Hardly anything can bring attention to the insidiousness of the air more than the current pandemic. In unraveling once again how harmful the phenomenologically latent can be, the latest coronavirus clearly reveals all the limits of a phenomenology traditionally considered to be a thought of a phenomenon that is identified only with what appears. These limits of phenomenology were first felt very lucidly and precociously by Wilhelm Schapp, one of Edmund Husserl’s first pupils:

Phenomena seem to be solid and resistant, but why should solid and resistant mean real? Phenomena do not show any stable delimitation, but why should the real be stably delimited? Phenomena come and go without leaving a trace, but why should the real leave traces? Phenomena cannot be grasped or weighed, but why should the real be able to be grasped and weighed? … I do not find any principle by which things should be the real. I do not find any principle by which daylight and a foot’s distance should present us the world as it is. Why shouldn’t twilight and a thousand feet’s distance present us the world more exactly?¹

Taking these caveats seriously and refusing to make phenomenology coincide with the visible, with what lies in the light of day or can fully be brought to light, this essay attempts to broaden the meaning of “phenomenon” (meaning what shows itself) to also include the invisible and un-appearing. What is inapparent is affective and a felt-bodily experience: if not all that epistemically exists appears, all that appears surely exists and must be taken seriously phenomenologically. This way one can and must challenge the traditional ocular-centrism, completely tantalized by boundaries of stable and knowable objects at a distance, and thus rile up traditional ontology.² By overcoming the existential narrowness of philosophers who seemingly limit their scope and case studies to books and desks, one should leave the desk (or, if you prefer, the Lucretian topos of “shipwreck with spectator”) and give due attention not only to latency but also to subjective facts.

Traditional Western ontology puts substances, things in themselves, before relations, and the dualism subject/object before the in-between preceding them, thus following the classic hierarchical three-branch system of substance-relation-accident.³ Similarly, it puts being before becoming, solid bodies — cohesive, solid, continuous objects that are mobile only through contact — and the central field of vision before what is vague, ephemeral, and peripheric. It also puts single entities before situations. I would like instead to understand situations, neo-phenomenologically, as gestaltic wholes made up of an internally diffuse-chaotic meaningfulness and a non-numerical manifoldness whose only unquestionable evidence comes from felt-bodily touching. Traditional ontology defines perception as a distancing-constative, as a merely ocular process and not as a deambulatory, peripheric, and synesthetic experience. Unfortunately, these parameters end up exiling everything that is vague, flowing, atmospheric into an alleged inner and private world of the soul. The soul, in turn, is conceived as a solid and stratified body — as a bundle of perceptions or as an ineffable inner theater.

In an ontology such as this, atmospheres and quasi-things are obviously not welcome. My argument suggests that instead, ontology should recognize that people are not surrounded by meaningless things whose qualities would be nothing but the outcome of projected physical data, but rather by atmospheric feelings and quasi-things that are innately affectively connoted. Embracing new and unthought ontological categories like those of “atmosphere” and “quasi-thing”⁴ allows us to leave behind the pragmatic purposes and the representational advantages attributed to objectivity and the artificial denial of invisibility. This acceptance of the elusive permits the admittance that, without being a substance or an accident, felt-bodily experience affects us like an extraneous agent; therefore, in turn, it gives full legitimacy to an expanded ontological repertoire.⁵

My atmospherology aims at developing exactly this suggestion. I assume that the variable and the ephemeral, the fluid and the vague, are no less “real” phenomena than the permanent.⁶ This implies that one should not neglect the challenging chaotic character of what one might perceive as an epistemic deficit; however, this can only be achieved by freeing oneself from the overestimated gnostic paradigm in favour of a pathic one.⁷ Transforming one’s lifeworld into the affective brushstrokes of a painting, rather than the accuracy and schematic simplification of a map, allows us to preserve every sensible-qualitative involvement from scientific reductionism.

This path led me, over time, from a neo-phenomenological atmospherology to an ontological theory of quasi-things.⁸ Over time and more recently, I have developed a comprehensive theory of “pathic” aesthetics, which focuses on the ability to let oneself go: a skill largely unacknowledged by the rationalistic post-Enlightenment dogma of subjective autonomy and finalistic action. By “pathic,” I refer to the perceiver’s affective, life-worldly involvement that belongs to the domain of feeling. The pathic therefore disables the perceiver from reacting critically, and leaves one forced to be amongst the intrusion of experience and the elemental. My atmospherological-pathic approach teaches us how to expose oneself to be a means of what happens rather than as a traditional subject who may transform every instance into reflection and every given into something done. This approach could and should focus attention on the quiet and indiscernible phenomenon of air. Air is not only weightless, invisible, and imperceptible, but also, unlike things in the proper sense, fully coincides with its affective, continuous, and situational appearance without being reducible to mere components of something else.

