When ethnic and nationalist wars over "homeland" expel from their homes fleeing refugees, who then search for new homes and have to clash with xenophobic populations, who in turn wish to send them back "home," the meaning of "home" becomes important for ethical and political considerations. A philosophical analysis of the meaning of "home" in its contexts may clarify the assumption embodied in ordinary language about the relation between person and home, as well as distinguish uses of "home" from Orwellian newspeak misuses of "home" that change its meaning while main-taining its relation with man to legitimize xenophobic and inhumane policies.

First there is a need to clarify some common confusions between home and other concepts. "A house is not a home," shows that not every permanent or fixed residence is a home. "Home is where the heart is," and "At the turn of the century Vienna is my real home," show that not every home is a permanent or fixed residence. The irony of "This is your home now," said to the prisoner by a jailor, pointing to a dungeon is based on a patently incorrect identification of a permanent residence (the dungeon) with a home. "Home is where the heart is" and the experience of successful immigration show the distinction between home and the place of birth. The irony of "welcome back home" said by the smirking jailor, as the captured prisoner of conscience was led back to jail after a failed attempt to flee his native country, is based on the fact that one’s native place is not always home. Home is not where we happen to be born or reside, subject to meaningless chance; we may be born on a means of transportation or in a jail, or be under circumstances that force us to reside in a location that is not home.

Home is usually a multi-level structure that combines several single level homes, such as an emotional home, a geographical home, a cultural home, etc. For example, "I am at home in Prague, reading Patocka, listening to a Mahler symphony, with my love in my arms." The combination of single-level homes that makes our home is so closely connected to our personality, that a description of a person’s multi-level structure of single level homes, his home, may be unique enough to suggest that person’s identity. For example, "I am at home in the marketplace, in the company of well-bred young men, arguing about the meaning of things."

The actual political purpose of Havel’s concept of independent dimensions of home was to allow the Slovaks to have their own national identity, while feeling at home in a non-national Czech and Slovak federal state based on civic society and respect for civic and human rights. While Havel is correct in his multi-layered characteri-zation of home, the equality between the layers of home is questionable. Elsewhere, Havel himself implies that the national level is relatively less important for him, when compared with the universal one:

In contrast to Havel, nationalists value far more their national single-level home than their other single level homes, certainly more than their civil and world single-level homes, if they recognize such homes at all. Accordingly, the importance of the familial or human-universal home levels may be more important, respectively, for family persons or for cosmopolitans.

Further, though all homes are multi-leveled, the kinds of levels may differ from person to person. For example, some people may have no national sentiments and accordingly no national home. Others may be incapable of perceiving a universal human home beyond the tribal or national one, and hence lack a universal human home. Nationalism, as Havel recognized has a tendency to deny the existence or the normative correctness of the non-nationalist levels of home. Havel’s failure in his attempt to convince the Slovak nationalists in his scheme led to his resignation as the last Czecho-slovak president. The exclusionary nationalist concept of home is yet to exact a heavy toll from East Europe.

Havel’s multi-level scheme of concentric circles of single-level homes centered around the person does not consider the possibility of having several homes on the same single level. For example, one may have more than one national home, one person may be simultaneously at home in the Hungarian, Jewish, and Slovak nationalities, or the Romani (Gypsy) and Czech nationalities. The mental incapacity to conceive the possibility of complicated persona-lities and corresponding multi-level and multi-single level homes, as in multilingual and multinational homes, has been a major intellectual basis of exclusionist and intolerant systems of thought and action. I do not claim, of course that Havel, who is a very tolerant and en-lightened person, shares these exclusionist positions; he is just unaware of the shortcomings of his analysis. Some exclusionist versions of monotheism, in contrast to polytheism for example, may resemble in that respect the nationalist concepts of home. While polytheism recognizes that we may have several religious homes whose co-existence is not excluded by any one religion, and while the more universalist, deistic or theistic leaning versions of monotheism recognize the diverse religious homes as steps on the road to an identical ideal home, some more fundamentalist versions of mono-theism exclude the possibility of having more than one religious home, and further prohibit other persons from having religious homes different from theirs. Nevertheless, persons may have several homes on a single level that are as much an expression of their iden-tity as the homes they may be at on different levels. For example, "I am at home at Buckingham Palace and Windsor;" or "I am equally insufficiently at home in my Jewish, German, and Czech homes, and I feel equally guilty because of it."

