Unheimlichkeit

This must be the week for foreign words, states of mind and abstractions.

I have already written about the longing for home in Tim Keller’s Prodigal God (and I like that picture so much I’m using it again). Well I finished listening to his sermon series the other day, and this idea featured in sermon No 6 of 7 called We Had to Celebrate.

In his book Keller uses my beloved concept of Sehnsucht and quotes from CS Lewis’s The Weight of Glory, which he does as well in the sermon, but in the sermon he also mentions Heidegger and his idea of "Unheimlichkeit", which literally means “unhomelike” or a sense of “not-being-at-home” (though my German dictionary also gives me the option, for the adjective, of “gives me the creeps”, and it can mean "uncanny"). So I went off in search of more information, googling Heidegger and unheimlich and Unheimlichkeit, and have been interesting myself the past two days reading random articles on the internet (like this one and this one).

It's probably old news to some, but apparently there was a time when philosophy was viewed as primarily being motivated by homesickness. Heidegger quotes Novalis as writing ‘Philosophy is really homesickness [Heimweh], an urge to be at home [zu Hause] everywhere’ (XXXIX, 7). I got this from A Heidegger dictionary By MJ Inwood on google books.

I’m quite fascinated! And I do love German for containing such excellent words.

This could be the longest blog post in the world if I really get going, but here are some quotes from Keller’s sermon, though you really should listen to it for the context, and the solution, to all this (and is it just me or does Tim Keller sound to anyone else like Vizzini – from the Princess Bride – when he gets worked up?):

Here’a an unlikely supporter reference, but this 20th Century philosopher, Martin Heidegger, believed that all human beings were characterised by Unheimlichkeit, which means homesickness. It means to be alienated, to feel that we’re not really home in this world. To feel that we’re in exile, that we’re in a world that’s profoundly at variance with our deepest desires.

...

Eva Hoffman, a polish jewish intellectual whose parents had to flee Europe during the Holocaust, she’s written about exile in her memoir called Lost in Translation and she says: “Since Adam and Eve left the garden of Eden is there anyone who does not in some way feel like an exile? We all feel ejected from our first homes and landscapes, from our first romance, from our authentic self. An ideal sense of belonging, of attuning with others and ourselves, completely eludes us.

...

Camus and the other existentialists were always at this [that we’re homeless here, and this is not a place we’re built for]. There’s one place in The Fall, where Camus – one of his characters is speaking to another – he says: “The weight of days is dreadful. For most people the approach of dinner, the arrival of a letter from home, or the smile from a passing girl, is enough to help people get around this sense of homelessness. But the person who likes to dig into ideas and think about them, for him life is impossible.”

Picture from here.