Episode 133 - Air

Transcript

Ellie: 0:13

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:16

The Philosophy podcast, that's a breath of fresh air.

Ellie: 0:19

I am Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:22

And I'm David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:23

I have been watching the last season of the Last of Us. I love this show. We talked about this show before. David, you're not totally caught up, right? You're like super behind this past season.

David: 0:35

No, but you told me you wanted to talk about this show, so I binge watched what was left. So I am up to date on the last of us. Yes.

Ellie: 0:42

Okay. Okay. Good job doing your homework. We are recording this episode before the current season is complete, and so we'll see what happens next. But for those of you who may watch it, I am gonna mention what could be considered a spoiler. So if you don't wanna hear that, skip ahead a little bit. Why am I mentioning this in the episode on air? Well. On this most recent season of the last of us, there is an episode where some of the characters go down to a hospital basement and they see that the cordyceps, which basically turns humans into zombies and is usually transmitted by a bite from somebody who is infected is in the air. So it's this really intense moment where you go from thinking that the danger to you is in the infected people. The zombies effectively, and the danger suddenly becomes something ambient completely around you. And the reason that I was thinking about this in terms of this episode on air today is because I think the idea that the air itself could be what's leading you to get ill involves such a sense of overwhelm. Lack of control, right? When the enemy is the air, there's seems to be nothing you can do. I think this brings me back a little bit to early COVID days as well. It's not something you can see or even otherwise sense, but it surrounds you on all sides. There's no escaping the air.

David: 2:10

Yeah, and the way it plays out in the show is that it leads the people who discover that the fungus is now spreading through spores that are floating through the air. Is that it leads them to make radical decisions? Right. The story is told from the perspective of this woman who is a soldier and whose unit she sends down to the basement to explore when they phone her, to let her know that the virus is spreading through the air. The person that calls her tells her that the only thing she can do is seal them all in effectively killing them.

Ellie: 2:45

And that person is her son.

David: 2:47

then you learn that that person is her son. And of course, I think this underscores just how difficult it is to keep the air at bay, right? When the threat is in the air, there is no way to keep your distance from it unless you just do the most radical thing, which is to shut it in and everybody else in with it.

Ellie: 3:10

Yeah, which they could do because it was in a hospital basement. Again, we haven't gotten to the end of the season yet, so we'll see what develops, but you can't do if the threat is outdoors as well. So we'll come back to some environmental concerns. This is part of our four episode series on the elements, and we've been touching on a lot of environmental philosophy in this series, and we know that things like pollution of the air are massively shaping our own health outcomes and our livelihoods.

David: 3:38

Yes, it's impossible not to talk about the environment and pollution when we're thinking about air. And just to put this in a global perspective, consider the fact that in 2019, 99% of the world's population was living in places where the air quality guidelines put out by the World Health Organization just weren't being met. And that means that air pollution, which here is a broad term that includes both pollution that happens outside in open spaces, but also pollution that happens inside of the household. So the things that we breathe in our kitchens, in our living rooms, in our bathrooms. So air pollution understood in that broad sense is associated with over 6 million premature deads annually. And the majority, and I hear mean almost 90% of those premature debts occur in low and middle income countries. With most of those happening in Southeast Asia and Western Pacific regions.

Ellie: 4:41

It's shocking to me that 99% of the world's population lives in places that the WHO considers as having unhealthy air quality. Certainly, that is the case for me living in Los Angeles. I live on a busy street. This is actually my last time recording in my current house because I'm about to move. But yeah, I live on a very busy street with lots of traffic and construction. I have like my very quaint little gas stove from the 1940s that is certainly not really leading to good to health outcomes. I have no exhaust event sadly, so I'm surely among this 99%. But as you mentioned, yeah, a lot of this is happening in Asia, and one of the things that really struck me in the last fire season in Los Angeles was how after having gone to India fire season now in LA just smells like India to me. And I'm talking about like a number of different places in India. India is obviously a massive, massive country, but having traveled to quite a few places within India, there was a very distinct smell of smoke, even sometimes in like places like the Himalayas, which have less pollution than elsewhere.

David: 5:48

Yeah. Well, it reminds me also of the first time that I ever traveled internationally. Once I was already in the US when I was a freshman in college. I went to this world debate tournament that happened in Beijing, China, and it was my first time, certainly outside of North America.

Ellie: 6:05

The one where you joked that you like brought the Communist manifesto with you and were carrying it on the plane.

