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Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) characterized philosophy as “a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language” (section 109). In an earlier essay (Stolorow & Atwood, 2017), George Atwood and I employed Wittgenstein's conception of such bewitchment to give an account of the genesis of various forms of metaphysical illusion. In place of a word a picture is projected, which is then imagined as a thing-in-itself, an everlasting entity. Such metaphysical illusion, mediated by words and reified pictures, replaces the tragic finitude and transience of existence with a permanent and eternally changeless reality. As was recognized precociously by Wilhelm Dilthey (1910/2002), this illusory metaphysicalization of experience is pervasive in human life.
An entity central to our everyday well-being is planet earth itself. The earth, both literally and ontologically, gives us the ground we stand on. It grounds our way of being.
Martin Heidegger, in his later work, is said to have moved away from phenomenology and toward a metaphysical realism. It is probably more accurate to say that he moved toward a complex amalgam of the two. This characterization certainly holds for his lecture “Building dwelling thinking” (1951), which gives important glimpses into the ontological significance of the earth. Indeed, Heidegger claims in this essay that the fundamental character of the human kind of being (existence) is dwelling. Such dwelling requires a space, a location, a home; and that home is the earth. In this vision, the earth provides grounding for the human kind of being. For humans, to be is to dwell on earth, and to dwell requires that they safeguard and preserve the earth that grounds them. Characteristically, such protectedness is sought in metaphysical illusion—the