Atmospheres to Think About
Atmospheres are the subject matter of productive work in a number of fields, also of reflection on a range of topics. Among the domains of inquiry Böhme has investigated, I’ll note four that hold great promise for continued study and creativity: matters of method, of disciplinarity, social sense, and philosophical anthropology.
Phenomenology, in the writings of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, was less a philosophical doctrine – one that supposedly privileges personal experience – than a philosophical method, a style of thought that does not seek to explain or analyse the world in the manner of the natural sciences but to describe phenomena as they give themselves to experience. Renewing this project, Böhme’s study awakens the amor mundi each of us feels, so that we can, with him, (re)discover the ecstasies of things, their expressions, resonances, and performances. The task is not simple, as Le Corbusier observed: ‘We must always say what we see, but above all and more difficult, we must always see what we see’ (1999: iii).
Seeing in this sense would seem to be celebrated in works of art. But which arts? Each of them equally, though differently? Since the withering of the composite work of art in the nineteenth century, we comfortably speak of the arts in their relative isolation: pure painting, pure music, pure architecture, and so on. Böhme’s book does not seek to overcome this plurality with a centralizing concept of art as such; instead, he demonstrates the actuality of rather unexpected conjunctions: plastic acoustics, musical chromatics, dramatic climates, and cinematic promenades – not as metaphors but concrete phenomena.
Sense such as this would not be for you or me alone, it would also be for us. Untimely as the claim may seem, atmospheres, for Böhme, are matters of common concern, moods are apprehended intersubjectively. Aesthetic experience is not only personal, and dispositions can be shared. This ‘new aesthetic’ elaborates an ethics of atmosphere production, according to which human interests intermingle with the beautiful. This thesis is particularly relevant today, when appetites for striking images are so hungry.
Perhaps the most challenging question arising from the book concerns the connections between the pre-reflective sense of atmospheres and other kinds of apprehension; more simply, how felt space can give rise to thought. The question must be asked because what is felt is also, perforce, subject to consideration. The varied spaces of eighteenth-century gardens, for example, not only gave rise to distinct moods but also to characteristic expressions, typical of one or another genre, and to legible emblems – ideas rendered palpably apparent. Atmospheres, then, form the background for more explicit perceptions and more intelligible articulations, background in the double sense of where a figure comes from, its history, and the supporting surround for something worth thinking about.
With this book before us, we can pursue the many correlations between practical relevance and aesthetic pleasure, the most decisive of which today is the atmosphere’s intellectual substance, for what Paul Ricoeur (1967) once said of symbols must surely be true of atmospheres, that when well contrived they give rise to thought.
Professor David Leatherbarrow,
Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture, Penn Design,
University of Pennsylvania