Another day, another draft ...

On being at home in the world
1
Near the beginning of Rilke’s first Duino Elegy are some famous and striking lines that have haunted me over the years as I am sure they have haunted others. But we are haunted by what we have failed to come to terms with or adequately address—the lines linger because they both describe our condition and recall us to a task, to something that we are subliminally aware of but keep at bay—an attitude that displays a human weakness whose overcoming is a significant theme of the elegies:

And even the noticing beasts are aware
That we don’t feel very securely at home
In this interpreted world[1]

2
But if these lines intrigue us and make us uneasy, as hinting at what we should accommodate and acknowledge, then they surely sit unhappily with the idea of ‘being at home in the world’, even if we read ‘being’ as a substantive. The intended ambiguity of this innocent phrase—being at home in the world—incorporates three philosophical ideas, that of ‘being’, ‘home’ and ‘world’. It is the complex relation between them that is the real theme of this essay. But before we can come to any conclusions about the implications for that theme of Rilke’s lines we should take the measure of the metaphor that has just suggested itself, that of ‘accommodation’, since it indicates both a place of residence, more or less ample and well-appointed, and what one—as the being in residence—is able to give house room to. It seems obvious that there is a ratio between the one and the other, and of both to the being who is in residence, which may help us in our thinking. Indeed the ratio between home and world is itself a metaphor for the being who is at home. though I suspect that what we can give house room to determines the proportions of the residence rather than the other way around. Or, more to the point, it is implicit in the necessity for constant dismantling and rebuilding.

3
Rilke’s lines tell us that even the animals know that humanity is not securely or reliably at home … but not at home where? He does not say in der Welt—in the world—but ‘In der gedeuteten Welt’. The adjectival ‘gedeutet’ would appear to qualify ‘world’ as such rather than serving to distinguish a particular kind of world from others—though I shall suggest a significant qualification in a moment—and it appears difficult to translate. The Leishman/Spender ‘interpreted’ seems better than the ‘translated’ of the Poulin version, since it carries the suggestion of ‘making sense’ rather than of conveying a sense from one language to another. But perhaps ‘signified world’ would be better than both, as suggesting the, as it were, ostensive, pointed to world that is indicated by our language, with the implication that there are things visible and highlighted by our interests, needs and desires, and, in consequence, things recessive, unnoticed and hidden from view, either in the shadows or invisible in the light of desire. This distinction between what is visible and what is invisible is clearly a crucial one. In part this is an aspect of the metaphor of visibility itself, since it suggests a contrast with what is invisible. If we are in a position to talk at all of a signified world that is visible then we imply a shadow world that remains unnoticed and overlooked, not yet made sense of.
We can connect the idea of a signified world with the early Wittgenstein notion that the limits of my language are the limits of my world. This formulation allows the possibility that we can refer at least to the idea of what lies beyond the limits both of my language and of my world, though I should want to qualify this by talking about what lies beyond the limits of the language that is available to me, and I should want also to speak, less individualistically, of the language available to us. If we do talk in these terms, we have to ask questions about the fundamental activity of making or establishing new sense in the first place, a task which belongs, I think, to the poets, and to philosophy to the extent that it achieves the condition of poetry, a task which involves the turning of the attention from what is visible and salient to what is peripheral and recessive so that the dominance of the one is overturned in favour of the other.

