The dwelling door: Towards a phenomenology of transition

Abstract

A meditation upon human dwelling reveals our primal embodied existence, our being-in-the-world. The notion of dwelling is the most taken-for-granted aspect of human existence. For this very reason, inhabitation, our familiar though enigmatic circumstance, is the most obscure problem upon which we may reflect. To understand this radically occluded aspect of our being is to ask a dangerous and disruptive question. Contemplating the notion of inhabiting discloses our primitive alliance with the world and thereby unsettles the natural embeddedness and forgetfulness of human existence. Subjective life is embodied existence.¹ Subjectivity is not a dream that passes over reality, nor is it a surveying of thought or a mechanical process. Human subjectivity involves us in a suffering of the inherent limitations and possibilities of the flesh. This subjectivity must be thought as opened up by the very limitation of what Unamuno has called a humanity of “flesh and bone.”² To think within this context means to arouse the slumber of our dwelling, to reflect on the mysterious alliance between person and world; it means to begin to move toward an understanding of human habitation.