Abstract
As Jeff Malpas, author of Rethinking Dwelling (2021) confirms, ‘Heidegger remains a central figure throughout the volume’ (p. 2) under review because ‘he is such an important figure in the architectural engagement with philosophy’ (p. 3). And this is explained by the fact that ‘his work thematizes ideas that are at the heart, not only of thinking about architecture and the built environment, but also of any genuine attempt to think about the nature of the human, ideas, specifically of place and space’ (p. 3). Malpas’s endeavour, then, is to think architecture’s engagement, not just in relation to space, but more particularly, in relation to place as understood in terms of Heidegger’s notion of dwelling.
It is in relation to dwelling, then, that this study finds its point of departure; it is a point of departure that allows Malpas to demonstrate his scholarship and erudition with regard to Heidegger’s philosophy as this bears on the notion of dwelling. Indeed, Malpas’s insights with regard to Heidegger’s thought alone make this book truly compelling. This is the case for those who might classify themselves as ‘interested readers of Heidegger’ rather than as Heidegger specialists. In short, there is much to be learnt from this volume.
In the first place, Malpas shows that ‘dwelling’ may well be a problematic translation of the German, Wohnen, the key theme of Heidegger’s essay, first given at a lecture at Darmstadt to architects in 1951, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’) (1975). For while ‘dwelling’ is a slightly unusual term in English – or at least is not an ‘everyday’ term – Wohnen, ‘in contrast, is an ordinary and commonplace term in regular everyday use’ (p. 4). Invoking Wohnen, then, is part of Heidegger’s strategy of demonstrating what is potentially concealed in a word in everyday use, rather than resorting to a term with a technical or specialist meaning. Food for thought is thus to be found in the ‘everyday’ and not – or not only – in specialist disciplines.
As mentioned earlier, Malpas’s approach is to show the importance of place in comparison to space. Indeed, ‘[p]lace’ is ‘not to be confused with space’ (p. 5). Moreover, place, which is bounded, is deemed to be ‘more fundamental’ than space, the latter being ‘largely undifferentiated’ (p. 5) and unbounded. The human, Malpas will argue, is more implicated in place than space. Here, a difference between Heidegger and Levinas emerges. For while Heidegger argues that the human finds its essential being in a place – to the point of being at home (dwelling) in a specific place – the Levinasian notion of ‘exteriority’ implies that the human is never entirely tied to place, the latter being, for Levinas, equivalent to interiority. Exteriority is consequently linked to space rather than place. The problem for Levinas is that place divides humanity into ‘natives and strangers’, where natives would be seen as the ‘natural’ inhabitants of place, and where ‘strangers’ are to be excluded, or at least to be included only within certain clearly defined limits. As a result, and as is known, terms such as exteriority, infinity, space and exile that are important to Levinas can be compared with Heidegger’s valorisation of interiority, finitude, place and home (Wohnen).
In a certain sense, perhaps, Malpas gives Heidegger’s notion of home a Levinasian twist. For he says that home, for Heidegger, can be ‘homelessness’ (p. 45); it also ‘opens up the possibility of being not at home, of homelessness’ (p. 69). Even more: ‘the possibility of otherness emerges out of the first placing of self in the world such that the world and one’s own place in it are at issue for one’ (p. 69). However, what is problematic for Levinas, according to Malpas, is that he never really explicitly addresses ‘the spatiality that is operative in his thinking’ (p. 71).
Be this as it may, the Levinas-Heidegger relation is largely invoked the better to gain an orientation in understanding of the Heideggerian notion of place. In this regard, Malpas states that his own position ‘is the idea of place as a sui generis notion that is not reducible to time and space, even though it is intimately related to both’ (p. 69). It would be easy to fall into the trap of presenting place as something resembling the traditional village dwelling as the focus of affective community bonds and its resistance to mobile city life. The rural hut, might, in effect, be an exemplar of the German heimat (homeland). And indeed, when Heidegger, in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, gives as an example of dwelling ‘the farmhouse in the Black Forest’ (p. 160), it almost seems as though the thinker’s notion of dwelling is one that is very traditionalist, so that the residing peasants, rather than any outsiders, might belong to the place. For his part, Malpas even provides a black and white image of the said hut (p. 16). The issue for him, then, is how to avoid Heidegger’s conception of place being linked directly to Nazism and the language of exclusion rather than openness, something that Levinas’s critique of place – despite Malpas – seems to presage?