Whether they be natural phenomena such as twilight, luminosity, darkness, the seasons, the wind, the weather, the hours of the day, the fog; or relatively artificial ones like townscape, music, soundscape, the numinous, dwelling, charisma, the gaze, shame, quasi-things express themselves as atmospheric influences. As affective affordances they are salient and real in the full sense of the word: not despite their being inapparent and ephemeral, but precisely because of it. They trigger an experience that is epistemologically vague but pathically certain, irreducible to causes or origins. The experience of a quasi-thing expresses (and certifies) our embeddedness in a lived space, reminding us of our being-in-the-word, better than other traditionally privileged states, such as the overestimated cogito. Restoring pathic experience (or mineness) to a central position, returns worldliness to a state outside the bounds of cognitive dualism and beyond Husserl’s phenomenological method of mediating one’s surroundings with one’s own ego. Thus, one gradually learns to appreciate the importance of entities that are vaguer than the solid, three-dimensional, cohesive, contoured, identified, and persistent things prevailing in traditional ontologies. Holes and shadows, clouds and waves, atmospheres and the wind play a completely new role within a phenomenologically legitimate ontological inventory, based not only on a material stability at the expense of fluidity or single things and their eventual constellations, but rather on influential qualitative nuances and fluxes with their evanescent yet meaningful impressions.

This is not, of course, the place to delve into my atmospherology; however, let me briefly offer that I understand atmosphere as an influential affective presence: as feeling poured out into lived spaces and thereby resonating with, and even into, felt-bodily processes. The affective presence of atmosphere acts through affordances of environmental invitations (precisely through motor suggestions and synesthetic characters) that are not limited to the visual or pragmatic. The non-objectifying externalization of atmospheres allows them to be perceived as a spatial state of the world rather than a very private psychological state; thus, while their intensity also depends on the subject, their phenomenological apparition is objective — at least when manifested in prototypic form.⁹ Due to this objectivity, atmosphere cannot be explained through conventional and associative language; instead, perceiving atmospheres means to communicate with all that is perceived through the felt-body and the affective charge of things, quasi-things, and situations., thus, arriving at an emotional segmentation of the lifewordly reality. Atmospheres are fully consistent with the neo-phenomenological redefinition of philosophy in terms of “thinking in situations” — in terms of a self-reflection of people regarding their “subjective facts” and how they feel in a certain environment.¹⁰

But let us return to the issue of the phenomenology of the inapparent. We can begin, for example, with an umbrella term like “air.” When I mention air, I do not mean in Heidegger’s ontological sense,¹¹ nor in the technological sense of making the invisible-ephemeral airy background visible,¹² nor as a synonym for sociological climate,¹³ or as a social-cultural fact. Instead, I would like to apply my neo-phenomenology approach of the inapparent to the more “ontically,” quasi-thingly phenomenon of air, particularly its windy atmospheres. This method of inquiry implies the “rediscovery of air” carried out by Hermann Schmitz’s phenomenological focus on the quasi-thing, as well as Sloterdijk’s rendering of atmoterrorism as an epochal event due to the modern tendency to make explicit the implicit and bring the imperceptible to the fore.¹⁴

This brings the philosophical thematization of speech as epistemically naive and pathically precise to the fore — such as in phrases like “there is something in the air” or “the wind is changing.” Speaking metaphorically like this means that one is feeling what is in the air, and, at the same time, that what is in the air is what one feels. These expressive phrases are both irreducible to cognition and to elementary sense-date; thus, the atmosphere described acts as a scaffolding of affective life. The de-psychologization of the emotional sphere is precisely apparent in the way in which the wind modulates our lived space and resonates with our felt-body.

Of course, there are many ways of treating air as an atmosphere. Smell, not surprisingly, is often considered the atmospheric phenomenon par excellence. Just because smell has neither “sides and therefore presentations per profiles (Abschattungen),”¹⁵ nor precise and defined edges, angles, faces and colors, it could be argued that smell is the atmosphere itself. Scent is something that, impregnating the lived space, deeply involves us — namely, a pre-dimensional space without surfaces, lines and points. The olfactory is also something we “breathe in,” that penetrates “through all the pores of [our] being” and sometimes “can become unbreathable as much on the physical level as on the moral one.”¹⁶ By saying that atmosphere is an affective “air,” it is also consistent to say that it is a “more”: something beyond language that remains unspoken in many sensory experiences, even though it is felt and evokes value-laden impressions.

Nevertheless, the air’s elusiveness — together with its effect on human politics, scientific knowledge, and processes of nature — is not what I want to talk about here. I’d rather focus on the atmospheric specificity of the wind, relying on its phenomenological-ontological analysis as a quasi-thing. The wind thus turns out to belong to a “big and colorful family” of physiognomic “characters”¹⁷: occupying a vast territory between the (so-called) mere qualia and things in the proper sense; exerting on the perceiver a more direct and immediate power than full-fledged things. These qualities allow me, on the one hand, to claim the central role played by an “attenuated reality” in making our everyday life richer and more colorful, and, on the other, to highlight wind’s atmospheric charge.