Having cleared some confusions of "home" with fixed resi-dence and place of birth and having seen that home may be a struc-ture of several single level homes (on different and identical levels) which may change in time, it is time to attempt a more positive analysis of home. In "home is where the heart is;" "at the turn of the century Vienna is my real home;" and "my marriage was a home-coming," "home" is marked by an emotional attachment: to a place, a person, an intellectual environment, etc. "I am at home in Prague, reading Patocka, listening to a Mahler symphony, with my love in my arms," as well as the sentences identifying the homes of Socrates, the British monarch and Franz Kafka stress the strong relation between personal identity and home (as Havel claimed in the above quotations). Home is where we could or can be ourselves, feel at ease, secure, able to express ourselves freely and fully, whether we have actually been there or not. Home is the reflection of our subjectivity in the world. Home is the environment that allows us to fulfil our unique selves through interaction with the world. Home is the environment that allows us to be ourselves, allows us to be homely. Since in a home environment we can express our true iden-tity, home is the source of home truth. Home may be an emotional environment, a culture, a geographical location, a political system, a historical time and place, etc., and a combination of all the above.

One’s natural home is the environment without which exist-ence is precluded by nature. For example, "The polar regions are the natural home of the penguin." Outside their natural home, penguins cannot survive (unless by human interventions that create artificially simulated natural homes as in zoos, etc.). Accordingly, in terms of spacial location, most of the dry land on the planet earth is the natural home of the human race. A closer examination of the nature of man and woman may discover other features (emotional, intellectual, etc.) of our natural home. Still, most of the features of home are not natural. As much as the human personality is acquired rather than a part of a common human nature, so is the human home unnatural. As much as one’s particular personality is individual and unique, so is one’s particular home, where one’s personality may fulfil itself.

"Homelessness" is an appropriate term for a general state of having no home, no ability to fulfil oneself in one’s environment. Homelessness is not necessarily a lack of permanent residence, for tribes migrating with their herds in search of pasture can be quite at home without a fixed, four-walled, residence. Homelessness goes much deeper, it is a state of lack of self-fulfillment, lack of control of one’s physical environment, lack of emotional comfort, absence of intellectual stimuli or state of utter social loneliness. The descrip-tion of the friendless, shelterless, comfortless persons that live as homeless in many modern inner cities is quite appropriate. Attempts to eliminate the "home" part of the description in such expressions as "street people" or "outdoor persons" are futile, Orwellian attempts to change a disturbing reality by eliminating the negative connotations of the language that describes that reality. Being home-less is bad; not calling homelessness by its appropriate name does not change that.

"Hospitality" is the extension of conditions of home for some-body else. The home of the guest is not necessarily the home of the host. Hence the considerate host cares to find what is the home of the guest, to provide the guest with conditions of hospitality. For example, a considerate teetotaller host, keeps a stock of alcoholic beverages for the pleasure of drinking guests. Yet, while the number of people who may feel at home at an identical ideal home is not limited by nature, hospitality in some cases is naturally limited. While the number of persons who may feel at home in my apartment is unlimited, since the space of the apartment is limited, so is my hospitality. The hospitality of some homes (mostly spiritual homes) does not have such natural limitation, for example a cultural or linguistic home may accommodate all those who may wish to fulfil themselves in it. The limitations on hospitality stem from the finite-ness and scarcity of the resources necessary to create the conditions of home. Spiritual homes suffer from no such limitations, more material conditions of home are more limited. The natural extent of possibilities of, or limitations on, hospitality may be disputed.

The expression "runaways-from-home" is widely misused because it refers generally to young people who leave the residence of their legal custodians, either because they wish to induce a certain response when they return, in which case they do not really run away; or, they may actually run away from an abusive environment, but then they do not run away from home. The only group of people who may be said to run away from home are some vagrants or Buddhist monks who voluntarily refuse to have a home, and runaway from any possible home, physical or emotional, they happen to come across.

With "the place of the woman is at home," the chauvinist utilizes an ambiguity in the meaning of "home" in the sentence. The place of men and women is at home, but their own home. What the chauvinist means is that the place of the woman is at the home of the man, not her own home. Correspondingly "homemaker" can mean a person, man or woman, who creates conditions of a common home for himself or herself together with his or her significant other. However, homemaker can also mean somebody who makes the conditions of home for somebody else, not for oneself, in which case the concept is discriminatory.

What has been said so far of the home in relation to the individual is also true of the home of communities. On one level the home of communities may be a defined geographical location, a homeland, or just a social and cultural environment as in the scientific community. Exile is a forced collective homelessness, the prevention by force of the possibility of self-fulfillment for a group of people. Communities may be exiled from their homeland, from their cultural or emotional home, etc.

