Why do we sometimes feel homesick for a future we haven’t lived?

Ernst Bloch was a German thinker who didn’t see home as a place you’ve left behind somewhere in your past. He saw home as somewhere you might have glimpsed as a kid, but never actually lived. His word for this was Heimat. Heimat means something like home, homeland, belonging. But he wasn’t using it to mean going back to some lost golden age, where everyone was living the dream in an idyllic village, everyone knew each other, no one had a phone and all that kind of stuff.

True home, Bloch thought, is a world we haven’t managed to build yet. It’s somewhere you feel you could genuinely belong and be happy and at peace: at one with your work, with nature, with the people around you, and with your own possibilities in life. That’s what true home is for Bloch, and his philosophy of hope is full of it. What you sometimes feel as nostalgia is, he thinks, actually a longing for the future.

He wrote a massive book, The Principle of Hope. It’s something like 1,400 pages, an absolute beast of a book, and he concludes it with this notion of Heimat. He says Heimat is “something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been.” So it’s a place you’ve never been yet. You might think you’re homesick for some golden age in the past, whereas actually you’re longing for a way of living you’ve never fully experienced.

Imagine you have an amazing holiday, or a brilliant night out with mates, and years later you get together and reminisce, wishing you could turn back the clock and go back to that moment. Bloch might say: all right, what was possible in that moment? Maybe you felt really connected to the people around you. Maybe you felt totally at ease in your own skin. The interesting question for Bloch becomes: what was that experience showing you about how life could be?

That’s where his idea of the not-yet-conscious comes in: the notion of the Not-Yet. He sees hope as an active orientation towards what he calls possibility that has still not become. What exists now isn’t all that could exist, and the reality you’re in now isn’t the only reality there can be. The experiences you reminisce about and feel nostalgic for give you little glimpses of possibilities that just haven’t found a lasting form yet.

That doesn’t mean he’s saying go and have more nights out and book more holidays. There’s a communal side to this: Heimat is a shared achievement. It goes beyond being optimistic about the future. It needs you to get your hands dirty, get stuck in, and take part in bringing that possible world about. He says it needs “people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong.” So you’ve got to get in there, get your hands dirty, stop moaning about everything, and make the world you want real. That’s the possibility of finally becoming at home in a world you helped create.

Lightly tidied for reading. The quotations are from the translations named below.