TWO

Quasi-Things Assault and Resist Us: Feelings as Atmospheres1

And he was left alone once more. He filled the pipe and closed the window, as the air was turning chilly. It took no effort for him to picture the doctor’s villa, the prosecutor’s gloomy house. He who so enjoyed going out and sniffing atmospheres!

—Simenon, 2015, 65

(Neophenomenological) Depsychologization of Emotionality

One need not be alexithymic to be sometimes unable to describe, even just metaphorically, how one is “feeling” and therefore identify one’s emotional state, of which lived bodily sensations (leiblich) rather than strictly physical ones (körperlich) are the expressive resonance. One’s emotional state is the “expression of a correspondence between personal directionalities and the expressive characters of the environment” (Fuchs, 2000, 229). This is why we often resort to the vague and (falsely) all-explicative term “somatization”: we are unable to pinpoint some such emotions within our sensory organs or bodily parts, and yet we try to account for this undeniable resonance (be it fluid or pathological, attractive or repulsive).2 And yet, this resonance is what brings to the surface—without any metaphorical (or, even worse, poetical)3 alibi—the analogy that unifies the subject’s and the world’s expressive forms in terms of existential a prioris of the lived-body, which exist prior to their becoming real within different regional ontologies.4 Due to our typically Western tendency to debodify the emotional sphere, such an analogy gets seriously downplayed and the correlative somatic effect of the emotional sphere is considered an accessory phenomenon: in principle and compared to inner life,5 it is seen as something illegitimate, as well as identical to some non-affective physical states, as if it were truly possible to confuse—each with its own specific qualia—the palpitation caused by fear with the one caused by some sport activity.

A different and promising approach is, once again, the neophenomenological one (put forward by Hermann Schmitz),6 thanks to which the role of life and involuntary bodily experience has been rehabilitated within the context of a systematic,7 original, and profitably unfashionable philosophy of affection: being aware of the fact that it is not possible to evaluate our condition without referring to existential feelings;8 in this context philosophizing means wondering how we feel in this or that particular space. The task of the resulting atmospherologic proposal—which I also present from an aesthetological point of view9 in what follows—is thus to focus on the inquiry on the subjective feeling, not reducing the latter to a mere epiphenomenon (“what is it like to experience this or that feeling?”). This question is thus given priority over both the genetic one (“in what series of events does this feeling occur?”) and the causal one (“what is the cause of this feeling?”); in any case, this approach distances itself both from the (sometimes grotesque) functionalist-adaptive view10 of emotionality (e.g., one gets ashamed in order to avoid being assaulted!) and from the more sober, though slightly anodyne, multi-factorial theories.11

Just like the other themes taken into account in this book, here, too, the phenomenological inquiry also involves the inquiry on the critique of culture. First of all, my task is indeed to dismiss the naturalistic (and by now commonsensical) thesis that feelings—both as biological processes and as products of our interactions with other individuals and the environment—are located within the inaccessible inner world of the subject. In short, the task is to take a distance from the association of feelings and neural processes, avoiding (broadly Cartesian) introjectionism and depsychologizing the emotional life as much as possible; I then provokingly state that feelings (qua atmospheres, as we see) come from the “outside,” rather than the “inside,” of a human being. This depsychologization, among other things, goes hand in hand with the choice of prioritizing facts that are irreducibly subjective, rather than emptied and sanitized to the point of being identifiable as objective: in other words, subjective facts that are such not only in a positional sense, but also because they depend on the subject and because only the subject is able to refer to them (in the first person), bearing in mind the variability of the “isles” (cf. infra 3) which constitute the Leib.

Even though it is not entirely new in the twentieth century, and despite being antithetical to the Christian and especially Lutheran tendency to reject whatever open talk about feelings,12 this strategy of exteriorization does not get along with the apparently unavoidable processes of demythification and disenchantment of Modernity. In fact, such strategy atmospherologically depsychologizes the entire emotional sphere; that is, it turns feelings into affections that go beyond the human body (let alone the strictly physical body) and whose peculiar qualities pervade and affect the lived space:13 they give birth to an irresistible emotional engagement14 and thus affect the whole environment to the point that something such as a neutral spectator is merely an exception.15 And this is one of the reasons why this strategy revitalizes, at least in a compensatory way, the archaic-Greek externalist paradigm and allows to take at face value the physiognomic-expressive character of the external world, which appears demonic because its quasi-thingly abyssality resists every subjective projection.

Atmospherological Premises

In this context, we cannot simply acknowledge the collective implications either of feelings or of the edgy16 and antireductionist side of a theory of emotionality seeming somewhat materialistic (though not “physical”). Nor should we feel paralyzed by the recent inclination that strongly enhances the role of feelings17 only because they have assumed some vague additional cognitive value. Despite its purpose of extending the sphere of rationality beyond those of propositions and judgment—either in a narrativist perspective (Nussbaum, Goldie),18 or by revaluating the role of the brain as functional toward the entire organism (Damasio)—this inclination nevertheless overstates the connection between emotionality and thought, thereby downplaying the role of the felt-body. It both swings schizophrenically between the subpersonal (physiological, neuronal) and the personal sides,19 and it underestimates the value of emotions understood as dispositions (Wollheim), as a sharp and unpredictable drive.

Atmospherology is something different. As an ingredient of the rediscovery of the (sui generis) externality and spatiality of feelings, wiped out by the millennial internalist and psychologist paradigm (ever since the fifth century), this theory identifies feelings (oriented or not) as physicalistically ineffable quasi-things, though possibly mixed with, or anchored to, something objective. Like any other quasi-thing, atmospheres assault us from the outside with a peculiar dynamism. They infect the sphere of the felt-body, either causing a specific unconscious miming resonance20 or encountering our strongest resistance supported by a high degree of personal emancipation: in any case, however, they are immune to whatever projective impulse of ours (besides, the belief in the latter is nothing but the mirror of the preliminary belief in the semantic emptiness of the world). In the end they abandon us just as suddenly as they’ve affected us, and we’re left unable to tell where they are, now that they’re no longer perceived. They reveal their non-interiority so perfectly that their duplication becomes impossible.21 And the consequence of this, which wipes away every kind of dualism (both Christian-Platonist and Cartesian),22 is that we cannot explain how the subject—from its inner psychical world, hierarchically stratified (sensitivity, ratio and perhaps even spirit), so isolated and private—is then able to get outside and acquire a reliable knowledge of the external world.

I do not hold it necessary to proceed with drawing some deceitfully nitpicking distinctions between feelings and emotions, between emotions and protoemotions (Elster), between emotions and passions, and finally between passions and moods—and maybe even between the latter and atmospheres. Also, for the moment, I hold it unnecessary to draw a distinction between primary emotions (i.e., non-propositional and non-decomposable reactions with an adaptive function) and secondary ones, which are grounded on the former ones and seem to be multicomposed and perhaps cognitively and culturally more developed. Granted that the emotional sphere is composed by different states whose length and intensity, connection to the world, dynamicity, and orientation may vary,23 I would like to put a philosophical stress not just on the vagueness of “emotions,”24 but on that of the entire pathic constellation, here uniformly conceived from an atmospherological point of view while allowing for easy passages from one state to another. Also, it is not my intention to overestimate, sociologically, the possibility to simulate emotions in general: they remain central within the “dramatic moments of one’s individual social and political life” (Demmerling and Landweer, 2007, 1), as they display that ubiquitous character25 which Heidegger (1995, 66–67) ascribes to the Befindlichkeit, that is, to the affective situation: “the attunement is not at all ‘inside’ in some interiority […] but for this reason it is not at all outside either” since it is, rather, “an atmosphere in which we first immerse ourselves in each case and which attunes us through and through. It does not merely seem so, it is so.”26

However, the identification of feelings with atmospheres that we perceive by means of a “felt-bodily synesthesic resonance” (Fuchs, 2000, 214) is not just an analogy. The quasi-thinghood of atmospheres shows that they are not just intersubjective entities, but rather quasi-objective ones. They are dynamically active onto the perceiving subject, though not in trivially causal terms (keeping one’s chin up is not “caused” by pride; rather it is pride): and in this case the neophenomenological “discovery” may well turn out to be, to a large extent, a simple “re-discovery” of the phenomenological realism of the early twentieth century, among other things. Instead of resorting to (perfectable) phenomenological and ontological arguments to support the atmospherologic solution,27 I hold it more convenient to face the main objections moved against this approach, such as the compelling preliminary one that the “atmospheric” is nothing but a metaphorical potentiality.

