Notes

Preface

1.Griffero (2014a).

2.Cf. Griffero (2016).

3.Today much is being written (at an interdisciplinary level) on this topic, whose relevance seems more than justified by the increasing immersive and engaging experiences of our everyday life. For a bibliography in fieri, cf. https://atmosphericspaces.wordpress.com/.

4.Which it would be wrong to reduce to insignificant automatisms.

5.Or in which, as Heidegger claims, we are even “thrown.”

6.Atmospheric colors, for instance, before being perceived as properties of the objects, are not condensed into surface colors but are diffused as a horizon of significance, a “style” about objects and then become atmospheric colors: it is as if the thing were thrust outside itself, as Merleau-Ponty notes.

7.I believe this is fully consistent with the interdisciplinary affective (or even atmospheric) turn we see in many humanistic disciplines oriented to qualitative investigations.

8.See especially Böhme (2008, 188–201).

9.For a reply to the objections it raised, cf. infra ch. 2.

10.For an analysis of atmospheric phenomenology, see Griffero (2014a, 129–141).

11.And the intensity of the protest of our mood in the case of an antagonistic encounter is indeed the best proof of the objective effectiveness of the atmosphere we react to.

12.Such as when one euphorically joins a community where a tragic atmosphere hovers or when, in general, one unexplainably feels out of place.

13.The atmosphere may change because of a slight change in the perceptual space or an additional cognition and a deeper appraisal, a new salience or a variation of perceptive distance, a change in the physiological conditions of the perceiver or in light conditions and the speed with which one approaches the place, potential conflict between non-homogeneous subatmospheres or scale-changes, etc.

14.But it is important not to overestimate the receptive (cultural, historical and individual) variability. The impressive entrance hall of a major banking institution, for example, will express an atmosphere of power for those who venture there in search of a loan (whence perhaps the impulse to leave the center of the room to take refuge in protective nooks and crannies), while expressing, on the contrary, an atmosphere of proud belonging for an employee who has developed a strong esprit de corps. But it’s clear that what generates both atmospheres (uneasiness or pride) is still the “same” spatial-sentimental quality of solemn vastness, only that for obvious reasons the former prefers a narrow and ordinary space while the latter chooses the vast and solemn one.

15.For a summary, see Schmitz (1990, 216–218).

16.That is, for Schmitz, chaotic manifoldnesses formed by states of affairs, programs and problems.

Chapter 1

1.Cf. Griffero (2013c).

2.Here it is superfluous to pedantically distinguish every time (orthoesthesic) perception from the fusional feeling regarded as preworld (Waldenfels, 2000, 96ff.): the type of perception that is relevant here and that I think is the prius of experience as a whole is not the distal and constative one, but the affectively and felt-bodily involved one, which is ambulatory and far from neutral.

3.Husserl (1997, 44ff., 112–114; 2001, 60).

4.Heidegger (1999, 67–70, and especially 2001).

5.By felt-body I mean, more solito in phenomenology, the body not as physical-anatomical (Körper) but as lived (Leib). Cf. infra ch. 2.

6.Klages (19912, 504).

7.“Perhaps material substance would not have been so neglected if the first phenomenologists had been more involved by their wives in housework”! (Soentgen, 1997, 89).

8.Cf. Andermann (2011).

9.Böhme (1995, 161).

10.Großheim (1994, 245–250). Especially if, as it now increasingly happens, we use an “apparatus equipment” without knowing exactly its “nature” and sometimes not even the exact way it works (Flusser, 1993, 7).

11.Böhme (1989, 185–186).

12.For a little girl, the bark of a tree is always also the face of a threatening demon (as in the well-known example by Uexküll, 2010, 129). But even in a bistable figure, it makes no sense to ask which of the two potential images is the real one, to be able to unmask the deceitful one.

13.In fact, “it is not the ‘sensible’ that somehow ceases to be, but it is rather the idea that breaks the sensible” (Schapp, 1981, 156).

14.Nevertheless, (ibid., 96, 136ff.) thinks of the “idea,” inseparable from the thing, as something extra-psychic no less than extra-physical, which is “understood” rather than perceived.

15.There are exceptions, but they should be sought in types of knowledge that have always been (or have become) marginal. For example, in Jacob Böhme’s theosophic ontology, the thing is nothing but the revealing of sound-olfactory signaturae (Böhme, 1995, 164–165).

16.In the sense that, for instance, a glass of water (individual thing) is other than water (substance) despite having the same chemical components.

17.But if being a thing means being a specimen of something, then every mysterious and non-specified entity would also be a thing, given its individuability as a specimen of the (evidently non-natural) species “something.” After all, contra Heidegger (1967, 190), it is still possible to feel an undetermined “something” without the mediation of a specific sense organ.

18.“A body is one and unchangeable only so long as it is unnecessary to consider its details” (Mach, 1959, 7).

19.Flusser (1993, 81–89).

20.On the emblematic value of a phenomenology of unwillingness, cf. Griffero (2012b).

21.In enhancing various forms of “attenuated” existence, Schmitz speaks right from the beginning of his System of quasi-beings, semi-reality or quasi-reality (Schmitz, 1964, 446, 450), and of Halbdinge (as opposed to Volldinge), also originally reworking Sartre’s reflections in Being and Nothingness on le mal (Schmitz, 2003, 15).

22.Schmitz (2005a, 159; 2005b, 61) mostly insists on this.

23.In short, the perception of quasi-things does not at all amount to the daze (confusion, lack of borders, unreality, etc.) induced in the experimental subject by spinning his or her chair (Kleint, 1940, 50–52).

24.“I require that all that exists […] is precisely determined” (Schapp, 1981, 139).

25.See Soentgen (1997, 20).

26.In fact, the ancients regarded any inadequately illuminated space to be inhabited by countless non-things (souls, spirits, etc.) (Schapp, 1981, 59–60), hypostatizing and personifying more autonomous and lasting qualities.

27.As claims Koffka (1955, 69ff.).

28.See Großheim (1994, 36) and Böhme (2001, 159–172).

29.Mahayni (2003, 24–25).

30.This is the main mistake of a (metaphorically or not) directional or vectorial conception of intentionality (Wiesing 2014, 42).

31.“If there is something which cannot be regarded as a finite ‘thing’ it is aerial space, which in consequence, to the primitive method of vision, was empty, null and void, simply non-existent” (Friedländer, 1960, 122). See Schmitz (1978, 118).

32.Soentgen (1997, 99).

33.In fact, air is the least bodily of ancient elements, and we have of it only an (indirect) testimony through the “experiences of our felt-bodily feeling” (Schmitz, 2003, 103), notably breathing and the wind.

34.Mahayni (2003, 215, 222); Soentgen (1997, 142).

35.Mittelstraß (1974, 67).

36.I have dealt elsewhere with the irreducibility of atmosphericness to something metaphorical (Griffero, 2010c).

37.Perhaps this is the secret of the “view from the tower”: that is, the authentic archetype of the modern legitimation of the (formerly taken to be heretic) aesthetic heterotopic curiositas.

38.Making use of the pioneering psychophysical reflections proposed by Willy Hellpach (1977), phenomenology should investigate the weather “neither as an objective fact, nor as the marginal condition of human action, but rather as a correlate of sensations, more precisely of felt-bodily feeling” (Böhme, 2011, 163).

39.These data are functional to the weekend culture and for this reason are privileged compared to mere weather conditions. However, weather forecasts have been integrating for some time the “objective” temperature with the “perceived” one, unfortunately still understood as an instrumentally measurable degree, for example, of humidity (psychrometer). Cf. Böhme (2004a).

40.As Ingold (2012) prefers to say.

41.See Ogawa (1998, 324ff.) and especially Yamaguchi (1997).

42.Watsuji (1961, 12–13).

43.The weather, as “a phenomenon of the earth-sky world […] is the very temperament of our being.” Short: “the world we inhabit, far from having crystallised into fixed and final forms, is a world of becoming, of fluxes and flows or, in short, a weather-world” (Ingold, 2012, 75, 77, 80).

44.Bachelard (1988, 225) doesn’t agree: “The wind threatens and howls but has no shape unless it encounters dust; once visible, it becomes a mere annoyance,” because all its representations “would give it rather a derisory appearance.”

45.As posited by Heider (2005, 46).

46.“Hearing is more dramatic than seeing. In reverie on the storm, it is not the eye that produces images, but rather the startled ear. We participate directly in the drama” (Bachelard, 1988, 226).

47.The direction of the waves; the pressure on the rudder; the intensity or color of the foam; certain smells, such as the flora of the still invisible mainland, and, if you like, even seasickness act here as reliable signs of the wind (see Minssen, 2004, 294–317). But for an attempt to visualize an intangible (dynamic, transient, aperiodic, turbulent) atmospheric medium such as air, cf. Wagenfeld (2015), who, in a sense, calls no-things what we define rather as quasi-things.

48.“Isn’t every flower the proof that natural things present themselves to others?” (Böhme, 1995, 167).

49.Even weight, traditionally conceived as the intrinsic property of something (and therefore as a primary quality), in hindsight is no more than the simultaneous and reciprocal exposure of physical bodies in space (Böhme, 1995, 165). On this specific notion of thing-ecstasy, see Böhme (2001, 131–144) and Griffero (2005a).

50.Heidegger (1985, 206).

51.That is why the ontology of quasi-things should also include atmospheres (Griffero, 2014a, 119–129).

52.For this qualitative-affective identity (the “power” of things), see Koffka (1955, 72): “the terrifying character of the thunder is its outstanding characteristic, its description as a noise of a certain intensity and quality, quite secondary.”

53.Ibid.

54.Even those who emphasize the role of protensions take things to be “the self-enclosed set of something that satisfies a particular context of expectation” (Grote, 1972, 41).

55.Of course it is impossible to sample quasi-things by grasping one part of them (Bloom, 2004, 6).

56.Soentgen (1997, 49–50).

57.“They have an inner sphere which they deny to us. Each thing is a black box” (ibid., 55).

58.“Husserl describes the thing as a portion, as an object produced starting from the ‘sensible hyle’ thanks to the creating power of the intellect” (ibid., 78).

59.Husserl (1997, 62).

60.Soentgen (1997, 56ff.).

61.“Latencies” and “norms of reaction” (Grote, 1972, 409ff.).

62.On this certification (of the human body, place and distance, inside / outside) offered by the readiness-to-hand of things, see Böhme (1995, 161).

63.“The of-what of things-towards-which only emerges with things-towards-which, for which the material in itself cannot show. The material is a derivative, something that descends from the things-towards-which” (Schapp, 2004, 31). Hence the absurd conclusion that “in order to appear, materials should await the formation of a situation whose centre is man” (Soentgen, 1997, 232).

