to reflect all of the stages of the human life—from birth to death—by including spaces both for the child’s crib and the coffin as well as the areas for daily adult activity. Such a home teaches or reminds us explicitly or subconsciously of the expanse and breadth of the human life. See the closing passages of his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1971, esp. p. 160).

  22. Rasmussen emphasizes that “places for children” are different than “children’s places”—the former being places that adults have created and designated for children, while the latter are places that children themselves create and maintain, and that may or may not be recognizable to adults. “Children’s places” are elemental in children’s daily lives, according to Rasmussen; these places offer children a “break from” adult places, and are often the places in which children’s most active and intense playing takes place (2004, pp. 161, 162, 166, 169, 170).

  23. See Winnicott’s chapter “Why Children Play” in his book The Child, the Family, and the Outside World for a general discussion of the role of play in childhood development. His chapter “First Experiments in Independence” in the same book also provides a helpful and related discussion of the character of the initial ventures of children acting and experiencing the world on their own (1992).

  24. In The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, Cobb (1977) confirms that the “dramatis personae” of the child’s personal play are most immediately herself and her parents, and next in importance any siblings she may have, and so on (p. 30).

  25. Porteous and Smith quote an environmental psychologist who argues that our childhood homes “…put a permanent imprint on our neurological abilities: ‘You think it only translates into preferences, but it actually affects our nerves’” (2001, p. 47).

  26. Marcus also supports this claim that our original home experience informs our future ways of living, writing: “Either we mirror what we saw and experienced in our childhood home, or we react strongly against it” (1995, p. 82). Her book House as a Mirror of Self presents numerous case studies of the relationship between persons’ past and present homes. And, Bollas at least indirectly supports the point when he writes: “The body memory conveys memories of our earliest existence” (1987).

  27. Steinbock (1995, pp. 232, 233).

  28. Tuan offers helpful examples of perceptual potentialities that we may or may not have depending on the culture and environment in which we live and were raised (1974, pp. 75–79).

  29. Blunt discusses research on traditional courtyard houses or “haveli” in Jaipur, India, which are created according to principles of “Vastu Vidya,” which dictate the proper orientation of the architectural layout of a home and also the appropriate activities for each part of the home (2005, p. 208). According to one researcher, Vastu Vidya directly connects the home and the body: “Vastu symbolically and functionally connects the body of the individual with the spaces of the home and the cosmological context” (Blunt 2005, p. 208). Feng shui is another example of a practice of aligning the home according to principles that in some ways attend to the body. A possible criticism of these practices arises from their externally-given dictates as to what makes a successful home. As my argument already suggests, the home, while having certain “elemental features,” is also importantly a developmental and personal construction—a construction that cannot be simply given to us or locked into place if it is to function fully as our home. While home-making principles or guidelines need not infringe upon our development of a home, they certainly can do so insofar as they can settle things in advance that may otherwise have been sites of an important development of the self, of one’s relations to others within the home, of one’s relations to the world beyond the home and others beyond the home, etc.

  30. For a focused discussion of spatial levels by Merleau-Ponty, see pp. 244–251 of Phenomenology of Perception.

  31. For Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of this and related experiments, see PhP, pp. 244–251. David Morris offers a thorough and complementary analysis of a number of experiments on orientation in his chapter “Residing Up and Down On Earth” in The Sense of Space (2004).

  32. Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 250).

  33. Hull (1997, p. 177).

  34. Informed by a psychoanalytic perspective, Bollas argues for a similar point: “The way in which we position ourselves in space and in time may partly reflect how we were originally situated spatially and temporally in relation to our parents” (1987, p. 45).

  35. See especially pp. 61–74 of Russon’s chapter “Others” in Human Experience for his discussion of familial narratives and their tension with “external” social narratives. Russon emphasizes that family narratives can be and often are produced in situations that do not resemble the stereotypical Western nuclear family; family narratives are equally present within situations of adoption, of shared parenting, of caretaking, and so forth (2003, see especially pp. 62, 63 on this point).

  36. Referring to the work of Ahmed on what it is like to be at home, Mallett writes: “Being at home involves the ‘immersion of a self in a locality’. The locality ‘intrudes’ upon the self through the senses, defining ‘what one smells, hears, touches, feels, remembers’. Equally the self penetrates the locality” (2004 p. 79). According to Mallett, Ahmed is particularly interested in ways in which this experience of being at home can occur in situations when a person is traveling or when the home is changing by means of ongoing new encounters with others—i.e., in situations when there is not a secure or stable “objective” home (2004, pp. 78, 79). Home can, in other words, encompass both movement and strangers, and still have a sense of familiarity (Mallett 2004, p. 78). We can say something similar about our bodies. Our bodies can experience new movements—e.g., “internal” changes and feelings that may come with illness or growth, or “external” activities or sensations that may come with trying out a new form of motion such as dancing or being exposed to something anew such as snow if one is coming from a tropical environment—and yet in the face of these new experiences, we can still feel a certain basic “at-homeness” in our bodies. Of course, sometimes these experiences—whether of the home or the body—can be so extreme that we can feel ejected from our homes, our bodies.

  37. See Marcus’s discussion of adults’ and children’s reliance on objects in helping us feel at home (1995, pp. 72–76, 81–87).

  38. The ease of air travel and the proliferation of chain stores make this transference all the more easy. As a result, we can miss seeing and approaching the people, the sights, and other features that do not fit into our established interests. Traveling with other people or with guides may help to draw us into new ways of approaching a city or place; but it is possible that we will have chosen these companions for their similarity to us and for the comfort we find in the way that these like minded persons are able to offer us a shared way of seeing, moving about, and of creating a certain space. If this is so, these other viewpoints will only magnify the way we tend to see things.

