6.

Three Pictures and Three Dreams

1
Why did we travel to the moon?62 Was the trouble worth the effort? Is a
sufficient answer to point to the desire to know just in order to know that according to
Aristotle helps to define our human being, a desire in which he locates the origin of all
philosophy and science? Or to point to a curiosity that again and again seeks to open
closed doors and calls us to leave home, to explore distant seas, to journey into the
unknown? Is it the freedom of thought that demands open space and invites us to leave
behind whatever places nature and society have assigned to us, to go beyond the
perspectives and prejudices bound up with such placement? Must reason by its very
nature give birth to what in German is called Fernweh, that longing for faraway places
that pulls us away from home and calls every establishment that would assign us our
place into question?
According to Kierkegaard’s aesthete, it was boredom that caused Adam and Eve to
lose paradise.63 But boredom is negated by the interesting and the interesting in turn
awakens the desire to know and incites curiosity. Again and again this desire will let us
lose some paradise or other. Nothing other than the freedom of thought lies buried in the
snake’s promise, “you shall be like God.” As the animal rationale, the animal that
possesses reason, the human being is the animal that has fallen out of nature and now
restlessly seeks its proper place, never quite content with its lot. This restlessness lets us
dream of a home that would finally allow us to be really at home. But paradise never
existed.
In a lecture he gave in 1951 at the 2. Darmstädter Gespräch with the title “The
Myth of Man Behind Technology” — this was the same symposium at which Martin
Heidegger lectured on “Building Dwelling Thinking” — the Spanish philosopher Ortega

y Gasset compared this discontent “with a love without the beloved,” with a "pain that we
feel in limbs that we never possessed."64 Heidegger was of a different mind: he would
th
have the architects that attended this symposium learn from an 18 century Black Forest
farmhouse what kind of building once allowed for an authentic dwelling — as if before
the Enlightenment human beings had really been at home in their world, content
with themselves and their world. But was this what Heidegger really wanted to say? — I
shall have to return to that essay. Ortega y Gasset, at any rate, did not want to hear of such
contentment; and so he called our discontent “the highest thing the human being possesses,
precisely because it is a discontent, because man wants to posses things that he never
had."65 And does this always wanting more, this striving for what is higher, not determine
our essence? Is it not bound up with our reason, which has to assign to everything real a
place in the logical space of the possible and thus lets us compare our
life-world with other possible worlds, whose temptations and promises seem to render the
world to which we have become accustomed sadly deficient? Again and again human
beings have demanded more. Our technology has its origin in such discontent, which wants
to create a new world "because, as it is, our world does not fit us, because it has made us
sick. This new world of technology is like a gigantic orthopedic apparatus, that you [and
here Ortega was addressing his audience, the architects present, who responded to his talk
with repeated laughter and applause] want to create, and all this technology has this
wonderful, but — as is the case with everything human — dramatic movement and quality,
to be a fabulous, great orthopedic device."66
A few of the architects listening to Ortega may have thought, as he spoke, of
Cain, who, as I told you last time, according to Genesis built the first city and to whose
race we are said in the Bible to owe the invention of technology and the arts. It was the
loss of paradise that let Cain turn to building a city and his race to technology to seek

