Philosophy of Sheds

Robert McCann 

An old Irish saying 

Is ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine 

“we live in each other’s shadow and in each other’s shelter” 

Language tells us about the nature of a thing 

Martin Heidegger 

小屋 

…from a mediaeval building site: 

Man with a cart full of building stone is asked by 

the foreman. 

“My good Man… are you taking your stone to 

build a wall?” 

“No Sir! surely You can see…” replied the 

stonemason “I am taking this stone to build a 

cathedral”.1 

1 This is an often repeated ancient saying that has followed the Master-Builder and then Architect through the ages and demonstrates everyday philosophy as the pursuit of wisdom in action. 

Introduction A. 

This is a short book about philosophy. It aims towards wisdom. What is wisdom? Some say wisdom is knowledge? Knowledge of what, a philosopher will ask. God perhaps? Philosophers have a word that attempts to capture a theory of knowledge, epistemology. Philosophers in the main agree that we often don’t have knowledge, although we delude ourselves into thinking we do. It might be better to acknowledge that we are mostly ignorant. Technically epistemology is the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. The etymology of the word epistemology is in very basic form derived from the Greek epistēmē (“knowledge”) and logos (“reason”), and accordingly the field is sometimes referred to as the theory of knowledge. The word itself was first coined in 1847 in a review in New |Yorks Eclectic Magazine according to Wikipedia, referring to some obscure article in German about technology, and then in 1854 and in English by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier in the first section of his Institutes of Metaphysics. For academic philosophers there exists a doctrine or theory of knowing, which plays out in a field of its own much like ontology is a philosophical term used to describe the notion of being. What is being? Really we know very little about what it means ‘to be’. Perhaps we might frame these questions in terms of our existence. We might accept that we exist, however the more interesting philosophical question is why do we exist at all. The existentialists or absurdist’s such as Camus & Becket indeed point us towards the notion that our lives are absurd and that we live in a permanent state of absurdity. Much like Buddha they suggest it makes sense to live in the moment and that while living a good life is a serious thing, we should not take life too seriously. That is also the aim of this book. It is not a serious work of philosophy, in the academic sense, rather it is a modest but nevertheless a serious effort to understand what it is that we can know, and that if there are tings we can know, are they worth knowing, or counterintuitively, if we didn’t know what we think we know would life be any different? 

we Epistemology is a word that I used as a framing device to answer the general question, 'what do we know, what is it to actually know something which then becomes known? A simpler question is 'What is knowledge? Who knows? I don’t! The purpose of this philosophy of sheds is to perhaps find-out maybe a little bit about what it is that I know about stuff. Its not going to be that important and maybe not very interesting except to me. The picture on the cover of this book is not and is of a green shed. that’s all I know. It’s a shed by most definitions and my more specific definition (which I outline later in the book). Its green. I think. But that could be a trick of the light. Or I might have altered the image. I didn’t, but you dear reader could not have known if I did or didn’t alter. I promise its green. Or at least it was green when I took the photo a few years ago. The owner might have painted it red in the meantime. Who knows? I don’t? You don’t? Well maybe you do, having passed the shed just now while you have been reading this book with the page open at this very sentence so its green or red who cares? Let’s say it’s still painted green a colour might be thought of as green as we know green to be. After all there are some people who see colours differently so we need to be clear that this is the colour green as we know it, but not necessarily as other know the colour that we call green. OK let’s try something perhaps a bit more straightforward. It looks like it is constructed using tin corrugated sheets. That’s all I know. Do I want to or need to know more. Most people couldn’t give a toss. It has been passed by most likely by thousands of people over the years since it was built. How many people? I don’t know. When was it built? I don’t know? Who built it? I don’t know and I don’t care or should I care? Do I ned to know who built it in order to care? Why should care? What is inside the shed? I don’t 

know? Schrodinger famously said that a cat can be alive and dead at the same time. The same could be said for my knowledge about what might or might not be inside that shed. Until I look inside I will never know. The owner could have a unicorn inside. OK all the evidence to date indicates that unicorns aren’t real. But until we look inside we will never know if unicorns are real or not? At this point it might be useful to add that Wikipedia tells us that philosophy 

is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its own methods and assumptions, and that the word itself comes from the Ancient Greek words φίλος (philos) 'love' and σοφία (sophia) 'wisdom'. Some sources say that the term was coined by the pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras, but this is not certain. 

I might add here that the academics are generally down on Wikipedia, I think because in the early days the information was a bit unreliable and not sourced and referenced in accordance with strict academic guidelines. I think its brilliant and had it been available in the time of Socrates he probably would have marvelled at the wealth of information available at the click of a button. The point is that philosophy is in a sense the only pursuit worth pursuing and in this philosophy is timeless. Much the way I walked past a random shed wondering if maybe, just maybe there might be a unicorn inside, human beings have looked into caves, tunnelled into the ground, or looked up at the sun in wonder before deciding it might be best if we fall to our knees and worship this sun-being. Socrates was wise because he was always going to acknowledge that until he looks inside sheds, he does not have knowledge of sheds. He famously said that the only thing he knew is how little he knew. In this respect Wikipedia does not contain knowledge, it contains information. Socrates famously schooled Plato, who schooled Aristotle. Both Socrates and Plato where soldiers and by all accounts fearless. Aristotle was a very bright aristocrat and at a certain age you become are fearless. Nothing seems impossible. You don’t give a fuck about what people think of you. Then you learn shit. The hormones arrive. They kick-in the door of your being. You become opened up for all to see. The girls and the boys take the piss, but it’s OK, because you don’t really give a fuck, or at least you don’t let on. It’s not so easy to shrug off the hurt when the teacher shines the spotlight on you embarrassing you in front of the class when you don’t know how to spell, or count, or recite passages from the good-book. Paslm ???? I still tremble when I read Paslm …Your class-mates wince as the strap whips through the air to meet the fleshy tips of your outstretched fingers. You pull back at the last minute and the strap misses. O’Reilly was humiliated. I can see it in his eyes. I knew I was in real trouble now. He never missed. He wouldn’t miss the next time, and by God he thrashed my fingers. The idea was that this thrashing would mean that I would learn to write better, to recite better, to count better, to be a better boy, to better myself while he battered me. It didn’t work. I have though about this long and hard and I will give him fuck all credit for any learning I ever got. I did learn to identify sadists and bullies. I think I would have learnt that without his perverse teaching methods. Anyway I was luckier than a lot in that I have only met a few bullies, never any sadists I don’t think. Except for |O’Reilly. The bullies were mainly middle and senior managers who bullied others, not me. They weren’t worth hating, they didn’t deserve my hate. They were just so pathetic. As I’ve grown older, and worked my way through the years, I’ve climbed ladders and avoided snakes. I’ve also come to learn that we have lost the dignity of work. As we have evolved from an agrarian way of working as a means of survival and sustenance through the industrial revolution, into the age of the internet and artificial intelligence, Feuerbach’s observation “Der Mensch ist, was er isst. Man is what he eats.” is a 

forgotten truism. While the circle of Young Hegelians, of which Feuerbach belonged, and which included Marx & Engles, foresaw and warned the human world that capitalism in order to survive would eventually eat itself, we gorge away, and try not to vomit.  

When you are young you go searching, for a wisdom of sorts. I found it in the voice of  Huckleberry Finn. He wrote in his letter, ‘grassing-up’ his friend Jim, a slave, 

“Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below 

Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. 

HUCK FINN.. 

He still wasn’t sure, should he send the letter? He called on his conscience, he prayed, he was stuck in a bind, a cultural bind, a societal construct, this was the Deep South along The Great Mississippi river The Slave owners, not all but mostly Confederates, still ruled and called on 

the Bible to justify their crimes against humanity. The wrath of The Lord weighed heavily and it seemed to Huckleberry, that if he were to free himself from sin, this was the right thing to do, he would give up his friend, he would be, 

“washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking--thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell.  

And he looked at the letter, it had a presence about it, he somehow knew that it contained something more than words; the words on the page weighed heavily, they carried power, the power of enslavement or freedom, life or death; and he thought, and he thought, and he thought again, of the memories of his friendship with Jim, a black man, a slave, the unwashed, the non-human, a commodity to be bought and sold, and the memories rose up and they shone a light into the dark, and he remembered, what Jim had said, 

…I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: 

"All right, then, I'll GO to hell"--and tore it up.” 

I sometimes wished I had had the courage of Huck Finn, voicing the wisdom of Mark Twain, for I’m reminded that, and although I don’t know very much, what I have come to know is that we should “give every day the chance to become the most beautiful day of [our] life’. Huckleberry took a chance that day, the day he thought he would go to hell. It became the day he would go to heaven. Think then, of the many wasted many chances, where our days had the chance to become the most beautiful they could be. I have wasted many of those days. Do I regret the missed chances, the wasyed times. Sometimes, but I try not to dwell. these for as Heraclitus teaches us, we cannot step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and 

we are not the same man. I have waded through many different rivers and I am a changed man, but the same wee boy. I don’t know much, but I do know this. I am grateful because I know I am more fortunate than many. 

This is a short book about philosophy. It aims towards wisdom. The word philosophy stems  from the Greek philos & etymology (??//) which is the study of wisdom. Socrates famously told his followers that the only thing I know is how little I know, He schooled Plato when he was a young man. Both Socrates and Plato where soldiers and by all accounts fearless. At a certain age you become are fearless. Nothing seems impossible. You don’t give a fuck about 

what people think of you. Then you learn shit. The hormones arrive. They kick-in the door of your being. You become opened up for all to see. The girls and the boys take the piss, but it’s OK, because you don’t really give a fuck, or at least you don’t let on. It’s not so easy to shrug off the hurt when the teacher shines the spotlight on you embarrassing you in front of the 

class when you don’t know how to spell, or count, or recite passages from the good-book. Paslm ???? I still tremble when I read Paslm …Your class-mates wince as the strap whips through the air to meet the fleshy tips of your outstretched fingers. You pull back at the last minute and the strap misses. O’Reilly was humiliated. I can see it in his eyes. I knew I was in real trouble now. He never missed. He wouldn’t miss the next time, and by God he thrashed my fingers. The idea was that this thrashing would mean that I would learn to write better, to recite better, to count better, to be a better boy, to better myself while he battered me. It didn’t work. I have though about this long and hard and I will give him fuck all credit for any learning I ever got. I did learn to identify sadists and bullies. I think I would have learnt that without his perverse teaching methods. Anyway I was luckier than a lot in that I have only met a few bullies, never any sadists I don’t think. Except for |O’Reilly. The bullies were mainly middle and senior managers who bullied others, not me. They weren’t worth hating, they didn’t deserve my hate. They were just so pathetic. As I’ve grown older, and worked my way through the years, I’ve climbed ladders and avoided snakes. I’ve also come to learn that we have lost the dignity of work. As we have evolved from an agrarian way of working as a means of survival and sustenance through the industrial revolution, into the age of the internet and artificial intelligence, Feuerbach’s observation “Der Mensch ist, was er isst. Man is what he eats.” is a forgotten truism. While the circle of Young Hegelians, of which Feuerbach belonged, and which included Marx & Engles, foresaw and warned the human world that capitalism in order to survive would eventually eat itself, we gorge away, and try not to vomit.  

When you are young and old the days go so slow on some days, that it seems the day will never end and because the brain won’t stop – thinking – or more accurately grinding the days can be painful, a real brain-ache. Some days though the days went fast, so fast they were painful on the brain. Heraclitus knew this as did Nietzsche. Heraclitus …. Nietzsche … there are a few other great minds whose brains seemed to be Wittgenstein. Kant thought not much about this although he thought \a lot, but his days meandered. Each day in Konigsburg, a place he never left from the day he was born until the day he died he would take his daily walk between ?? ??. Thankfully sometimes the days meander. Those are the days I liked best back then. Those are the days I like best now. I never have any brain pain during those meandering days. During the dark days of the troubles, the trouble took place both inside homes and outside on the streets. Al sorts of places became places of shelter, security, sanctuary and for some sacred. Sheds are places to store flowers, shovels, nails, screws, some saws, a hammer in an old toolbox, an axe, hidden so that it was safe from the hands of an axe murderer, some old smelly blankets, a couple of tatty deck chairs and an antique leather sofa, burnished to a yellowy brown hue by the countless bums resting, farting, shuffling, snoring, 

slobbering and sleeping on it. Sheds in northern Ireland also stored guns, the materials to make bombs, the bombs themselves. When you are young you have no fear of these things, stored in sheds, because you have no real knowledge of these things. It’s not that you don’t know what they are – guns, bombs, hammers, nails, sofas and chairs. Rather you don’t have knowledge about them. You might think or believe you have knowledge but at this age, or at any age for that matter what is it that we can really know? This is what the philosophy of sheds attempts to explore. What is knowledge, or more sensibly what is there to know about knowledge that we need to know, that is if we can ever know it at all? 

There is not much to say other than that I lived along with my younger brothers and sisters in Belfast until The Troubles had my parents packing for Odense in Denmark. For his part my father was a wise and kind man, who loved my mother very much. My mother was a beautiful woman who loved my dad very much. They got married and I was born on valentines day. After a few years we moved back to Northen Ireland, I think, because my parents loved the place. This was a mistake. I think, because northern Ireland didn’t love them. There was some joy for my mother and father as another little brother and sister came into the world, but the place was a troubled place, it was a dark violent place and there are times when I think what life might have been like if we had stayed in Denmark. But here’s the thing. I can think of these things, about what life might have been like, I can even imagine a life better or worse, and it can seem real, but I can never ever know. 

My mother loved my dad until she died. My dad loved my mother until he died. Before they died 

The philosopher Edmund Gettier is famous for a paper he wrote which relied on sheds, or in America they call them barns. In 19?? Called ??? and is Gettier himself is famed for bring the Gettier problem as to the limits of our knowledge into the philosophical cannon. ….////?////// etc etc expand. As for hammers in sheds the philosopher Martin Hiedigger observed that dasien or being is much to do with the way we use tools ‘in-hand’ etc etc. . 

Introduction 

This project takes its inspiration from several philosophically interlinked ideas including what Juhani Pallasamaa in his philosophical mediation on architecture ‘The Eyes of The Skin’, terms the ‘centralised images of focused Gestalt’ as it relates to the architectural and urban settings of our time, the largest element of which are our homes. To explore further I will draw upon, Heidegger’s important existentialist essay Building Dwelling Thinking and Gaston Bachelard’s influential philosophy of imagination, referencing his celebrated classic The Poetics of Space: as Danielewski writes “Bachelard believes that the invention of structure results in the transparency through which we need to view the world”2; and this connects to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion that our lives are shaped by the ‘the visible and the invisible’. We tend to perceive the world through our bodily senses and our everyday lives, and it is to intersubjective relations and being as such that we should look, if we wish to move toward a world shared in common. This points us toward the existential importance of perception and reflection. Simply put, I suggest that we have become objects 

2 Bachelard G. (1958) The Poetics of Space: Forward by Mark Z Daniele: Introduction Richard Kearney: Penguin Books 2014 

and we are viewers of objects based on social and culturally constructed descriptions of what, we are led to believe, it is to be-at-home, but which tell us little about what it is to be-at-home. I argue that ‘to be-at-home’ is to exist within a concept that cannot be grasped in simple affectual terms. To do so carries the risk of falling into the confines of linguistic conventions that rest more comfortably within specific disciplines, including architecture, art, anthropology, the social sciences, political philosophy, and the psychoanalytic traditions.  Rather it is to philosophy we must turn, to peel away the veneers that we have layered over what it is to-be-at-home. The aim is to somehow peer into the spaces-between to examine and indeed challenge the constructs that emotionally and physically house and enclose our lives. This requires imagination and creativity. Tracing a phenomenology of perception and experience of being-at- home as it intersects with philosophy of mind, language, architecture, and art and as it plays out in the making of our built environment might offer some insight. The ambition here is toward illuminating the essentiality of hope, shaped by imagination and possibility through a clearer understanding of being-at-home. 

In part 1 I will frame the thought ‘being-at-home’ within what at first reading may seem straightforward references to the subject of our built environment, however when studied closely hidden meanings are to be found within. These meanings are concealed both unintentionally and intentionally. I will focus in the main on attempting to reveal the unintentional meaning, however it is impossible to escape the intentional political philosophies that shape our lives, and it is to Ethics one must be directed for a fuller exploration.  

