Fortunately, there first exists (apart from the light waves and nerve currents) the coloring and shine of things themselves, the green of the leaf and the yellow of the grain field, the black of the crow and the gray of the sky (Heidegger, 1967, 210).
My journey from an aesthetics of atmospheres1 to an ontology of quasi-things has its frame of reference in the ambitious project of a “pathic aesthetics.” By “pathic” I do not mean pathetic or pathological, but rather the affective involvement that the perceiver feels unable to critically react to or mitigate the intrusiveness of. This very involvement is, for me, the core of the aesthetic sphere (in the etymological sense of aisthesis)—much more so than art and beauty. Philosophically rehabilitating pathicity means valorizing the ability to let oneself go—a skill so rare today that it appears surprisingly (and critically) very relevant nowadays; one could sum it up as the ability to be a means of what happens to us rather than subjects of what we do. This skill was obviously misunderstood by the rationalistic post-Enlightenment dogma of subjective sovereignty and finalistic action; and yet it is the main heuristic instrument of a pathic aesthetics. The practicability of the latter, though, entirely depends on our ability to welcome what “happens to us,” whether we like it or not, resisting the temptation both to transform the “given” into something “done” and to seek shelter from this contingency in (now compromised) late-Romantic nostalgias.
Only if we philosophically valorize what happens (to us) can pathic aesthetics—now emancipated from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century view of art as a continuation of religion and/or politics “with different means”—truly adopt Baumgarten’s idea (1750) that aesthetics is “also” a theory of sensible knowledge. Elsewhere I have defined it as a “thought of the senses”2—where the genitive is both subjective and objective—conceiving it as a non-gnostic but, indeed, pathic phenomenology (Straus). For this very reason, it is finally free from what is only one of the many possible conceptions of aesthetics—that of philosophy or even metaphysics of art. In fact, classic aesthetics is (a) idealistic in focusing on the work and its supposed autonomy, (b) metaphysical in considering art and beauty sub specie aeternitatis, (c) bourgeois in its full adherence to the process of civilization (through abstraction) of the European elite, (d) intellectual in focusing on judgment or interpretation rather than “experience” and in misunderstanding the role of felt-bodily sensitivity in the name of the (Kantian) alibi of “disinterested pleasure.” In short, classic aesthetics is governed by the same estrangement from and of nature that we find in the hard sciences and in the Enlightenment apology of the (alleged) autonomy of the subject.
However, as soon as one abandons this aesthetics “from above” and traces artworks back to (at most) exemplary cases of sensible perception, one sees that it is possible to avoid the frustrations caused both by transcendentalism—which is always bound to the analysis of the conditions of possibility—and by interpretationism (hermeneutics and semiotics), which is always bound to a necessarily deferred sense with respect to the “presence.” My pathic aesthetics, instead, intends to remain, against this twofold “bad infinity,” as faithful as possible to the presence—to the way in which “appearances” resound in our lived-body. My itinerary mainly consists in prescinding from special “things” such as artworks and from the traditional categories of aesthetics (beautiful, sublime, genius, etc.) so as to rather investigate atmospheric feelings3 in the context of today’s aestheticization of the lifeworld and the so-called diffuse design, typical of late capitalist societies. The analysis of situations and atmospheric perceptions, constituting the first step of this wished-for pathic aesthetics, introduces us to the entities that, without being full objects, are present and active on us.
