On the background of Husserls difference between “home-world” and “alien world” (Heimwelt and Fremdwelt) I propose a phenomenological reflection on the concept of “belonging”. Understanding “home” through “belonging” moves away from rootedness. As organic and flexible the latter metaphor might be, it still remains subject to inflexibility, being located in one place. Indeed, I work towards understanding home as being uprooted, however and all the more home.
Dwelling, as Heidegger has shown, is not a matter of not travelling, not migrating, staying at home. Rather, it is a matter of building oneself a home, of working on it, of inhabiting earth, as Burkhard Biella (1998) puts it in the opening of his book “Eine Spur ins Wohnen legen” (trans. “Setting a trace into dwelling”): “Martin Heidegger can count as the thinker of dwelling” (p. 9, my trans.) But then again, if we were to follow Heidegger, the topic is to be traced back to the beginnings of philosophy, as we read in Letter on Humanism: “The saying of Heraclitus (Fragment 119) goes: ethos anthropos daimon. This is usually translated, ‘A man’s character is his daimon’. This translation thinks in a modern way, not a Greek one. Ethos means abode, dwelling place.[…]. According to Heraclitus’s phrase this is daimon, the god. The fragment says: Man dwells, insofar as he is man, in the nearness of god.” (Heidegger 2008, Basic Writings, 256)
With Waldenfels I will discuss the Plurality of Orders for experience and the occurring violence when order is understood as a totality. Also with Waldenfels I will discuss the term of belonging in the light of foreignness and the consequences for conceiving home. I intend to pinpoint how violence brings to the fore the fragility of home, by also rendering into question what “home” means: home as a shelter, a place we are supposed to feel secure, even a place we could feel “rooted”, from where we can grow into the place we inhabit, from where we can reach out.