On the Concept of Home: Part I - Introduction
My friends, do not be alarmed by my lack of updates. I have intentionally avoided writing because the Haiku project was not effective and I was trying to do something different, something that will spark again my criticial faculty as well as help me with my many writing projects at school. Hence here is the solution: I will be presenting another series. This time, the series will be directly related to my presentation for the MURC in the upcoming March. I would like to discuss the concept of "home". My haikus have hinted at this concern, but now I am going to make explicit address to it.
The main inquiry here is this: "Why must we live in our homes?" I posit this question because the idea of "home" is both intimately vague and vaguely intimate. What augments the importance of this question is the fact that we all consciously or unconsciously take "home" for granted, that is to say, it is the starting point in which we approach the structure of our everyday lives. "Home" anchors our sense of space: in a typical day, we begin at home, then we go to work, and finally we come back home. "Home" is the anchor to our daily activities. "Home" also anchors our sense of time: we move away from place A (which was your home) to a new place B, and over time that place B may or may not become home. But the reference to the history of place A anchors our sense of time, grounding the fact that now (after a passage of a certain time) B is home instead of A. "Home" is also the ground of our ethics: it is a place where you know what to do and what not to do. And this is most clear when we go to an entirely different culture - a culture that is not home-like - and we feel at lost when people do things that are different, perhaps even offensive. "Home" grounds our entire being, in space and time, in physics and metaphysics. But there is something strange about this grounding: why must we live grounded lives? Why must we live in our homes? Can't we live unattached to home, like the migrating bird moving seasonally and spending half of its life in the air traveling? I think human behaviours would suggest that we cannot live like migrated birds because even travelling hockey players have homes, even people who does not have a physical house and is actually travelling in an impromptu style will tell you that location X is home. That is why the main question is not "must we live in homes?", but "why must we live in homes?"
If Camus believes that suicide is the most important of all philosophical question, then I believe that the exact opposite - the question of home - is the most important of all philosophical inquiries. But before we launch ourselves in this intellectual wandering - after all, we too are starting from the home of our mind towards a new home - there are several pre-questions which need to be addressed. They are the inquiries of the various assumptions of the question of "home". As an introduction, I will list these questions out.
1. What is home?
2. How do we come to know what "home" is?
3. How does "home" come to know who we are?
4. Upon understanding the many layers of "home", how does it influence our everyday lives?
5. Must we live in our homes?
After we figure out the answers to these pre-questions, we can then legitimately deal with our main question. And after dealing with the main question, our inquiry still beg us to ask one more question: how do we build a home?
As of now, I have very brief ideas to the answer of these questions. However, whatever the answers may be, I am confident that these are the right questions to ask; philosophical discussions, as a general rule, require the right questions, not the right answers. I hope this wandering will bring us back home, but with a firmer understanding of our journey and of our dwelling place.
The main inquiry here is this: "Why must we live in our homes?" I posit this question because the idea of "home" is both intimately vague and vaguely intimate. What augments the importance of this question is the fact that we all consciously or unconsciously take "home" for granted, that is to say, it is the starting point in which we approach the structure of our everyday lives. "Home" anchors our sense of space: in a typical day, we begin at home, then we go to work, and finally we come back home. "Home" is the anchor to our daily activities. "Home" also anchors our sense of time: we move away from place A (which was your home) to a new place B, and over time that place B may or may not become home. But the reference to the history of place A anchors our sense of time, grounding the fact that now (after a passage of a certain time) B is home instead of A. "Home" is also the ground of our ethics: it is a place where you know what to do and what not to do. And this is most clear when we go to an entirely different culture - a culture that is not home-like - and we feel at lost when people do things that are different, perhaps even offensive. "Home" grounds our entire being, in space and time, in physics and metaphysics. But there is something strange about this grounding: why must we live grounded lives? Why must we live in our homes? Can't we live unattached to home, like the migrating bird moving seasonally and spending half of its life in the air traveling? I think human behaviours would suggest that we cannot live like migrated birds because even travelling hockey players have homes, even people who does not have a physical house and is actually travelling in an impromptu style will tell you that location X is home. That is why the main question is not "must we live in homes?", but "why must we live in homes?"
If Camus believes that suicide is the most important of all philosophical question, then I believe that the exact opposite - the question of home - is the most important of all philosophical inquiries. But before we launch ourselves in this intellectual wandering - after all, we too are starting from the home of our mind towards a new home - there are several pre-questions which need to be addressed. They are the inquiries of the various assumptions of the question of "home". As an introduction, I will list these questions out.
1. What is home?
2. How do we come to know what "home" is?
3. How does "home" come to know who we are?
4. Upon understanding the many layers of "home", how does it influence our everyday lives?
5. Must we live in our homes?
After we figure out the answers to these pre-questions, we can then legitimately deal with our main question. And after dealing with the main question, our inquiry still beg us to ask one more question: how do we build a home?
As of now, I have very brief ideas to the answer of these questions. However, whatever the answers may be, I am confident that these are the right questions to ask; philosophical discussions, as a general rule, require the right questions, not the right answers. I hope this wandering will bring us back home, but with a firmer understanding of our journey and of our dwelling place.
posted by Tristan at 11:41 a.m.
1 Comments:
we'll see if they are the right questions.
brent.
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