David: 6:10

Yes. That, yeah.

Ellie: 6:12

I forgot when you mentioned that.

David: 6:13

Well, I, I got stopped on the way back in LAX and detained for a while, under the Patriot Act at the time. In this case my story is about how I went to China. We got this hotel and I was really excited to go out into the city, but it was already kind of late in the afternoon and we were really tired and I remember opening the windows to the hotel that gave out onto the city, and I remember thinking like, oh, it's kind of a little bit gray androse and I didn't think anything of it. And then I went to bed that night. This was, in December, so it's the winter. That night it snowed a lot and the snow took out a lot of the particulate matter in the air. And when I woke up the next morning and I opened the windows again, I kid you not, Ellie, about 200 yards in front of my hotel. There was a massive radio tower that the air pollution prevented me from seeing. Just the day before. And so I think one of the problems with air pollution in particular is that it's kind of that boiling soup metaphor where you're in it but you can't see it, right? Like it's not visible. You cannot really see the air pollution 'cause we're just seeing the environment and we take it for what it is and by the time it becomes visible. It's either in retrospect or when it's already too late and the conditions are beyond a critical point. But I remember thinking there's no way that I couldn't see this massive structure had it not just been because the air was so polluted and effectively for the next two weeks that I was in China, I kept spitting out like black stuff out of my nose.

Ellie: 7:57

Okay. We don't, we don't need that detail. I'm gonna cut you off right there, my friend. Yeah, it's like air is invisible until it's not. Today we're talking about air.

David: 8:09

Why is air the element of freedom and imagination,

Ellie: 8:13

How has air been weaponized in battle to produce a sense of terror?

David: 8:18

And what happens when we forget this invisible element? This is the final episode in our series on the four elements, and we've been talking a lot about ancient Greek philosophy in this series because the idea of the four elements comes from them. Specifically we've mentioned a number of pre-Socratic philosophers, many of whom considered one of these elements to be the founding principle of the universe.

Ellie: 8:51

It's like in order to earn your stripes as a pre-Socratic, you have to align yourself with one of the elements. Like Thales already chose water, so I need to choose fire.

David: 9:04

Exactly, and one of those Presocratics Anaximenes is the one who said, I need to choose air because he thought that all things on earth are made of air. You know, when air becomes more refined, it turns into fire. When it becomes more condensed, it turns into the two other heavier elements, water and then earth. And he specifically describes the process of air becoming more condensed as felting. So felted air is a cloud and a felted cloud is earth or stone. And to be honest, I don't really know what felting means, but I think we need to bring it back into our vocabulary.

Ellie: 9:50

dude, I have like a trauma response to hearing the word felting. I had this absolutely beloved peach, beautiful alpaca sweater that I was obsessed with. And after like just a few wears, I accidentally shrink it in the wash. And when you shrink a wool or alpaca sweater in the wash, it gets felted.

David: 10:11

Oh, oh, so that's what it means.

Ellie: 10:13

Yeah, actually, yeah. Sorry. You said you didn't really know what it means, let me tell you. Yeah, it's like the process where the fibers change their shape and then suddenly get like much more packed and closely knit. So as opposed to a sort of loose knit oversized sweater, suddenly you're gonna get this like really tight shrunken sweater.

David: 10:31

I see. So it's about like tightening the composing fabrics, which would also make it literally heavier per square inch, which is a big difference between the elements in ancient Greek metaphysics, right? Like fire is the lightest because it moves upward. Then you have air, and below that you have water. And at the very bottom you have Earth obvious reasons.

Ellie: 10:53

Well, okay. But all elements ultimately boil down. Boil down, let's say air out to air for him though, right.

David: 11:00

Yeah. Ultimately everything is made of air, depending on the level of refinement or felting that that air is subjected to. And he also specifies that our soul is made of air, or rather we're told that he believes that since, as with many Presocratics, we don't really have anything he wrote. So his views are passed down to us by other authors.

Ellie: 11:25

What he actually said is floating in the wind, which is almost felted air. But this idea of the soul as made of air, I think tracks with how many of us conceive the soul, which is as immaterial a very common view to hold. Whether or not we explicitly realize that we believe it. Is that the soul is immaterial, and that means you know when the body dies, the soul lives on, it's not material and it doesn't require the existence of materiality to live. Also, a very common view in the history of philosophy. One of many possible people we could point to here being Descartes, who explicitly says there are two substances, one is matter and one is thinking immaterial, not matter. Right. He doesn't explicitly tie that to air as far as I recall, but Anaximenes sure did. And it seems, it seems like we could think about the through line between them being this idea of the soul as immaterial.

