Spazi e sentimenti (atmosferici). A partire dalla nuova fenomenologia

((Atmospheric) Spaces and Feelings: Following up on Schmitz’s New Phenomenology)

Abstract

Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology opposes the prevailing conception of space understood either as a formal continuum void of lacunae (geometry and physics) or as an external theater within which human beings are spectators and actors (common sense). In so doing, the New Phenomenology begins a profound rethinking of the traditional phenomenological notion of “lived space.” The intention is that of turning around or at least relativizing the psychologized-internalized-reductivistic paradigm that has imposed itself ever since the fifth century BCE. According to such paradigm, feelings are simply internal to the subject and consequently the external world is void of immanent features. If, on the contrary, one admits that feelings are not internal but rather external, and more precisely they are atmospheres that are effused in the pre-dimensional space, then one can distinguish among various kinds of atmospheres on the basis of whether they irradiate from the space of vastness, the directional space or, finally, even the local space. Our vital involuntary and felt-body experiences thus resume their most authentic physiognomy and end up being characterized for the most part by an atmospheric voluminousness that is irreducible to the isotropic dimensions of quantitative sciences.