Routledge Handbook of Well-Being

Kathleen Galvin, Kathleen T. Galvin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317532521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Nursing

The Routledge Handbook of Well-Being explores diverse conceptualisations of well-being, providing an overview of key issues and drawing attention to current debates and critiques. Taken as a whole, this important work offers new clarification of the widely used notion of well-being, focusing particularly on experiential perspectives.

Bringing together leading authors from around the world, Routledge Handbook of Well-Being reflects on:

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• What it is that is experienced by humans that can be called well-being.

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• What we know about how to understand it.

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• How well-being is manifested in human endeavours through a wide range of disciplines, including the arts.

This comprehensive reference work will provide an authoritative overview for students, practitioners, researchers and policy makers working in or concerned with well-being, health, illness and the relation between all three across a range of disciplines, from sociology, healthcare and economics to philosophy and the creative arts.

Part 1

The human experience of well-being

What is well-being? Philosophical and theoretical foundations

1
Residence, identity and well-being

Paul Gilbert

At the age of 55 the American novelist Henry James, who had lived a somewhat peripatetic life from childhood, settled down in Lamb House at Rye in England. ‘He had found his home, he who had wandered so uneasily, and he longed for its engulfing presence, its familiarity, its containing beauty’, as Colm Toibin puts it in The Master, his biographical novel about James (Toibin p. 132). One of James’s own characters, Strether in The Ambassadors, has a different and opposite experience at the same age. This American, when offered a beautiful home by the woman who loves him, Maria Gostrey, rejects it, even though ‘it built him softly round, it roofed him warmly over’ (James p. 374). As he explains, “I’m not … in real harmony with what surrounds me. You are’ (James p. 371). Henry James, we may say, feels at home in Lamb House, Strether does not feel at home at Maria Gostrey’s. Having a home, rather than being homeless, is in all sorts of ways contributory to one’s well-being, but feeling at home also seems an important ingredient. What, though, does it consist in and why does it conduce to well-being? An obvious answer is that feeling at home is an agreeable feeling and that well-being consists in a preponderance of agreeable feelings over disagreeable ones. My aim in exploring homely feelings is to show how such a hedonist account is over simple and throws further light upon well-being.

Feeling at home is a multifaceted phenomenon. It is not only in one’s own place of residence that one can feel at home but in other people’s too, in some towns, villages or stretches of countryside but not in others, with some people and not with others, and, by a longer metaphorical stretch, with the subjects or activities with which one has a greater familiarity – philosophy and cooking in my case – than with others – physics and carpentry, say. These differences concern the scope of the feeling, but, whatever the scope, feeling at home is always indexical, in the sense that I feel it here in this place, with these people or engaged in this occupation now. It is a feeling directed at the part of the world with which I am currently engaged in some activity or other, so that it characterizes the tone of the activity, so to speak, in relation to features of the context in which it is performed. For example, I might feel at home sitting in my own old room but not in your ultra-modern one. Sitting itself feels different in the two environments.

This is not to say that I necessarily have different sensations in the two situations. Indeed, while feeling at home can often involve characteristic sensations, it is unlikely that I feel any such sensations when sitting in my own room. Rather, what distinguishes this situation from the other is the absence of the sensations that I feel there as I shift uneasily in a modernist chair. We can quickly dismiss, then, the thought that what makes feeling at home contributory to well-being is that it always involves agreeable sensations. It is agreeable to feel at home but not necessarily for this reason. Furthermore, just as someone can feel at home without any particular sensations so they may not be conscious of feeling at home and still be properly ascribed the feeling. In Barbara Pym’s novel Some Tame Gazelle one of Belinda’s guests, the Archdeacon, falls asleep after dinner: ‘if the Archdeacon had not been asleep, she could have had some conversation with him, but it was nice to know that he felt really at home, and she would not for the world have had him any different’ (Pym p. 127). He was not, of course, conscious of feeling so much at home that he could reasonably fall asleep, nor need he have had any associated sensations; presumably the only sensations he had were of drowsiness. What his feeling at home at Belinda’s did involve was that he felt no need to combat his drowsiness and make an effort to remain awake, as he would have tried to do in other people’s houses.

