Home and the Loss of Home. Reflection on the Anthropological Situation

Abstract

Home is intuitively understood as a primary experience, a life axiom. The submitted reflection has a philosophical character. Its main aim is to answer the question “What is the meaning of home for human existence in the context of the crisis of modern humanity?” Another important factor is the question of the other, whose presence is a constituting condition of home, its quality and meaning as well as a condition of the philosophical discourse on home. Human modality of existence is essentially bound with being “somewhere”. A human exists as a being who understands themselves as existing in an existential relationship with place and time (Heidegger). Oikos (home) is a particular case of topos (place). Home is an extended organism, it is our prolonged body (Bachelard). An authentic approach to home opens for us only from a distance, detachment. The current age is the age of uncertainty, where rootlessness, the loss of the sense of oikos and responsibility for it prevail (Bauman). Bauman`s observations confirm the actual state of threat of social and cultural homelessness. Paraphrasing Kant`s second anthropological question, we ask again: What shall we do? Home is chiefly hospitable generosity. In this sense, home is constituted by face (Levinas). Home is precisely the place that enables dialogue with respect to the difference of identities.