Situazione - Atmosfera

When does a state of affairs really become a "situation"? The theoretical biology of the early twentieth century binds man, like any other species, to an insuperable world-environment that does not coincide with the objective world. Irritated and at the same time stimulated by this "discovery" of man's unavoidable environmental destiny, the subsequent German philosophy undertakes to preserve man's freedom, conceiving the "authentic" situation not as a natural datum to which to submit completely, but as the outcome of an existential project, of a linguistic pre-decision, or of a significance that can be stylized in culture. All these approaches, however, underestimate the atmospheric and therefore affective significance of situations, to which the pathic aesthetics, inspired by New Phenomenology, must instead pay particular attention being precisely aimed at identifying and enhancing the atmospheric constraints of everyday experience.