Often, however, we are reflectively aware of feeling at home somewhere or among certain people. In many cases our relation to the place or people will be purely indexical, while in others it is not just this place or these people but a place or people with certain characteristics towards which the feeling is directed. Here we can speak of the feeling as conceptualized, since it is directed at an object as falling under certain concepts, and that it falls under them gives my reason for the feeling. This is something of which I can be directly aware, not something I have to learn by observing the situations in which I feel at home, as I might do with other people. Thus I might be struck by how similar someone else’s room is to my own and feel at home there in consequence of this. This is not to imply that feeling at home somewhere is always feeling as if I were at home, in a place with some salient properties that my own home has. What makes me feel at home may be quite different properties from those of my own home, for, in unfortunate cases, one’s own home may not be one in which one does feel at home. That was the experience for Iris Murdoch when she lived in the house in Hartley Road, Oxford, which her husband, John Bayley, had bought for them. ‘She had driven her pen there day after day, and all the more determinedly’, he writes, ‘because the place was, as I well knew, so uncongenial to her’ (Bayley p. 222).

What, then, are the sort of qualities in virtue of which one may feel at home at a place when this is conceptualized as apt for this feeling and how might one’s apprehension of it convey these qualities? We can adopt here, I suggest, a notion that Allen Carlson employs in discussing the aesthetic appreciation of the environment. Feeling at home is not exactly an aesthetic response to a place since aesthetic judgments are universalizable, to be shared by all who view the same scene, whereas we have no corresponding inclination to suppose that others ought to feel at home in the same places that we do ourselves. Carlson speaks of a place as having ‘expressive qualities’ (Carlson p. 113), and he illustrates this by contrasting the way in which traditional farmsteads can be appreciated aesthetically with the repellence felt at the new agricultural landscapes of America. The former are expressive of community and ecologically sound cultivation; the latter express a loss of social stability and environmental integrity (Carlson p. 183). Carlson points out, however, that the very farmsteads that contemporary Americans admire were, when relatively new, viewed by Henry James’s brother, William James, as ‘hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature’s beauty’ (quoted Carlson p. 175). My suggestion is, then, that we can regard feeling at home, when this is a conceptualized feeling, as a response to the expressive qualities we detect in the place.

Carlson’s contrast between the responses to traditional and new agricultural landscapes could well be used to illustrate the likely difference between the sorts of places in which one would feel at home and those in which one would not. However, while Carlson takes the expressive qualities to which we should respond aesthetically as ‘life values’, exemplified by community and environmentally sound agriculture, there is no reason to think that what is responded to when one feels at home in a place is objectively valuable. The qualities taken to be expressed in a place where one feels at home are the qualities of a place where one thinks one could, other things being equal, make a good home for oneself. What these qualities are will depend upon one’s conception of what one’s home should be like. This is where one may begin to have doubts about whether feeling at home in a place which one conceptualizes in a certain way is necessarily a good thing. It may be an agreeable feeling, but is it a good feeling to have if one’s conception of home is open to criticism? For to say that the feeling is not universalizable is not to say that it is beyond criticism. In particular, one can criticize people for not allowing themselves to feel at home in a place because of its failure to correspond to their image of home, and one can do this by showing that the image is inadequate and thereby something which is limiting and thus stands in the way of their well-being. We can go on to consider just one possible example of this.

A familiar way of conceptualizing a particular sort of place as having the properties of home, not just a type of house but types of community and countryside as well, is as the sort of place proper to those of a certain identity, national, regional or ethnic. This sort of place makes an English person, say, feel at home because it has properties that are supposed to be characteristically English, for example those of the English country cottage. While the idea that different sorts of places produce different sorts of people goes back to the Greeks, it is given classic expression by the German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder. ‘Every region of the earth’, he writes, ‘has its peculiar species of animals which cannot live elsewhere … why should it not have its own kind of men? … The Arab of the desert belongs to it, as much as his noble horse and indefatigable camel’ (quoted Ergang pp. 90–91). People will feel at home, Herder implies, only in the land that shapes them as the sort of people they are. Being there will contribute to their well-being because they would be literally out of place elsewhere. While some vestiges of these ideas may linger on in popular thought I hope that we can dismiss them here without argument. What actually happens when people feel at home in a place that they conceptualize in a way associated with their identity is that they respond as they have been trained to respond when they are inducted into the identity. To feel at home in places that conform to the images they were then given is to feel that this is the right place for one, given who one is, and thus to enact the identity with which the images are associated.

