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Section 2. Objects of Experience

The Wind Is Not Moved Air. Back To (Quasi) Things Themselves

Tonino Griffero
p. 118-129

Abstract

The wind is the topic of a desirable pathic aesthetics and neophenomenology of air. More specifically, it is a good example of an atmospheric ephemeral quasi-thing, because, as religions have always recognized, it blows where it wishes. It involves us on the affective and felt-bodily level as an atmospheric feeling poured out into pre-dimensional space: that is, as a very concrete experience, significantly both climatic and affective, physical and felt-bodily. Unlike full-fledged things, the wind is not edged, discrete, cohesive, or solid; it does not possess immanent and regular tendencies; it can appear in a partial form, without doing so through fragments and sides; it is (felt as) more immediate and intrusive than things, generating inhibiting or attracting motor suggestions; it dies down with the same inexplicable immediacy with which it rises; it does not have a threefold causality (cause-action-effect) but a twofold one (cause/action-effect). Given these quasi-thingly wind characteristics, the paper sketches a review of the main types of felt-bodily resonance, within a range whose two extremes are narrowness and vastness, triggered by windy atmospheres (for example sudden gust of wind, breeze, shallow wind, stormy wind and calm).

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Editor’s notes

DOI: 10.17454/pam-2609

Full text

1. A pathic phenomenology of the ephemeral: atmospheres and quasi-things

1“As the wind blows”, “gone with the wind”, “blowing in the wind”, etc. Innumerable phrases involve the wind, usually anthropomorphising and symbolizing it. Even though it is a fundamental component of lifewordly experience, it is something almost as ontologically elusive as the air it is made of. The underestimated relevance of air clearly reveals all the limits of a traditional phenomenology focused on what appears frontally and circumscribed by stable boundaries.

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 make up reality. 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? (Schapp, 1981, p. 95)

2Refusing to make phenomenology coincide with the ortho-aesthetically visible, with what lies in the light of day, it could be said that the “phenomenon” also includes what is invisible and non-appearing but still acts on us affectively and felt-bodily and is thus captured better by verbs of growth and motion than by nouns. As a result, one must challenge traditional ocular-centrism, completely tantalized by boundaries of stable and knowable objects, and cast traditional ontology aside, leave the desk and get out “in the open”, thus giving due attention both to what is latent and to the subjective facts where latency resonates.

  • 1See Ingold’s “midstreaming” (Ingold, 2015, pp. 150-151) and Begout’s “mersif” (2020).

3But traditional Western ontology places substances before relations and the dualism subject/object before the “in-between” preceding them,1 thus following the classic hierarchical three-branch system of substance-relation-accident instead of focusing its attention on “intensive” relationships (not yet transformed into reversible relations). Similarly, it puts being before becoming, solid bodies – cohesive, sound, continuous and moving only through contact – and the central field of vision before what is vague, ephemeral, and peripherally seen. It also places single entities before situations. Instead, I would like to consider situations, neo-phenomenologically, as a perceptual prius, as Gestaltic wholes made up of an internally diffuse-chaotic meaningfulness and a non-numerical manifoldness, whose evidence is proven by the perceiver’s felt-bodily involvement. Moreover, traditional ontology defines perception as a remote and purely factual process, as a merely vision-based acquisition and not as a deambulatory and synesthetic experience. Accordingly, it ends up exiling everything that is vague, flowing, atmospheric into an alleged only subjective psychic inner world, in turn wrongly conceived as a stratified and ineffable inner theater made up of a bundle of perceptions.

4In this thingly ontology atmospheres and quasi-things are obviously not welcome. While the former are spatialised feelings (Griffero 2014, 2020, 2021), the latter are entities that didn’t even have a name before Hermann Schmitz raised them to the status of authentic ontological category (Halbdinge) (Schmitz, 1978, pp. 116-139), partly influenced by Sartre’s brilliant pages of Being and Nothingness devoted to pain (le mal) as a psychic-affective object with its own reality, intermittent life, habits and “melodic” development (Sartre 1978, pp. 333, 335-337). By the admittedly unsatisfactory term “quasi-thing”, Schmitz means something that lies somewhere between things in the proper sense – which can sometimes even turn into quasi-things, such as when, for example, an area appears snowy because of the moonlight – and mere qualia and that, despite being the object of bodily and felt-bodily perception, cannot be objectified.