Part 1 Structure:  

It is apt that as in any project we can think about rooting ourselves metaphysically, physically and or both, to a position on planet earth and unlikely as it may seem, as good a place as any might be a place called Milton Keynes. In a wood just outside the metropolis there is an urban architectural project called Cave: this is an elemental shelter formed of three concrete slabs with no prescribed use, for people to appropriate as they wish and so feel ownership of the space. 

 To add a sense of physicality and scale; in London, Winston Churchill in October 1943 after the bombing of the House of commons Chamber and upon debating its rebuilding, proffered that the shape of the building was responsible for the two-party system of government and therefore the essence of Brutish parliamentary democracy saying: “we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us”  

 In architecture, John Ruskin wrote in his celebrated essay The Lamp of Meaning that 

…the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in the age and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of a mysterious symphony, nay even of power or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity  

 And in philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein stated that; “when you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there”; while Martin Heidegger’s 

interpretation of ‘Dasein’ as ‘being in the world’ or the experience ‘in which each of us is himself’ observed that ‘language tells us about the nature of a thing’. 

Finally, Imatiz Dharkar in her poem This Room breathes life into the language of being-at home enclosed, 

This room is breaking out 

of itself, cracking through 

its own walls, 

in search of space, light, 

empty air 

This in a quite visceral way describes the compression of a space captured and then layered one layer upon another until it becomes smothered, reduced to a concept, a unit, a commodity, a home unable to breathe. 

 The urban project Cave might invite us to think about how and why we wish to capture and enclose a space to create something we call home, to consider the meaning of being-at-home; and to what good? 

 Churchill’s comment is interesting in that at first reading there is the suggestion of what it is to be at home in the future, however in reality this is a political statement about government power and social control through building, the appropriation of spaces and language. 

 Ruskin reminds us that, our built environment, our civic spaces, our buildings, and our houses have a unique ability over time to hold society to account, to read back to us who we have been, who we are now, and potentially who we will be in the future. 

 Wittgenstein &, Heidegger, Pallasamaa, Bachelard Merleau-Ponty speak philosophically to our imagination, the visible an the invisible the limits of language in explaining  being-at-home allowing us to unpack the existentialist meanings that have become associated with something that we might call home. 

 To this in the 1960’s the UK Government decided to establish a ‘new town’ called Milton Keynes to alleviate housing congestion in London and the Southeast of England. The project attracted international attention and included work by celebrated architects such as Sir Richard MacCormac, Norman Foster, Henning Larsen, Ralph Erskine, with Erskine known for his focus on social regeneration and the interests of people. While Milton Keynes has many detractors’ critics and supporters for various reasons, architectural, aesthetic, political, social and cultural, the concept of this new town, or any city, town, village, hamlet, or house seems to have been captured in an architectural project completed 2011 called Cave: an 

elemental shelter formed of three concrete slabs with no prescribed use, for people to appropriate as they wish and so feel ownership of the space.3  

 In a 2019 lecture4the architect-philosopher Edna Langenthal observed that architectural thinking and practice seems to have become “ephemeral and detached from the ethical principles of architecture”, and this reminds us that the accepted role of the contemporary architect is that of ‘place-making’. This is not to argue for the role of the architect as ethical place-maker, architects have a job to do and are human beings just like the rest of us, and the academic literature on architecture and its role in society, for good, bad, or indifferent is plentiful and readily available. However, when thinking about place or our sense of place, we naturally think about what it is to be at Home, and the architect’s central role follows the tradition of The Master-Builder, who historically sought to develop ideas and concepts into geometric material and structural entities. So, while there are concerns, both about and within the profession5 and its place in ‘making’ for societal ‘well-being’, architecture has an important role to play in terms its contribution to the social sphere, particularly as regards the provision of decent healthy homes for All. It should be noted at this point that this paper is not about architects or architecture; nor does it claim that one form of architecture or place-making is any better or worse than any other, rather the claim is, that to understand Home as ‘a space enclosed’ is something that architecture has traditionally and professionally assumed a responsibility for6; and that this something, that we might call homeness is poorly 

3 Royal Institute of British Architects Journal 16 July 2021: 

https://www.ribaj.com/culture/studio-morison-silence-alone-in-a-world-of-wounds-yorkshire-sculpture-p ark 

4 Cyprus lecture… 

5Ibid 

6 The state of the architectural profession today is not for this essay, however, see Pearman H. (2021 p.49): How to take the lead again. Royal Institute of British Architects Journal: January 2021. Pearman laments the declining influence of the role of architecture in the social sphere. This has been identified as starting with the dismantling of local council employed architectural departments. He also highlights a Hayekian neo-liberal or market led political philosophy that shaped the delivery of housing in the UK. This has become most associated with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and ‘The ‘Right to Buy’ scheme which allowed council tenants to buy their council homes at a discount with the idea that the UK would become ‘a property-owning democracy’, Successive Conservative and New Labour Governments expanded this initiative, the result of which embedded the delivery of housing into the realm of the private market. Pearman references a 1974 polemic or ‘a view of the future’ by a previous editor of the RIBAJ Malcom MacEwan who wrote ‘Crisis in Architecture’ and the complacency of the architectural profession writing “architects have become caught up in a social system that rewarded their most selfish and destructive impulses while repelling their most generous and creative ones”. Further and in terms the role of architect and the profession of architecture, planning, etc Pearman states, “it’s not clear which way architecture will go…’. He bemoans the notion that so-called good architecture is ‘old-looking’ and bad architecture is ‘new-looking’ a movement led ‘by the people behind Create Streets and Building Beautiful and based on Roger Scruton’s “ideology that beauty = traditional”. Jurgen Habermas (19??) also identified this period as a social philosophical epoch observing that “moral questions have become cost / benefit questions… the development of capitalism is such that the public sphere [our houses]and democracy have become completely eliminated”, which is in stark contrast to the idea of the ‘Property-Owning Democracy’ championed by Margaret Thatcher above. Why might this be relevant to this paper? The Master-Builder becoming architect and taking on the mantle of home builder carries with it social & ethical responsibilities while Habermas’s critique is a commentary on the failure of the neo-liberal (sometimes called ‘Anglo-Saxon’) economic model built on home ownership as speculative capital, as commodity is one that essentially de-links the notions of a person’s well-being and human flourishing from the provision of shelter towards one becoming enslaved and burdened with mortgage debt which has the effect of house owners living in a near permeant state of anxiety. This leads us directly to Heideggerian thoughts on authenticity as essential to Being or Dasein: See also The Spirit Level: Why More Equal 

understood. It seems sensible therefore to question how, not just architects, but planners, designers, artists, and writers and indeed philosophers, attempt to capture the concept of Home? They do this through a process of firstly thinking, then often collaborating, towards building and making, which requires some consideration of the material-physical structures that enclose and capture our lives: these are the pieces of our built environment that are most visible and tangible: and it is in this sense that the architecture of Home, not just as lines on a drawing, but also as a sense notion, can act as a datum or point of departure for us All, (rather than a select few)7towards understanding the ontology of home. 

 In part I, I8 will explore meaning and the language of Home as it relates to the process of placemaking which is a fundamental and profound part of the scope of architecture, and its power and possibilities, and I will draw upon some key aspects of Heideggerian thinking as well as referencing philosophical thoughts and ideas related to home-ness or ‘what it is to be at home? (Jacobson 2006, 2012, King: 2009 Handel: 2019,). To do this I will also in a novel way reference and connect Wittgenstein’s thoughts on ordinary language and the meanings that we can draw out of our everyday language to Home. Although there is record of just a single meeting between Heidegger & Wittgenstein9 and the philosophical literature rarely connects these two thinkers10, Wittgenstein took a great interest in the meanings that arise out of architectural function and form11 and applied analytical methods to try to understand the ‘language-games’ which contain hidden, (some deliberate) and some mis-understood meanings. This approach I argue, can be applied to the language of home in such a way that the hidden meaning of home can be seen more clearly. 

Part II… Structure and Being 

Part III… Structure and Form (Whylie, Ingold) 

I conclude that much of the literature on architecture and housing focuses on critical theory and has become hemmed in by sociological and economic studies that play to a narrative constrained by the cultural norms and political ideologies that shape society for good or ill; and that our homes are an essential and natural part of. Philosophy is unique in that it allows an exploration of those human qualities that are universal of which the need for home I argue, is maybe the most profound in terms living an authentic life. In the philosophical literature 

Societies Almost Always Do Better (2009). Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson: , Housing and Capital in the 21st Century: Duncan Maclennan & Julie Miao 

7 Bourdieu… Gramsci…an elite, who has power…political philosophy…don’t stray too far…into 8 This paper alternates between the use of a first-person narrative and third person narrative in order to connect my thoughts to the wider philosophical discussion referenced. 

9 See Braver L… 

10 There are several thinkers who do connect Heidegger and Wittgenstein, but rarely on any similarities with regards their philosophical ideas. In this they are considered very different Wittgenstein from the Analytic tradition dealing with logic and mathematics, Heidegger from the Continental tradition dealing mainly with metaphysics and phenomenology. I see however a novel connection to both through the ontology of home, or home as being. They were both clearly moved to think deeply about the role of Home and like all of us, we are unable to escape Home, and in many ways, this informed their personal philosophies and how they viewed the world. For Heidegger this was the often-referenced Bavarian farmhouse, (see Dwelling and Thinking) For Wittgenstein this was designing and building a house for his sister which I reference also in the paper, but more profoundly his need to escape to Home in remote corners of Austria, Norway and Ireland and eventually to live out his days in his simple lodgings in Cambridge 

11 Langenthal E…. 

and the notion of authenticity, Heideggerian thought focuses12 on the anxiety felt when one becomes deprived of a sense of home-ness. This anxiety (Heidegger’s did not explicitly refer to homelessness per-se) in every-day thought more akin to a physical reaction13, something that we think we can capture and measure (as a socio-political-economic-unit) through a thinking physical biological brain. However, to understand how anxiety manifests itself as something that has physical, metaphysical, and phenomenological qualities, we need to consider this in the sense of a loss of Hope. Hope as a human quality can best and maybe only really be understood when we experience the absence of Hope, when we experience a sense of No-hope, or Hopelessness, something that is most acutely felt when we associate with a loss of Home. This is where the importance of philosophy can best serve us if given voice. 

 Think of the recent Grenfell Fire Tragedy in London (or any human tragedy) when on the14th of June 2017, 72 people lost their lives and more than 200 families were left homeless. The cause of this homelessness can be measured and will be attributed to ‘man-made’ political, moral, and socio-economic failings, but the loss of Hope and the human need for, and to regain and hold on to the potentiality of Hope is much harder to grasp and understand. We can maybe think of hope as a sparkling bubble…we can see how beautiful it is and therefore know it is somehow wonderful…but try catch it and put it back into the bottle. This is more difficult. Try: think: what is hope? Picture it. Draw it. 

 Nature plays its part too. In California USA in a town called Paradise, located in what is by all accounts a natural paradise with idyllic natural woodlands, yet this earthly nature once thought as bountiful and beautiful, rendered a community powerless as a forest fire burnt thirteen thousand homes to the ground and eighty people lost their lives. This was a town-place full of hope and it is hope that will move the community in Paradise to rebuild their homes and their lives. Nature however will carry on regardless. 

 Finally think also of our history of war and self-inflicted carnage and think of how armies in action or in retreat, operate scorched earth policies. The aim is to deliberately deprive a community of its home14, or to prevent homes falling into enemy hands. These may seem somewhat extraordinarily stark examples, however as Wittgenstein observed we walk with our minds closed when we see the everyday. The material-physical aspects regarding the loss of Home, or the sense of Home-ness is widely discussed, mainly in technical, political, and socio-economic terms, however, Hope in the sense of being-at-home and human flourishing 

12 Jakobson etc… 

13 We can measure anxiety…increased heart rate, fight or flight, stress etc…expand….??? 14 See Handel 2019, what is in a home? Towards a critical theory of housing/dwelling The Occupied Territories Palestine: See “The Caledon Protest Northern Ireland” when Austin Currie MP and two others occupied a council house. This is now accepted one of the critical social political acts that led to ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and to the start of the Civil Rights Movement which led to Bloody Sunday. The action was in protest over the allocation of a house by the local council to a nineteen-year-old unmarried Protestant, Emily Beatty, who was the secretary of a local unionist politician. A Catholic family with three young children had been evicted recently from the house next door. After a few hours, the RUC (police) removed Currie and his fellow-squatters. Currie said that they had squatted in protest against the allocation of the house to an unmarried woman while more than 250 [homeless] people were on the waiting list [for housing] in the local area. He also wanted to draw attention to the system of allocation which allowed an individual councillor to give houses to anyone he wished. 

https://www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/1031-civil-rights-movement-1968-9/1032-caledon-protest/ 

and as something with its own distinct quality is less widely discussed and is poorly understood in the literature as regards Home and its central role for our well-being. 

 Hope therefore in this regard is profoundly an essential part of the ontology of home and is something that can be experienced as important and real when we are sheltered, when we feel secure, when we experience a sense of sanctuary, and for which some this Home becomes sacred space. 

I. Structure and Meaning 

….once the journey has commenced starting with the question ‘what is home’ the explorations becomes a circular question that collapses into itself and the stalls quite quickly due to the inadequacy that ordinary language has in capturing and informing in a meaningful way four interdependent aspects and sub-aspects of Home. These are: 

Aspect Sub-Aspect 

Shelter Roof / Sky / Nature / Element / Visible 

Security Walls / Floor / Earth / Nature / Element / Visible 

Sanctuary Body / Mind / Nature / Element / Visible / Invisible 

Sacredness Mind / Body / Element / Nature / Invisible 

 Simply put the architect-materialists15try to capture home-ness which might be defined as a range of relationships between the home and the person. Specifically, they do this through inception, then seeing and interpreting a personal or client brief & scheme design towards constructing shelter. This is primarily to provide human-scale personal security, which if successful can offer the experience of sanctuary and for some this becomes sacred space. Put together this is often called Home and while the architect-materialists have argued that it's important to have a home, not just in the sense of a roof over one's head, but of an environment in which one is 'at home' the question persists; what is it (if anything) that is being said about the sense of 'being at home'16that we are drawing on? To this, postmodern (sometimes considered sceptical) thinkers, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, 

15 I have adopted this as an interchangeable and general term for those who practice and partake in the physical act of designing and building. I feel that this is a more accurate term for the architect in the context of this paper. I am thinking specifically about the origin of the title architect, which derives from the Greek Architekton , architect (n.) This is not materialism or to be confused with Physicalism such as hat associated with Jackson Kym, Papeidou et al 

16 This is not a novel term and has more recently become a term adopted by contemporary philosophical thinking on the subject of of being and being at home and has been in the main an interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s Hiemat best known in his book Poetry language thought: Dwelling and Thinking. See also Kirsten Jakobson, Peg Raws, et al 

Gadamer, Deluze et al have searched for the meaning behind terms such as home that sit easily in our everyday or ordinary language, and they have discovered that language can be thought of as a series of meanings that are interpreted in different ways according to the situation that we find ourselves. The Hegelian philosopher and writer John O’ Donohue (1997) observes that often our ‘words are too thin to echo experience; they are too weak to bring the inner mystery of things to real expression’17, and for terms such as ‘at home-ness’ and ‘being’ the interpretation and argument differ depending on historical and contextual form and the meanings often become disguised or lost. In this O’ Donohue’s illuminating prose illustrates wonderfully the inadequacy of language in expressing a universal truth: that as human beings, we are at the centre of the natural world and we respond to the environment, including the built environment that we encounter, and live in; and we seek meaning to allow us naturally strive to improve our capacity in ways that help us build to enhance our freedom ‘to be’. For O’ Donohue the appeal to the Self is an appeal to individual human, community and political action towards goodness or in political philosophical terms towards ‘the social good’ of which the provision of shelter, security, sanctuary and sacredness is maybe the most profound. 

