Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Thresholds & Inhabitation
Bernd Jager
Jager is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Quebec in Montreal. Many of his writings (sidebar, below) are central to environmental phenomenology in that they explore existential dialectics often expressed in spatial and place terms—for example, the lived tensions between dwelling and journey, insider and outsider, house and city, or mundane and festive worlds. For thoughtful commentaries on Jager’s work, see: Essais de psychologie phénoménoguique-existentielle: Réunis en homage au professeur Bernd Jager, Christian Thiboutot, ed. (Montreal: CIRP, 2007); this volume includes a bibliography of Jager’s writings. The following essay is extracted from a longer paper, “Toward a Psychology of Homo Habitans: A Reflection on Cosmos and Universe,” presented at the annual International Human Science Conference held at Ramapo College, Mahwah, New Jersey, June 2008. bernd@ican.net. © 2009 Bernd Jager. Originally published in Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, vol. 20, no. 3 (fall 2009), pp. 8-10.
The distinguishing trait of human habitation is that it establishes and honors thresholds that cannot be reduced to relationships of force. A threshold can be crossed only by mutual agreement: It represents a symbolic relationship that has distanced itself from mere instinct, appetite and brute impulse. As such, it constitutes the foundation for prayer and sacrifice as well as for dialogue, love, and friendship.
A threshold embodies the typical and unique ways human beings are linked, both to the Earth and to the heavens and to their earthly and heavenly neighbors. It represents a limit that all at once separates and binds human beings to what surrounds, undergirds, and overarches their existence.
Approached in this way, the threshold constitutes the ultimate foundation of a human world reflected in all building projects from the most primitive cave or hut to the most magnificent palace or city, all of which we might even consider as mere variations on the theme of the threshold, the essential function of which is to hold separate and distinct worlds together.
******
We think of a cosmos as an inhabited world shaped and ordered by customary limits and divided by hospitable thresholds in such a way that human and divine encounters become possible. The fundamental order of the cosmos is, therefore, a moral order, guided by custom and ritual and governed by a threshold that both separates and symbolically unites human and divine neighbors. To be a neah-gebür, or neighbor, means to be a “near-dweller” who “builds,” “farms,” and “dwells” (buan) “nearby” (neah) in such a way that he or she must cross a threshold and perform the proper rituals to come into the presence of other near-dwellers.
The cosmos, understood as a neighborly world, is reflected or replicated in all inhabitable structures. A house, temple, or city is not only marked by thresholds. Each also manifests an absolute and material limit made manifest in foundations, roof, and walls. The walls separating one house or town from the next may be understood as representing the memory of a painful, original division overcome through the gate or doorway. This original division cannot ever be completely healed or overcome. It must be accepted as a first condition for building a human life and dwelling in a human way.
We are reminded here of the birth of an infant, understood as a first and painful separation from an all-providing mother. We think here also of the Genesis myth of Eve’s creation out of a rib taken forcibly from Adam’s chest and of the story of Adam and Eve being chased from Paradise. We find this theme of a fateful, original separation also elaborated in the Aristophanic myth as it is told in Plato’s Banquet. This myth represents the birth of humankind as the result of a punishment meted out to an earlier non-human race of arrogant giants who refused to maintain neighborly relations with the gods. To curb their arrogance, Zeus cut each of them in half, thereby hoping to make them more responsive to both the gods and to each other.
This operation was at first unsuccessful because the separated halves found no way to mutually interact to form a cosmos and create a human world. They succumbed to loneliness and despair. The gods then reshaped the halves so they could face, talk, and make love to each other. These new creatures could then dwell and relate to each other as neighbors. In this way, so the myth tells us, human beings were born.
******
|
1971 Horizontality and Verticality: An Exploration into Lived Space. In A. Giorgi et al., eds.. Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology, vol. 1 (Duquesne Univ. Press). 1975 Theorizing, Journeying, Dwelling. In A. Giorgi, et al., eds., Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology, vol. 2 (Duquesne Univ. Press). 1976 The Space of Dwelling. Humanitas, 12. 1985 Body, House and City: The Intertwinings of Embodiment, Inhabitation and Civilization, In D. Seamon & R. Mugerauer, eds., Dwelling, Place and Environment (Columbia Univ. Press). 1992 From the Homestead to the City. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 23 (2). 1998 Human Subjectivity and the Law of the Threshold. In R. Valle, ed., Phenomenological Inquiry in Psychology (NY: Plenum). 2001 Psychology and Literature, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 32 (2). 2007 Memories and Myths of Evil: A Reflection on the Fall from Paradise. In Essais de psychologie phénoménoguique-existentielle. C. Thiboutot, ed. (Montreal: CIRP; ISBN 978-0-9781738-6-9).
|
Myths about humanity’s genesis are at the same time cosmogonic in
that they relate the creation of a divine and human cosmos. In
light of Biblical and Platonic myths, we come to understand the
building of walls and the construction of houses, domains, and
cities as acts of material affirmation of an original, divine act
of separation that broke a perfect, undivided world apart and
opened the prospect of a divided, yet neighborly, cosmos.
If walls express consent to separation, we may think of thresholds as clearing the way to human and divine encounters, to love and friendship, and to the coming into being of a human community. In this sense, the very structure of an inhabitable domain repeats in the building and maintenance of its walls and thresholds, a cosmogonic narrative that tells of the coming into being of a human world marked by neighborly relations.
