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.pdfus. The proximity of the Home which seems to reveal, or at least to point to, the particular character of our ontology, and gives a kind of hint at our uniqueness as compared to other living beings, tends to become a difficulty, a hindrance, an obstacle on our way to a careful exploration of the role of Home.
It has long been a familiar observation that what is closest to us and is connected with us does not lend itself easily to analytical consideration. An investigation of the role of something, together with the function and behaviour that this role entails, may be misleading: in the case of the Home, it will actually lead us away from it, as it will impose on us a rigid identification of the Home with some kind of objectness. And it will impose it in an imperative way, in a way that will probably make it impossible for us to avoid this kind of identification.
At the same time, it is noteworthy that a person who is driven by the necessity of moving on and has been engulfed by the space of ‘mobile’ existence is capable of leaving their home, of abandoning it, but not of existing without an image of a Home; such a person is incapable of doing without this image, to the extent of conceding that this image can be embodied in any number of places and environments. Man finds it unbearable to live without the eidos of the Home, he may be sometimes prepared to call a Home whatever comes his way.
Another highly characteristic feature of the Home is the capability of every home to accommodate a variety of things. The Home does just that – it accommodates things and can potentially accommodate anything. But a careful observer cannot fail to see quite clearly that, for a Home to be a Home, rather than degenerate into a mere dwelling, what is ‘accommodated’ must of necessity possess an essential bond with us. If what is accommodated has no internal link to us, we have to give up on our home, and even if we do not actually leave it, it grows increasingly alien to us, and alienated from us.
What has been accommodated must be more than just the content of our life, as it may function, among other things, in the form of a ‘representation’, when we perceive the accommodated: it must be connected with us in an essential way, i.e. it must enable us to penetrate it. In other words, we must enter what has been accommodated, our thought must inhabit it, and dwell in it, as we come to understand the accommodated as a continuation of ourselves. In this case, man and what his home has accommodated are one.
The Home is capable of linking up things that do not seem to have any connection with each other in terms of their origin, although this lack of connection may be no more than a first-glance impression. If we are able to understand and to accept that different things are there in the world in a state of unity, the Home can now be understood as a world. The accommodating power of the Home suggests that it should be treated as a topos of the space and time of the world, and that a special emphasis should be placed on the ability of the Home to collect the world in itself.
An important feature of the Home is connected with its ability to accommodate not only what we are supposed to be, but also what we actually are. A
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home is a home only as long as it accommodates our being, serving as a place where our eventness is formed, whereas what people are supposed to be can equally well be realized outside their home: this happens, among other things, when we leave our home for the social spaces of the Internet. If our home copes with the task of collecting our essence within itself, and does not fail to be our home in this respect, we find it a place to love and enjoy. If it does not, it loses its significance – for us.
Thus, the Home, if it is worth the name, can accommodate both the essence of a person and its representation, or rather one’s notion of one’s life. At the same time, powerful external pressures mean that our understanding of the Home is ever more insistently connected precisely with its representations, with the result that work organized by representation is substituted for our effort of collecting our essence. It would seem that it is precisely this circumstance that directly contributes to the attempt at identifying thinking with the practices of representation, whereby thought is not regarded as it is in itself, i.e. not as the act of connecting man with himself, an act which necessarily involves a risk due to the fact that in the course of going the way to himself man has to rely on the unknown. On the contrary, thinking is nowadays increasingly taken to mean the various ways of man’s cultural and social identification in the context of his attempts at forming representations both of himself and of the others. In this situation, thinking is repressed by the sheer amount of representations and is heavily influenced by them. Representation becomes isolated from thought, with man growing increasingly alienated from himself, and his essence becoming incomprehensible to himself, while, in his ignorance of himself, he is striving to find some form of support in more and more new acts of self-identification.