 However, to become free, we need to comfortably exist as part of this world and the act of existing is something we do together. And it is in this notion of togetherness that we All, not just the architect-materialists seek Home: it is in this sense that we might ask the question “what is it to be at home?” This is not a particularly new or novel question, rather framed in this way the search for Home can be considered in part a search for truth of Self; what does it mean ‘to be’, what is the ‘act of being’? However, these are big metaphysical questions akin to the great minds asking, ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ and although this is an important consideration, when we think about the everyday, including the act of constructing shelter and making things the way we do, we need to search for further meaning; not just in language but through an appreciation of ‘creating and making’. The so-called Avant Garde artist Rene Marguerite searches for hidden meanings in the everyday in his paintings which often reflect the mundane: a pipe; looking out of a window; the interior of an anonymous room, with a maybe a clock on the wall, stopped at a moment in time. This is a-familiar and could be a moment in time in anyone’s life, one lived at home. However, behind the pictures lie the hidden meanings, the realities of home-ness, the material-structure is covering up something as Marguerite observes: “we are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all”18this clearly is the description of our homes hidden in plain sight behind the mundanity of our houses. The Austrian American artist and architect Fredrick Kiesler’s (1890-1965) conceptual work of architecture ‘Endless House’ sought to express an elaborate. Personal metaphysics bases on the concepts of what he termed ‘connectivity’, ‘correality’ and ‘biotechnique’ with the aim of merging the human spiritual and practical into a new housing typology. Kiesler is celebrated as an architectural innovator and original thinker, however it would seem that while non-everyday language-games are used to convey the meaning of home, the aim is a universal one, and that is the attempt to capture the elusive quality homeness. In many ways’ outsiders like Kiesler and Friedensreich Hundertwasser19fail and succeed at the same time. They succeed in illustrating how fiendishly difficult it is to capture space as something that has the quality home-ness but fail because of that very same difficulty. And there are urban architectural projects such as Cave 

17 John O’ Donohue (1997 pp93-94) Anam Cara Spirtual Wisdom from the Celtic World’ 18 Rene Marguerite… 

19 Friedensreich Hundertwasser (Austrian, 1928–2000) was a painter, printmaker, and architect best known for his paintings characterized by colourful, ornamental, and biomorphic shapes. 

in Milton Keynes (2012), an elemental shelter formed of three concrete slabs and with no prescribed use, for people to appropriate as they wish and so feel ownership of the space. This project is as much about the understanding we have of substances and concepts, but which are more than mere performances, rather in the making something becomes visible  

visible to the human being, and once visible must respond in no other way but in a human way.  

 Continuing along a similar path towards understanding and human response, the social philosopher Richard Sennet beautifully articulates the act of making, just for the sake of making, with his essay on Cellini’s salt cellar final version completed in 1543 Francis I of France from models that had been prepared many years earlier for Cardinal Ippolito d’Este. Sennet observes that the yearning for authenticity in the everyday does not rest solely with the artist or the architect, or anyone in particular. Rather “the carpenter, the lab technician, and conductor are all craftsmen because they are dedicated to good work for its own sake.”20 Other than in the sense of scale and the use of materials; in terms human agency and action and in the attention to detail; including scientific detail, we might reasonably compare this to the making of anything be it a vaccine in a lab, to a house on the street, becoming home or something that we might call home as contained within an enclosed structure. There are of course numerous different types of houses, from fixed structures to nomadic structures. Some are celebrated as important works of art and craft. Celebrated Houses such as Falling Water by Frank Lloyd-Wright possess an aesthetic that appeals to the human cultural and artistic norms that surround them. Of course, some think them beautiful, some think them ugly, some think them functional, some think them pointless, some think they appeal to human vanity and question the ethics that allow the disparities of wealth that allow them to be created, while others suggest that our houses should be purely functional, ‘form follows function’ houses are ‘machines to live in’ are the phrases famously coined by Le Corbusier; however regardless personal preference on ‘the good, bad or ugly’ they all have (or at least all houses should have) a quality in common with the exquisite craftsmanship of the Cellini work. Within each human occupied house lie certain human qualities; not just that of the maker-architect- artist-materialist-sculptor, creating a unique table adornment for a very wealthy benefactor21 during the Italian renaissance, but also in the sense, that the artifact-structure has become imbued with unique irreplaceable qualities contained within and therefore might be considered without value or philosophically speaking is unquantifiable. The claim is, that we seem to know and understand instinctively that the urge towards crafting and making shelter are qualities that we all have. This is the sense of home-ness, a feeling that is unique to each human being, but which is something which has no value to anyone other than as the personal act of giving home to oneself and receiving back home-ness. In the Margarite paintings, the Keisler housing concepts or the Cellini sculpture example, or any of the examples / models of housing structures, the sense of being at home becomes manifest within an artifact-structure that actualises the human urge towards making and craftsmanship. It is when this becomes realised, it is then that the feeling of hope imbued by the maker within the material-artefact-structure becomes manifest and therefore succeeds in the purpose of its meaning. The search for meaning here is in the attempt to grasp the ontology of home-ness imbued and contained within and in the process discovering 

20 Richard Sennet… 

21 History of Cellini’s Salt Cellar 

something with an inherent human quality when subject to human agency and articulation becomes translated into the word home. 

So, what is it to be at home? The field of architecture, design, planning and often artistry, necessarily focusses on ‘sticks and bricks and mortar’ as the materials with which to fashion our houses. However, while thoughts of home, and designs on a page, contain potential, ‘sticks and bricks and mortar’ alone do not a home make. Consider the concept of house & home as a philosophical question. This is not a novel idea. Giles Deluze observed that “a concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window”22. In the everyday, and in actual language we take words out of their natural place in talking and assume they refer to some essence or ideal entity which we try to define. ‘Deleuze’s brick’ demonstrates that when we attempt to understand the application of a word for either a concept or an object, the brick as a concept and as an object also exists as something that contains potentiality. Home however, as a concept does not necessarily follow from the concept of a brick. A home, or rather the certainty of a physical structure can be actualized through the making perhaps through constructing using sticks and or bricks, but the concept home within the physical structure contains a very different potentiality. It is in this, and in the search for an ontological account of Home that we find the potential of Home, as being, its real purpose, something that is buried deep within its meaning. Some of the great minds from the modern era such as Ernst Bloch developed the notion that this search for meaning can be thought of as ‘possibility’; the ‘not- yet’, realized. For Bloch the ‘not-yet’ contains within it a utopian potential expressed as the principle of hope23 and the potential for hope is a uniquely human quality that connects the human persons being-at-homeness not only to material entities, be-it a brick as illustrated by Deluze, or a house much like the houses we see each day, but critically ‘the-not-yet’ and the potential of hope connects to the language needed for human expression and an understanding of ourselves as we interact and go about our everyday lives. Though rarely mentioned on the same page, Bloch’s contemporary Martin Heidegger through his interpretation of Heimat24refers to this notion the potential of hope as ‘being in the world’, a central idea developed in his book of essays Poetry Language Thought. In particular the oft referenced essay Building Dwelling Thinking has been interpreted25 as a meditation on being at home; as he states; “how we build and then dwell is how we live”, however for Heidegger, this was not so much about how we might ordinarily see the physical world of building structures and making things in the every-day; rather he offers philosophical insight into our relationship with ‘dwelling’ or the ‘spatiality of being’26 and that, the way of our dwelling or the way that we do dwelling is essentially the manifestation of our being ‘thrown into the world’. The Heideggerian scholar Hubert Dreyfus (1929-2017) interprets this as Heidegger positing the notion: ‘I am therefore I think’27; a deliberate upending of Descartes famous ‘cogito ergo sum’ and it is in this ‘thrown-into-ness’ in which we can think in terms of the way that we design and build structures for shelter and then live and ask the question whether we live ‘authentic’ lives. (more of which later). For Heidegger the question of authenticity tells us something about “the prospects for successful being in the world” [which depends] in important ways on the proper constitution of the 

22 Find quote 

23 Bloch: The Philosophy of Hope 

24 Explain using SJ Gadhammer paper for reference… 

25 Some scholars argue that this essay is not about the ontology of home or home-ness, rather it is a commentary on….?/??? find and n 

ame the scholars 

26 French C. (2015p356). To lose one’s home in the world: The injustice of immigrant detention 27 Dreyfus… 

spaces and places in which individuals’ dwell”28 This notion of ‘the authentic life’ seeks to escape and embrace at the same time the anxiety that comes with living, something that essentially encapsulates everything that life, or the act of existing or ‘living a life’ throws at it, including the anxiety felt when life becomes discontented through the deprivation of home-space. French explains this important aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy in the context of political philosophy and the international / national, macro / micro political ideologies shaping immigrant detention, but which equally can refer to the everyday, be it the mundane in the art of Margarite, or the extraordinary such as The Grenfell Tragedy, The Natural Disasters that devastate communities or the conflicts that traumatise generations. This is a familiar model of housing delivery in the western world, which without care it seems involves the loss of home-ness, that is; becoming homeless, within29(or without) the ordinary house, if ‘that place’ is deprived of the qualities, security, sanctuary and for some the necessary lived experience of sacredness as French states:  

If the place of being should collapse or be destroyed... then the individual in question suf ers a kind of harm that reaches far into his or her being. In fact, the individual is thrown into a highly deficient mode of being that in Heideggerian terms we might characterize as anxiety, caused by the deprivation of a home in the world. 

 Heidegger in common with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and although the records indicate that while Heidegger and Wittgenstein were aware of one another ‘there was only one recorded mention of the other’30, set out in their philosophical projects to discover31 some of the hidden meaning in language related to being-at-homeness. Wittgenstein in his magnus opus Philosophical Investigations (PI) placed an emphasis on the analysis of ordinary language. At the beginning of PI Wittgenstein describes the activities of a builder building a house as taking the form of a ‘language game’ and he illustrates with an example that, when we hear a sentence to a builder’s assistant containing instructions and words like “fetch that ‘slab’” or “bring me that ‘brick’”, we must ask what do these terms mean for the builder, and the words must also describe what they do with these words and the role they play in everyday life. For Wittgenstein his philosophical thought and development can (if looked through an architect-materialist lens) is illustrated in his collaboration and completion of the design and build of the now famous ‘Wittgenstein Haus’ for his sister Margaret in Vienna, which was completed in 192832. He worked closely with his one-time friend the architect Paul 

28 French C. Ibid 

29 It is clear that a person for example suffering domestic or any sort of traumatic abuse, or is maybe suffering from depression, mental illness, anxiety, unhappiness (for example over-crowding / falling out with siblings, parents, family) within what might seem to an outside observer be pretty comfortable, secure and happy, bit in reality the person enclosed has become trapped in a state of homelessness. 

30 Lee Braver: Direct quote… Though they were aware of one another, each made only one recorded mention of the other, and these were made in passing. These remarks open a narrow pathway into a large field of investigation. However, perhaps because they came to represent opposing camps of professional philosophers, few have attempted to read them so as to bring them into productive dialogue. Lee Braver's publication is the latest of these relatively rare efforts. His general thesis is that, despite their differences, Wittgenstein and Heidegger both insist upon our radical finitude as human beings, and that there is an unsurpassable limit to the reasons we give as to why things are the way they are. In other words, reason as a ground-giving activity cannot ground itself but arises out of our situation in a world that is always already "there" before the question of grounds or reasons can arise in the first place. In developing this thesis, 

31 This was of course was / is not the main aim of their respective philosophical projects 32 The Architect: Paper…. 

Engleman (a pupil of Alfred Loos33) and the significance for Wittgenstein (similarly to Sennett’s discussion on the Cellini sculpture and Bloch’s principle of hope) was not revealed in the making of the house, but rather it is only ‘when a person imagines the house as a space where actual life takes place’ 34that the meaning of the house becomes a ‘complete form of life’35. It is only when Margarites art and Cellini’s imagined sculpture becomes real for the viewer and functional for the user that the hope contained within becomes realised. Wittgenstein of course is recognised as one of the great minds in the history of philosophy and while the study of philosophy rightly focuses on his philosophical canon, it is in Wittgenstein the Man where the ontology of home manifests itself most starkly. It is not difficult to imagine that the great minds in the history of philosophy all start out blindly asking simple questions such as why is there something rather than nothing, which then become entangled in philosophical bewilderment. In this respect Wittgenstein is considered the philosopher most associated with the attempt at untangling the complexity of thought into simplicity of language and yet his was a fragile mind. After returning from fighting in the great war, (as of course many people did and do) sought out the sanctuary afforded by the shelter and security of a simple House in the remote mountains of Skjolden in Norway (constructed between 1914 and 1918) and stood as a solitary architectural marker in Wittgenstein's life as it was the only structure designed and built purposefully for his own personal interests and preoccupations. This place was made as a stripped back bare-bones Hut. It Housed his body and his meagre possessions, but once lived in it became a place that his mind could know as Home. This was not mindless action. This was Home as a state of mind and body. This was Home as sanctuary and indeed sacredness, as a place of prayer, for Wittgenstein was forever praying, maybe not in the familiar biblical sense, but certainly he prayed for his mind to be still so his body could become calmed. He thought often of taking his own life36, as his sense of self-worth deluded him into thinking his life was worthless. Considered in this light it is hard not to see that the Hut that Wittgenstein called Home was much more than the materials from which it was made. As far as searching out the hidden or philosophically abstract meanings or more accurately and profoundly the ‘real’ meanings in language; in a lecture to his students in Cambridge circa 1936 he read an extract from a detective novel. The detective in the novel is alone on the deck of a ship in the middle of the night and hears no sound except the ticking of the ships clock. The detective muses to himself ‘a clock is a bewildering instrument at best: measuring a fragment of infinity: measuring something which does not exist perhaps’. As Wittgenstein observed to his students ‘obviously a clock is not a bewildering instrument at all’ – ‘the clock becomes a bewildering instrument when we say, it measures a fragment of infinity, measuring something which does not exist perhaps37. In terms of the clock as bewildering, or a sculpture’s beauty living in the eye of the beholder, it is in home as an abstract were the introduction of an entity or quality which can’t be seen but that we can somehow picture in our mind and make epistemologically real in other words they possess the potential to become something we can have knowledge of.38 However, what are these qualities? Do they exist if we remove our instinctive need for shelter and security and the sense-data that we understand and associate 

33 Alfred Loos Brief Biog… 

34 http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue55/Langenthal.pdf 

35 Ibid 

36 See Monk R. 200? P.p???? 

37 Ibid P.p. 

38 It should be noted at this point that the pictures in our mind of home-ness are quite different from those of our imagination. When we think of home, these are reason-based thoughts that possess the quality potentiality whereas our imagination while possessing some of the qualities of potentiality, also allows us to think of unicorns and hobbits and fairies and God. 

with the qualities of sacredness say? At first glance the answer might seem relatively straight-forward. Again, the home when viewed through the combined lenses of the architectural-materialist and designer, mathematical theory & materials science, or anthropology, psychology, and social science, we do glean some understanding about ‘the how’ space becomes home. However, if we ask; what do we know about ‘why’ a material space becomes something other than mere shelter, while removing all the body-sense-data that we associate with a space becoming home it seems to become something that rests in the mind. In this, Home-ness is neither a logical nor a physical possibility, rather Home-ness is the metaphysical possibility of home which reads to an existentialist phenomenology. For Wittgenstein it seems clear from his philosophy that architecture and indeed the act of building and placemaking and the acts of craftsmanship and the attention to the truth that is inherent in the material detail, (for example the operation of a window or a door handle that operates exactly as intended) becomes the space where one becomes at home. A simple object or a complex piece of machinery 39 or a unique work of art seems to return to us the human qualities ingrained in it. Critically however, this needs to find expression both in language and doing, and for Wittgenstein in the everyday, and in actual language these are  words and expressions that we take for granted, however it is when we take words out of their natural place in talking, and assume they refer to some essence or ideal entity, which we then try to define, quite often unsuccessfully (find and insert W Quote) that has led us towards deceiving ourselves that we are living the home-ness that is necessary for our well-being. 

