Huts, Homelessness and Heimat
Chōmei and Heidegger
Not all hut-dwelling thinkers have left records of their huts. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, wrote little about the hut on a Norwegian fjord, near Skjolden, where he intermittently spent summers in the interwar years — despite ‘thank[ing] God’, in a letter to a friend, that he came there to work and think. Others, like Baopuyi and Thoreau, did leave records — as, too, did the two men I shall discuss: the Japanese poet and Buddhist monk, Kamo no Chōmei (c. 1155-1216) and the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).
This article is part of a year-long series in which we examine six different philosophies of happiness and how they apply to today’s life. Find all the articles in this series here.
People have long been fascinated by hut-dwelling thinkers and authors. From ancient China, Greece and India to the present day, poems and memoirs of several of these thinkers — the Tang poet Baopuyi, for example, or the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau — have become literary classics. During the last three years, a large number of people have visited exhibitions, in Chicago and Venice, devoted to hut-dwellers.
Why the fascination? An interest, perhaps, in the psyche of people who can sustain, even relish, living alone in a hut — in, for example, their ability to ‘experience life away from social definitions of success or failure’, as Ann Cline put it in A Hut of One’s Own. But, as the title of that Venice exhibition, Machines à penser, might suggest, what fascinates may be the role of a hut in a philosophical perspective on the world and the human condition. Perhaps the tininess and isolation of the hut suit it to exemplify a quite general conception of our being in the world.
Not all hut-dwelling thinkers have left records of their huts. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, wrote little about the hut on a Norwegian fjord, near Skjolden, where he intermittently spent summers in the interwar years — despite ‘thank[ing] God’, in a letter to a friend, that he came there to work and think. Others, like Baopuyi and Thoreau, did leave records — as, too, did the two men I shall discuss: the Japanese poet and Buddhist monk, Kamo no Chōmei (c. 1155-1216) and the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).
Wittgenstein’s hut in Skjolden, Norway.
An odd couple, one might think. My pairing is not, however, arbitrary. It’s not simply that the two men had similar personal motives for dwelling in a hut, notably a great distaste for the times in which they found themselves living. Nor is it only that, in both cases, large and morally charged conceptions of nature, society and humankind are distilled in their reflections on the huts and their environs. More interesting is the seemingly stark contrast between the significance that Chōmei and Heidegger respectively recognised in their huts. For the Japanese poet, his hut represented impermanence, instability and homelessness; for the German philosopher, tradition, continuity and home. This contrast no doubt reflects wider ones between the legacies of Buddhism and European Romanticism.
But equally intriguing is a deep affinity between the two writers in the hopes they invested in the liberation that dwelling in a hut could foster — a freedom not only of the hut-dwellers themselves but, more enigmatically, a ‘letting be’ of the things in the surrounding world. We’ll return to the contrasts and affinities when we’ve learnt more about the huts and their place in the lives and thought of the two men who dwelt in them.
Chōmei
Kamo no Chōmei was born in, or close to, 1155 in the then capital of Japan, Kyoto, the son of the superintendent of an important Shinto shrine – a position he was disappointed not to inherit after his father’s death. He appears, for many years, to have been a moderately successful and well-regarded poet and musician in court circles. When, once again, he was passed over for the superintendentship of a Shinto shrine, Chōmei ‘turned [his] back on the world’, as he put it, left Kyoto and took the tonsure, joining a community of Buddhist monks in a mountainous area north of the capital. It is in what he did, now in his mid-fifties, after ‘five fruitless years’ spent there, that our interest in Chōmei begins. Given permission by the Hōkaiji Temple, south-east of Kyoto, Chōmei built himself a little hut on a hill, Toyoma, on Temple land — the hut where he was to live until his death in 1216 and to write his classic memoir, Hōjōki.
The Heraclitean opening to Hōjōki (‘A Record of the Ten-Foot-Square Hut’) is known to every educated Japanese: ‘The river flows on unceasingly, but the water is never the same water as before’. Only 13 pages long in the Penguin translation, this little book is still required reading in Japanese schools. Its early sections emphasise the impermanence and instability of everything — buildings, landscapes, human lives — by recounting the many disasters that, in the author’s lifetime, had caused havoc and misery. Floods, earthquakes, droughts, famines … all of these have served to make ‘this world a hard place to live’ in, and demonstrated the fragility of our lives and possessions. (Sales of Hōjōki zoomed, apparently, in the wake of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011).