64.For some ideas on the aesthetics of portions (and of crunching, thus reconfiguring anything that has a crust) see Soentgen (1997, 153–155).

65.Excluded in discrete things, but possible in totally homogeneous material substances (one portion of salt or water is not different from the other), arbitrary portioning (Ibid., 98–100) seems to be missing entirely from quasi-things, unless they are reduced to material things (for example, lived air to its chemical reification).

66.Quasi-things “are pure phenomena, or appearances that exist only as long as they appear, and not appearances of something” (Böhme, 2001, 62).

67.Ibid.

68.“Then, beyond every manifestation, the quasi-thing itself is transferred felt-bodily narrowness that, through the felt-bodily communication of the genus of incorporation, acts as a power and thus keeps its manifestations together” (Schmitz, 1978, 136). This thesis of an externalizing “transfer,” however, is no less than problematic in an antiprojectivist theory such as Schmitz’s!

69.Schmitz (ibid., 133) excludes the immediate invasion of the evening and therefore its quasi-thingly nature, perhaps because of the erroneous confusion between intrusiveness and harassing oppression.

70.Bloom (2004, 6–7).

71.Wiesing (2014, 111–112), for whom the main quality of pain is precisely to exist only in the moment in which it exists, denies the meaningfulness of the question by differentiating pain and perception.

72.See Ammann (1925–1928, 2: 47).

73.Cf. Varzi (2003) for a sophisticated analysis of the issue, albeit focused on theses (all could amount to momentary entities that take place over time) extraneous to common sense and therefore to the first-person philosophy that constitutes atmospherology.

74.See Szerszynski (2010, 24).

75.There would therefore be an occult realm, from which from time to time quasi-things emerge (Soentgen, 1997, 96, criticizing Grote 1972, 372).

76.As suggested by Thomas Fuchs (quoted in Schmitz 2003, 191, 193).

77.That is, a quasi-thing (antinaturalistically) understood as “a this one” (Heidegger, 1967, 18) present in close proximity.

78.Such intermittence is not to be confused either with the sci-fi one (teleportation of objects) or with the artificial one of analytic ontology: unlike Theseus’s ship, a quasi-thing certainly cannot be disassembled and reassembled (using the same units).

79.“Only the surface allows for a stable local space—a system of relative places that are made mutually identifiable thanks to relations of position and distance measured on immobile objects—and orientation” (Schmitz, 2010, 279). For a framing of the issue of “lived space,” cf. Griffero (2014 a, c).

80.Schmitz (2003, 394).

81.See Soentgen (1997, 126ff.).

82.But even the “artworks” of a land artist such as Richard Long show that the line of the wind, always reflecting also the nature of the area, follows a trend that is predictable to some extent.

83.Only to an extent (cf. supra C).

84.Schmitz (2005a, 287).

85.On this concept, with plausible anthropological bases (breathing but also the word as breath) but perhaps even more supra-personal and meteorological ones (wind), see Rappe (1995, 304–323).

86.“The wind comes from nowhere, shows its presence as it touches and grasps us felt-bodily, and soon after it goes back to the indeterminate which it came from” (Mahayni, 2003, 219). See also Schmitz (1969, 271).

87.Mahayni (2003, 251–257).

88.Henceforth I will freely refer to the classic measurement of the wind proposed by Francis Beaufort (1831). Cf. Minssen (2004).

89.Mahayni (2003, 223–224).

90.Watsuji (1961, 73–74, 136).

91.Hence the working hypothesis of constructing “a phenomenology of the scream” starting from “a phenomenology of the storm” (Bachelard, 1988, 229).

92.Heidegger (1993, 151) is mistaken when positing that “whether this unity is conceived as sum or as totality or as a Gestalt alters nothing in the standard character of this thing-concept”—that is, of the thing as the unit of a multiplicity of sense data.

93.A situation, “the only event that is never ascribed to a genus” (Schmitz, 1998, 184), is always chaotic-multiple—that is (I come back to this several times) not composed of discrete elements but of states of affairs, programs, and problems, including protensions (Schmitz, 1978, 129).

94.According to Schmitz, this is the epochal human introjection (the Greek invention of the psyche) of all the qualities of the outside world, including the affective ones. Since then the world has been explained in terms of the insufficient triad (already present in Aristotle) substance-accident-relation and reduced to discrete quantifiable elements. It follows that possible moods are conceived (fatally and mistakenly) as mere metaphoric projections of the subject.

95.For Schmitz, quasi-things are: the voice and the gaze, gravity and the electric shock, the bitter cold and the scorching heat, the solemn silence or the oppressive and annoying noise, obsessive musical motifs and pain, nighttime darkness and experienced time, anger, and even the conscience when, as a semi-free reaction, “merging cause and action, it works on the situation, the emotional involvement and on itself” (Schmitz, 2003, 14–15, 76).

96.Waldenfels (2000, 105).

97.Paraphrasing a famous quote by Rilke: “live [quasi-]things, lived and conscious of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last still to have known such things. On us rests the responsibility […] of preserving their memory” (Rilke, 1947–1948, 375).

98.Or, if you like, something more stable and objective such as the “atmospheric” (Böhme, 2001, 59ff.).

99.I like to think that the examples in which I set out to “lose myself” are, like quotations, almost “wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction” (Benjamin, 1979, 95).

Chapter 2

1.Cf. also Griffero (2014e).

2.The term “resonance” refers to the “simultaneous transposition of a rhythmic process into a different medium” (Fuchs, 2000, 197).

3.Rather, poetry follows from the fact that “analogy is the fundamental medium of our being-in-the-world” (Spaemann, 1996, 290). At most we could think of the atmospheric as an “absolute” metaphor, following Blumemberg (cf. Griffero, 2010c).

4.See Fuchs (2000, 202, 204), Binswanger (1947, 75ff.).

5.See Fuchs (2000, 221–222).

6.Cf. Schmitz (1965; cf. also 2009 and above all 2011c for a summary).

7.Grounded in the analysis of ninety different types of “feelings” (Soentgen, 1998, 103).

8.Cf. Ratcliffe (2008).

9.Cf. Griffero (2006b, 2009c, 2010b, 2014a), following Tellenbach (1968), Schmitz (1964ff., 1969, 1998, 2014), Hauskeller (1995), Hasse (2005), and especially Böhme (1989, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2006).

10.Which is nevertheless unrelated to everyday experience, as its aim is that of researching the “purpose” of emotions (Ulich, 1982).

11.Such theories dangerously atomize each single component (that is, a feeling is a combination of perception, judgment, etc.), but are basically unable to explain their unity.

12.They thus get segregated within the safe zone of one’s (supposed) privacy or within scientifically legitimate enclaves (psychotherapy). Or—which is worse—they are obscenely spectacularized by the media (Hasse, 2008, 109–110).

13.A lived-space which is thematizable both from an atmospherologic point of view (Griffero, 2014c) and as the evolution of the oneiric condition, onto- and phylogenetically prior to the neutral-objective space (Fuchs, 2000, 209).

14.Schmitz (1969, 343).

15.Despite its originality, the reinterpretation of the Husserlian uninterested subject as the one who “lives with an emotional tone that refers to the being of the world, rather than to the being of the things”(see Costa, 2007, 181) is still too much under the influence of reason. Indeed, in this case the sense of wonder is not existential or historical, but rather a rational fact.

16.According to Soentgen (1998, 106–107, 118), some neophenomenological ideas cannot be proven, and yet appear to be particularly useful to eradicate certain deeply rooted biases.

17.Rather than focusing on the strategies by means of which they can be inhibited (as has happened ever since Plato’s “winged chariot”), or anyway controlled for pragmatic and/or ethical purposes.

18.Cf. Weber-Guskar (2007).

19.See Demmerling and Landweer (2007, 21).

20.Sometimes it is a “silent insinuation,” while some other times it’s a “sudden and violent haunting,” without altering the mimetic certainty: “the perplexity as to what feeling is actually capturing us does not at all amount to our hesitation about what gestures to choose.” (Schmitz 2002b, 73–74).

21.“For every individual endowed with conscience, the world is split between their own external and internal worlds, with the proviso that they will become maximally aware of an object of their own external world only insofar as such object has a proper representation within the internal world of the individual” (Schmitz, 2007a, 14).

22.“The sole aim of all the thinker’s efforts to establish a connection between the body and the soul as an interaction, a parallelism, or an intersection is that of eventually patching the distinct fractions of what is an immediate experience, in our daily life: the vital unity of the man whom we perceive, even through the autonomizations of the body and the soul” (Simmel, 1985, 54).

23.One might think—but this is just an example—that emotions, much like atmospheres, may last less time than feelings, which in turn (as they are more centripetal) may last less time than moods (as they are more centrifugal).

24.“The conflicting results of the research on the meaning of the word ‘emotion,’ as well as on the meaning and the structural dimension of the words which constitute the emotional lexicon of the languages we have studied thus far, lead researchers to think unanimously that it is currently not possible to identify a proper definition of ‘emotion,’ or to classify the emotional lexicon of a language” (Galati, 2002, 143).

25.See Bollnow (1956, 47). It is possible that seemingly extra-atmospheric situations are impersonal and anonymous atmospheres, or situations whose atmospheric charge does not reach the critical threshold; or, again, they may be dissolving moods that haven’t been compensated by a new Stimmung yet.

26.For a first, tentative atmospherologic revisitation of Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit, cf. Griffero (2008a).

27.To which I refer once and for all (Griffero, 2014a).

28.From which I exclude (Griffero, 2010c; 2014a, 108–112). While admitting that metaphors “enhance atmospheres, amplifying them and enchaining other metaphors” (Costa, et al., 2014, 355), I exclude that an atmosphere is not but an effect of metaphorical language and prefer rather to think (with Ingold, 2012, 80) that the literal and the metaphorical meaning of the term “atmosphere” suggests that something more fundamental is at stake.

29.Wittgenstein (2009, 164e; 1980, 84).

30.Supporting conviction and understanding (Wittgenstein, 2009, 77e, 90e, 167e).

31.Wittgenstein (1980, 111–113).

32.“An atmosphere that is inseparable from its object—is no atmosphere” (Wittgenstein 2009, 192e).

33.Among other things, it has been considered avoidable: “a particular atmosphere, which dissipates when I look closely” (Wittgenstein, 2009, 77e).

34.Wittgenstein (1992, vol 1, §726; vol. 2, 38).

35.See Hobuß (2007, 192–194).

