On Dwelling explores the meaning of dwelling in places where we humans live and work—from our homes to the very planet we co-inhabit. Crossing boundaries and disciplines, it lays the groundwork for addressing place-based issues like migration, ethnic division, resource use, and human-caused peril to the earth itself.

themes among the essays resurface and resonate. Though our request for essays was broad and open-ended, we found that topics such as seeing, authenticity, interpretation, wholeness, care, and dwelling ran as undercur rents throughout. Our major hope is that each essay plays a part in revealing a larger whole of meaning which says much about a more humane relation ship with places, environments and the earth as our home. Part I. Beginnings and directions At the start, we recognize the (...) tremendous debt this volume owes to philosopher Martin Heidegger (1890-1976), whose ontological excavations into the nature of human existence and meaning provide the philosophical foundations for many of the essays, particularly those in Part I of the volume. Above all else, Heidegger was regarded by his students and colleagues as a master teacher. He not only thought deeply but was also able to show others how to think and to question. Since he, perhaps more than anyone else in this century, provides the instruction for dOing a phenomenology and hermeneutic of humanity's existential situation, he is seminal for phenomenological and hermeneutical research in the environmental disci plines. He presents in his writings what conventional scholarly work, especially the scientific approach, lacks; he helps us to evoke and under stand things through a method that allows them to come forth as they are; he provides a new way to speak about and care for our human nature and environment. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 3, pp 366 - 387 In this article, I focus on Heidegger’s conception of hospitality in his first and final lectures on Hölderlin’s _Germania_, _Remembrance_, and _The Ister_. I argue that the hospitality of the foreigner for Heidegger is the condition of possibility of dwelling understood as the happening of history.In the first section I analyze the notions of hospitality in Levinas and Derrida. The second section unpacks some of the senses of the earth (...) in Heidegger as the site of man’s historical dwelling, whereas in the third section I focus on holy mourning as the disposition that reveals the earth as the uncanny ground of history. In the final section, I spell out Heidegger’s conception of hospitality, the greeting, and the foreign guest. (shrink)

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s seminal essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, published in 1954, is one of the texts which has had most influence on architectural thinking in the second half of 20th and early 21st century. What much of modern and postmodern architectural thinking extracts from Heidegger’s text and revolves around is the understanding of building and dwelling as more or less abstract forms of being without taking into account the people inhabiting space. In these traditions little has (...) been said about what the Danish architect Jørn Utzon adds to the term “being” and announces as the most important aspect of architecture: Well-being understood as human well-being. The present paper means to re-interpret Heidegger’s text critically in order to rethink dwelling and building within an architectural context, presenting Jørn Utzon’s work and thinking as a lifelong search for the architecture of well-being. (shrink)

In his later work, such as “The Question Concerning Technology”, Martin Heidegger puts forward a critique of modern technology. Alongside this critique, Heidegger presents a kind of positive alternative through his discussion of “dwelling”. I put forward a reading of Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and his embrace of “dwelling”. On my reading, Heidegger’s thinking centers on the idea that modern technology’s form of “world-disclosure” prevents human beings from encountering (and then living in light of) our own essence. (...) In contrast, he takes “dwelling” to allow us to do that. When humans dwell, they also live in such a way as to (purportedly) allow other things (e.g. rivers) to exist in accordance with their own essence. I argue that, for Heidegger, the (purported) truth that humans should live in accord with our own essence is explanatorily prior to the (purported) truth that humans should let other things exist in accordance with their own essence. Following this interpretative argument, I reflect on some of the promises of this position that I attribute to Heidegger, along with some of the most pressing challenges facing those who might want to further develop it. (shrink)

Assesses Irish republicanism's strategic process of moderation, from violence to peace and power.

Dwellings of Enchantment probes literature and cues humans to experience awe, love, and respect for our wonderfully complex, multispecies home. Interweaving new materialist, postcolonial, ecopoetic, ecofeminist,and ecopsychological approaches, it delves into various ontologies, literary modes, and tropes framing our coevolution within the oikos.

