ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches some of the central claims and main arguments by which Hermann Schmitz arrives at this view, which he has developed in his 1969 book Der Gefühlsraum (The Space of Feeling) and refined in later writings. It contextualizes these claims, as Schmitz only seldom does, with a view to ongoing discussions in the philosophy of emotion. Atmospheres, according to Schmitz, are “complete occupations of a surfaceless space in the region of experienced presence”. They are specific ways in which the surrounding space, insofar as it is accessible to or rather resonating in the feeling body, is experienced. Schmitz further elucidates the spatial nature of emotions as atmospheres by conceiving of them as holistic syntheses of kinesthetic forces and intermodal qualities affecting the feeling body. Schmitz’s theory has its main focus on precisely that phase of an emotional episode in which critical distance, strategies of emotional self-regulation and actively shaping one’s feelings are not yet at play.