there Ersatz for what had been lost. Ortega’s thought goes in a similar direction when he
speaks of limbs that we never had and yet miss. Wings and airplanes come to mind, as
does our communications technology.
First of all and still most of the time our body binds us to a particular place. In his
lecture, heavy with nostalgia, Heidegger had spoken of the importance of a rooted
existence. But human beings are not trees, firmly anchored in some soil. As it says in an
old folksong: thoughts are free! This freedom of thought has from the very beginning
desired to overcome distance, to trade place for open space. We demand mobility, demand
wheels, sails, wings: freer access to things than our body and our senses allow
us. We want to understand things as they really are, not subject to the limits imposed by
particular perspectives. Freedom and curiosity, Fernweh and the claim to truth are
inseparably bound together.
A presupposition of every search for truth is the commitment to objectivity;
objectivity again demands a bracketing of and going beyond all interests and limitations
imposed by some particular point of view. Was Plato not right to teach that to gain access
to the land of truth we have to ascend from the cave of our life-world into the light? But
this ascent, to which we owe all progress, enlightenment, and our science, is
shadowed by an ever growing discontent, for it has denied our modern life-world the aura
of home. With the bracketing of all subjective interests and perspectives the world, as
known by science, has to turn into an essentially meaningless collection of facts, indifferent
to us and our desires.
With this we touch the shadow side of that never satisfied curiosity that Ortega
understood as “the highest thing the human being possesses.” Not surprising therefore
that Ortega’s Fernweh should have been countered by that Heimweh or nostalgia that in
that Darmstadt symposium found a voice in Heidegger’s contribution and its emblem in
his place-establishing Black Forest farmhouse. This change from Fernweh to Heimweh is
easy enough to understand: the indifference of the world threatens a loss of humanity. To
the self-elevation, the self-transcendence of the earthbound subject, which is a
presupposition of science and technology, corresponds necessarily a self-diminution, as
Nietzsche so clearly saw. Consider in this connection his ambiguous praise of
Copernicus in Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Together with the Pole Boscovtch —
Nietzsche means the Ragusan Jesuit Joseph Roger Boscovich — Copernicus is celebrated
as the “greatest and most successful opponent of visual appearance (Augenschein).”67
What led Copernicus to this victory are considerations that remain a presupposition of
our science. The visual appearance of the world that is presupposed by our world picture is
devalued as mere appearance: doesn’t reality present itself to us here in perspectival
appearances, inescapably bound and refracted by particular points of view. A
presupposition of the world discovered by our science is the devaluation of the world
presented to us by our senses. Nietzsche speaks of “the greatest triumph over the senses
that has been achieved on earth up to now.”68
But is this victory not also a defeat of our humanity? The shadow-side of this
victory is that self-diminution of man, which according to Nietzsche since Copernicus has
undergone an “unstoppable progress.” Thus we read in the Genealogy of Morals: “Since
Copernicus man seems to have stumbled unto an inclined plane — ever faster he rolls
away from the center—where? Into nothing? Into the ‘piercing awareness of his own
nothingness.’”69
The progress of science, and especially the progress of astronomy, which let the
earth become a spaceship drifting aimlessly in the immensity of the universe, lets us
experience this earth ever less as being like a firmly built and well-furnished house in
which everything has is proper assigned place. Already in Kant’s Critique of Practical
Reason we meet with this changed understanding: consideration of the countless worlds
that make up the universe “annihilates as it were my importance as an animal creature that
has to return the matter, that formed it, to the planet, after it was equipped for a short
time (one does not know how) with vital force.”70

Underscoring this insight into the abandonment of human beings by a world that
has grown immense, Schopenhauer begins with it the second volume of The World as
Will and Representation:
In infinite space countless shining spheres, around every one of them rotate
perhaps a dozen illuminated smaller ones, hot within, covered with
 a solidified, cold rind, on which a moldy covering has produced living and
knowing beings: – that is the empirical truth, the real, the world.71
The young Nietzsche appropriated this Schopenhauer quote and placed it in slightly
changed form at the beginning of “On Truth and Lie in a Extra-Moral Sense.” And can
this “empirical truth” be challenged? The world that our science uncovers does not care
for us. These heavens do not proclaim the glory of God. Our science does not and cannot
know anything of values, God or freedom. For these there is no room in the logical space
it presupposes. As already Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi knew, every attempt to fully
comprehend all that is has to lead to nihilism, where such nihilism need not lead to
typically modern attempts to regain the lost center despite all this — where I am thinking
especially of attempts to have art reoccupy the place left vacant by the death of God; but
also of that second religiosity, as Oswald Spengler called it, which today attempts to push
itself into the place vacated by a religion that science would seem to have relegated to a
never to be recovered past.
Our modern life-world, shaped as it is by science and technology, is thus anything
but gemütlich or comfortable. To be sure, our building and dwelling speaks of an
enormous gain in mobility and that is to say also in freedom; but at same time it
communicates a difficult to bear sense of being adrift. What Milan Kundera called the
unbearable lightness of being gives birth to a desire for weightiness, for a sense of
gravity. Ortega’s grand dream of a technological orthopedics is thus shadowed by

Heidegger’s dream of some farmhouse in the Black Forest or by the genius loci of some
still medieval town, such as perhaps his native Meßkirch.
Words such as Gemütlichkeit and genius loci are perhaps already sufficient to turn
some who have read their Lyotard or Deleuze to dismiss what I have to say here as the
words of a theoretical dinosaur. Is there anything that Heidegger’s Black Forest farmhouse
still has to teach us? Does talk of some genius loci not attempt to resurrect something that
has been left behind by the progress of reason. But the desire for home and for an art and
architecture that answer to this desire is not dismissed so easily, as demonstrated by the
widespread tendency to seek comfort in kitsch productions that nostalgically evoke some
supposedly more wholesome past. The opposing pull of Fernweh and Heimweh in all of us
resists resolution; I want to say: should not be
resolved, should be preserved.