John Dewey shows the essential role of artistic expression in experience. Expression, as emotional articulation, is essential to establishing our intimate engagement with the world. G.W.F. Hegel shows that just this process of expressing our mode of “dwelling” in the world has been operative historically at the cultural level. It is characteristic of contemporary art that, in attempting to establish a new form of dwelling within the context of our technological world, it articulates just this vision of our (...) experience as essentially expressive. (shrink)

Nursing has a considerable history of theory development but has consistently struggled to reconcile theoretical reality and practice realities. Many authors have attempted to reconcile what has been called the “theory–practice gap,” but the space where these two realities enmesh has remained problematic and contentious (Aimei, Macau Journal of Nursing, 14, 2015, 13; Factor, Matienzo, & de Guzman, Nurse Education Today, 57, 2017, 82). The idea of the theory–practice gap has a significant history in nursing, but also continues to have (...) a significant presence within nursing literature and mythology up to the present (Aimei, Macau Journal of Nursing, 14, 2015, 13). In this paper, the space between theoretic reality and practice reality, as evidenced by the theory–practice gap, will be examined. A Heideggerian perspective of “dwelling” (Heidegger, 1971, Poetry, language, thought, New York, NY: Harper Colophon) will be used as a guiding discourse to move nursing away from this classic tension between theory and practice, towards a perspective where theory and practice are woven together as part of one reality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Walter Fisher's narrative paradigm has sparked intense debate about the role of narratives in rhetorical scholarship. The theory has subsequently been followed up by numerous criticisms and revisions. This article argues that especially the latter can benefit from a complementary phenomenological perspective that Fisher himself placed within the original paradigm. Through the Heideggerian concepts of building and dwelling, rhetoric within the narrative paradigm may be seen as a primary means for engaging with both individual and communal goals and (...) exigencies, providing a more nuanced account for how people care for and act on the narratives in their lives. (shrink)

(2002). Dwelling with monuments. Philosophy & Geography: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 235-242.

Abstract:Dwelling near Lake Superior in the Anthropocene, we uncover a greater intimacy and acquaintance with our earthly responsibilities. Thoughts wash over us like waves as our thinking ebbs and flows between the fact that we must learn to dwell here while also coming to terms with the planetary implications of our very being. That ebb and flow is presented here in a series of waves, which can be read in or out of order, in an orderly or disorderly fashion. (...) These waves crash into one another as we reflect on place, dwelling, hospitality, deep history, enchantment, wildness, and thinking itself. We discover in this mixture an invitation to think more deeply about our responsibilities by contemplating one of the other bodies with which we cohabit the earth: the deep, blue body of Lake Superior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dwelling in the GapsGalen SanderlinHave you ever wondered what it would be like to be a mythical being? As a hermaphrodite, I exist in a culture that sees only male or female. Those of us who don’t fit into the rigid sex binary are left out of many of the protections offered to our cousins who more neatly fit the two categories. This leaves an enormous gap in (...) cultural definitions and societal acceptance of my fundamental being.My journey has three main threads: 1) My personal and often rocky self–development, as I have come to understand and accept what it means to be a hermaphrodite, and finding others of my tribe; 2) recognizing the harm done by my medical treatment and actively seeking to change how the medical system treats hermaphrodites, starting from birth onwards; and 3) identifying what was done to me as a human rights violation.I was born in January of 1975. No genetic test was done at the time. My body looked male and my assigned sex/gender was male. As a child, I gravitated toward “male” toys. In 1989, a rural– MD noted that I was not experiencing puberty like my peers and she recommended that my parents take me to a teaching hospital in Seattle for tests. A pediatrician referred me to the adolescent medical division, and from there I was referred to an endocrinologist. After conducting many invasive tests, including drawing blood and comparing my testicles to a bead ring of ersatz testicles, the endocrinologist diagnosed me with Klinefelter’s Syndrome and a karyotype of 47,XXY. I was prescribed testosterone injections to affirm and strengthen the male identity I was assigned at birth and to prevent my body from developing secondary female sex characteristics (breasts and hips).Soon after the shots started I bulked up, adding muscle and hair everywhere. I also became dangerously aggressive and moody. I began to have serious self–esteem issues and a drastic increase in risk–taking behavior as my body was subjected to medical intervention that my parents innocently followed.The prescribed hormone treatment fractured my psyche—what I know now to be a common defense mechanism experienced in trauma survivors. The portion of my consciousness that existed prior to testosterone became deeply buried to prevent harm, and I experienced the emergence of a new “entity.” With each change in prescription, new fractures occurred: testosterone cypionate to enanthate shots, to patches, to gels.The physicians did not consider my feelings or preferences during recommendations or treatment. I feel I was forced into a “male” body based on a medical emergency they created to ease societal concerns.Last February I decided to stop hiding. Tearing the mask off has brought a flood of emotions hidden behind old traumas. I’d been living openly as an intersex person, but still deeply closeted, if not from the public—worse, from myself.Here is the writing that came pouring out of me as I’ve been accessing my repressed memories:I felt the first stirrings of my existence in August of 1989, like a fleeting visage of a long lost lover passing just out of view. The timing of the universe—Out of the infinite we are born, but in this case the body we are to occupy was already housing many other souls. Is this some mistake? Asked to be patient I waited... Late in the year of 1989 I was borne on testosterone wings into an imaginary masculine role/body.Molded in the image of Adonis, Hermes was forced to submit. No longer sexless or ageless—lost in a sea of supposed pressures and roles. My assumed gender [End Page E10] was male. Why!?! Screaming, thrashing, and damaging all around me, no way to express the horror of being so brutally manhandled.My guide Galen/Juniper were excised from our psyche—lost behind a barrier. The only solace was a shared beat: 1,2,3,4 over and over. Was this the pounding of our heart? Thank god for our love of music least we lose ourselves entirely.Why do they insist on calling me Galen? I no longer knew who this was. I... (shrink)