5An ontology that does not make the mistake of confusing phenomenology with etiology should recognize that we are not surrounded by meaningless things whose qualities are merely the outcome of projected psychic data, but rather by expressive qualities which mostly result in atmospheric feelings and quasi-things (Griffero, 2017a). This allows us to leave behind the pragmatic-representational advantages attributed to visual objectivity and to expand our ontological repertoire, by accepting elusive, non- or just partially observable environmental agencies, which, without being a substance or an accident, certain felt-bodily affect us like extraneous agents.

6Importantly, atmospherology develops this suggestion and assumes that the variable and the ephemeral, the fluid and the vague, are no less “real” phenomena than the permanent; that the chaotic character of what one perceives is not always an epistemic deficit; that it is necessary to free oneself from the overestimated “gnostic” paradigm in favour of the “pathic” one (Straus, 1963), thus thinking of the lifeworld more as a landscape than a map and enhancing the ability to let oneself go: a skill that underlines the unexpected intrusion of experience, but which is largely unacknowledged by the rationalistic post-Enlightenment dogma of subjective autonomy and finalistic action, which tries to transform every experience into thought and every “given” into something “made”.

  • 2For a first approach see Schneider (1959, p. 100), Böhme (2012, pp. 11–22), Diaconu (2012, p. 88), (...)

7Whether they be natural phenomena such as twilight, luminosity, darkness, the seasons, the wind, the weather, silence, the hours of the day, fog, or relatively artificial ones like a townscape, music, a soundscape, the numinous, dwelling, charisma, the gaze, or shame – quasi-things always (for Schmitz just sometimes) express themselves as atmospheric influences. As affective “affordances” (Griffero, 2022a) they are salient and real in the full sense of the word: not despite their being inapparent and ephemeral, or their “infra-usual simplicity” (Hasse, 2017, p. 173), but precisely because of those “properties”. Quasi-things trigger an experience that is epistemologically vague but pathically certain, thus expressing (and ensuring) 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)2 to a central position implies going outside the boundaries of cognitive dualism and beyond Husserl’s constitutive ego and learning to appreciate entities vaguer than full-fledged things (holes and shadows, clouds and waves, atmospheres and the wind, etc.) and their influential qualitative “impressions”.

  • 3Ontologically (and not just epistemically), subjective facts are the meanings that at most one per (...)

8Atmospheres as feelings poured out into lived spaces and thereby resonating with, and even into, felt-bodily processes, act through environmental affordances (or, according to Schmitz, through motor suggestions and synesthetic characters) that are not limited to the visual or the pragmatic. Being spatial states of the world rather than private psychological states, their intensity partly depends on the subject, but their phenomenological apparition is quasi-objective. Perceiving them means to communicate with quasi-things and situations, to provide an emotional segmentation of the lifewordly reality: a “thinking in situations” that implies an individual’s self-reflection regarding “subjective facts”3 (how one feels in a certain environment).

2. Air

  • 4“The wind is wind ‘in the sails’”; “the south wind ‘is accepted’ [‘gilt’] by the farmer as a sign (...)
  • 5See Diaconu (2013, especially §§4-5). On the transformation of air into sound see Minssen (1997, 2 (...)
  • 6See Diaconu (2013) and Baert (2013, 2019, pp. 221-255).

9Talking about the phenomenology of the inapparent, let’s begin with an umbrella term like “air.” I do not mean it in Heidegger’s sense of an omen,4 or in the technological sense of making the airy background visible;5 nor as a synonym for sociological climate, for its effect on politics and cultural practices (its connection with life itself and the breath, spirits and God, pathologies, its personification and artistic use,6 etc.), not even following Sloterdijk’s (2016) theory of atmoterrorism as an epochal event due to the modern tendency to make the implicit explicit. Rather, neophenomenologically, I focus on air in its quasi-thingly windy atmosphericity, excluding here as far as possible its usual symbolic association with vanity, instability, etc. By the way, “rediscovery of air” brings out the philosophical thematization of speech as epistemically naive and pathically precise, such as in phrases like “there is something in the air” or “the wind is changing,” which mean in a way irreducible to cognition and elementary sense-data that one is feeling what is in the air, and, at the same time, that what is in the air is what one feels. Thus described, a certain windy atmosphere, exactly by modulating our lived space and resonating with our felt-body, also acts as a relevant scaffolding of everyone’s affective life.