4
Perhaps what Rilke is trying to say is that this ‘not very securely’ is our unavoidable mode of being at home in the world. In other words, we do not consistently enjoy the comfortable, unselfconscious domesticity suggested by the metaphor simply of being at home. The world is our home, where we live, but it is, despite appearances and our best efforts, porous and ramshackle, not entirely wind and water tight and we can hear sounds from elsewhere, more or less menacing. The association of ‘world’ with ‘home’ accords with an important aspect of the use of the former term. Not only is the world essentially ‘gedeutet’—the world as shown in our language—but the underlying metaphor is of a contained space, which can be entered or left, dismantled, undermined, breached.
But if we talk of a space that is contained we imply by contrast a wider and more open space within which it is located, and part of which it therefore encloses … but the open space beyond what is enclosed is, as I have just implied, represented in the imagination as a place of danger, and we would feel perilously exposed if our world should be undermined. To sharpen the point about the sense of the expression ‘world’, we might say, recalling Eliot, that if humankind cannot bear very much reality, then it needs a world to shelter in—to shelter from what we fearfully and sometimes for good reason represent to ourselves as the storms, wild beasts and monsters that lie in wait outside the threshold and the carefully patrolled boundaries of the enclosure, boundaries both internal and external—patrolled, but never with complete success. Indeed ‘the world’ is just such reality as we can bear and a little bit more (the shadow world), and what lies beyond is the natural habitat of Rilke’s Angels, who live in this element and are equipped to do so—and we find them terrifying.
I have referred elsewhere to an intriguing passage in the first paragraph of Freud’s chapter on the ‘Dissection of the Personality’ in the New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in which he says that ‘the repressed is foreign ground to the ego – internal foreign ground – just as reality (if you will forgive the unusual expression) is external foreign ground’(88)[2]. It is the idea of ‘reality’ as ‘foreign ground’, Ausland, that is intriguing here, partly because there is an implicit contrast between home and abroad, and partly because ‘reality’ seems to refer to more than what can overwhelm us physically. It is rather that there is an internal relation between what is repressed, the internal foreign ground, and the external foreign ground of its intentional objects. To put it another way the repressed and reality stand in a relation of tension to Ego and World.

5
These reflections have been prompted in part by a recent re-reading of the Eighth Elegy, in which Rilke uses an expression that will remind many of his influence on Heidegger. He talks of ‘das Offene’ (literally ‘the open’). I am not equipped to discuss the nature and extent of that influence but in any case I should like to respond to the Elegy both more naively and as from a different tradition or formation of philosophy. As Ezra Pound has said, ‘poetry is not the merely decorative word’ and if it is not that, if it doesn’t merely tell us what we already know, but makes new sense and ‘names’ and brings to light what was previously hidden from view, then we have to learn to listen to it, and also see what it attempts to reveal—and not dismiss it because it must be saying with too little precision something that we already know. Philosophers tend not to like the state of ignorance and the role of pupil, but it does seem to be the proper demeanour before the metaphors of poetry since these are often our first access to what we have not yet appropriated, or, to return to our previous metaphor, accommodated.

With all their eyes the animals all see
What lies open. Only our eyes are turned
As it were away and set like snares
Around their clear way out.

There is a grotesque fusion of ideas here which passes from what is represented by the direction of our gaze away from das Offene to a representation of our eyes as snares set around it. But the thought seems to be that the direction of our gaze implies that we are in some way hostile to das Offene and to those who are aware of its presence. But what does the phrase mean—das Offene?
It is an expression that gathers within itself several modalities of the metaphor of openness. The significant contrast is between the animals, aware of what lies open before them, which is also said to provide a clear way out—presumably of their confinement—and ourselves, whose eyes are set in the opposite direction from what lies open, and open to view—to us, if we only looked, as much as to the beasts.
The image that comes to mind is of domestic animals who see the open gate that would take them outside their enclosure and to freedom, and of us, perhaps scarcely aware that the gate is open because our attention is directed within the enclosure, and the beasts are anyway trapped there just by the power of our scrutiny. So there are three related ideas and corresponding contrasts, between what is open and what is closed, between what is free and what is confined, and what is outside and what is inside, in a context of awareness and unawareness, and where to be free is to be outside and in the open. The gaze of the animals is the image of this ability to look at if not move towards the opening to what lies outside. I have to say, though, that I do not find it a compelling image. Leishman reports Rilke as referring in a letter of 1924 to how the animals ‘are most at home in a broader segment of consciousness’ and he cites an observation of Eberhard Kretschmar to the effect that if ‘we look any animal in the eyes … we shall see that their look … simply does not meet our eyes … and that every animal’s look, even when it is looking at us, looks out beyond beyond us … into immeasurable distances, into the open, into pure space’. It is the second part of these remarks that seem problematic even as they echo the language of the Elegy. There is indeed an uncanny sense that we are looked beyond even as we are looked at by animals, but I am not persuaded that these fellow creatures are gazing into immeasurable distances, even if their demeanour provides an image of such.
But it is not just that we are scarcely aware of the open gate—we have no conception of what is outside:

What is outside we know only from the face
Of the beast; because from its earliest years
We twist the child around and make it see
What is laid down, not what is open
And deep there in the beast’s expression. Free from death.
Only we see that. The free animal
Has its passing always behind it, and God ahead
And when it runs it runs within eternity
As springs of water run

We do not see what is open before us because we are looking back—there are six references in this short Elegy to our being turned in the wrong direction—but we do see death, unlike the animals, who run within eternity. We are different from them:

No, not even for a single day
Have we ever had that pure space before us
Into which the flowers open; always world
And never Nowhere without not: it is pure,
Beyond our scrutiny, we breathe it in, it is boundlessly known
And never an object of desire.