Toward post-constructivist epistemology -- Respecting common sense and first-person perspective -- On method -- Looking ahead -- Being is dwelling -- Dwelling grounds building and thinking -- The foundation of dwelling -- From epistemology to environmental ethics -- Response to a world in crisis -- On being rooted -- The earth does not move - literally -- The ground of the image -- Fostering the taking of roots -- On getting the earth to move -- Uprooting | (...) rooting -- Cultivating culture -- Cultivating (an interest in) science -- Nacherzeugung and nachverstehen -- Nacherzeugung, nachverstehen, and the cultivation of culture -- Emergence of the image -- An empirical case -- Recon/naissance: from first movements to symbolic gestures -- Ideation implies intersubjectivity and history -- Multiplicity, bifurcations, pregnance -- Movement and the birth of form -- Becoming aware -- Aspect dawning -- An empirical investigation -- A post-constructivist perspective on the coming of awareness -- The invisible body -- A mysterious illness -- Pathos and learning -- Our animate bodies and school learning -- Disappearance of the subject -- On theory and its relation to life -- Memorable moments of classroom life -- Inchoate living vs. an experience -- Life and its mimesis -- Concrete human psychology -- The subject-in-the-making -- The subject* as patient -- L'interloque -- The death of autopoiesis -- There is (a) life after constructivism. (shrink)

This chapter is a study on Luce Irigaray’s engagement with Martin Heidegger’s approach to language. Although language is central to both thinkers, rather than privileging language in terms of the poëtic event of being, the arising of something out of itself, Irigaray reveals how language is privileged in terms of its promise of dialogue between two who are different. This difference provides for a limit to what can be known or recognized, as well as for a creative potentiality that is (...) directed towards the future. (shrink)

The aim of the present text is to offer an interpretation of Eyal Weizman’s_concept of forensic aesthetics, demonstrating how this approach reveals the ways in which the aesthetic perception of violence, trauma, and decomposition of human dwelling can be transformed in the current digital optical war regime. Forensic aesthetics tries to grasp a_forensic sensibility as both an aesthetic and political practice, requiring individuals to become sensitive to violence and be able to comprehend and experience the affects of disintegration, trauma, (...) and despair that are characteristic of the experience of the survivor. The environment, dwelling, and architecture are not only inert observers, but rather have become material witnesses of crimes, violence, and destruction of various dwellings inhabited by various species. The application of digital technologies in forensic aesthetics carries a strong ethical appeal to avoid injustice. Traces and fragments of evidence, as well as multiple videos and images, are synchronized and recomposed within digital architectural environments and dwellings, as an optical and interpretative tool that shapes a new type of aesthetics. (shrink)

Museum visitors partake in the effect of what we can call the domestication of the view. They witness the constant changes in how objects are allowed to exist in a museological space. In this way, visitors are challenged to cultivate new sensibilities that simultaneously reveal and conceal things and their relationships. These meanings have been subject to political debates, controversies, disputes, and conflicts around property rights involving museum representatives and other actors. As a result, the domesticated things inside the museums (...) threaten to displace themselves, moving towards the uncertainty of other shelters and other hands. Each time other flows and movements towards other ‘homes’ are asserted by different sort of groups and communities to reclaim or ‘bring home’ objects previously obtained through a mixture of pillaging, acquisitions, donations, and violent actions, distinct voices ask the same question: whose home? By exploring a case concerning the restitution of objects outside and inside museums, this article explores an alternative understanding of the notion of the house as a legitimate relationship between materiality and those worlds in which objects dwell. In the first sections, to explore the idea of heterotopy coined by Michel Foucault from an anthropological perspective, I return to some interpretations of notions such as ‘home’ and ‘house’ drawing on classical ethnographies. Secondly, I focus on what Ghassan Hage calls a ‘diasporic lenticularity’ to explore other “modes of existing” in multiple places and realities. Finally, I conclude by revolving distinct cases concerning museum practices and reallocation processes, transforming and (re)creating new spaces to locate and house unstable objects and presences. (shrink)