36.For an infant, the atmosphericness of motherly language (the so-called motherese) is extrasemantic, as it’s constituted by physiognomic variations of acoustic parameters.

37.Piattelli Palmarini (1995, 76–77); Griffero (2014a, 4 and note 12).

38.Lately Schmitz (2005a, 284; 2011a, 30).

39.See Hauskeller (1995, 30) and Soentgen (1998, 108–112), who suggests that we might consider it as an “order of types,” similar to that of clouds.

40.Such a risk of reification is avoidable through a certain diversification (Griffero, 2014a, 129ff.), partly following Böhme (2001).

41.Demmerling (2011, 53).

42.See Schmitz (1978, 257ff.).

43.As stated by Soentgen (1998, 111).

44.Schmitz (2003, 180–181).

45.Besides, such an analogy appears to be incomplete: if we can surely consider “a feeling as a kind of climate, or a climate as a kind of feeling” (Schmitz, 1969, 362), then why doesn’t a climate become “mine” when it affects me? (Fuchs, 2000, 84, 226).

46.Schmitz (1967, 1969); Griffero (2010a, 2014c, 2014f).

47.Hauskeller (1995, 25).

48.This is a sovrapersonality that (partially or totally?) works within culturally homogeneous circles.

49.“Something is never solely enclosed within its boundaries. It emanates heat like an oven, as well as cold like ice (zur Lippe 1987, 515). Cf. Böhme (2001).

50.Cf. Gibson (1986).

51.Demmerling (2011, 50).

52.They should not be understood in a reductionist way, however: although atmospheres are higher-order properties supervening to physical properties, which in turn constitute them and bring them to realization, the former never fully identify with or, which is worse, reduce themselves to the latter.

53.Schmitz (1965, 343; 1998, 188; 1999, 285ff.).

54.Böhme (2001, 59–60).

55.“We all have in our past a delightful garret.” (Hugo, 2006, vol. 2, 231).

56.Kimura (2005) and Yamaguchi (1997).

57.“A third element which is inserted in between two borders as if it were a membrane and whose sole effect is that of stiffening the psychologistic hiatus between the internal worlds and the external world, with its psychologistic-reductionist-introjectivist paradigm”(Schmitz, 2002b, 71; see also 2005a, 273).

58.Huppertz (2007, 159n2).

59.Without being illusory, material and teleologically addressed toward objectivity as much as the one referred to by Winnicott (2005, ch. 1, for instance).

60.Though it’s identified neither with the mental image, nor with the real object (Costa, 2007, 154ff.). From this point of view, the atmosphere is an emotional state that’s constantly supposed on the reflexive level (yet allowing for variations of meaning along the course of the experience). Each time, though, it’s always as “real” as a life experience, without being parasitic of some regulative idea of a meaning (or a feeling) in itself.

61.Blum (2010, 244–249).

62.In this hypothesis, each affective-qualitative element perceived in an external world completely devoid of tertiary qualities and inhabited only by quantifiable and material dimensions (primary qualities), by neutral data waiting to receive some kind of meaning and to be integrated with theoretical constructs of statistical-prognostic value, would necessarily be illusory (i.e., an unconscious projection of a psychic element [of the inner world]).

63.When we mistakenly judge the sentiment of others as more intense than it is, we can even perceive the authority of “a feeling that is not felt by anyone” (Hauskeller, 1995, 23).

64.(Patzelt, 2007, 196–197).

65.In the obvious sense that “to dive” into an atmosphere of grief, for instance, is not identifiable with the mere “knowledge” about the unavoidability of death.

66.Blume and Demmerling (2007, 126).

67.As posited by Hauskeller (1995, 22); see Blume and Demmerling (2007, 127).

68.Blume and Demmerling (2007, 127).

69.Schmitz (2008, 8).

70.Probably in a no more cognitive than affective way, implying an immediate experience of the primitive presence and the coercion to accept the state of affairs as a “fact.”

71.A force that instead, in the case of the atmosphere of love, is based on constraints that are always relatively vague and, in any case, neither too tight nor too loose (Schmitz, 2008, 8, 11–12).

72.Hence the recurring mistake, a true refugium ignorantiae, of seeing a kind of sorcery in it (see Carnevali, 2012, 100–103).

73.Griffero (2012b).

74.Schapp (2004).

75.“The software of new conflicts is given by information and media design and—as a result—by the generation of artificial atmospheres of fear” (Milev, 2012, 301).

76.Böhme (2007, 282–283).

77.Think of the conditioning due to so-called mental images (individual and/or collective), “catchy” melodies and rhythms, or suggestive names of places and people.

78.Griffero (2014a, 130–131).

79.Here we shall prescind from the antipsychologistic objections made against Schleiermacher by Otto.

80.Otto (1936).

81.In every highly developed religion the appreciation of moral obligation and duty, ranking as a claim of the deity upon man, has been developed side by side with the religious feeling itself. None the less a profoundly humble and heartfelt recognition of the holy may occur in particular experiences without being always or definitely charged or infused with the Hense of moral demands. The holy will then be recognized as that which commands our respect, as that whose real value is to be acknowledged inwardly. It is not that the awe of holiness is itself simply fear in face of what is absolutely overpowering, before which there is no alternative to blind, awe-struck obedience. Tu solus sanctus is rather a paean of praise, which, so far from being merely a faltering confession of the divine supremacy, recognizes and extols a value, precious beyond all conceiving. (ibid., 53–54)

82.Following Seneca (1917, 273), who acknowledged (Letters to Lucilius, 41, 3) that the divine is naturally suggested by thick woods, lonely places and dense shadows, Otto (1936, 12–13; my emphasis) can state the following:

Let us follow [this feeling] up with every effort of sympathy and imaginative intuition wherever it is to be found, in the lives of those around us, in sudden, strong ebullitions of personal piety and the frames of mind such ebullitions evince, in the fixed and ordered solemnities of rites and liturgies, and again in the atmosphere that clings to old religious monuments and buildings, to temples and to churches […] The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its profane, non-religious mood of everyday experience.

83.“Revelation does not mean a mere passing over into the intelligible and comprehensible. Something may be profoundly and intimately known in feeling for the bliss it brings or the agitation it produces, and yet the understanding may find no concept for it. To know and to understand conceptually are two different things, are often even mutually exclusive and contrasted. The mysterious obscurity of the numen is by no means tantamount to unknowableness” (ibid., 139).

84.“It does not arise out of them, but only by their means. They are the incitement, the stimulus, and the occasion for the numinous experience to become astir, and, in so doing, to begin at first with a naïve immediacy of reaction to be interfused and interwoven with the present world of sensuous experience”(ibid., 117).

85.“Like all other primal psychical elements, [the holy] emerges in due course in the developing life of human mind and spirit and is thenceforward simply present. Of course it can only emerge if and when certain conditions are fulfilled, conditions involving a proper development of the bodily organs and the other powers of mental and emotional life in general, a due growth in suggestibility and spontaneity and responsiveness to external impressions and internal experiences. But such conditions are no more than conditions; they are not its causes or constituent elements” (ibid., 128).

86.See Rappe (1995; for a summary see 312–323).

87.For the proto-Christian, already prepared to the not fully personal objectivity of feeling by the Old Testament idea of divine wrath that permeates everything, it must have seemed entirely plausible to conceive the divine as an impersonal power (1 Jn 4:18)—hence the subsequent resistance to accept the personalization of the spirit in the Trinity (Schmitz, 2012, 55)—that is, as an atmosphere.

88.“No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” (1 Jn 4:12).

89.“Local divine atmospheres are part of the immense realm of supra-personal and objective feelings, which partly exist […], like weather, without a place and simply, so to speak, ‘in the air,’ or more precisely in the space of vastness; and which are partly also condensed in determined places and around certain objects, often only as fleeting evocations” (Schmitz, 1977, 133–134.) See Norberg-Schulz (1980), Kozljanič (2004), Griffero (2014a, 74–75; 2016, 206–228).

90.See Schmitz (1977, 149; 1990, 439).

91.Griffero (2010a, 2014c).

92.Even Phillip Gröning’s film, Into Great Silence (2005), set in the monastery of the Grand Chartreuse in the French Alps (Huppertz 2007, 160–166), rather than generating a religious atmosphere through various means (silent spaces extraneous to the historical time, light that is conducive to recollection, characters without a socio-biographical identity almost ahead of otherworldly depersonalization, almost hypnotic practices aimed at the generation of transformational psychic conditions), simply sets up a condition of possibility that is necessary (but not sufficient).

93.See Schmitz (1977, 91): “an atmosphere, whether it is a feeling (or a constellation of feelings), is divine, as a gripping power, when its authority has an unconditional seriousness for those who are gripped by it.”

94.See Thibaud (2003, 293), Bockemühl (2002, 221), and Minkowski (1936, 234); see also the doubts expressed by Mühleis (2007, 130, 136).

95.Thus Böhme (2001), referring to Albers (1975). Blum (2010, 130) also distinguishes between matters of concern and matters of fact.

96.Kojève (2013, 28).

97.It does not seem possible to decide to undergo once again the authority of a dissolved atmosphere.

98.Patzelt (2007, 211ff.).

99.Böhme (2007, 289–290).

100.Blum (2010, 66 and lxviii).

101.For example, slow motion in cinema is atmospherically revealing (ibid., 214–216).

102.Ibid., (14, 35).

103.Kojève (2013, 7).

104.Böhme (2007, 288).

105.Meyer-Sickendiek (2011).

106.Schmitz perhaps juxtaposes too much depth and breadth (1969, 337).

107.“Flat and shallow moods always have a somewhat monotonous direction […] On the contrary, all deep feelings have within themselves a polyvocal direction. And the deepest oppositions of the soul seem to agree without exception on immediately reunifying at the same time the starkest contrasts of feeling inside them” (Krueger, 1953, 191).

108.Scheler (1963, 46).

109.Schmitz (2002b, 75; see also 1999, 288).

110.Thibaud (2003, 287) and Griffero (2014a, 129–141).

111.Schultheis (2008).

112.Schmitz (2008b, 9).

113.Schmitz (2003, 47–48).

114.A contrast of feelings that, unlike Hauskeller (1995, 23) and Demmerling (2011, 47), Schmitz does not attribute to the simple corporeal motions (otherwise a tired person would become perky for the sole reason of meeting energetic and volitional people), but that he explains by calling to witness the pleasure for the others’ misfortunes (or vice versa) (Schmitz, 2002b, 70–71). Schmitz and his critics underestimate, however, the case of syntony: a sad person among the sad is, in fact, often less sad, and a happy person among other happy people (who are happy in an excessive way, or simply for trivial reasons) is a little less happy (and not only due to a superficial spirit of distinction).