Every threshold that guards an inhabited domain repeats the myth of a primordial and perfect unity that preceded the building of walls and the creation of a human world. The walls speak of the disturbance of that unity, while the thresholds speak of the subsequent miracle of love and desire that ordered a cosmos and made it a place fit for human and divine habitation.
******
We should note here that a cosmic or inhabitable space always refers to a space and a time that is inherently dual or plural, insofar as inhabitable worlds or domains necessarily point to neighboring ones. Within a house or city, we are never totally enclosed, since walls are interrupted by windows and doors that speak of the surrounding world. An inhabitable domain inevitably makes reference to actual or potential other worlds with which it forms a meaningful whole. To inhabit a home means to inhabit at the same time a neighborhood, a city, and a world. We cannot truly inhabit a cosmos without maintaining viable relations with neighbors and neighboring worlds.
An ancient Greek proverb boldly proclaims that it is impossible to be human in isolation from other human beings. “Eis aner oudeis aner” can be translated as “one man, detached from all others, ceases to be human.” If we extend the logic of that proverb, we can conclude that a house that offers no pathways to other houses and neighbors ceases to be a place fit for human habitation. That logic also reminds us that, if the Earth were to become detached from the heavens, it would no longer be able to shelter human beings in a human way.
The essential dynamic of a cosmos concerns ongoing relationships between what might be called cosmic or neighboring pairs, the first of which is the Earth, understood as the dwelling place of mere mortals; and the heavens, understood as the dwelling place of divine and immortal beings. The heaven-Earth relationship would thereafter be re-created in the bond between mortal and immortal beings or in that of host and guest, man and woman, child and adult, or native and stranger.
When mortals no longer recognize the divine or when neighbors no longer partake in mutual interest, the human world regresses to an archaic, uninhabitable state, and cosmos dissolves into a physical universe. That archaic state can be symbolized by a house without windows or with doors forever shut. To confine one’s life to such a place would effectively mean to surrender one’s humanity.
******
We have established that thresholds are symbolic limits embodying the law governing human and divine relations. In contemplating a house, a temple, or a city, we note that portals and thresholds are places of vivid, personal interactions, while walls evoke a silent world of fateful partitions and separate destinies. Together, they create a space of dwelling that fosters community while also according each person a separate, distinct life.
The threshold not only separates and binds human beings; it also marries a private, intimate realm to an outside, public, workaday world. The interior space of a home is like a harbor from which ships sail forth in all directions and to which they return to bring home their gathered treasures.
The threshold that both divides and joins an “inside” and “outside” sets in motion a dynamic of leave-taking and homecoming that inaugurates the temporal rhythm of work and play, of an active and contemplative life. This dynamic inside-outside interaction demonstrates that a home cannot exist apart from the path leading from its doorsteps to the doorsteps of another house and another realm. This pathway interconnects not only neighbor to neighbor but also links a familiar world with unknown surrounds. We reinforce and elaborate such a path when we leave the intimate supportive circle of family and friends to enter the workaday world or to undertake voyages to foreign shores.
In short, an inhabited space, no matter whether it forms house, city, or cosmos, links together separate and distinct worlds that thereby are transformed into a symbolic or cosmic whole. We speak here of a “symbolic” whole because its parts are all at once held apart and kept together by virtue of an interconnecting threshold. The word “symbol” originally referred to a “pledge” or “token” that usually took the form of a coin or a piece of pottery that was broken in pieces at the time friends had to part. Each would take a part of the whole and guard it as a symbol of their enduring unity. Only an inhabited world that is divided and reunited by walls and thresholds can conceive of symbols, and hence of love and friendship.
******
From whatever angle we approach the house or city, both reveal themselves invariably as a cosmos, understood as a place where the original, absolute separation symbolized by walls becomes humanized through the addition of windows and portals that grant access to neighboring realms. A house or a city becomes inhabitable by virtue of having joined together an inside and outside, a heaven and Earth, a self and another.
Building a house, a city, or a temple is therefore never solely a question of labor and technical skills. Neither should we understand an inhabitable structure solely as a technical instrument that protects us from the naked elements. The building of houses, temples, and cities should first and foremost be understood as a poetic achievement that repeats the genesis of a human world. As Mircea Eliade force-fully reminds us in Le sacré et le profane (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), a house is not, in the provocative phrase of Le Corbusier, “une machine à vivre” but, on the contrary, “forms a whole that repeats the exemplary creation wrought by the gods, in the form of a cosmogony” (p. 55).
To enter a cosmos means to enter a world that cannot be fully encompassed by a single stance or point of view. It can only be explored through exchanges with others. To disclose the cosmos, we cannot remain stationary but must journey and accept a rhythm of coming and going, of entering and leaving, of living and dying. It is this temporal order that gives the hospitable cosmos its astonishing variety and richness.
This richness cannot be captured by violence and becomes obscured by dreams of total possession and complete understanding. Persons and things make their true appearance only after we have renounced dreams of conquest and after we become reconciled to the fact that cosmic realities are destined to forever escape our categories and elude our grasp. A human and divine cosmos cannot be encompassed or controlled. It can only be embraced.