Always world and never, by contrast, ‘Nowhere’—which I take to imply a condition beyond co-ordinates—‘without Not’— and differentiation. So the critical contrast is between world and ‘that pure space before us’, das Offene. I shall return to this theme. Rilke now returns to the image of the child who gets quietly lost in this space but is again jogged back, then says of the dying and of lovers:

Or someone dies and is it.
As we approach death, we see death no longer
And stare ahead, perhaps with that gaze of the beast.
If the other were not in the way, lovers
Are close to it and in awe …
As though through inadvertence is it seen
Behind the beloved … but no one gets beyond
Them, and the world comes back.
We are always turned towards creation, and so
See there only the reflection of freedom
Obscured by ourselves. Or some dumb beast
Looks up and calmly looks right through us.
This is destiny: to be over against and
Nothing else but over against.

‘The world comes back’, ‘We are always turned towards creation’. ‘Who’s turned us round like this?’ It is important to refer to that set of contrasts that I mentioned earlier—open/closed, free/confined, inside/outside—because they give us, I think, the form of a possible experience which may give us access to Rilke’s thinking: the experience of release from confinement as an image of the barely discerned idea of such a release, where what we seek release from, the confined space, is the world, even though the lament is that our collective attention is resolutely focussed within its bounds and away from what lies beyond it, das Offene. The lament must surely remind us of the predicament of the prisoners in the cave and the situation of the released prisoner. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the released prisoner stands ‘outside the world’ absolutely. He stands outside the world of the prisoners, can see the limits of that world clearly, and is witness to the causal mechanisms that determine its limits. And if we wished to apply this metaphor, we could perhaps say that the fixation of the prisoners’ gaze is determined by the energy of the passions, or even the klesas. But the released prisoner still has to make himself a home, as it were, in a larger and more ample world of experience, one which gives him a perspective on the restrictive enclosure of his former fellow-prisoners, with whom now he cannot communicate as he did before. Or at least, he cannot directly communicate the sense of his new form of experience: what he is able to speak about surpasses the limits of the language available to the chained prisoners.
The open and unconfined space into which we may perhaps hope to be released—das Offene—must, therefore, lie beyond the world. This could be familiar in a troubling metaphysical way, but it would be a mistake I think to dismiss it too precipitately. We have to think of an enclosure, an opening in the perimeter of the enclosure and so a way out of it into the open fields, woods and spaces beyond, and the task is to give content to these relationships without descending into the philosophically suspect. Can we make any sense at all of the idea of a contrast between something called the world and something outside it that we call das Offene?
I am inclined myself to think of das Offene in the negative, as the unenclosed. This helps us to see it more clearly as set over against what is enclosed, so we have the idea of what is enclosed and what is unenclosed. However, we still need a content to fill in these terms. Our clue must be that sense of a possible experience—of release from confinement—and how we might articulate it. There is a remark in one of Rilke’s letters that gives us a further and related clue, a remark that describes the dynamic nature of and resistance to what is ‘beyond’, to what is therefore unenclosed, which is also felt at least in some moods and some people, as the open space into which one is released from confinement:

I sometimes ask myself whether longing cannot so stream out of a man, like a storm, that, against it, in opposition to its outgoing current, nothing can reach him … Letter of Rilke14th May 1912)