115.“We do not perceive an atmosphere, but rather perceive in accordance with the atmosphere” (Thibaud, 2003, 293).

116.Garelli (1992, 81), Kazig (2008, 149).

117.Cf. Böhme (2001) and Griffero (2010b).

118.Cf. Griffero (2014b).

119.Pinzer (2012, 107–108).

120.Pallasmaa (2011, 89).

121.Warren (1995).

122.This is true not only, as for Sartre, with regard to atmospheric irradiation of the gaze of others, but also for the appearance of a thing (see Jäkel, 2013, 94ff.).

123.Schmitz (1999, 258ff.).

124.Ever since Kenny (1963).

125.Which might be but “the positivistic surrogate of the atmospheric” (Schmitz, 2003, 7).

126.Grounded either in axiologic judgments, though not necessarily propositional ones (Nussbaum, 2001), or in forms of knowledge that are corresponsive in their “secret intentionality” (Goldie, 2000, 54).

127.The reference to the world of moods is broader and vague. As it shows itself “as an answer to the question ‘how are you?’ then the next appropriate question appears to be not so much ‘what about?’ as ‘why?’ Only in this way is it implied that the sadness was meant as a mood, as not as a directed state” (Tugendhat 1993a, 184).

128.See Slaby (2007, 102, 109; 2008).

129.See especially Metzger (1941, 175ff.).

130.Schmitz (1969, 319). The origin of a feeling does not cease to be so only because it does not appear (Hauskeller, 1995, 28).

131.Schmitz (1969, 321).

132.Whose clarification can even be pathogenic, much like in the case of a psychotic worry which turns into a hallucinated perception of a “concrete” threat (Fuchs, 2000, 381 n25).

133.In my view, the atmosphere is precisely “the acceptance of a meaning which has established itself at a passive level”: this is how Costa (2007, 148) explains prethetic (operating) and revealing intentionality, on the basis of which the meaning appears to the subject without being itself the subject’s product.

134.When the priority of perception is given not to the subject or to the object, but rather to the perception itself (non-directionally, therefore non-dualistically understood), the percipient is in turn necessarily identified with the perceived (ontological equivalence), with a portion of the world (see Wiesing, 2014, 95ff.).

135.Demmerling and Landweer (2007, 30).

136.Schmitz (2003, 406–409). Merleau-Ponty (2005, xi) legitimates from the very start a “reflection upon an unreflective experience.”

137.This is also presupposed by Waldenfels (2000, 278–280). However, he disapproves of a sort of cripto-Cartesianism (I am I > my felt-body is my felt-body) within the Schmitzean theory so aggressively that we may think of a (more-than-theoretical) tension between the two. This cripto-Cartesianism, according to Waldenfels, is allergic to the dimension of alterity and paradoxically, for an author who cares for depsychologization (like Schmitz), leads to “a new sort of interiority, with a rather simplistic description (Biedermeier)” (ibid., 280).

138.Which is feared by anyone who idealistically holds that nature, as it shifted from an autonomous power to being subject to laws of the humans, “can have no power over him, for in order to become objective it has to experience his own power” (Schiller, 1902, vol. 1, 92).

139.The fact that, unlike “things” in a strict sense, quasi-thingly feelings can be articulated only through language (Demmerling, 2011, 54–55) is readily denied, I think, by the precision of their felt-bodily resonance, as well as by the inevitably analytic-discriminatory character (hence “posthumous”) of the language, in contrast with the atmospheric-situational holism (Griffero, 2013a).

140.See Fuchs (2000, 236).

141.Contra Demmerling (2011, 50). Also, let us not forget that the less an atmosphere is observed and noticed, the more strongly it determines us (Heidegger, 1995, 68).

142.Schmitz (2003, 251).

143.This sounds like Lichtenberg’s well-known joke: “Is it possible that girls may blush in the dark? Such a matter is undecidable, as we would need the light in order to verify this” (Schmitz, cited in Blume 2003, 81n22).

144.As Hauskeller also thinks (1995, 31–32 and n. 37).

145.Cf. Scheler (1973) and Griffero (2015).

146.Blume and Demmerling (2007, 129–131).

147.Kettner (2007, 68).

148.According to Schmitz (2013, 101), they are provided mainly by the motor suggestions and the synaesthetic characters inherent especially in the eyes and the voice.

149.Ibid., 106ff.

150.If we really were to adopt the four pure types of authority described by Kojève, they would be: father-son, master-servant, leader-band, judge.

151.Schmitz (2012a, 169–170).

152.Which aesthetic sensibility also pertains to: the melancholic atmosphere of a rainy landscape appears relatively less melancholic in the artistic mediation (Schmitz, 2005, 289). But the relationship between the two levels of atmospheric power—hence the paradox that makes the museum into a device that both removes aura (transformation of an originally religious authority into a “solely” artistic authority) and confers it (transfer of value and therefore aesthetic authority to banal everyday objects)—deserves much further investigation.

153.Through self-consciousness, “anyone can discover in himself an ability to abstract from anything whatsoever, and likewise to determine himself, to posit any content in himself” (Hegel, 1991, 37; my emphasis).

154.“When the gripping is authentic, he who is caught must first of all be in solidarity with the feeling and accept it in its own momentum; only later can he be personally confronted with the sentiment, surrendering to it or resisting it” (Schmitz, 2012a, 45). Hence the possibility, usually excluded at the outset in the field of political science, of authority over the self: in this case, instead, it is exercised by a part of the self (involvement) over another, refractory part of the self (the previous state of mind but also more rational reflection).

155.Beyond inadequate positivist theories (theory of values, natural law) or consensual theories (discourse ethics) of the sources of law (Schmitz, 2012b, 41–49).

156.It is not by chance that in cultures that are not legally normed one tends to respect wrath (of the wronged person), which is obviously considered endowed with exceptional authority.

157.Jesus’s solution (Jn 7:53–8:11: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her”) is different, as it turns the wrath towards the guilty, demanding vengeance, into collective shame (Schmitz, 2003, 302).

158.See Schmitz (2005a, 242). For example, it is by prefeeling the atmosphere of outrage that would cause our outburst that we avoid to cross a Michael Kohlhaas type of road without exit.

159.Welcoming the (by no means exhaustive) distinction among physical, social, and medial atmosphere (Heibach, 2010b, 11).

160.We might speak, in general, of a “climatic pleroma” or “third subtle” (climate, Stimmung, milieu, Umwelt, even expression, etc.), that, because of its non-objectual and non-informative nature, is unrecognized by modern European rationalism (Sloterdijk, 2012, 28–29).

161.Günzel (2011, 67).

162.Werhahn (2003, 79–81).

163.Böhme (1995, 199–200).

164.What if (Mt 12:44-45) the room was occupied by even worse and more numerous spirits (see Werhahn, 2003, 80)?

165.Heibach (2012c, 263).

166.Schmitz (2002b, 169).

167.The only exception admitted by Schmitz in this trivial “smelling” (aesthetic) atmospheres is dwelling as cultivation of feelings in an enclosed space (home, church, garden, Japanese tea house, etc.).

168.For a few suggestions see Heibach (2012c, 263ff.).

169.Schmitz overestimates the immediacy of feelings (despite their status nascendi) and the automatic gestural consequences of gripping (often one is immediately certain of feeling something, but one does not know what it is!). Besides, this is simplistically explained as a relationship between servant (perceiver) and master (feeling), thus underestimating not only the ambiguity of feelings but also the—at least partial—active role of the subject in their very creation (see Soentgen, 1998, 112ff.).

170.Schmitz (2003, 328; 2008, 14).

171.Bieger (2011, 88–89).

172.Griffero (2013b).

173.Diaconu (2012, 88).

174.Such sovereignty “presupposes […] a certain willingness to expose oneself, so that human beings may be trained in accepting the fact that they are hetero-determined” (Böhme, 2008, 197).

175.Schmitz (1969, 348; 1990, 258–260).

176.See Soentgen (1998, 149), Fuchs (2000, 228–229); Wildt (2001, 469).

177.It is not accidental that Schmitz studied with Erich Rothacker, whose core philosophical anthropology displays forms of life as (possibly also creative) reactions to the “meaningfulness” of the Umwelt (cf. Griffero, 2008b).

178.Yet to be explained is how an emotional rapture may be kitsch, as it is—at least for the case of the prototypical atmosphericity—dyscrasic, unexpected, and unrelated to the emotional commonsense (also of the percipient subject).

179.Why is it necessary to stigmatize (see Hauskeller, 1995, 30) the fact that someone is experiencing some trivial joy (Schmitz 1969, 355), if we wish for a full passivity with respect to the atmospheric influence? “Schmitz fights against the “ideology of the ‘I,’” but there are very few philosophers who pronounced the word ‘I’ as willingly as he did while claiming to be original” (Soentgen, 1998, 117).

180.Humankind cannot “put itself in the perspective of vastness and, as if it were some Archimedes’ point, leverage such vastness to manipulate feelings”(Schmitz, 2005a, 283).

181.The “being-what-it-is of every individual endowed with conscience”(Schmitz, 2002b, 148).

182.For some, atmospherology is an inappropriate generalization (Blume and Demmerling, 2007, 123) of certain circumscribed types of emotional experience—for instance climatic and/or collective (e.g., Saturday night’s “fever”). The fact that a good theory of feelings (also atmospherologic) is grounded in a philosophy of situations (for which Soentgen [1998, 108] accuses Schmitz) is so well established that the very concept of “situation” has been one of the most studied by Schmitz over the last two decades (Griffero, 2009b).

183.Cf. Schmitz (2011b), concerning their atmosphericness.

184.On the Stimmungsraum, see Fuchs (2000, 193–251).

185.Before choosing the theme for a novel, Simenon suggests that one needs find the right atmosphere, to which one may eventually attune a certain season and the other details, much like a musical theme.

186.See Bieger (2011, 84).

Chapter 3

1.Cf. Griffero (2010e).

2.“The full and extraordinary support system that would be required to allow a brain-in-a-vat to experience things as we experience them, or in other words, to allow a brain-in-a-vat to be phenomenologically in-the-world and not just physically in-a-vat, would have to replicate the bodily system that already supports our ordinary existence” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008, 131).

3.Starting from the fruitful consequences of the erect position: mobility and freedom of the hands, distance and independence from anything, predominance of the sight and thus of foresight, etc.

4.Also considering a Gestaltkreis between spontaneous motion and perceived environmental feedback (Weizsäcker).