Unsurprisingly, people were feeling ‘suspended, unsettled, adrift’, but not simply as a result of the natural disasters, for their moral condition was too degenerate to equip them to cope with these dire events. Chōmei unfavourably compares his own times with ones in which people were more benevolent and considerate. Here there is an implicit invocation of the Japanese Buddhist idea of mappō, a long period of decline in which, increasingly, the teachings of the Buddha get forgotten and human beings revert to craving, resentment and sheepish conformity. Attachment to worldly things means that those who have them live in fear of losing them, while those who don’t are consumed by envy. ‘Hankering [and] vexation’, as Basil Bunting renders it in his poem ‘Chōmei at Toyama’, are ‘the run of the world’.
Convinced of the ‘folly of all human undertaking’, disillusioned with the community of monks he’d joined, and in search of ‘a little peace of mind’, Chōmei moved to the ‘little safe shelter’ on Toyoma hill — ‘one hundreth the size of the house of [his] middle years’. The second half of his memoir records his solitary life there over the next four years. Only ten-foot-square, the hut was simplicity itself. A tiny stove, bracken for a bed, two Buddhist images, a couple of shelves, a few books (The Lotus Sutra, one by the priest Genshin, an anthology of poetry), and his two musical instruments (a koto and a biwa) were all that the shack contained. Outside was a small covered verandah and a little rock pool.
Traditional Japanese hut. Source: Youtube video screengrab
Chōmei is keen to emphasise that he wasn’t ‘concerned about where [he] lived’, nor about constructing a house ‘to fit the site’. He stresses, equally, that the hut is so constructed as to be easily dismantled and moved elsewhere on a couple of carts. These are important remarks, key to understanding what the hut signified for him.
To begin with, in its fragility and moveability, the hut represented in a salient way the central Buddhist truth of the impermanence of everything.
This is not the dull truth that even such seemingly enduring entities as rocks undergo some change and will eventually disappear. The point, rather, is that things — our possessions, our environments, and indeed we ourselves — are much less constant and enduring than we like to imagine. And much less stable, too, for everything is subject to unpredicted contingencies that transform not only the contexts in which we live, but our own characters, emotions and aspirations. Like the Kyoto residents whose seemingly durable houses were destroyed by earthquakes and fires, all of us are liable to suffer if we remain blind to the transience and instability of everything we experience. It is this blindness, after all, that, according to the Buddha, is largely responsible for the attachments we form to possessions, jobs, goals, other people, and our own interests.
This leads to the second type of meaning his hut had for Chōmei. It represented a Buddhist ideal often expressed by the metaphor of ‘homelessness’. The person seeking enlightenment, the scriptures tell us, ‘goes forth from the household life into homelessness’, not just in a literal sense — becoming a mendicant monk, say — but through achieving detachment from the material, personal and emotional attachments that household life inevitably generates. Here the home or household life itself refers not only literally, but figuratively to the whole everyday social world of commitments, conventions and purposes in which people are ordinarily engaged and submerged. It was to denote detachment from all of this that Buddhist monks ‘going forth’ often chose for themselves the epithet ‘Anagārika’ (‘one who does not live in a house’).
It is the same ideal of detachment that Chōmei’s hut — which he refers to as a ‘temporary abode’ or ‘passing shelter’ — signified for the poet-monk. Or, rather, it’s what he wanted it to signify. For, at the end of Hōjōki, he confesses that his shelter has become a home, and a place that he loves. In some poignant passages, he comes to question his ‘life of seclusion and peace’, indeed to regard it as an ‘error’, precisely because it has become an object of an attachment that is an ‘impediment to [a good] rebirth’. Unable to resolve the paradox of a life of detachment itself turning into a form of attachment, Chōmei can only place his trust in Amida, the Buddha whose name is invoked by his devotees in order to achieve rebirth in the Pure Land that he created. That, in his own anguished estimate, Chōmei failed to live up to the ideal of homelessness only serves to confirm, of course, that this was the ideal that his hut was meant to exemplify.
Hōjōki is an extended meditation on the impermanence of the world and the danger of attachment. Written by the reclusive monk Kamo no Chōmei at the dawn of the thirteenth century, this classic work of Japanese literature is celebrated for its linguistic simplicity and philosophical depth. (Kindle Edition)
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Heidegger
Jump 700 years and to the other side of the world, and another famous hut was about to be constructed, in 1922, for the philosopher Martin Heidegger. This was also located on a slope of a high mountain valley, but this time in the Black Forest, close to the village of Todtnauberg, and 30 km from Freiburg, where Heidegger spent most of his teaching life. The site was carefully chosen — Heidegger knew the region well from skiing and hiking trips — and the hut was built to last. Though simple and basic, at 6m by 7m square and with three rooms including a study, the hut was palatial by Chōmei’s standards. There were important differences, too, in the two men’s uses of their huts.