10Of course, there are various ways of treating air as an atmosphere. Smell, for example, is often considered the atmospheric phenomenon par excellence (Griffero 2022b). Just because smell has neither “sides and therefore adumbrations (Abschattungen)” (Tellenbach, 1968, p. 28) nor precise and defined edges, angles, faces and colors, it could be argued that smell is the atmosphere itself. Moreover, the olfactory is 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.” (Minkowski, 1936, pp. 117-118). However, smell is air, i.e. an atmospheric-affective “air,” “a something more,” that, being transient and elusive, “supervenes” on a certain spatial situation and its strictly material components and often remains unspoken.

  • 7Except sometimes, “as in mist, or in rising smoke from fire and chimneys, or in light snow when fl (...)

11Air is not only weightless, invisible as such,7 but also, unlike things in the proper sense, acts as a perceptual transcendental in the “weather-world” (Ingold, 2015, 68) and above all fully coincides with its affective, continuous, and situational appearance. It is therefore obvious that the pathic-phenomenological significance of the weather (and the wind in particular) has long been overlooked, and certainly neither the prognostic obsession of “weather forecasts” nor today’s physicalistic-analysis of the climate make up for this shortcoming. Besides, to think that a phenomenological analysis of the wind can be exhausted by studying the movement of air masses, isobars, etc., is not much smarter than the “scientific” description of climate that Musil (1996, 3) makes clever fun of by summarising a long list of scientific data (pressure, isotherms, isotheres, temperature, humidity, etc.) in the fairly accurate statement: “it was a fine day in August 1913.”

  • 8Including both “air tone” and “weather image” (Witterungsbild), or the “landscape” as a whole: the (...)

12Fact is that, while we perceive very little of the physical atmosphere and the scientific weather parameters (heat, cold, smell, light, and temperature, within certain limits), we sense-feel much more of the atmosphere as a qualitative je ne sais quoi, of the weather or climate as a totality resonating in felt-bodily-sensory experience. Nevertheless, a phenomenology of weather as the perceived “air tone” (Luftton) is still a desideratum, which is far from being satisfied by the addition of the subjective (“perceived”) temperature alongside the “measured” one. Its “atmospheric mood”,8 which perhaps those who live more in contact with nature feel pre-reflectively, is yet to be addressed by phenomenology, precisely as the long-awaited philosophical climatology (announced from Montesquieu and Herder on) is yet to be realized, perhaps due to the excessive fear of determinism.

13The atmospheric phenomenological-ontological specificity of the wind relies in its being the “prototype” of quasi-things in general (Mahayni, 2003, p. 219), if only because it “is the movement par excellence and at the same time conveys the experience of universal becoming-moved.” (Hasse, 2017, 182). In short: the wind belongs to a “big and colorful family” of physiognomic “characters” (Schmitz, 1978, p. 134) that, as quasi-things, occupy a vast territory – constituted by an “attenuated reality” making our everyday life richer and more colorful – between the (so-called) mere qualia and things in the proper sense, and exert on the perceiver a more direct and immediate power than full-fledged things.

  • 9Or reducing the weight that drags us down to gravity, the felt pain to its neurobiological causes, (...)

14Importantly, quasi-things are usually dismissed in two manners: a) by forcedly “thickening” them and turning them into things in order to reduce their particular intrusiveness: for example by reducing the wind to “moving air” when it blows or “still air” when it dies down9; b) by tracing them back to perceptions so chaotic and decontoured that they end up being considered as something anomalous, if not pathological. These two epistemic strategies quickly show their weakness: we must never forget that if not all that (epistemically) exists appears, all that appears surely (phenomenologically) exists and is also intersubjective by principle.

