Correspondence and Atmos-Sphere – Towards a Philosophy of Correspondence

Reinhard Knodt: Correspondence and Atmos-Sphere

Correspondence and Atmos-Sphere

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,As some of you know, I have often written about theneed for a philosophy of aesthetic correspondences. Alittle Reclam volume of mine bears that title, andwhoever is acquainted with it knows that within itthe concept of atmosphere plays a decisive role.Apart from that, I apply my philosophy ofcorrespondences, with varying degrees of success, tomy favourite subjects, gardens, works of art,architecture and religious questions, withoutspending too much time on systematic explanations. Myinvitation to speak here today I interpret as a kindof challenge – to finally give a systematic form tothe nucleus of my philosophy. This can be adequatelydesignated by the term “correspondence”, orphilosophy of correspondence. Atmosphere is a veryimportant expression in the framework of thisphilosophy of correspondence. The clarifying hyphen Ihave added to it in my title is in imitation ofHeidegger (atmos, wind or breath, and sphaira, envelopeor circle, thus, roughly, the “breathing circle”).

BackgroundFirst of all, an attempt to localize my project. Aphilosophy of correspondence is not merely a theory

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of certain relationships, it is above all a praxis ofphilosophizing and of describing phenomena, one thatI began to develop in the 90s, but which, as method,I only became aware of quite gradually. That Reclamreacted so swiftly at the time and inserted theproject into its well-known yellow-jacketed serieswas both a help and a hindrance, since the wholebusiness was then looked upon as something quiteself-evident, which is by no means the case. Thephilosophy of correspondence is strictly speaking notyet in existence. It only pretends to be. Thereexists a series of essays or attempts that follow itstracks – the most well-known is probably the book on“atmosphere” by Gernot Böhme. But one also notices onreading this book that the philosophy ofcorrespondence is not yet “in the world”, in otherwords, its novel aspect was little understood and didnot lead to any practice (if one leaves on one side,for the time being, those practices that I havemyself stirred up through the activities of the“Schnackenhof”).If one tries to describe the philosophy ofcorrespondence, one could speak of a bridgeconstructed between two important twentieth-centurystyles of thinking. – On the one side stands thestyle of discursivity inaugurated by Habermas, withits political ambition stemming from Hegel, and the

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related informationism derived from the informationtheory of the 40s, in other words, the model ofsender, receiver, and “message” (the “Shannon-Weavermodel” being an example, where the “message” might be“understood” or “misunderstood” in relation to a“code” which is used by the sender or the receiverand in relation to a medium being used). BothHabermas’s theory and the model of “medium andmessage” have in the meantime been stylized as aproject of modernity which will constitute the mediaas a sort of digital “second world” alongside thereal world, and at the same time a sort of discursivecathedral of reason, or even an ideal of discursiveorganisation and also of description for what goes onin the world. This is a model which is occasionally,without much care for precision, identified with theconcept of democracy, or sold as “media democracy”,and which identifies the rule of discourse more orless strongly with the rule of the rulers.On the other side from this cathedral of discourse,apparently unmovable and a little cranky, if alsoappealing, stands Heidegger’s old Black Forest hut,his entirely different interpretation of thinking as“aisthesis”, with its most important methodicalterms, the “experience of being” and the“understanding of being-there” (implying already thatthe most important things cannot be “understood” at

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all, but only “experienced”). Heidegger was Husserl’spupil, but distanced himself gradually from thelatter’s phenomenology of “the things themselves” andentered into an alliance with the arts.It is no exaggeration if one claims that the lastthirty years of philosophical reflection in thetwentieth century, including postmodernism, playedthemselves out in a quarrel between the philosophy ofdiscourse on the one side and the incorrigible andstubbornly resistant successors of Heidegger on theother – both from a conservative and also from apostmodern “progressive” perspective. An early climaxwas the “hermeneutics debate”, in which the field ofunderstanding of temporal reality was narrowed, tothe exclusion of art, but also thereby successfullysecured by Gadamer. This was the period of my studieswith Gadamer and Kaulbach and then with ManfredRiedel, who occasionally characterized himself as adisciple of Bloch (which is only partly true), andthen also with the structuralist Neumann, who basedhimself on French thought and thereby on Nietzsche’ssuccessors and postmodernism. Both sides, thediscursive pupils of Habermas as well as theaestheticians indebted to Heidegger’s ontology,approached their subject in very different ways andwith very different attitudes. Who knows – perhapshere there persists into the present day a romantic