Understanding the tight connections between human dwelling and the sense of smell seems nowadays urgent. Since human being-in-the-world finds its very prerequisite in being-in-the-air, an inquiry on air design, today particularly intrusive, is a philosophical necessity. The aim of this contribution is to sketch an exploratory investigation on the aesthetic relationships between space, smell and gendered atmospheres through the case of food, specifically through its osmosphere: its flavour as its affective aura. Firstly, I discuss analogies between atmospheres and smells. (...) Secondly, I proceed by presenting olfactory devices whose aim is conveying gendered food-related and emotional atmospheres, scrutinising the phenomenological intertwining between food, cooking, gender, ‘sense of home’ and the olfactory imaginary of the matter. Finally, I put forward some observations which weave together aerial dwelling and ecological thought. (shrink)

The aim of the present text is to offer an interpretation of Eyal Weizman’s_concept of forensic aesthetics, demonstrating how this approach reveals the ways in which the aesthetic perception of violence, trauma, and decomposition of human dwelling can be transformed in the current digital optical war regime. Forensic aesthetics tries to grasp a_forensic sensibility as both an aesthetic and political practice, requiring individuals to become sensitive to violence and be able to comprehend and experience the affects of disintegration, trauma, (...) and despair that are characteristic of the experience of the survivor. The environment, dwelling, and architecture are not only inert observers, but rather have become material witnesses of crimes, violence, and destruction of various dwellings inhabited by various species. The application of digital technologies in forensic aesthetics carries a strong ethical appeal to avoid injustice. Traces and fragments of evidence, as well as multiple videos and images, are synchronized and recomposed within digital architectural environments and dwellings, as an optical and interpretative tool that shapes a new type of aesthetics. (shrink)

The supple and ever-present search for the possibilities offered by the narrative form in fictional writing corresponds to the use of the narrative as a mode of understanding and explaining our being-in-the-world in philosophy. The intimate liaison between the realm of fictional imagination and that of human everydayness inspires writers to seek ways to tackle issues of temporality, the conflicting character of human drives, and the ultimately unresolvable tension between finitude and infinitude. As a literary and philosophical category, the narrative (...) remains an inexhaustible space for the exploration of the way we understand our lives. I propose a hermeneutic investigation of the interactions between the art of narration and the categories of space, presence/absence, and (be)- longingness as evoked in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. This article engages Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity, and, more specifically, his notions of homelessness and homecoming, to shed light on the inimitable character of Woolf’s artistic representations of the spatial dimension of human existence, reality viewed as both tremulous and solid, as well as of human embodiment and the disparity/closeness between the corporeal and the spiritual. (shrink)

This article discusses the Embodied Generative Music (EGM) project carried out at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics IEM in Austria. In investigating a new interface that combines motion capture and sound processing software with movement improvisation and performance, I focus on dancers? learning processes of dwelling in the virtual sonic environment. Applying phenomenology and its concepts, I describe how dancers explore reversibility of sound and movement to shape this connection in an artistically expressive manner. The article proposes (...) that dancers build bodily knowledge through both the sonic environment and their own passive and active, intuitive and deliberate, movement choices. While dwelling in a digital environment changes dancers? habitual manners of behaving, it opens up to them new kinds of kinaesthetic opportunities of intimacy and pleasure in motion. The findings from this research reveal the importance of bodily interaction with virtual environments in developing new movement-based interfaces. (shrink)

This article argues that, as far as the problem of Confucian religiosity is concerned, there is an interpretative turn from Mou Zongsan’s moral metaphysics to Tu Weiming’s religious hermeneutics. Some concluding remarks are made: First, Tu’s hermeneutics is rooted in the ontology of self as interrelatedness, which is completely different from Mou’s theory of true self as transcendental subjectivity. Second, Tu’s hermeneutics of self can be better illuminated with the help of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein as Being-with (Mitsein). For Tu (...) and Heidegger, self cannot be seen as something separate from community. This article also points out that the paradigmatic shift is evidenced in another similarity between the four categories of self, community, nature, and the transcendent in Tu’s hermeneutics on the one hand, and the four symbols of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals employed by Heidegger to interpret the meaning of dwelling, on the other. In such a primordial situation of dwelling, gods are not supposed to be intellectually known; they are rather to be neighbors in community. (shrink)