5.Looking for a name that’s not tainted by dualism, the later Merleau-Ponty (1968) referred to “chair,” which in my opinion is no less equivocal.

6.Properly, “a subject has no perceptions, but rather perceives!” (Wiesing, 2014, 77).

7.Cf. Griffero (2003, 2006a, 2009a, 2011c, 2011d).

8.See Böhme (2003, 9) and Waldenfels (2000, 42).

9.Though linguistically approximable. Indeed, if we allowed that “to feel our felt-body already entails the tendency to distance ourselves from it within our consciousness” and, a fortiori, that “the explicit linguistic articulation of the felt-body is […] a product of its elimination, even in the case of its counterposition to it” (Böhme, 2010, 112, 119), the lived-body would be comprehensible only when practiced.

10.Also in Merleau-Ponty’s view, the body is composed of organs, even though, differently from the physical one, it is open to the world.

11.Horror, anguish, hunger, thirst, pleasure, disgust, vigor, fatigue, and, as we see in detail, pain and shame; cf. infra chap. 4 and 5.

12.Csepregi (2006, especially 51ff.).

13.With the notorious theoretical (materialism, occasionalism, psychophysical parallelism, psychosomatics) and therapeutic (drugs and psych drugs abuse) consequences.

14.But also in second person, given the possibility to access the physical body through the interaction with a “you” (Demmerling and Landweer, 2007, 22n42).

15.If we conceived of the Leib as an autonomous “thing,” instead of a quasi-thing or as a function in which we are emotionally involved in first person, we would fatally fall back to dualism, which we want to avoid: such dualism would be no longer between body and soul, but rather between felt-body and physical body (Soentgen, 1998, 60ff.; Waldenfels, 2000, 280; Blume and Demmerling, 2007, 119–120).

16.Straus (1963, 367–379).

17.Böhme (2003, 75).

18.Starting from the paranoid anguish of shame, as the reification and decentralization of one’s own person, up to dysesthesia and, above all, dysmorphophobia as an exaggerated perception of a certain portion of the physical body, which is surgically incurable precisely because it’s felt-bodily.

19.Waldenfels (2000, 255–257).

20.“Surfaces are unrelated to the felt-body; there are no surfaces within our felt-bodily sensations” (Schmitz, 2010, 280).

21.Such as when we anatomically highlight, for instance, the sensation for which the uterus is a nomadic organ inside women’s body. This conception was common up until the eighteenth century.

22.Grote (1972, 92).

23.Cf. Griffero (2014c).

24.In fact, the question “where are you?” would be replied with a “I know where I am, but I feel like I’m not there” by the schizoid patient (Minkowski, 1970, 272ff.).

25.Following Straus (1963, 316–324).

26.A central notion in Schmitz (since 1965).

27.“In anxiety or joy the sensation seems to have its seat in the heart. Many affections, yea most of them, manifest themselves most strongly in the diaphragm. Pity moves the intestines, and other instincts manifest their origin in other organs” (Kant, 1900, 50*). Of course, the mistake is simply the organic collocation.

28.See Schmitz (2010, 225), for example.

29.Schmitz (1965, 27ff.); Soentgen (1998, 19).

30.Consider the difficulties transsexuals face when they strive to find a match between their lived-body and the topography of their (new) physical body.

31.Though the difference becomes thinner if we define the body schema as an automatic system of sensory-motor processes and prereflexive and proprioceptive consciousness (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008, 146), and if we see it as “an invisible network of the spatial orientation [which is not] limited to our felt-body, but rather also includes its correlation to the environment and to its own dealing with things” (Fuchs, 2000, 41).

32.See Böhme (2003, 29).

33.Waving the hands, for instance, pretending to greet someone (Waldenfels, 2000, 114–115).

34.The original and often oneirically attestable fragmentation of the body makes room for a single phantomatic unity, according to Lacan, only by means of a mirror image.

35.“The body schema, the way the body articulates, [is] at the same time an expression of the way the others see me” (Waldenfels, 2000, 121).

36.Which is inexplicable in terms of illusion of the representational consciousness or as a malfunction of nerve funicula, and this is why it is meaningfully reinterpreted from both a psychological and a physiological (“existential”) perspective by Merleau-Ponty (1945, 88ff.). The phantom limb is actually a felt-bodily isle, a quasi-thing, which appears to be delusional only insofar as it is framed on the basis of the body schema (for instance, when one leans on the missing leg and falls): Schmitz (1965, 30) thinks so as well, albeit rejecting (2003, 387) Merleau-Ponty’s explanation, which he considers grotesque.

37.See Schmitz (2010, 231–232).

38.As a “systematic representation and culturally specific of the lived-body and of its motion” (Rappe, 1995, 34).

39.Cf. Griffero (2014c).

40.Cf. Rappe’s systematic work (1995), in line with Schmitz’s interpretation.

41.See Schmitz (1965, 365ff.).

42.If we admitted that human perception, which is all but a natural invariance, is nowadays governed by tasks of mere data acquisition and/or decodification of signals, how could we take it away from deep anthropological influences, especially if we’re driven simply by a resurrected theoretical paradigm? Where should we draw the resources to single out a sensible-bodily perception, which may be a perfect seismograph of one’s own emotional situation, rather than of the organism?

43.Since “only culture treats the body as a thing that can be owned, only in culture has it been distinguished from mind […] as the object, the dead thing, the corpus,” it “remains a cadaver, no matter how trained and fit it may” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, 193–194).

44.“Those who extolled the body in Germany, the gymnasts and outdoor sports enthusiasts, always had an intimate affinity to killing, as nature lovers have to hunting. They see the body as a mobile mechanism, with its hinged links, the flesh upholstering the skeleton. They manipulate the body, actuating the limbs as if they were already severed. […] Unaware, they measure the other with the eye of the coffin maker” (ibid., 195).

45.It is not (following Aristotle) the soul, but the felt-body that is every other thing: “body am I through and through, and nothing besides; and soul is just a word for something on the body” (Nietzsche, 2006, 23).

46.Just as well, the relation between the mother and the foetus thus becomes surprisingly artificial. In a way, it is turned into an artefact, thanks to prenatal diagnostics (see Böhme, 2003, 37).

47.Which is something more than the “embodiment” made possible by new habits that have become familiar (Leder, 1990, 31).

48.“The tool is integrated within the felt-bodily sensations, so that it is—and it is moved—as if it were one of my parts” (Böhme, 2003, 305).

49.In the Jamesian sense that anger, for instance, does not appear in clenching the fist, but rather it is that clenching (Waldenfels, 2000, 226).

50.“From our felt-bodiliness come moral problems; that is, serious problems, and as we make our decisions on those, we thereby decide what we are and how we are as human beings” (Böhme, 2008, 67).

51.For a first, historiographically useful approach to a phenomenology of the felt-body as philosophy of nature working as a “‘didactical integration’ in the sense of an education to life and experience”; see Thomas (1996, 201 for the quotation).

52.“In general I am a self as it’s inevitable that I am given to myself”; “my body is not mine because I own it, but because I am given to myself as a felt-body” (Böhme, 2008, 157, 160).

53.Schmitz (2010, 248).

54.Hence the plethora of artificial remedies (sleeping pills, laxatives, aphrodisiacs, painkillers, stimulants), as they can force the body to do what it, in its non-intentionality, should be perfectly able to do by itself.

55.Cf. also Shustermann (2008).

56.The one suggested by New Phenomenology is particularly complex, and its obviously combinable “letters” include: “angst, vastity, contraction, expansion, direction, tension, dilatation, intensity, rhythm (felt-bodily economy as a combination of intensity and rhythm), privative expansion, privative contraction, protopathic tendency, epicritic tendency, felt-bodily isles formation, felt-bodily isles decrease” (Schmitz, 1965, 170).

57.“To experience oneself within the presence of the lived-body and to live felt-bodily living in nature, on the street, or at a meeting, is only possible through practice and by overcoming alienating attitudes” (Böhme, 2010, 127).

Chapter 4

1.Cf. Griffero (2011a).

2.Klages (1991a, 316).

3.“The seeds of destruction are indifferent to whether they destroy the mind of a numskull or a genius” (Jünger, 2008, 53).

4.Le Breton (1995, 26).

5.“A paradoxical instance of safeguard, repeated proof of existence, substitute of love to alleviate something’s absence, means of putting pressure on the other, claim warranty, way of atonement, etc.” In short, “between the stimulus and the perception there is the whole thickness of the individual as uniqueness, history, social and cultural belonging” (Le Breton, 1995, 55, 111).

6.Is it true that humans can set themselves excentrically (Plessner) with regards to pain, while “the pain an animal endures does not cause to it to suffer,” seeing as “it does not enjoy freedom with regard to its hurtful sensation, nor the consequent emancipation from the ‘vital’ pattern of behaviour” (Buytendijk, 1961, 87, 86)?

7.“A situation, a meeting, a silence, a word, a refusal to salute, etc., are all painful in their objective and concrete form. Thus we speak of the hurtfulness of a word that causes us pain […] In all forms of helplessness, whether fear, unfulfilled desires, ethical hurt, sense of guilt, man is thrown back on himself and experiences the expression of helplessness in the change in the beat of his heart” (Buytendijk, 1961, 139, 141).

8.Le Breton, 1995 (19, 23).

9.See Costa (2007, 43): “Even if we know what happens in our brain when we perceive, it does not necessarily mean that know what it means to perceive […] I can only know at first hand what perception is, insofar as I experience perceiving.”

10.Straus (1963, 356).

11.See Plügge (1967, 12).

12.After all, as wittily noted by Pierre Bayle, God could have very well given us impulses other than pain to protect the body.

13.“The conclusion that pain is to be found ‘wherever it has a share in the plan of the organism and is accordingly necessary and useful’ is completely without foundation” (Buytendijk, 1961, 106)

14.“On the one hand, suffering itself produces its own masks; on the other hand it borrows them, it wears them, because every individual pain is preceded by the social figures of pain in the world—people correspond to them when the necessity of pain imposes it, they communicate pain through them” (Natoli, 1986, 12).

15.See van den Berg (2007, 187, 195).

16.Melzack (1975, 283).

17.Le Breton (1995, 40).

18.Scarry (1985, 27ff.).

19.Eastern cultures are apparently more careful to it (Grüny, 2004, 144–145).

20.Unless one rightly regards the intentionality of consciousness as the act of “receiving the manifestation of the object” (Costa, 2007, 47).

21.Szasz (1975, 89).

22.See Buytendijk (1961, 117); Weizsäcker (1990, 541); Wendell (1996, 171).