In this situation of representation being clearly on the offensive, and of man intentionally making himself dependent on representations, the practice of internally collecting oneself assumes paramount importance. It is exceptionally important for us to get into ourselves, to be ourselves and to be within ourselves. It is important to go deep into ourselves. A different dimension in our attitude to the Home, one that develops outside the logic of representation, is connected with our ability to relate to the Home as just that, a home, when we not only consider it with the help of various representations, but also perceive it as our world which enables us to be integral, to be a whole. This vision is connected with a clear expansion of perception and with giving up any definite representation or notion of the Home, and this enables us to detect in our home the presence of something that escapes our notice when we consider it in a strict, and therefore, narrow perspective through identifying it with a concrete objectness and a concrete function.
What matters is the habit of, – or, when we have none, at least an attempt at, – retaining by thought the inner integrity of a thing which does not fall into parts, as thought is cut into parts by the cares engendered by our existence. This is something that not only distorts, but also perverts the essence of thought:
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when one is concerned with entities, or beings (Seiendes), one becomes unable to concentrate on anything but what is given ‘at hand’ (Vorhandenes): what is present is ‘without form’ in this perspective.
What matters is not just that the thingness of the house which is our home is determined before the object. What matters is that, being outside of things, we are doomed to expend the essence – the essence of both ourselves and the world, the essence of every single thing – rather than collect it within ourselves, and in this sense, we are linking ourselves ever more closely with the avoidance of the deep. It might not seem to be all that tragic, but the matter is that we become unable to go back to it – to the deep: there is no turning back, and we intentionally connect ourselves with the surface, becoming one with it.
The essence of the Home is to be understood: the study of its individual components is of little value, for they may be encountered not only outside our own home, but outside people’s homes as such. This is why, if we are to comprehend the essence of the Home, we can only rely on understanding, and this is by no means easy. Nowadays, people seem to be occupied with everything but thought: they are literally occupied, occupied with a variety of things – things which have essentially nothing to do with them, and which they do not understand. We often fail to perceive the accommodating power of the Home, fail to feel the coziness of the whole which our home can give us. It is possible that, proceeding as we do from representation and its decisive impact on our thought, which is in itself, i.e. beyond representation, always connected with a horizon of risk, we cannot expect help – for our thought – from anyone or anything, and that we will never learn what coziness is.
We normally do not feel cozy in the world of our life, and we now seem to be growing accustomed to the uncoziness of our existence, to be getting used to the uncoziness of our home, and therefore, to the uncoziness of the world. Our home, if we mean just that and not something else, is in fact a world. In other words, the coziness of the home is connected with the coziness of the world: one is the continuation of the other. In this context, one might paraphrase Heidegger’s famous words “Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell”1 in the following way: the Home is the language of Being. Through understanding the accommodating power of the Home and through finding our place in it we become reunited with ourselves. The language of the Home is symbolic and, therefore, capable of collecting the plenitude and retaining the integrity of our presence, thereby concentrating within itself the ‘event’ dimension of our life, when all the attendant circumstances are interpreted, and even misinterpreted, in this sense – one which is directly relevant to us. In the language of the Home the facts of life are given a special designation and articulation: they are perceived by those living in such a house precisely as facts of consciousness.
1 Heidegger M. (1967/1998). “Letter on ‘Humanism”; translated by Frank A. Capuzzi, in M. Heidegger, Pathmarks, Cambridge: CUP, p. 239.
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УДК 1:3+141.319.8
ББК 87
V. Rossvær
Nord University
Bodø, Norway
THE BORDER AS HOME
Abstract. In the article, the philosophical-political aspects of the problem of understanding the World as a common Home are analyzed. The principle of supremacy and sovereignty of the state in Plato’s philosophy is associated with the Greek existential experience of the home (oikos) as limited possession. As opposed to this position, the cosmopolitan philosophy of Immanuel Kant is considered. Central to the latter is the figure of the visitor as a person possessing an inalienable right to hospitality anywhere in the world. Kant’s political-philosophical position is associated with the existential experience of viewing the starry sky as Unlimitedness. The Earth can become a common Home for men open to such experiences. Subsidiarity is considered as a political principle for the World understood as a Home.
