According to Aristotle, our nature speaks through our needs. One of the central things it asks for—we might say ‘demands’—is that we live in households. But today our technological practices are obscuring our real needs; and so we miss what human nature is saying to us. And we struggle to understand what a home should be.

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, Thomas Aquinas writes:

“And so he says that the household is simply a community constituted by nature for everyday life, that is, activities that have to be performed daily.”

The household is the most natural of communities, since its outlines arise from what humans need to do every day, together. So, human needs call for a community in which we do certain basic activities, with a small number of loved ones. Every day.

Aristotle and Aquinas use two simple examples: eating and warming oneself at the fire. Eating is the most obvious. Everyone must eat several times a day. In earlier societies this clearly demanded a whole set of activities, from producing, preserving, and preparing to eating and cleaning up. Much of home life revolved around these very activities. Just read, for instance, any of the Ingalls Wilder Little House series of books.

But for many people today, enabled and encouraged by technological developments, the whole realm of eating looks very different, especially in two ways. First, many of the activities that made eating possible can be omitted by most people. In other words, production, preserving, and preparing food are commonly done by machine, or by the hands (usually aided by machine) of others.

Second, a host of factors make it easier and/or more necessary to eat ‘on the go’ or apart from a small community of loved ones. Thus eating around a table in the home—an activity broadly recognized to have profound personal and civilizational import—becomes increasingly obsolete.

The situation with Aristotle and Aquinas’s other example, indoor environment control, is similar. John Senior wrote how the use of air-conditioning unwittingly undermined community by removing a major motivation for sitting on the porch in the evening; the same could be said for centralized heating versus sitting by the fire. Here again technology developed and used in certain ways has changed what and how people experience basic needs.

The point here is not to argue that certain technologies are wrong or that they should never be used. There is something much deeper at issue. We are discovering now (in a way we never could before) that basic human needs call for a set of activities that also address higher needs precisely through how they tend to the basic ones.

If this is so, then we have a key to rediscovering and renewing our homes. We can learn to attend more carefully to the pedagogy of our nature, and how our more obvious or ‘basic’ needs (for which, most of the traditional home-arts were developed) are intimately tied to all other human needs. This will give us real impetus to be intentional about how we do the most normal things in our homes, and therefore also about what technologies we use, or not, in doing them.

A personal favorite illustration is how infants need a diaper change several times a day. Is this accidental? Or is this need precisely what provides the context for addressing the deepest needs of infant, and parent! Face to face contact; moments of communication; reassurance of love and presence. Here child and parent are told, are reminded, who they are; again and again; every day.

But what if technology were to make such an activity ‘unnecessary?’ How many of us would reach here, as perhaps we have in less obvious areas, for a change that would in fact be devastating in its consequences?

Aristotle and Aquinas think that human nature indicates the structure and end of a household precisely through our wonderfully complex and intertwined needs. Today, perhaps more than ever (and that is not a throw-away line), we should look again and be docile toward that which is anything but random or accidental: the embodied, real needs of persons. And as I have suggested elsewhere, thinking about the needs of the young and the elderly is a great place to start; and it can lead to our rediscovering and renewing the primordial home of all truly human life. ~ ~ ~

LATEST PODCAST EPISODE: HOW WENDELL BERRY CHANGED OUR HOUSEHOLD. Since Berry’s death many are taking stock of his unique voice warning of the tragic demise of community and household, culture and agriculture in twentieth century America. But his prodigious appeal and influence are most evident in his pointing to something beautiful that is still very much in our reach. Sofia and I share the astounding gift his work has been for our own household. Find and share all our podcasts HERE.

John Cuddeback

Husband, father, and professor of Philosophy. LifeCraft springs from one conviction: there is an ancient wisdom about how to live the good life in our homes, with our families; and it is worth our time to hearken to it. Let’s rediscover it together. Learn more.