However, Wittgenstein himself does not seem to have a clear idea of such metaphoricity.28 In fact, at first he defines atmosphericness as “a special application of language, for special purposes” (Wittgenstein, 2009, 167e), “precisely that which one cannot imagine as being absent” (Wittgenstein, 1992, 4). But later, within a context in which he notoriously wants language to become independent from life experience, he mocks the tendency that considers metaphoricity to be an “aroma,” an “imponderable something” (Wittgenstein, 1980, §243) essential to express semantically deep layers of language, indescribable characters, and big personalities.29 However, by acting so, Wittgenstein ends up reducing it to a merely superfluous supplement,30 even though it historically became so much entrenched in previous linguistic uses that it now appears as a discriminating factor: just as it is “embarrassing and ridiculous” to imagine Goethe writing the Ninth Symphony (Wittgenstein, 2009, 192e), so the existence of an atmosphere for the word “if” and for a long-familiar piece of furniture, or even for the great impression suggested by the signature of a great man, may just as well appear undoubtable.31 So, in this perspective, the merely linguistic use is what may be atmospheric—hence a clear and serious reduction of the richness of experience, neophenomenologically understood. What’s more, such linguistic use would also be misleading: in fact, it suggests, in a contradictory way, the inseparable distinction between the thing and its own atmosphere32 while spreading a persistent semantic error33 because of its metaphorical weight (as a picture of the use of the correlated word)34—namely, an illegitimate transitive (descriptive) use of intransitive (emphasis) or even simply reflexive expressions.35 The least I can say is that this prominent Austrian philosopher does not seem to measure up to the atmospherologic approach, which cannot be reduced to the figurative use of words and takes into account the phonosymbolic dimension;36 nor does he measure up to this approach from a strictly linguistic point of view, if it’s true that the persuasiveness of syllogisms presupposes an atmospheric effect37 (though it’s not well-studied and understood yet).

Depsychologization: A Metaphysical Reification?

What irritates the most within the atmospherologic approach is not just the partial desubjectification of feelings, but rather their ontologization, even in spatial terms, for which they appear “in the common world—in principle—not differently from the way houses and trees do. Feelings are no more subjective than high streets are; they are simply less easily definable” (Schmitz, 1969, 87). Although it has been re-examined and corrected, also in the light of a less critical antipsychologistic vis and of certain arguments which introduce the original dimension of quasi-things,38 this thesis shockingly distances itself from introjection and aims at underlining the external, not just projective, nature of (atmospheric) feelings. Such externality is proven by the fact that, though we can experience feelings in a direct way, we can also simply observe them with a “distanced attitude” (Schmitz, 2005a, 285), we can talk about them with other people and understand each other almost completely, as well as speculate about their effectiveness (contra Schmitz in this case) through counterfactual reasoning and skilful situational manipulations.

In this approach, the emotional becomes quasi-thingly, causing an immediate ontological objectification. This has obviously been seen as a dangerous reification: pseudo-transcendence similar to that of Platonic ideas, though undergoing the same precise classification process as chemical substances and vegetal species.39 Although such an ontological inflation40—which some have strangely accused of obscurantism41—is mitigated by the acknowledgment of the existence of non-well-definable feelings42 (for instance, in music), we cannot deny that the neophenomenological approach sets forth a certain stress on definitions, with “a will to be absolutely precise” (Schmitz, 1994, xiv), which sounds a bit inconsistent43 with a philosophy that is highly receptive towards whatever is fluid and semantically “chaotic.” However, this objection falls short, because it’s impossible to consider emotional dimensions as reifying, since their spatiality is toto coelo different from the local-thingly one (on which the misleading analogy with streets depends). In short, atmospheric feelings cause an illicit reification only for those who admit the sole existence of a physical, geometrical, dimensional space on the one hand, as well as the existence of things as cohesive and discrete entities on the other.

Thus, what is not acceptable for most theorists is the topological conception of the emotional; that is, if sadness is some anonymous atmospheric sadness which becomes my own only at a later time, most theorists cannot accept the claim that what’s subjective is simply the perception of an atmosphere—so quasi-thingly and objective that it can permeate its own specific (predimensional, surface-free) space. It doesn’t matter whether I am sad or whether a landscape is: sadness simply consists of an atmospheric involvement coming from the outside. This sadness is my own not because “I” own it, but rather because—making the “I” an adverb rather than a pronoun—it assaults me or, at least, because it’s related to me.44 This original spatialization of the emotional, which is undoubtedly suggested by the atmospheric experience also in a strictly climatic sense,45 is based on the hypothesis there must be a space that’s more fundamental than (and irreducible to) the directional and local-relative one46—a space which is populated not just by things, but rather by quasi-things.

An objection might be that such spaces can suggest only certain intersubjective moods, without coinciding with them, and furthermore that a certain feeling is not perceived as atmospheric when we ourselves perceive it, but rather when we perceive it in others and in some environmental resonance.47 Also, we can object that a certain landscape, say, appears to be exciting in itself as soon as the objectual elements and the subjective reactions bump into each other, “on the basis of intersubjectively shared, reactive rules” (Demmerling, 2011, 53). However, the objection—that is, we don’t perceive our anger as atmospheric, and when we perceive it as atmospheric it’s not our own anger—leads to the paradox that the atmospheric exists only from a second- or a third-person perspective, ruling out the viewpoint of the subject who’s emotionally involved; on the contrary, according to the view I’m presenting here, there cannot be atmospheric perception without this emotional involvement.

Another claim might be that since the same environment may be both perceived as sad or happy by different subjects, the objectivity of feelings entails that “all the feelings should be constantly present in the given space” (Fuchs, 2000, 227). However, this can be true only if we both disregard the typically intermittent state of atmospheric feelings—which are quasi-thingly—and take the strong relativistic premise of the objection at face value, thus underestimating the countless and otherwise inexplicable examples of over-personal emotions (e.g., fans at the stadium, the national grief for Lady Diana’s death, and so forth).48 In order to explain the different and often antithetical emotional reactions of different individuals to the same situation, we would not necessarily want to infer that some of them are subject to self-delusion, but rather that there might be a somewhat different kind of “filtering” process for the potential atmospheres, which correspond to the different felt-bodily dispositions and degree of personal emancipation of the different subjects.

One further objection is that the desubjectification of feelings prevents them from being localized within the lived-body: but in this case we may reply that the felt-bodily dimension is not integrally singularized. Just as for the “I,” for the felt-body “the proper vastness is not a vastness that I happen to own and control” but instead “the vastness in which the felt-body dissolves (‘debodification’)” (Schmitz, 2005a, 283). Thus it is not within the lived-body, but rather through the debodification within the lived space, that we can perceive, say, the atmosphere of holyday relaxation as an objective quality that’s not private at all. Still, atmospherology can and must find a more solid bond between the atmospheric, its expressive content immanent to the environment, and the personal situation of the subject who’s affected by it.

Are Atmospheres Supervening or Are They a Simple “in-between”?

As they are radiated by environments, landscapes, quasi-things, and even things proper, atmospheric feelings are the “ecstasies”49 or affordances of such elements, here understood as the visual “offers” studied by ecological psychology50 but in a broadened synesthetic sense that is not necessarily pragmatically oriented. That is to say, they are a radiation that’s conceivable without falling back to the “Procrustean bed of the emitting-receiving model, or of the subject-object contraposition” (Schmitz, 2003, 244). There is a particularly crucial objection to this view, which in turn ennobles the coarser one for which a situation cannot be sad simply because a situation cannot feel: such objection states that feelings are not immanent to the external world (say, melancholy to the sunset), but rather that they are simply latent within the subject and awaken because of this or that worldly experience.51 To feel the “joy” of the sea would not amount to feeling an objective emotion, but rather to experiencing a temporary emotional involvement on the part of the perceiver, since “usually […] the perceiving subject is not struck by a feeling, rather his getting struck is the feeling itself” (Hauskeller, 1995, 26). Even though these objections are in line with common sense (perhaps even too much so), they nevertheless underestimate what I hold to be a fundamental aspect—namely, that usually situations may not be penetrated in an emotional way, so that they result impermeable to the projective feelings of the subject. In my perspective, the fact that a certain atmosphere may cease to exist as soon as a certain environment is no longer perceived is a sufficient condition to hold that particular environment responsible (not casually nor occasionally) for the awakening of an atmospheric feeling, while the subject is only its occasio.

The claim that atmospheric feelings are supervenient entities52 should be integrated with the inquiry on those entities to which this atmospherogenic force inheres either in a constant or in an occasional way, on the basis both of the constellation they inhere to, and of the peculiar combination they generate within the mood of the percipient subject. No matter if they are more stable and “natural,” much like the unsettledness of a wood at night or the attractive-repulsive sublimity of a cliff in the mountains, or if they are idiosyncratic and cognitively penetrable (Eliot considered April to be the cruellest month, Wertheimer thought black to be grim even before being black, Cioran held that self-disdain could be strengthened by the beauty of a landscape), atmospheric feelings emerge from outside reality—at least prototypically (probably in their climatic form)—and not from the subject’s interiority. Even if they were but the outcome of a subjective projection, it would still be necessary to explain why a feeling is projected into that space and not into another one; most certainly we may conclude that it’s the space itself, along with its specific qualia, that’s invoking the feelings projected into it.