Therefore, I am interested in our ordinary (naïve) sensible experiences, especially when they are involuntary.4 From the perspective of aesthetics of reception (so to speak), I am serious about the criterion of affectivity—of how “one feels” when experiencing the copresence of oneself (me) and a thing (or quasi-thing). From the perspective of aesthetics of production (so to speak), I wish to underline the competence of the “aesthetic work” that, objectifying or (à la Baumgarten) perfecting sensible knowledge, has specialized indeed in the generation (or at least, evocation) of atmospheres. However, what changes here is the very meaning of experience. A pathic aesthetics, in fact, does not presuppose an interpretative and constructivist approach—that is, the idea that the world is given only through some reflective “access”—but rather supposes that there is a sense (in both meanings of the word) that is always already sedimented outside of us and can be verified through our felt-bodily and prereflexive communication with the world. Much of this comes from the impressions radiated by spaces, possibly inhabited by things, and, as we see in this book, also by quasi-things—in any case, by entities that fully coincide with their felt-bodily appearance “in act” (active and effective—indeed, wirklich) and with their generating the affective situation (Befindlichkeit) in which we find ourselves.5
The expressive qualities that, radiating atmospheres, become quasi-things are both particular natural phenomena (twilight, luminosity, darkness, the seasons, the wind, the weather, the hours of the day, the fog, etc.) and relatively artificial phenomena (townscape, music, soundscape, the numinous, dwelling, charisma, the gaze, shame, etc.). These qualities are salient not despite being apparent and ephemeral, but precisely because of that. And yet, for that very reason, Western thought (and sometimes common sense) considers them devoid of reality as opposed to full things, which are endowed with borders, separated from others, perduring in time, and are normally inactive if not touched. The present pathic and atmospherological aesthetics, which is (broadly) realist in rejecting the lazy explanatory hypothesis of associationist and projectivist type, emphasizes instead the cooperative relationship between perception and the more nuanced dimension of quasi-things, which, just like the ecstasy of things, emotionally tune their surroundings.6 I want to offer an initial aesthetological and philosophical analysis of this pathic area, intermediate (“in between” indeed) but predualistic.
The core of this “in between,” however, is always the felt- or lived-body (Leib) (ch. 2)—that is, the non-physiological or anatomic dimension that always also presents itself as a task, as something we are daily responsible for—even more so when, like today, it is subject to (and threatened by) countless modifications and technological prostheses. Both the theories of atmospheres and that of quasi-things thus presuppose an adequate investigation of human felt-bodily living. They also seek to rehabilitate the specifically aesthetological paradigm of certainty, thought of as experientia vaga without rules, irreducible to an etiologic and genetic approach. However vague, because it underscores our affective hetero-determination, this experiential and sensible certainty attests our being-in-the-world better than other, traditionally privileged, states (including the cogito).
In short: we must learn to “experience pathically” (in the right way), no longer regarding teleological efficiency as a phenomenologically privileged path. We must pay attention not to our role as subjects—which has been pathologically overestimated by modernity with well-known negative consequences—but to the pathic “to me” (or the perceptological “me”) that precedes egological solidification, which as such is fatally destined to the dualism typical of cognitivism. Having this program in mind,7 I wish to try to conceive of human beings not as “subjects of” but rather as “subject to”—not independent and autonomous as modernity would it, but sovereign and adult just because they were educated to expose themselves (in the right way).8 Moreover, it is known that what happens to us hetero-determines us much more violently when we fight it than when we abandon ourselves to it (cum grano salis). So this is a chance to see affective involvement as potentially leading to emancipation rather than—as our paranoid culture claims—occult and alienating mediation.
Nevertheless, if the journey I propose starts from the general project of a pathic aesthetics, the first destination is that of atmospheres. In fact, it is the atmospherological paradigm9 that guides the analysis of quasi-things. But what is an atmosphere? First of all, it is an example of the passive synthesis, largely intersubjective and holistic, that precedes analysis and influences from the outset the emotional situation of the perceiver, resisting any conscious attempt at projective adaptation. As an influential “presence”—inextricably linked to felt-bodily processes and characterized by a qualitative microgranularity that is inaccessible to a naturalistic-epistemic perspective—an atmosphere is, in short, more a “spatial” state of the world than a very private psychic state.