3. Windy atmospheres

  • 10“The experience of wind lends itself well to accounting for subtle atmospheric change, regardless (...)

15The relative phenomenal inaccessibility of the air certainly ceases to exist when it comes to the wind. Air has always indeed 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. In fact it shows itself not only, for example, in an inflated dress or in the bending branches of a tree, in a waving flag or in rippling clouds and water, in what people wear or the slight bent-over fashion in which they talk or walk. It also appears in how it atmospherically affects our surroundings and 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.10 Since the wind is always a mediated and thus indirect manifestation (maybe through a smell performing essential survival functions in hunting and exploration), we are required to always experience it in a specific context and perspective and not to talk about it in a general or abstract way (i.e. regardless of the 1805 introduction of the first wind-scale by Sir Francis Beaufort) or, at least, to pay attention to what is “hidden behind data provided by the wind levels and coagulated in numerical form” (Minssen, 2004, p. 302). As strange as it may sound, the best lifewordly and phenomenological (not physicalistic) description of the wind as an ephemeral and purposeless phenomenon was written in the Gospel two millennia ago: “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3:8).

  • 11The wind, in fact, “can be smelt, heard and felt, if not touched, and its effects are visible”, or (...)

16However, far from being completely multi-sensorially occluded,11 the wind could become, in general, the key-point of a highly desirable “aesthesis of air” (Horn, 2018, p. 22) and be, in particular, a very good example of an atmospheric quasi-thing, as various religions have recognized (think of ruach and pneuma as spirit-winds). Indeed, the wind blows where it wants to: a description that is as essential as it is phenomenologically incontrovertible, emphasizing precisely the wind-like nature of all stirrings (Schmitz, 1969, 268-276) and, significantly, the both climatic and affective, both physically and felt-bodily dimension of windy atmospheres.

  • 12Echoing the Shintoist distinction between “formed things” and “formless things”, Ogawa argues that (...)

17The wind synthetically testifies to the quality of our emotional involvement, exactly like the notions of ki or fūdo understood as the pre-dualistic coexistence of self and world (Watsuji, 1961). In Japanese culture, in fact, the wind as “wind of impermanence” (Ogawa, 2021, p. 16), with its references to further dimensions and non-thematic presence, characterizes everything that in the West is understood by climate as human milieu (fūdo literally means “wind-and-earth”) and “landscape” (but also style, feelings and even culture), i.e. a non-thingly atmospheric dimension that is both concrete and cultural (Marinucci, 2019). In particular, even if “there is almost no limit to the width of meanings for ki”, “ki means air and wind. At the same time, it refers to the movements and processes that we feel within our bodies” (Ogawa, 2021, pp. 11, 12), thus well identifying that passive pre-egoic and pre-objective “in-between” in which the human and the world are originally overlapping.12

  • 13I develop here in part Soentgen’s analysis of things (1997) and Schmitz’s theory of quasi-things.

18Given the phenomenological inadequacy of any scientific quantifiable parameter for the wind – kph speed tells us nothing in pathic terms, as we inevitably compare it to car speed (Hasse, 2017, pp. 207-209) – it’s time to better detail the atmospheric quasi-thingly power of this quasi-nothingness.13

  • 14About the cinema’s poetic “representation of the invisible” (the wind) see Nova (2011) and Thomas (...)

A. The wind ignores boundaries. It is not edged, discrete, cohesive, or solid, and is therefore hardly penetrable (unlike 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. The fact that we do not perceive a “side” in the wind that hides other ones while suggests their presence, means that if a thing can still deceive us by having concealed sides a quasi-thing like the wind never deceives, because it totally coincides with its phenomenal (paradoxically invisible) appearance. In fact, “we see the leaves rustling in the wind, branches billowing, volcanic ashes scattering, a flag flapping, we can listen to the wind’s voice, but no one has seen the wind itself” (Ogawa, 2021, p. 79).
Sure, we feel it on our (physical and lived) body, but only if and as long as we are exposed to it. Being only directly experienced through the (felt-)bodily sense of touch, to all other senses it appears only through epiphenomena and media representation14 that can also be spatially and behaviourally misleading (the wind may carry distorted and illocalised smell and sounds, etc.). To those in shelter, instead, the wind becomes a kind of purely visual spectacle, based on what it moves (water, clouds, branches, boats, air balloons, noises and sounds) and on the sound it makes (the violent whistle that Bachelard considers as the universal, archetypal and pre-objective anxiety).

