IEP 405: Phenomenology and Environment

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 4. Heidegger and Place

HEIDEGGER AND PLACE

Heidegger’s writing, and the essay we have read in particular, have been hugely influential in the discourse that has arisen around the idea of place. What is attributed to him is really identifying the relationship we have with place in such a way that we can identify what the difference is between the kind of environments where we engage in true dwelling (the language of the authentic vs the inauthentic is used) and the kind of placeless spaces that deny the kind of living that is appropriate for humans. We are going to get back to this idea and some of the place literature in block 5 but for now it is worth thinking about whether what you have read can give any clear guidance with regard to, for example, design decisions?

Exercise
You realise that your garden needs a shed in order for you to properly care for the garden and indeed your house. Obviously you will want to look at some practical guides with regard to this and take advice from experts – carpenters, manufacturers, but does the idea of the fourfold add anything?

I would love to see some answers to this on the discussion site and won’t say much on it here. I think it does add something, but possibly one of the aspects of the problem that it is not so easy to solve with this is specifics about where it can go wrong. I can see how the idea of the fourfold can somehow express when something is fitting, there is something just right about it, but I find it difficult to draw out what an instance of it not working would be like.

With this problem in mind (what is a non-place or a non-thing) we can perhaps see that the ‘advice’ is about the way to think about it, not the way to do it. There can be no formulas about the way to do something because each situation is unique, the only formula is that we need to think about it at a deep level.

For an example of reading a building (the construction and the process of growing/caring) now read Robert Mugerauer’s chapter ‘Heidegger: retreiving the still-coming source’ that is in your reader. The short extract from Stefanovich is there as I thought she was helpful regarding what we understand the divinities to be. With the Mugerauer chapter do not get to caught up or confused by the first two pages as these relate to the argument being constructed in the whole book.

THE PROBLEM OF TRADITIONALISM IN DWELLING

One of the main criticisms that is brought to Heidegger and those who use the idea of dwelling is that there is, at its core, a mistrust of the new and a naïve romanticising of the past. Note that Heidegger denies this in para 2:22, but only after giving his distinctly rustic example. I can’t help thinking that, as a writer, if you identify a possible misreading what you do is go back and change the example or at least give a contemporary one as well. But, what would a contemporary one look like? Obviously it would be harder to find, hence the reason for writing the paper to address the absence, but is it possible, for example, to think of city dwelling? Surely we can construct a picture of dwelling that brings together the fourfold in some less obvious way.

The attendant problem with this potential traditionalism is, of course, Heiddegger’s membership of the Nazi party. The debate about whether he was just politically naïve and swept up in the culture of the time or whether there is some fundamental connection, between his ideas and those of National Socialism in Germany at that time, has raged and I think it would be fair to say that the politically naïve interpretation is now seen as untenable. Certainly it doesn’t seem credible to me that someone who can identify the processes of contemporary culture such as Das Man and idle talk in order to articulate them in a philosophically robust way can then be presented as naïve in exactly this respect. However, this does not mean that the kind of ideas we have been discovering in 'Building Dwelling Thinking' are necessarily linked to Nazism or would inevitably result in the kind of thinking associated with it.

One of the critics of the contemporary use of dwelling because of these types of connections is Neil Leach and in an interesting chapter called ‘The Dark Side of The Domus’ (in Ballantyne, A. ed. 2002 What is Architecture) he sets out these concerns. He says that the idea of dwelling has become the dominant paradigm in the attempt to combat alienation and homoginisation, but “taken to extreme it can have negative consequences”. Heidegger, in linking dwelling with architecture presents building as having to grow out of the land. There is an emphasis on earth as soil/roots and this suggests a situated architecture that is an evocation of a homeland. By quoting from Heidegger’s rectoral address of 1933 Leach pretty much establishes that for Heiddegger there was a strong connection between the nationalistic aims of the Nazis and a ‘correct’ understanding of a people’s relationship to land.

Apart from the uncomfortable association here, which could be enough to make one ignore Heidegger’s work, Leach also raises another problem with the way that the idea of authenticity is used even from Heidegger’s perspective. For Leach the very idea of authenticity is just a further construction of the very homoginization it is being used to criticise. The retention or recreation of, for example, regional difference is thereby seen as just another market product. On this understanding the mass market, in its faceless sameness, calls forth in us a demand for difference, but is that demand merely another mass market product, a niche item, a way of constructing a more interesting identity?
Difficult questions! This is something we come back to in weeks 9 and 10 and perhaps some practical work on the question would help.

Exercise

try to identify a place, local to you if possible, and spend some time there and try to articulate how it brings together the fourfold. Afterwards, if you want to try this with a ‘non-place’ and see if it actually does fail to unite the fourfold do have a go.

Web notes by Isis Brook updated March 2005