The wind is the topic of a highly desirable “aesthetics of air [that] must first render air sensible by being an aesthesis of air.”¹⁸ More specifically, it is a very good example of an atmospheric quasi-thing, as religions have always recognized, pointing out that it blows where it wishes: “you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”¹⁹ As something apparently inapparent, air actually occurs mainly ex negativo, when one misses it. And yet the wind especially affects us on the affective-bodily level in the form of an atmospheric feeling poured out into pre-dimensional space: that is, as a very concrete experience, significantly both climatic and affective, physically and felt-bodily. Provided, of course, that the wind, exactly like the weather, is duly subtracted to the prognostic obsession of today, inscribed in the flood of “weather forecasts,” and synthetically testifies to the quality of our emotional involvement — exactly like the Japanese notions of ki or fūdo, understood as pre-dualistic coexistence of self and world.²⁰ It thus provides a first starting point for a long-awaited philosophical climatology (from Montesquieu and Herder on) mainly based on elemental media — something never realized, also for excessive fear of climate determinism.

The relative phenomenological inaccessibility of air certainly ceases to exist rightly when it comes to the wind. Wind has always been the object of the human attempt to catch it and exploit its power. The wind can be directly experienced thanks to a felt-body resonance even in the absence of optical data as it forcefully hits us. It shows itself indeed not only, for example, in an inflated dress or in the bent branches of a tree, in a waving flag or in its effects on the clouds and on water, but also in how it atmospherically and “ecstatically” affects our surroundings. Fully coinciding with its own flow and thus being an event in the proper sense (a “pure act,” in a way), it pervades space with its particular voluminousness, tuning it in this or that way (obviously a breeze is affectively different from a hurricane) and arousing specific motor suggestions and synesthetic affordances.

Since wind is always a mediated and thus indirect manifestation, as a gestalting appearing a back-and-forth switch of figure and background, we are required to observe it in a definite context and perspective. This means that wind cannot be experienced in general or in an abstract way: strong or gentle, still or storm-like in different moments or places. Apparently omnipresent, the wind ignores boundaries, and land-borne boundaries in particular. But, above all, wind is irreducible to air moving, as Western ontology instead usually claims, thus thickening it and turning it into a thing in order to reduce its particular intrusiveness.²¹

A. The wind is not edged, discrete, cohesive, or solid, and is therefore hardly penetrable like things. Nor does it properly possess the spatial sides in which things necessarily manifest themselves and from whose ortho-aesthetic coexistence one can usually gather their protensional regularities. Thus, we do not perceive in it a side hiding while announcing the others, which means that if a thing can still deceive us by having concealed sides — temporarily or eternally hidden inner strata and only apparent qualities — a quasi-thing like the wind never deceives, because it totally coincides with its phenomenic appearance.

B. Things possess immanent and regular tendencies. An object weighs and tends to fall; the pages of a book turn yellow; if we don’t lift something it stays on the ground. Because of these immanent dispositions, also proving their compatibility or incompatibility with other bodies, things testify to us their physical-bodily presence. While things have these tendencies even without interaction (the glass remains frangible even if nobody breaks it), which confer to them a future as well as a past revealed by signs, marks, fractures, etc., because of its relative immateriality the wind does not seem to have actual tendencies (nor does it have a history). In their atmospheric and quasi-thingly effect, night, anxiety, and the wind, for example, don’t ever get old and don’t show any temporal patina. By virtue of its absolute “presentness,” the wind is not the continuation of something prior, but something always new and so radically evenementiel that it does not require a genetic phenomenology and etiologic explanation.

C. While things transcend their momentary character — in the sense that neither are they born nor can they die all of a sudden, but instead bear the signs of their own specific history; and that one can possess them, portion them, save them, or annihilate them — the wind can appear in a partial form, without this necessarily meaning that it does so through fragments and sides. So, if I can point at a single object made of silver to demonstrate what silver is, in the same way, I can refer to this wind, regardless of its specific present variant, to explain what the wind is in general. And this is because a single wind is not the portion of a larger wind-thing but fully expresses the “character” of its appearance. In the same way that a different tone does not make the voice of a person (another quasi-thing) a different one (warm, metallic, polished, hoarse), a quasi-thing like the wind has its own distinct identity, which, within certain limits, can be traced back to types, but not to universal-conceptual genera.

D. Above all, the wind is (felt as) more immediate and intrusive than things, because it is able to generate inhibiting and sometimes even unbearable motor suggestions. The felt-bodily communication triggered by it can be summed up as an alternation of encorporation and excorporation much more intense than that triggered by things. As a “center of encorporation” ²² able to occupy some surfaceless and lived spaces, as a violent “attractor of our everyday attention,” ²³ it is often more incisive and demanding than things in the strict sense.