Key words. Home, World, oikos, cosmopolitism, border, Unlimitedness, visitor, subsidiarity.
В. Россвэр
Северный университет г. Будё, Норвегия
ГРАНИЦА КАК ДОМ
Аннотация. В статье анализируются философско-политические аспекты проблемы понимания Мира как общего Дома. Принцип превосходства и суверенитета государства в философии Платона связывается с греческим экзистенциальным опытом дома (oikos) как ограниченного владения. В противовес этой позиции рассматривается космополитическая философия Им. Канта. В качестве центральной (у Канта) отмечается фигура посетителя как человека, имеющего неотъемлемое право гостеприимства в любой точке Земли. Полити- ко-философская позиция Канта связывается с экзистенциальным опытом рассмотрения звездного неба (космоса) как Безграничного. Земля может стать общим Домом для людей открытых такому опыту. Субсидиарность рассматривается в качестве принципа политической организации для Мира как единого Дома.
Ключевые слова. Дом, Мир, ойкос, космополитизм, граница, безграничное, посетитель, субсидиарность.
1. According to Plato nothing is farther from the home (oikos) than the border of the city state. Even if they are parts of the same whole, the home defines the inside, whereas the border defines the outside of the whole. If we compare the state to an apple, the home is its growing centre, whereas the border is its protective skin. The oikos is the place where you are born and grow up to
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own something, the border is the place where everything you own is threatened and may get lost.
In the Greek city state, the oikos also is defined as a property by its border stones. The life in the city is built over the rule and authority of certain border stones placed between the different properties belonging to different landowners, set down to separate what I own from what my neighbor owns. The border stones are separating my fireplace and my home from my neighbor’s fireplace and home. It is precisely in this context of setting out the stones to separate territories that the problem of the oikos arises as a matter of political sovereignty.
In Plato’s political philosophy, the oikos, as the most elementary level of the state is primarily seen as securing reproduction and survival. Therefore it is something insufficient in itself, and cannot be seen as a source of the absolute sovereignty its inhabitants. The oikos depends for its common meaning and direction upon the sovereignty of the clan. Only the clan, as a higher level, can give mutual strength to the inhabitants by the idea of a common ancestry. At the same time it confirms the idea that a home is something owned.
In addition to the clan there is a third and upmost level of the state. The third level is eudemonia or happiness. It is only here that the true idea of sovereignty comes up. But at the same time the oikos looses its importance as a place where you belong.
Happiness for every Greek means to prove yourself to be of excellence. To be happy means to reach for the highest level of social sovereignty in the state. But sovereignty here is not a culmination of the homely ideals of belonging, instead it shows itself as perfection of independence. The highest form of life within the city-state, too easily transforms for instance personal courage into an individual readiness to go to war to defend the borders of the city state.
2. In Kant’s philosophy of peace the Platonic picture of the importance of the home is radically changed. The key to Kant’s unexpected revision of the idea of ownership to the oikos is the visitor, a figure who at first glance seems to have lost his home. The surprising thing is that Kant’s philosophy of peace, which is basically dependent on integrating all human being in a universal and legal order, could imply having the right for everyone to visit other countries.
The basis for Kant’s revision of Plato’s Republic is his rediscovery of this human right, a right that seems to be in conflict with the Platonic idea of superiority of the state. But the visitor’s right is an illustration of the right of subsidiarity, which was much debated in antiquity. The very principle of subsidiarity originally comes from the Republic II, 369b. There Plato insists that the individual is not self-sufficient, but in need of many others, implying that the community has no rights of its own, but instead serve individuals. The implication of this principle is that the true sovereignty does not come from above, from the political excellence, but from below, contrary to the usual message one can read out of the Republic.
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The principle of subsidiarity may defend the individual against the state. It also seems to have its roots in the home. Therefore is may be of use to defend the right of a visitor, as the dignity of man coming from below not from above.
