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To Dwell, to Think
di Massimo Cacciari

1. "You must understand that none of the gods are seekers after truth" (Symposium, 204 a 1), no god, that is, yearns for knowledge; no god can be philo-sopher, because he is already perfectly sophós. To philosophize, therefore, not only has nothing "divine" about it, but it also represents, in a certain way, the activity that best clarifies the difference between the divine state and the human condition. To philosophize is to determine the radical finiteness of the human condition. But nevertheless, the definition of a limit implies an awareness of the existence of another dimension that exists "beyond" the limit itself. This is the paradoxical quality of the philosopheîn: the term implies the insurmountable difference between the human and the divine, and at the same time it implies a love of that sophia that is the property of the divine alone. The philosopher knows that he is abysmally distant from divinity, and yet he wants to be reunited with it; to the extent in which he takes part in the sophia, he is wise enough to acknowledge his own "misery"; but because he is a lover, he will seek, in every way, to "find a cure" for his own misery.
Must not, after all, even the gods themselves be absolutely not enamoured of knowledge? A precious possession, even when thoroughly recognized and secure, because it is one and the same as our very nature, is still something to be cherished. And may a god remain unmoved by the sight of a man who loves knowledge? Only the gods of Epicurus could have managed as much. The god, who needs nothing, because he is full of knowledge, cannot help but know that man needs; and man, who loves the knowledge he cannot have, catches a glimpse, in this love, of a spark, a premonition of that knowledge. How, otherwise, could he love that which is utterly concealed to him? Were this not the case, the condition of the gods would be comparable to that of the ignorant, who absolutely do not want to attain knowledge (because they think they already know all that there is to be known): "blissful", the former, in their knowledge, "blissful" the latter in their ignorance, and both indifferent to the philosophountes, those whose fate is research, a research in which they recognize the finite character of mortality, but at one and the same time, precisely in that finite nature, also see its ek-static quality, that "loves" to transcend itself. No, even the gods ad-tend the philosopher, calling him to come to them. Bridges and divine messengers exist between perfect knowledge and philo-sophia. And among them, the most powerful is Eros; the philia of the philospher is his image. Eros is the "great demon", he is on the side of divinity. Therefore he expresses the "lover" nature that is also a part of the character of the gods. And philosophical research sees its reflection there, as in a mirror. It will never be able to completely "mingle" with the divine - but it can mingle with the divine image. In this sense the philosopher imitates divinity: mimesis of its nature, to the extent that a part of that nature can be expressed, revealed, for that part of that nature that "loves" to manifest itself.
Eros loves beauty (and what could possibly be more beautiful than knowledge?). He hunts it down along all paths, and the path to beauty opens before him, everywhere. Path, Poros, in fact, is the name of his father. But if the philosopher demon constantly insists upon following the path of research, it must be because he senses, painfully, his own misery, his distance from the goal. And therefore Penia is the name of the mother. Where will we encounter him? ,(Symposium, 203 d 2), along the roads, on the thresholds. Not inside the house; not within the sheltered confines of the city walls. We might say that distance is his place -the place of dialogue, of communication, but also of danger, adventure, disorientation. An awe-inspiring -but also fearsome- sight (Plato repeatedly calls it deinós: "deinós hunter, deinós enchanter"). A bewildering figure, unheimlich, always wavering between the outside and the inside, in doubt, in danger. Aoikos, never at home: this is his most telling appellation (203 d 1); and this is the term on which we should focus. He sleeps under the open sky, on the bare ground, rugged, barefoot, unshaven. Rich, indeed, but in resourcefulness and cunning; artful, of course, in the concoction of potions/poisons; but all his arts are nevertheless, without fail, also the expression of his penia. What he makes is a sign, bearing witness to what he does not possess.
Unkempt, hirsute, always on the path, always intent upon "unwinding" his path (diaporein); he is anything but attractive, his appearance repels all those who are not true seekers of knowledge. Those who "love" home sweet home -in other words- will doubtlessly be frightened away by the face of Eros, and by the face of Socrates as well, which is its human image. So is Socrates teaching us to leave the home, initiating us into a condition of aoikia? In his grand apologias of philosophy, it appears that this is precisely his objective: any "economic" dimension, anything that is the province of the oikos (including the everyday affairs of the polis, because they are part of the economic sphere) is seen as a trap, an obstacle for the research of the philosopher. The house represents the aporia of Eros; the place where the poros is interrupted, where its skepsis fails. If to philosophize means to continue tirelessly along the path, or even to create the path itself through research, then how can the philosopher possibly be a "dweller"? Is it possible to "dwell" in roads and thresholds, bridges, passages, distances? Is it possible to dwell... in the Open?