David: 12:17

Yeah, and the soul is associated specifically with breath in numerous religious traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism. And of course that's very important because breath is our first subjective act upon arriving in the world, right? Our first breath of air is our entry into life and into time.

Ellie: 12:38

Again, speaking of Hinduism, breath plays a very important role in the Upanishads. In Sanskrit, the word is prana, which is also known as vital force or energy and prana is associated with Vayu, the God of air. So in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, for example, we see that the breath is the most important one of all the different bodily senses and faculty. So air doesn't show up, but breath does. And the reason that breath is considered the most important of all of the different bodily senses and faculties is because it's the only one the body can't live without. The  Upanishad goes through different senses, so you lose your sense of smell. Turns out you're still alive. You lose your sense of sight. Of course, same, right? Many people don't have sight. You lose your sense of touch thinking intellect and so on and so forth, and you can still survive. But the breath, this  Upanishad suggests is the one that you can't live without.

David: 13:40

And if this is true, then it would make sense, not only that we would associate it with the soul, but also that we would think of that soul as immaterial, right? As something that is not equivalent to the material physicality of the body. It's something that can transcend the body in one way or another. Whether that is literally transcended simply in the sense that it exists in a different realm, in a different metaphysical realm, or transcended temporally in the sense that it can be reborn in another body down the line.

Ellie: 14:11

Yeah, and indeed Steven Connor writes in his book The Matter of Air, which. Honestly is like such a good juicy book for an overthink episode. It's like it was written for the kind of episodes that we do, but I regrettably didn't end up having the time to read it thoroughly, so I just looked at some bits here and there. I really wanna read it this summer, but he says that the air is unique among the elements in signifying the being of non-being the matter of the immaterial. This is such an interesting point to me. And he says, in light of this, the air encompasses its own negation, so imagine an open space. Now imagine that that same space has had the air taken away from it. The empty space still seems to have the qualities of air, like the difference between imagining it with air and without air is non-existent.

David: 15:02

Maybe because now I'm thinking of like a vacuum and, uh,

Ellie: 15:06

If you actually know anything about the scientific properties of air, you probably wouldn't think that. But I think like the point is just when we imagine air, we imagine it as nothing.

David: 15:16

But I think that's an interesting point because now it means that you are defining imagination as visual imagination, right? You're like making me visualize a room with nothing in it

Ellie: 15:25

Ooh.

David: 15:25

like air. And this is a point that I'm getting from Gaston Bachelard, whom I've mentioned before, especially in the episode on fire. But he wrote also a book on air.

Ellie: 15:36

Dude, these French philosophers love to write different books about the elements and Irigaray whom we're gonna talk about later. She wrote a series of book on the elements. Bachelard has got these books on the elements.

David: 15:46

All these elemental Frenchies, but the book that Bachelard wrote, I just like couldn't find it, but it's called Air in Dreams. I just wanted to get the title exactly correct. And he says two things in that book about air that connect to this point that you've just made from Steven Connor. One point that he makes is that air is the only element that you cannot paint. You can paint water. You know, like water gets reflected in all sorts of ways because of the materiality of water. You can paint earth, you can paint fire even if it's static, but you cannot really paint air. And that's because air is the one element in the cosmology that we're working with here that challenges the pictorial imagination. So air forces us to think in non pictorial terms, which is why I think Bachelard would say that the problem with that thought experiment that you just gave us, Ellie, of imagine a room with air in a room without air. It's indistinguishable if you're thinking about it visually. But if you imagine actually being inside of that room, you would be able to tell the difference because guess what? You wouldn't be able to breathe. And so that's one point that. It attunes us to the being of non-being by reminding us that there are things in the world that are not visual. So I would add the clarification that it attunes us to that which the eye tells us does not exist. The second point that Bachelard makes that I wanna throw in the mix here because I really like it. Is his claim that air is the element for human action and human freedom, and that's because it's the only element in which we feel like ourselves. So think about our relationship physically to the other elements. Fire burns, earth repels, or resists, water I can move through water, but it slows me down significantly, so I don't really feel free in any of these other elements, air is the element of human action and therefore human freedom, which is why he says that there is a very close association to be drawn between air and the faculty that he thinks is the Acme of our humanity, which is imagination, because both of them represent the freedom to move beyond the here and the now.