This, however, presupposes the overturning of an introjectionist metaphysics, largely dominant in our culture. In fact, the present book follows the aggressive “campaign,” started several decades ago by Hermann Schmitz, of depsychologization of the emotional sphere and of externalization of feelings, therefore understood as constraints that, like climate conditions, modulate the lived and predimensional space whose presence we feel—and, as a consequence, also our mood. As pervasive impressions that precede the subject/object distinction, their “authority” resonates in our felt-body. However counterintuitive—we are after all attempting to think of the emotional sphere as it was conceived before psychicization; that is, before the demonic extrapersonal (thymos) was relegated to a fictional private psychic sphere (psyché)—this aesthetic-phenomenological conception of the atmospheric feeling aims at correcting the dominant dualism and questioning a purely projective explanation of external feelings. However, following Schmitz, I do not aspire to an impossible regression to a preintrojectionist way of life, but simply to a healthy rebalancing of the predominant psychic ontology.
Of course, similar to quasi-things (as I show), atmospheres, too, cannot but irritate traditional ontology because of their unavoidable vagueness. Then it might be convenient to begin by precisely defining what kind of perception the atmospheric and quasi-thingly one is. First of all, perception means having an experience and not the distancing-constative process that specialized psychology limits itself to—and, least of all, it means having the mere passive-reflective registration of a portion of the visual field by an immobile eye. This perception then does not concern cohesive, solid, continuous objects that are mobile only through contact, nor discrete forms and movements, but rather chaotic-multiple situations and quasi-things endowed with their own internal (and only partly cognitively penetrable) significance, whose petulant focalization would even represent a pathology. In other words: in this perception, the phenomenological “that” and “how” reveal themselves to be irreducible to the cognitive “what.” Perceiving atmospherically is not grasping (presumed) elementary sense-data and, only afterwards or per accidens, qualitative states of things; but it is instead being involved by things or, even better, quasi-things and situations.
Perceiving atmospheres mostly means being touched by them in the felt-body. It does not mean only that this kind of perception is direct and deambulatory, kinaesthetic and affectively involving, synaesthetic or at least polymodal, but most of all it means that one renders oneself present to something through the felt-body. Unlike the physical body, a legitimate object of natural sciences, the felt-body is indeed devoid of surfaces and occupies an “absolute” and nongeometrical space; it is capable of self-auscultation without organic mediations; it is manifest in the affective sphere and articulated, according to Schmitz, not into discrete parts but into “felt-bodily isles” (cf. ch. 3) that “communicate” with each other and with the world. It is indeed this felt-bodily communication with all the perceived that, as we see, explains the perception of quasi-things through the extrareflective-situational intelligence of external motor suggestions and synaesthetic characters.
Although atmospheres are opaque to the so-called expert knowledge, they produce a real segmentation of reality. In fact, while uniting and allowing for a productive tuning, they also divide at the same time. As invariants thus obtained from a flux, still classifiable into a familiar and sufficiently systematic repertoire of affective-emotional kind, they must certainly be registered in the ontological repertoire originated by our ordinary, intuitive, and pragmatically efficacious segmentation of reality. Most of all, atmospheres take us out of our inner closed-off sphere. Sartre rightly sets the philosophy of transcendence implicit in Husserl’s intentionality against the “alimentary” philosophy of immanence that claims to assimilate everything to consciousness. It would be a matter of taking “everything out” (even ourselves!) and thus freeing ourselves from “interior life,” bringing terror and magic back into things. Yet my atmospherological approach is influenced neither by Sartre nor only by classical phenomenology, but rather by the heterodox science of the phenomenon sketched by Ludwig Klages—namely, a science of “elementary souls” appearing phenomenically as originary real images—and above all by the neophenomenological redefinition of philosophy in the terms of a self-reflection of people regarding the way in which they orientate within their environment. It therefore claims the right to express, indeed, “how one feels”—namely, to examine experience so as to discern its atmospheric charge in the light of an aesthesiologic and quasi-thingly sensibility.