And yet if the philosopher, possessed as he is by the Dionysiac folly and delirium of the lover of knowledge (Symposium, 218 b 3-4) is necessarily aoikos (and atopos is the very nature of Socrates: 215 a 2), nevertheless he aspires to attain the "abode" of knowledge. The image of the house becomes double: here and now, it means arrest, impediment, aporia; but the love of knowledge also brings with it the necessity for love of the dwelling, the desire to be-at-home, so that the possessor of knowledge "will be happy" (204 e 7), possessing beautiful, good things, no longer in need of anything. The condition of dwelling, of "abiding", is certainly a divine condition, one of divine knowledge. But what is the significance, then, of the statement that the house, here-and-now, is simply a deception, a trap? that the house is merely a siren ready to sed-ducere the philosopher away from his research? Eros too, as we have seen, is well-supplied with arts, potions, spells. His path is not linear; it is full of holes and digressions, it appears and disappears; at every step it is necessary to invent new means to get beyond obstacles. And is not the house absolutely a part of this "wealth" of artifice?
But if the philosopher yearns for the "happy" abode (or at least declares as much... is he deceiving us? This is the "great" accusation with which Alcibiades threatens Socrates at the end of our "fatal" dialogue. In vino veritas?), an idea of what he is seeking must already "abide" in him. He could not seek, were he without this idea to guide him. Philosophy, in fact, is not "empty" research, it is anamnesis: a re-collection, a re-placement of what we already are at the center of our heart, a re-vealing of what we already possess. And therefore the home is not merely the obstacle we encounter along the path, but also the idea that, along the path, appears as the end of the journey. No abode here-and-now can fully embody this ideal, but there is nothing to prevent a house, here-and-now, from imitating it. And therefore there is nothing to prevent Eros from also becoming an architect.
Can architecture imagine, posit-in-image, the idea of the house as conceived by the eros aoikos of the philosopher? The desire to feign, to simulate -in all the senses of the term- the house-that-is-lacking: is this not the paradox of every great work of architecture? Therefore the temple is the supreme fiction: to go so far as to imagine the house of god, the abode of perfect knowledge, the place where the philosopher would finally live, in happiness... and finally cease to be a philosopher.
But how can we imagine the house, how can we have the words and forms with which to simulate it, in the age of the philosophountes (or of ignorance, that dwells in its own shelters, believing them to be true abodes)? The language of this era, the language of Europe, is the same language Thucydides indicated as that of Athens: it is the tongue of those who "always pursue the new", who see the value of their work in its novitas ("neoteropoioi"), "quick to act out what they have thought", "audacious beyond their own strength", "ready to abandon their own country". Atopia, aoikia is also the sign of their condition(1). Of course, the "affairs" of the philosopher are something else again; of course his yearning seems to have a different aim, and his haste is always tempered by the lingerings of meditation. But is not novelty of discourse fundamental for him too? and to an even greater extent, when it attempts to appear in ancient garb, as mythos(2). And is not his primary passion also that of abandoning the reassuring dwellings of the doxa, to take to the open sea?
Civitas augescens, a city whose identity is that of the need to grow; Athens, too, in the period of its power, was also such a city, in some ways. But this was a controversial tendency, that advanced with fear and trepidation, perceived more as hybris than as a destiny planned by the gods. Rome alone was to be civitas augescens, in a sense at that point consciously anti-Platonic and anti-Aristotelian. This was imposed by the city's myth: Rome can continue to be itself, to be the Urbs, only by becoming the World, de-liriously until it becomes the World(3).
How to imagine the house, where Eros reigns, through all his masks, philosopher or sophist, feverish inventor of new strategems and admired-enchanted lover of the divine sophia? In the languages of a "wayfaring" era, of a civitas that is essentially peregrine (Christianity thus appropriates the Roman myth of the civitas augescens), the house appears destined to be no more than a temporary shelter, a moment of the universal movimentum that captures and uproots everything. The abode is but a thing of the future, like our city; we ourselves are cives futuri, as in the extraordinary expression of St. Augustine. With respect to the force of this yearning each house becomes merely a negligible "hearth", and each city a vicus, just another village, to pass through, nothing more.
