Inwardness

Definition

Inwardness — the German Innerlichkeit — names the doctrine that the subject's truth is located within: that inner life (personal feeling, private thinking, self-reflection) is the site of authenticity, and that the world outside is, by comparison, representation or illusion. In Teyssot's account it is both a philosophy and an architecture. The philosophy: "The nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, living in a small apartment, regarded the subject as the only truth and believed that reality consisted only of his thinking within his room. Anything that happened outside his window, any public representation, was merely an illusion – exactly contrary to what Hegel had been saying in Berlin. Kierkegaard was perhaps the first theorist of privateness, the first theorist of the inwardness that the German had defined under the word Innerlichkeit" (p. 345). The architecture: "This 'inwardness' is usually associated with the interiors of middle-class households, which, from a stylistic point of view, described the Biedermeier period between 1820 and 1850" (p. 345) — inwardness is housed, in a dated, classed, stylistically specific interior, whose optical apparatus (Hummel's window-mirrors) makes the interior look at itself. Inwardness is therefore the wiki's interiority concept in its historical-philosophical costume: interiority before it became a design term, as the Biedermeier interior's product and program. Its pathology is Teyssot's thesis: "Perhaps because it protects too much, this mirrored interiority leads to a kind of excess of interior life, an exaggeration of introspection" (p. 346) — inwardness overfed by its own mirrors turns into boredom, and (in Adorno's verdict) "Mirror and mourning hence belong together" (p. 347).

Key Thinkers

Georges Teyssot — the concept's architectural historiographer (1996/2006): Kierkegaard's privateness, the Biedermeier address, Hummel's mirrored drawing room as inwardness's optical apparatus, and the suppression thesis (inwardness's excess as psychological disturbance).
Søren Kierkegaard — the first theorist of privateness/inwardness: the subject as the only truth; reality as "only his thinking within his room"; the window's outside as "merely an illusion" — posed "exactly contrary to what Hegel had been saying in Berlin" (p. 345). (Not yet paged — see log.)
Theodor W. Adorno — the concept's dialectical critic: Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933) reads inwardness as the constitution of the bourgeois aesthetic — "inwardness" and "melancholy" as domesticity's contours; the window mirror that "testifies to objectlessness"; "Mirror and mourning hence belong together" (p. 347).
Walter Benjamin — inwardness's fabric theory: boredom as "a warm gray cloth that is padded on its inside with the most glowing, colorful silk lining" (p. 346) — the interior's arabesques as the lining of time.
G. W. F. Hegel — the public counterpoint: the Berlin systematic philosophy against which Kierkegaard's room-bound subjectivity defined itself (p. 345).

Interiority — the general concept of which inwardness is the historical-philosophical register: Teyssot supplies interiority's nineteenth-century form (inner space as the space of reflection) and its pathology (the mirroring excess).
Privacy — inwardness's spatial condition: Kierkegaard's privateness theorized; "isolated privacy" (Adorno, p. 347) as the window-mirror's social product; private space's genealogy from prayer to intimacy.
Biedermeier — inwardness's stylistic address: the middle-class household interiors, 1820–1850, in which the doctrine took residential form.
Mirror — inwardness's optical instrument: the principle of "mirroring and doubling" (Brunotte, p. 346); windows that become mirrors until the exterior is illusion; the fogged mirror where the self disappears in its own breath.
Aesthetic Boredom — inwardness's pathology: the over-protected interior that breeds "an excess of interior life, an exaggeration of introspection" (p. 346).
Separate Spheres — inwardness's gender-class frame: the private sphere's philosophical extreme, where the room becomes the whole world.
Domestic Interior — the material host: the middle-class interior that houses and produces the inward subject.
The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the dialectic that inwardness collapses: when windows are mirrors, "there is no outside world" (p. 346).
Melancholy — inwardness's affect, by Adorno's account: one of "the contours of 'domesticity'" (p. 347). (Page needed — see log.)

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

Boredom and Bedroom: The Suppression of the Habitual (Teyssot 1996/2006) — the founding source: Kierkegaard as "the first theorist of privateness" (p. 345); the Biedermeier address of Innerlichkeit (p. 345); the window-mirror equivalence and the solipsist interior ("One exists only within this Innerlichkeit," p. 346); the fogged mirror and the over-protection thesis (p. 346); Adorno's inwardness–melancholy contours and the window mirror's objectlessness (p. 347); the genealogy of private space from seventeenth-century prayer to nineteenth-century intimacy (pp. 345–346).

Open Questions

Is inwardness a philosophy, a pathology, or a style? Teyssot's essay runs all three together: a theory (Kierkegaard), a disturbance (the suppression thesis), and a period décor (Biedermeier 1820–1850). Can the three be separated — and does the wiki's interiority concept need the historical stratum Teyssot supplies, or is inwardness interiority's obsolete costume?
The Hegel contrast: Kierkegaard's inwardness is defined "exactly contrary to what Hegel had been saying in Berlin" (p. 345). Is the private room's ideology dialectically produced by public philosophy — the room as the anti-system's spatial form — and what would an architecture built on Hegelian publicity look like against the Biedermeier's?
Over-protection vs. deprivation: the headnote names "suppression of the comforting habitual" as pathogenic (p. 345), while the body locates disturbance in over-protected inwardness (p. 346). Is inwardness's comfort the habitual's source (the room stabilizes repetition) or its suppressor (the room replaces the world with mirrors)? The excerpt cannot settle it.
The gender of inwardness: the sources Teyssot cites (Kierkegaard, Adorno's Kierkegaard, Mallarmé's Igitur) are all male figures in interiors coded masculine-philosophical, while the wiki's Biedermeier page (Houze) codes the era's domestic interior feminine (the artist-housewife, the mirror-contemplating woman). Is the Biedermeier interior's inwardness gendered two ways at once — his philosophy, her mirror — and does that doubling explain the fogged mirror's self-disappearance?
Inwardness and the spectacle: for the flâneur "the city and the crowd are a huge spectacle" (p. 347); for the room-flâneur the world appears "only… reflected by pure inwardness." Are these two instances of one spectacle-structure (the world as representation), with the interior as the spectacle's private box — and does that make inwardness an early form of the wiki's spectacle rather than its refuge from it?

Notes

Created from the Teyssot ingest; the concept bridges interiority (the general term), biedermeier (the style) and aesthetic-boredom (the pathology). Its companion new page from the same source is bedroom.