What is Home?
Novalis and Philosophy as Homesickness
Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere. Where, then, are we going? Always to our home. (Novalis, Fragments)
The German Romantic, Novalis, offers us a compellingly humble and remarkably psychological view of philosophy. Even if philosophy is the pursuit of knowledge or truth, it is, first of all, the quest for home. In contemporary parlance, theory is a form of “cope.”
How should we evaluate philosophy in light of Novalis’s definition? Can a philosophy ever succeed?
One of the insights contained in Novalis’s view is the notion that the human endeavor is animated by lack. Home is the aspiration; exile is the default.
Do we ever arrive? If we do arrive, or if we think we have arrived, we are no longer philosophers. Hegel says the same thing, but from a critical point of view. He says his goal is not to love wisdom, but to have it. Strauss writes that the moment the philosopher thinks he has achieved total knowledge he be stops being a philosopher and becomes a “sectarian.” The Socratic impulse is the skeptical one. A dogmatic philosopher is a contradiction in terms.
So philosophy is a form of world building, a home made with words and concepts, but a temporary one, like a Jewish sukkah or hut. Philosophy is a tent, a shelter. Or, philosophy is the sense that, even when we dwell in fancy buildings, something is off. In this sense, Novalis indicates philosophy to be a kind of restlessness or agitation.
In so defining philosophy, Novalis brings it closer to the spirit of religiosity, not the consolation of the faithful but the cry of the psalmist. How does your reading of philosophical prose change when you hear it as such?
Is the philosopher the dove after the flood looking for dry land?
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