This approach must also rehabilitate the so-called first impression—that is to say, the involuntary life experiences that function as a global response and show our affective felt-bodily involvement. When, for example, we feel something when visiting a certain apartment for the first time, we have an affective and felt-bodily perception that has immediate evaluational and expressive consequences, whose explanation, though, sounds like a flat rationalization ex post. In this case, we perceive atmospheres or quasi-things that are indeed feelings, but mostly external ones, effused into a spatial dimension and constrained by situations—that is, by multiple and chaotic states of things that can be distinguished from others precisely thanks to their peculiar atmospheric tone. From my point of view, the situational constraint is always also an atmospheric constraint.
The desubjectification of atmospheres attempted here must not lead us to forget that a quasi-thingly effect is still relative to a subject who feels touched by something partially undecipherable. And it is thanks to these felt-bodily suggestions—inviting her to this or that reaction, possibly to a sort of cooperative embodiment—that she gains her own identity. But, if the variable intensity of the atmospheric impression therefore depends also on the subject, its phenomenic apparition must be framed in the sphere of Husserl’s passive synthesis. In fact, I uphold the antiseparatist thesis on the relationship between perception and value and the idea that, in her feeling, the perceiver encounters atmospheric affordances. These not only imply a preconscious reflective-motor response but convey messages about their possible uses and functions. What I mean to say with this ecological account of atmospheric agency is that people are not surrounded by things that are devoid of meaning but by things and quasi-things always already affectively connoted. As James Gibson noted, the perceiving of an affordance is a process of perceiving a value-rich ecological object. In the human lifeworld there is indeed nothing rarer than the perception of an inexpressive object, and it is perhaps atmosphericness itself that makes it possible for mere sensation to become a real perception.
However, going beyond Gibson, I must say that forms, whether they are static or in motion, do not express merely apparent causal relations and pragmatic affordances but also tertiary qualities or sentimental (and therefore atmospheric) ones, which permeate the space in which they are perceived. They are, in other words, shivers of meaning present in things or quasi-things, within certain limits no less interobservable and repeatable than perspective properties. In this sense, for example, a diminished seventh chord suggests a tense and chilling atmosphere just because it sounds like a metallic friction—namely, because of its own immanent sound material and not for associationist reasons. It is only in this (also atmospheric) sense that, following Wertheimer, “black is lugubrious even before being black.” The idea—very briefly—is that atmospheres function as (intermodal, amodal) affordances (i.e., as ecological invitations or meanings that are ontologically rooted in things and quasi-things)—namely, as demands not only of a pragmatic-behavioral and visual kind.
Precisely due to their supervenience on material situations, atmospheres as quasi-things seem to “demand” special objectivity. For instance, it is legitimate to expect that the unease and the feeling of being spied on, aroused in us by a dark wood, is affectively and bodily felt by anyone who shares such an experience. The disquietude can certainly be greater for a city person than, say, for a lumberjack; but certainly the wood has, for everyone, traits that impede a projection of joy or lightheartedness. In opposition to the associationist temptation or, even worse, the conventionalist one, one must then restate that the atmospheric affordance of disquietude aroused by the wood does not derive from the thought of fear, but is rather the immediate irradiation of a quasi-thingly feeling that is spatially poured out. Association, if anything, comes after; and it is certainly not arbitrary.
Even if an atmosphere—at least the prototypical one, in my view—lies not so much in the eye of the perceiver, but is rather a relatively objective feeling we encounter in the external space, I do not embrace in toto Schmitz’s campaign of desubjectification of feelings. With the purpose of a wider, practical applicability of this approach, I prefer to admit that there are various types of atmospheres, also, as we see, depending on the characters of the quasi-things that radiate them: in short, they can be prototypic (objective, external, and unintentional, and sometimes lacking a precise name), derivative (objective, external, and intentionally produced), and even quite spurious in their relatedness (subjective and projective). These different types of atmospheres can then generate various types of emotional games.