Although we usually talk in terms of the intentional object of a desire in a way that allows us further to talk of what is salient for us in the environment and what occluded, important as these are, nevertheless this remark gives us a helpful additional sense of how the energy of desire flows out from us in a way that prevents the countervailing energies—the conatus—of the environment impinging upon us. It also implies the idea that our incuriousness is a function of a depleted energy available for action, to user a phrase of Simone Weil’s. But we must also take into account another aspect, if we think of Freud’s remark cited earlier, viz the resistance to acknowledgement of those countervailing energies in the form of a responsive sensibility.
I have said enough to suggest that we can think of a narrower and a more ample world, rather than the world as such with an outside or beyond. If we think in terms of a distinction between what is narrower and what more ample then at least we have one term which allows by contrast the idea of an outside, something beyond our current world, or beyond the limits of the language that is currently available to us. But Rilke talks simply of world and of our constant confinement to it. Maybe we need to make a further distinction, one which is justified by his several references to the direction of our gaze, viz the world and our attitude to the world, where, however, certain attitudes simply determine the world and language we have available. We need to find some aspect of ‘the world’ that gives us a contrast: why should we see the world as the enclosed term in the first place, and as the term that lies over against ‘the open’? And at what point does the world, at what point does enclosure, become oppressive? The emotional contrast is between being oppressively hemmed in and contained, and being released into a state of freedom from the oppression: getting out of the prison. What is open here is what is unenclosed, and it is this that gives force to the way Rilke talks of ‘world’, the idea of a restricting enclosure of space in the midst of the prairie, as it were, though if that is our image we can surely see the need for enclosures and protection from the elements in the form of a homestead. Nevertheless we do have two protagonists here, as we have seen, the restless Rilke and a complacent and incurious humanity, the chained and the released prisoner. At what point does the world become oppressive then? I suggest that it does so when we have intimations or even real but temporary experience of something lying beyond it, and then suffer a closing in of horizons. So it is not enclosure as such that is the problem. As we have just seen we also need enclosure to protect us from the cosmic winds. Perhaps the point is not that the world hems us in and restricts our vision, as that our vision is restricted not by it but to it, and that when this happens, what constitutes the world may dwindle down to what our vision is restricted to.
Our world becomes restricted just to what our vision discloses and it is our own self-enclosure that is the problem. In other words it is not the world as such that is the problem, but the direction of vision—we look at it but not through or beyond it towards a further possibility: viz a larger and more ample world—and this excludes any awareness, except the most peripheral (which is perhaps the point of Rilke’s examples) beyond the enclosure: a limiting incuriousness which prevents other possibilities opening up. Whereas the point about das Offene is that what remains unenclosed—what could never be contained by us—is hidden or concealed, though it lies open to view for those who turn their attention in the right direction. It should perhaps now be clear that we are moving towards the idea of more than one conception of what constitutes the world, conceptions which are potentially at least in collision. If we say our vision is restricted to but not by the world we make a distinction which allows us to say that to the extent that our vision is restricted to the world then that very preoccupation determines the world we inhabit, makes us precisely worldly. This allows us to see the concept of the world as essentially determined by a fusion of the epistemological and the ethical which is implicit in the traditional Christian notion of the ‘world’, which names both a view of life determined by the narrow self interest of the flesh and those who are possessed of that view. To put it another way, our ethical sensibility determines our significant world and we are uneasy with it. To continue to use Christian language, the ‘world’ in its pejorative sense, is just such reality as is appropriated by the unregenerate, who are still blind to what is there and opens up to those who undergo the experience of metanoia. I should want to say something here about the evanescence of mauvaise foi, that what we thus describe is a failure of acknowledgement and a refusal to accommodate what we sometimes recognise but suppress because we cannot support it. But this brings us rather conveniently to conditioned co-production. It does so at least in respect of a significant application of that principle. There arise, in dependence on conditions, which have of course to be spelled out, states of mind that obscure or reveal what lies open before us if only we turned our attention to it. Here talk of dependent origination needs to be mediated by the metaphor of waking up or, to come to Rilke again, of turning round. However, our interest in the principle of dependent origination is not in the general formula but derives precisely from the oppressive sense of dukkha and such applications of the principle as lead us to release into the open dimension of being. But it is not something that is called das Offene that is important to us. What is of interest is what lies open, and here I want to make some final remarks about what I believe to be the mystical escapism of Rilke.