2
I spoke of the way Fernweh and Heimweh pull every one of us in opposed
directions. If our building or our dwelling or our thinking is to do justice to our essence it
also must do justice to this struggle within us. In this connection windows and doors in
which interior and exterior meet demand special consideration. To illustrate this here three
pictures.
The first is Caspar David Friedrich’s Frau am Fenster (1822) in Berlin’s Alte
Nationalgalerie. The woman, presumably the painter’s young wife, one of those figures
seen from the back that are so typical of Friedrich and seem to look out of their world
into the infinite. But we must be more specific. Here the woman looks out of the
window unto the Elbe, looks into the open. A few light clouds move across the sky. The
masts of the boats invite thoughts of possible journeys, of a freer life. Dark interior and
bright exterior are sharply opposed. The open exterior, promising freedom and life,
underscores the suffocating quality of the severe space. Here the window is not an opening
that allows passage into the open. We feel confined. To be sure, with the
woman we look through the window. But the picture allows us to see only a small segment
of the world beyond. Is the woman dreaming, like a bird in a cage, of a freedom that the
windows thin cross seems to deny her? This picture does not invite us to think of
architecture as providing comforting shelter, but in the image of a prison. The basic
mood of this picture is a Fernweh that remains without satisfaction.

The second picture is Edward Hopper’s Western Motel (1957) in the Yale University Art
Gallery. The motel room in which we see the sitting woman, belongs to the same
limitless space of which the large window shows us an arbitrary excerpt. This room
permits no being-at-home. The walls of this room are unable to effectively bound this
space. Space seems to flow through this room, to deny it all sheltering power. Such a
room does not permit a genuine dwelling. As the suitcase and the car visible through the
window show, this woman is on her way somewhere.
But travel here is not at all enticing. Being underway is rather a fate, perhaps a curse. No
trace here of Fernweh. The disengaged gaze of the woman fits the portrayed space. The
basic mood is here a feeling of abandonment, of not belonging anywhere, of having no
home.
 The third picture is Adolf Menzels Balkonzimmer (1845), once again in Berlin’s
Alte Nationalgalerie. Focus of this picture is the opened double door, draped with light
white curtains, opening the room to the invisible balcony. We almost feel the draft of
summer air that carries the bright exterior into the room, bounded by sunlit floor, ceiling,
and walls, the door beckoning us outside, very different from the mirror, which casts us
back into the room with its furniture, where the lightless lamps that accompany it only
underscore the flood of light streaming into the room. The mirror is part of the furniture of
this room. Together with the decorative moulding that frames the ceiling and the furniture
it helps to furnish the room. In such well-furnished rooms things have their proper places.
Here one could feel at home. But the raft of wind playing with the curtains

beckons us outside. The double-door opens the room to a beyond that knows no limits.
But the curtains veil this beyond, protect the interior, provide it with a permeable
boundary. Separating and at the same time joining interior and exterior this balcony-door is
the gate through which the light enters that enlivens this room and allows it to become
a metaphor of a truly humane dwelling. Centrifugal and a centripetal desire here join
Fernweh and Heimweh in a play that makes it difficult to speak any longer of Weh, i.e.
woe. The basic mood here is a bourgeois contentment with the world that does not
exclude a certain tension.

3
Bachelard thought that we all dream of a house that promises physical and spiritual
shelter, of a home that at times seems to call us in fleeting memories and which yet never
th
existed even if in some 18 century farmhouse we may perhaps discover its metaphor. The
counterpart of Bachelard’s oneiric house is the oneiric city, thought by Heidegger in the
image of his native Meßkirch, with shady oriels, fountains, and images of the Virgin
decorating the corners of houses. In countless variations this dream will not
let go of us and again and again has helped shape our building and dwelling.
Examples are easy to find, also in America. Here just one: If one considers only
financial success, one of the most successful painters in America was the recently
deceased self-styled “Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade. In his paintings he likes to
presents us with houses that conjure up a happy past when all was still right with the
world, somewhat in the manner of countless cheap postcards, such as Christmas greetings.
But not only that: A developer working with Thomas Kinkade promised to allow such
dreams to become reality and thus to fulfill the dream of authentic dwelling.
We have the saying: “There’s no place like home.” Literally understood, however
the words say something else: there is no such place! Home so understood is a fantasy.
And must we not agree with Ortega? Would the return to a home that would really grant us
peace and rest not contradict our essentially restless essence, would it not mean death
in life? In our world we are never at home as such pictures promise. What is here
shortchanged is our freedom. Heimweh here threatens to suffocate all Fernweh and with it
our humanity.
 To be sure, freedom is often difficult to bear. This leads to dreams of a weighty
architecture that assigns us our place so effectively that it crushes freedom. The kitsch
artist and architect Adolf Hitler thus once promised to liberate such dreamers from the
burden of their freedom: “Providence has destined me to become the greatest liberator of
humanity. I liberate human beings from the coercion of a spirit that has become its own
end, from the dirty and demeaning self-tortures of a chimera called conscience and
morality and from the demands of a freedom and a personal autonomy that only a very few
can ever meet.”72 Architecture would create an environment that would help
establish an ethos. As the aesthetic practice of more than one school of art or architecture
of those days can show us, this was no isolated or idle promise. The Bauhaus dreamed a
version of that dream, although it dreamed of a very different ethos; and Heidegger, too
once dreamed it, he too, like National Socialism, which he had embraced in 1933, invoking
the Greek paradigm, as did the Nazis.
Faced with such architecture that would assign human beings their place, it is
understandable that from the very beginning a certain ill will against architecture should
have followed it like a shadow. Doesn’t the Bible tell us that it was Cain who built the
first city? And isn’t the Tower of Babel the first work of architecture mentioned there?
Just in our age, which let deconstruction become an academic fashion, a fashion that
quickly spread from philosophy to the humanities, and somewhat surprisingly also to
architecture, we meet with this ill will over and over.
Consider for exmple the cover of Denis Hollier’s Against Architecture: The
Writings of Georges Bataille.73 It shows one of the most admired masterpieces of
architecture, the cathedral of Reims in flames, victim of a failed German offensive in
World War One. But the destructive power of the flames, given the book’s title, is, it
would seem, not mourned here or condemned. The picture is not meant to call attention