23.Hence the suggestive hypothesis that pain is a kind of frozen past, a bodily life not (no longer) in place, a “having-become settled […] that on the one hand allows for the unfolding of felt-bodily vitality and on the other hand increasingly restricts it” (Fuchs, 2000, 124).

24.Required not only by Christian dolorism but also by the (often patriotic) sense of belonging to some communities as a virtue independent of individual talent (Buytendijk, 1961, 159–160).

25.Schmitz (1965, 308ff.).

26.Thus posited Gadamer (2003).

27.See Schmitz (1964, 183–207; 2003, 222–226).

28.“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity” (Greene, 1951, 47).

29.“The principle of subjectivity is the occurrence of affectively giving oneself to oneself” (Böhme, 2008, 144).

30.In fact it is the disease, and not health, that comes forward and meets us, invading us, because health is not exactly something that manifests itself (Gadamer, 1996, 107).

31.Paraphrasing Gadamer (1996, 112), one could consider the question “do you feel pain?” legitimate, while the question “do you feel no pain?” is ridiculous.

32.“It’s almost as if the body of the patient were trying to hide under a roof too small” (Böhme/Akashe-Böhme, 2005, 66).

33.They locate/confine pain in one part of the (physical) body—for Freud, with libidinal investment (see Schilder, 1999, 104)—while freeing the other ones, or impede the complete domination of consciousness by means of opposite stimuli of various nature.

34.Thus posited Böhme (2003, 101).

35.Respectively Bakan (1968, 76) and Weizsäcker (1926/27, 320); see Grüny (2004, 123).

36.Moldzio (2002, 258ff.).

37.Achelis (1925, 55); Jackson (1994, 206).

38.See Fuchs (2001, 65).

39.Scarry (1985, 55).

40.Schmitz (1964, 226–227).

41.Tagliapietra (2006, 142) is less exclusive: “One is never as fully oneself as when one experiences pain or pleasure. The basic emotions nail the abstract generality of our thoughts to the uniqueness of a body and the particularity of a situation.”

42.See Illich (1976, ch. 2).

43.Le Breton (1995, 161–172).

44.“Someone who has been in an area which is all but cut off from medical assistance knows that resignation, courage, and trust give greater joy than the knowledge that the doctor can be called at any time” (Buytendijk, 1961, 15).

45.“Any attempt at an apology for pain, which the search for meaning is always in danger of falling into, is itself an act of violence towards those who suffer” (Grüny, 2004, 264).

46.“Even through the willingness to endure something or, more generally, to let something happen us, we decide what kind of person we are” (Böhme, 2008, 234).

47.This thesis is central to Jünger (2008).

48.Le Breton (1995, 147ff., 211).

49.Cf. Böhme (2009).

50.Schmitz (1964, 222).

Chapter 5

1.See Griffero (2012a, 2012c).

2.Marquard (1989, 62).

3.Cf. H. Böhme (1996).

4.See Canetti (1978, 15ff.) and Sanders (2009). For an interdisciplinary approach, cf. Antonelli and Rotili (eds.) (2012).

5.Despite the undoubted tendency to self-concealment (Neckel, 2009, 104; more generally 1991), enhanced today by the media iconomania (Belpoliti, 2010, 148–149).

6.See Meyer-Drawe (2009, 38).

7.Cf. Wurmser (1981).

8.Blume (2003, 90–91).

9.See Demmerling (2009, 89n13). In Scheler (1987), this is a protection of the ideality of the spirit compared to what makes humans “completely similar to animals: corporeality” (Tagliapietra, 2006, 66).

10.Straus (1966) speaks of it in terms of “protecting shame.” Cf. also Binswanger (1958) and, more generally, Demmerling and Landweer (2007, 219–244).

11.After all, this has always been acknowledged: “no one feels shame before children or animals—or of the same things before those who are known to them and those who are not; before the former, they are ashamed of things that appear really disgraceful, before strangers, of those which are only condemned by convention” (Aristotle, 1926, 219).

12.“Not being able (physically or culturally, cognitively or aesthetically) of individualisation: this is the most modern form of connection between shame and person from the social point of view” (Neckel, 2009, 118).

13.See Belpoliti (2010, 29) and Sennett (2003, 101ff.).

14.Hilgers (2006, 15) suggests an instructive variety: “Embarrassment, shyness, shame for the cessation of competence, shame for addiction, shame for intimacy, shame for being the third wheel (oedipal shame), shame for the discrepancy between the ideal (the self) and the state-of-the-is [,] feelings of shame connected to a sense of guilt, hence often the inevitable development of the shame-guilt spiral, [and] humiliation and mortification.”

15.“Those who feel ashamed duplicate themselves, as they perceive themselves ‘from the outside’ as those who are ashamed” (Fuchs, 2005, 250) and that, therefore, are “rejected” (Seidler, 1995, 178).

16.For instance, one is more ashamed of a sentimental failure than of a specific technical incompetence. Maybe this is because the sphere of love is an indispensable value that is both adaptive (maternal care aimed at survival and/or its centrality for reproductive success) and cognitive (implying the person as a whole) (Lewis, 1995, 138ff.).

17.As posited by Heller, Nussbaum, and mainly Duerr (1988), notoriously in opposition to the thesis brought forward by Elias (1994) on the growing separation between the public sphere and the private sphere (i.e., the “myth” of the process of civilization). Modesty and shame are, for Duerr, absolutely original ontological characters, as shame and repulsion for the exposure of genitalia are consubstantial to homination itself, while being culturally refinable (Tagliapietra, 2006, 135).

18.Honneth (1995, 137).

19.See Demmerling (2009, 86).

20.See Heller (1985, 13) and Hilgers (2006, 15).

21.Sometimes, in fact, anger prevents shame (the duel wiping out an offence) and sometimes shame silences anger (the more or less stylized ritual of apologizing). See Schmitz (2010, 195).

22.Prototypical compared to the subsequent shame for sexual organs (Nussbaum, 2004, 186).

23.Holzhey-Kunz (2006). Demmerling (2009, 87–90).

24.For an opposite thesis, cf. Simmel (1992a).

25.Castelfranchi (2005, 176-177).

26.In shame we are immersed and subjugated: we do not judge some previous emotion (Schmitz, 2010, 197–198).

27.Schmitz (1994, 105).

28.“Shame is not properly protensional but prohibiting” (Lipps, 1977, 32).

29.See Schmitz (2010, 196–197). “The feeling ‘I am the mid-point of the world!’ arises very strongly if one is suddenly overcome with shame; one then stands there as though confused in the midst of a surging sea and […] dazzled as though by a great eye which gazes upon us and through us from all sides” (Nietzsche, 1997, 166).

30.Taylor (1985, 81).

31.Schmitz (1964, 248).

32.Griffero (2014a: 140–141, and 2012a, 2012c).

33.See Castelfranchi (2005, 164, 170).

34.This was already posited by Aristotle (1926, 219).

35.“A landscape can have a sad, serene, or troubled effect and—when the clouds gather and the light turns dark—even an angry one, but surely not a bold, shameless or grateful one” (Schmitz, 1965, 147).

36.Nussbaum (2004, 185).

37.In the absence of a witness, rather than an emotion it would be “a passion to torture oneself with contempt continuously, but in vain” (Kant, 1996, 160).

38.“Feeling of loss of selfhood in the eyes of the (possible) other” (Tugendhat, 1993b, 57). See also Demmerling (2009, 93).

39.Anolli (2000, 7, 35, 61).

40.Due to shame, young Japanese people “bury themselves” in their room (Belpoliti, 2010, 127–139).

41.“Intermediaries of centripetal vectors of feeling as an atmosphere that also spreads without them” (Schmitz quoted in Blume, 2003, 110).

42.“The great health ignores the objectivity of the body because it does not feel its weight” (Natoli, 2001, 106).

43.In fact, it is because of the gaze of angels that women should cover themselves (1Cor 11:10).

44.“‘Is it true that God is everywhere?’ a little girl asked her mother; ‘I find that indecent!’” (Nietzsche, 2001, 8).

45.This is all the more so after the weakening of external moral authorities.

46.Since we live “in the minds of others without knowing it” (Cooley, 1922, 208).

47.See Heller (1985, 48) and Scheff (1988, 399).

48.This is the sense of the gift of modesty to humans for their survival, which is addressed in Plato’s Protagoras. Hence, the birth of modern individualism, with its autonomy and its right to secrecy (Tagliapietra, 2006, 77, 136).

49.Schmitz (1973, 35–43, 44–47).

50.“I can be shamed by what another has the courage to do. Showing me the possibility of that before which, discouraged, I fled, I am exposed. I thus become aware of ‘my limits’” (Lipps, 1977, 41).

51.This is tackled by Titze (1997).

52.See Landweer (1999, 43).

53.Castelfranchi (2005, 167–169); Goffman (1967, 108n6).

54.But for a critique of the current of thought (started by Snell) according to which the Homeric man, not perceiving himself as personal unity and center of action, is alien to the idea of responsibility, see Williams (1993, 21ff.). For him, the absence of the name for it (say, for the psyche as separated from the body) does not at all entail the absence of the notion of interiority: “an absence of theory is not a theory of absence” (ibid., 27).

55.Lipps (1977, 10, 13). On Lipps, cf. Hennigfeld (1993) and Kerckhoven (2001).

56.Schmitz (1997, 156; 1980, 173).

57.Hence the eternal alienation in the presence of the absolutely non-objectifiable entity (God).

58.The very fear of nudity symbolizes, in fact, the fear of appearing not as subjects (thanks to clothing) but as mere objects.

59.For Widmer (2009, 62–63), as well as for Lacan, this is the only way to truly become a subject.

60.“It is necessary that the Other be present to consciousness completely in order that consciousness precisely by being nothing may escape that Other who threatens to ensnare it” (Sartre, 1978, 284). However, it is not certain that this leads to a real communication between gazes: “I never know the other as both subject and object. Nor can I ever relate to him as a subject to a subject” (Blume, 2003, 169). Cf. Schmitz (1981).

61.Schmitz (1980, 26–27).

62.Nussbaum (2004, 177ff.).

63.Schmitz (1990, 344).

64.Nussbaum (2004, 216, 243–244, 319).

65.It is with the paralysis induced by the collectivization of shame that Schmitz (2010, 199–201) explains the corporate interests of postwar Germany.

66.Goffman (1967, 100) and Schmitz (2003, 45–47).

67.See Lipps (1977, 30, 41). In any case, this is a less direct perception than that of the external expression of shame (Schmitz 2005a, 286).

68.Such volatility makes it a sort of “law of all or nothing”: cf. Ballerini and Rossi Monti (1990, 1997) and Rossi Monti (1998).