Kant is the first thinker in modernity who conceives of a cosmopolitan right. Even if the word “cosmopolitan” goes back to the Cynic and Stoic philosophers’ discussion of human rights, the concept of a cosmopolitan right may be seen as a new revival of the platonic principle of subsidiarity.
The cosmopolitan right of the visitor, according to Kant, actually concerns the relation between one single person, a visitor, and a foreign country, and is not rightfully to be subsumed under today’s idea of an international right, a type of right that concerns the relation between states only.
As a being living on the Earth, with the ability to move, man has the unexpected right to visit. The right to visit gives us a picture of cosmopolitan man as a being with cross-border commitments, binding him to others inside the borders of his homeland, but and also to others of other nations, foreign to himself.
As we shall see, by means of this right, the crossing of national borders is for the first time given a productive role in the process towards global peace. It is the beginning of a new idea of home.
The justification of the right of the visitor, according to Kant, lies in the fact that the Earth is round and not flat. The new right means the obligation to try to integrate this fact into one’s worldview. The roundness of the Earth, according to Kant, in itself makes every human being into a potential visitor.
If the Earth had been flat, people could constantly have avoided conflict by moving away from each other. As it is, people are clustered together in complex communities over geological time and are forced to meet each other under dramatic geographical and historical conditions that requires adequate friendly measures. It makes it impossible only to turn one’s backs on one another and run.
The visitor, according to Kant, has a right in a foreign country to knock on the door of the home of a person he does not know. He comes without an invitation, and he comes unannounced. Still, according to Kant the visitor has the right to hospitality.
Even if Kant’s language seems to imply that the visitor is a guest, the visitor is not a guest. Somewhat misleadingly, perhaps, Kant insists on calling the cosmopolitan right a “Besuchsrecht”, the right of a person to go visit like a guest.
The reason that the visitor is not a guest, is that there are, according to
Kant, no precise rules governing the visitor’s meeting with people in the country he is visiting. There is no protocol for a visitor. He comes unannounced and leaves without any formal good-bye. A guest, on the contrary, must behave according to certain conditions of mutual respect and concern that are clear to the invited person before the invitation. If the right of the visitor were a guest’s right, his visit would only relate to a contract defining a permission for a definite project of going to the household he is visiting.
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The basis of the cosmopolitan right, however, is the idea that nobody on earth originally has more right to a certain place than another. The surface of the earth is limited in extension and this limitation confers on every man the right to a friendly reception when entering unannounced on another person’s land. Every piece of land is a part of the surface of the globe. Therefore, as long as the visitor behaves friendly on this sphere, he cannot be treated as an enemy. The right to make a new arrival provides him with protection from those who are already living there.
If we are looking close enough, we see that the visitor is challenging the established concept of home by his behavior. Therefore he is by Kant given no right to physically enter foreign territory. The visitor cannot cross the border unless he is granted permission to do so, and the visitor is often not going far. He is not, as a visitor, automatically admitted into foreign territory. The right of the visitor is coming from the earth he stands on, not from any official permit to cross legitimatized by the tradition of sovereignty. The visitor has the right to hospitality, but for Kant this word means only that everyone has the right to request interaction with other states and their inhabitants, not more, not less. The visitor then, might look like a refugee, or Orthodox monk, or simply as a misfit. Many students, therefore, have been lead to think of the visitor as basically a homeless person, and consequently to regard cosmopolitanism as an individual’s calculated retreat from the feelings and obligations of home and of belonging to a society?
To put students on the right track, Kant’s reference to the Earth’s roundness nevertheless may be hinting that the visitor is looking for a global home because he regards the earth as a cosmic home. The basic dimensions of the visitor’s global world is constituted from below as a shared feeling of subsidiarity loaded into the social setting. The roundness of the Earth, then, provides the visitor with a special togetherness that is politically important and challenging the central sovereignty of the state.