B. Things possess immanent and regular tendencies. An object has a certain weight and tends to fall; the pages of a book eventually turn yellow, etc. Because of these immanent dispositions, which also prove their compatibility or incompatibility with other bodies, things testify to their physical-bodily presence. Things have these tendencies even without there being any interaction (a glass remains frangible even if nobody breaks it), whereby their past is revealed by signs, marks, fractures, etc. Instead, because of its relative immateriality, the wind does not seem to have tendencies or history. In their atmospheric and quasi-thingly effect, quasi-things like the night, anxiety and the wind don’t ever get old and don’t show any temporal patina. By virtue of its absolute “presentness,” the wind is therefore not the continuation of something prior, but something always new and anarchic, so radically unpredictable-évènementiel that it is beyond any genetic phenomenology and etiological explanation. It rejects any “learned orientation” (Bachelard, 1988, p. 234), and even when it announces a change, it does so in a way that is as phenomenologically certain as it is epistemically vague.

  • 15Does the wind only change its face, depending on whether it blows with or against us (Schmitz, 199 (...)

C. But, above all, wind is irreducible to moving air, as Western ontology instead usually claims, thickening it and thus turning it into a less intrusive und unpredictable thing. Things transcend their momentary character, in the sense that they are neither born nor can they suddenly die, but instead bear the signs of their own specific history; and one can possess them, portion them, save them, or annihilate them. Instead, the wind can appear in a partial form, without this necessarily meaning that it does so by means of fragments and sides.
However, I can refer to a specific wind also to explain what the wind is in general, because a single wind is not the portion of a larger wind-thing but fully expresses its “character” when appearing. In the same way as a different tone or volume does not turn a person’s voice (another typical quasi-thing) into a different one, the quasi-thingly wind has its own distinct identity, which, within certain limits, can be traced back to types (i.e. breezes, wafts, squalls, whirlwinds, hurricanes, and cyclones), but not to strictly universal-conceptual genera. Even if it does not exist except when it blows, it presents itself, however, in repeated and recognisable forms, above all as it resonates felt-bodily in a similar way. While all quasi-things “have a persistent character with a changing face” (Schmitz, 2016, p. 186) and accordingly they are always accompanied by a halo of protensions, this does not seem to apply perfectly to the wind, whose “character” seems less stable than Schmitz thinks.15

  • 16“Just as the wind blows towards us, fate also comes towards us, although we have little idea of th (...)

D. Furthermore, the wind is (felt as) more immediate and intrusive than things, because it is able to generate inhibiting and sometimes even unbearable motor suggestions as well as to give a sort of friendly caress. The felt-bodily communication triggered by it can be summed up as a variable relation between encorporation and excorporation, though a much more intense one than that triggered by things. As a “center of encorporation” (Schmitz, 1978, p. 169) occupying some surfaceless and lived spaces, as a violent “attractor of our everyday attention” (Soentgen, 1997, 13), the wind is often more incisive and demanding than things in the strict sense. Rilke clearly expresses this when speaking of “the wind against us” (The Walk, 1924) as a sign of a grasping mood,16 and Hofmannsthal, by appealing to the mysterious origin of the wind, speaks of the “strange things” in its blowing (Early Spring, 1892).
Sure, only “the raging wind is the symbol of pure anger, anger without purpose or pretext”, an “anger that is everywhere and nowhere, that is born and reborn out of itself, that twists and turns” (Bachelard, 1988, p. 225), but even a slight breeze is always a proximal-invasive (not distant-auratical) sensing. Sometimes this penetrating aggressiveness even takes on the features of meddlesome curiosity, as when Virginia Woolf fantasizes about the failed attempt by cheeky night drafts and little airs, separating themselves from the wind and penetrating everywhere, to alter deep mnestic-autobiographical atmospheres (Woolf, 1992, pp. 273-274).

