Concluding Building Dwelling Thinking, Heidegger presents the Black Forest Farmhouse as an example of genuine dwelling. The attachment to the ground as homeliness is represented by this structure of a past era that exists within and sustains the fourfold at the same time.
“Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the "tree of the
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dead"—for that is what they call a coffin there: the Totenbaum—and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time. A craft which, itself sprung from dwellling, still uses its tools and frames as things, built the farmhouse.” (Heidegger, 1951, p.158)
The farmhouse represents for Heidegger the authentic being-in-the-world as it gathers under its roof all different needs, activities, and generations. It allows the earth and the sky, the mortals and the divinities to define its functions and coexist in harmony as a dynamic whole. And reversely, through the self-sufficiency and the economy of this building, the fourfold is accomplished. The farmhouse example may seem far removed from the contemporary world – and it was already outdated when it was presented in Post-war Germany – but it designates Heidegger’s ideas on genuine dwelling. Heidegger argues that “not every building is a dwelling” (Heidegger, 1951, p.143), distinguishing dwelling from merely finding shelter in a structure. To dwell means to remain in close connection with the earth and situated on it. Thus the earth becomes the point of departure and the common place for everybody. To Heidegger, the house emerges from the ground and becomes a physical manifestation of all the
different activities that occur within it, and hence it constitutes place. Therefore dwelling signifies remaining, staying in place.
Heidegger resorts to Old English and High German to explain how dwelling and building are related. According to this, “to build” is said to be “to dwell”, and in turn,
“to dwell” traces its origin on the verb “to be”. Therefore “the way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling” (Heidegger, 1951, p.145). Then dwelling becomes the basic characteristic of human being.
Heidegger insists that it is not buildings that invite us to dwell, but instead, “we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers” (Heidegger, 1951, p.146). If building is dwelling and dwelling is being on the earth, then building as dwelling means both cultivating the earth and constructing on it. And if being on the earth means staying within the fourfold, then dwelling as being means sparing and preserving, remaining at peace on the earth and safeguarding it. Then the connection to the ground as emplacement and as authentic being-in-the-world is fundamental to Heidegger. The earth becomes the home of people and a presupposition for genuine dwelling. The ideal home is here well-anchored on the ground, specific and unmovable, mediating between the earth and the sky, first ensuring a sense of belonging and then
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opening up to spirituality. The ground is significant in its pragmatic sense; through its physicality it provides the foundation of human being, and determines the conditions of human life. It situates humans in its materiality and it creates this sort of place that constitutes a centre of meaning and grants people a sense of attachment and rootedness.
Juxtaposed to the stable ground of Heidegger’s Black Forest Farmhouse, Gaston Bachelard approaches authentic dwelling in an “oneiric house”, a house between dreams and memory, reality and imagination. Bachelard traces emplacement and the
conceptualisation of the “ideal home” to the poetic image within the human psyche.
What is important here is not how homeliness is contained within the human being, but instead, its projections on the soul and consequently on the self. The soul is considered as a placial receptacle of poetic images (Casey, 1998, p.289). Imagination thus plays an important role to human nature, as it separates us from the past and from reality: “to the function of reality, wise in experience of the past, as it is defined by traditional
psychology, should be added a function of unreality, which is equally positive... Any weakness in the function of unreality, will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee.” (Bachelard, 1958, p.xxxiv) The function of the real and the function of the unreal collaborating augment and complete the actual experience.
Bachelard names his method topoanalysis, “the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives” (Bachelard, 1958, p.8), through which he attempts to locate and identify memories and poetic imageries. He argues that in the past constituted by memories, the localisation of memories in space is more important than time, as time can be absorbed in imaginary spatiality.
According to Bachelard, the memories of the house that we were born primarily, together with the memories of other houses that we have lived in, constitute a mental background imagery that will always be projected in the future, to outline the idea of our dream house. “Over and beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits... The house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting. We are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house, and all the other houses are but variations on a fundamental theme” (Bachelard, 1958, pp.14-5). We inhabit this house in our memories and we enhance it with dream values. The oneiric house
becomes a concentration of thoughts, memories, and dreams, and this psychic imagery determines the modes of our habitation in real life. And there is always one for
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everyone, hidden behind the real past. To Bachelard this dream house has an intense verticality, a cellar and an attic, to give space to the different aspects of the imagination.
The cellar, dug deep into the earth, “the dark entity of the house” (Bachelard, 1958, p.18) represents the place of the unconscious and the irrationality of the human being and everything that needs to be concealed in the human soul. Oppositely, the attic is the place of the intellect, where “the fears are easily ‘rationalised’” (Bachelard, 1958, p.19), seen under the light of the day and confronted. The up-down opposition in the oneiric house mediates between the verticality of the human being and the earth-sky dimension. Thus this dream house becomes the “first universe” (Bachelard, 1958, p.4), framing the way people conceive the world.
In Bachelard’s thinking, imaginary place may be conceptual and immaterial, but it is also highly structured instead of abstract: “imaginary space, far from being arbitrary or chaotic, is consistent, specific, and finely wrought” (Casey, 1998, p.292). Topoanalysis suggests a well articulated material imagination that enables anything substantial – in reality or in virtuality – to come forth: “the sheltered being gives perceptible limits to its shelter. He experiences the house in its reality and its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams.” (Bachelard, 1958, p.5) Then while Heidegger sees the world as the place where mortals dwell, Bachelard resorts to virtuality and imagination. Here the poetic image and the memory situated in the psyche come to represent the world, therefore the authentic place itself rests first and foremost inside the human soul. These psychic images, function as places that determine everyday experience and being-in-the-world.
The juxtaposition of Bachelard’s oneiric home to Heidegger’s genuine dwelling is here to point out that virtuality and imagination – that may equally derive from pragmatic spaces of the past or from fantastic ones – can shape the concept of a place and a home, similarly to materiality and groundedness. Homeliness and placeness can be found in nonsensible items too, due to the ability of the human soul to “store” and “retrieve”
such spatialities. Ages before the conception of cyberspace and the emergence of Virtual Reality that initiated the attachment to virtual environments, Bachelard suggests that nonphysical and conceptual space can still count as place (Casey, 1998, p.288), as long as it contains a powerful phantasmatic/virtual background. Then the reason why we are attached to the ground may not be its heaviness and the physical law of gravity itself, but instead some sort of an immaterial support in the form of emotional
connections, memories and poetic images.
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