Exiles are searching for home, for a refuge. Those who pro-vide such a refuge are hospitable. The extent of the possibilities for hospitality is a debated political issue. For example, those who represent inhospitable political movements may claim that "the ship is full," that if more guests are admitted there would be no actual home left for anybody. Usually, they lie. For example, even if the whole of European Jewry had found refuge in Switzerland during the Second World War (not to say the USA, Canada, and Australia), there still would have been an actual Swiss home. More reasonable inhospitable political forces claim with some truth that hospitality costs the hosts material resources.

The personal equivalent of such a position is a person who refuses to entertain guests because it costs money and effort: one has to prepare dinner, buy foods and drinks, be polite and entertaining, and to top it all, when the guests finally stop spending the host’s resources and leave, the host has to wash the dishes after them. So who wants to be a host? The point, however, is that personal loneliness or political seclusion are worse than some dent in the personal or national budget. We also hope that if we are hospitable today, if we want or need our guests’ hospitality to-morrow, the relationship of hospitality will be mutual. For example, major political forces in Hong Kong displayed particularly inhospi-table attitudes towards the Vietnamese refugees who sought their home on the shores of that crown colony. Soon the same xenophobic populations may be seeking their own homes away from Chinese oppression.

The use of "home" by the media and various deportation au-thorities, such as the American, in the case of Haitians refugees and Hong Kong officials in the case of Vietnamese refugees, as in "forcibly sending refugees back home" or "repatriating them" is an Orwellian misuse of the language. Home and homeland are surely not a place where one prefers not to have been born, and wishes to escape. Home is where a person or a community can be safe and fulfilled. Had places like the former Yugoslavia, Haiti and Vietnam been the homes of the refugees who left them, they would not have risked their lives to escape to lands they thought had the potential for becoming their home.

East Europeans who seek shelter in Germany, Haitian risking the high sea to get to America, and the Vietnamese boat-people seek their home. The European community and American authorities who force them to go back are not returning them home or repatriating them, but deporting them from what they conceive to be their potential home to exile in the land of their birth.

The assumptions that the land of our birth is for some reason our home, or that our home is determined by our ethnicity, that there is an inevitable and involuntary connection between geography, ethnicity and what we are and where we can be fulfilled all are based at best on a misunderstanding of language, and, at worse, on its deliberate misuse to justify morally questionable political decisions. Statements like "returning refugees home" or "surrounding Haiti with a navy picket-fence" attempt to utilize the positive connotations of the relation between person and home, while twisting the meaning of "home" to be either the land of birth, or fixed residence, or mostly somewhere held to be a collective territorial home.

We are all descendants of immigrants. The natural home of humanity is the dry land of the planet. People, unlike trees and bushes, are not "rooted" -- people are born with legs. The fact that we are born with legs and intelligence opens to us ever new spacial and intellectual horizons. The human race, like other animals, is a migratory specie, from our ancient ancestors who, as we are told by anthropologists, migrated from Africa’s planes to settle the globe some three million years ago, to present day refugees and migrants. The human ability to migrate has been one of our basic assets for survival, allowing us to free ourselves of geographic constraints, from bondage to the earth. Bosnians, East European refugees in German hostels, Chinese, Haitian and Vietnamese refugees, like our ancestors and ourselves, whoever we may be, are searching for a home. This search for home is a basic trait of being human. It seems though that in today’s inhospitable world, the search may end in homelessness rather than in homecoming.

Palacký University Olomouc, The Czech Republic

1. Vaclav Havel, Summer Meditations, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1992), pp. 30-33.

2. On Patocka and home see: Aviezer Tucker, "Jan Patocka’s Idea of the World Movement as Ultimate," Ultimate Reality and Meaning, 20 (nos, 2-3, June-September 1997), pp. 107-122.

3. Havel, Op Cit, p. 31.

4. Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1990), pp. 178-179.

5. Following C. P. Snow’s novel Homecoming. Harold Pin-ter’s play of the same name gives homecoming a bitter cynical turn.

6. "... even my prison cell was my home in a sense, and I felt very put out whenever I was suddenly required to move to another. The new cell may have been exactly the same as the old one, perhaps even better, but I always experienced it as alien and unfriendly. I felt uprooted and surrounded by strangeness, and it would take me some time to get used to it, to stop missing the previous cell, to make myself at home." (SM, 30).