E. The most philosophically intriguing (non-thingly) point is that the wind dies down with the same inexplicable immediacy with which it rises. Even if it has a certain “character,” in the same way that we say, for example, “here’s my usual pain in the shoulder,” “that’s the melancholy of an autumn evening,” etc., the wind doesn’t have the same continuity of existence as things, which as a rule cannot disappear from a point in space and reappear in another. For this reason, the uncanny questions asked by children (“What does the wind do when it isn’t blowing?”), poets (“who is the wind chasing?”, “who is the wind angry at?”, “what are the strange things it brings with itself and from where?”) and physico-theologians (“who is behind the wind?”, “what is it a sign of?”), exactly because they imply in a thingly way an agency, a being separate from feeling it or a purpose distinct from the performance, turn out to be excellent philosophical questions. The answer usually given by adults (“it has died down,” or even “it went to sleep”) should be regarded more as a normal impulse to a quieting reification than a simple joke.
Thus the wind is not sensed as a thing but as a quasi-thing in its intermittent life, and it would make no sense to ask where it is when it is not present yet or when it is no longer there. This discontinuous life produces a kind of broken biography whose gaps cannot be filled (does the wind, or a certain type of wind, have a history?) and are very different from the latency periods normally found in things that are temporarily not perceived. To prevent this somewhat uncanny experience of 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.

  • 17What Ingold says about some non-objects: “the sun shines by day and the moon and stars by night, a (...)
  • 18Only when the cause can be separated from its effect can natural science express its prognosis and (...)

F. Lastly, following Hermann Schmitz more closely here, 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 thing that may possibly fall on the floor and break a glass if it hits it, the wind “is precisely this blowing and nothing else” (Grote, 1972, p. 251), namely it does not exist before and beyond its blowing.17 Fully coinciding with its own flow, the wind’s “essence” relies on its being an event in the proper sense (a “pure act,” in a way), so that a sentence like “the wind blows” is nothing but an “analytic judgment” (if there were here really a subject and a predicate) that cannot be replaced with the expression “moving air blows” (Ammann, 1929, pp. 9-11; Ogawa, 2021, p. 45). The wind (but also rain, thunder, etc.) is not the substratum of something else and the use of the impersonal (es, it, il) does not indicate the independent object-substratum-cause required by science18 but “what precedes all objectivation of singular things […], ‘what immediately appears to the subject as totality’” (Ogawa, 2021, p. 45). So to speak, the felt wind is an aggression, even a physical tragedy, without a prior separate aggressor (a cause): an “actual” atmospheric fact rather than a “factual” fact (the wind as a physical-climatic element) (Böhme, 2001, passim).
Importantly for an approach focused on the lived-bodiliness, however, is that the wind finds its specific physical- and lived-body’s resonance as a “distressing or reassuring partner from whom [one] withdraws or confides in” (Schmitz, 1978, p. 127). Like any other quasi-thing, the wind is sensed in one’s lived body not as if it were its own state, but rather as a felt-bodily partner, be it an enemy or a friend, a guide or an obstacle, a “destroyer” or a “preserver” (in the words of Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind). A Leib-(neo)phenomenology (Schmitz 2011; Griffero 2024) should thus provide a felt-bodily foundation for the atmospheric typology and phases of the wind. The first step is to de-psychologize, as far as possible, the usual literary interpretation of wind, while the second is to verify the permanent dialectical interweaving between the physical body (mainly involving felt-bodily islands like the skin, hair and forehead) and the lived body’s resonance with its resulting affective-atmospheric qualities. These, of course, also vary depending on whether the wind blows behind us, in front of us, gently enveloping us or hitting us from the side, thus causing the loss of balance.

  • 19See Mahayni (2003, pp. 223-231) and Hasse (2017, pp. 173-227).

19Let’s start from a preliminary neo-phenomenological hypothesis19 about the “felt-bodily communication” (Griffero 2017b; 2024, pp. 129-136) triggered by the wind.

