Coming home may not be what we like to know about things.
Coming home is an idea that can bring up a mixture of feelings. While often we see in modern philosophy a love to inhabit a sort of pure world of thinking, the well-known and impactful philosophers, the ones who remain through history, were not merely intellectual thought-crunchers. They were people who were deeply connected to what is, or at least as best they could be, and involved in the attempt to communicate this truth.
One such deep philosopher was Martin Heidegger, and he loved the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. For them, home was a powerful metaphor for the modern condition.
In the mid-to-late 20th century art forms, many artists expressed a longing to return home; indeed, so often we hear love songs to lost lovers or attitudes about how a person need to let go because thewy have things to do. Buried within this popular fashion is the modern theme of Will and longing to return home (return to love). We might even think of the coolthemes of being tough and having an attitude as the modern rejection of home, or even the creating of home in a alien world. When I think of it this way, It makes me less baffled by all the strife, hatred, and wars that go on.
For those who were perhaps more deeply engaged in the modern condition, home isn’t a safe place you simply return to. In the modern world, humans are essentially homeless—cut off from the gods, from meaning, from origin. Yet we still belong to what we’ve lost. That tension is everything. We could even say this is a reason why in the last 50 years or so the social concern and the sense of community has become an ideological call.
The return of modern philosophy puts us in a bind of knowing things
“We cannot even know that we ourselves exist, since all we find when we look within is a bundle of sensations” – a paraphrasing David Hume…
“I could not have the experience of choosing freely if I were only the empirical organism I appear to be. It is only because I belong in the noumenal world outside of space and time that I can live my life according to moral principles.” – and then Immanuel Kant, from John Gray’s book Straw Dogs.
The issue of modernity has a deep history. In the Western philosophical world, this issue is often understood to have come to a head between Hume and Kant, and Kant is the one who many philosophers point and reference for nearly every sort of philosophical consideration that arises in contemporary life.
Kant placed everything into the realm of what one says about things and what one can justify about them. That’s it.
Now you know whenever you think anything and go about trying to convince someone, you are being Kantian. when you have an opinion on things, you are being Kantian. In fact, there is no argument that one can make that does not conform Kantian metaphysics, and I even go so far as to say because of this, he established the manner of Being in the modern world for a certain kind of knowing.
The attempt to unbind us: Speculative Realism.
I believe it was on 2008 a few unknown philosophers where called the University of London for a conference that was titled “Speculative Realism”.
They were:
Quentin Meillassoux
Ray Brassier
Graham Harman
Iain Hamilton Grant
These philosophers seemed to be taking about something that was new for the time: objects. Things that exists despite what we humans think of them.
If I can be so bold to restate their general point, which each had come to in their own way, was that the general school of thought that had pervaded the discipline of philosophy for the last 200 years which that identified as phenomenalism, the school of thought started by Kant, was at its end. Phenomenalism is the school of thought that everything arises to thought, and that humans cannot know things in themselves, that we only assert and justify our own models of things, but are never getting to the object itself. We are always only talking about subjects.
From Analytical or Continental, to Correlational or Real.
Since then, philosophy and the critical world at large, has decided not to worry about the issue they brought up. Instead, it appears that it was more a wake up call; I would say that to this day we are still dealing with that thump on the head.
Some could even say that the reason why we have our polemical political climate is due to the reaction against that call of the Speculative Realists. This would be due to the fact that it creates a very sticky condition for knowing knowledge. The reaction is either double down on what one believes, or realize that what one believes is not really what is the case.
These are the only two options. And we can see how politics is reflecting these reactions — most often by doubling down on ethical assertions.
It really is as though we can’t (Kant) help ourselves. Lol.
Oh! The irony !
Coming home to the The Truth of Reality and the Reality of Truth
The word truth is such a hot bed of contention, I think in the last 10-15 years, we have learned to recoil from it. We think of right-wing ideological demands, Left-wing reactionary extremism, political manipulation, failures of communication, and obstinacy.
And we live in fear because of the reality of truth.
But I think we need not be afraid of the word when we come across the truth of reality. If we understand a difference embedded in the word, how we encounter it it is very similar to the what philosophy is concerned with.
It is similar to the word home.
For some people, home is no place they would even like to return to, but it is a place they would like to get to, to create for themselves.
For others, it brings up mixed feelings of love and nostalgia. Coming home is a kind of security, but also a kind of longing sadness of life, of growth, letting go of the past and yet being in it with others.
And many in between.
Over all, while the modern world is indeed a place of alienation, of having to be and do things that constantly challenge who I am and who I want to be, the truth of it can be said to be that which I carry with me, the home that is me in the world.
This can be a daunting discovery. For sure. And many resist it.
And that’s ok.
It is the home in which you reside to live this life.
If we don’t care, then we might be more comfortable finding ourselves at home in being at odds with things. Truth can thus remain merely some idea, definitional situation, one of imposition and involved with power plays.
Nonetheless, if that is the case, then it is true.
Then, if we do care about what is happening, reality becomes that place where words are imbued with a sense of “supposed to”, as though some God has made it so.
Either way. Is ok.
But what are you looking for?
What do you want?
One response to “Coming home”
I am rephrasing what you have written to see if I understand what you are saying:
“Home” is a place of (state of) primary connection. “Not at home” is a place of (state of) alienation.
Perhaps coming home is the acknowledgment of what is true, or, as the counselor might say, it is knowing our experience. If I can know my experience, I am connected to the truth of it.
While I may or may not like the truth of it, nonetheless, by right of being conscious of my truth of my experience, I am not alienated from myself, but am at home with myself, wherever I may be in the world.