Abstract
The intimate sphere can be defined as something “built and maintained by the concern and the interest for the concrete lives and existences of others, who are not unfamiliar in general but interpersonale and embodied” (Junichi Saito 2003). This paper deals with the intimate sphere in connection with “women's embodiment”,“mother's territory”, and the“family metaphor”, adopting an approach informed by feminism and philosophy-ethics. Even if we focus only on Saito's “interpersonale and embodied others”, this is a concept which requires discussion. Moreover, it is necessary to address the novel notions of “private sphere⁄individual sphere”, “root sphere”, and “life sphere”, in order to open up problems which tend to be disguised by the naive dichotomy between intimate and public spheres. Within this new framework, I explain the intimate sphere as a base or home of life which aims to protect the vulnerability of human beings.
The theoretical activity of philosophy is a form of narratology, that is, conceptualizing a reality captured by intuition using words and then establishing new theoretical ideas. Issues which may be obscured within in a dominant episteme can then be recognised and investigated.
Probably, sociology will thoroughly dissolve the fiction or myth that the family is a space of love, by stubbornly discussing the family in a descriptive way and revealing the malfunctioning of families in reality. However, even if the normative family idea is consigned to history, our emotional attachment to the family may still remain. There exist questions about the family from the perspective of childhood and the perspective of aging and death and these are discusssed under the heading “Family as an issue”. From the perspective of human beings endowed with language, “the family is a highly contextualized collective” (Tamaki Saito 2006). In other words, human beings require a space where their existence is unconditionally accepted. What issues arise here at the metaphoric level, over and above a purely functionalist discussion of family? I hope to encourage a discussion which evolves from the concept of intimate sphere toward “root sphere”, “private sphere”, and “life sphere”.
