ABSTRACT
This chapter explores homely feelings to show how a hedonist account is over simple and throws further light upon well-being. At the age of 55 the American novelist Henry James, who had lived a somewhat peripatetic life from childhood, settled down in Lamb House at Rye in England. A familiar way of conceptualizing a particular sort of place as having the properties of home, not just a type of house but types of community and countryside as well, is as the sort of place proper to those of a certain identity, national, regional or ethnic. This is the case for the hedonist account we started with, where well-being consists in the presence of agreeable feelings and the absence of disagreeable ones. Feeling at home in its primitive preconceptual form can be viewed as a pleasure so understood, and they desire it because they want to function well and not for any ulterior reason.