The hypothesis that atmospheric feelings are supervening entities seems to be justifying their externalization in a less troublesome way than found in Schmitz’s thesis, which describes them as “abyssal.” Even though, in Schmitz’s theory, this qualification denotes the lack of directionality rather than of causes, if all feelings are unpredictable demonic forces, hardly controllable, transcending their genetic situation, intense yet with no “phenomenically circumscribed” direction (Schmitz, 1999, 285), the atmospherologic discourse ends up lacking applicability (in primis from a aesthetological point of view). If the only true atmospheres were those that are completely independent from humans and things,53 it would be pointless to study the ties imposed on them by the objectual poles of which they are the ecstasies. While acknowledging how useful the radical and counterintuitive neophenomenological campaign of depsychologization may be, I hold it more advisable to commit, opting for inflation as usual, to the existence of different types of atmospheres: prototypical (objective, external, and non-intentional), derivative (objective, external, and intentionally generated), and even spurious in their relationality (subjective and projective)—the last is the case of Proust, who’s idiosyncratically fascinated (as noticed by Levinas, 1979, 192, with a certain awe) by the “reverse of the sleeves of a lady’s gown, like those dark corners of cathedrals” (though we also ought to remember the auratic mat of the Guermantes).

In order to lessen the (controversial) objectivity and abyssality of atmospheric feelings, Böhme has introduced a distinction—no matter how lexically appropriate—between the atmospheric, a more objectively situational feeling that does not depend on the “I” (e.g., the night in general), and the atmosphere, which instead depends more on the subject (e.g., this-night-to-me).54 This is all to avoid that an increase of subjectivization caused by the atmosphere may end up overestimating its individual relativity, for the sole purpose of finding a correspondence between that atmosphere and the variety of atmospheric perceptions at all costs. The value of the atmospherologic approach ultimately lies in the fact that it embraces the external and extraordinarily constant character of feelings (at least compared to the long timescale of evolution), supporting the fact that they are an unavoidable phenomenal prius.55 In this sense, Eliot could perceive a bright April morning within an atmosphere of cruelty only because the intersubjectively expected atmosphere, whose objective constituents are felt through the own-bodily resonance, was and still is completely different (peaceful, auspicious, etc.).

In the attempt to avoid both the complete objectivization and the complete subjectivization of feelings, Böhme suggests that an atmosphere may in fact be an “in-between,” something independent from and prior to the subject and the object, being their transcendental precondition (along the lines of the Japanese ki).56 Even though Schmitz sees the umpteenth escamotage of the psychosomatic dualism57 in this move, this intermediary and prerelational “collocation” of atmospheric feelings looks undeniable: granted that such a collocation doesn’t get reified and that we admit the existence of a relationship that is prior to its relata, experience seems to confirm its validity, although the absence of a term that pertains to this “in-between” may lead to an adjectivation alternatively relying on the subjective or the objective.58 The atmosphere is, to all extent and purposes, an “in-between,” a quasi-thing that is so presubjective and preobjective that it can be considered “transitional.”59 Referring to the atmosphere, possibly in analogy to the noema,60 we can partly explain how it is possible that “on the one hand nothing can appear unless it appears to a subject; on the other hand, what appears is not structured by the subject” (Costa, 2007, 142–143). Otherwise said, in the form of an “in-between,” the (prototypical) atmosphere necessarily appears to a subject, even though it’s not the subject that generates it.

Authority and Dynamism: Numinosity and Atmospheric Interactions

We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen. I thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those houses were divided were in every stage of dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while To Let, To Let, To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants and their unholy interment under the gravel. A frowzy mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewn ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot and all the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar—rot of rat and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand besides—addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, “Try Barnard’s Mixture.” (Dickens, 2011, 22–23)

It is hard not to be affected by the effect of this (gloomy) literary atmosphere. It is even harder to regard the “emotionally impregnated” space61 it outlines as the mere subjective projection of an ill-disposed perceiver. Or, even worse, to “reduce” the spatial percept to a constellation of factors so deaxiologized and devoid of significance that they could be perceived in the most diverse ways.62

In principle, we cannot exclude that one individual, but not another, may perceive a certain atmosphere, or that an atmosphere may be perceived in an exaggerated way, erroneously.63 Sometimes the authority of atmospheres does depend, like that of speech acts, also on certain necessary contextual requirements—being in a church as tourists, waiting for the bus to take us elsewhere, is very different from being there as believers waiting for a true encounter with God64—but in other cases (the prototypical ones), it is violently imposed over the perceiver, completely reorienting his or her emotional situation and proving wholly refractory to any relatively conscious attempt at a projective adaptation. Be it serene or tense, relaxed or oppressive, smoky or airy, formal or informal, etc., an atmosphere still possesses and exercises authority or authoritativeness. Because of this dissonance and this extraintentional externality—and since it displays itself as a felt-bodily involuntary involvement—an atmosphere may redirect the entire emotional situation of the percipient, unexpectedly yet with an evident supercognitive authority,65 so that his or her correlation with the world acquires a specific tone.

At this point, it is clear that we might even end up taking the sociological perspective into account, and explain the externality and authority of atmospheres by referring to “culturally determined emotional norms” (Demmerling, 2011, 48), embodied in the situation to the point of causing us to be subordinated to the feeling we get,66 possibly invoking the socially desirable trend to adjust our own feelings (form of perception) to the one we encounter (content of perception), especially if it is unexpected.67 But we need to resist these counterhypotheses, which also sound reductive with regards to persuasive (in a positive way) or obsessive (in a negative way) ideas: rather, it is necessary to restate that the social authority of a feeling displays a character that’s simply derivative and vicarious with respect to the “natural” authority of a prototypical atmosphere—namely, an atmosphere which is involuntarily perceived in the external space.

The authority of atmospheric feelings—more stable and performative than a social norm or a thought68 but less so than the evidence of a state of affairs69 due to its less homogeneous diffusion—can be traced back to a sort of prestige or “force” that constrains and enthrals70 almost in the manner of an automatism,71 even in the absence of physical coercion.72 It may take various forms and not just the three ones listed by Schmitz (legal, moral, and religious). It is a normativity that, of course, is not so much discreet but rather loosely diffused into a situation; and yet it is able to inhibit any critical distance in those who come across it, especially if unexpectedly,73 as they become involved in the script (or “story”)74 or sheet music it predisposes. The angst-inducing atmosphere produced, for example, by the ubiquity of breaking news predisposes those who are enmeshed by it to see enemies everywhere75 or at least to overestimate the dangers of the outside world. By not reducing communication to an anodyne and to some extent controllable exchange of information, atmospherology should then properly evaluate the overall performative, illocutionary, and perlocutionary effect not only of language,76 but in general of all forms of expression, even if merely mental.77

But to make an atmospheric feeling into a binding authority would perhaps imply the transformation of phenomenology into theology. In fact, is not precisely the “numinous”—described by Rudolf Otto (and before that by Shaftesbury), that is, an author explicitly preferred to Husserl—the model of Schmitz’s conception of atmospheres? In fact, the atmospheric feeling—at least the prototypical one, which is marked as involuntary, vital experience by ingression and discrepancy78—does not resemble only the (Schleiermacherian) feeling of “dependence,”79 but also the mysterium tremendum. The numinous is both disturbing (primus in orbe deos fecit timor!) and fascinating in its corporeal resonance (shudder, goose bumps, ecstasy, etc.); we cannot exhaustively identify its foundation, since empirical phenomena are not its cause but only its occasional stimulus, nor can we have a notional intelligence of it.80 Similarly, the atmosphere manifests its own authority or majesty, it often attracts and repels as if it were the sublime and, while not being something absolutely other, it generates in those who are gripped by it a creatural feeling, a “depreciation of the subject” (Otto, 1936, 11) and of their own profanity that leads them to an affective submission.81 But above all, as mysterium tremendum, majestas, augustum, energicum, fascinans, the numinous is demanding and sentimental without being either psychological in the subjectivist sense or a “you” that can be encountered—as happened in the subsequent realization of it in personal divinities (even differentiated by gender in historical religions). Similarly, atmosphere is contagious, in some respects bound to emotionally specific places82 and binding without being a projection of the perceiver.

Indeed, the similarities are many. Summarizing: just like the numinous, every atmosphere is (a) the more deeply felt, and in a way known, the less it is linguistically circumscribable;83 (b) generable but not rationally communicable; (c) engaging for the felt-body with consequences on the physical body (it is “hair-raising,” it makes your “limbs tremble,” it gives you “goose bumps,” etc.); (d) contagious, because “like stored-up electricity, [it] discharg[es] itself upon any one who comes too near” (ibid., 18); (e) attractive not in spite of the fact that it terrifies but because of it; (f) supervening with respect to sense data that are merely its occasio;84 (g) finally, especially active on emotionally predisposed minds, since “impression […] presupposes something capable of receiving impressions, and that is just what the mind is not, if in itself it is only a tabula rasa” (ibid., 164).85

And the fact that the holy is “an experience of determined atmospheres” (Soentgen, 1998, 90), perhaps second in intensity only to the erotic,86 seems to be confirmed by the proto-Christian notion of “holy spirit,” considered—prior to its dogmatization and crystallization in the form of the third person,87 and still today by minor communities (mystical, Quakers, Pietism, etc.)—as the epiphany of an external feeling88 that, according to St. Paul, contends for the lived human body against an opposite atmosphere (the flesh). It is a dynamistic and externalist model present in the archaic Greek world, for which feelings, and especially the religious ones, were notoriously not internal but external to the subject. Such model is applied here to the holy spirit-pneuma as neither individual person nor property interior to those who are gripped by it; but it also applies to the values (mens, pietas, virtus, fides) understood by the most ancient Roman culture not as inner virtues but as objective powers, as well as to any other conception of feeling as a demonic possession (from the Dionysian onwards). This model, which was overcome by the subsequent concretization of the divine—required by the dialogic character of human being—and by the “invention” of features such as omnipresence, perfection, and soteriological certainty (which make the divine into a more controllable and manageable partner), survives in modern Europe, according to Schmitz, only in the so-called voice of conscience, in the Kantian moral law as numen (true “fact of reason”).