How do permanent artworks installed in public places shape the relations that take place around them? Drawing upon the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray I claim that two public artworks, Richard Serra’s Tilted Spheres (2002-2004) and a bronze casting of Louise Bourgeois’ Maman (1999) work to open up embodied being and to creatively transform reality. Serra’s work reveals an important aspect of public space, that of the space/time of the anonymous body, as well as the ways in which (...) a shared and hence relational embodied perception is necessary for dwelling. Bourgeois’ Maman reveals possibilities for helping us to think out what it might mean to share the same world even as we dwell in different worlds, in a space/time that we cultivate as our own. (shrink)

The Heideggerian question posed here as “what does it mean to dwell in a global age” leaves open, invites even, the possibility of committing two conceptual mistakes from which, depending on the theoretical universe we inhabit, two separate sets of problems arise. On the one hand, if the adverbial “in a global age” is taken to denote a radical historical caesura between “our age” and the age in which the concept was first deployed, one has to prove that the caesura (...) is indeed not only historically operative but legitimate on an ontological level. This would, however, be a futile attempt: there hardly exists an essential, qualitative difference between the ontological regime of “our global age” and the one sketched in Heidegger's 1954 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” We have not been blessed by any epochal turns, despite important switches – to move for a second to a different register—in regimes of accumulation. Thus, it may be concluded, the ontological question about the state of “dwelling in a precarious age” has already been posed and answered by Heidegger himself—from an ontological perspective, he is our contemporary. And of course, to such question there can in fact be only one answer: it is the same “metaphysics” that has precluded the possibility of “dwelling” throughout modernity that gave rise to our age as global. But then to avoid the mistake sketched out above and the repetition of an already accomplished analysis, the question as it is posed for us here should be taken as a politicization of the original concept, foreign to a puritanically ontological Heideggerian diagnostics, although building on its foundations: what is to be done historically at this moment to enter “dwelling”? (shrink)

Understanding the tight connections between human dwelling and the sense of smell seems nowadays urgent. Since human being-in-the-world finds its very prerequisite in being-in-the-air, an inquiry on air design, today particularly intrusive, is a philosophical necessity. The aim of this contribution is to sketch an exploratory investigation on the aesthetic relationships between space, smell and gendered atmospheres through the case of food, specifically through its osmosphere: its flavour as its affective aura. Firstly, I discuss analogies between atmospheres and smells. (...) Secondly, I proceed by presenting olfactory devices whose aim is conveying gendered food-related and emotional atmospheres, scrutinising the phenomenological intertwining between food, cooking, gender, ‘sense of home’ and the olfactory imaginary of the matter. Finally, I put forward some observations which weave together aerial dwelling and ecological thought. (shrink)

In this article, I explore displacement as a force that precludes dwelling. I do so in the context of the georgic mode, a literary tradition defined by dwelling and by the kind of agricultural endeavoring that Heidegger relates to “building.” As he explains in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” to build is not only to make or to construct, but also “to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine”. Thus, in addition to creation (...) outright, Heidegger’s “building” involves husbandry. His expansive definition multiplies the kinds of human activity described by building. When humans cultivate plants, they create a situation and environment wherein the crop can flourish. The generative force is nonhuman; growth comes from the plant itself. We cannot build a vineyard as we can a structure. In addition to placing humans in a caretaking role, the three terms in Heidegger’s title further indicate that the husbandman’s “building” requires his continual attention to his place and to his work. Building, in the agricultural sense of the word, requires prolonged physical presence and much thought. Heidegger’s choice of a vineyard underscores the importance of time to dwelling: as a perennial plant that requires years of investment before bearing fruit, the vineyard functions as a site where planning and labor, observation and care unfold across the seasons and over a period of years. The full scope of Heidegger’s dwelling, then, involves prolonged and productive agricultural thinking and laboring. My fundamental premise is that Heideggerian dwelling reaches a confluence with the georgic mode. (shrink)

Religious philosopher Panikkar sees wisdom as our universe, our world, our Mother Earth, and as a source of happiness and joy--a dwelling place where people are blessed. Here he discusses wisdom in the context of four different areas: an existential feminine approach; a less fragmented anthropology; its most ancient meaning in philosophy; and the preservation of its identity.