In a nutshell:10 (a) an atmosphere can overwhelm us (ingressive encounter) and be refractory to a more or less conscious attempt at a projective reinterpretation; (b) it can find us in tune with it (syntonic encounter), to the point that we don’t realize we entered it; (c) it can be recognized (be it felt as antagonistic or not) without being really felt in our body; (d) it can elicit a resistance that pushes us to change it;11 (e) it may not reach the necessary threshold for sensorial-affective observation, thus causing an embarrassing atmospheric inadequacy for oneself and for others;12 (f) it may (for various reasons, also absolutely idiosyncratic)13 be perceived differently in the course of time; and (g) it may be so dependent on the perceptual (subjective) form that it concretizes itself even in materials that normally express other moods.14
Summing up, an atmosphere is the object of natural perception, but it is filtered through the ideas and evaluations of the perceiver and is indeed an invitation that can also be changed or partly declined. So in most cases, in our everyday life, atmospheres exist “between” the object (or rather, the environmental qualia) and the subject (or rather, the felt-body). By stating this, I do not mean to fully embrace a projectivistic relativism. And the reason is always the same: if by observing an atmosphere we ipso facto alter it, no “first” atmosphere could ever overwhelm us and affect us. Instead, this is the very prototypical fact I have started from in my investigation of atmospheres and quasi-things.
I have spoken at length about atmospheres. But certainly not in vain, because atmospheres are both an example—or rather, the main example—of the wider ontological category of quasi-things and the fundamental way in which quasi-things touch and involve us. In short, atmospheres are not only quasi-things (par excellence) but also what quasi-things radiate on the perceiver.
It is emphatically claimed that today we are living in a (supposed) augmented reality. Well, I wish to set against this claim the more realistic warning to keep into account the many forms of “attenuated reality” (so to speak) whose existence luckily makes our everyday life richer and more colorful. That’s why, in a project that wishes to adequately valorize the intermediate entities unceremoniously done away with by the prevailing ontology, the passage from atmospheres to quasi-things seems entirely coherent.
Despite the fact that they do not “exist” fully—that is, in the only sense contemplated by (scientific and sometimes even commonsensical) reductionism, the half-entities I thematize (atmospherically) act very powerfully on us. And this happens not despite, but precisely thanks to their attenuated physical reality. In fact, why is it that, say, the future or an image—despite being less “present” than the couch we are sat on—are able to condition our thoughts and choices much more than the couch? Why is it that a melody, thanks to its very efficacious half-reality, can become an earworm that keeps coming back to our mind (even unpleasantly)? The reason is that images and melodies are indeed instances of quasi-things that generate a deep and intimate felt-bodily resonance through their expressive qualities (motor suggestions and synaesthetic characters).
However, to understand this new ontological category, one must let go of the rigid millenary dualism that admits the existence of only things (substance) and sensible qualities (accident); in order to do so, one must take the liberty to prescind from pragmatic purposes and the indisputable representational advantage offered by the artificial objectification of what is elusive. Only in this “liberated” condition can we finally experience something that is not a substance and yet is not an accident either, something that affects us in a way that is felt only in our felt-body while not being generated by it—indeed, it is rather felt like an extraneous agent, devoid of a substrate and with structurally imprecise borders, and yet real (i.e., active) only when it affects us.
This half-entity was something so unthought of that it didn’t even have a name before Schmitz raised it to the status of authentic ontological category (Halbdinge) in the last volumes of his System (Schmitz, 1978, 116–139). Right from the beginning of his masterpiece (in five volumes and ten books), Schmitz expresses his interest in quasi-beings, semirealities or quasi-realities (Schmitz, 1964, 446, 450); in this sense, he confesses that he was influenced by the brilliant pages of Being and Nothingness in which Sartre examines the mal. If pain “is not in the space” and “neither does it belong to objective time” (Sartre, 1978, 333), “pain-as-object” becomes illness as something psychic.