 Refer to the act of building, say a house with which we are familiar constructed of bricks. When we attempt to understand the application of the word brick as a concept or a brick as a thing, it contains both the quality of its everyday usage and materiality, in that a modern standard European brick is 102mm wide X 75mm deep X 225mm long and is a clay object; we can expand the example of a single brick into a million bricks transformed into a cathedral. The single brick combined with human agency and experience has revealed its hidden meaning and realized its potential and its meaning depends on the application. As Deluze observed we can throw a brick through a window, to maybe undertake a robbery, start a riot, or as a means of escaping from a burning building. We can also as Wittgenstein sought to achieve, attempt to build a perfect40 house. The concept brick has the potential to build a cathedral, within which to home priceless artifacts, or has the potential towards building a house becoming home. However, it should be remembered that Home is a concept that does not require necessarily the material qualities of the brick that builds the house. Home requires often but not exclusively the physical qualities of the house which can be made of sticks and or bricks, to construct four walls upon which to put a roof and inside which can be constructed a floor. It is in the within of structure that leads towards an ontological account of Home and it is there that we discover its potential, its real purpose, something that is buried deep within its meaning. Home therefore is not just to be in a house or shelter, home is being at home something which might be argued has become lost in the everyday. The notion home viewed from the outside and by that we might mean the normative, cultural literal influences that we encounter depends on many non-linguistic features, and these features deceive us into thinking we are ‘at home’ when often we are not. It is not the physical view from the outside looking in, nor the view from the inside looking out of a house that necessarily means being-at-home, rather as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard observed “the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace”41 This to be understood requires us to anchor to a datum-point which in this case is a 

39 W Engines and hi smathematics… 

40 Describe why the W House is near perfect… 

41 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 

physical-material house structure. In our developed minds42 we can dream of home somehow and we can through dreaming look at what it is to be at home. We can imagine standing outside the house; we can imagine floating above the house and we can imagine burrowing underneath the house and being in all three places or more at the same time and, then we can imagine looking into an enclosed space and seeing the potential that the space has to make us feel sheltered, secure, and even sanctified.43. Viewed from this multi-view-multi-dimensional aspect we seem to have an ability to look-into-being at home. This in effect is looking at the space within the physical structure but also looking at the space that we have given to home-ness within us. It is also in this sense that the notion home is inside us and the reality is outside us. The material realities we take for granted such as that, that architect-materialists through their designs on a page, make into houses, streets of houses, housing estates and urban landscapes are acquired realities and learnt behaviours rather than innate human qualities. Home for the architect-materialist starts as a material entity, where ‘bits & pieces’ are simply connected and which have been given sundry names, ‘chair’, table’, or ‘washing machine’. This has blurred the difference between house and home and the qualities or more accurately the ‘human feelings’ which have become lost and profoundly these are the feelings most associated with shelter, security, sanctuary and sacredness. The way perhaps to understand this sense of meaning, potentiality, and home-ness towards ‘what it is to be at home, is to think about the potentiality contained in the spaces that we don’t see, but have discovered through imagination, ingenuity and then proven through scientific experiment44. 

Similarly, recalling the urban architectural project, be it a cave, a bundle of branches to make a treehouse, a structure sailing along a quiet canal, a collection of terraces or a tower block on a housing estate or even a mansion on a hill, we can shape notions of shelter in our minds, but 

we cannot exist without shelter and this tells us something about our sense of self. However, what does this have to do with what it means to exist? (it is not immediately obvious) This may seem obvious but, think of our place in nature; to be human is to curl and unfurl within and without our shelters and we do seem to know somehow, beyond instinct, that our shelters can become an enclosed space called home and home captures the sense of some or all of the qualities, shelter, security, scaredness and sanctuary. 

Part II Structure and Being  

42 Imagination is an area of philosophical study that is treated in much more detail in The Philosophy of Mind and is not for this essay. However, it is an important question to consider: for example can a new-born-baby, or even an unborn baby imagine and this is the subject of much debate. 43 It should be noted at this point perhaps. that the faculties possessed by Architects and designers, artists and mathematicians, philosophers and scientists are no different to anyone else’s in this respect. The difference is that they have had the opportunity to become trained to use their faculties differently and this allows the concepts of three dimensional or even multi-dimensional views of the world to become actualised on for example a page and therefore in the world towards making a house or indeed a cathedral 

44 I am thinking here that the great natural philosophers imagined what they could not see, conducted experiments to prove their hypothesis, and used mathematics and geometry to demonstrate proofs in action. Think of the vacuum imagined as ‘space emptied’ devoid of matter a subject of debate in philosophy since the ancient Greeks and not really grasped until studied empirically by Evangelista Torricelli circa 1643. The seemingly alchemic qualities of the simple experiment to create a vacuum is wonderfully painted by Joseph Wright of Derby in his painting of 1768 ‘Experiment on A Bird in An Air Pump in The National Gallery London. It shows a candlelight scene of a family group huddled around an air pump, inside which is a little songbird that is mysteriously shown to be brought back to life when air is released back into the vacuum chamber. At the time this was thought of as magic and wizardry. 

For a moment, consider the Human Body…much like Michael Angelo’s’ Universal Man depicting the universe…or an everyday washing machine as a metaphor for both house and home. The human body and the machine has many different component and intricate parts that combine and function together to . The biological sciences have discovered that these parts, in particular the brain to function requires an electrical current. To understand an electrical current, we need to think about the world at the atomic level. Atoms are the building blocks of the universe. Think of the falling star, the majestic oak tree, the microscopic plant root; every human being and animal is made of atoms. Atoms are mostly empty space but at the centre of each atom is the nucleus. The nucleus is made up of particles called protons and neutrons. Electrons revolve around the nucleus in shells. The protons and electrons of an atom are attracted to each other and each carries an electrical charge. We have through evolution ingeniously figured out how to capture and harness this electrical charge to power our brain and our body, but also our material lives, such as our washing machines, to wash our clothes, which we wear as second skins. However, none of this tells us very much about the mind of a neighbour, the mind of her pet tarantula or indeed what microscopic plankton think. What we seek to understand is the property of mind and which might be referred to as the quality of mind, or to keep things very basic the quality of the wash and the feeling experienced when we adorn washed garments. One person’s feeling will be different to another’s. Even if one person describes this feeling to another in as precise a way as they possibly can, while at the same time their body & brain activity is being monitored and measured for the purposes of gathering supporting empirical and scientific data, we can never know another person’s mind. The feeing we get when we place clean garments against our naked skin, the sense of protection we get from the judging eye, the confidence we feel when we step out in glamorous dress, or the sense of sacredness felt by the priest when uttering prayers to a congregation once adorned with sanctified robes, yes these can be seen to be instinctive learned cultural behaviours, however these feelings that belong to each of us alone cannot be swapped or shared. In the same way that a washing-machine has an outer-skin and a material and mechanical function, our brain has a protective skull, and they are all powered by unseen universal forces. The outer skin of the house tells us little about the quality of ‘being at home’ which is also a-life lived inside, much as the protective bone in a skull tells us little about the mind and the brain enclosed. As the house encloses the body like a second skin it is in this sense that the meaning of ‘being at Home’ as ‘feeling’ depends on its articulation rather than its representation. The articulation of ‘being at Home’ requires not only potentiality but also the idea of something that has always been there waiting to be spelled out. Identifying ‘being at Home’ is a matter of analysing what is already there, not a matter of adding something new and the aim of an ontological account is to strip Home of its outer shell and its ‘bits & pieces’. The outer shell of the House, and its inner layers of societal constructs and cultural beliefs need to be peeled back so that we can peer into its centre, which much like the atom is an unknown mostly empty space. And it is this space that allows someone to be ‘home-sick’, yet scientific explanation and even the provision of shelter, security, sanctuary, and sacredness will not bring about peace from a yearning for home, if the space to ‘be at home’ in One’s Self does not exist, for example think of the sense of despair felt in homelessness. This is not the same as maybe a lack of ability to ‘get on in the world’ physically or mentally. The sense or feeling of ‘Home’ or ‘being at home’ is more to do with the spirit in which one acts. We do not stand outside this feeling, rather we dwell inside this feeling, it ‘just is’. Heidegger distinguishes this difference as being comfortable in an environment where one uses 'equipment' (the house) unselfconsciously and is 'absorbed in the everyday'. For Heidegger however being comfortable isn't a condition of maximum flourishing. He thinks you can only become 'authentic' by experiencing the uncanniness or the ‘just-is’ness’ of the everyday. It is within the mostly empty space that the potential of the 

Self becomes actualized. This is the articulation of a feeling of being not only at home but of ‘being at home’, is the self-seeing into the centre of its ‘home-space’ and this is a prelude to understanding Oneself in a truly authentic fashion. 

EXTRATS and DRAFT NOTES 

HOME AS A STATE OF MIND & BODY 

A PHILSOPHICAL TREATISE: 

or 

…in search of Wittgenstein’s Hut. 

It’s strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. 

John O’ Donohue 

An old irish saying 

Is ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine 

“we live in each other’s shadow and in each other’s shelter 

Language tells us about the nature of a thing 

Martin Heidegger 

Contents: 

Abstract? 

Introduction. 

1. Home: A Journey via Wittgenstein’s Hut 

2. Shelter and Security 

3. Sanctuary and Sacredness 

5. A Journey: Home via Home 

Conclusion 

Abstract? 

Do I need One? 

Introduction 

 My aim in this paper is to search for an ontological account of Home. First: human beings are at the centre of the natural world and they respond to the world they encounter. Second: as human beings we try to understand ourselves and the environment we live in, and we naturally strive to improve our capacity in ways that help us build to enhance our freedom. This is both a human and a political act. However, to become free, we need to survive as part of this world and the act of existing is something we do together. In this, to construct is to provide shelter, seek security, experience sanctuary; and for some this becomes sacred space: indeed, this describes existence itself. Home in this sense is an existential ontology. Heidegger refers to this as ‘being in the world’ 

How we build and then dwell is how we live. 

How we dwell, is how we build and then live . 

 By locating the home within the realm of the philosophical we can see that the edifice that encloses is not simply (though ‘the making’ can be very simple), material objects placed together located in the natural landscape. The house consisting of natural and material objects, made by us, and connected to landscape, is profoundly, mystically even, the tangible and unseen elements that form together to create an emotionally centred human existence. Furthermore, the home is more than a social good. Once formed we often call our houses Home. What then is Home? The descriptive term Home denotes the existence of something more than bricks and mortar. Home is more than an ordinary language word, say a noun in a language game . Home is a question and the question ‘What is Home’ becomes complex when it is considered that every finite thing has a built-in conatus to persist in its own being with the tendency to survival as a lower order priority and striving towards transcendence as the highest order of actualisation. This then becomes a search for truth and the question ‘What is Truth’ has not so far been fully resolved . 

 In this respect this is an endeavour that will be familiar to students of philosophy and philosophers alike since the time of the Ancient Greek Philosophers. Think of the enigmatic Socrates, who wrote nothing himself, ‘the arguer who never gave up…[and] who stubbornly chose to die’ rather than sacrifice his principles in search of truth. As for Plato having written the Apology as an account of Socrates life and death, he wondered about the ordinary world of the everyday while searching for true reality beyond the confines of our caves, indeed the ‘fable of the cave’ seems an apt metaphor in the search for Home. And for Plato’s student, Aristotle’s teleology continues to challenge the inquisitive mind while reminding us that we exist in a state of nature, much like Spinoza who put forward his proof that there is but ‘One Thing’: ‘Nature’ and this he sometimes calls God. Spinoza himself considered one of the great modern philosophers ‘developed what can be properly called a personal philosophy of life’ and in common with all of the great minds sought to understand the world by distinguishing between inquiry into what we know and inquiry into what exists . They asked what seemed like simple questions such as what is truth, what is justice, what is beauty, what is love and how do I know what I know about these things? Plato’s philosophy developed into knowledge and forms. For Plato we must try answer the question ‘What is X’ before we can say anything about X. Even today the questions at first glance seem simple, but the answers remain elusive. What are the many instances or examples of X? It turns out that the instances and examples of X are unreliable once we start to consider what is truth, goodness, beauty. Every instance of X will also be an instance of the opposite to X and this leads us question how we attach meaning at all to words, such as truth, goodness, beauty and Home. The search for Home in normative terms however sits in the shadow of industry and the social sciences, where the tendency is towards scientific data rather than the metaphysical and the simple question, what is Home remains unanswered. 

 The search for Home then is no less than a search for the truth of, why are we here? Who am I / who are we? What am I / what are we doing? This is the fundamental question of metaphysics and Heidegger amongst others put it thus, ‘why is there something rather than nothing? ‘, indeed, from the time of Parmenides in the 5th Century this is still one of the enduring problems in metaphysics. However whether the concept ‘nothing’ can be argued as ‘something’ is not for this essay, rather the question ‘what is home’, is a fundamental question located within metaphysics; this also seems to be a search for Self, or as Plato giving voice to Socrates might say, ‘know thyself’.  

 In summary this paper is a modest epistemological, metaphysical, and existential study, asking what is it that I / we really know about Home and is this genuine knowledge? Socrates for his part cautioned against searching for irrelevant explanations and certainly he ‘had no leisure for mythology’ , as he says in Phaedrus, ‘to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous’ .. This we might reasonably interpret as; the task of knowing oneself is nigh on impossible. Indeed, the famous Socratic aphorism “the only thing I know is how little I know” resonates and he maintained that genuine knowledge results from discovering universal definitions of key concepts. Whether my search for genuine knowledge of Home and therefore Self might add in any way to what is already known, will be debatable, I am hopeful however that my exploration will bring to light some novel ideas particularly as regards placing the Home within a philosophical framework, and at some point this may be found useful. 

Home: A Journey via Wittgenstein’s Hut 

 It is not difficult to imagine that most of the great minds all followed the same path, starting out, asking simple questions which then branched out into a forest of philosophical entanglement. To illustrate; like many others seeking Home, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher most associated with turning complexity of thought into simplicity of language needed the sanctuary afforded by the shelter and security of a simple House in the remote mountains of Norway. This place was made as a stripped back bare-bones Hut. It Housed his body and his meagre possessions, but once lived in it became a place that his mind could know as Home. This was not mindless action. This was Home as a state of mind and body. This was Home as sanctuary and indeed as a place of prayer, for Wittgenstein was forever praying, maybe not in the familiar biblical sense, but certainly he prayed for his mind to be still so his body could become calmed. He thought often of taking his own life , as his sense of self-worth deluded him into thinking his life was worthless. Considering in this light it is hard not to see that the Hut that Wittgenstein called Home was much more than the materials from which it was made. At a lecture to his students in Cambridge circa 1936 he read an extract from a detective novel. The detective in the novel is alone on the deck of a ship in the middle of the night and hears no sound except the ticking of the ships clock. The detective muses to himself ‘a clock is a bewildering instrument at best: measuring a fragment of infinity: measuring something which does not exist perhaps’. As Wittgenstein observed to his students ‘obviously a clock is not a bewildering instrument at all’ – ‘the clock becomes a bewildering instrument when we say, it measures a fragment of infinity, measuring something which does not exist perhaps . What makes the clock, or the home bewildering is the introduction of a sort of an entity which can’t be seen but that we can somehow picture in our mind. Similarly be it a cave, a bundle of branches to make a tree-house, a structure sailing along a quiet canal, a collection of terraces or a tower block on a housing estate or even a mansion on a hill, we can shape notions of shelter in our minds, but we cannot exist without shelter. However, what does this have to do with what it means to exist? This may seem obvious but, as a snail carries its shelter on its back, to be human is to curl and unfurl within and without our shelters. Of course, and as far as we know, we do not yet know what a snail knows? Is its shelter a place of security, sanctuary or indeed sacredness? Until we can figure out the mind of a snails, it must remain conjecture that the difference between us human beings and the humble snail is, that we do seem to know somehow, beyond instinct, that our shelters can become an enclosed space called home capturing the sense of some or all of the qualities, shelter, security, scaredness and sanctuary. However, what are these qualities? Do they exist if we remove the instinctive and the sense-data that we understand and associate with the qualities of sacredness say? At first glance the answer might seem relatively straight-forward. Indeed, the home when viewed through the combined lenses of architectural design, mathematical theory & materials science, or anthropology, psychology, and social science, we do glean some understanding about ‘the how’ space becomes home. However if we ask; what do we know about ‘why’ a material space becomes something other than mere shelter, while removing all of the body-sense-data that we associate with a space becoming home it seems to become something that rests in the mind and this merits philosophical investigation. In this, Home-Space thinking philosophically is neither a logical nor a physical possibility, rather the thesis is: Home-Space is the metaphysical possibility of home which reads to an existentialist phenomenology. 