The paper addresses the issue of dwelling as a powerful way of cultivating atmospheric feelings without the risk of suffering their disturbing aggressiveness, and deals with inclusiveness or immersivity that true dwelling arouses. To avoid the widespread trend to consider every space a dwelling place, it proposes that only a really “lived” place, in so far it radiates a specific and particularly intense-authoritative atmosphere (in kinetic, synesthetic, felt-bodily sense) affecting the perceivers and finding in their body its (...) precise sounding board, makes dwelling in the proper sense possible. Just as there are different types of atmosphere (prototypical, derivative, spurious), there are therefore different types of dwelling and inclusiveness. However, contrary to the today’s projectivistconstructionist explanation and globalized orientation, for a “pathic aesthetics” only a lifewordly qualitative-emotional experience based on an atmosphere of intimacy-familiarity really turns a house into a home. (shrink)

The paper addresses the issue of dwelling as a powerful way of cultivating atmospheric feelings without the risk of suffering their disturbing aggressiveness, and deals with inclusiveness or immersivity that true dwelling arouses. To avoid the widespread trend to consider every space a dwelling place, it proposes that only a really “lived” place, in so far it radiates a specific and particularly intense-authoritative atmosphere (in kinetic, synesthetic, felt-bodily sense) affecting the perceivers and finding in their body its (...) precise sounding board, makes dwelling in the proper sense possible. Just as there are different types of atmosphere (prototypical, derivative, spurious), there are therefore different types of dwelling and inclusiveness. However, contrary to the today’s projectivistconstructionist explanation and globalized orientation, for a “pathic aesthetics” only a lifewordly qualitative-emotional experience based on an atmosphere of intimacy-familiarity really turns a house into a home. (shrink)

This book philosophically discusses the educational challenges of dwelling poetically, which, according to Martin Heidegger, means learning from great poems how to live a worthy life and relate authentically to beings and to Being. The gifts of great poetry are carefully described and concrete approaches are presented that the educator can adopt.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Original Dwelling Place: Zen EssaysRobert E. GossOriginal Dwelling Place: Zen Essays. By Robert Aitken. Upland, California: Counterpoint, 1996. 241 pp.Robert Aitken narrates his over forty-year journey into Zen, elucidating not only his spiritual journey but also reflecting the Americanization of Zen Buddhism. He was introduced to Zen Buddhism during World War II as an internee in a camp for enemy civilians in Kobe, Japan. Original Dwelling (...) Place is Aitken’s ninth book to explore a series of topics that accent his personal journey into Zen. He has gathered a series of essays about the texts and lineage teachers with whom he studied over the years. In the opening section, entitled “Ancestors,” he pays homage to the masters [End Page 212] who influenced his own Zen practice. He writes, “All of my guides have passed away, but they are alive in my mind and body” (p. 5). The book reflects his continuing bond with those deceased teachers who exercised a vital presence and environmental influence within his life. He shares some stories, personal insights, and legacies of some of his guides, such as Nyogen Senzaki, Soen Roshi, Blyth Sensei, and D. T. Suzuki. I found his essay on the legacy of Dwight Goddard filling in many personal details of a pioneer Western Buddhist who significantly contributed to the Americanization of Buddhism. In many ways, Aitken’s own spiritual development and Original Dwelling Place recapitulate the Americanization of Zen Buddhism, providing some important insights into that process of Buddhist acculturation.Yet Aitken does not limit his guides to twentieth-century ones. He brings alive the classical discourses and relates them to contemporary life. Throughout his essays, I was struck by how alive and dynamic Aitken’s Mahayana contemplative vision and practice are. There is a spirit of “contemplative action” that collapses the duality of meditative practice and living that discovers the truth dynamically within a matrix of open living. As a Christian practitioner of Ignatian spirituality, I found many parallels to the Jesuit ideal of being “contemplative in action.” Aitken’s essays elucidate an ongoing dynamic dialectic that fluctuates between meditative reflection and the world of experience—reminding me at times of the contemplative Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, and at other times of the Jesuit poet-activist, Daniel Berrigan.The reader garners an aesthetic sense that classical Zen texts have been an integral part of his journey and have provided him with a platform to reflect on topics such as marriage, death, the use of money, sexuality, and Zen practice. Some of his essays have a meditative quality, drawing the reader into an web of intertextuality and experience where Zen teachers and Western poets engage in a contemplative path of pleasure expressed in awareness of the everyday dewdrop world. There were moments that I envisioned reading a particular essay on retreat, for they had a meditative quality that reminded me of some the writings of Thomas Merton. Like Merton, Robert Aitken does not merely probe meditative experience but attempts to interrogate the everyday experiences of Western Buddhists from meditative awareness. Most Japanese Buddhists, he notes, are married within Shinto ceremonies, and Western Buddhists have resurrected old Buddhist marriage ceremonies seldom used by Japanese practitioners. Western Buddhist marriage ceremonies, Aitken notes, are a relatively new tradition that often blends ceremonies from The Book of Common Prayer with Buddhist rituals. He ends his short essay on marriage with final reflections on how marriage and family form a little sangha.In “Death: A Zen Buddhist Perspective,” Aitken breaks new ground by noting how Buddhists face the fact of death and find solace in impermanence. He quotes the Japanese haiku poet, Isa Kobayashi (1763–1827), grieving at the loss of his baby daughter:The dewdrop world is the dewdrop world, and yet—and yet(p. 124). [End Page 213]Isa looks desperately for something to give him hope but only finds comfort in his grief. Aitken points out that within grief is emancipation and that bereavement can be a good teacher. He develops some reflections on a highly underdeveloped topic within Buddhism: grieving and the transformation of grief into solace.Aitken writes on political revolution and the matters of ethics. He addresses... (shrink)