Illness is transcendent and passive. It is a reality which has its own time, not the time of the external universe, nor that of consciousness, but psychic time. The psychic object can then support evaluations and various determinations. As such, it is distinct even from consciousness and appears through it; it remains permanent while consciousness develops. […] The illness has an absolute cohesion without parts. In addition it has its own duration since it is outside consciousness and possesses a past and a future. […] And these characteristics aim only at rendering the way in which this illness is outlined in duration; they are melodic qualities. […] For organizing reflection, the brief respites are a part of the illness just as silences are a part of a melody. The ensemble constitutes the rhythm and the behavior of the illness. But at the same time that it is a passive object, illness as it is seen through an absolute spontaneity which is consciousness, is a projection of this spontaneity into the In-itself. As a passive spontaneity, it is magical; it is given as extending itself, as entirely the master of its temporal form. It appears and disappears differently than spatial-temporal objects. If I no longer see the table, this is because I have turned my head, but if I no longer feel my illness, it is because it “has left.” […] The disappearance of the illness by frustrating the projects of the reflective for-itself is given as a movement of withdrawal, almost as will. There is an animism of illness; it is given as a living thing which has its form, its own duration, its habits. The sick maintain a sort of intimacy with it. When it appears, it is not as a new phenomenon; it is, the sick man will say, “my afternoon crisis.” […] Nevertheless this synthesis of recognition has a special character; it does not aim at constituting an object which would remain existing even when it would not be given to consciousness (in the manner of a hate which remains “dormant” or stays “in the unconscious”). In fact, when the illness goes away, it disappears for good. “Nothing is left of it.” But the curious consequence follows that when the illness reappears, it rises up in its very passivity by a sort of spontaneous generation. For example, one can feel its “gentle overtures.” It is “coming back again.” “This is it.” Thus the first pains, just like the rest, are […] the “announcements” of the illness or rather the illness itself which is born slowly—like a locomotive which gradually gets under way. On the other hand, it is very necessary to understand that I constitute the illness with the pain. This does not mean that I apprehend the illness as the cause of the pain but rather that each concrete pain is like a note in a melody: it is at once the whole melody and a “moment” in the melody. [The] illness is transcendent but without distance. It is outside my consciousness as a synthetic totality and already close to being elsewhere. But on the other hand, it is in my consciousness, it fastens on to consciousness with all its teeth, penetrates consciousness with all its notes; and these teeth, these notes are my consciousness. […] For the unreflective consciousness, pain was the body; for the reflective consciousness, the illness is distinct from the body, it has its own form, it comes and goes. […] The illness is mine in this sense that I give to it its matter. […] We shall call it a psychic body. It is not yet known in any way, for the reflection seeks to apprehend the pain-consciousness is not yet cognitive. This consciousness is affectivity in its original upsurge. It apprehends the illness as an object but as an affective object. One directs oneself first toward one’s pain so as to hate it, to endure it with patience, to apprehend it as unbearable, sometimes to love it, to rejoice in it (if it foretells a release, a cure), to evaluate it in some way. Naturally it is the illness which is evaluated or rather which rises up as the necessary correlate of the evaluation. The illness is therefore not known; it is suffered, and similarly the body is revealed by the illness and is likewise suffered by consciousness. (Sartre, 1978, 335–337)
There are palpable differences between Sartre’s view and the one expressed in my book. There are two main ones. First, opposing the introjectionist paradigm, I cannot speak of a psychic object and assign a constitutive role to consciousness as Sartre does. Second, from my perspective the quasi-thingness of illness (and, for me, also of pain as such; cf. infra ch. 4) is perceived on a level that is not reflective but pathic and prereflective. Still, these differences do not change the fact that this (necessarily) long quotation harbors an anticipation of many details about the “subjectivity” of quasi-things.
Of course, for Sartre, illness is only one example of the “thousands of other ways, themselves contingent, to exist our contingency” (Sartre, 1978, 338). In fact, the “big and colorful family” (Schmitz, 1978, 134) of quasi-things includes many other entities: the wind and the gaze, sound (in music and in general), color (at least in some cases), the night, certain thermal qualities (cold and hot), smell and electric shock, weight and the void, time (obviously only when we quasi-substantialize it, by saying something such as “saving time”),15 and—what matters the most to me—atmospheric feelings.