Heidegger in front of his hut in Todtnauberg.
Although Heidegger usually went there alone to work and think, his family frequently accompanied him and he entertained many visitors over the years. This was no hermitage, no absolute retreat from the world. Indeed, when we note various facets of the philosopher’s life in the mountains — dressing in traditional Swabian costumes, smoking a pipe with local peasants in a Weinstube — it becomes clear that the hut, far from being a ‘passing shelter’, was perceived by Heidegger as his real home. Or better the little hut ‘up here’, as he referred to it, signified for him a Heimat, in a way that his large house in Freiburg, ‘down there’, did not.
‘Home’ and ‘homeland’ do not capture the rich sense of this German word, one indicated in a radio talk of 1934 when Heidegger explained his decision to ‘stay in the provinces’, rather than take up a Chair in Berlin. The hut and its environs are his ‘work-world’, a place where his thinking is ‘embedded in the region’, ‘sustained and guided’ by its mountains, valleys and inhabitants. In an Address given in his birthplace, Messkirch, he defines his Heimat as ‘that which sustains and determines and lets us grow in the core of our existence’, a place where both ‘encompassing nature and historical tradition abide together’, and ‘Origin’ or ‘Heritage’ shapes ‘human existence’.
These words invoke what is often described as a uniquely German notion, celebrated in countless Romantic poems and Lieder, of Heimat as both a geographical region and a repository of the language, customs, memories, and traditions that provide people with a sense of identity and belonging. For Heidegger, the hut and its surroundings gathered together these dimensions of the Heimat in which it was located. But why should this have been so important to him? To answer this — and to explain the increasingly central place of Heimat in his thinking — we need to trace the direction his thinking took from the time of his seminal work Being and Time (1927).
Caspar David Friedrich, Landscape with Mountain Lake
The stated aim of this book was to address ‘the question of Being’ — of how, that is, any particular being, such as a hammer or a cow, comes to be experienced for what it is. Heidegger’s answer is that this is not, as traditionally assumed, through observation and inspection of the world, but through our practical engagement with it. Hammers and cows, show up for us in the first instance, as ‘equipment’ or things ‘ready-to-hand’, revealed through practices like carpentry and farming.
But it was an accompanying theme that, for many readers, made Being and Time fascinating — the ‘existentialist’ one of authenticity. Precisely because we are generally ‘absorbed’ in practices and ‘equipment’, we reflect neither on them nor our own lives. This means that, in their ‘average everydayness’, people are living inauthentically, for they fail to recognize that their individual existence is ‘an issue’ for them, something they should ‘make their own’ by giving it sense and direction. Far from doing this, people instead live under ‘the dictatorship of “Them” (das Man, the anonymous ‘public’)’, unreflectingly valuing, understanding, and enjoying things as ‘They’ do. In the grip of ‘Them’, individual lives get levelled.
Authenticity, Heidegger argued, was not to be retrieved, as later existentialists imagined, by ‘choosing’ one’s own values and committing to them come what may. Instead, people should look to their ‘heritage’, and to the ‘heroes’ of the past, in order to identify ‘possibilities’ of living in freedom from the dead hand of ‘Them’. For several years, Heidegger came to view heritage as that of a nation or Volk: hence his short-lived enthusiasm for and association with the Nazis. It may, in part, have been disillusionment with National Socialism that inspired a change in his thinking about heritage. But the change was also due to his growing perception of the ‘monstrousness’ of what he came to view as the defining stamp of modernity — technology.
September 26: Martin Heidegger’s Birthday (1889-1976)
The technological life
By ‘technology’, Heidegger was not primarily referring to technological processes, like steel production, but to the predominant way of ‘revealing’ the world as so much ‘standing reserve’, ‘on tap’ for human consumption and exploitation. The Rhine, say, has become an electric power resource or something for tourists to gawk at. As a result, things and places lose their distinctive character: one forest is the same as another when regarded as potential lumber. When combined with such developments as television, jet travel, central heating and air-conditioning, the effect is to level everything down. The difference between the seasons, for example, is disguised when the temperature can be kept constant all year round by a thermostat. The distinction between what is ‘near’ and ‘far’, ‘close’ and ‘alien’ is blurred when we can watch, or fly off to see, events on the other side of the world. In effect, people are becoming heimatlos — unable any longer to appreciate the distinctive features of the places where once they felt uniquely at home.