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remnant of that legendary “battle to the death” thatNietzsche saw being fought between the camps of the“scientists” and the “artists”.A confrontation between enemies entails occasionalaccusations, and thus the descendants of Heideggerare even today accused of a kind of ontologicalrapture of the depths, a nostalgia for the “being ofbeings” that is forgotten in the “enframing” (Ge-stell)of technology and discursivity, and only sparks tolife here and there in the clearings of great art andphilosophy. For that reason, the endeavour ofphilosophical speech should follow this path, [argueHeidegger and his followers], instead of losing itsway in the pragmatic constructs of secondary“chatter”, above all of sociology. Habermas in turnis accused by his opponents of a kind of discursiveaddiction to the heights, the heights of abstraction,a dubious belief in the constructability andpolitical controllability of ever more abstractdiscourses piling Babel-like up to heaven, and abelief in their institutionalization, according tothe motto “God’s bureaucratic mills grind slowly butsurely”. Art, in the eyes of Habermas’s successors,is best transformed immediately into a kind of“communication”, or more precisely, into a form ofpolitically-motivated social work undertaken in ademocratic spirit. When it came to aesthetics,

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Habermas himself once admitted to “not being musical”– quite self-assuredly and openly, recognizingperhaps the necessity of aesthetics in the traditionof Heidegger and Hölderlin, but, one may assume, notprizing it very highly. On the other hand Heidegger,too, bade farewell to metaphysics, which, as healready wrote in his Nietzsche lectures of 1940s, hewanted to “overcome” – a situation which one canconfidently characterize as one of ontology’s granddelusions, since in Heidegger’s case we are all stillwaiting for the never-quite-manifested or onlyhesitantly and occasionally “unconcealed” Being,something which is only unproblematic for Taoists (aswe know, Heidegger is very popular in Asia) – and infact a certain amount of Oriental thinking, perhapsvia Nietzsche, is reflected in Heidegger, somethingwhich recent scholarship has taken up (for instancein the book “Abwesen” by the Buddhist HeideggerianByul Chul Han).But instead of all this let us pose the question:where will a philosophy of a correspondence, whichclaims to build a “bridge” here, take us?

Attempt at a descriptionThe philosophy of correspondence begins from a commonpractical deficit created by the opposition justdescribed, as well as by its individual poles. As

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fundamentally as Heidegger and Habermas differ fromone another, they resemble each other nonetheless inone respect, inasmuch as, both in the case of theglobal process of communication and its discursiveinstitutions and in that of the self-unconcealingdestiny of Being, they open up in the first place ahighly questionable fundamental distance between theperpetually elusive objects of knowledge and theindividual and his or her thought. We ourselves, orthe experiencing, feeling and thinking subject, feelsmall, left behind, hardly worthy of notice, when wesee ourselves confronted by the sprawlinginstitutions of discourse on the one hand or theindicated processes of “clearing” on the other. Wesomehow have the dispiriting impression that it makesno difference if we start climbing around in thescaffolding of the Habermasian cathedral ofdiscursive reason, and even Heidegger’s endlesschains of questions only bring us a few centimetresforward on an infinitely long path, if, that is, justabout everything in our quest is not dissolved intothat famous ‘conversation that is us’, which does notmake us any more satisfied unless we prefer to keepsilent and listen, or at most, say something bylistening – to Language. Habermas would certainly remind the frivolousindividual who attempts to think for himself – in a

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global perspective – that the “philosopher” in theemphatic sense is finished, an untimely figure ofidyllic subjectivism, who presumptuously seeks acentre while operating with his reason in someperipheral area of the Milky Way of Discourse, whilst“the” great discourse of the world in reality will atbest keep a job open for him – as universityofficial, statistician or artistic social worker at acommunal-political reception. The pathetic contrastbetween a limited self lacking all prospects and thecathedrals of collective discursive reason also marksthe descendants of Heidegger, however, who are inprinciple already elevated above “secondary chatter”.In their perspective – we can guess it in advancealready – we will never become old enough to see thehorizon of the Promised Land. We can “approach” it,certainly, but like Moses, and more in an “everunavailing” understanding that is simultaneously anunderstanding that all is to no avail. In sum itresembles, by no means coincidentally, that processdescribed by Elias Canetti in relation to the historyof the Roman Catholic Church – the process by whichthe priesthood in the course of the centuriesdeferred the Last Judgement, salvation, and thecomfort of the Second Coming to an invisibly distantfuture, in order to fill out the meantime with therituals of power...