Therefore, the name “quasi-things” can be attributed to the sensible qualities that, for their marked expressiveness and intrusiveness, have a real physiognomic “character.” As we see in these pages, they affect us like (sometimes friendly and sometimes threatening) partners—and this also explains their millenary mythical-poetic hypostatization. They are similar to surfaceless situations16 whose aggressive authority may in fact be (relatively) overcome only with the advent of surfaces and the neutral perspective that they make possible, freeing us from a challenging felt-bodily communication.
Something very significant for my atmospherological paradigm is the fact that Schmitz himself came to believe that all atmospheric feelings are quasi-things—even the less aggressive ones, and not only those that act as an “almost demonic counterpart.” In this sense we can say that a quasi-thing is any entity that—while not being a full thing—deeply incorporates the felt-bodily narrowness and therefore exerts on us a more direct and immediate power than that exerted by the full thing, in terms of suggestion and sometimes depending on the context. Even the faint dripping of a tap in another room, usually unnoticed, can under certain conditions turn into a loud noise, which haunts us just as a confused noise turns into a non-existent voice persecuting the psychotic subject.
Following and radicalizing the hypothesis that quasi-things are feelings themselves due to their atmospheric half-objectivity, irreducible to private inner states of mind, in this book I therefore try to say more of the ontological characters typical of quasi-things (cf. infra ch. 1), and to apply the notions of quasi-thing and felt-bodily communication to a number of concrete phenomena. In fact, it is clear that the philosophy I embrace is not paralyzed by physicalism and reductionism: rather, it explicitly favors ontological inflationism—that’s the authentic leitmotif of the present book and the core of its continuity with my previous works—and a phenomenology engaged with what appears (the phenomenon) as it appears and in the affective-bodily involvement it implies, besides its genesis or causes. After analyzing the ontological concept of quasi-thing based on the example of the wind (ch. 1), I address (ch. 2) the affective-atmospheric presuppositions of the present discourse and the main objections that have been made against the very idea of atmosphere—especially against the fact that, insofar as they are conceived as quasi-things, atmospheres are external feelings that both ravish and resist the human being, proving to be endowed with a specific and relative objectivity as well as a non-ignorable reality (in a sense that is not so much physical-material but rather active-effectual).
Then I proceed to illustrate the felt-bodily foundation of my theory, not only of atmospheres but also of quasi-things (ch. 3). Here I outline the (new) phenomenological theory of the lived or felt-body’s constitutive and holistic (prereflective) involvement in human experience. Against a view of the (material) human body resulting from a long historical and intellectualistic process of reductionist and introjectionist objectification of the lived experience, I posit that from a phenomenologic and aesthetic point of view our body is first of all a felt-body. By means of its feelings, specific dynamics (between expansion and contraction, absolute location of subjective orientation in a predimensional, surfaceless space) and felt-bodily “isles,” the felt-body feels what belongs to us also in the surrounding area without drawing on the five senses and the perceptual body schema. This is how we have an acquaintanceship with ourselves, a lived self-consciousness, and are able to regain a sensibility for the nuanced realities of lived and spontaneous experience as well as for an ethics of bodily existence. In this sense, felt-bodily isles are both a tool for sensing the affective radiation provoked by quasi-things and “places” that, communicating with each other and with our consciousness, are themselves quasi-things.
Pain is also a quasi-thing (ch. 4). It appears in us but not as coming from us, and this special innerness/outerness is the character through which pain attests both our subjective presence and our being-in-the-world. As we have seen in Sartre, pain attacks us intermittently while having its own recognizable character; it dispossesses us of every initiative, and yet, as long as it is not destructive, at the same time it nails us to the absolute location—the non-relative “here” of our lived-body—from which we (unsuccessfully) try to escape. But this is precisely the way in which it confirms our identity more than any self-ascription. In the chapter devoted to pain, in fact, I restate that a pathic aesthetics needs an education to passivity, because learning how to be exposed in a “sovereign” way to what happens to us (even if it’s painful) has an emancipatory and even soothing power with regards to the illness we are being attacked by.