3. The real basis for Kant’s idea of the visitor lies in Kant’s ethical writings. Even more than that, the important political reflection that integrates the visitor into his ethics, represents the culmination of Kant’s reflection of the meaning of the moral law.
Kant is using the argument concerning the roundness of the earth to add a new cosmopolitical dimension to his ethical theory, thereby letting the whole idea of the categorical imperative cuminate as a vision of global peace. The full weight of this moral and juridical context shines through on the last two pages of his Critique of Practical Reason, in the socalled Beschluss, giving the visitor a home on Earth.
In the Beschluss, Kant insists that our feeling of respect for the Unlimited Universe above us reveals a moral attitude of the same kind as the Moral Law itself. The respect for the Unlimited cosmos outside man’s planet Earth, there-
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fore, does not only arise from man’s inner universe and the Moral Law. This respect is due to an independent fact, which extends the “Bewusstsein meiner Existenz”.
The consciousness of my own existence is according to this no longer to be regulated by the sovereignty of the various national states and their borders. Neither by any narrow legalistic interpretation of the Moral Law. The border crossings of the visitor does not behave like a national, but does not need to, he is justified by an ethical imperative where the Unlimitedness of the sky speaks out its moral meaning.
The moral universe of man is enriched in its normative meaning by means of this enormous fact above us in the skies. To understand the full meaning of the moral law you may perceive the Unlimited in the sky above you. If you perceive this fact, the consciousness of one’s own existence is extended in depth and meaning by the outlook on the unlimited sky.
Kant’s fundamental idea here is that the experience of the unlimited space of the Cosmos wakes up man from his dogmatic sleepiness: “Die Verknüpfung darin ich stehe” is extended “ins unabsehlich Grosse mit Welten über Welten”.
The starry Heavens supports and extends the meaning of the Moral Law by revealing the Outer world as something real and Unlimited. To perceive this is like integrating all of mankind on a big border that cannot be crossed at all, but in its unlimitedness passes silently through everybody’s oikos. This is where you belong. The endless cosmic fact defines an area that is simply Unreplaceable for the man’s consciousness of himself as a moral being. It is man’s basic
Home Ground. A person who is looking at the Unlimited sky and may is confronted with a feeling of respect for the unknown Cosmos as an Other, will find a “higher than the national state” confirmation of the feelings of friendship generated in his own oikos. To recognize this experience of the starry heavens as an political responsibility, is to start realizing the perennial peace. generated in his own oikos. To recognize this experience of the starry heavens as an political responsibility, is to start realizing the perennial peace.
4. We can now see that there is a cosmopolitan right that is not limited to the borders of one particular nation. Living on this endless border confirms a field of experience confirming that one actually shares a common right with the rest of the whole mankind.
The effect of Kant’s view is to introduce the experience of the Unlimited Cosmos as the basis for a change of national moral orientation in the relation to foreign states. The bare relations of friendliness, harmony and friendships as qualities generated in the oikos, are becoming extended and redefined as conditions for a new vision of the world as a home.
The visitor replaces the legal idea of sovereignty by the idea of the Unlimited Cosmos as morally Unreplaceable in any consciousness of oneself. What Kant seems to say is this: The four walls of my home with its friendly contacts
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are widened until they are seen as parts of the unlimited Cosmos. This is a new idea of home, constituted by man’s subsidiarity under the stars.
We have now a final definition of the visitor and his new home. It is there for all to see. It depends on the experience of the outer world as morally unreplacable. Everyone may just by oneself take step outside one’s house on a clear Winter day to look at the endlessness of the starry universe to see how nature stamps the passport of the visitor. Giving the visitor a satisfying place to belong.
This awareness of Nature as unlimited is changing the borders of the homely life in the oikos, revealing a dependence on the earth’s roundness as a condition for your moral existence. The experience of unlimitedness defines subsidiarity a new type of sovereignty from below. A form of sovereignty which is felt as growing as a non-dominating fact about your existence, is giving the outer world and planet Earth an new and absolutely unique status as a common center in a friendly universe.