 Socrates for his part framed the notion Home as a series of laws ‘that shaped him: they were his home’ and although they eventually led to his death, these same laws made possible ‘the way of being, that is Socrates’ someone ‘who even as an individual, owes itself to something beyond his immediate personal realm’ . For Socrates and Wittgenstein and indeed all of us, Home is the sticks and mud that we carry with us for shelter or the bricks and 

mortar of the polis, but home is also and at the same time something else. Home is the nature of the human person, its community, its politics and its natural and built environment.  

 This leads to, what it is that we know? There are thoughts, notions, concepts, objects, and subjects that hide in plain sight. The wonder of just existing and being alive is one of them. All being well we rarely feel the need to question, and in many ways concepts, constructs and institutions such as God, faith and government envelop and then provide the answers that we want to hear and therefore make perfect sense so why question?. Home is another. As a thought, notion, concept, object, and subject Home is also something that hides in plain sight; while seeming to hover under the radar of, what we understand to be serious philosophical study. However, if we bring home into the light and consider carefully the question ‘what is home’ as a metaphysical mind-body question rather than an analytical question , we can frame it thus: What is Home, starts as a question, it follows with an exploration of the idea of Home that then becomes a question that maybe asks ‘is this all there is?’ This leads to another question. In simple diagrammatic form, knowledge of Home is something that can be discovered through questioning, exploration, and questioning. 

….once the journey has commenced starting with the question ‘what is home’ the explorations becomes a circular question that collapses into itself and the stalls quite quickly due to the inadequacy that ordinary language has in capturing and informing in a meaningful way four interdependent aspects and sub-aspects of Home. These are: 

Aspect Sub-Aspect 

Shelter Roof / Sky / Nature / Element / Visible 

Security Walls / Floor / Earth / Nature / Element / Visible 

Sanctuary Body / Mind / Nature / Element / Visible / Invisible 

Sacredness Mind / Body / Element / Nature / Invisible 

Taking this approach Home can be considered as a philosophy of interdependence : which taken together form a universal representational subject. This is something that we can consciously represent to ourselves as a multidimensional attribute of the self and its agency. However, it also seems clear that we are each limited to our own perceptual world view and therefore a question arises: how ought we view Home in terms our individual human-being on the one hand, and our collective human- being on the other, and in so doing, understand perhaps, a little more our place in the world and indeed why we exist at all? If we think of  shelter and security from a social philosophical viewpoint, aspects of Home and the notion that as human beings we had to start somewhere, arise much like the question that the philosopher Martin Heidegger poses: ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ Possibly I 

will follow with an exploration Spinoza’s thoughts here…transcendence towards the sacredness of home in nature  

 Home then, is used interchangeably as a representational term that is; ‘home is of the mind’ or ‘home as a mode of thinking’ or even that ‘home is a state of mind & body’ which denotes: 

1. Subject, 

2. Object 

3. Both 

Home uniquely is also a term that can be imagined, sensed, framed and then realized as a physical or bodily and material representation of home particularly as it relates to forms of shelter such as the house and our built environment. However, home is more than ‘bricks & mortar’. To explore this, I have adopted the notion of philosophical interdependence and I have taken as a starting point, the notion that thought comes before language and from language interdependence flows. Immediately however there is a concern. The appropriation of the term ‘home’ from its ordinary language usage runs into problems of understanding. That said, attempts to formulate a seemingly straightforward concept into a philosophical idea is not new. Aristotle in De Anima places the notion of universal thoughts within the soul; ‘that part that knows and thinks’, and he asks, ‘what differentiates the different parts of the soul and how thinking can take place?’.  

If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible. 

Picking up Aristotle’s key point ‘… Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible’, in more recent times particularly in the field of analytic philosophy and contemporary linguistics, philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle J.L Austin, R.P Strawson, Gottlob Frege, Rudolf Carnap and others looked to, ‘what is sensible’ and then sought to articulate how thoughts becoming language could be explained using logic and philosophical argument. Ordinary everyday language was dismissed as being of little philosophical significance and could not really help solve metaphysical and epistemological problems. Wittgenstein, maybe the best known of the so-called Vienna Circle, sought to reformulate the language of everyday as a ‘language game’ and from there transpose ‘ordinary language’ into logical form. Very basically , his philosophical endeavour was a call for philosophy to dissolve the appearance of philosophical problems rather than an attempt at meaningless efforts to solve them. Looking back, Spinoza in turn through the geometrical method sought to unify body, mind, and universe. Like Wittgenstein’s TLP, Spinoza’s most important work Ethics is a difficult and challenging philosophical treatise and, it is written in definitions, axioms, propositions, and 

demonstrations, with the aim towards understanding a ‘world-spirit’. This is something he called God. Wittgenstein on the other hand struggled with the notion of God, however as far as he and Spinoza’s philosophical systems, and for near contemporaries such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty Kuhn, to name just some, what they had in mind was a path towards a common goal, a search for genuine knowledge and to answer the question: what do these thoughts that we have mean and represent? It is in this respect that we are only able to articulate our thoughts somehow and indeed maybe only somewhat, via sounds and symbols; and so how can these sounds and symbols, of which ‘home’ is unique, be understood? How might the sound and symbolism of home, help us make sense of the world and our place in it? And, once we have made sense, or profoundly once we have found our sense of place and taken shelter there, what is it that we find, and how do we know? The Hegelian philosopher, poet and writer John O’ Donohue put it thus: 

Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world awaits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world. Through our voices we bring out sounds…these sounds are words. The world is full of words. The noise of words keeps what we call the world there for us. Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call the world together. Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.  

 A language therefore it is argued is not just words and sentences. The words we use and the way we use them is a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, and is in a sense a whole history that creates what a community is and therefore what it means to be. It is in this sense that human beings become embodied in a language and in its usage and that there are universals that we call upon to understand both the self and our place in the world. It cannot be assumed however that these are things that function as material objects in the same way that a display cabinet might function as a thing to put a vase of flowers on, although interestingly, once said vase is placed, we might think, “oh my it is so beautiful that vase really looks at home there”. This form of thinking becoming expression, often expands into the superfluous, whereby homes become curated objects embodied not in the sense of living in home as being, rather the human aspect has become something that is decorated with the term that in a language game are meaningless subjects. There are certain universals however that transcend our ordinary use language. The notion truth is accepted as a universal, even as it become dissected with the logician’s scalpel. P→Q is an object and a subject in a truth-table, however it might be constructed and placed in a language game. Similarly, the notion home is a universal, and however termed or constructed and placed in a language game, the idea of home sits as a metaphysical representation of our being; just as we are unable to escape truth, 1+1 = 2, we are simply unable to escape home, no matter who we are, or where we are. However, we continue to question and much like Plato’s parable of the cave our perceived realities look to logic to question the shadows that form on the walls of the life that surrounds us. To find ourselves we first need simple shelter, somewhere that offers security, this object shelter often becomes a sanctuary, and that combined with our human being makes it into something that became sacred. 

 On the surface, the question What is Home seems a straightforward question; this is not a particularly novel or new question. It has been asked before, but in a myriad of different ways, mainly in the context of everyday language as it relates to the built environment, and communications through the, technical, architectural political and social sciences . However, 

in both the general and the academic literature, the concept home, has become compressed from an idea that holds a series of multidimensional meanings into a single meaning, namely ‘the house’ and the house on its own is an entity which becomes meaningless when stripped of its human-mind dimension. Is this important and if so, do we know why it is important? The thought is, that as human beings we think we know, why home is important, but it is not altogether clear, how, we know home is important. I suggest that to gain a better understanding of home, we need to explain how we know why home is important and therefore answer the question what is home? It is in this sense that this thesis orients towards natural philosophical enquiry rather than an analysis of scientific data, this is for the other disciplines. Nor will an adherence to a specific philosophical system such as linguistics or phenomenology be adequate and a look towards metaphysics, and some aspects of the philosophy of mind and social philosophy seems to offer a better path towards understanding home. In the main however the intention is to focus on a more interesting aspect, in that the concept of home can be investigated perhaps as a post-Kantian transcendental and existential idea where home is a state of mind that includes an innate mode of thinking that can be cognized uniquely as a non-physical object in the mind. In other words, we can think of home in our minds, normally in the shape of a house-like structure and this can either remain as a thought or given the wherewithal can be made into a physical entity that can be experienced with all the human senses. The thought home however does not require the external human senses, in order to become realised as human agency. the claim is that thought X (home) is a necessary condition for the possibility Y (home) and Y if realised equates to W (emotional and physical well-being which can also include the house). This formulation essentially concerns itself with an existential question, whether the thought ‘home’ is something a priori, a posteriori or both? Is home a universal idea becoming a concept which has a potential towards physical reality and which along with a necessary human dimension if considered philosophically might offer us some clues as to why we exist at all? 

 The study of Home has been left in the main to the social sciences. This may be because we do not it seems consider home as an inviolable right, afforded the same status as the right to life and liberty, however we do consider the right to property ownership, which in the main are our houses, as inviolable. It is in this context that the political and social sciences view home as ‘the home’, ‘a place, to call home’, ‘I have a home for this kitten’, ‘that vase looks right at home here’. etc This is quite different to the idea Home and are not necessary conditions for the possibility Home, however these descriptions of human action are the necessary conditions for the ancient notion of eudaemonia or human flourishing which Aristotle introduced as the bed-rock essential for our well-being. We have as human beings a first order need for shelter to survive, and this need has evolved over millennia to become our houses. In effect these material structures becoming entities. enclosing natural spaces, have become by design a system of social control. In turn our concept of home has been appropriated into socially constructed systems that serve to reduce our innate notion of home and our sense of self to the material objects that house our lives. These systems have over time become embedded legal frameworks that place the right to the earth’s natural resources with those who appropriate for material gain. This is not to say that the right to own property is in-itself a wrong, rather the commodification of our emotional connection to home is perhaps a concern that turns away from the notion that home might be considered in the form of a transcendental object or substance. Again he philosopher Martin Heidegger provides a path towards a philosophy of home-existing-in-the-mind, observing: ‘dwelling is the goal of building though not every building is a dwelling, or in other words, how we build and then 

dwell is how we live, and how we dwell is how we build and then live. Critically however Heidegger is asking us to think about how we really live and dwell, he is asking us to consider something that is in the mind but that sits alongside the physical world: he says “buildings house our lives even when they are not literally our houses’ . Or to make it even clearer, he says, “first we must think, then we will dwell, then we will build as we should. Before the first two stages are achieved it is impossible to say what the third will look like.” 

Shelter: and Security 

Thought: A simple, physical structure whereby there is protection against the elements, such as wind, rain, intense sunlight. 

 Another way perhaps towards asking the question philosophically, ‘what is home’ might be to consider Carl Sagan’s opening line in his introduction to Stephen Hawking’s literary masterpiece A Brief History of Time: 

“we go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world…few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos comes from, or whether it was always there, if time will one day flow backwards and effects preceded causes; or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know”  

 The starting point here is a certainty that there are ultimate limits to what humans can know, or as Socrates famously stated, there is only one certainty and that is how little I know. So, the question ‘what is home’ can be considered an epistemological question: how do we know that we know what we know about home? A way towards an answer to how, we know what we know about home, might be if home is understood as something about which nothing greater can be thought. Anslem of Canterbury’s famous ontological argument for the existence of God calls upon this thought in his metaphysics, however if we put aside the idea of faith in a supreme being, we can explore the idea that we cannot exist without home and home cannot exist without us. This line of thinking places home at the centre of human nature and simply put, we are unable to escape the thought home. And it is in this sense that home becomes sacred. That said, we need not dispense with metaphysics completely. Home is something that exists within the metaphysical or more narrowly within the transcendental realm but, uniquely home is also something that exists by virtue of certain physical attributes that make home a reality. This is not a new problem. Most famously Descartes pondered this notion, in that how can we know that the thought ‘cogito ergo sum ‘ is proof of being, and this remains a persuasive and contested idea. Indeed, once we take up Descartes thought into our own minds it is hard to dismiss the thought that ‘I am a thinking mind and therefore I am’. Heidegger on the other hand upends Descartes with the thought to ‘I am therefore I think’ and that it is only when we are ‘thrown into the world’ that we come into being. 

 There are of course countless philosophical, scientific, and technical pieces of literature on the mind-body problem and any attempt to understand how the essentiality of home might be framed within the mind-body problem, requires a slightly different approach. To this there is 

a wonderful passage at the start of J.R.R Tolkien’s literary masterpiece The Hobbit that suggests that home is both at once physical and metaphysical. The claim goes like this: there 

are many if not most who will say that the Hobbit does not exist, and therefore his home does not exist, but it is clear to even the most rational thinking sensible reader, whom upon reading the passage below can see where the Hobbit lives, 

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty dirty wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit hole and that means comfort. It had a perfectly round door like a porthole painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke; with panelled walls; and floors tiled and carpeted. And chairs and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats – for the hobbit was fond of visitors…[and] many little round doors first on one side and then on the other side; bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these) wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes) kitchens, dining rooms...the best rooms were the only ones to hav 

, e windows, deep set round windows, looking over his garden, and the meadows beyond sloping down to the river. 

Tolkien somehow captures home as being and therefore gives it meaning. Home has become an entity that can be firmly grasped and recognised as a mode of thinking that is embedded into our minds. Of course, we could never have known Tolkien’s mind until he brought the Hobbit to life, and the Hobbit only lives because he had somewhere to call home. Nor can we really know how another person lives or what is in anther persons mind, because and as it relates to the reality of their unique human existence and not ours. The universal notion home whether it be The Hobbit, The Queen of The Castle, the Garden City Dweller or The Housing Estate Tenant is an attribute of being, specifically mind, where we make implicit associations with our immediate surroundings. As we grow and develop these help us make sense of the world around us and become part of human cognition. These associations with the physical realm are learned behaviours and as conscious agents they are experiences built upon experiences as we grow older. As human beings we travel existentially further from the centre of our immediate being where our attitudes are shaped both implicitly and explicitly by the social norms and cultural values that surround us. As our horizons expand and we continue to move forever towards them, we process huge amounts of information and stimuli and we categorize what we experience and like the ancient mariner seeking out the far horizon, we sometimes wonder will we ever see the edge of our world. In the past, falling off the edge of the world if we sailed too far seemed as certain as the sun rising and setting. If rain fell from the sky, there was no doubt in both mind and body that if we did not seek shelter, we would get wet and cold and eventually perish. In this, our earthly spaces have not changed. As we have travelled further, the great philosopher’s and ordinary mortals attempt to understand ‘the mind of God’ and it is difficult to comprehend that we exist in a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a creator to do. This requires a leap of faith away from faith, however, we do hold on to some certainties, such as the earth is a globe and around and around it we can go. And so we continue to look for patterns and associations and our brain will group these associations into common patterns which become repeated each time we come across them. These associations become reinforced both consciously and sub-consciously. In western societies we do this mostly with our houses , automatically categorising them according to a range of characteristics, what they look like, becomes what they should look like. We take comfort in similarities even though the similarities are socially and culturally constructed modes of implanted associations. These implicit associations are deeply rooted, they influence our behaviours and 

thoughts without us realising it. In effect the way we have come to view Home has become an unknowing and therefore possibly at times an unhealthy self-serving attribution bias blurring the distinction between knowing how and knowing why home is important and therefore what home is? The epistemological challenge therefore is to remove the bias by removing learned behaviours. This requires a shift from conventional thinking, including our conventions related to the language games that shape and frame our thoughts. Instinctively we gravitate towards our biological needs as a lower order need which manifests as the physical structures that constitutes shelter. Once this lower order need is satisfied, we can move towards exploring more fully our innate need for home, which however known is an attribute of nature necessary for human existence. These attributes are not created or given to man by some agency outside himself, although this is where the ontology of home becomes manifest as a house, rather home is something created by man not outside the mind but of the mind. These modes of being can be understood as an order of essentiality: 

1. Shelter, 

2. Security, 

3. Sanctuary 

4. Sacredness. 

 In the everyday we tend to think of Home as something that is tangible, something that can be lifted and transported from one place to another place, however the Home is not in reality ‘a thing’, although we have become conditioned to think of it as such. An obvious answer might be that surely a nomad transporting her tent across the American plains, or the an lucht siúil, meaning "the walking people” travelling from place to place in Ireland, carry their homes with them. It is clear that the physical attributes that we associate with Home have the capacity for both solidity and fluidity and indeed the materials that are put towards enclosing space require the property of malleability allowing the shape-shifting material structures that form the houses that we have become so familiar with. The tent carrying traveller in effect is carrying his house on his back, but his Home in his mind. Home therefore is something quite different, that is, it is something that can only be experienced as a thought and is therefore innate, much as Descartes believed that inborn in our minds are certain mathematical ideas such as the ideas of geometrical shapes, or the idea of God and of essences or eternal truths and even the thought that something cannot come from nothing. The mind-body problem that Descartes or Spinoza grappled with offers a philosophical path towards our attempt to understand more fully how we might know why Home as thought-off in the mind is important. 