The notion of atmosphere, at least the prototypical (Schmitzian) one, is therefore certainly indebted to that of the divine as numinous and genius loci, as precisely the local condensation of an atmosphere,89 but it is so only in the sense that it shares not so much its absolute necessity but rather its absolute accidentality and its undeductibility from other phenomena. The divine—the derivation of Yahweh from the Egyptian god-wind Amun and the climatic origin of many religious beliefs are probably true90—blows where and when it wants, impregnating a certain human space and appearing more as a transient predicative concept or appellative (“here is god” would only mean “divine event”) than as the name of a stable entity which is subject to predicates. In the same way, the atmospheric feeling is such because, being the epiphany of an impersonal external force, it pervades a certain space (lived, anisotropic, and yet predimensional)91 so intensely that it wins every critical resistance and ability of abstraction. The atmosphere is therefore “divine” in this context only as it is resistant to a critical distance that, however, is always possible: in contrast to what is implied by the traditional theological notion of authority, in the case of atmospheres, the felt-bodily and emotional involvement (effect) can indeed deny its cause (which is not a transmission of essence here), or at least, discussing it, mitigate its strength. The “divinity” of atmospheres also involves a merely local authority, often only temporary, related to a certain community or even to a single person, and it is so hard to plan92 that we could invite those who have not experienced numinous moments—and, although with some differences, atmospheric ones either—“to read no further” (ibid., 8).

Now that we have spoken of the peculiar “divinity” of atmospheres (in the strict sense of the numinous),93 it is necessary to specify better their authority. Being legitimate, even with socially relevant repercussions (marginalization in the first place), only prescinding from physical coercion, the authority of an atmosphere—whether it is a percept or the horizon within which we perceive something (in the intransitive sense in which “it is the tone that makes the music”)94—is such because it implicitly claims an absolute validity and thus inhibits, at least in principle, any real possibility of choice and reaction in the perceiver.

Unlike socio-political authority, however, atmospheric authority does not always presuppose its own acknowledgment, much less a self-aware one, appearing mostly in the form of light and shade and with a variable intensity. This explains why no one can force me to feel it from the outside: atmospheres, in fact, exist in the proper sense, except for their more or less successful planning, only in act, as actual facts and not factual facts95—that is, only when we sense their authority. They may exercise authority over the presence, in contrast to what the dead (cause) exerts on the living (its effect),96 only if they are involuntarily (mnestically) reactivated in the present97 (à la Proust), or, symbolically, in traces of the present (as in every millenarianism, even secular). If an atmosphere that here and now does not oppress anyone is certainly not oppressive, we could still sense the authority of atmospheres that do not capture us or that, as subatmospheres, lose in the interaction with other subatmospheres equally willing to occupy the entire space of the lived presence. Sometimes98 the outsider, rather than disturbing the socio-cultural milieu or disregarding its expectations, acts as if he or she “felt” the same atmosphere, thus contributing to its preservation and to the process of reflexivity needed in each construction of reality, yet without fully recognizing its authority.

Just as socio-political authority may not have spontaneously generated itself but might have simply been transmitted (as in the case of officials) from a more autonomous authority, so atmospheric authority is often not the one (to use Schmitz’s terminology) exerted by the anchor point, which is what is authentically responsible for the atmosphere, but the progressively weakened one of its condensation points: this is why oftentimes the atmosphere of anguish, properly “caused,” for example, only by the pain of a dental visit, is overcome by an atmosphere that is condensed into what is associated with it (even the magazines in the waiting room!) and whose authority, yet, is no less powerful.

Also, unlike political authority—which is more easily preserved “if the people who are supposed to be subject to it know what needs to be done in order to preserve it (and see, of course, that it is done effectively)” (Kojève, 2013, 93)—the authority of atmospheric feelings presupposes the non-total dissolution of the prereflective and shaded state it springs out of. Undermined by disenchantment99 and irony, by even small gaffes and wrong tones and even more so by suspicion (“the emperor has no clothes”), the atmospheric feeling does not always survive cognitive penetrability. And if an engaging feeling, for example the atmosphere of grief at the funeral of a loved one, is not scratched, as I have already mentioned, by the cognitive level (by the fact that we “know” that we all shall die), the atmospheric detection is instead affected—it is a totally different cognitive element—by the full understanding of its generative conditions, just as a fully explained persuasive technique ceases to be such.

Things are different in the case of an atmosphere that is not in contrast with a kind of knowledge but that was generated by it (this perspective, however, is very different from the unfortunately yet uninvestigated persuasive atmosphere of thought): knowing that an object in itself anonymous was owned by a prestigious person makes us see it ipso facto as an ecstatic object, capable of removing the homogeneity of the surrounding space thanks to its emotional and symbolic “volume,” able to arouse special attention and reverence due not so much to fully aware knowledge but rather to suggestions unintentionally borrowed from “cognitive archives” and “sentimental archives” that are anything but systematic.100 In short: we know that what grips us is an atmosphere, but it cannot be “reduced” to a concept. Nor is it necessary for such knowledge to be truthful, since the atmosphere, coproduced by its phenomenic appearance and by the thought of it (or by acting in it)101 according to the model of Kantian “free play,” can receive an effectual contribution also by non-knowledge (the charm of the indecipherable) and false knowledge.102 There is authority—it is right—only where there is a change in those who react.103 But in the case of atmospheres, it is not at all necessary to suppose a free and conscious agent, as often the (prelinguistic, prereflexive) condition of our actions, its base tonality (Damasio’s background emotions?)—unconsciously perceived and sometimes even misunderstood (it seemed as mere anxiety and instead it was love!)—turn out to be more powerfully atmospheric than the direct irradiation of this or that subject.104 It is essential only that the atmospheric precondition is sufficiently intense, or rather, deep.

But we need to rethink this depth beyond the verticality typical of Western topics (from Plato to psychoanalysis)105 and in the light of the neophenomenological externalization of the affective. This “depth” would then be a property not of the soul of the perceiver, but of what appears,106 and perhaps it would be explainable—referring to a tradition that goes from the eighteenth century to twentieth century Gestalt psychology—through its ability to generate mixed feelings. Mendelssohn, for example, explains the pleasure for the negative by saying that, when you put the object at a distance (here is the link with the sublime), every performance is satisfactory for the subject because it is an affirmative predicate of it and because it is intuitive knowledge of affirmative characters of the object. It follows that mixed feelings are not as immediately rewarding as those that are only delectable, but they are also not as monotonous and, in the long run, nauseating: in fact they are capable of “penetrating deeper into the mind and appear to sustain themselves there longer. […] The unpleasant mixed with the pleasant captures our attention, and prevents us from being prematurely sated” (Mendelssohn, 1997, 143). Consequently greater authority is held by an atmospheric feeling whose overall quality is not only gestaltically irreducible to its components, but also deep as it is “mixed.”107 Since the pleasure/pain distinction invests only the most peripheral states of existence,108 the most authoritative atmosphere might therefore not be the unilateral one but the “mixed” one, both because it is discrepant compared to the state of mind of the perceiver, and because it is able to induce the perceiver to complete its overall tonality even in the absence of further adumbrations. Whether atmospheric effectiveness is “naturally” inherent to a certain space or it was absorbed by it over time maybe as a result of a functional planning, it still presupposes an empathically predisposed and in a sense “sociologically” competent perceiver—that is, someone able to recognize in the atmospheric potential a generator of lifestyles and collective feelings: it is enough for us to exclude here that an atmosphere can be arbitrarily generated or declassified to a contingent and totally subjective emotion.