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For a philosophy of correspondence?Here the philosophy of correspondence intervenes. Itarose, historically speaking, out of the intellectualthaw of the postmodern currents of the 90s, thegeneration of those (then in their 30s and 40s) wholong ago criticized Habermas as a kind of methodicalmadness (e.g. Schnädelbach) but who also did not wantto sign up to all of Heidegger either. My ÄsthetischeKorrespondenzen (1993) was a book that – without layingfoundations – presented eight possible applicationsof a philosophy of correspondence, and which wasdiscussed at the higher levels of philosophy (even bySloterdijk, who presented it in a line with Schmitzand Bollnow), but which as an individual phenomenonwas insufficient to establish a real, workingconnection between the communication concept and theidea of aisthesis. At best it appeared as an interestingphenomenology of the everyday, and was praised as“brilliant” in the press, if it was understood atall, and if I understood myself back then. At thetime I was in contact with Wolfgang Welsch, who wasin the process of developing a model of “aestheticthinking”. But from that arose no real trend; hisendeavours too were read as a theory of communicationdisplaced onto art, i.e. as the attempt to practicecommunication itself from an aesthetic standpoint, an

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interpretation which is only now beginning to betransformed.What distinguishes “thinking in correspondences” or aphilosophy of correspondence from thinking in thecategories of communication or of hermeneutics? Moreprecisely: what distinguishes the atmospheric horizonof moods, approximations, differences and (as HermannSchmitz has shown, also physically experienced)correspondences from the horizon of discourse and thehorizon of understanding? Is “correspondence” notjust another new term to adjust the aesthetic deficitof the concept of communication by means of a littleart? Is the philosophy of correspondence reallyanything new?

a. The word correspondence has its roots in the Latin“respondere”, meaning “to reply”. “Co-respondere” isagreement or meeting together to respond, or evenmore literally, bringing weights (pondus) together inorder to produce a counterweight, a kind ofdependence. It is a concept that denotes both theconnection itself (Fr. corréspondance) and a practice (forinstance, letter-writing). “Correspondence”, such asbusiness correspondence, or the exchange of gossipwas the collection of letters, reviews or socialnotices in certain sections of newspapers. From thereading of such “correspondence” one could establish

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how well or badly a play had been received by thepublic, how the political mood was in a country or ina portion of the English House of Commons, how thebusiness climate, the political situation, oranything else of note was to be evaluated orinterpreted.Correspondence is however not a one-sided act ofreading or interpretation. It is better characterizedby an immanent process of communicating “back andforth” within the horizon of a common situation, a“back and forth” that does not only present thissituation, but also helps to shape it. In this simplesense, correspondence is a form of communality, acoming-to-an-agreement and adjustment in view of aposition or situation that is thereby shaped incommon. Correspondence stands in a poieticrelationship with the atmosphere in which it takesplace, in other words, it assists in creating thisatmosphere.

b. In a structural model, which we could useexperimentally to describe this state of affairs, onemight posit that correspondence in the simplest caseis a trivalent relationship. In contrast to the bipolarrelationship of the principle of communication, inwhich a speaker (proponent, sender) A communicateswith a listener (opponent, receiver) B in order to

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come to a result, an accord, a decision etc – andalso in contrast to the merely self-revealing essencein Heidegger, we can say in the philosophy ofcorrespondence, positing a strongly simplified model,that the correspondent (A) corresponds with acorrespondent (B) in view of a common horizon H,which gradually “shines through” or appears withinthis correspondence. This “shining through”(Aufscheinen) is an important expression, which notunintentionally relates to Heidegger’s way ofspeaking. It signifies that atmosphere is not simplyproduced, just as love, too, is not simply producedor caused; rather it “shines” or begins to shine,like an emerging light, through the “contribution”,as it were, of the participants. This “contribution”is also not simply an act, at any rate it is notsomething like a settlement or an agreement. (Afterall, we hardly talk about love’s “discursivity”.)Instead, this “contribution” in such matters is morelike a work of art in the making, composed of a senseof tact, of an attuned giving of signals, ofhesitation, gestures of mutual awareness and thus ofa tentative, playful creation of a productive tension– a process existing between understanding and beingin discourse with others. Put more abstractly, correspondence is the making-fruitful of a situation in the sense of a being- (or

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acting) together. Communication, on the other hand,is a kind of discursive trajectory that works towardsaccord, that points toward an end, a conclusion, a“making common” via some sort of official resolution.Correspondence has the aim of a communal celebration.Communication has the goal of a common resolution, anend or destination-point. Put differently – whencommunication has attained its end, it becomestedious, because there is nothing more to discuss.When correspondence has attained its aim, it becomessomething felicitous, something enthralling.