Ellie: 18:11

It is funny 'cause my first instinct is to be like, no, I feel way freer in water. But I think that's just because being in water is a novelty. It's like, ugh, get going in the ocean or taking a bath. So nice. But then if I were actually stuck there for, you know, more than a couple of hours, I'd be like, daddy Air, take me back. Bring me home only with you do I feel free.

David: 18:31

Well, and I mean, you wouldn't be able to do all the things that you really value about your human life. Ellie, in water all the time, right? So that goes without saying.

Ellie: 18:40

He is just the element we take for granted or she, if we're following a Irigaray's analysis, but I skip ahead.

David: 18:48

And in both cases he sees an element of what he calls ascension of a, kind of like going above and transcending. So to connect it to the claim about the immateriality of the soul and the connection between swollen and breath and breath and air. For Bachelard, what air allows us to do, and you see this primarily with the beings that really call air their home, which are birds, and that is that they move upwards, which very few other creatures can do. And so this essential logic he says, defines our experience of air, our experience of human freedom, and also our experience of our own imaginations.

Ellie: 19:30

Doesn't quite square with the way that we talk about some people as airheads. It's like, they're just like, if you, if you just have air in your head, you're considered not very bright. But if you reach upward. Toward the air. I don't know. I don't,

David: 19:47

Well, but, but we, no, but we also have that saying, having your head in the clouds and so

Ellie: 19:52

Having your head in the felted air.

David: 19:54

In the felted area. And I think that sometimes code for being an idealist or being a philosopher, like having your mind somewhere away from the practical world of immediacy.

Ellie: 20:06

it's freely flowing upward.

David: 20:08

And so there is this sense that as you think more abstractly, you are moving up.

Ellie: 20:12

Hmm. Yeah, and I mean, for sure, I think a lot of the metaphors of human flight speak to that freedom as well. I mean, the metaphors and the literality of them, right? Like to board an airplane, obviously that can produce a lot of anxiety for people, especially given the recent gutting of airline employees and people who work on the grounds in air traffic control. But that can produce like a real sense of freedom, right? Or people have like dreams of flying and that kind of representing freedom too.

David: 20:43

Well, and that's why the human soul has often been pictor lies as a bird because we have the sense that our mind being a material and something that transcends can leave the body much like a bird, leaves a branch of a tree in order to seek another abode.

Ellie: 21:01

I wanna bring in one other site of human freedom with respect to air here, which is air conditioning. Think about the way that air conditioning technology has completely transformed human experience for those of us who are lucky enough to have it. I myself have a window unit. Very lucky to have a window unit, don't have central air. My kitchen is practically impossible to hang out in over the summer. Yeah. And you know, there have been some major, major issues recently with global warming, especially in the southwest United States, where people who don't have access to air conditioning are an extreme danger. Of course. Like this is also a danger for unhoused people. So it's not just as simple as like air conditioning, fun, cute, luxury. It also can really enable not just our freedom, but our basic existence. While we're thinking about freedom though, and a little bit more on like the fun, luxury side of things, one thing I found is that air conditioning technology is what led to the social phenomenon of the summer blockbuster because the air conditioned theater provided a place for people to escape the summer heat in cities. And I know this was something that my mom used to do all the time when my sister and I were little. We grew up in the valley, which is an extremely hot area of LA and it's usually like 10 degrees warmer there than where I currently live, which is just five miles away. And she would just take us to the movies. And so air conditioning technology really shaped that phenomenon of the summer blockbuster. And our boys, Horkheimer and Adorno actually mentioned the air conditioning of the theater in passing. In the dialectic enlightenment, they say the unemployed of the great centers find freshness and summer and warmth in winter in these places of regulated temperature,

David: 22:46

Well, and just like you lived in the valley, as you know Ellie, when I landed in the United States after moving from Mexico, we first landed in a small town in the desert.

Ellie: 22:53

Reno, Nevada.

David: 22:55

No, I was not. I was at right outside of Las Vegas, Reno is where I went to college. Girl.

Ellie: 23:00

Wait, I totally knew this.'Cause you talked in another episode. I forget which one. Nostalgia. I think you talked about this in nostalgia.

David: 23:06

yeah. Yeah.

Ellie: 23:07

Sorry, not Reno, but you used to live in Reno.

