Home is where the art is, the science too 

The Greek word ‘Oikonomia’ referred to the order and management of the home – Oikos means “household”, and nemein is “management.” 
| Photo Credit: PILAR OLIVARES

Things happen at home that don’t happen anywhere else. At a physical level, the home provides organization, with different rooms for different activities; it is a place of comfort, cleanliness, intimacy, solitude, and creativity. And disagreements, conflicts, loneliness too. Where else but in our homes do we rip off the masks we wear to the outside world, perhaps put on new (or old) ones? With so much emotion invested in the home, it should be the natural topic for philosophers. 

Yet, as the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia points out, philosophy, which has a lot to say about cities has very little to say about the home. 

The ancient Greeks didn’t ignore the home (they tried not to ignore anything). The Greek word ‘Oikonomia’ referred to the order and management of the home – Oikos means “household”, and nemein is “management.” Thus did we derive the word ‘economics’. For Aristotle, Economics was the science of ‘household management’, and by extension, management of the city, state and so on. 

I do a quick calculation and find I am currently living in the 15th place I have called ‘home’. That’s only half the number of places Coccia called ‘home’ before sitting down to write Philosophy of the Home: Domestic Space and Happiness. It is a personal, reflective, provocative, sometimes contradictory, but always fascinating study of our most intimate space. 

“A house,” wrote Le Corbusier, “is a machine for living in”. It provides “baths, sun, hot water, cold water, warmth at will, conservation of food, hygiene [and] beauty in the sense of good proportion”. For Coccia, a home is “the epitome of moral reality: a mental and material artefact that makes us inhabit the world better than our nature would otherwise allow.” When our homes disappoint us it is because they cannot maintain the silent promise of shared happiness they made at our first meeting. 

The bathroom and the kitchen, says Coccia contain a range of gizmos from microwave ovens to washing machines, making these the most technically complex and therefore modern spaces in the home. 

Treatises on homes, if one goes by the Coccia book, are excuses to travel into and beyond the feelings they inspire. Digression makes it all very interesting. For example, on the subject of cooking, Coccia says, “We can have no intimate relationship with the world without transforming it.” There is a connection, and it’s fun to identify it. 

Similarly, although he comes from another angle, Bill Bryson finds writing about homes a neat way of getting into thoughts that do not necessarily cohere. In At Home, he discusses the  kitchen of the Duke of Marlborough, mainly to tell us that the Duke was “so cheap, he refused to dot his ‘I’s when he wrote, to save on ink”. The gossip is fun too. 

The poet Paul Valery said poems are never finished, only abandoned. Homes are never finished too. There’s always another extension waiting to be built, another shelf to be added. Homes aren’t abandoned either, merely restyled.