E. But perhaps the most philosophically intriguing point is that the wind dies down with the same inexplicable immediacy with which it rises. Even if, as we have seen, it has a “character,” i.e. it is this or that particular wind (as we say of other quasi-things, “Here’s my usual pain in the shoulder,” “Here’s the melancholy of an autumn evening,” etc.), it doesn’t have the same continuity of existence of things, which as a rule cannot disappear from a point in space and reappear in another. For this reason, the embarrassing question asked by the child (“What does the wind do when it isn’t blowing?”), implying in a thingly way a being separate from feeling it, ²⁴ turns out to be an excellent — qua upsetting and disturbing —philosophical question. The normalizing and reifying answer usually given by the adult (“It has died down,” or even “It went to sleep”) disregards its importance.

Though they are things that are not perceived, ²⁵ quasi-things like the wind have rather an intermittent life, and it would make no sense to ask where they are when they are not present yet or when they are no longer there. Their intermittence produces a kind of broken biography that cannot be filled in principle (does the wind, or a certain type of wind, have a history?) and is very different from the latency periods normally belonging to things that are temporarily not perceived. Just to prevent this uncanny experience — to mitigate the anxiety provoked by the incessant change of qualia — standard ontology has no other option than to subsume atmospheric perceptions under genera and to give priority to tangible and well-determined entities, which are endowed with a regular, homogeneous, cohesive, and three-dimensional shape and can be singled out through genus and species.

F. Lastly, following Hermann Schmitz again, like all other quasi-things the wind does not have a threefold causality (cause-action-effect) but a twofold one (cause/action-effect). Very briefly, while a book is a book that eventually falls later on the floor and breaks a glass if it hits it, the wind — which in a certain sense “is precisely this blowing and nothing else” ²⁶ — does not exist before and beyond its blowing. So to speak, it is an aggression without an aggressor (a cause) that may be separated from it and be prior to it. In other words, the wind is atmospherically an actual fact (a pure phenomenon) and not a factual fact (the wind as a physical-climatic element). When it hinders our way and perhaps makes us fall it is an action coinciding with its cause.

Traditional Western ontology felt compelled to transform bipolar causality into a tripolar causality, because obviously only if cause can be separated from effect (i.e. a necessary substrate from its more or less accidental manifestation) can science express its prognosis and operate in a preventive way. This indistinction of cause and action confirms a fortiori that the somewhat unexpected appearance of a quasi-thingly configuration is necessarily followed by an involuntary experience, a pathic-atmospheric and felt-bodily involvement that is at least initially uncontrollable.

The quasi-thingly wind characteristics examined here apply without doubt to every atmospheric experience and not only to elemental atmosphericness. And here it should open a long speech on general types of resonance triggered by windy atmospheres (narrowness and vastness) and the resulting felt-bodily communication. ²⁷ Just to give a very simple example on how the discourse should develop: resonance can be a.) discrepant and b.) syntonic. By inhibiting fluid bodily behaviour, the atmospheric discrepancy (when you are not friends with the wind, when the wind kicks up because it is strong, harsh and biting) induces an epicritic contraction. It gives birth to individual felt-bodily isles of which the subject was previously unaware. But awareness can sometimes lead to their pathological disorganization, or independence. On the other side, by facilitating bodily behavior, the atmospheric syntony (when the wind favors us, is a sweet breeze or gently refreshes a muggy environment) provides a protopathic felt-bodily state of well-being, which momentarily prevents some particular isles from emerging and even promotes an uncritical fusion with external reality.

Obviously, the phenomenological cases of our encounter with the air and the wind (what I called “atmospheric games”) is necessarily much more complicated. ²⁸ Here I am merely sketching a phenomenological atmospherology of quasi-things that aims at integrating the traditional ontologic “catalogue” starting precisely from the wind. However, it does not amount to corroborating the universal tendency (onto- and phylogenetic) to reification, whose advantages do not compensate for the loss of the semantic-pathic polyvocity of reality. My double-track aim rather consists in taking relations and events as (quasi-)things while taking many things as less thing-like: in fact, many so called things (a mountain, a road, etc.) are not much more defined than the atmospheric feelings they irradiate — with the significant difference that the atmospheric quasi-thingly repartition depends on a segmentation of what we “encounter” that is not so much artificial (functional) or cognitive-semantic but rather affective and felt-bodily. In short: quasi-things have quality (intensity), extension (non-geometric dimensionality), relation (to other quasi-things and the perceiver’s states of mind), place (they are here and not there, even if only in the lived space) and time (they occur right now, etc.). My aesthetic-phenomenological survey of the windy atmosphere should be seen precisely in this light.