Yet it is not just because of the possible limiting effects I have indicated that we can question whether it is good, say, for someone to feel most at home when they move into the country cottage of their dreams. This is because what is important to someone, as we may suppose their having these feelings for the reason given is, is not necessarily what is good for them, in the sense that it does actually contribute to their well-being. Having the national identity they espouse and living a life which supposedly reflects this identity may figure large in an individual’s scale of values. But it is not thereby objectively valuable. If we are to think of well-being in terms of what is good for someone, irrespective of their views of what this is, then we have to assess their propensities to have such feelings as feeling at home in this light.

However, when we turn to more primitive manifestations of feeling at home than the conceptualized ones we have been discussing we may think of them as more uncomplicatedly good to have and we need to ask why this should be. The most primitive case of feeling at home, I suggest, is the experience of being able to move around unthinkingly in a familiar environment and to get on with activities there without difficulties occasioned by the place. This is what we can usually do in our immediate environment – the house we live in, the streets down which we walk and so on, all of which we do without attending to their layout. One aspect of this manifests what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls our motor intentionality, whose object is ‘that highly specific thing towards which we project ourselves, near which we are in anticipation and which we haunt’, rather than its being ‘an object represented’, so that ‘motor intentionality … is concealed behind the objective world which it helps to build up, (Merleau-Ponty p. 138 fn.2). Motor intentionality is involved in our commerce with the things we encounter in our everyday activities, the things which Martin Heidegger terms ‘things ready-to-hand’ (Heidegger p. 98), like the pen with which I write these words. When I put the pen down and reach for it again I do not conceptualize it as a pen in a certain place to be grasped, for my hand goes out for it automatically. Similarly, the large-scale things in our environment are not conceptualized in terms of what I must make certain directional movements towards. It is my body which has, so to speak, learnt my route around house and streets. It is, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘the body which “understands” in the cultivation of habit’ (Merleau-Ponty p. 144).

The resident of a place will normally have the sort of familiarity with it that enables them to negotiate it in this habitual, unthinking way. They feel at home there without any sensations or thoughts of feeling so in virtue of this capacity. Similarly with familiar people to whom we can relate without reflection, without minding our ‘p’s and ‘q’s as the expression has it. We feel at home with them in virtue of being able to talk and act with them in this easy-going way. The activities with which I feel at home are likewise those that I can engage in without the difficulties of unfamiliar activities – the difficulties of having to constantly monitor my own practice to see if I am acting correctly, rather than simply getting on with the task in hand. Indeed, the case of activities with which I feel at home is in many ways a model for other cases of the feeling, since it brings out how being able to act without a certain sort of reflection and self-appraisal is what enables one to feel at home. We can recall here how in the house in Hartley Road Iris Murdoch had to drive her pen ‘determinedly’ because ‘the place was so uncongenial to her’. She could not get on with things easily because the uncongenial aspects of the house intruded upon her activities like writing.

To feel at home in a place, then, normally requires not only the capacity to negotiate it effortlessly but the ability to pursue one’s ordinary activities there without any impediments it causes. We all know how this can be hampered by a light that glares, a dark ceiling that looms over one or by a chair that creaks. In order to get on with our activities the environment needs to be unobtrusive. For it to obtrude is as bad as for one’s pen to run out of ink, interrupting the flow of one’s work. Then the object is, in Heidegger’s words, ‘met with as something unusable’ and ‘enters the mode of obtrusiveness. … It reveals itself as something present-at-hand and no more’ (Heidegger p. 103). We cannot feel at home in an environment that is, as we say anthropomorphically, hostile in this way. We have, as Elaine Scarry puts it, a ‘habit of taking object-awareness as the norm and object unawareness as an aberrant and unacc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Contributor bios
• Introduction
• Part 1 The human experience of well-being: what is well-being? Philosophical and theoretical foundations
• Part 2 How are understandings of well-being developing? Disciplinary and professional perspectives
• Part 3 How is well-being manifest in human life? The aesthetic nature of well-being
• Index