ABSTRACT
By way of conclusion in the last chapter I argued that twenty-first-century men and women are artists of life who have to make themselves up; they also as a result have to make themselves at ‘home’. In the modern world, ‘homes’ must always be built, and then re-built. Individuals seldom belong securely and contentedly to any place or to the identity that we inherit – we feel compelled to move around and travel. Just as this involves movement of bodies, it also involves movement of the mind, of curiosity. It is my view that one of modernity’s most homely terrains is leisure – not just because it may offer us a personal fulfilment, but because it is a ‘home’ with a social dimension which brings with it a sense of belonging and obligation to the wider social context that makes it possible. In other words, leisure is the most ‘homely’ of modernity’s ‘homes’ because it is not only an experience but also an activity – in acting we cannot only be ourselves but actively participate with others in something that we find not only ‘sensually satisfying’ and ‘cognitively rewarding’ but also sometimes ‘dense with meaning’ (Heller, 2011: 211). Of all the interpreters of ‘home’, Agnes Heller has gone the furthest in explaining how, when people no longer feel unselfconsciously at home in the world, we might find happiness, might find a new ‘home’. As she argues, this is always something of a challenge, for modernity is a forever starting over world without any secure foundations; though this is not to say that life needs to be one of universal homelessness, because modernity provides innumerable places where we might find new ‘homes’ to belong. In this regard, Heller (2011) argues that there are actually three types of ‘home-experience’ we can choose from: spatial homeexperience; temporal home-experience; and absolute spirit home-experience – the kind which is associated with the search for meaning. Heller borrows the idea of ‘absolute spirit’ from Hegel which he expresses in the following way: ‘absolute knowing’ achieves a form of perception that ascents to an awareness of ‘absolute spirit’ (Hegel in Stern, 2002: 195); and all that now remains to be done is to supersede this awareness by giving shape to the ‘absolute spirit’ as an experience, which means turning it into a hermeneutic activity. What this tells us is that the ‘density of meaning’ found in the absolute spirit home-experience cannot be explained ontologically since it is interpretation that is the source of this density.
