Studia Phaenomenologica

Aesthetics is fundamentally a theory of sensible experience. Its scope has expanded greatly from an initial centering on the arts and scenic nature to the full range of appreciative experience. Expanding the range of aesthetics raises challenging questions about the experience of appreciation. Traditional accounts are inadequate in their attempt to identify and illuminate the perceptual experiences that these new applications evoke. Considering the range of environmental and everyday occasions aesthetically changes aesthetics into a descriptive and not necessarily celebratory study of sensible experience, for it must now accommodate a complete range of negative as well as positive values. Th is paper develops an analysis of the multiple dimensions of environmental sensibility.

The concept of atmosphere may be defined as tuned space, i.e. space with a mood. This concept opens a lot of new perspectives for Aesthetics. The very paradigm of it is stage design. Stage designers install a certain climate on the stage. But in our days almost everything is staged. Thus the theory of atmospherefinds applications in Commodity Aesthetics, Design, Architecture, but also the staging of politics as well as the staging of a person through a certain life-style is a field of application. Finally the Aesthetics of Atmosphere helps to understand art, in particular performative art and music.

Through an atmospherological approach, primarily inspired by the Aisthetik (Böhme) and the New Phenomenology (Schmitz), the paper investigates the relationship between atmosphere and lived space, defines what kind of perception the atmospheric one is and examines the space we experience in the lifeworld and to which plane geometry turns out to be completely blind. Sketching briefly the (philosophical) history of lived space (from Heidegger to Schmitz), we assume that atmospheres function as (transmodal) affordances that permeate the lived space, i.e. as ecological invites or meanings that are ontologically rooted in things and quasi-things.

The paper the author considers Bachelard’s approaches to the question of space in his specific phenomenological manner. After a preliminary reflection on Bachelard’s polemics with a Bergsonian underestimation of space in favor of time as duration, the paper discusses on the phenomenological attitude to the constitution of space. The next chapter explains Bachelard’s dynamical model of valorization in which positive and negative values oscillate in relation to our inner and personal experiences. The last chapter concerns the specific phenomenology of hostile spaces in contrast to intimate ones. In agreement with Bachelard, the author claims that intimacy needs experience of the dangerous and of openness, so it is not easy to determine when a specific place is or is not experienced as secure. Majestic, light and spacious buildings may not be experienced as more secure for us than small cabins with an intimate shadow of humanity.

The ordinary space is continuously cluttered with bodies and constantly, when we move, we must maneuver, push and shove, walk around, make space. The awareness of having to operate in a limited space, where the places are always already occupied, is sustained by a special mode of appearing of ordinary space: the occupancy field. A phenomenological analysis of the occupancy field demonstrates that: (i) the format in which space presents itself in ordinary perception is marked by our awareness of occupying space with our body and having to squeeze it somewhere each time we move; (ii) bodies and space are co-dependent on an intentional level: ordinary space has, by a sense of vacuum, a mode of appearing which is indissociable from the phenomenological structure of bodies; (iii) the presentation of space is dependent on an anticipation of possibilities: it is because the situation is considered from the opportunities and constraints on the possible set up by our body that a space presents itself to us. We could not experience space if our perceptual apparatus took a mere snapshot of the current states of aff airs, if through it we had only access to the state in which the environment is at time t. To experience space means fundamentally to be ahead of one’s time, consider the present not from the future, but from the possible.

This article discusses the complex space of the city as an urban milieu of vitality. On the skin of the city, a permanent change of its physical and physiognomicappearance takes place. The alternation of urban “faces” is constituted situationally in the structures and wrinkles of the skin. However, characteristic features of urban quarters do not only appear visually; they become bodily felt and are perceptible as holistic impressions, emanating from atmospheric “vital qualities” (Dürckheim). Therefore, lively urban districts are discussed as “body islands” (Schmitz) in urban space. Seen from this vitalistic perspective, the cityis not only a world of rational actors—as it is common ground in the social sciences—but also an unpredictable space of performativity.

