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Philosophy is essentially homesickness - an urge to feel at home, everywhere.
Novalis (Das Allgemeine Brouillon # 857)
“How much home does a person need?” asks Jean Améry, a refugee from annexed Austria, and the answer he comes up with is: “all the more, the less one can carry within oneself” (Améry, p. 44). Given that home is less about a concrete location, and more about idealized, distorted and split memories of one's childhood and youth, it quickly becomes obvious that when referring to home, one is actually talking about a psychic entity (with all the over-determination that that entails) i.e. about a central internal object, inhabiting one's subjective consciousness. Améry goes on to suggest, that if one were to ascribe elements like “full command of the dialectics of knowledge and recognition, trust and confidence” to the notion of ‘feeling at home’, home would reveal itself to be a representation of no less and no more than, “basic security” (Améry, p. 47).
Inquiring into faraway eras and mentalities, one comes across the classical scholar Moses Finley who, while commenting on Homer's concept of home [oikos], writes: “… oikos was the centre around which life was organized, from which flowed not only the satisfaction of material needs, including security, but also ethical norms and values, duties, obligations and responsibilities” (Finley, 1979 p. 57). Hence home for the ancient Greeks, was what gave to human beings, a sense of identity and purpose, deeply embedded as it is, within a context of communal belonging.
To the extent that home therefore, stands for a concretization of the psychic state of a secure generative base, it is intricately linked to the putatively once-experienced or indeed the retrogradely imagined (fantasized) states of primordial completion or unity, where no disquieting differentiation between me and not-me exists, and therefore no individuation can be forced upon the sense of Being. These views clearly coincide with the thinking of the ps