to the inhumanity of war: quite the opposite. The flames are here the expression of a
sublime freedom that refuses to recognize the authority of any pre-given order, be it
moral, religious, or architectonic. The desire for freedom feeds the ill will against
architecture.
 Architecture is here thought to imprison us and thus to deserve being destroyed.
Bataille was of course not the first or the only one to have attacked architecture. Consider,
for example the exhibition "Deconstructivist Architecture," curated by Mark Wigley und
Philipp Johnson. (1988) The catalogue spoke of the emergence of a new sensibility,
fascinated by possibilities of contaminating, disrupting, violating, subverting architecture.
That sensibility led to an architecture that self-consciously calls traditional architecture
into question, that is to say, an anti-architecture, which in today’s
architecture world, both in theory and practice, has played a significant role, so e.g. in the
work of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Kohlhaas,
and CoOp Himmelblau, the architects celebrated by that exhibition.
Paradise had no need for building. In this garden Adam and Eve were already at
home. And does genuine dwelling not demand a house that should as much as possible
resemble such a garden? As Heidegger’s Black Forest house seems to protest against
Ortega’s orthopedics, so drams of paradise have long protested against architecture.
But if the fall, and that means the awakening of our freedom and our reason, has
let us fall out of nature, does that same reason not promise us Ersatz for what we dream of
and supposedly lost, yet never possessed? Prefiguring Ortega, Bacon and Descartes thus
dreamed already of a science and a technology that would allow us to realize the promise
of that paradise to which the cherubim’s flaming sword is supposed to deny us access.
The garden city movement represented a version of the same dream. Initiated in
1898 by Sir Ebenezer Howard, it argued for an approach to urban planning that remains
very much alive.
Dreams of paradise have given rise to the hope that relying on their reason human
beings should be able to realize their promise. Kinkade addressed that hope in one way,
the Nazis in a another, the garden city movement in yet another way. But is the dream of
paradise perhaps a dream we ought to resist? Does the hope to realize paradise here on
earth perhaps ask too much? Is our reason able to furnish, not just the body, but also the
soul with adequate shelter?
That painters such as Hans Baldung Grien or Albrecht Altdorfer liked to place the
birth of Christ not in some barn but in some fantastic ruin invites thought. Is a ruin,
architecture caught up in a process of decay or deconstruction, not a more fitting setting for
 the birth of the Redeemer, who is to rob time of its sting and to deny hell its victory, than
any architecture that reason could construct? The conviction that reason alone is not
sufficient to provide for genuine dwelling has survived that death of God proclaimed by
Nietzsche. Something deep in us remains dissatisfied by both the spiritual and the built
architectures which our reason has furnished us and welcomes thoughts of architecture in a
state of disintegration. Such discontent feels drawn to ruins that let us experince the
mysterium tremendum et fascinans of nature, of space and of time.
I have spoken of the tension in us between Fernweh and Heimweh. Should that
tension be resolved? We are dealing here with that opposition that finds expression in the
different dreams communicated by the paintings by Friedrich and Hopper that I showed
you. One side of us demands freedom and dreams of journeys into the unknown, the
other dreams of home and of being sheltered. One seeks the sublime, the other the
beautiful. But building needs to embody that rift if it is to allow for a genuinely human
dwelling. That generates the dream of a dwelling that does justice to both Fernweh and
Heimweh. The panting by Menzel does better justice to that dream.
In the following lectures I shall continue to explore these three dreams.