Another atmosphere and quasi-thing that is felt-bodily mediated is shame (ch. 5). This feeling, too hastily thought to be extinct in our society, seems instead to have only migrated to other contexts, where it continues to play its traditional regulatory function (but now with respect to post-traditional values). Shame, too, is far from being closed off in our (supposed) inner sphere. Like other feelings, it is also atmospherically poured out in the (lived) outer space—indeed, it attacks those who feel it from the outside. Rather than personal shame—which is already atmospheric as a form of affectivity that condemns those who are subject to it in a centripetal form—I deal with vicarious shame, which we feel (non-empathetically) for those who “should” be ashamed. As we see, like any other atmospheric feeling, even in its vicarious version, shame acts as a quasi-thing.
Then (ch. 6) I move on to the specific atmosphere radiated by a very special picture, such as the portrait. As always, I start from the idea that there is a felt-bodily communication between the perceiver and every outside Gestalt. In the light of this, I interpret the relationship between the gaze (especially in the portrait) and observer on the ground of the complex dynamics that this relationship activates (exchanging glances, supportive or antagonistic embodiment, motor physiognomic suggestions, synaesthetic qualia, etc.). This proves once again that the atmosphere that an image radiates is also an ecstasy of the “thing” itself (in this case of a portrait’s eyes or glances) and not a projection of the perceiver’s subjective state of mind. Most of all, it proves that, precisely because it is intermittent and affectively involving to the point of an almost hypnotic rapture, the gaze is a real quasi-thing. Here it is also very clear that a quasi-thing is an expressive affordance that seduces and emotionally involves our lived-body, that even produces (to put it with Sartre) a hemorrhage of our identity, and not a mere occasion of an arbitrary hermeneutical exercise, in which someone believes, deceptively, to give to the “outside” the color and the mood of his or her very private state of mind.
Finally, I deal with light and its atmospheres, which are particularly evocative when the light is somehow dimmed (ch. 7). Being very effective on the affective and felt-bodily level despite being, materially speaking, almost “nothing,” light is also a quasi-thing in an exemplary way. But perhaps it is because of the atmosphere of presence-absence, and due to the evocative vagueness aroused by dimmed light—my analysis mainly focuses on twilightness—that the viewer can have an extremely involving emotional experience, abandoning himself to moods that, once again, it would be absurd to consider the projections of his (supposed) ineffable inner life.
To conclude: the wind, feelings, felt-bodily isles, pain, shame, the gaze, and twilight, as outer atmospheric powers, are for me particularly clear examples of quasi-things. The list certainly does not end here, and could/should include other phenomena so materially elusive as they are emotionally engaging. But in this book it is enough for me to outline a possible path: one that, rejecting both constructionism or interpretationism and banal causalistic realism, outlines the perimeter of a pathic aesthetics. The latter first of all focuses on the (re)discovery of the external character of feelings (atmospheres); then, drawing on the example of atmospheres, expands the ontological catalogue to include half-entities: being neither things nor mere qualia, they occupy (sometimes literally) wide portions of our everyday experience. In fact, every day we all describe these quasi-things, we set them in a (lived) space, we recognize their amodal and intersubjective identity, and above all we always feel their emotionally intrusiveness. A philosophy that is not an abstract exercise, but a reflection on how one feels here and now, should then recognize that any ontological repertoire (worthy of the name) cannot do without quasi-things and the affective qualities they generate. Therefore it is not by choice but by necessity that I believe that entia sunt multiplicanda. In fact, even an eliminativist à la Horatio (“there are more things in Heaven and Earth … ”) has only to leave his desk and walk out of the laboratory, paying some attention to the quantity and variety of his own sensible experiences, as well as the affective and felt-bodily nuances of his encounter with the world, to realize that Ockham’s razor is as presumptuous a tool as it is insufficient.
The present book is the partially modified and bibliographically updated translation of Quasi-cose. La realtà dei sentimenti (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2013). The preface was written especially for the English edition and the second chapter appears here in an extended version.