So much for the connection between atmosphere and authority (be it numinous or not). It often happens that the accusation of reification is associated with that of the excessive fixity of feelings. That is, atmospherology does not take into account the fact that feelings may develop as time passes by, deviating, acquiring different forms, and even completely reverting during one’s life. But the fact that feelings may emerge either in a quick or in a gradual way—much like an “unexpected infiltration” (Schmitz, 2002b, 73)—and that one may even be sure to be feeling something while ignoring its content (Musil), does not entail that feelings are ontologically undetermined. Only those who have already opted for the subjectivist view will get to this conclusion, thus underestimating the precision of the felt-bodily resonance that follows from atmospheric involvement. Sure enough, there are determined feelings as well as less definite ones, much like pure colors coexisting with soft ones. But the oscillation through which a person reacts to a certain feeling, particularly if this person is endowed with intelligence, cannot be immanent to the feeling itself, on pain of developing some “false phenomenology.”109

One should not underestimate the fact that the motor suggestions and synesthetic impressions through which atmospheres take hold of the percipient do cause the emergence of definite and resolute expressive forms within the percipient itself. This is precisely why nobody ever wonders how an individual can learn to jump for joy or to withdraw into oneself out of shame, while it is legitimate to be in doubt about the way to adequately express a feeling that’s perceived in others and not in first person. Attempting an “urbanization” of Schmitzean neophenomenology, I shall prefer a gradualist counterexplanation of this phenomenon over the predictable naturalist one, expressed in terms of cabled behavioral quasi-automatisms that are due to biologically encapsulated and evolutionistically sedimented “programs.” According to the former explanation, instead, the ontologization of the emotional sphere needs not downplay either the fluid status nascendi of the many emotional situations, or the dynamic processuality, which sometimes characterizes an atmospheric feeling.110

One thing is clear: the sociological explanation of the authority of atmospheric feelings explains much but not everything. It does not explain, for example, if not through fanciful anthropomorphic hypotheses, the authority of climatic and naturalistic atmospheres or the corporeal resonance of any atmosphere. This clearly shows that conventionality perhaps does not totally rule out the suddenly binding character of atmospheres (for a traditionalist, a convention also has an aura of authority!), but it does not do full justice to it, at least not in the prototypical ones (discrepancy).

Then the binding authority of an atmosphere, such as a meadow that we might call, not at all metaphorically, “happy,” does not come from a subjectivist-fictional inference (“it is as if the lawn were happy”), but rather from the effect of resonance of the percept (that meadow) in the perceiver, who feels this atmospheric authority in his Leib but (Schmitz reports this on many occasions) as not originating from it. This authority may take many forms, such as the pedagogical one, which, in hindsight, is necessarily based in all its choices (communicative forms, spaces, rituals, etc.) on pathic affordances addressed to the learner’s felt-body;111 but also that of vicarious shame (cf. infra ch. 5), whose atmosphere even conditions the detached observer and his physiognomic-gestural (contractive, in the broadest sense) conduct.

An example very dear to Schmitz of these atmospheric games is that of the cheerful person who, encountering a sad person (who is so for “serious” reasons), tends not to encourage her to recover her lost dignity, as if this person was merely tired, but—at least initially, and provided that he has adequate sensitivity—he tends to mitigate or completely conceal his own joy in order to respect the privacy of the other. This is because the atmospheric sadness radiated by people or things—very differently from a kind of exhaustion whose possible atmospheric character would still be spatially restricted112—has more authority than atmospheric joy,113 because, unless a malicious joy arises (schadenfreude), it “claims entirely and exclusively for itself the space of lived presence and, with the dominance of this authority, it represses to various degrees the atmosphere of joy, which is just as prone to the endless invasion of the lived presence” (Schmitz, 2009, 81). That is why the sad person normally feels more legitimated than the cheerful person to sink, sometimes even to the point of pathetic self-satisfaction, into the atmosphere that surrounds him and that he radiates; and he does not only feel an intense atmospheric contrast when he comes across a joyful atmosphere, whence the worsening of his sadness, but he also feels entitled to more or less explicitly protest against what he regards as the unjustified (unfair?) happiness of others.114

Thus, in their confrontational game, the atmospheric feelings inherently endowed with greater authority prevail. It may be the vanity of things perceived in a cold winter morning or in an anonymous non-place, which is able to inhibit, respectively, someone who confidently opens the window and someone starting with the best hopes. But it can also be, symbolically, the solemn gravity (the holy) that impresses one who enters a church for superficiality or animated by the worst intentions, or the accused convinced of being smarter than the court (the law) called upon to judge him. It may be the wrath that persecutes, sometimes to the point of paranoia, the one who feels a strong sense of guilt for their actions, or the mutual trust felt by those who “breathe” it as being irreducible to the logic of giving and trying to get something back. It may be, finally, the binding authority of the atmosphere of love: it is no coincidence that it justifies at least part of the crazy things one does “for love,” and it also arouses in those who do not reciprocate such feelings a certain respect for those who are caught by it.

Can Atmospheres Be Produced as Percepts and Entities?

It’s undeniable that, sometimes, perceptive non-transitivity (non-theticity) may be more suitable to explain the specificity of the atmospheric experience. But in this case, rather than perceiving something (even the atmosphere itself), we’d be perceiving “in accordance” with something (in accordance with an atmosphere). Thus atmospheres are not so much percepts, but rather non-transitive contextual conditions of a perception,115 which become transitive only at a later time.116 They are a sort of horizon which, while affecting anything they lingers onto, stay unobserved, much like “glasses, which cannot be seen when one looks through them” (Bockemühl, 2002, 221). They look very similar to “the spiritual atmosphere in which both the man and the world around him are immersed […], without ever converging onto a specific point. […] This breath, in fact, creates a unique spiritual atmosphere and incorporates inside of it, beyond concrete objects and beyond men, the whole that it itself describes” (Minkowski, 1936, 257; my emphasis). By reducing atmospheres to qualities that are purely contextual and situational, there’s the risk of underestimating the quasi-thingly power and significance through which they assault us, as we have seen. In other words, we may underestimate their authority and the felt-bodily involvement deriving from them: we might downplay their being aggressive and intrusive quasi-thingly partners. Schmitz vigorously—and, from his point of view, coherently—objects to the application of the atmospherologic discourse, say, in aesthetologic terms.117 Otherwise said, he keeps from claiming that atmospheric feelings can be produced artificially in the world of the so-called diffuse design and of the aestheticization of everyday life. This, in my opinion, is rather an unavoidable and fruitful position for both a pathic aesthetics aimed at bypassing “philo-artistic strabismus,” and for designers, urbanists, musicians, etc.

Let us dig a little bit more into the emblematic case of architecture.118 It is a well-known fact that presenting their projects, architects often speak of “atmospheres.” But do they actually feel this “obscure object of desire” (Kretzer, 2013, 117) or do they just imagine it? And can an atmospheric Erlebnis, with its vagueness, openness, and random pattern, be planned and brought into being through technical constructs, especially by means of a tool as distancing as the PC? Shouldn’t we instead uphold that an atmospheric effect is something unavailable,119 and even more so if atmospheres never exist, if not in a very inappropriate way, as purely potential (virtual) states? There are no recipes, of course, in planning atmospheres. Architectural drawings can do nothing else but concentrate “on a specific site [and] try to plumb its depths, its form, its history, and its sensuous qualities,” and try thus “to express as accurately as possible the aura of the building in its intended place” (Zumthor, 1998, 36, 13). The architect must simulate, thanks to a prognostic body-schema and role-play competence, the future body feeling of the beholder/user and identify him/herself with his situation and so perhaps with the desired future atmosphere. He or she must, last but not least, explicitly rely always on a “pact of generosity” (Sartre), on some form of complicity, also as a tacit felt-bodily knowledge, of the beholder/user. Design is certainly always the exploration of an alien domain,120 but the claim that atmosphere always “escapes analysis” seems to me greatly exaggerated. The same goes for the statement that “any specific proposal for constructing atmosphere […] is no longer atmospheric,” because “atmosphere may be the core of architecture but it is a core that cannot simply be addressed or controlled” (Wigley, 1998, 27). When it is only planned, the atmosphere of course does not yet exist in the real sense of the word, but this does not mean that architecture works hard to create only “the illusion that atmosphere can be controlled” (ibid.). The design of an atmosphere often works perfectly, and if an illusion exists, it works in every human activity as a heterogenesis of ends and can never be completely avoided. Many urban atmospheres are, for example, the unconscious result of planning, such as in the case of Manhattan, which offered its inhabitants “the spectacle, inscribed in stone, concrete and steel, of a way of life obeying a very different program, one answering a question quite different from that of ‘housing’” (Damish, 2001, 110).

It would be better not to exaggerate the strict actuality of atmospheres. First, they undoubtedly depend also on the coperception of past and expected atmospheres that are not in act, such as when, for example, the atmosphere of a hospital is tense precisely because we anticipate the situation to follow (the visit, the diagnosis, etc.), and we remember earlier ones (further waits, etc.). Second, the atmosphere in fact may certainly be also the successful outcome of a design on which we can counterfactually reason. In designing buildings architects should indeed contrive places that invite certain behaviors and so be aware of how to create affordances and how they are perceived.121 We can certainly imagine, for example, the architectural conditions under which the atmosphere of that hospital could be less tense. An atmosphere thus sometimes exists, obviously in an incomplete and only hypothetical way, also as a potential to invite a certain mood and activity. I do think that architects do not produce atmospheres but only suggest and evoke them in the beholder and that for this reason architects should simply design more neutral places that stimulate the hermeneutic and emotional creativity of the user.