6
The starting point for all this must lie in the distinction between what there is, or reality, or existence, or being, on the one hand, and what of that reality we acknowledge or appropriate or realise, whose content constitutes the world, on the other. But if reality lies outside or beyond the world it is not so in the sense of the world being a copy of reality or something that bears any kind of comparison with a distinct reality. The world is what of reality we have assimilated or habituated ourselves to, or accommodated. In this sense the world is certainly just what we have enclosed and what lies beyond is the unenclosed, still open, undetermined reality we have not yet accommodated. But this is all far too general and needs to be brought down to something much more specific and it seems to me that we are really talking of self-knowledge and the failure of self-knowledge. I quoted a passage from Eliot earlier on, about how humankind cannot bear very much reality. This I think gives us a clue to the fact that we are talking about acknowledgment rather than simply knowledge. There are clearly connections between this talk by Eliot and Rilke’s laments about our condition. However, the reality that we can bear alters with changes in the sensibility that has to bear the weight, and this is a context for talking about how a world can be transformed or undermined. Briefly, our subjective formations are determined by unresolved conflict in our orientation towards the intentional objects of our competing desires and feelings. Now as Rilke recognises very clearly, for example in his marvellous first sonnet to Orpheus, there is an orientation that dominates consciousness and one that is overlaid, and it is through the stillness of listening brought about through music that allows the recessive consciousness to emerge, in such a way that our being is a function of what we are able to acknowledge. But the reality or dimensions of existence that are not within our human enclosure press themselves upon our attention in the form of intimations and images, and hauntings.

But what of Rilke’s alleged mystical escapism? It might be helpful to start with Leishman’s commentary. He remarks, helpfully enough, that

Being or existence perceived as something not-ourselves, Rilke calls ‘world’ and contrasts with what he calls ‘the open’ …

But then he goes on:

In this ‘open’ world there is no time, no past or future, no end, no limit, no separation or parting, and no death as an opposite of life.

He has plenty of warrant for this in the Eighth Elegy, especially perhaps Rilke’s comment about how we see Death but the beast doesn’t; how we see Future but the beast sees all. And the remark that

This is destiny: to be over against
And nothing else, always over against

And ‘never Nowhere without not’. But it is one thing to say that there is no time there and another to say more modestly and less Platonically that we have no experience of time; it is one thing to say that there is no limit and another to say that we have no experience of limit. But the point is that we are being pressed towards a particular application of the idea of das Offene as lying beyond the world. Earlier Leishman had written:

Rilke now insists upon a still more fundamental defect or limitation—the fact that in almost all consciousness there is a distinction between what philosophers call subject and object; the fact that our awareness of Being or existence, as an object, as something distinct from ourselves, prevents us from identifying ourselves with it and achieving a condition of pure Being or pure existence.

But Rilke’s insistence is not expressed quite in these terms, which have been supplied by Leishman. Rilke certainly talks of our destiny, as we have seen, of gegenϋber, immer gegenϋber, which Leishman translates as ‘opposite … always opposite’. What Leishman seems to envisage here is a distinction between one form of consciousness, a defective one, in which there is a distinction between subject and object, and another, higher one, in which we are identified with Being or existence and achieve a condition of pure Being or existence.
But in the first place, there is not one form of consciousness in which there is a distinction between subject and object. Our forms of consciousness certainly reveal how much we are aware or unaware that our own position is as dependent on conditions as the objects of our perception, that there is no duality in that sense. Certainly there are states of pure awareness which we might describe as ‘non-dual’ because there is no awareness of a subject over against an object, but such states are ethically interesting only to the extent that they liberate or reorient us. To the extent that they do not do this then we have an attachment to a kind of mystical escapism of the kind I mentioned. But again, this talk of ‘over against’ is slippery. There are alienated states of consciousness which reflect our alienation from others, in which one experiences oneself as standing over against, in opposition to and separate from them, perceiving them merely as objects of one’s desires. But to overcome the experience of separateness is not a matter of overcoming the distinction between subject and object, but of realising the nature of that distinction and the forms of relation that are available to us.

[1] Und die findigen Tiere merken es sschon,
Dass wir nich sehr verlässlich zu Haus sind
In der gedeuteten Welt
[2] “…das Verdrängste ist aber für das Ich Ausland, inneres Ausland, so wie die Realität – gestatten Sie den ungwohnten Ausdruck – äusseres Ausland ist”.