Japanese architecture emphasizes transitional spaces between rooms rather than the rooms themselves. If these transitional spaces can be successfullyrealized, then everything in the room will naturally fall into place with anything else. This also applies to the relation between a building and other buildings stretching out through the whole city, and ultimately to the relation of the city to the natural environment. “En” is the Japanese word for such transitional spaces. It means both “edge” and “connection.” It also means destiny. When two people fall in love at fi rst sight or understand each other without having to speak, they are said to have “en.” This article provides a phenomenological description and constitutional analysis of two Japanese bridging structures: (1) the engawa at the side or back of a house or temple which functions as a veranda for viewing the garden and a hallway to connect the rooms, and (2) the hashigakari bridgeway of the Noh theater by which the principal actor gets from the green room to the stage.

Almost simultaneous emergence of Existentialism and Marxism at end of the Little Ice Age had coincided with rapid urbanization and prevalence of mood disorder in northern Europe. This historic configuration is cast against Relph’s notion of place in his critique of urban planning. During the LIA street walking had mitigated mood disorder triggered by sunlight deprivation of indoor spaces while, at the same time, it had also buoyed a place. It was the unplanned place in the open air—a dilapidated street corner in St. Petersburg or Romanesque streetscape of Old Copenhagen—that offered authenticity, cerebral restitution, and for ardent minds also discernment and acumen. Relph’s critique continues to be of pressing relevance to winter-cities designed for automotive access, and also for the interpretation it offers on the thought and events of the late LIA and following it.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the notion of landscape is a phenomenological typical object and a perfect meeting point of different fields of study, and, in particular, a distinctive topic for a dialogue between phenomenology and human sciences. Starting from an analysis of a text of Erwin Straus, we attemptto support the view that into all kinds of landscape—sensory, perceptual, geographical, pictorial or built—we can read various ways of living, dwelling or being in the world, or in other words we can read into them some forms of the original experience. This means that within all landscapes, as embedded in these forms of experience, we can read various ways of living, dwelling or being in the world. So we believe it is possible to constitute and to think a unitary sense of landscape from a phenomenological interpretation of space and human behaviour.

Because the status of nature is ambiguous in Being and Time, we explore an ecological perspective on Heidegger’s early main work in this article. Our hypothesis is that the affordance theory of James Gibson enables us to a) to understand being-in-the-world as being-in-nature, b) reconnect man and nature and c) understand the twofold sense of nature in Being and Time. After exploring Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world and Gibson’s concept of being-in-nature, we confront Heidegger’s and Gibson’s conception of being-in-the-world and being-in-nature. It will become clear that Gibson’s affordance theory enables an ecological reading of Being and Time, in which the relational character of being-in-the-world is stressed and the exceptional position of human being-in-the-world has to be rejected. Moreover, it becomes clear that an ecological reading of Being and Time enables us to reconnect being-in-the world with being-in-nature (unconcealment), which is rooted in “primordial” nature as its infinite origin (concealment).

A radical thinking of space remains for phenomenology a difficulty, which Heidegger has been concerned with. He developed an existential conception of the spatiality of Dasein in Being and Time, which he abandoned in his later philosophy; according to its “turn,” this philosophy proposes a notion of emptiness to describe spatial experience. The paper endorses the view that this notion makes possible a thinking of space in its essence. Pursuing further the reflection concerning the empty space, Maldiney advocates the influence of the East Asian tradition on this issue. However, given that none of these authors considers dance as an art susceptible to disclose space in its essential vacuity, this paper aims to argue that there is a true choreographic empty space.

The paper analyses Patočka’s phenomenological treatment of the concept of space and of personal spatiality. Patočka’s solution (the pronominal proto-structure of interpellation) is used to assess Heidegger’s approach to the concept of space. Patočka’s phenomenological advancements in regards to histeacher’s developments are considered first through a comparison of their respective concepts of “Earth”, and second, through an evaluation of the reasonsof the impossibility of the Heideggerian attempt, in Sein und Zeit, to reduce spatiality to temporality.