  1. The sudden gust of wind, whose discrepant effect inhibits fluid bodily behavior, causes surprise and calls for some protection, undoubtedly also arousing felt-bodily islands that are relatively unprepared for such activation (weak contraction for protective purposes), and whose awareness can sometimes lead to their pathological disorganization or independence. Precisely because of its suddenness, it brings the physical body into the foreground as it is affected in its thingness, and, as a result, causes a subtle felt-bodily epicritic (sharp) disquiet, almost presaging something more dramatic.

  2. Instead, the breeze facilitates a syntonic bodily behavior. It urges the lived body to emancipate itself from the physical body, to let go and expand itself in a vastness that becomes an object of desire and longing. Hence a protopathic (diffused) felt-bodily state of well-being, which momentarily prevents some particular felt-bodily islands from emerging and even promotes an uncritical (almost ecstatical) fusion with external reality.

  3. In the case of shallow wind, the (felt-)bodily resonance is light-syntonic and receptive to many other factors that the wind pushes into the background (light effects, sounds, materials of perceived objects, people, etc.) without canceling them completely, and that actually contribute to the specificity of the windy atmosphere. The shallow wind, exactly like the breeze, is also easily transformed by changes in attention and easily differentiated according to the perceiver’s disposition and environmental changes.

  4. Things are quite different in the case of the stormy wind, which completely attracts attention and covers any other possible sound or perceptual data, so much so that the physical body, here most present in its being an ob-jectum opposed to the wind, is urged to make a quick decision to protect itself. It may attempt to maintain a (physical as well as emotional) balance or to compete with this particularly aggressive partner with affective and bodily consequences, be it by contracting (circumscribing a safe area from which to experience powerful atmospheres) or by heroically facing the wind as a powerful opponent.

  5. Nor can it be underestimated that even calm (for example during navigation) may be an example of the quasi-thingly manifestation of the wind. Provided that the wind can never be totally absent, perceiving its momentary lacking always implies the retention of previous (perhaps more and normal) experiences of it (Hasse, 2017, p. 181), and, when sailing, a protension suggesting a condition of latent menace (“dead calm”).

20But these are just some examples of more types of felt-bodily resonance of the windy blowing. It would also be useful to investigate the felt-bodily resonance pertaining to the various geographical wind zones, following (maybe in a bit less deterministic way) Watsuji’s groundbreaking analysis of monsoon-prone countries’ resignation to life as it comes because of the unbearable fusion of heat and humidity, the South Seas sensory and atmospheric monotony and Europe’s atmospheric windy stagnation and regularity, resulting in an anaffective rationalism. Accordingly, the repeated (physical and above all lived) bodily resonance to the wind may certainly become a true affective-cultural habitus, even though maybe more easily recognisable by outsiders, and give rise to a felt-bodily communication resulting in people’s specific way of moving and feeling.

4. Conclusion

  • 20“The hill is not an object on the earth’s surface but a formation of that surface, which can only (...)

21The quasi-thingly indistinction of cause and action confirms that the pathic-atmospheric perception is an involuntary, involving and felt-bodily experience, and that it implies a “mineness” that is at least initially uncontrollable. This sketch of a phenomenological atmospherology of the wind as a quasi-thing – based on an ontological inflationism (things, quasi-things, qualia) and the rest-realistic assumption (Rappe, 2012, p. 49) that objectivity is nothing but the intersubjective perspective needed to live together – aims at re-balancing the traditional ontologic “catalog”, whose representational-pragmatic advantages are harmful for the everyday’s lifewordly semantic-pathic polyvocity. It actually suggests a double-track approach, which takes some relations and events as (quasi-)things while taking many things as less thing-like (a mountain for example).20 With the significant difference that the resulting atmospheric quasi-thingly segmentation 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 felt-bodily and emotional state), place (they are here and not there, even if only in the lived space) and time (they occur right now, etc.). Their phenomenological thematisation, therefore, provides a privileged observatory on important qualitative nuances of nature outside and within us.

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Notes

1See Ingold’s “midstreaming” (Ingold, 2015, pp. 150-151) and Begout’s “mersif” (2020).

2For a first approach see Schneider (1959, p. 100), Böhme (2012, pp. 11–22), Diaconu (2012, p. 88), Wiesing (2014) and Griffero (2020, pp. 56-65).