 At its most basic, as a level order 1 priority, shelter is something that provides us with the physical protection whereby we can equip ourselves against the elements. While the hobbit might not be real, in this world; as human beings, we are simply not able to cope with the extremes of nature such as the wind and rain, the heat of the high summer sun or freezing temperatures in winter. In many ways we are not unlike all other animals and just as a door-mouse makes its nest in the weaving of some wheat stalks, or a hedgehog curls its spiky being into a protective blanket of leaf-litter, or a barn owl making its roost high in the rafters of an old barn, or indeed as a snail carries its home on its back, we human animals search first 

for place, we then asses if this place can provide us with the material wherewithal to build a shelter, and having decided that ‘this is a good place’ we proceed to construct and make. This seems at first glance not particularly extraordinary, nor would it seem that this line of thought has any philosophical merit, however imagining the first human thought rational or otherwise, as human beings we have always needed to seek shelter or we perish. Furthermore while it may seem slightly outlandish to relate place making today with our prehistoric ancestors, it was they who sought out and inhabited the shelter of caves at Lascaux in South West France, or the Altamira caves in Northern Spain. In terms moving from the first human thoughts on survival, towards cave living and then deciding to mark these places as home; the exquisite examples of cave paintings points to our ancestors seeking meaning through dwelling. The caves that our prehistoric cousins occupied, afforded protection in what would seem to us today a very primitive shelter, however at some stage in their evolution there was a profound shift towards social cohesion. We moved from becoming primitive housebuilders, to becoming home-makers. We had discovered the life preserving benefits of fire allowing us to keep warm, cook for sustenance and now we had something more profound, an innate sense of being through dwelling perhaps and with a little imagination we can picture now, the human intimacy of our ancient family laughing, holding hands and dancing and in a moment of joy and a knowledge of self they decided to leave future generations a sign that something amazing had occurred: they made a hand-print. There is something universal about being a human person that impels us to leave our mark and so making a place special. Our human ancestors left us that most intimate of signs, their hand-prints, adults and children as one making a gesture unique to the human spirit which along with the paintings of everyday life on the walls of those caves are saying “I am here, I will always be here because this is my home”.  

Security: 

Thought: Protection against forces other than, or in addition to, the elements, such as predation from animals or factors, human or otherwise, that could physically threaten or harm. 

 Under normal everyday circumstances it is in our homes that we feel most secure. Physical shelter is critical for survival, and it is only once we have found and made our place, then through a sense of physical safety do we move towards making it secure. In the natural world from time immemorial we can imagine that we have quickly figured out that just finding or making shelter is not enough to protect us from getting eaten by those in our animal family who are hungry and more powerful than us. Equally having found and constructed shelter, the act of securing it against predators allowed us in turn to use our intelligence in such a way that we could hunt, gather, cook, store and think about the future. Specifically, the act of securing our shelter allowed ‘future-thinking’ and logically in order to think about the future we need to remember and learn from the past. We put a lot of effort into securing our homes form perceived threats that are irrational etc However most of us have been deceived into thinking that live in a house, we become free to live a good life; one that is in tune with our human and earthly nature and which is based on four seemingly straight-forward, but if viewed philosophically, become the rather complex concepts subjects shelter, security, sanctuary and sacredness. Most people think of their homes as physical material entities or 

'bricks and mortar'. This entity once constructed provides shelter, and security as first order properties and in simple terms are substances essential for basic survival. It is thought then that once these needs have been satisfied, sanctuary and a sense of sacredness come into being as second order properties and therefore not as important as becoming sheltered and secured but all combining to represent an entity that we call home. At a social philosophical level, this first and second order of properties leans towards Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’  and if viewed through this lens the needs we have as human beings for shelter and security appeals to the vulnerability of the body, while the need for sanctuary appeals to the vulnerability of the mind. However, the human condition framed in this way is problematic. The conditions that have become secondary are in actuality a first order need which is a necessary condition essential for the freedom to become fully human. The construct that places the need for shelter and security above the need for sanctuary, has the effect of  dehumanizing the human person due to the exploitation of a natural resource in favour of a few over the many... to be has become decoupled from the essentiality of what it means to be fully human and this as shall be explored further in chapter / part. In conclusion home therefore is to be understood as a moral philosophical concept. Home is something that is in the mind, but essential for the body. One cannot live a full meaningful life without the other. How we choose to embody the concept of home is more complex than might ne thought, particularly if home is thought of a superficial concept. In conclusion home is a beneficial constitute of the human mind 

Sanctuary & Sacredness 

Sanctuary: 

Thought: spiritual aspect which implies a place of tranquillity, harmony, and calm. A place where thoughts can be gathered and subjects pondered, for example, in a study. Does not necessarily have to be within the confines of four walls, however, as sanctuary could be achieved in the garden. 

Sacredness: 

Thought: the idea that a part of the home can be dedicated to a god and used as a place of worship, such as a shrine, or more loosely or broadly defined as a place that is reserved for an individual where they can be safe from assault, trespass, or violation. , possibly by other members of the household. A place where there can be no intrusion or disturbance by anyone else, (although here there is the overlap with sanctuary, 

but perhaps sanctuary could be a more general area for any member of the household 

The architecture of Home does not teach us what the sacred is, but it may touch it and draw others us to it. Can we design spaces that call for a meeting between the earth and the heavens? This can maybe be illustrated with a philosophical journey towards Home 

A Journey Home 

 It was just starting to rain as I walked up the grassy lane towards the cottage. I remembered the old Irish saying “is ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine” it means that we live in each other’s shadow and in each other’s shelter, and is a reminder from an ancient history that we are all connected. I had returned home after many years away, finding, that while much had changed it was still the same. The window frames painted red had become faded over time and cast shadows that seemed to bleed into the white-washed walls of the cottage. I remembered painting those walls as a boy, mixing the lime with water and watching it burble in a big black bucket like some primordial soup about to morph into a globby monster and thinking, that the only way to keep the monster at bay was to paint it in thick layers onto the cottage walls. I thought of my Mother and her soft lilting tone recounting the story of how my great-great-great grandfather had single-handedly built the cottage during the great famine in Ireland. The thick, rough stone walls had provided shelter and warmth; a small mercy while the potato harvests turned into a rotten mush overnight. The smoke from the turf-fires at that time, she said, masked the stench of hunger and starvation, while the remoteness of the cottage provided a welcome sanctuary from the worst ravages of the potato blight. Over time and as the famine subsided, the cottage became a sacred place, a ‘wake-house’ where the dead where remembered and prayed over; it became a ‘first-night-place’ after a wedding day, where ‘life’ was made, and it became a welcome refuge for future generations to call home. The memories of childhood and of my mother had become washed into and bound up in the house. I wondered, are these memories the perceptions of past experiences, experienced? Indeed, is there even such a thing ‘as the past’? What do we as human beings mean when we think about or talk about the past? Our experiences and memories are remembered, though the majority seem to become forgotten, but surely, they do not become permanently erased? This line of thought has exercised the great philosophers, from Socrates, Aristotle & Plato, through St Anselm and St Augustine, to most famously Descartes who exclaimed cogito ergo sum, ‘I think therefore I am’. This surely is an experience. It is still not clear what-of our many past experiences can be known, however it would seem that in order to be known, memories seem to require the addition of a physical event. An obvious example would be the birth of a child; a mother surely never forgets the moment she and her baby change the human and natural world in a unique way. Another example might be the occasion of someone getting married and the physical and material addition of the church service along with wedding dress, photographs of the happy couple and the giving of wedding rings. These material items seem to serve as reminders of human events becoming anchored to experience which somehow become connected like links in a chain. Equally a person dying; that person will never remember their own death (as far as we know) (note: discount near death experiences), however the physical and material act of burying a person once alive and now dead serve as a reminder or a connection to our past lived experiences. And it is in the traditional Irish ‘Wake-House’ that these experiences become manifest and indeed profound. The practice of holding a prayer vigil and keeping watch over the dead until they are buried is a custom that is as ancient as man itself, and is practised in some form or another in most countries through-out the world. In Ireland it is a custom that is profoundly connected to hearth & home. The wake lasts for 3 days and 2 nights before burial and family and 

neighbours come to the home to pay their respects, join in prayer, and enjoy ‘the craic’. This is form of remembrance is a centuries old tradition that in a sense can only take place when folk return to their memories. To remember the person now gone, it is the lived experiences 

that calling upon past experiences which celebrate a life lived. It is this experience that the ‘potentiality of hope’ for life going on. While it would seem rational to think that certain memories and experiences can stay with us from the moment of experience to the moment of our death it also seems irrational to think that other memories and experiences can become permanently erased, rather they have been forgotten maybe. The tradition of ‘The Wake’, but with the mental tools that allow us to mine the memories of our own minds and indeed other minds, with work, albeit an infinite amount of work, we would eventually be able to link the chain of our experiences much as Hume thought from start to end. 

 How can memories come into existence and then having existed disappear? It seems an odd thought, to think that our memories derived from experiences disappear. Indeed if thought about; from our very first experience at the commencement of life, to our very last experience at the end of life, these experiences all somehow become in a sense stacked up as we get older, one following the other, all becoming mixed with the physicality of our universal nature. Indeed, the question might be are memories physical? Certainly, as human beings we seem unable to touch memories external to our physical being, or can we? Before exploring this notion more fully this question can be placed within a philosophical framework. To do this we need to explore and try to understand our place in the world, and by this we mean our existence or what does it mean to exist? Critically we cannot exist on this planet and in this world without some form of external physical shelter. James Joyce in his celebrated novel Portrait of The Artist as Young Man looks to notions of a universal consciousness, manifesting itself in the quite street of North Richmond Dublin: he wrote “the houses conscious of decent lives within them gazed at one another with brown inpertruble faces” and we wonder how we associate the human story with our material and natural order. Immanuel Kant observed that 

‘certain of our cognations rise completely above the sphere of all possible experience, and by means of conceptions, to which there exists in the whole extent of experience…[into] the transcendental or supersensible sphere, where experience affords us neither instruction nor guidance…it is lie the investigatons of reasons’  

Take this house described above or any house for example. The house clearly is a physical entity made up of thousands of physical and material substances. The house becomes into being as a home only as it exists in sympathy with the human condition. The walls of houses become washed with the passing waves of lived experiences. This is a quite different to the lived experiences that we attach to the civic buildings that add to create the built environment. These material structures are not necessary for human survival, rather they are dependent upon the construction of human shelter; a house which has become a Home. 

 Much like anyone might when they enter a house, I took in my immediate surroundings. It was in the haphazard details, the way the books where stacked higgledy-piggledy on the bookshelves. In the living room, the worn-out armchair was still there in front of the open fire. My mother loved to sit in that old chair and read quietly to herself once the children had 

been chased off to bed with a switch cut from the ancient hawthorn tree in the front garden. The smoke from the fire-making each morning had left its imprint on the wall above the hearth; and as I stood there thinking of the generations of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, cousins, friends and neighbours and previous generations before him, warming themselves at the fire, I could in my mind smell and taste the turf-smoke, distinctive and unforgettable, and feel the heat thrown out from its fiery glow. It was said that the fairies’ lived under the hawthorn tree, and at night when everyone was asleep they would settle in front of the dying embers, heat their tatties, sip little glasses of whiskey and sing, laugh, dance and tell yarns until dawn. It was a nice memory I thought. It connected me to the place again, but in truth I had never really left. The notion that I existed at all in time and space, in this place, suddenly overwhelmed me. It seemed obvious that the material physicality of place combining somehow with a sense of self was the manifestation of nature itself. It was not clear however, as Spinoza observed, that ‘one thing follows from another’? Thinking about home and human nature, do they exist as distinct separate entities or substances? Does one follow the other, if so, which goes first? Where is the starting point? It would seem at first obvious that the notion building the house, which might be an instinctive or intuitive notion ‘to build and therefore to dwell’ ,comes first, however surly the concept home starts with an idea, that of shelter. The concept home might be understood as a single infinitesimal moment, becoming a series of moments that would develop into experiences much like the philosopher David Hume would observe in his Treatise of Human Nature. (1740). Hume’s natural philosophical approach was to divide the mystery of personal or human nature into countless impressions or experiences, gained over a lifetime, staring at a point of existence. I considered these experiences as something both intuited and determined, simply bundles of perceptions making up a human life, and that if we attempt to look for our human nature beyond these perceptions, this is rather like looking for a chain apart from the links that connect it, much like the impressions, experiences and memories that connect us to our nature in a place called home. Peg Rawes considered the relationship between Spinoza’s ethics and housing welfare, referencing Spinoza stating that ‘society is assisted by the doctrine of relations which teaches us to hate no one, despise no one, ridicule no one, be angry with no one, envy no one; that everyone should be content with what he has and should help his neighbour…solely from the guidance of reason as occasion and circumstance require (E IIP49S)’ , and yet more than anything in our human nature it is the concept of home physically manifesting itself as shelter, security etc that causes us the most grief… 

 The cottage was rented out now. The house at that moment had returned to its physical form, just four walls, a floor and a roof enclosing a space at a precise moment in time for the strangers who now paid to inhabit this living space. My mother had lived in happiness and had died in pain in that house. The farmer next door had wondered, since I no-longer lived in the house, “why I didn’t sell it?”. “It’s too full of memories… they are me… and I’m not for sale” I replied. It struck me that I had left the house behind but not the home. Leaving my home behind would be like trying to escape my own nature, my very existence and surely this is not possible. 

Conclusion: 

Thought: Without Home we simply cannot exist. 

 There are of course countless stories both fictional and factual that refer to house and home. In social philosophy and particularly in architecture Le-Corbiusioe was famous for his houses as function over form and machines for living in. Frank -Loyd Wright …Bahaus…Alfred Loos…who was a contemporary of Wittgenstein …. similarly thought that ornamentation was a capitalist plot…. Wittgenstein is regarded as one of the greatest minds in human history, but is less well known for his love of architecture and the house that he designed and built, which is most highly regarded for its attention to detail and offering a glimpse into his philosophical thinking. Wittgenstein retreated to the wilds of Norway where he built a primitive hut, a place where he could escape to think, contemplate. This space became nature tamed and enclosed in order for it to become human. The four walls, a floor and a roof connected Wittgenstien , …then Hideigger…then Spinoza…they all connected material space to human nature …etc etc…. in terms (architecture, social sicent etc,,,) and the above short passage captures quite simply our human existence as it is bound up in home. The description of memories, dreams, needs and desires are universal and distinctly human, and which become into existence by virtue of our nature. Nature in turn does not exist separated from the human person but as something inherently human. The home in nature therefore is not only the instinctive urge towards building shelter, which provides also security and is somewhere to seek sanctuary or create a place that is sacred, but is something that we can and do think of as something of which nothing greater can be conceived’ . Taking this path then, home can be placed at the centre of a complex network of innate ideas: these ideas have formed into superordinate concepts which can be revealed as entities that serve in turn to create our human-built environment. We see then the manifestation of home bound to human nature at every turn. Home as the artist and architectural theorist Freidensreich Hundertwasser states ‘…is our second skin the outward expression of who we are’. Where this thesis diverges from Hundertwasser;s notion that the house can in a sense be changed in the way that we might change our outwardly appearance, home is an ontology is an entity that we are able to shed or shake-off but are unable to escape from. Indeed any attempt at esape is a denial of human nature and might be best described as the r we from our human nature. T 

 Artist and architectural theorists as Hundertwasser connect the mystery of home to the material with the argument that the current styles of building houses “deplete the expressive possibilities of the house” and the substance home becomes disconnected . He argues that the house is our second skin – the outward expression of who we are – and that in modern approaches to building, this skin becomes standardised. We take on the attitude of being like any and every other person, like no specific person: we live, as Heidegger says, as ‘one of them’. Considered philosophically our homes are entities, or modes of being (a thing with distinct and independent existence, existence; being ) that exist not only in the mind constrained by our imagination dreams, needs and desires but also as something that has substance. I argue that, in Spinozian terms, the entity home is a substance which is ontologically and epistemologically self-subsistent and requires nothing beyond itself to exist; and that a true understanding of it requires nothing outside of the concept of the substance itself. 