It’s true, as we have seen, that atmospheres are sometimes more a transcendental unconscious, a background perceptive condition—what only allows “emotions to emerge, to be” (Zumthor, 1998, 27)—than a thetic object of transitive perception or the cause of a specific atmospheric experience. But this does not exclude that at other times the atmospheric encounter can to some extent be planned. Far from finding in people and things only generic and vague occasions to manifest themselves, atmospheres are sometimes exactly the expressive way in which things (in this case buildings) call for us or even look at us.122 Also the building itself looks at me and can make me, as Sartre likes to say, “no longer master of the situation.”

But Schmitz—I repeat—would not agree. For him, the media (e.g., the Hollywood imaginary), are able to generate only fake atmospheres—an axiology which is seriously troublesome within a rigorously descriptive-phenomenologic context—as they make use of a “technique of impression” (Schmitz, 2003, 256) that’s typically found in totalitarian regimes and in advertisement. There are many possible replies to this point. For a start, this objection downgrades the rhetorical coté, within the aesthetic tradition, to a generator of superficiality and precariousness, depriving it of its educational and cultural value. Such values are instead ascribed to the act of “inhabiting” as a culture (here taken to be non-manipulative, who knows why) of feelings within a self-contained space. Above all, however, there are no external parameters allowing us to distinguish authentic feelings from fake ones. In my view, it is not only possible to favor the emergence of atmospheres through situations that are skilfully set up artificially: atmospheres can also be genuinely generated.123 Nor can we exclude that, even though they can be produced intentionally and by means of sophisticated counterfactual strategies, atmospheres may assault the percipient subject with their authority, so that he or she will be kept in awe at both the emotional and the felt-bodily level just as it happens with non-intentional ones.

Intentionality: Is It Just a Myth?

There’s a common misconception, deeply rooted in a certain tradition that, just like the Cartesian one, finds it easier to explain the content of mental acts rather than their antepropositional felt-bodily dimension. Such a misconception is that of distinguishing each one emotion on the grounds of its different intentional content or “formal object”:124 in other words, the existence of emotions would be completely dependent on certain specific objects or states of affairs (i.e., on “values”125 considered as precognitive, perceptive, and pragmatic priorities).126 The urgent necessity of defining boundaries through intentionality, particularly problematic even in a third-person perspective, is crucially opposed by Heidegger’s analysis of the Stimmungen: indeed in this case they are forms of the situational correlation to the world, not understood in terms of specific events. They are forms in which, since feeling-the-world and feeling-oneself identify with each other, an objectual focus is not really given,127 to the point that even in Husserl’s view “a sad event […] is not merely seen in its thinglike content and context, in the respects which make it an event: it seems clothed and coloured with sadness” (Husserl 2001a, vol. 2, 110–111). Next to the auctoritates, however, there’s common experience: sometimes we feel threatened (or cheered up), despite the absence of an objectual reference to something that actively threatens us (or cheers us up). In this case, what counts is not so much the formal object of a certain feeling but rather the evaluational atmosphere on the background, in which some more sharply defined feelings may eventually emerge later.128

But the most original (and thereby problematic) reply comes directly from Schmitz himself. Not just because he makes a distinction between non-directional atmospheric feelings (pure excitement like joy or sadness, nostalgia, or the spring mood) and directional ones (either all-directional or centripetal/centrifugal), but especially because, on the grounds of Gestalt psychology,129 he reinterprets the apparent intentionality of feelings, as he shows that what appears to be the object is rather only the point “in which this feeling, as an atmospherically effused field, is centred […] thanks to a certain harmony of its proper stimulations” (Schmitz, 1969, 311). Therefore, within the atmosphere of, say, the “fear of the dentist,” it might be necessary to distinguish the sphere of the formal condensation (the dentist, his or her tools, the office, the personnel, the whole practice are all perceived by the patient as a sensible presence of his or her concern) and an anchoring point—the real generative location—which amounts to the pain itself that’s caused by the dentist’s practice. In the case of directional atmospheres, we might then have feelings which permeate a certain sphere of condensation without a true, identifiable, anchoring point, but whose intensity is proportional to the proximity to this unknown anchoring point. Is it not true that, as we get closer to an authority figure, we may perceive an atmosphere of subjection already caused by the very objects located in the waiting room? However, to deny that the ditched lover’s sadness is primarily caused not by the abandonment (anchoring point) but rather by the sad sensations provided by the environment (sphere of condensation) which remind him or her of the abandonment,130 amounts to shifting away from a rigorously phenomenological perspective to a third-person causal-genetic one.

Nevertheless, we cannot say that every problem is solved. If they are considered non-intentional, feelings seem to get closer to the Stimmungen, which are non-objectual and unmotivated. But does the occasional, or even vicarious, Gestalt-fashioned transitivity really give a satisfactory account of the emotional palette? Could it not be the case that an instinctive drive (hunger, thirst), as it disappears once it’s compensated, may become a certain diffused meaningfulness (an atmosphere) permeating the whole environment? Take the erotized worldview of young man who solely awaits for the realization of his own indeterminate, though slightly uncontrollable, impulse: is his not an atmosphere? Now, instead of rejecting intentionality tout court and reverting its direction—such that it’s the object’s intention that it’s directed toward the subject!131—I hold it more advisable to consider intentionality in a smoother, less objectual sense: we should understand it as an extended condition,132 “operative” rather than “acting” (Merleau-Ponty), in a revealing sense which pertains to the passive syntheses,133 or for which the direction is replaced by the “taking part.”134 Despite Schmitz’s rough elimination of intentionality, his theory has its own merits: as he awakes us from the dogmatic sleep of the phenomenology of interiority and intentionality, he brings about the recurring difference between the cause of a feeling and its content,135 sometimes erroneous or vague; also, he generally highlights the massive and spatialized nature of an (atmospheric) feeling whose “rationalization” is but an ex post “centering” (be it adequate or not). Therefore, the very location of the atmospheric is this emotional “no-man’s-land”: that is, when the Stimmung is no longer completely undetermined, as it has found its own sphere of condensation within “ecstaticizing” events or things, though it’s not yet centered precisely on that anchoring point (curtly conceived as an intentional pole)

I certainly share nothing with the objection that it is impossible to access (or to speak about) the pre-reflexive, for two reasons.136 First and foremost, against the gnoseological mimetic-descriptive137 model I set the explicative one: namely, what is to be known must not be conceived as something stable which eventually needs to be given a certain meaning, but rather as a fact that’s singled out in different situations with a diffused significance. Secondly, the scope of the neophenomenological approach is certainly not limited to the naïve life experience—in such a case “it might be better to dismiss phenomenology and simply exclaim “oh!” (Schmitz, 2003, 408)—but it researches what undoubtedly appears to be a fact that resists every phenomenological variation, adapting to it in a flexible way, without any extralinguistic illusion whatsoever.

But if, on the one hand, the very possibility of conceiving and giving a name to atmospheric feelings makes them quasi-thingly, as if they were “sentimental scores” (Frese, 1995), could it be the case that this possibility may distance them to the point of objectualizing them and dissolving their quasi-thinghood?138 The hidden premise underlying this objection is the unjustifiable idea that the atmospheric vagueness be de dicto, and not de re.139 Rather, it is certainly true that the peculiar atmosphericness of, say, the fog or of the sunset twilight cannot disappear because of conceptual, epistemic, or naturalistic clarification of such climatic events.

Noticing and Feeling: Subject-Dependence?

As outlined above, what seems to refute projectivist reductionism is the dissonance that’s experienced between the felt atmosphere and the percipient’s conscious mood. It appears useless to add (perhaps indulging in associationism) that the percipient need be at least predisposed to it, or that such atmosphere doesn’t come anew to him or her: for what remains unanswered is the question on the “first time”140 that feeling was perceived (for example, “how is it that a blooming lawn suggests an atmosphere of joy?”). But the dissonance surely does not always translate into a real rapture: the distinction between the feeling as such and the correlated emotional and felt-bodily involvement of the perceiver provides an explanation of the common possibility that a certain atmosphere may be perceived even though it’s not directly felt141—that is, the possibility of noticing it within the “traces” that are immanent to a certain space, whilst the subject is in a relatively different mood. But this of course is true of atmospheric feelings, not of elementary felt-bodily impulses.