c. Here it becomes clear that communication and(where they are attained) also its results, forinstance a contract, are something much “stronger”than the relationships of correspondence.Correspondence is “weak”, but it is omnipresent, andit is always fruitful. The nature of making a“contribution” lies in the fact that in matters ofcorrespondence one cannot “will” anything, one canonly, with a general aim in sight, strengthen,weaken, connect, combine, pick up again, tense,relax, press forward or hesitate, but never simplycome to an agreement, compromise, or make out acontract. Everyone can see, for instance, that inmatters of love, as a successful correspondence, onecannot simply produce something: it comes about, as

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if of itself, or it does not. Hate or war likewisecannot simply be started or stopped. Correspondencemagnifies something which – even if only in nuce – isalways already there. Perhaps something is alwayslacking, too. The philosophy of correspondence, inany case, points towards the fact that we can alwaysonly act in common, make a contribution, strengthenor weaken by holding back, that we are in the finalanalysis dependent, that in a higher sense we couldeven be said to follow a greater law in order to makeit fruitful for us through participation and nascentcorrespondence and to direct its fruitfulness onto usin order to become creative ourselves – or not. Thatmay seem like a big concession, even a renunciationof freedom and self-positing. I would maintain,however, that we can only attain happiness throughcorrespondence, whereas through communication and itsdiscourses we can only, at best, be successful, andnot happy – even when success is attained. Forhappiness is not the drawing-up of a contract withthe world, but the presence of the world infulfilment.To this extent there exists for the philosopher ofcorrespondence no opposition or polarity, but onlyconstruction or weakening, or the breaking or dying-away of correspondence. Abstractly: correspondencearises or it does not. It cannot be laid claim to,

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and I will never “understand” the other, in any case.I can come to an agreement with him – but who knowshow many errors lie at the basis of the agreement andhow long the accord can be maintained? Instead thephilosophy of correspondence starts from theobservation that things themselves are enchained,threaded together, befriended, even in love with eachother, and that we take part in these relationships –including, indeed more particularly, when we try toknow the world. – I am, therefore, no spokesman forthe difference between the systems of our reason andthe “world”. Things in themselves may exist or not –what matters is not that I “understand” or simulatetheir existence but that I correspond, presupposingthem as background. Whether in love or in war, thatis only a question of the tension between truth andillusion.

Atmos-SphaireAs an envelope or circle of breath, atmosphere has todo with breathing, and speaking. Apart from that, wespeak metaphorically of the “breath of things”.Spaces, objects, people, events, the appearance ofsomeone in company, all these can be described in ametaphorical sense as if they gave off a certain“air”. A well-bound old book breathes a different airfrom a TV brochure. A Buddha figure gives off a

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different air from a fire hydrant, and on a footballpitch a different atmosphere dominates from in acathedral. The atmos and our sensibility foratmospheric qualities must once have had a verypowerful significance. In the early Middle Ages, ahole in the sarcophagus of a saint or a deceasedpowerful man would give devotees access to his atmos.One could bring one’s hand into proximity with thedecaying body. Later the relic took over the role ofatmospheric vehicle. It had the advantage oftransportability, but remained a symbol with apowerful atmosphere of presence. With the relic theatmos of the saint was implanted in a specific spot.Around the relic arose the church, the monastery, andthe cult of a community around the monastery. Thesecircles around relics can also be interpreted asatmos-sphairen; without this atmospheric cult of the airof the dead, or without other atmospheric ritualssuch as anointing, Christianity and its culturalspread would hardly be imaginable. The “air ofparadise” which is occasionally mentioned and thescent of corpses, already disguised with myrrh in theRoman catacombs, have as it were prepared ouratmospheric organs, and whoever entered the CatholicChurch as a child knows this very well. Today wereceive – sensitive as we are to everything andanything – “atmospheric” signals from all quarters,

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and install ourselves in the most sublime ofatmospheric works of art, from architecture to thedesign of public spaces. At other points we destroyor abstract from the atmospheric, perhaps, throughthe combination of various objects whose atmosphericradiance is thoroughly at odds with one another. Agarden is an atmospheric work of art. We embellishand exchange atmospheres – or to put it more banally,we redecorate. Important atmospheric scenes, such asthe skyline of New York, are supervised andmaintained with an eye to their atmospheric effect.The atmospheric aura or effect of the skyline of NewYork and of a candle on a restaurant table that onelights in order to approximate the situation ofcloseness and communality one might experience whensitting at the last campfire of our civilization is,to be sure, differently dimensioned. But in the endthey come to the same thing. The skyline and thecandle are the nuclei of breathing-circles. In thebreathing-circles correspondence is unfolded, and ourlives take on meaning. In correspondence theattunement, or the attuned space, develops that makesus once again into an instrument of the atmospherethat we are shaping.