3Ontologically (and not just epistemically), subjective facts are the meanings that at most one person, the one being felt-bodily affected, can talk about (i.e. in the first person).

4“The wind is wind ‘in the sails’”; “the south wind ‘is accepted’ [‘gilt’] by the farmer as a sign of rain”, so that “the farmer’s circumspection first discovers the south wind in its being by taking the lay of the land into account” (Heidegger, 1996, pp. 66, 75). “The south wind can be a sign of rain. It is more accurately an omen, and first and strictly an omen which is addressed to everyday concern, where it is encountered and as such discovered by everyday concern in the course of directing itself toward the weather (cultivation, harvest, or a military venture)” (Heidegger, 1985, p. 206). Ironically, some consider Heidegger to be a real weatherman, a “captain of the air” (Luftschiffer), thus valorising the period he spent as a military meteorologist on the Western front (Durham Peters, 2015, p. 241).

5See Diaconu (2013, especially §§4-5). On the transformation of air into sound see Minssen (1997, 2004, pp. 155-183) and, on how to visualize and design a no-thing like the air, Wagenfeld (2015).

6See Diaconu (2013) and Baert (2013, 2019, pp. 221-255).

7Except sometimes, “as in mist, or in rising smoke from fire and chimneys, or in light snow when flakes, in the feathery descent, pick out the delicate tracery of aerial currents” (Ingold, 2015, p. 68).

8Including both “air tone” and “weather image” (Witterungsbild), or the “landscape” as a whole: the “sense-tonic effects” link physical and psychological but are rightly explained as “response” and not as projective empathy into the landscape (Hellpach, 1946, pp. 63, 66-67).

9Or reducing the weight that drags us down to gravity, the felt pain to its neurobiological causes, etc.

10“The experience of wind lends itself well to accounting for subtle atmospheric change, regardless of whether it is seasonal, climatic, or emotionally felt” (Low, Hsu, 2007, p. 5).

11The wind, in fact, “can be smelt, heard and felt, if not touched, and its effects are visible”, or they “can be felt to occur but are not seen to occur” (ibid, p. 10).

12Echoing the Shintoist distinction between “formed things” and “formless things”, Ogawa argues that “the appearance of things is only made possible by their horizon, and this horizon discloses a dimension in which what is within it manifests itself as a quasi-thing” (Ogawa, 2021, p. 36: my emphasis). See Hisayama (2014) and now also Kuwayama (2023).

13I develop here in part Soentgen’s analysis of things (1997) and Schmitz’s theory of quasi-things.

14About the cinema’s poetic “representation of the invisible” (the wind) see Nova (2011) and Thomas (2016).

15Does the wind only change its face, depending on whether it blows with or against us (Schmitz, 1990, p. 217)?

16“Just as the wind blows towards us, fate also comes towards us, although we have little idea of the character of its signs.” (Meyer-Sickerdieck, 2012, p. 134).

17What Ingold says about some non-objects: “the sun shines by day and the moon and stars by night, and clouds billow. They are, respectively, their shining and billowing, just as the hills are their rising, the fire is its burning and the pebbles are their grating.” (Ingold, 2011, p. 117).

18Only when the cause can be separated from its effect can natural science express its prognosis and operate in a preventive way.

19See Mahayni (2003, pp. 223-231) and Hasse (2017, pp. 173-227).

20“The hill is not an object on the earth’s surface but a formation of that surface, which can only appear as an object through its artificial excision from the landscape of which it is an integral part” (Ingold, 2011, p. 117).

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References

Bibliographical reference

Tonino Griffero, “The Wind Is Not Moved Air. Back To (Quasi) Things Themselves”Phenomenology and Mind, 26 | 2024, 118-129.

Electronic reference

Tonino Griffero, “The Wind Is Not Moved Air. Back To (Quasi) Things Themselves”Phenomenology and Mind [Online], 26 | 2024, Online since 01 July 2024, connection on 16 December 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/phenomenology/3590

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About the author

Tonino Griffero

Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata - t.griffero@lettere.uniroma2.it

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