They have become, as Heidegger puts it, increasingly incapable of dwelling. For to dwell is not simply to live somewhere, but to ‘spare and preserve’ the things in one’s environment — animals, mountains, bridges, farm houses. Commentators have not unreasonably drawn an eco-friendly lesson from such remarks, but Heidegger’s central point is one about how we should experience things. To spare and preserve means to ‘let things be themselves’, which entails, for a start, that they should not be regarded as simply on tap for our use. But it means, second, that a bridge, say, should be experienced and appreciated in the full range of its relationships to the natural world, to the lives and deaths of the people who cross it, and to the ‘holy’, the spiritual ethos of a community. To dwell is to allow the bridge — and the river, the nearby hillside, the Weinstube and one’s own house — to ‘gather’ together these dimensions of being.
Caspar David Friedrich, The Summer, 1807
Heidegger became convinced that, if the power of technology is to be resisted, and the possibility of authentic dwelling preserved, this would only be in ‘rural regions and small country towns’, like Messkirch: for it is here that those ‘powers of encompassing nature and historical tradition abide together’. To dwell, then, people must live in a Heimat, a region or province blessed with a rich natural environment and cultural heritage, ‘the healing power of yesterday’. The Todtnauberg hut, for Heidegger, not only stood in such a Heimat, it epitomised it.
In this beautifully written book, David E. Cooper uses a gentle walk through a tropical garden – the view of the fields and hills beyond it, the sound of birds, voices and flutes, the reflection of light in water ... as an opportunity to reflect on experiences of nature and the mystery of existence.
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There, then, is the seemingly stark contrast in what their huts signified for Chōmei and Heidegger respectively — homelessness and Heimat. I say ‘seemingly’, in part, because the homelessness sought by the Buddhist poet wasn’t quite the same thing as the homelessness that depressed the German philosopher. More importantly, for all the difference between the two men’s perceptions of their huts, there are underlying affinities. For each of them, a hut signalled liberation. In the one case, this was liberation from ‘worldliness’, from a human world made ‘a hard place’ to live in by cravings and attachments that cause immense suffering. In the other case, it was liberation from the technological way of experiencing the world that threatened to drive out every other way, erase the distinction between ‘near’ and ‘far’, and level the world down.
We should recognise, too, that for both thinkers their hut was a place to cultivate a further kind of liberation. If we view the world as so much ‘standing reserve’, or our view of it is corrupted by our cravings, then we are failing to experience things as they really are. Now it is a goal of the Buddhist path as much as of European phenomenology to experience things as they are themselves. We need, in Heidegger’s terms, to be ‘released’ to things as they are, so that they are ‘let be’, no longer trapped within conceptual schemes shaped by all-too-human interests and prejudices. For the Buddha, overcoming of lust and other attachments is necessary for ‘knowledge and vision of reality’.
What is especially intriguing for students of eremitism is the intimate interplay of personal motives and philosophical commitments behind Nanavira’s decision to live alone.
We saw how, for Heidegger, we let things be what they are through experiencing them in the full compass of their relations to nature, human life, and the ‘holy’ and mysterious. Chōmei, steeped in the Buddhist conception of the interdependence of everything, would concur. The plants, creatures, clouds and snow that he encounters on Toyama serve as ‘aids to meditations’, so that these natural phenomena are not only appreciated in their relationship to one another, as aspects of an integrated environment, but in their human and spiritual significance. The swathes of wisteria point to the purple clouds that, for devotees of Amida, ‘bear the soul’ to the Pure Land. The brief, melancholic song of a cicada conveys sorrow at the ephemeral character of life.
There is a final affinity between the two men. I spoke earlier of the hopes they invested in their huts as locations of liberation. But, in both cases, hope was accompanied by pathos. Heidegger was under no illusion about stopping the onward march of technology by railing against it as ‘the devil’s work’. Only ‘here and now and in little things’ — simple traditional tasks and enjoyments in and around a mountain hut, perhaps — might some people resist the hegemony of technology. Chōmei, likewise, was under no illusion about the ‘self-power’ of human beings to achieve enlightenment and, as we saw, doubted that even his hut-dwelling life had freed him from attachment.
The two men’s pathos is recorded by them in remarkably similar terms. For Heidegger, as he put it in a posthumously published interview, ‘Only a God can save us’. For Chōmei, all we can finally do is to invoke the ‘other-power’ of Amida ‘before falling silent’.
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