Not all hut-dwelling thinkers have left records of their huts. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, wrote little about the hut on a Norwegian fjord, near Skjolden, where he intermittently spent summers in the interwar years — despite ‘thank[ing] God’, in a letter to a friend, that he came there to work and think. Others, like Baopuyi and Thoreau, did leave records — as, too, did the two men I shall discuss: the Japanese poet and Buddhist monk, Kamo no Chōmei (c. 1155-1216) and the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).
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People have long been fascinated by hut-dwelling thinkers and authors. From ancient China, Greece and India to the present day, poems and memoirs of several of these thinkers — the Tang poet Baopuyi, for example, or the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau — have become literary classics. During the last three years, a large number of people have visited exhibitions, in Chicago and Venice, devoted to hut-dwellers.
Why the fascination? An interest, perhaps, in the psyche of people who can sustain, even relish, living alone in a hut — in, for example, their ability to ‘experience life away from social definitions of success or failure’, as Ann Cline put it in A Hut of One’s Own. But, as the title of that Venice exhibition, Machines à penser, might suggest, what fascinates may be the role of a hut in a philosophical perspective on the world and the human condition. Perhaps the tininess and isolation of the hut suit it to exemplify a quite general conception of our being in the world.
Not all hut-dwelling thinkers have left records of their huts. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, wrote little about the hut on a Norwegian fjord, near Skjolden, where he intermittently spent summers in the interwar years — despite ‘thank[ing] God’, in a letter to a friend, that he came there to work and think. Others, like Baopuyi and Thoreau, did leave records — as, too, did the two men I shall discuss: the Japanese poet and Buddhist monk, Kamo no Chōmei (c. 1155-1216) and the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).
Wittgenstein’s hut in Skjolden, Norway.
An odd couple, one might think. My pairing is not, however, arbitrary. It’s not simply that the two men had similar personal motives for dwelling in a hut, notably a great distaste for the times in which they found themselves living. Nor is it only that, in both cases, large and morally charged conceptions of nature, society and humankind are distilled in their reflections on the huts and their environs. More interesting is the seemingly stark contrast between the significance that Chōmei and …
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