What is the relationship between prisons designed to lock people in and suburban fortresses designed to lock people out? Building on Jonathan Simon’s account of “homeowner citizenship,” I argue that the gated community is the structural counterpart to the prison in a neoliberal carceral state. Levinas’s account of the ambiguity of dwelling—as shelter for our constitutive relationality, as a site of mastery or possessive isolation, and as the opening of hospitality—helps to articulate what is at stake in homeowner citizenship, (...) beyond the spectre of stranger danger: namely, my own capacity for murderous violence, and my investment in this violence through the occupation of territory and the accumulation of private property. Given the systemic nature of such investments, the meaning of hospitality in the carceral state is best expressed in abolitionist social movements like the Movement for Black Lives, which holds space for a radical restructuring of the world. (shrink)

What is the relationship between prisons designed to lock people in and suburban fortresses designed to lock people out? Building on Jonathan Simon’s account of “homeowner citizenship,” I argue that the gated community is the structural counterpart to the prison in a neoliberal carceral state. Levinas’s account of the ambiguity of dwelling—as shelter for our constitutive relationality, as a site of mastery or possessive isolation, and as the opening of hospitality—helps to articulate what is at stake in homeowner citizenship, (...) beyond the spectre of stranger danger: namely, my own capacity for murderous violence, and my investment in this violence through the occupation of territory and the accumulation of private property. Given the systemic nature of such investments, the meaning of hospitality in the carceral state is best expressed in abolitionist social movements like the Movement for Black Lives, which holds space for a radical restructuring of the world. (shrink)

“Home” is well known from everyday experience, plays a crucial role in all kinds of narratives about human life, but is hardly ever systematically dealt with in the philosophy of medicine and health care. The notion of home is ambiguous, is often used in a metaphorical way, and is closely related to concepts such as house and dwelling. In this paper the phenomenon of home is explored by means of some phenomenological writings of Heidegger, Bollnow, Bachelard and Levinas. Common (...) in their views is that being at home and dwelling mean something more fundamental than an activity we do along with other activities, such as working and travelling. Dwelling, building a house and being at home are fundamental aspects of human existence. Being human is dwelling. While exploring the relevance of this phenomenological perspective for medical theory and practice, the focus is on the care of people suffering from dementia. (shrink)

Introduction to the thematic issue Dwelling Aesthetics: New Paradigms and Perspectives. ESPES. The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2022.

This article aims to present Judith Butler’s theory of diaspora as a theological paradigm for post-secular social existence. Her accounts of dispossession, statelessness, and exilic identity all afford us a normative challenge for how to think politics and the theological together. We begin by framing Judith Butler’s diasporic theory of politics within Adriennes Rich’s poetic perspective on ecstatic identity. We proceed to argue that by emphasizing both the precariousness and interdependency of social life, Rich and Butler’s shared commitments to universalizing (...) queer forms of collective belonging and affective relations offer an alternative post-secular paradigm to that offered so far by theorists such as Charles Taylor or Jürgen Habermas. Achieving a post-secular “state” may ultimately be a matter of embracing the failure of our own representations, particularly the failures of contemporary religion to represent either the divine or the human, or to constitute a society with its own political theology. It is paradoxically this kind of failure that can open us up to look at ourselves, and to focus on the precariousness and vulnerability of human existence that we see with our very eyes and reproduced by our very own hands. (shrink)