In such an era, any image of the dwelling, any research aimed at "imitating" that abode we seek and about which we must have an idea, since we seek it, seems at the point of becoming idolatrous. The true home is only in the future, adveniens, period. Thou shalt not conjure up its image. Thou shalt be chaste in the treatment of the dwelling, abstaining from the desire to represent it; show only that you lack it (castitas from careo, I lack; castitas as capacity to renounce). This timbre of sober, severe renunciation is undoubtedly that of much great contemporary architecture: each such edifice seems to introduce itself as follows: "I am not truly an abode; how could you seek or offer shelter in me? I seek, if anything, to imitate an idea that obsesses me; but you want to attain that idea, so don't stop here." But were this speech to become: "This, yes, this is truly a house", the speaker would be guilty of the sin of pride, that of the philosopher who claims to have attained knowledge -or the ignorance of he who knows nothing of his ignorance.
What is the real dwelling of this era? The means that permits one to proceed, to open the way, the path. Thucydides said as much, long ago: the Athenian's home is a ship. The means for going beyond the confines of the urbs, the instruments through which the civitas grows to coincide with the World -this is where we live. Today we can observe this, physically, but this is no more than the fulfillment of our Geschichte: no sudden leap, no "miracle" of the Technical. We live in the means/midst (of communication). The house, if it is not to become an idol, the illusion of an abode-knowledge that is lacking, must be the bridges, the gates, the streets, all the "machines" that cross them, all the information that circulates, all-pervading Logos-Action, that runs-radiates, apparently, wherever it wishes. The places of our identity as simply passers-by; this then is what the architect must design, if he is strong enough to renounce the mimesis of the idea. Passagenwerke, his buildings, candid declarations of the impossibility of dwelling, of abiding. His "place" is the atopia par excellence, because every place (every "genius loci"), for him, would be simply an element in a network without boundaries, in which production, trade, communication intertwine.

2. Must the architect, therefore, also renounce the "company" of the philosopher, "imagining" that abode whose idea the latter expresses and seeks? But before answering this, we must ask: it is really possible to conceive of a nomadic way of dwelling? a dwelling that is absolutely extraneous to the measure that links it to the earth, that no longer in any way rhymes with the places that are the earth?
Hegel felt architecture to be the eldest of the arts, because it is called upon to give form to an element that is objective in itself, the external environment, the natural terrain. Architecture is essentially the imprint of the spirit on that which is without inner nature. No matter how proud it may appear in its constructive grandeur, no matter how triumphant its victories over "heaviness" or the instinct of gravity, this techne, that lays claim to sovereignty over all the others, must always rest its foundations on the earth. Even when it takes flight to design the pure distance that connects and overcomes the diversity of places, it must still reflect the conflict between the World and the Earth, from which it must uproot itself -and therefore from which it is always, again and again, forced to "depart". "Naturae naturalia denaturare pertentans..."4: this, undoubtedly, is its aim in the era that brings the fulfillment of the overbearing eros of the civitas augescens. But precisely in its renewed thrusts, in its "alpine" aspirations, its "glass", in the constant pursuit of uprooting-dematerialization, the original connection to the Earth becomes stronger than ever. Each gesture -of renunciation, abandon, conflict- refers back to the earthly dimension. What is essential in the form it assumes is precisely that which can be seen as having been lost or wounded or abandoned: the earthly root of dwelling. Therefore architecture cannot be resolved in an architecture of pure wayfaring. Its ethos cannot give rise to a pure community of exodus, to cives futuri here-and-now completely "free" of any ethos and completely extraneous to any "home".
This means that by nature the architect is forced to try to imagine that possibility of dwelling that the philosopher recollects and that, along each path, constitutes the sense of his research. He who truly constructs, the true Baukunst, rather than deceiving with mere "designs", cannot but gather in his language the recollection of what dwelling was (essentially was; not a chronological use of the past tense), the multiple forms that sum up the misery-wealth of the path, the idea that makes the steps rhyme. A difficult relation, always in danger. Nothing ensures that it will not be snapped apart -in fact, the relation appears constantly precisely in the form of its laceration: thus, therefore, the fable of an original abode -thus, therefore, the illusion and the deception of a perfectly uprooted path- thus, finally, the hybris of the designer that seeks to incarnate the idea, forcing everything into "the future".
Perhaps we can say that the measure (commodulatio) that belongs to European architecture is that dramatic accord (concordia discors) between the great struggle of philo-sophia, pure nostalgia for wayfaring, and pietas for the "well-founded earth". In the most daring flights of philo-sophia, down to its most "stultiferae naves", it continues to hold its gaze fixed on the recollected idea of the house -and in addressing itself to the Earth it manages, nevertheless, to sense the terrae motus that menaces. A house of errant roots. An idea that experiences, each day, the forms and the perils of its realization. To feign, to simulate -again in all the senses of the latin term "fingere"- the dwelling for that vicissitude that is man, this is the improbus labor of architecture, the objective (impossible?) of its work. Leon Battista Alberti has taught us this: man is infirmissimus, his life by now is a roaring river, and his technai all participate in the art of the most dangerous navigation; his nature is never "content", always cogitating, and therefore turbulent, and this determines his existence; all the forms of his endeavor express his co-agitating thought: they emend, "correct", transform nature, always seeking, in short, to de-naturalize her; their world is in constant conflict with the Earth.