In response to this dilemma, Malpas argues that Heidegger’s notion of place is not one based on self-containment à la Descartes, where being at home means being entirely cut off from the outside world – where home would enable the living of one’s interiority to the full. Rather, a proper understanding of Heidegger is to see place as a key mechanism of connecting and engaging with the world. Thus the body, as part of place, is not just one element of a mind-body relation but is ‘necessarily externalized and extended into the world – as essentially emplaced’ (p. 66). On this reading, then, place, for Heidegger, does not entail complete closure but is a mode of openness, an openness that is tied to ‘complexity and multiplicity’ (p. 67).
The upshot is that, in light of Heidegger, it is only by thinking in terms of a revitalised notion of place rather than space that the basic concerns of architecture can be effectively addressed. For our author’s aim is not just to correct the record of Heidegger on place, but to demonstrate how Heidegger’s thinking is relevant to architecture, the discipline that has traditionally been seen to be concerned with the enclosure of space rather than an engagement with place.
‘Place’ we read, ‘is tied to the human’ (p. 35). Place, Heidegger would say, is the way the human is in the world. Consequently, the task is to show that the relation of the human to place is not a simple or static one. This is particularly so because the human does not always act in accordance with ‘what it is’ (p. 42). What is clearly in evidence is that Malpas is at pains to demonstrate that Heidegger’s thinking about place and dwelling is not determinist in the manner of cause and effect (the nature of place does not give rise to the character of the human). Nor is place to be understood simply as location, although the latter is integral to place. Again, the nature of place is not to be understood as being preceded and determined by certain modes of human subjectivity. In other words, place has to be distinguished from a subjectivist appropriation where the mode and tenor of a location would be the outcome of projections and actions of a subject, or subjects. Furthermore, to the extent that home, like location, is implicated in the nature of place, homelessness and alienation, as already noted, do not contradict the centrality of place. In general terms, then, Malpas reveals the ‘topological character of human being’ (p. 45).
Place, to reiterate, is bounded and limited. It is indeed ‘finite’. The finitude of place and of the human would then seem to correspond. Of course, as is well known, the ultimate instance of finitude for Heidegger is ‘being-for-death’. Malpas does not make this explicit, but as finitude, place presages death. Perhaps this is also the basis of its emotional charge.
In the final chapter and in the Epilogue of this work, Malpas advocates for architects and designers to engage in works that respond to site even as building also brings place into the open (p. 102). Where this is not done, as exemplified by Pudong in Shanghai (p. 159: fig 9.2); Docklands in Melbourne (p. 159: fig 9.3); and La Défense in Paris (p. 160: fig. 9.4), the buildings concerned are cut-off – alienated – from their surroundings. There is no rich transition from the exterior (the built environment) to the interiority of the tower blocks. As such, these architectural forms could, following the spirit of our global times, be established almost anywhere in the world.
Given his careful formulations, attention to detail and impressive Heidegger scholarship, does Malpas succeed in presenting a Heideggerian notion of dwelling that is made for our times? The answer is that if the book encourages readers to reassess (rethink) Heidegger on dwelling, it will have achieved something important. However, there are limitations.
First among these is what comes across in the end as an intrepid defence of Heidegger on dwelling, place, home and the human. It is not that Malpas ignores some of the thinker’s shortcomings, such as the fact that Heidegger’s ‘spatial and topological language is used in a way that is indeed exclusionary’ (p. 52), and even evokes elements of Nazi ideology. Nor does the author ignore Heidegger’s references to the peasant hut and to other rural images as exemplars of dwelling, which could possibly imply a certain essentialism. Malpas’s strategy is to admit, rather than deny, Heidegger’s failings, but only in order to argue that these are effectively superficial when one considers the deeper nature of Heidegger’s thought. In short, the latter is not ultimately exclusionary, or ultimately essentialist, or ultimately consistent with Nazi ideology. The problem is that one cannot escape the feeling that Malpas has overplayed his hand and that the ‘reality’ being promoted is Heideggerian thought without any profound blemish. Thus, when it comes to the claim that only the human has a hand (that it is, says Heidegger, ‘the essential distinction of man’; p. 122), Malpas does not seem to find anything problematic here, whereas surely this is another instance where the ontic has come to take precedence over the ontological. In other words, the presence or absence of the hand becomes an empirical rather than a philosophical question. Do not orangutans also have hands? Ditto in relation to Heidegger’s proposals regarding the typewriter and writing. There, it appears that, for Heidegger, there is something essential about the relation between pen (hand), paper (parchment?) and writing, a relation that is supposedly obscured by the typewriter. This raises the whole issue of the human and technology as it is taken up in Bernard Stiegler’s work, and where it is shown that technology (technics) is the defining feature of the human (see Stiegler, 1998). For Malpas, the point Heidegger is making is that the typewriter, as an instance of technology, supposedly leads to the way that ‘language itself comes to appear as disembodied and displaced, even as formalized and abstracted’ (p. 122) and leads to the concealment of the role of the hand in architecture and design. It would thus seem that ‘Heidegger’s hand’ is being defended at all costs.