An example: performance and tensionMany things become clearer in application, perhaps

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even the most important things, and therefore I offerin closing a brief application of the above ideas. Ina lecture, in other words a live performance, whatmatters is tension, excitement – not interestinginformation, as those lecturers think, perhaps, whobore their colleagues with overlong speeches. If thereader requests a guiding example, let him or herimagine that the philosophy of correspondence existsto explain how tension is built up in a performance.What is tension? One could call it the opposite ofstrain. To break the strained atmosphere at the startof a lecture, a good speaker will skilfully employ acasual joke, a personal anecdote, a gesture promptingthe audience to relax, in order afterwards torecreate tension, but in a more appropriate manner.In a crime novel the tension is the constantlypressing question of who the murderer is, so that (onthis model) one could simplistically believe that“tension” exists horizontally, stretching from thebeginning to the end. In a less naive sense one musttake into account that tension in a way is present atall times, but must be kept constant, in order toconstitute the stable horizon of listening orreading. Tension persists, then: it must not bebroken off. We must ask what maintains the permanenceof tension, and accompanies, as it were, the horizonof performance by providing its corresponding pole.

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To this we find the following hints.Take for example the phrase: what a beautiful day! Itis a well-known phrase, since the German PresidentJoachim Gauck used it as the opening of hisacceptance speech shortly after being elected. As weknow, this phrase produced an astonishingly positivereaction. One might well ask why this was.Gauck did not say, “Ladies and gentlemen”, but, “whata beautiful day!” At the beginning of his speech hecreated a horizon that enclosed all those present,providing a common situation to which they were allsymbolically sworn in. One could say that such aphrase is even more all-embracing than, let us say,“dear congregation”. This phrase, and the situationto which it points, indicates a horizon that iscommon to all and within which the speech can now getunderway. There are other celebrated phrases thatcreate this tension or have done so in the past: “Ichbin ein Berliner”. Tension of this kind – I would call itvertical tension – elicits correspondence. Itdifferentiates itself from the horizontal tensionthat is created in trivial literature (crime novels,romances, adventure books). There telling a story iseasy, since it must in some way, on the face ofthings, serve as answer to the dramatic initialquestion (who is the murderer, will the guy get thegirl or not, will the group survive the adventure,

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who must die...). In literary fiction the matter ismore difficult, since the demand of literatureconsists in the implicit claim that the correspondinghorizon that makes everything “tense” (or exciting)is reality itself. A well-delivered speech thus opensup a vertical horizon which gradually unfolds itselfas the reality in which we ourselves live, by“contributing” more and more until it becomes clearthat the speaker speaks of the very reality that heis, and in a light that inspires us. Musical performance functions in the same way. Theart of musical performance is, besides dazzlingbrilliance and purity, the tension that must never beinterrupted. The listener experiences the course ofthe performance as a movement towards the essential.It is as if there lay behind the apparent horizon, asthe performance continues, a new, still higher, stillmore mysterious, more sublime, more bizarre horizon,piling itself up upon the first, and doing so onlybecause the performer in the performance masters theintense play of correspondences, pushing the horizonever further out and, as appears as a simply unendingprocess in a Bach fugue and as great performersexperience, extending the horizons endlessly into agradually building yearning which, in complicity withthe performer, also magnifies him, culminating with acommon song of yearning, with that inner extension which

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is incomprehensible to all outsiders and to thoseimmune to the atmospheric spell of the performance,and which is resolved in the final applause. The“carrying” of the tension, which is also an enduranceof the tension until its necessary resolution, thatis performance – in the case of an academic lecturejust as in the case of a life lived in common,performance as correspondence, of course, aphilosophical movement between the philosophy ofdiscourse and hermeneutics. An art with the help ofscholarship – participation – correspondence,precisely.

Literature {zitierte Lit. alphabetisch nach Name}

Name1, Vorname1: „Titel1“ Quelle1, Ort, JahrName2, Vorname2: „Titel2“ Quelle2, Ort, JahrName3, Vorname3: „Titel3“ Quelle3, Ort, Jahr

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Correspondence and Atmos-Sphere – Towards a Philosophy of Correspondence