Intro to Wisdom: Discovering the philosophy of the dorm
As fall quarter ended, I found myself with a lot of free time to spend in the dorm. My finals had wrapped up early in the week, so I took to reading a book on my shelf that had been collecting dust since I purchased it: “Philosophy of the Home,” published in 2021 by Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia.
As I read, I was struck by a creeping, uncanny awareness of Coccia’s critiques of the traditional conception of the home and their relation to my current residence (a Stanford dorm). So I’d like to take a close look at the culture, ecosystem and construction of dorms in relation to a traditional residence and see if we can gain some insight into Coccia’s questions regarding the ideal ‘home.’ In other words, we’re going to look into the “Philosophy of the Dorm.”
The transition from living at home to residing in a college dorm is a significant one, as most college students know all too well. It’s full of unfamiliar spaces, norms and restrictions on how you structure your life. You’ve just spent eighteen-odd years learning how to live by your family’s rules in your family’s home, and now that’s all being thrown out the window for an entirely new set of expectations and collective living. It’s an intimidating prospect, especially for an only child like me who had thus far led a relatively secluded life. And so arises a big question: how might a dorm’s structure help with that shift?
It’s just that sort of radical change that Coccia writes about in “Philosophy of the Home.” Coccia’s concerned with the development of technology and media causing the death of the home as an insular space, and leading to its rebirth as a “world-home” – a place not separated from, but connected to the rest of humanity and nature.
This principle can also be applied to the student’s transition to dorm life. In both situations, our home environment has fundamentally changed due to previously external forces piercing past boundaries.
Coccia bases his critiques on the notion that the modernist or pre-modernist home is unequipped to handle this transition, keeping up the useless facade of a self-contained residence rather than adapting to the entry of the world into the home. But at college, we see dorms diverge from traditional homes: they were specifically designed (at least in theory) to support students in their new lives. By doing so, they seem to offer a compelling way of living.
For one, dorm rooms are very upfront about their possible transformations and inevitable turnovers, something Coccia notes as being relatively hidden in the usual moving process. While lacking a shred of interesting structure, dorm rooms feel like little modular boxes whose character can be completely altered, but will eventually return to emptiness. The impermanence of a dorm stay is self-evident, revealed either by the identical furniture in each room or the ephemerality of your own changes in the space. But in this awareness of impermanence, we are freed from the burden of ownership, the need to possess. We are able to accept the transitional nature of our stay and enjoy it regardless of its fleeting existence, just as Coccia advocates.
Even more relevant than this impermanence is the shared, collective living that dorms tend to enforce, starting with the shared bathrooms. It’s one of the more cumbersome aspects of dorm life, but perhaps also the most transformative. The initial discomfort of sharing these spaces can reasonably be chalked up to discomfort at the increased vulnerability we must face. Bathrooms are where we are often most aware of our physical selves and the awkward, untidy elements of the ways our body functions. In a dorm bathroom, it is impossible to ignore our internal vulnerability — not only because of others’ awareness of us but also because of our awareness of them.
Coccia specifically advocates for freeing the home by making bathrooms “the space in which each body intersects with other bodies, and is intersected by them.” Perhaps by confronting the vulnerability at the heart of the bathroom, we can also recognize that vulnerability in others, forging connections in our solidarity with them.
Finally, we can look to the lounge to see how the dorm reinterprets the concept of home. In college dorms, lounges operate as ‘third places’ integrated into a home — those spaces separated from work and home, meant to foster community and social engagement. Dorms prioritize the lounge (that ‘third place’) over the rooms (the ‘first places’) in their physical arrangement, often placing the lounge closer to the entryway than any individual room. In this way, dorms convey their values; how they adapt a traditional home (as Coccia might see it) into a space welcoming the influence of others. The convenience of isolation is sidelined for the pursuit of community and connection, reflecting the experience college intends to offer students.
I’m extremely lucky to be living in a dorm that has robust activity and a sense of community in the lounge (shoutout Schiff!), and to have experienced a relatively smooth transition from a quiet family home to this more shared, collective dorm living. And much of that is due to the ways dorms can push people towards community, if (and it’s a big if) those people are willing to put themselves out there and work for that community. While Coccia writes of the home as this complex entity that controls our experience, the dorm is ultimately just a framework for those within to live their best possible lives. Within this framework, it’s more than possible to create an energizing, fulfilling sense of community if everyone contributes just a bit of investment and effort.
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