Or if one thing depends on the other, might this be a mutual dependency, and if so, what might this mean for the Hobbesian who seeks to frame the right to property as an inalienable right, much the same as the right to life? If the right to life a human right, is not the right to home by virtue of its nature be a human right also. We might try to detach our sense of self from the memories of home to the physicality of ‘the now’. We might through artificial constructs detach the concept home from a space enclosed and return it to its physical form. 

This might be simply four walls a floor and a roof making a house. however, this is all it is, it’s just a house!  

Robert McCann Draft (Part) Dissertation for Professor Susan James Review 1st Session 19th March 2021. 

A Deconstruction Project to search for the space between 

Oblique perspective… other forms of relational thinking, such as those descriptive accounts offered by Actor-Network-based analysis, is the desire to go beyond description of relation alone – 

Gestalt 

In shifting the view from the properties of an object itself towards a consideration of how it comes to be thought and known as such, this approach can perhaps avoid falling into too many foundationalist traps, allowing us to reconsider materiality and spatiality 

‘affectual’ and ‘emotional’ geographies, and takes the form of a linguistic slippage between affect and emotion based on a confusion between the psychiatric ⁄ psychoanalytical traditions of the term, such as those in Freud, Sedgwick and Tomkins, and a Spinozist understanding of the concept. 

Whether we are thinking of natural objects, such as plants and animals, or artifacts, such as houses, the requirements for generation are the same. We do not produce the matter (to suppose that we do leads to an infinite regress) nor do we produce the form (what could we make it out of?); rather, we put the form into the matter, and produce the compound (Ζ.8, 1033a30–b9). Both the matter and the form must pre-exist (Ζ.9, 1034b12). But the source of motion in both cases—what Aristotle calls the “moving cause” of the coming to be—is the form. 

In production that results from craft (or art, technê), “the form is in the soul ” (1032b23) of the craftsman. For example, “the craft [of building] is the form [of the house]” (1034a24) and the craft, i.e., the form, is in the understanding, and hence in the soul, of the builder. The builder has in mind the plan or design for a house and he knows how to build; he then “enmatters” that plan or design by putting it into the materials out of which he builds the house. In natural production, the form is found in the parent, where “the begetter is of this same sort as the begotten (not that they are the same thing, certainly, nor one in number, but one in form)—for example, in the case of natural things. For human begets human” (1033b29–31). But in either case, the form pre-exists and is not produced (1033b18). 

As for what is produced in such hylomorphic productions, it is correctly described by the name of its form, not by that of its matter. What is produced is a house or a man, not bricks or flesh. Of course, what is made of gold may still be described in terms of its material components, but we should call it not “gold” but “golden” (1033a7). For if gold is the matter out of which a statue is made, there was gold present at the start, and so it was not gold that came into being. It was a statue that came into being, and although the statue is golden—i.e., made of gold—it cannot be identified with the gold of which it was made. 

The essence of such a hylomorphic compound is evidently its form, not its matter. As Aristotle says “by form I mean the essence of each thing and the primary substance” (1032b1), and “by the substance without matter I mean the essence” (1032b14). It is the form of a substance that makes it the kind of thing that it is, and hence it is form that satisfies the condition initially required for being the substance of something. The substance of a thing is its form. 

Universals vs Particulars 

What follows is a deconstruction project, a dismantling, an unpacking of what Juhani Pallasamaa terms the ‘centralised images of focused Gestalt’ as it relates to the architectural and urban settings of our time, the largest portion of which are our homes and, which ‘tend to make us outsiders’. We have become viewers of objects based on social and culturally constructed descriptions of ‘what’, we are led to believe, ‘it is to be at home’, but which tell us little about ‘what it is to be at home’. To ‘be at home’ is to peer behind a veil not to look for or at an object, or a substance or a concept with properties that can be grasped easily. Nor is it adequate to think of the notion of home as something that can be thought in purely 

affectual and emotional terms, which carry with it the risk of falling into linguistic confusions that rest more comfortably within say the social sciences or psychoanalytic traditions.  

Rather we need to somehow peer into the space-in-between not only the various academic disciplines, but also the structures that house our lives and encase our minds 

Introduction. 

 In a 2019 lecture the architect-philosopher Edna Langenthal observed that architectural thinking and practice seems to have become “ephemeral and detached from the ethical principles of architecture”, and this reminds us that the accepted role of the contemporary architect is that of ‘place-making’. This is not to argue for the role of the architect as ethical place-maker, architects have a job to do and are human beings just like the rest of us, and the academic literature on architecture and its role in society, for good, bad, or indifferent is plentiful and readily available. However, when thinking about place or our sense of place, we naturally think about what it is to be at Home, and the architect’s central role follows the tradition of The Master-Builder, who historically sought to develop ideas and concepts into geometric material and structural entities. So, while there are concerns, both about and within the profession and its place in ‘making’ for societal ‘well-being’, architecture has an important role to play in terms its contribution to the social sphere, particularly as regards the provision of decent healthy homes for All. It should be noted at this point that this paper is not about architects or architecture; nor does it claim that one form of architecture or place-making is any better or worse than any other, rather the claim is, that to understand Home as ‘a space enclosed’ is something that architecture has traditionally and professionally  assumed a responsibility for; and that this something, that we might call homeness is poorly understood. It seems sensible therefore to question how, not just architects, but planners, designers, artists, and writers and indeed philosophers, attempt to capture the concept of Home? They do this through a process of firstly thinking, then often collaborating, towards building and making, which requires some consideration of the material-physical structures that enclose and capture our lives: these are the pieces of our built environment that are most visible and tangible: and it is in this sense that the architecture of Home, not just as lines on a drawing, but also as a sense notion, can act as a datum or point of departure for us All, (rather than a select few) towards understanding the ontology of home. 

 In part I, I will explore meaning and the language of Home as it relates to the process of placemaking which is a fundamental and profound part of the scope of architecture, and its power and possibilities, and I will draw upon some key aspects of Heideggerian thinking as 

well as referencing philosophical thoughts and ideas related to home-ness or ‘what it is to be at home? (Jacobson 2006, 2012, King: 2009 Handel: 2019,). To do this I will also in a novel way reference and connect Wittgenstein’s thoughts on ordinary language and the meanings that we can draw out of our everyday language to Home. Although there is record of just a single meeting between Heidegger & Wittgenstein and the philosophical literature rarely connects these two thinkers , Wittgenstein took a great interest in the meanings that arise out of architectural function and form and applied analytical methods to try to understand the ‘language-games’ which contain hidden, (some deliberate) and some mis-understood 

meanings. This approach I argue, can be applied to the language of home in such a way that the hidden meaning of home can be seen more clearly. 

Part II… Structure and Being 

Part III… Structure and Form (Whylie, Ingold) 

 I conclude that much of the literature on architecture and housing focuses on critical theory and has become hemmed in by sociological and economic studies that play to a narrative constrained by the cultural norms and political ideologies that shape society for good or ill; and that our homes are an essential and natural part of. Philosophy is unique in that it allows an exploration of those human qualities that are universal of which the need for home I argue, is maybe the most profound in terms living an authentic life. In the philosophical literature and the notion of authenticity, Heideggerian thought focuses on the anxiety felt when one becomes deprived of a sense of home-ness. This anxiety (Heidegger’s did not explicitly refer to homelessness per-se) in every-day thought more akin to a physical reaction , something that we think we can capture and measure (as a socio-political-economic-unit) through a thinking physical biological brain. However, to understand how anxiety manifests itself as something that has physical, metaphysical, and phenomenological qualities, we need to consider this in the sense of a loss of Hope. Hope as a human quality can best and maybe only really be understood when we experience the absence of Hope, when we experience a sense of No-hope, or Hopelessness, something that is most acutely felt when we associate with a loss of Home. This is where the importance of philosophy can best serve us if given voice. 

 Think of the recent Grenfell Fire Tragedy in London (or any human tragedy) when on the14th of June 2017, 72 people lost their lives and more than 200 families were left homeless. The cause of this homelessness can be measured and will be attributed to ‘man-made’ political, moral, and socio-economic failings, but the loss of Hope and the human need for, and to regain and hold on to the potentiality of Hope is much harder to grasp and understand. We can maybe think of hope as a sparkling bubble…we can see how beautiful it is and therefore know it is somehow wonderful…but try catch it and put it back into the bottle. This is more difficult. Try: think: what is hope? Picture it. Draw it. 

 Nature plays its part too. In California USA in a town called Paradise, located in what is by all accounts a natural paradise with idyllic natural woodlands, yet this earthly nature once thought as bountiful and beautiful, rendered a community powerless as a forest fire burnt thirteen thousand homes to the ground and eighty people lost their lives. This was a town-place full of hope and it is hope that will move the community in Paradise to rebuild their homes and their lives. Nature however will carry on regardless. 

 Finally think also of our history of war and self-inflicted carnage and think of how armies in action or in retreat, operate scorched earth policies. The aim is to deliberately deprive a community of its home , or to prevent homes falling into enemy hands. These may seem somewhat extraordinarily stark examples, however as Wittgenstein observed we walk with our minds closed when we see the everyday. The material-physical aspects regarding the loss of Home, or the sense of Home-ness is widely discussed, mainly in technical, political, and socio-economic terms, however, Hope in the sense of being-at-home and human flourishing and as something with its own distinct quality is less widely discussed and is poorly understood in the literature as regards Home and its central role for our well-being. 

 Hope therefore in this regard is profoundly an essential part of the ontology of home and is something that can be experienced as important and real when we are sheltered, when we feel secure, when we experience a sense of sanctuary, and for which some this Home becomes sacred space. 

I. Structure and Meaning 

 Simply put the architect-materialists try to capture home-ness which might be defined as a range of relationships between the home and the person. Specifically, they do this through inception, then seeing and interpreting a personal or client brief & scheme design towards constructing shelter. This is primarily to provide human-scale personal security, which if successful can offer the experience of sanctuary and for some this becomes sacred space. Put together this is often called Home and while the architect-materialists have argued that it's important to have a home, not just in the sense of a roof over one's head, but of an environment in which one is 'at home' the question persists; what is it (if anything) that is being said about the sense of 'being at home' that we are drawing on? To this, postmodern (sometimes considered sceptical) thinkers, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Deluze et al have searched for the meaning behind terms such as home that sit easily in our everyday or ordinary language, and they have discovered that language can be thought of as a series of meanings that are interpreted in different ways according to the situation that we find ourselves. The Hegelian philosopher and writer John O’ Donohue (1997) observes that often our ‘words are too thin to echo experience; they are too weak to bring the inner mystery of things to real expression’ , and for terms such as ‘at home-ness’ and ‘being’ the interpretation and argument differ depending on historical and contextual form and the meanings often become disguised or lost. In this O’ Donohue’s illuminating prose illustrates wonderfully the inadequacy of language in expressing a universal truth: that as human beings, we are at the centre of the natural world and we respond to the environment, including the built environment that we encounter, and live in; and we seek meaning to allow us naturally strive to improve our capacity in ways that help us build to enhance our freedom ‘to be’. For O’ Donohue the appeal to the Self is an appeal to individual human, community and political action towards goodness or in political philosophical terms towards ‘the social good’ of which the provision of shelter, security, sanctuary and sacredness is maybe the most profound. 

 However, to become free, we need to comfortably exist as part of this world and the act of existing is something we do together. And it is in this notion of togetherness that we All, not just the architect-materialists seek Home: it is in this sense that we might ask the question “what is it to be at home?” This is not a particularly new or novel question, rather framed in this way the search for Home can be considered in part a search for truth of Self; what does it mean ‘to be’, what is the ‘act of being’? However, these are big metaphysical questions akin to the great minds asking, ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ and although this is an important consideration, when we think about the everyday, including the act of constructing shelter and making things the way we do, we need to search for further meaning; not just in language but through an appreciation of ‘creating and making’. The so-called Avant Garde artist Rene Marguerite searches for hidden meanings in the everyday in his paintings which often reflect the mundane: a pipe; looking out of a window; the interior of an anonymous room, with a maybe a clock on the wall, stopped at a moment in time. This is a familiar and could be a moment in time in anyone’s life, one lived at home. However, behind the pictures lie the hidden meanings, the realities of home-ness, the material-structure is covering up something: “we are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a 

curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all” this clearly is the description of our homes hidden in plain sight behind the mundanity of our houses. The Austrian American artist and architect Fredrick Kiesler’s (1890-1965) conceptual work of architecture ‘Endless House’ sought to express an elaborate. Personal metaphysics bases on the concepts of what he termed ‘connectivity’, ‘correality’ and ‘biotechnique’ with the aim of merging the human spiritual and practical into a new housing typology. Kiesler is celebrated as an architectural innovator and original thinker, however it would seem that while non-everyday language-games are used to convey the meaning of home, the aim is a universal one, and that is the attempt to capture the elusive quality homeness. In many ways’ outsiders like Kiesler and Friedensreich Hundertwasser fail and succeed at the same time. They succeed in illustrating how fiendishly difficult it is to capture space as something that has the quality home-ness, but fail because of that very same difficulty. 

 Continuing along a similar path towards understanding, the social philosopher Richard Sennet beautifully articulates the act of making, just for the sake of making, with his essay on Cellini’s salt cellar final version completed in 1543 Francis I of France from models that had been prepared many years earlier for Cardinal Ippolito d’Este. Sennet observes that the yearning for authenticity in the everyday does not rest solely with the artist or the architect, or anyone in particular. Rather “the carpenter, the lab technician, and conductor are all craftsmen because they are dedicated to good work for its own sake.” Other than in the sense of scale and the use of materials; in terms human agency and action and in the attention to detail; including scientific detail, we might reasonably compare this to the making of anything be it a vaccine in a lab, to a house on the street, becoming home or something that we might call home as contained within an enclosed structure. There are of course numerous different types of houses, from fixed structures to nomadic structures. Some are celebrated as important works of art and craft. Celebrated Houses such as Falling Water by Frank Lloyd-Wright possess an aesthetic that appeals to the human cultural and artistic norms that surround them. Of course, some think them beautiful, some think them ugly, some think them functional, some think them pointless, some think they appeal to human vanity and question the ethics that allow the disparities of wealth that allow them to be created, while others suggest that our houses should be purely functional, ‘form follows function’ houses are ‘machines to live in’ are the phrases famously coined by Le Corbusier; however regardless personal preference on ‘the good, bad or ugly’ they all have (or at least all houses should have) a quality in common with the exquisite craftsmanship of the Cellini work. Within each human occupied house lie certain human qualities; not just that of the maker-architect artist-materialist-sculptor, creating a unique table adornment for a very wealthy benefactor  during the Italian renaissance, but also in the sense, that the artifact-structure has become imbued with unique irreplaceable qualities contained within and therefore might be considered without value or philosophically speaking is unquantifiable. The claim is, that we seem to know and understand instinctively that the urge towards crafting and making shelter are qualities that we all have. This is the sense of home-ness, a feeling that is unique to each human being, but which is something which has no value to anyone other than as the personal act of giving home to oneself and receiving back home-ness. In the Margarite paintings, the Keisler housing concepts or the Cellini sculpture example, or any of the examples / models of housing structures, the sense of being at home becomes manifest within an artifact-structure that actualises the human urge towards making and craftsmanship. It is when this becomes realised, it is then that the feeling of hope imbued by the maker within the material-artefact-structure becomes manifest and therefore succeeds in the purpose of its meaning. The search for meaning here is in the attempt to grasp the ontology of home-ness 

imbued and contained within and in the process discovering something with an inherent human quality when subject to human agency and articulation becomes translated into the word home. 

