Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

Conference | Paper

Threefold Homelessness: The Classic, the Romantic, and the Modernistic

Haotian Wu

Wednesday 4 September 2024

16:35 - 17:15

TU-Main Venue

Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world’, writes Heidegger (2008: 243) in Letter on Humanism. This existential-ontological homelessness underlines the tradition of phenomenology, which, overall, can be read as an existential philosophy to dwell, to become at home in the world. To evaluate phenomenology in this light, I argue, we must first comprehend the issue of homelessness in its magnitude and density. This is what I propose to do in this paper, consisting of three parts. In the first part, ‘Classic homelessness: the eternal resurrection of tragic consciousness’, I argue that the tragic experience, especially the encounters of death, guilt, and suffering, constitutes the most fundamental dimension of homelessness. Any attempt at homecoming, therefore, must acknowledge this inalienable alienation of being human. Key inspirations here will be Karl Jaspers’ notion of the limit-situation, his Tragedy is not enough, and tragedies in world literature. In the second part, ‘romantic homelessness: the poetry of heart and the prose of circumstance’, I argue that homelessness takes on a new dimension with post-Cartesian ontology, the subject/object divide. Crucial to this section is the sensibilities of inwardness, alienation and the disenchantment of the world. In the third part, ‘modernistic homelessness: schizophrenia or utopia, that is the question’, I argue that, in the 20th century, the homelessness that phenomenologists encounter, becomes totalistic. It manifests psychologically as the symptoms of schizophrenia, the fragmentation of the self, and politically as totalitarian regimes, the reactive endeavours of total control. For this part, Hannah Arendt’s studies of totalitarianism and Louis Sass’s phenomenological descriptions of schizophrenia will serve as the guideline. Overall, this paper contributes to ‘The Many Worlds of Phenomenology’ by describing the three worlds of homelessness that overlap in the predicament of our contemporary life world.