Gaston Bachelard 'The Poetics of Space' - WordPress.com

7 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutthe life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, itscouncils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, manwould be a dispersed being. It maintains him through thestorms of the heavens and through those of life. It is bodyand soul. It is the human being's first world. Before he is"cast into the world," as claimed by certain hasty metaphysics,man is laid in the cradle of the house. And always,in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle. A concretemetaphysics cannot neglect this fact, this simple fact, allthe more, since this fact is a value, an important value, towhich we return in our daydreaming. Being is already avalue. Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, allwarm in the bosom of the "house.From my viewpoint, from the phenomenologist's viewpoint,the conscious metaphysics that starts from the momentwhen the being is Hcast into the world" is a secondarymetaphysics. It passes over the preliminaries, whenbeing is being-well, when the human being is deposited ina being-well, in the well-being originally associated withbing. To illustrate the metaphysics of consciousness weshould have to wait for the experiences during which beingis cast out, that is to say, thrown out, outside the beingof the house, a circumstance in which the hostility of menand of the universe accumulates. But a complete metaphysics,englobing both the conscious and the unconscious,would leave the privilege of its values within. Within thebeing, in the being of within, an enveloping warmth welcomesbeing. Being reigns in a sort of earthly paradise ofmatter, dissolved in the comforts of an adequate matter.It is as though in this material paradise, the human beingwere bathed in nourishment, as though he were gratifiedwith all the essential benefits.When we dream of the house we were born in, in theutmost depths of revery, we participate in this originalwarmth, in this well-tempered matter of the material paradise.This is the environment in which the protectivebeings live. We shall come back to the maternal featuresof the house. For the moment, I should like to point out