But what, when it comes down to it, are we to make of the essay/lecture that is so much the focus of Rethinking Dwelling? While Malpas places emphasis on dwelling in relation to building, so that there is no building that is not also a response to dwelling, in the Heidegger essay we read that: ‘The Old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell’ (1975: 140); and: ‘to build, is really to dwell’ (p. 147). Again: ‘Building as dwelling’ is the human’s mode of ‘being on the earth’ (p. 147). If, to ‘dwell is to build’ and to build in the most profound sense is to dwell, then, on this basis, Rethinking Dwelling could equally be entitled: Rethinking Building – or, at least: Rethinking Dwelling as Building. Perhaps it is just a matter of emphasis, but, on the other hand, it could be that there is no place before the building begins – there is no site in itself prior to building. If this is so, then the work of architects and designers becomes particularly crucial. They would not just be custodians of a site, but also its conscious and unconscious creators in the sense that the work of architects would be based on the work of previous generations of builders, culminating, for the moment, with modernist and postmodernist trends.
Of course against this Malpas could (and does) point to the fact that Heidegger, in invoking the ‘fourfold’ (earth, sky divinities and mortals), explicitly gives the emphasis to dwelling over building: ‘We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is because we are dwellers’ (p. 148). But given Heidegger’s effort to equate, at a deeper level, the very meaning or ‘being’ of dwelling with building, the more colloquial, ‘everyday’, invocation of ‘dwelling’ becomes, to say the least, ambiguous. All the more is this so when we learn that it is the bridge that makes the banks of the river appear, not the reverse (p. 152) – that it is the bridge that gives rise to ‘location’. Indeed: ‘building produces locations’ (p. 158). But the bridge is also fundamentally a ‘thing’. As such, it ‘gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky divinities and mortals’ (p. 153). It is as a ‘thing’ that the bridge allows the fourfold to appear (p. 155). Moreover, it is said that ‘genuine buildings give form to dwelling in its presencing and house this presence’ (p. 159).
Another (albeit, for now, final) point for consideration with regard to the study under consideration is the extent to which empirical claims seem to have a determining effect, both for Heidegger and for Malpas. In Heidegger’s case, we have cited the peasant hut; in the case of Malpas, we have cited the towers that are hostile to the built environment surrounding them. In a telling passage, Malpas also refers to Heidegger’s specific reference to a ‘country path – der Feldweg – that runs from Messkirch into the surrounding countryside’ (p. 174, fig. 10.1). The question the interested reader of Heidegger wants answered is: how is the reference to the country path (and to the landscape) not part of Heidegger’s critique of the city, with all its ‘hustle and bustle’ and its tendency to conceal dwelling and to shut down thinking? ‘One can only really think in the countryside’ might be the message being conveyed. And Malpas supplements this when he writes, with regard to solitude, that: ‘although it is not impossible in the urban context of city and town, it often more immediately and readily occurs away from the denseness [what is this?] of human habitation, in places in which human activity takes place against a much larger and more encompassing domain’ (p. 173). This is why ‘landscape’ is important for ‘forms of topological thinking’ and a thinking that ‘often converges with aspects of environmental thought’ (p. 173). Here, what the interested Heidegger reader might seek guidance on is how such an approach can be something that calls on us to think rather than being a valorisation of life away from the city – of life that appears to be more genuinely a mode of dwelling and a demarcation of place if the context is rural rather than urban; when, in short, dwelling would seem, in the last analysis, to merge with a rejection of the stranger.