  39. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the “habit body” makes a similar point; see esp. pp. 82–85, 144–147 in the Phenomenology of Perception. Supporting Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the passive or background character of the body and, by extension, of the home, both Gallagher (“Lived body and Environment”, 1986) and Leder (The Absent Body) emphasize the importance of the absence of the body and the home in our daily activities. Gallagher writes:

    When the lived body is ‘in tune’ with the environment, when events are ordered smoothly, when the body is engaged in a task that holds the attention of consciousness, then the body remains in a mute and shadowy existence and is lived through in a non-conscious experience (“Lived Body and Environment,” 1986, p. 152).

    Leder extends this point to our home, observing that, as with the body, “… the experience of one’s own home will be marked by corporeal effacement. As I gaze through the windows, they are in focal disappearance, the means from which I look upon the world” (1990, pp. 34, 35).

  40. Merleau-Ponty (1962, pp. 83, 84).

  41. We see such a description of home in Merleau-Ponty’s description of how we are fundamentally related to the location of our home:

    For primitive man, knowing the whereabouts of the tribal encampment does not consist in locating it in relation to some object serving as a landmark: for it is the landmark of all landmarks—it is to tend towards it as toward the natural abode of a certain peace or a certain joyfulness, just as, for me, to know where my hand is to link up with that agile power which for the moment is dormant, but which I can take up and rediscover as my own (Phenomenology of Perception (PhP), 1962, p. 285).

    A further relevant example can be found in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the changed life world or home of the phantom limb sufferer:

    It is precisely when my customary world arouses in me habitual intentions, that I can no longer, if I have lost a limb, be effectively drawn into it, and the utilizable objects, precisely in so far as they present themselves as utilizable, appeal to a hand I no longer have. Thus are delimited, in the totality of my body, regions of silence (PhP, p. 82, my emphasis).

  42. This alignment of the body and home can be disturbed in many ways, of course. Objects can be out of place or new objects can be introduced into the home; fatigue, illness, or intoxication can offset our perspective in otherwise familiar surroundings; new additions can take “getting used to,” and so forth. Similarly, our bodies can become sore, injured, or “out of joint,” making us experience our bodies as awkward or temporarily unmanageable. In these cases of temporary disjunction with our home or body, the possibilities for acting that are usually open to us through our body or home are somehow hindered, and attention is thereby drawn to our body or home. We must work on the body or our way of being-at-home to return them to their unnoticed state, to their state of being powers in which we are engaged rather than of being objects that we notice. Or, in some cases, we must simply let them return to this state—say, in the instance, of letting a stomach flu work its way out of our body, or letting the after effects of a broken water pipe evaporate from carpeting. Even in these cases, we can, of course, play a hand in aiding or hindering these returns to “normalcy.”

  43. Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 166, first emphasis my own).

References

  • Bachelard, G. 1964. The poetics of space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.

  • Barral, M.R. 1969. Merleau-Ponty on the body. Southern Journal of Philosophy 7 (2): 171–179.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blunt, A. 2005. Cultural geography: Cultural geographies of home. Progress in Human Geography 29 (4): 505–515.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bollas, C. 1987. The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Casey, E.S. 1993. Getting back into place: Toward a renewed understanding of the place-world. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cobb, E. 1977. The ecology of imagination in childhood. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher, S. 1986. Lived body and environment. Research in Phenomenology 16: 139–170.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heidegger, M. 1971. Building dwelling thinking. In Poetry, language, thought, trans. A. Hofstadter, 145–161. New York: Perennial Library.

  • Hull, J.M. 1997. On sight and insight: A journey into the world of blindness. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hundertwasser, F. 1997. In Hundertwasser architecture: For a more humane architecture in harmony with nature, ed. Angelika Taschen. Köln, Germany: Benedikt Taschen Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leder, D. 1990. The absent body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mallett, S. 2004. Understanding home: A critical review of the literature. Sociological Review 52 (1): 62–89.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marcus, C.C. 1995. House as a mirror of self: Exploring the deeper meaning of home. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Matta-Clark, G. 1974. Splitting (in process). In Object to be destroyed: The work of Gordon Matta-Clark, ed. P. Lee, 19–20, 2000. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  • Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of perception. Trans. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.

  • Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. The philosopher and his shadow. In Signs, trans. R.C. McCleary, 159–181. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

  • Morris, David. 2004. The sense of space. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Porteous, J.D., and S.E. Smith. 2001. Domicide: The global destruction of home. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rasmussen, K. 2004. Places for children—Children’s places. Childhood 11 (2): 155–173.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Russon, John. 2003. Human experience: Philosophy, neurosis, and the elements of everyday life. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Steinbock, A.J. 1995. Home and beyond: Generative phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tuan, Y.-F. 1974. Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Inc.

    Google Scholar 

  • Whiteread, Rachel. 2001. House. In Rachel Whiteread, ed. L.G. Corrin, P. Elliott, and A. Schliecker, 16. London: Trustees for the National Galleries of Scotland with the Serpentine Gallery.

  • Winnicott, D.W. 1992. The child, the family, and the outside world. New York: De Capo Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kirsten Jacobson.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Jacobson, K. A developed nature: a phenomenological account of the experience of home. Cont Philos Rev 42, 355–373 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-009-9113-1

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-009-9113-1

Keywords

Navigation