69.Reinterpreting the supposed intentionality of feelings à la Schmitz (cf. supra, ch. 2) here we’d have a condensation zone (those who are captivated by shame or radiate it involuntarily) and an anchor point (the shameful act) (Schmitz 1990, 302, 343; 2010, 194–195). See Blume (2003, 79) and Demmerling (2009, 77).

70.Landweer (1999, 52); Tagliapietra (2006, 38).

71.Hence a moral disease, but in some cases also a positive refusal to internalize heteronymous moral parameters (Mason 2010, 408). See Schmitz/Marx/Moldzio, 2002, 170; 2003, 319, Schmitz/Sohst 2005, 92–93) and Blume (2003, 76).

72.Schmitz (1990, 330; 2003, 324; 2010, 198).

73.In fact, the involuntary character of blushing (Darwin docet!), which allegedly expresses one’s adhesion to the norm with childish innocence, is traditionally ascribed with an evolutionarily adaptive value. See Castelfranchi (2005, 173ff.).

74.Without being able to fake it, not even in front of those who weren’t aware of it until then.

75.Schmitz (1990, 339; 2010, 197).

76.In this sense, it is similar to the atmospheric fear infecting poor Cosette: “She was covered with it, so to speak; fear drew her elbows close to her hips, withdrew her heels under her petticoat, made her occupy as little space as possible […] and had become what might be called the habit of her body” (Hugo, 2006, vol. 3, 166).

77.Hilgers (2006, 13).

78.Anolli (2000, 52–55) and Castelfranchi (2005, 186ff.).

79.Lewis (1995, 7).

80.Hence also the loss of self-esteem of those who see their reflection distorted by the anger of shame (Wurmser, 1981).

81.“The discreditor is just as guilty as the person he discredits—sometimes more so, for, if he has been posing as a tactful man, in destroying another’s image he destroys his own” (Goffman, 1967, 106).

82.Those who are ashamed of someone else are neither completely foreign to them nor completely close to them (Simmel, 1992a).

83.Anolli (2000, 15).

84.Landweer (1999, 37); Castelfranchi (2005); Schüttauf, Specht, and Wachenhausen (2003, 24ff.). Instead, atmosphericness is totally inactive in the case of totally idiosyncratic norms unknown to the witness (Demmerling, 2009, 79).

85.See Taylor (1985, 69), Schmitz (2010, 200) and, for an opposite opinion, Blume (2003, 88n7).

86.Food etiquette, for instance, allegedly hides the embarrassment for an animal-like activity such as eating (Schmitz, 1990, 385).

87.See also Landweer (1999, 122).

88.For instance, I might be ashamed of being a bad piano player, ideally considering music to be the victim of my shortcoming.

89.Anolli (2000, 30).

90.See Williams (1993, 89) and Tagliapietra (2006, 17–18).

91.Anolli (2000, 12).

92.This is posited by Simmel (1992a).

93.Wurmser (1990, 210); Schmitz (1973, 46).

94.Landweer (1999, 44).

95.The language of the shameful person is sometimes prolix and sometimes laconic (Anolli 2000, 31–32, 56–59), while sometimes it ritually falls into swearing (Heller, 1985, 29).

96.Scheff (1988, 402).

97.Anolli (2000, 73).

98.Simmel (1992a, 69; 1992b, 80–82).

99.Aristotle already posited that shame is particularly intense if those who are misbehaving are people we respect or who respect us (Aristotle, 1926, 215ff.).

100.See Wildt (1995, 31) and Blume (2003, 96–108).

101.Unless one admits that, in that case, they are ashamed for not being able or willing to react—or even, as posited by chauvinism, for having felt pleasure.

102.Schmitz (1997, 159).

103.Tagliapietra (2006, 174).

104.That is, the secrecy that is transcendentally alien to exposure and not simply yet to be revealed.

105.Even though it cannot be reduced to a private inner world, due to its over- and presubjective nature.

Chapter 6

1.Cf. Griffero (2014d).

2.Merleau-Ponty (1964, 162–163).

3.“The world watches me. Everything watches me: it watches out of itself; it ‘looks out.’ To appear is a basic ontological mode of the being of things; they are in all respects ‘appearance.’ […] To appear is really a form of seeing. The originary way of seeing, with which things are in a sense born to the world. It founds my seeing related to them. The seeing of man is a response, an adherence to the gaze of the things themselves. Gaze-of-response” (Rombach, 1987, 185).

4.See Waldenfels (2000, 372): it’s a communication that is woven throughout our being-in-the-world, but whose prototype (syntonic, in this case) is perhaps the bodily, affective, and communicative-mimetic understanding between mother and infant. But we could also mention here the “reversibility” (Merleau-Ponty): since body and things are of the same “flesh,” we could say that a thing, which is sensible without being sentient, possess an agency of its own, that “my bodily seeing the tree is the way the tree sees through me” (Ingold, 2012, 83). Ingold defines these two interrelated “being with” inhalation and exhalation and calls atmosphere only the first one.

5.“A look can punish, encourage, or estabilish dominance. The size of the pupils can indicate interest or distaste” (Hall, 1966, 81).

6.It “is not at all a reception of signals but a corporeal communication, basically of the type of that corporealization which occurs in a particularly pure way in all forms of suggestion, as well as in acting together with others with no reaction time” (Schmitz, 1989, 13).

7.Fuchs (2008, 51).

8.I use the adjective “corporeal” as referring to the felt-body.

9.(Merleau-Ponty 2005, 370, 373–374). “To see things in motion is to see-between, to see-in, to peer into the cracks, joints and sutures of things, to bury oneself in them and suck them; it means loving things, sinking in them and then re-emerging from them” (Kassner, 1997, 78).

10.First and foremost prescinding from the long-standing issue of the contribution given by portraiture to the genesis of the (modern) subject, but also from the issue of the portrait as necessarily being a self-portrait (of the artist) (Pommier, 1998) or a mere rhetorical expression of the social function of representation (Gurisatti, 2006, 238–239).

11.Levinas (1979, 187ff.) would force atmospherology to an incoherent apophantic ineffability.

12.Gurisatti (2006, 242).

13.Which can be summarized in “a directed, relatively complicated figure that indicates the direction to the involuntary motor behaviour. A direction that proceeds from narrowness to vastness and in which the gestures of its sensitive corporeal tendency always extend far beyond their perceived realization in the world of the physical body” (Schmitz, 1989, 213–214).

14.“In the face-to-face encounter, we are neither confronted with a mere body, nor with a hidden psyche, but with a unified whole. When I see another’s face, I see it as friendly or angry, etc.—that is, the very face expresses these emotions” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 148–149).

15.Covering the rest of the body, or underestimating the motor expressiveness of the body as more transient.

16.The face also assumes its own meaning only if it recalls, first of all through the “bust,” “the link with the set to which it belongs” (Stoichita, 2003, 29). The atmosphere of a menacing look, moreover, “as atmosphere, also appears in threatening clouds that thicken and bring rain. What’s more, in the flicker of the face or hands, or even in the rigid tension of the gaze, there emerges a corporeal intensity that is spasmodically marked and included in the pathos of the threat that emanates it, and also in the conflict of person decided to attack, etc.” (Schmitz, 1989, 185–186).

17.Cf. Eberlein (2011).

18.Between corporealization, consisting in encompassing the other or things in one’s felt-bodily contractive tendency, and decorporealization, recognizable in the suspension of the contractive tendency in favor of another contractive center (eminently, hypnotic trance).

19.Self-portrait with bottle of wine, 1906.

20.Fraenger (1996, 73–75).

21.Schmitz (2002, 133, 136–137).

22.There is nothing “which, staying so absolutely in place, seems to reach beyond it to such an extent: the eye penetrates, it withdraws, it circles a room, it wanders, it reaches as though behind the wanted object and pulls it toward itself” (Simmel, 1959, 281).

23.“As a radar, the look is bound, as if it were almost enchanted, to the object approaching and transfers its motor suggestion—the intuitive foreshadowing of its impending motion—to the motoric schema of the body, whose directions (proceeding irreversibly from narrowness to vastness) the gaze itself is a part of, in such a way as to succeed in the adequate movement with which it dodges the object” (Schmitz, 2010, 226–227).

24.Levinas (1979, 202, 212).

25.Wittgenstein (1980, § 1100). The gaze is traditionally considered endowed with a particular ontological power (in distans) (Griffero, 2003, 2011c), based on the belief that “the light, the visual rays do not originate from the observed object but from the eye” (Frey, 1953, 9).

26.“When one reads into the eyes of others, they respond in a way that always obliges one to engage (together with further reading) in a new initiative, possibly modified by their response; one becomes aware that the message of these eyes is the expression of an experience” (Schmitz, 1989, 197).

27.Waldenfels (2000, 379).

28.Condon (1975, 43).

29.That, in a nutshell, “is addressed elsewhere, observes a gaze cast upon him, observes a chance of attention or of an indefinite encounter, and also makes the whole face mobile, with some discrete trait” (Nancy, 2000, 42). I leave aside, on principle, any kind of interplay of gazes (philologically rather interesting), both between the artist and the person portrayed and between the various figures portrayed.

30.That “with its patterns of recognition and its identification codes exerts a morbid fascination on a public anxious to peer into (or expose) the soul of others” (Gurisatti, 2006, 183–184).

31.Frey (1953, 35).

32.Waldenfels (2000, 386–387n16).

33.Even as the unextended moment, to which infinite movements will aim and from which infinite movements will depart (Simmel, 1959).

34.The “thrill of the most subtle expressive impulses up until the peripheral area of expression is what gives a cyclothymic man a certain atmosphere, an aura that radiates outside” (Lersch, 1951, 143).

35.In fact, “the full face aspect,” perhaps because it marginalizes the boundary lines (Friedländer, 1960, 124), is the immediate expression of the ‘’demonic individuality,” sometimes even of the paralyzing spell, but above all of “sympathy,” of pity, of the bond between me and you in the relationship that the “world” has with the “I” (Frey, 1953, 6, 20, 11).

36.Antagonism is in fact more communicatively effective (possibly in equilibrium with the consonance) than harmony (Fuchs, 2000, 250), which in itself is too prone to emotional contagion and to a unipathy that reduces the other to the self (Scheler, 2008, 8ff.).

37.Frey (1953, 12).

38.Often also symptomatic of a heightened attention (horizontal frown) and of wait, or even of a conflicting disposition (vertical frown). See Lersch (1951, 93).

39.See the wonderful analysis of Tintoretto’s self-portrait by Frey (1953, 47): the face emerges out of a dark non-place, and the eyes are empty, veiled by a mask that prevents any reading.