But this conflict is always a necessary relationship. Just as the eros aoikos is nevertheless the idea of the house, so architecture harbors the idea of the earthly root in every terrae motus: each movement, even the most violent trials of the vicissitude that is man, is movement that belongs to the Earth; even the most arrogant self-affirmation of autonomy and freedom of thought remains, always, contained by the fact that our being this way requires. As Heidegger puts it: over his possible-being, over the opening of his being, the existence that is man holds no sway. Architecture, perhaps, should remind us of this, with its tectonic values ("enfuturized" constructions, yes, but which must always and in any case provide shelter) and earthly values (reminder of the property of the place, the already-done, the inherited language).
Is a logos of architecture possible, in the most original sense of the term? This is the same question Heidegger asks with respect to thought: is a non-calculating-designing thought possible, a way of thinking that does not arrange the elements according to its own univocal perspective possible? A thought that is, instead, inclusive-connective, capable of harboring difference, or re-positing difference within itself, staying open to the Adveniens without premeditation? It would be a logos (legein, colligere) of the relation between ethos, sedes, on the one hand, and the ek-static essence of thought, on the other; a logos that proportions impulse to dwelling, an idea of dwelling that necessarily dwells also in the most "heroic furor", on the one hand, and in caring for the Open, on the other, the questioning regarding that Beginning that defies definition, that is the voice that beckons Eros toward his unreachable goal. Because the greatest wealth, Poros, will never be able to conquer the inopia magna, Penia, of our love for the Beginning.
An architecture whose forms rhyme with the silence that watches over the apeiron of the Beginning would "naturally" be free of all idols: it could not, of course, disguise itself as a stable dwelling, but neither could it pose as an uprooting force and nothing more, because it would wind up masking the universal Entortung as a new "natural"condition, establishing itself there within. It would, however, remain suspended between the tectonic rigor of its Passagenwerke and the unspeakable object of its eros, that survives in the becoming. But it would be the suspension of lingering, of patient metiri-meditari: lingering in the procedure, patience in vicissitude, a movement of reflection, of return "to the interior" (Er-innerung) that accompanies any flight of thought, that inhabits the aoikia of thought(5).
There can be no "design" of reconciliation in this movement. Nothing can guarantee that the "rhyme" will function, that its logos will truly be inclusive, rather than reduced to the calculating-impositional order of "logical" propositions. That the eros aoikos of thought will be able to re-flect itself in the unspeakable oikos, which it always in any case lacks, may or may not happen, is given or is not. Its dimension is that of the gift, not that of the design; if anything the dimension of patient waiting, not of pro-airesis.
But beyond any balm of reconciliation or consolation, architecture can truly, with respect to thought, recollect, imagining this as the play among Earth, place, house, the undefined "Nature" of the Beginning, that philosophy forgets. And thought, with respect to architecture, can always demand catharsis from an earthly idolatry, from any consideration of the place and the root as dead holdings. Architecture, then, would be the lingering of thought in itself, and thought its eros aoikos, the thing that urges architecture to navigate well.

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Notes
1. I have examined these considerations at length in my "diptych": Geo-filosofia dell'Europa, Milan 1994, and L'Arcipelago, Milan 1997.
2. It is precisely when he speaks "in myths" that Plato "revolutionizes" every earlier form of paideia; it is when he seems to be defending the ancient primacy of the oral tradition that he expresses himself as the fatal philosopher of the dominion of the written word.
3. Regarding the idea, a fundamental one for our entire civilization, of civitas augescens, I cannot but refer readers to the research of P. Catalano and his entire school (which I have discussed in my brief study Il mito della civitas augescens, "Il Veltro", 2-4, 1997).
4. Alberti's vision of man, as can be seen in these words from the Theogenius, can be applied, as a whole, to the architecture of this era. For the "tragic Humanism" the unreachable grandeur of Rome (and its language!) is also and essentially per-turbing: not calm and resolved "monumentality", but principle and energy of universal "mobilization".
5. This is the method of Alberti, which he tirelessly explains, from I libri della famiglia to De re aedificatoria: he considers everything, he measures and connects each thing: "ergo rimari omnia, considerare, metiri, lineamentis picturae colligere numquam intermittebam".

per gentile concessione di"Casabella"

translation by Steve Piccolo