 So, what is it to be at home? The field of architecture, design, planning and often artistry, necessarily focusses on ‘sticks and bricks and mortar’ as the materials with which to fashion our houses. However, while thoughts of home, and designs on a page, contain potential, ‘sticks and bricks and mortar’ alone do not a home make. Consider the concept of house & home as a philosophical question. This is not a novel idea. Giles Deluze observed that “a concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window” . In the everyday, and in actual language we take words out of their natural place in talking and assume they refer to some essence or ideal entity which we try to define. ‘Deleuze’s brick’ demonstrates that when we attempt to understand the application of a word for either a concept or an object, the brick as a concept and as an object also exists as something that contains potentiality. Home however, as a concept does not necessarily follow from the concept of a brick. A home, or rather the certainty of a physical structure can be actualized through the making perhaps through constructing using sticks and or bricks, but the concept home within the physical structure contains a very different potentiality. It is in this, and in the search for an ontological account of Home that we find the potential of Home, as being, its real purpose, something that is buried deep within its meaning. Some of the great minds from the modern era such as Ernst Bloch developed the notion that this search for meaning can be thought of as ‘possibility’; the ‘not- yet’, realized. For Bloch the ‘not-yet’ contains within it a utopian potential expressed as the principle of hope and the potential for hope is a uniquely human quality that connects the human persons being-at-homeness not only to material entities, be-it a brick as illustrated by Deluze, or a house much like the houses we see each day, but critically ‘the-not-yet’ and the potential of hope connects to the language needed for human expression and an understanding of ourselves as we interact and go about our everyday lives. Though rarely mentioned on the same page, Bloch’s contemporary Martin Heidegger through his interpretation of Heimat refers to this notion the potential of hope as ‘being in the world’, a central idea developed in his book of essays Poetry Language Thought. In particular the oft referenced essay Building Dwelling Thinking has been interpreted as a meditation on being at home; as he states; “how we build and then dwell is how we live”, however for Heidegger, this was not so much about how we might ordinarily see the physical world of building structures and making things in the every-day; rather he offers philosophical insight into our relationship with ‘dwelling’ or the ‘spatiality of being’ and that, the way of our dwelling or the way that we do dwelling is essentially the manifestation of our being ‘thrown into the world’. The Heideggerian scholar Hubert Dreyfus (1929-2017) interprets this as Heidegger positing the notion: ‘I am therefore I think’ ; a deliberate upending of Descartes famous ‘cogito ergo sum’ and it is in this ‘thrown-into-ness’ in which we can think in terms of the way that we design and build structures for shelter and then live and ask the question whether we live ‘authentic’ lives. (more of which later). For Heidegger the question of authenticity tells us something about “the prospects for successful being in the world” [which depends] in important ways on the proper constitution of the spaces and places in which individuals’ dwell” This notion of ‘the authentic life’ seeks to escape and embrace at the same time the anxiety that comes with living, something that essentially encapsulates everything that life, or the act of existing or ‘living a life’ throws at it, including the anxiety felt when life becomes discontented through the deprivation of home-space. French explains this important aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy in the context of political philosophy and the international / national, macro / micro political ideologies shaping immigrant detention, but which equally can refer to the everyday, be it the mundane 

in the art of Margarite, or the extraordinary such as The Grenfell Tragedy, The Natural Disasters that devastate communities or the conflicts that traumatise generations. This is a familiar model of housing delivery in the western world, which without care it seems involves the loss of home-ness, that is; becoming homeless, within (or without) the ordinary house, if ‘that place’ is deprived of the qualities, security, sanctuary and for some the necessary lived experience of sacredness as French states:  

If the place of being should collapse or be destroyed... then the individual in question suffers a kind of harm that reaches far into his or her being. In fact, the individual is thrown into a highly deficient mode of being that in Heideggerian terms we might characterize as anxiety, caused by the deprivation of a home in the world. 

 Heidegger in common with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and although the records indicate that while Heidegger and Wittgenstein were aware of one another ‘there was only one recorded mention of the other’ , set out in their philosophical projects to discover some of the hidden meaning in language related to being-at-homeness. Wittgenstein in his magnus opus Philosophical Investigations (PI) placed an emphasis on the analysis of ordinary language. At the beginning of PI Wittgenstein describes the activities of a builder building a house as taking the form of a ‘language game’ and he illustrates with an example that, when we hear a sentence to a builder’s assistant containing instructions and words like “fetch that ‘slab’” or “bring me that ‘brick’”, we must ask what do these terms mean for the builder, and the words must also describe what they do with these words and the role they play in everyday life. For Wittgenstein his philosophical thought and development can (if looked through an architect-materialist lens) is illustrated in his collaboration and completion of the design and build of the now famous ‘Wittgenstein Haus’ for his sister Margaret in Vienna, which was completed in 1928 . He worked closely with his one-time friend the architect Paul Engleman (a pupil of Alfred Loos ) and the significance for Wittgenstein (similarly to Sennett’s discussion on the Cellini sculpture and Bloch’s principle of hope) was not revealed in the making of the house, but rather it is only ‘when a person imagines the house as a space where actual life takes place’ that the meaning of the house becomes a ‘complete form of life’ . It is only when Margarites art and Cellini’s imagined sculpture becomes real for the viewer and functional for the user that the hope contained in it becomes realised. Wittgenstein of course is recognised as one of the great minds in the history of philosophy and while the study of philosophy rightly focuses on his philosophical canon, it is in Wittgenstein the Man where the ontology of home manifests itself most starkly. It is not difficult to imagine that the great minds in the history of philosophy all start out blindly asking simple questions such as why is there something 

g rather than nothing, which then become entangled in philosophical bewilderment. In this respect Wittgenstein is considered the philosopher most associated with the attempt at untangling the complexity of thought into simplicity of language and yet his was a fragile mind. After returning from fighting in the great war, (as of course many people did and do) sought out the sanctuary afforded by the shelter and security of a simple House in the remote mountains of Skjolden in Norway (constructed between 1914 and 1918) and stood as a solitary architectural marker in Wittgenstein's life as it was the only structure designed and built purposefully for his own personal interests and preoccupations. This place was made as a stripped back bare-bones Hut. It Housed his body and his meagre possessions, but once lived in it became a place that his mind could know as Home. This was not mindless action. This was Home as a state of mind and body. This was Home as sanctuary and indeed sacredness, as a place of prayer, for Wittgenstein was forever praying, maybe not in the 

familiar biblical sense, but certainly he prayed for his mind to be still so his body could become calmed. He thought often of taking his own life , as his sense of self-worth deluded him into thinking his life was worthless. Considered in this light it is hard not to see that the Hut that Wittgenstein called Home was much more than the materials from which it was made. As far as searching out the hidden or philosophically abstract meanings or more accurately and profoundly the ‘real’ meanings in language; in a lecture to his students in Cambridge circa 1936 he read an extract from a detective novel. The detective in the novel is alone on the deck of a ship in the middle of the night and hears no sound except the ticking of the ships clock. The detective muses to himself ‘a clock is a bewildering instrument at best: measuring a fragment of infinity: measuring something which does not exist perhaps’. As Wittgenstein observed to his students ‘obviously a clock is not a bewildering instrument at all’ – ‘the clock becomes a bewildering instrument when we say, it measures a fragment of infinity, measuring something which does not exist perhaps . In terms of the clock as bewildering, or a sculpture’s beauty living in the eye of the beholder, it is in home as an abstract were the introduction of an entity or quality which can’t be seen but that we can somehow picture in our mind and make epistemologically real in other words they possess the potential to become something we can have knowledge of. However, what are these qualities? Do they exist if we remove our instinctive need for shelter and security and the sense-data that we understand and associate with the qualities of sacredness say? At first glance the answer might seem relatively straight-forward. Again, the home when viewed through the combined lenses of the architectural-materialist and designer, mathematical theory & materials science, or anthropology, psychology, and social science, we do glean some understanding about ‘the how’ space becomes home. However, if we ask; what do we know about ‘why’ a material space becomes something other than mere shelter, while removing all the body-sense-data that we associate with a space becoming home it seems to become something that rests in the mind. In this, Home-ness is neither a logical nor a physical possibility, rather Home-ness is the metaphysical possibility of home which reads to an existentialist phenomenology. For Wittgenstein it seems clear from his philosophy that architecture and indeed the act of building and placemaking and the acts of craftsmanship and the attention to the truth that is inherent in the material detail, (for example the operation of a window or a door handle that operates exactly as intended) becomes the space where one becomes at home. A simple object or a complex piece of machinery or a unique work of art seems to return to us the human qualities ingrained in it. Critically however, this needs to find expression both in language and doing, and for Wittgenstein in the everyday, and in actual language these are words and expressions that we take for granted, however it is when we take words out of their natural place in talking, and assume they refer to some essence or ideal entity, which we then try to define, quite often unsuccessfully (find and insert W Quote) that has led us towards deceiving ourselves that we are living the home-ness that is necessary for our well-being. 

 Refer to the act of building, say a house with which we are familiar constructed of bricks. When we attempt to understand the application of the word brick as a concept or a brick as a thing, it contains both the quality of its everyday usage and materiality, in that a modern standard European brick is 102mm wide X 75mm deep X 225mm long and is a clay object; we can expand the example of a single brick into a million bricks transformed into a cathedral. The single brick combined with human agency and experience has revealed its hidden meaning and realized its potential and its meaning depends on the application. As Deluze observed we can throw a brick through a window, to maybe undertake a robbery, start a riot, or as a means of escaping from a burning building. We can also as Wittgenstein sought to achieve, attempt to build a perfect house. The concept brick has the potential to build a 

cathedral, within which to home priceless artifacts, or has the potential towards building a house becoming home. However, it should be remembered that Home is a concept that does not require necessarily the material qualities of the brick that builds the house. Home requires often but not exclusively the physical qualities of the house which can be made of sticks and or bricks, to construct four walls upon which to put a roof and inside which can be constructed a floor. It is in the within of structure that leads towards an ontological account of Home and it is there that we discover its potential, its real purpose, something that is buried deep within its meaning. Home therefore is not just to be in a house or shelter, home is being at home something which might be argued has become lost in the everyday. The notion home viewed from the outside and by that we might mean the normative, cultural literal influences that we encounter depends on many non-linguistic features, and these features deceive us into thinking we are ‘at home’ when often we are not. It is not the physical view from the outside looking in, nor the view from the inside looking out of a house that necessarily means being-at-home, rather as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard observed “the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace” This to be understood requires us to anchor to a datum-point which in this case is a physical-material house structure. In our developed minds we can dream of home somehow and we can through dreaming look at what it is to be at home. We can imagine standing outside the house; we can imagine floating above the house and we can imagine burrowing underneath the house and being in all three places or more at the same time and, then we can imagine looking into an enclosed space and seeing the potential that the space has to make us feel sheltered, secure, and even sanctified. . Viewed from this multi-view-multi-dimensional aspect we seem to have an ability to look-into-being at home. This in effect is looking at the space within the physical structure but also looking at the space that we have given to home-ness within us. It is also in this sense that the notion home is inside us and the reality is outside us. The material realities we take for granted such as that, that architect-materialists through their designs on a page, make into houses, streets of houses, housing estates and urban landscapes are acquired realities and learnt behaviours rather than innate human qualities. Home for the architect-materialist starts as a material entity, where ‘bits & pieces’ are simply connected and which have been given sundry names, ‘chair’, table’, or ‘washing machine’. This has blurred the difference between house and home and the qualities or more accurately the ‘human feelings’ which have become lost and profoundly these are the feelings most associated with shelter, security, sanctuary and sacredness. The way perhaps to understand this sense of meaning, potentiality, and home-ness towards ‘what it is to be at home, is to think about the potentiality contained in the spaces that we don’t see, but have discovered through imagination, ingenuity and then proven through scientific experiment . 

Similarly, be it a cave, a bundle of branches to make a treehouse, a structure sailing along a quiet canal, a collection of terraces or a tower block on a housing estate or even a mansion on a hill, we can shape notions of shelter in our minds, but we cannot exist without shelter and this tells us something about our sense of self. However, what does this have to do with what it means to exist? (it is not immediately obvious) This may seem obvious but, think of our place in nature; to be human is to curl and unfurl within and without our shelters and we do seem to know somehow, beyond instinct, that our shelters can become an enclosed space called home and home captures the sense of some or all of the qualities, shelter, security, scaredness and sanctuary. 

Part II Structure and Being  

For a moment, consider the Human Body…much like Michael Angelo’s’ Universal Man depicting the universe…or an everyday washing machine as a metaphor for both house and home. The human body and the machine has many different component and intricate parts that combine and function together to . The biological sciences have discovered that these parts, in particular the brain to function requires an electrical current. To understand an electrical current, we need to think about the world at the atomic level. Atoms are the building blocks of the universe. Think of the falling star, the majestic oak tree, the microscopic plant root; every human being and animal is made of atoms. Atoms are mostly empty space but at the centre of each atom is the nucleus. The nucleus is made up of particles called protons and neutrons. Electrons revolve around the nucleus in shells. The protons and electrons of an atom are attracted to each other and each carries an electrical charge. We have through evolution ingeniously figured out how to capture and harness this electrical charge to power our brain and our body, but also our material lives, such as our washing machines, to wash our clothes, which we wear as second skins. However, none of this tells us very much about the mind of a neighbour, the mind of her pet tarantula or indeed what microscopic plankton think. What we seek to understand is the property of mind and which might be referred to as the quality of mind, or to keep things very basic the quality of the wash and the feeling experienced when we adorn washed garments. One person’s feeling will be different to another’s. Even if one person describes this feeling to another in as precise a way as they possibly can, while at the same time their body & brain activity is being monitored and measured for the purposes of gathering supporting empirical and scientific data, we can never know another person’s mind. The feeing we get when we place clean garments against our naked skin, the sense of protection we get from the judging eye, the confidence we feel when we step out in glamorous dress, or the sense of sacredness felt by the priest when uttering prayers to a congregation once adorned with sanctified robes, yes these can be seen to be instinctive learned cultural behaviours, however these feelings that belong to each of us alone cannot be swapped or shared. In the same way that a washing-machine has an outer-skin and a material and mechanical function, our brain has a protective skull, and they are all powered by unseen universal forces. The outer skin of the house tells us little about the quality of ‘being at home’ which is also a-life lived inside, much as the protective bone in a skull tells us little about the mind and the brain enclosed. As the house encloses the body like a second skin it is in this sense that the meaning of ‘being at Home’ as ‘feeling’ depends on its articulation rather than its representation. The articulation of ‘being at Home’ requires not only potentiality but also the idea of something that has always been there waiting to be spelled out. Identifying ‘being at Home’ is a matter of analysing what is already there, not a matter of adding something new and the aim of an ontological account is to strip Home of its outer shell and its ‘bits & pieces’. The outer shell of the House, and its inner layers of societal constructs and cultural beliefs need to be peeled back so that we can peer into its centre, which much like the atom is an unknown mostly empty space. And it is this space that allows someone to be ‘home-sick’, yet scientific explanation and even the provision of shelter, security, sanctuary, and sacredness will not bring about peace from a yearning for home, if the space to ‘be at home’ in One’s Self does not exist, for example think of the sense of despair felt in homelessness. This is not the same as maybe a lack of ability to ‘get on in the world’ physically or mentally. The sense or feeling of ‘Home’ or ‘being at home’ is more to do with the spirit in which one acts. We do not stand outside this feeling, rather we dwell inside this feeling, it ‘just is’. Heidegger distinguishes this difference as being comfortable in an environment where one uses 'equipment' (the house) unselfconsciously and is 'absorbed in the everyday'. For Heidegger however being comfortable isn't a condition of maximum flourishing. He thinks you can only become 'authentic' by experiencing the uncanniness or the ‘just-is’ness’ of the everyday. It is within the mostly empty space that the potential of the 

Self becomes actualized. This is the articulation of a feeling of being not only at home but of ‘being at home’, is the self-seeing into the centre of its ‘home-space’ and this is a prelude to understanding Oneself in a truly authentic fashion.