Bravery would not exist without brave people, while melancholy may well exist despite the absence of a melancholic person; for instance, this is true when a certain autumnal landscape is soaked in such a feeling, which is eventually noticed by some casually happy wanderer; or again, when someone is visiting a museum in a particular and non-melancholic mood of aesthetic delight, and yet he or she is able to perceive the melancholic atmosphere that spills out of a certain landscape canvas. (Schmitz, 1969, 148)

Even though this is not only true for “other people’s feelings, literary descriptions, theoretical discussions, at the theatre or at the cinema” (Demmerling, 2011, 50), aesthetic experience (in a generic sense) is properly grounded in this kind of relatively unemotional perception. The atmosphere that’s triggered by certain words written on the page of a novel or by certain film sequences does not necessarily entail an actual rapture: indeed, completely different feelings may well be triggered by the following lines or sequences and/or the reader/the spectator may be more receptive towards the latter.142

What should we reply to those who think that, unlike trees, streets, or mountains, no atmospheres would exist in a world devoid of perceiving subjects, so that feelings exist if and only if somebody “has” them, as intrinsically relational phenomena? First of all, granted the (covertly idealistic) premises of the objection, we shall reply that, in a world without perceiving subjects, even trees would exist solely by the virtue of some third-person, abstract, epistemic discourse, which is something that neophenomenology does not really address. Besides, at the level of philosophical anthropology, mountains too exist as alterations of the ground that are relevant to the human “size” only in virtue of a species-specific ontological segmentation (as we have seen). Moreover, in Schmitzean terms, they may exist as single objects only if the percipient is able to make use of the “explicativity of the propositional discourse” (Schmitz, 2005a, 285) within its readily developed (non-primitive) presence. Finally, with a touch of irony, a further reply might be that the question is phenomenologically undecidable, as a full subject-independence “does not even count for country roads. Who can tell whether they still exist when everybody’s asleep?” (Ibid.).143

On the contrary, surely there are many different ways to try to demonstrate the full subject-dependence of atmospheres. One way to do it is to reduce the undoubtable experience of our being passive towards them—drawing from a quasi-Fichtean projectivist theory—to a sort of feedback coming from a previous and unconscious projection (emotional, in this case). Or, more humbly, we could limit ourselves to noticing the posthumous effect of an atmosphere whose intersubjective origin got erased. Specifically to avoid both reification and projectivist subjectivism, Böhme reasonably associates the atmosphere to the copresence of both the subject and the object, whose boundaries are anyway not so sharply defined at this level: the former takes it to be an existent entity only when it is felt, when it is actual.144

What should we conclude on the basis of all this? I’ll just reaffirm that, even though they are experienced by the subject, just as they supervene to physical-material entities without being reduced to them, so atmospheric feelings are neither something that’s only subjective, nor the mere justification of a subjective projection (in short, the threatening character of the sky is as little subjective as its color). Rather, atmospheric feelings are an essential part of a “universal grammar of expressivity,”145 whose value is even adaptive-evolutionistic. Indeed, the phenomenon of expressivity “is directly grounded in the constellation of observable events which identify its position in space, so that it depends on them and is located where they are located” (Bozzi, 1998, 115). This is also proven by the trivial and undervalued fact that, were those events absent from the perceptive arrangement, the atmosphere previously felt vanishes as well (sometimes even completely). Through their externality and (at least relative) subject-independence, atmospheres display a certain analogy (disquieting to some, reassuring to others) with the logical-mathematical entities of Frege’s “third realm,”146 which is irreducible to subjective representations. Instead of looking up, however, our atmospherology prefers to look down and start from the common experience for which two people may sometimes share not only the same thought, but also the same (atmospheric) feeling—by the virtue of the same felt-bodily resonance, ongoing here and now, of a certain perceptive-environmental arrangement.147

Overestimating its subject-dependence, one could raise the objection that the atmospheric perception of a feeling may simply be a mistake. Those professions which require a certain degree of competence as regards the atmosphere may well confirm how easy it can be to be mistaken in this context, clumsily generating an unwanted atmosphere: for instance, some advertisement may become hilarious rather than authoritative, or one could set up an open-space environment in order to ease social relationships and unexpectedly end up creating a stressful place with complete lack of privacy. However, the actual possibility of perceiving an atmosphere in the wrong way is a completely different question. First of all, under what conditions are we mistaken: as soon as we get contaminated by it? And, what if this were the right way to “feel” it? Can we say that we’re mistaken when we resist it? What if such resistance actually proved that we did (ingressively) perceive it correctly? Are we mistaken when we express it in a subjective way? Or isn’t the subjective resonance the best proof of its involving effectiveness? Are we mistaken when we notice it without feeling it? Or when we don’t even perceive it? We moved into a real maze. And it is not helpful to make a distinction between real and apparent atmospheres: both because the only (properly) existing atmosphere is the actual one, and because our ability to hold it deceptive relies on an external criterion that is not available (e.g., the intention of the individual who produced it, or a pathic view-from-nowhere of the surrounding environment). Also, the normative introduction of a socially and culturally ideal-typical atmosphere—which would thus be the only legitimate one—would bring about far more difficulties than it can solve, as it “reduces” nature to culture.

More Ethics, Fewer Atmospheres?

Whether the authority of an atmosphere is, to use Weber’s categories, legal (I feel I must respect the atmosphere of the courtroom), traditional (I overpay an ancient book for the aura that surrounds it), or charismatic (I am unilaterally corporeally influenced by an environment or a person), it is often called “irrational” just because we ignore the general mechanisms of felt-bodily communication148—namely, the way in which an atmospheric feeling, suggesting a rule (broadly understood) to be respected, fascinates the perceiver, keeps him in check, ravishes him (an intoxicating fragrance, a spark that catches the eye, soft skin that causes us to stroke it). In this case, the greatest charismatic suggestion would be featured by an atmosphere that blends disembodiment and unilateral embodiment, thus taking away from the passivated partner her personal distress and transferring to her the distress of the dominant partner instead, reaching an almost narcotic effect.149 Such dispossession causes the recipient to “sink” into the percept and “fixate herself” on the issue imposed on her, and perhaps makes atmospheric authority150 similar to the (Hegelian) authority of the lord over the bondsman.

While doubting that “knowing what [atmospheric] authority is, the way Man and men must be acted on can be deduced so as either to engender or to maintain an Authority” (Kojève, 2013, 5), we begin by distinguishing absolute authority, which cannot be resisted, and relative authority, whose centripetal direction one can resist by appealing to a higher level of personal emancipation. For example, one can feel wrapped up in shame on a level, but at the same time transcend this atmosphere on a higher level, for instance by regarding that shame as the result of mere convention; likewise one may feel gripped by a defeatist atmosphere but still manage to transcend it because of a recent personal success.151 But absolute and relative are in turn (historically and culturally) relative, depending on the given felt-bodily and biographical situation—in a word, on the level of personal emancipation of the subject involved152—so that, even while being very close, two people might perceive different atmospheres (for example, they might or might not feel ashamed), but this does not necessarily entail the unreality of such atmospheres: they would be no less real than a toothache had by only one of the two, or than the same language spoken in a relatively different way by the two.

But the very admission that it is possible, if not to totally abstract oneself from involving situations (as evidenced by Hegel),153 at least to achieve a certain distancing from an atmosphere which, for that very reason, perhaps does not even “become” a real feeling,154 suggests that we should say something about the ethical consequences of this atmospherologic approach. And not just because, since the (religious, ethical, aesthetic, ontological, legal) authority is a claim that, after careful checking, we feel we cannot lightheartedly avoid without feeling guilty, we must recognize that the legal norm is really a norm155 only if it rests on the authority of legal feelings. We are referring to the specific pathos of wrath156 and shame (depending on whether, outraged by the injustice, one feels in the right or in the wrong): two feelings whose legalization, which aims to prevent unregulated consequences (retaliation and suicide), forms the so-called legal sensitivity.157 These feelings are as such the emotional and corporeal foundation of the whole social life (especially of the idea of duty)—a foundation underestimated only because it is previously controlled by an ethical constellation of prefeelings.158

The ethical-political problem is also caused not only by the social but also climatic (environmental issue) and medial (manipulation) ubiquity of the atmospheric phenomenon,159 and then by the interference between “natural” or background atmospheres and the intentionally generated ones, between subatmospheres of different content and qualities, and so on. And, last but not least, by the fact that if “people never shape their conduct upon the teaching of pure reason” (Le Bon, 2009, 15) but through impressions, vague reminiscences, easily translatable ideas—in short, through seductive images that public personae and active subjects try to control, wherever possible, in order to “cultivate the sensorium which is the basis of all unity and all consensus” (Carnevali, 2012, 88)—much in politics depends precisely on the “climate”160 that one is able to arouse.

But then is the risk not that of irresponsibly indulging in the atmosphere? Of becoming a mere appendage to it, as some fear about the Internet and the navigable space that it “contains”?161 Obviously what has been said so far on atmospheric authority takes a relatively different shape depending on whether atmospheres, as we have already mentioned, are understood as objective demonic powers—external to us, unintended, with respect to which the subjective component is reduced to the more or less critical reaction of the perceiver (prototypical atmospheres)—or as an external and objective effect but of a relationship, implicit as may be, between subject and object (derived atmospheres), or again as idiosyncratic moods, subjective and projective (spurious atmospheres).

At the heart of the matter, we find the polite but firm dispute between Hermann Schmitz and Gernot Böhme:162 does the increasingly pervasive and seductive “aesthetic work” (cosmetics, furniture, urban planning, lighting, fashion, set design, etc.) directly generate an atmosphere—or at least the phenomenic conditions of possibility163 of a physiognomic-expressive aestheticness that applies to atmospheres as well as things—or does it merely exercise a “technique of impression” (object of investigation of an unspecified “technology of impression”) (Schmitz, 1998, 181–182), which is very different from the ordinary climatic, seasonal, collective, housing feelings, etc., (i.e., situations or quasi-things) that by their chaotic multiplicity cannot be generated by single events and things?