The experience of the actual world’s existence as unreplaceable for man’s existence supports the moral respect for the Others as a binding upon yourself, revealing a deep feeling of respect coming from the below of endless space. It is the licence to knock on your neighbor’s door and the clue to perennial peace.
Such is the experience of the visitor, who finally reaches Home. Only this feeling of cosmic subsidiarity can be the visitor’s final step to realize for himself a nation-transcending cross border cosmopolitan right of visiting.
5. Even if the real unlimited was an absurd conception for the philosophers of antiquity, the border-crossing thrust of Kant’s final argument makes one think, not only of Plato, but also of Aristoteles. Kant’s argument about cosmic respect in the form of a feeling of the outer world as unreplaceable may be inspired by Aristotle’ reminder in The Nicomachian Ethics that friendship is in some ways more basic than justice.
Aristotle sees than friendship is a virtue more basic than the other-related virtue of justice just because it is friendship that holds the city-states together (1155a22-38). He even points out that as a traveler one can notice that everybody belongs with, and is a friend of every other (1155a4-6). It is, therefore, not only the Stoics who by virtue of the conception of oikeiosis gives to friendship some political importance.
The Stoic and Aristotelian idea of friendship as having a political meaning and importance is represents a positive view of the meeting of states and civilizations. The idea that friendship is a condition for justice between states is indeed supporting subsidiarity, not sovereignty as the basic condition for the make-up of any just state.
Due to this recognition of the other, man is giving himself the right to go anywhere. He is on his own home ground even if he enters into a foreign coun-
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try, and the other has established access to the visitor’s home, before they even meet in the excellence producing space of the agora.
The crossing of the borders of a city-state may realize another form of kingly dignity, an unlimited respect for the other that strengthens the importance of the common cosmic oikos.
Kant’s version in the Beschluss that the experience of the world as unlimited is bringing in a new way of seeing the fulfilment of our Civilization, is sending us across borders into another countries as visitors. Even if the precise nature of this right is not elaborated by Kant, it is nourished by the idea that all men have to work it out for themselves what it means to be living a global village, situated in endless space.
6. To put it short, the experience of the visitor is the discovery of a moral meaning that confirms man’s right to live on both sides of national borderlines.
Living on the round Earth, man self-respect is grounded in the experience of the Unlimited as a right to transcend national borders and in a right to visit.
Kant’s praise for Plato is revealed in his description of Plato as the philosopher who first introduced the concept of ideas, which is a potential for seeing something unlimited, not be found in the sensuous world of ours. The forceful intellectual conception of the sovereignty of the eternal forms oversteered Plato’s philosophical sensibilities.
Still, the real unlimited is just the dimension Plato overlooks in the state. Like him, also the Stoic opposition also lacked the concept of the real as unlimited.
Kant’s revision of Plato’s Republic concerning the oikos, therefore is based on a basic existential experience that the Greeks philosophers did not know, namely the experience of a real Unlimited. Kant’s political philosophy is based on linking this experience of man’s sense of his own existence to his commitment for people other than himself.
Kant is the first philosopher who takes steps to integrate the experience of the unlimited in our attitude to our neighbors, thereby also denying our protective sense of Home as something that can be owned. Only by means of the unlimited can man get a hold on his true homeplace that is prior to and does not get organized through superiority and the excellence of the leaders of your own particular state.
Kant, therefore, starts a full revision of the Greek city by taking the experience of the real unlimited Cosmos into the household. It is decisive that in the Beschluss of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant, as we saw, insists that the experience of where my soul belongs, is reaching wider and greater that the principle of sovereignty of the city state. The consciousness defining my existence cannot be organized by the sovereignty of kings, but reveals a cosmic order of unreplaceable subsidiarity. This means that man’s home is wider than the oikos.
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