Abstract

KRUGER, Jaco. Thinking nature as home: from transcendental homelessness to oikeiosis. Acta acad. (Bloemfontein, Online) [online]. 2024, vol.56, n.2, pp.63-79. ISSN 2415-0479.  https://doi.org/10.38140/aa.v56i2.8972.

In response to the outbreak of World War 1, Georg Lukács, one of the forerunners of the Frankfurt School, penned a work titled The Theory of the Novel, in which he claimed that the modern world is characterised by "transcendental homelessness" and that this situation is reflected in the form of the modern novel, as opposed to the epic form of earlier ages. The present paper takes up Lukács's notion of transcendental homelessness and applies it more widely than literary theory to analyse the homeless condition of modernity as manifest in the way nature is conceived and treated in strict parallel to the way colonised peoples and territories are treated. The analysis of capitalism and colonialism in terms of ontological homelessness raises the question as to the possibilities for homecoming beyond the state of ontological homelessness. Can there, amid the current justified wariness of sedentary and colonising metanarratives, be a non-naïve conception of homecoming? Can nature in contemporary thought non-naïvely and non-reactively be symbolised in terms of home and homecoming? In response to these questions the paper concludes by considering the Stoic notion of oikeiosis and its implications for interacting with nature as a kind of non-sedentary homecoming.

Keywords : transcendental; homelessness; modernity; capitalism; colonialism; Stoicism.

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