40.The gaze is directed to the void here, crossing and reaching beyond an observer felt as absent or infinitely distant.

41.“The more frequent and intense the innervation of specific muscles, the more it leaves traces on the surface of the epidermis: engrams, solidified movements” (Lersch, 1951, 23). Hence Schopenhauer’s idea that the portrait only of elderly people reveals their true nature.

42.“When the power of the traits threatens to crack—as is the case if the eyes are wide open, the mouth is open or the cheek muscles are flabby and hang—we have the distinct impression of a decrease in the spiritual life, or even of a ‘despiritualization’” (Simmel, 1985, 57).

43.In particular in the case of the self-portrait, which, in its theatrical aggressiveness, is “an emergence from the picture to a degree which usually is not characteristic of portraits” (Friedländer, 1960, 124), and almost explicitly seeks to engage in a corporeal skirmish with the observer.

44.Waldenfels (2000, 368ff.).

45.Schmitz (2002, 129).

46.Hegel (1998, I, 153–154).

47.In the case of Rilke, for example, an absolute verticality that, rather than to religious devotion, might allude to the resomatization of asceticism implied in contemporary athleticism (Sloterdijk, 2013, 19ff.).

48.Figal (2015, 213ff.).

49.Böhme (2010, 178).

Chapter 7

1.Cf. also Griffero (2013d).

2.Cf. at least Blumenberg (1993), Hauskeller (2004), Lechtermann and Wandhoff (2008).

3.Jovialish alludes to Jove, and therefore to something heavenly and divine.

4.The German word is Schein, which also means appearance.

5.But in Christian epiphanism (e.g., Scotus Eriugena), every stone or block of wood is a light capable of illuminating.

6.For a confirmation of the ancient link between brightness and beauty, rejected by Socrates, see the sophist Hippias (Hipp. Ma. 289dff.)

7.The age when Jacob Böhme’s vision took place is also that in which the still-life painting genre bloomed (Böhme, 1989, 168).

8.Probably based on the ancient analogy between perceived (external light) and perceiver (inner light) (G. Böhme and H. Böhme, 2004, 150).

9.For the “brightness” of the spiritual body, cf. Griffero (2006a; 2009a).

10.See Soentgen (1997, 238) and Bremer (1974).

11.Such pleasure is produced by means of “the being-for-the-other, which returns to the subject as the enlargement of his own sphere of significance” (Simmel, 1997, 209).

12.Cf. Sedlmayr (1979; 1964).

13.“We have been taught to look into light without putting on black spectacles” (Gombrich, 1984, 45), and to observe the “play of disembodied light” (Arnheim, 1974, 303).

14.In the sense that if one is blinded by the light, one cannot see clearly what is in the light (Rothacker, 1954, 9).

15.Be it the being’s destiny or, more modestly, the world project (paradigm) in force, it is still extrascientific.

16.Perhaps even with the skin, particularly sensitive to any light variation (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 118–119).

17.According to the famous, but now very controversial, thesis by Panofsky (1955).

18.Clarity is far from “an absolute value. […] It only represents a form of life, one of the many. Not even for the world, in the name of clarity, would we give up the dark, the night, the mystery and intense life that throbs in these phenomena, offering itself to us” (Minkowski, 1936, 159).

19.“As soon as night falls, our feeling about the nearest of things is changed. There is the wind, which travels as if upon forbidden paths, whispering as if seeking something, annoyed because it does not find it” (Nietzsche, 2013, 155).

20.The “atmosphere of discreet charm” of blurriness is sometimes reached even by perceptually (and, therefore, less sensibly) lingering on an object (Minkowski, 1936, 209).

21.“No one would like to live in an infinitely vivid place, where everything is patently connected to everything else. […] We don’t wish to live in a goldfish bowl; we would be overwhelmed by a multiplicity of evocative signs” (Lynch, 1981, 143).

22.“Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry. It is because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief. Despair yawns” (Hugo, 2006, vol. 2, 223).

23.Gombrich (1984, 28).

24.Whereas the tendency to deprive things of their aura rather consists in the “need to possess the object, from the closest proximity” (Benjamin, 2008, 285).

25.“The observer determined to mark differences treats even what is far away as if it were close, and sacrifices the intuitive picture for a sequence of places that he measures with his gaze one after another, i.e. separately, while the gaze of one who is immersed in observation, even of a nearby object, is captivated, devoid of purposes, by the image of the object—and this means at least that the image of a shape is not enclosed by borders, but by all of the images around. Not so much the object’s distance, but rather the mode of observation decides whether it has the characteristics of closeness or distance; and no one ignores that closeness has the character of the thing, while distance has that of the image.” (Klages, 1991, 428–429)

26.Böhme (1989, 177).

27.Wagner (2001, 264) referring respectively to James Turrell and Dan Flavin.

28.Böhme (1989, 166–189).

29.An exception is given by Adorno’s (2013, 112) rather shy allusions to the subversive character of transience (that of fireworks) compared to the abstract duration of truth.

30.This is the unresolved case of Monet’s twenty paintings of Rouen’s cathedral at different hours of the day (cf. Mahayni, 2002).

31.This should be properly distinguished both from the simple weakening of the light (adapting to which the eye preserves the previous optical world) and from the so-called eye twilight, where light shines through closed eyelids.

32.This blurring, however, can even come from excessive light intensity (Lehmann, 1986, 155–156, 159, 190, and passim).

33.In Japanese landscape painting, the fog takes spatial depth away from the field of view, so that “what you see has a flat effect, the fog itself looks like a wall on which the objects do not stand out,” and mountains appear even more distant if interrupted by layers of mist (Böhme, 2006, 67, 72).

34.An exception to this is provided by the solitary man, who curiously sees fog as a consolation that “fills the abyss surrounding him” (Benjamin, 1999, 338).

35.In fact, the first impulse of a melancholy person—think of the traditional representation of acedia as a cloud (caligo)—could even be to go to the oculist.

36.Böhme (2006, 67, 70).

37.“This fog, these clouds and these lonely forest paths veiled in mist are what trains and educates us living in northern Germany” (Klages, 1944, 492).

38.Griffero (2014a, 57–60).

39.See Merleau-Ponty (2005, 330), Schmitz (1969, 389–390.), Bollnow (2011, 211ff.) and especially Minkowski (1936, 155), for whom the “teachings” of the night outweigh those of the day.

40.Hauskeller (1995, 127).

41.After all, this is vertiginously atmospheric (following the marvellous description found in Hugo 2006, vol. 2, 144) only “in the sooty opacity” generated evidently by some residual light in which “a chimerical reality appears in the indistinct depths. The inconceivable is outlined a few paces distant from you with a spectral clearness. One beholds floating, either in space or in one’s own brain, one knows not what vague and intangible thing […] as though one’s soul were becoming amalgamated with the darkness.”

42.As in the solar eclipse, which can suggest ex contrario the numinous character of what is missing, described by Stifter (see Sedlmayr 1964, 9–17), but also splendidly filmed by Michelangelo Antonioni (Eclipse, 1962).

43.Benjamin (2008, 283).

44.Bollnow (1956, 144–145).

45.This transient luminosity cannot be set against the city “in itself” since architecture designs and builds always also “with” light (even more so if artificial) (Böhme, 2006, 91).

46.For Klages (1929–1932, 176–177), for example, twilight, irreducible to discrete properties as a unified image, consists in the vertiginous mutual coimplication of a flag fluttering in the twilight, of the fluttering and the twilight itself, and so on (see Griffero, 2014a, 120–121).

47.That’s why it can be called “fresh,” “dim,” “secret,” “quiet,” etc. See Schmitz (1964, 154). We get lost in twilight (Tuppini, 2003, 150) just as we do in “muffled noise, a threatening shadow, in one of those indistinct rustles that only in the evening acquire their surprising and menacing character, or in someone’s being unnoticedly busy near the pier.”

48.During the day space, on the contrary, “the intermediate space between things, that is, this apparent nothingness, is perceived in it” (Bollnow, 2011, 205).

49.I therefore consider it reductive to state that “light when it travels through the night as in the beam from a lighthouse is thing-like, or when it spreads across the sky at dawn,” and not when the light is “here in this room.” Similarly, it is reductive to claim that the fog drifting up a valley is thing-like but the fog encountered by a ship isn’t (Koffka, 1955, 70–71).

50.Nietzsche describes the night in Venice as only relatively dark (Olschanski, 2004, 73–74): “Let shadows start preparing / to grow into the brown and balmy night! / Too early in the day for chimes, the flaring / of gilded trim awaits a rosy light, / Much does the day compress, / much time for verses, prowling, secret sharing” (Nietzsche, 2001, 257).

51.Otto (1936, 71).

52.In the gloom of the forest, for instance, we go “deeper and deeper” as if “into a limitless world” which is always ancestral, seeing as “in the reign of the imagination, there are no young forests” (Bachelard, 1994, 185, 188).

53.Think of the distressing existential question to which Nietzsche (2006, 85) feels the need to answer when “the sun set long ago. […] The meadow is moist, coolness emanates from the woods.”

54.One has “the compelling impression of things emerging from a state of non-being and likely to return to it,” of “life as a process of appearing and disappearing” (Arnheim, 1974, 327). However, the spectrality generated by the disappearance of boundaries and the following sensorial deceit (Bollnow, 2011, 209) can also be merely a feeling of emptiness suggested by a transient phase of the day without its own specific character (Ratzel, 1905, 174).

55.“The ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods. […] In bright daylight the ear is less necessary” (Nietzsche, 1997, 143).

56.“The specific modulation of a material surface is defined patina. It derives from one’s material activity stimulated by an unintentional external influence” (Soentgen, 1997, 188).

57.Mahayni (2003, 99, 89–94).

58.For instance: uniforming or blurring filters, or colors so intense as to conceal the structure of matter and the form, or else the production of shadows in a medium that (like photography, especially in color) would in itself be unable to detect them (Böhme, 2004b, 121).

59.“It is clear amounts to saying: now we can see, we can see things” (Böhme, 1998, 37).

60.Seitter (2004, 59).

61.Böhme (2001, 126–129).

62.In the West even trees show a “spontaneous and natural regularity”: an “effect of symmetric precision that […] in Japan […] is the product only of man’s hand” (Watsuji, 1961, 73).

63.Such as when “between the red walls a narrow and sordid alley appears, one that maybe the shadows of the metal fire escapes will make arbitrarily lyrical for a moment” (Pierantoni, 1998, 15).

64.Twilightness, while mitigating rational individuation, always also intensifies it (even though largely) pathically.