Are Atmospheres Shared Feelings?

Today’s so-called “affective turn” increasingly recognizes that humans can feel “with” others exactly as they can share beliefs and intentions. “Atmospheres”, here meaning feelings that pervade and tonalize a certain external (lived) space, sound at fist glance something shared by definition. But this is too fast and needs further investigation. In order to do that, the first part of the paper briefly discusses the very ambiguity of the notion of shared feeling as such: i.e. is a shared feeling something intentional? What is its spreading degree? Does it really have a numerical identity? The second part concerns the reinterpretation of the concept of shared feeling from an atmospherologic perspective and extensively addresses this issue starting from the (certainly controversial) neophenomenological distinction between the atmospheric feeling as such and the affective involvement it triggers. The three kinds of atmosphere I outlined (prototypic, derivate, spurious ones) also apply to different types and grades of emotional sharing through felt-bodily processes, showing that they usually produce a well balanced condition of similarity and difference. Finally, the paper researches the possibility that an atmospherologic approach could also serve for a better understanding of those socio-historical moods that influence the private and collective climate more than you might think. However, the conclusion drawn in this paper is that a fully shared atmosphere, i.e. that is able to generate a true collective felt body, seems a pretty rare experience, since only one of the possible forms of felt-bodily communication (namely the solidaristic encorporation) makes sharing and reciprocity fully possible. This means that one can feel in the most cases the same type-atmospheric feeling but not really feel what the token-atmospheric feeling is like for others.