Dwelling in the UHS

Is an intramural dispute inevitable? Perhaps, perhaps not. The hesitations Jeremiah discussed in his recent post are worth considering, and in this vein, it’s important that we first drop the ‘quasi’ from our usual facade of ‘quasi-Heideggerianism.’

Heidegger’s fundamental ontology asked the general question, ‘What is the structure of Being?’ As it relates to global commerce, we can rephrase this is as, ‘What is the relationship between building and dwelling?’ In his Poetry, Language, Thought, Heidegger defined the difference between building and dwelling as between creating things and inhabiting them. This is not exclusively related to the concept of ‘home’: roads, mills, and parks involve dwelling. Where and how we dwell is intricately woven into the concept of ‘place,’ which appears to be at stake when confronted with the ‘universal homogenous state.’

For Heidegger, building is good as long as we cultivate within our phenomenological horizon. Bauen, the German word often associated with building, originally meant ‘to remain’ or ‘to stay in place.’ Staying in place leads to an acquisition of neighbors and sets one’s horizon for a limited sphere of dwelling. For Heidegger this is good building. To achieve Bauen, however, requires an anchoring of the ‘fourfold’ in everything we build.

The fourfold is the Earth, sky, divinities and mortals. Everything made by people must instantiate the fourfold. Heidegger’s example is the dwellings of inhabitants of the Black Forest. They built small houses on a terrace (Earth), design their roofs to handle massive snowfall (sky), have an altar in one corner (divinities) and a place for birth and death in another (mortals).

We can imagine a bridge today that anchors the fourfold. It spans a small river that flows through the middle of a town. Heidegger argues that things create the space they inhabit: before the bridge crosses the river, there is nothing. After the span, there are banks. There is a stream qua stream. Once this bridge creates a location, mortals can move through it. The bridge assists in the formation of neighborhoods, further facilitating local relationships.

This is in contrast to a highway bridge. You cannot walk across it. It subordinates everything to purely human purposes and eliminates divinities. Worst of all, for Heidegger, it connects the global to the local, eliminating that sense of place. Heidegger saw the fourfold as an anchor in the sense that it preserves the near and far. He feared ontological 'homelessness,' where a lack of location and place eliminated the non-interchangeable milieu inherent in local existence. We would not be able to give the thought to our dwelling that it so richly deserves. We would be destroying local and unique experience entirely.

If we fear what Heidegger feared, is the answer to take steps in eliminating or limiting international trade and finance? My position is exactly the opposite: if we take the position that McDonald’s and Starbucks and their ilk constitute ‘bad building’ and slowly wear down our sense of a qualitatively ‘good mode of dwelling,’ it is our responsibility to find a better relationship with the objects of a globalized world. Protectionism is not only bad economics in terms of wealth creation, it would not solve the problems illustrated above. Adequately preserving the local requires an incentive, and it’s not forcing neighborhood workers abroad and small businesses to fail because our idea of place requires a massive disruption in global supply chains. Manipulating trade policy for philosophical ends, I’m afraid, will eliminate the freedom to interact with our surroundings in a better way. It will not change much, except we’ll all be poorer.

There are two remedies, each of which may seem insufficient to some. First, and perhaps least important, is public: states should spend less of its taxpayers’ money on projects that crowd out local and private business. Much of spending on what big government types deem as ‘commonly good’ can only be articulated as such because it spans the widest net of public interaction. It is not local by necessity, and sees an achievement of ‘farness’ (spatially and temporally) as intricate in its goals and schemes.

Secondly, the private: find the places most satisfying to your soul and indulge in the placeness of them all. Maintain your relationship with the local despite your inevitable interaction with the global. Do so doggedly. And then bargain with Heidegger over the phenomenology of dwelling if you must.