Now, while suggesting that there may be non-atmospheric situations164 and belying the deadly illusion of being able to generate any feeling, Schmitz’s choice to circumscribe the atmospheric phenomenon also generates some doubts as to whether something that, as required by the model of the numinous, basically depends on the observer’s mere moving can really claim absolute authority. What’s more, in the light of the antidualistic and antiinformationist model of a felt-bodily communication that acts as an unanalyzable impressing situation often even without anchor points, it entails that it is impossible to explain manipulation (traditionally) in terms of moral responsibility (of what manipulates) and guilty loss of self-determination (of the manipulated).165

The clear demarcation between transcendent-abyssal atmospheres and tricky situations as “suggestive” condensations (Plakatsituationen) perhaps dangerously “centered” in some charismatic individual166—Hitlerian state holidays, the extreme version of those during the French Revolution, advertising and contemporary aesthetic work (now devoid of any social normativity)167—certainly has the merit of warning one against the instrumental and rhetoric administration of one’s affections. Yet, such demarcation is and will remain problematic as such. Both because in history, unfortunately, charismatic propaganda in totalitarian regimes can be exchanged for absolute (and, in this sense, divine) authority, and because no one is ever involved in an atmosphere that one knows to be manipulated (such acknowledgment is made only ex post and often only in the third person).168 And also both because overcoming the dualism of subject/object involves the collaboration (not far-fetched, but radically excluded by Schmitz) of the manipulated person in the genesis of the atmosphere, and because the Schmitzian primacy of presence seems to underestimate the (sometimes not timely but delayed) nature of the atmospheric experience, perhaps even conceivable as a “compromise solution” with respect to the traumatic effect of the initial discrepancy.

Finally, it is needless to remember that the manipulative (in a non-judgmental sense: persuasive) appearance is obviously implicit in every practice that generates an atmosphere, much as the illusory appearance (which is such, besides, only in relation to a different and incommensurable level of “reality”) and the parasitic exploitation by the condensation points (charismatic character or suggestive situation) of atmospheric feelings that are more authentic and widely disseminated.

And yet it is only by acquiring a better atmospheric “competence,” not reducible solely to the affectus non nisi parendo vincitur, that we can really learn how not to be grossly manipulated. How to reserve for us, where this is not given by the authority itself (in its best examples), a space for critical reflection of our own—even more so when, as in today’s globalized world, we must be disenchanted about more and more dangerously anonymous authorities (from the “stock market” to GDP to credit SPREAD, etc.).

But if this competence—the duly secularized “ability to distinguish between spirits” (1 Cor 12:10), as it were—mitigates the objection that in such determinism169 a person would be “a blind passenger of atmospheres” (Soentgen, 1998, 117), still it does not entail easy illusions about full emotional transparency or about the availability of an Archimedean point less fallible than personal critical sense.170 As in contemporary culture, there is no privileged place for awareness and maybe we will have to settle for the interaction of the most diverse experiences (spatial, medial, functional, etc.), without claiming a critical position superior and/or external to them,171 but promoting on an emotional level a kind of “separation of (atmospheric) powers” that is healthy for mental life. For example, by relearning from the most artificial atmospheres—for example, from the cold and procedural ones of democracy172—what the peculiarities of the most natural ones are, and vice versa.

Just as the experience of trompe-l’oeil and “immersive” spaces relies on the fact that an immersive phase will be followed by a partly emotional and partly reflective phase of emersion, so an atmosphere is poorly manipulative when it stimulates this sequence, when the “I” that it calls upon is neither a wholly non-reflective subject—and maybe tasteless enough to appreciate only the atmospheric character of clichés (such as a blue and clear sky)—nor a subject placed at an excessive contemplative distance173—provided, of course, that such coexistence of affective and corporeal involvement and relatively self-reflective detachment can be demonstrated.

As already mentioned, the authority of atmospheres exists in the proper sense only when it overcomes all the critical scruples that the perceiver may mobilize, when it prevails over his resistance and she cannot access a further critical level. That is, when reflection does not weaken the suggestion of the numinous, of the voice of moral conscience (secularized residue of the divine) or of the appeal to do what we feel is right: this is perhaps the atmospheric-binding sense, that can be hardly overestimated in a hopefully shocking philosophical revaluation of suffering, paraphrasing Luther’s famous statement “Here I stand. I cannot feel otherwise.”

Nevertheless, it is a short step from the problem of the (possible) atmospheric manipulation to the ethical one. Surely, passiveness is neither really a problem nor a taboo for a neophenomenology whose core is emotional rapture: indeed, this approach does not give way either to an ascetic-rationalistic control of external feelings or to arbitrary projective transformations of them, but rather it allows for a relative distance from them. As the abandonment to the unexpected and to the atmospheric force field is considered in a positive way, I wonder whether this might weaken too much the sovereignty (better said, the autonomy)174 of the subject: the risk, in this case, would be that of putting forward a perspective that would be just as deresponsibilizing as the perspective it was meant to overcome is moralistic. And wouldn’t a subject—whose only options are to expose itself, resist, or give in to the burst of the “new”175—be restricted to an exclusively contemplative attitude or, which is worse, be at the mercy of relentless demonic and destinal forces?176 Wouldn’t it dissolve in “a purely ‘systemic’ and ‘situational’ ontology” (Fuchs, cited in Schmitz, 2005a, 271), where there’s room only for challenge and response,177 and for a pathic obedience, which swallows creativity as it shrinks to mere unexpected reaction to some given circumstances?

Sure enough, there is such a risk, which also includes that of indulging in some kitsch aesthetics that’s not grounded in “the activation of our judgment, but rather in the captivation of our heart” (Forssmann, 1975, 9).178 Such a risk should not be exaggerated, though. Particularly in the most radical Schmitzean form—granted it’s not self-contradictory as it sometimes denies the role of abandonment though generally using it and wishing for it179—atmosphereology surely aims at proving the unavoidable authority of external feelings180 and the impossibility to produce them intentionally (therefore I am rather sceptical about the idea that atmospherology is a form of justificationism of totalitarian rhetoric). But it is also true that this approach defends the view that there are absolutely—not just positionally—subjective facts181 (“I am sad”), to be distinguished from the ones referred to in the third-person (“Griffero is sad”), and even from objective ones (“Miami is located south of New York”). Although atmospherology may bring about some risks, I hold it to be less dangerous than the current leading illusion that the emotional sphere may be universally controlled and manipulated (even just in chemical-genetic terms). As a matter of fact, the typical outcome of the latter approach is astonishment for the fact that a person, despite his or her proud autonomy, has not been capable of simply saying “no.”

We could now proceed with the normalization of the atmospherologic approach by means of distinctions and semantic-lexical clarifications, as it refuses every generalization182 while being open to cultural and socio-interactional explanations of the emotional life, in terms of the necessary complementarity of the gnosic and pathic levels. But if we “urbanized” too much the counter-intuitive objectivity that’s neophenomenologically attributed to the emotional—which is the basis of the repudiation of the common illusion that we can control and manipulate feelings (for example by finding out something more about the situation)—we would end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

But in this case the “baby” appears to be heuristically productive, particularly because it’s radically counterintuitive and (by now) unrelated to our (psychologistic) common sense. In fact, as the atmospheres become the prototype of all quasi-things (although we shall hereby limit ourselves only to some of them: lived-body, pain, shame, gaze, light), the chosen approach justifies and fosters a desirable ontological inflationism. With the exception of totally unconscious emotions (for Elster, protoemotions)—which are devoid of a specific qualitative experience, so that they need not be taken into account—it is now time to dismiss Ockham’s razor without regrets, as we face the qualitative-expressive richness of the life-world. No matter if they are emotionally relevant physiognomical lines or intermodal affordances, ecstatic irradiations of the objects, or real intersubjective atmospheres (Stimmungen):183 what is certain is that our world—irreducible to abstract categories like those of space, time or causality—is above all and first of all pathically attuned.184 The qualitative eidetic which is immanent to this world is able to produce a variegated (and atmospheric) felt-bodily resonance, whose peculiarity is that the “feeling” in this case always amounts to the “feeling oneself.” And it is so to the point that, much like a script,185 following its “scripted space” and “immersive” urgency,186 the atmosphere somehow shows us how to behave, how to act, and also how to think.

This atmospherological approach—which is an example of a direct realism devoid of exaggerations (the original sin of a large part of pret-a-porter philosophy) and presumptions of all-comprehensiveness—strongly reasserts a qualitative supervenience, foreign to any reductionist escamotage, and supports the idea that an adult is not a person who removes the passivizing-negative sphere, but rather an individual who doesn’t neurotically prescind from it. Its focus is not thinghood as such, but rather quasi-thinghood with a particular stress, in this chapter, on the prototypical atmospheric feelings. Indeed, their influence appears as more than analogical with that of Baudelaire’s loved one, which “permeates my life / Like air impregnated with salt” (W. Aggerer, translator).