Recent efforts to talk about the self in a postmodern dialect have created a dilemma: How can one conceptualize the human self as multiple, fluid, contextual, and radically relational while also maintaining that it is intentional, private, focused, and accountable? Creative Dwelling weaves elements of feminist psychology and process theology into a dynamic interdiscplinary dialogue about human subjectivity. The result brings a new coherence and vitality to our search for more inclusive and adequate ways of understanding our humanity. The (...) theologicl implications are profound: the dynamics of empathy and clarity impel the author to reframe characteristics of the divine nature, sin, salvation, and spirituality. The book culminates in a study of "dwelling" as a new, iconoclastic, and visionary metaphor for our experiences of the ever-emerging self. (shrink)

This article analyzes the philosophical concept of dwelling from the perspective of a media pragmatics. Media pragmatics is presented here as a method that discloses the circular relation between rule-bound practices and the material and technological substrates that support them. This method is put into practice through a comparative philosophical interpretation of two “canonical” models of dwelling: the Greek oikos and the bourgeois home. Because dwelling, as Heidegger argued, is an interface mediating between the “lifeworld” and the (...) “world” while also organizing relations within the lifeworld, it serves here as a privileged object for articulating this method. (shrink)

Introduction: the road ahead -- Pt. I. Envisioning a just place -- 1. Why jewish social justice? -- 2. Place matters -- 3. The ideal city -- Pt. II. Principles and practice of social justice -- 4. Storytelling for social justice -- 5. Creating an integrated Jewish life -- 6. Partnerships and power -- 7. Sacred words: engaging with text and tradition -- Pt. III. Taking action -- 8. Direct service -- 9. Giving and investing money -- 10. Advocacy -- (...) 11. Community organizing -- Conclusion: where justice dwells. (shrink)

Introduction to the thematic issue Dwelling Aesthetics: New Paradigms and Perspectives. ESPES. The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2022.

The lived experience of children dwelling in the absence of home is explored through the memoirs of Haddy, who as a child of four moved with her family from Fiji to Canada. The recollections of some refugee children along with situations from the author’s own life appear more nominally. The feeling of at-homeness, the act of leaving home, the experience of arriving in a new place, and making a new home are considered. Schutz’s (1971) notion of the ‘stranger’ is (...) applied to children living on the margin as they learn to be at ease in their new world (Lugones, 1987). The significance of language in the everyday lived experience of home (Heidegger, 1971) is also discussed. Moreover, Husserl’s homeworld/alienworld dialectic as opened up by Steinbock (1995) is considered in some depth. The co-arising and interdependent nature of homeworld/alienworld is presented as essential to gaining insight into the lived experience of children between homes. Pedagogical considerations suggested for early learning and care settings include but are not limited to creating environments where homeworld/alienworld encounters can be lived out in rich and meaningful ways, promoting active engagement with difference and diversity, providing for home language and dominant language use, the establishment of homecomrade connections, and instilling a focus on the reciprocity of care for the other. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology Volume 12, Special Edition May 2012. (shrink)

Against the dominant trend in contemporary republicanism, which views Roman political theory as providing significant resources to contemporary emancipatory projects, this article reads the Roman legal and political theoretical tradition as revealing above all the capacity of Republican resources to be coopted in support of monarchic domination. It does so by tracing changes in doctrines of liberty, popular sovereignty, magistracy and majoritarianism from the period of the free Republic into the Principate and thence into the Justinianic codifications, as well as (...) their reception in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Italy. Along the way it urges a more nuanced view of the sources of the Republican tradition: an awareness both of when specific sources on Rome became available to late medieval and early modern thinkers and of the imperial origins of the major sources available before the sixteenth century. (shrink)

From the beginning in 1932, LEGO toys have expressed and were designed with an ethos grounded in simplicity, care, fun, and sustainability. The LEGO corporation's emphasis on openness parallels the philosopher Martin Heidegger's emphasis on openness, releasement, and working creatively within the structures and limitations of history and culture. When one play with LEGO toys, he/she eventually realize his/her creations can be taken apart or knocked down. Heidegger explains that these moments of destruction are opportunities for understanding. For Heidegger, play (...) is especially important because it reconnects them with the awe and wonder. The open structure of LEGO toys invites openness from creators. Other toys might create, require, and sustain different moods and modes of play. However, LEGO play reveals moods and desires in a unique way. LEGO play often extends over a sustained period of time, inviting play with the same bricks in diverse environments with different emotional settings. (shrink)