David: 23:10

But it, so it's the, the Southern Nevadan desert and it gets very, very hot in the summer. I mean, we're talking about 120s. And so that scorching heat would turn places like the shopping center or the grocery store or the public library into refuge spaces for those of us trying to get out of the heat. And so the discovery of air conditioning has very much changed the relationship that we have to public spaces. And I would say that's especially true for people who can't afford AC and who need to find those places that maybe people from the upper class can just create in their home environments relatively easily.

Ellie: 23:53

How do you feel about the fact that Europeans don't use AC that much?

David: 23:55

Ugh, it's a contradiction in terms, right? It's like you wanna be the first world and not have ac It doesn't work.

Ellie: 24:02

Yeah. You know, I think that humans, even though we're so destructive and awful in so many ways, are fundamentally like an extraordinary species who I have so much respect and gratitude for, and I feel like air conditioning is a great example of this. What an invention. Beautiful invention. Thank you to whoever invented air conditioning.

David: 24:39

If air is the element of human freedom for Bachelard, it is the harbinger of death and terror. For the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. In his book, terror From the Air Sloterdijk argues that the 20th century was born on a very specific date, April 22nd, 1915. This was the day when German soldiers launched the first large scale gas attack against French and Canadian troops in the western border of Belgium using 150 tons of chlorine gas as their means of combat. The attack resulted in a massive gas cloud that was nearly six kilometers wide and six to 900 meters deep. And as the cloud of chlorine gas flew over the French and Canadian troops, the. It caused a number of symptoms in the soldiers. First, there was tingling in the throat, then ringing in the ears, and that was followed very quickly by pleading for water and spitting blood.

Ellie: 25:48

Whew.

David: 25:49

The gas attack destabilized the Allied forces and is now recognized as the first large scale use of poison in modern warfare. Now, the reason that Sloterdijk says that this event marks the beginning of the 20th century is because he believes that it marked a shift in the logic, meaning, and practice of war. Before 1915, war meant attacking the body of the enemy through direct hits. And the emblem of this style of war was the bayonet fitted rifle. So you have a rifle that shoots bullets, but that in principle, you can also use to stab people when they get very close to you. So whether with bullets or with the bayonet, the idea is to destroy the body of the enemy and thereby lead to a collapse of their vital functions. But after April 22nd, 1915, war became instead about attacking the milieu that supports the living functions of the body, he says in this book that this marked quote, the introduction of the environment into the battle between adversaries.

Ellie: 27:03

Okay, this is reminding me of. A lot of the last of us example because the, even though it's not like a war in a traditional sense, the people in that show go from being attacked by literal humans or once humans now kind of zombies, to then suddenly experiencing this as ambient all around them. And there's one really powerful scene where a character is turning due to this air and you just see them riving on the floor as this air destroys them. And in terms of how profoundly this changes war. It also makes me think about how it changes strategizing for war because suddenly, whether it's in the case of the last of us, or in the case of this like actual historical event, which is like way, way, way more important 'cause it's not happening in a TV show, but the TV show just had a big impact on me. What can I say? You have to then start protecting yourself differently. You have to envision ways of protecting yourself from the enemy as well as from the environment, from the enemy and the environment.'cause that can be turned against you any minute.

David: 28:08

Another way of interpreting this historical event is that it marks the birth of air as a separator, as something that separates us, because of course, the German troops that were releasing the gas were not equally vulnerable to it as the French Canadian troops that were on the receiving end. So here we could also say that air can separate us insofar as it is being literally weaponized. And that's the function of weapons, right? To separate winners and losers, survivors and victims. Now, a lot of the book is about how this particular event subsequently changed the nature of military strategizing. After 1915, militaries really had to invest a lot more money into what Sloterdijk calls secondary artillery, which refers not so much to guns and cannons, but to things that help the troops protect themselves from the milieu that can be weaponized like masks, so on and so forth, right? So things that protect your body by creating a mini environment around it.

Ellie: 29:13

And civilians too. I mean, when I think about like even World War ii, I'm thinking about the masks that the citizens would've had to have on

David: 29:19

Yes, yes. That would be the secondary artillery. And beyond that, it also changed the meaning of what it means to hit an enemy and what counts even as a successful hit, because of course, previously, whether you hit an enemy, would depend on whether you literally cause damage to their body, right? Like to their skin, to their organs, to their tissues. But with chemical warfare, whether you hit successfully an enemy depends on whether you created an atmospheric condition that will prevent them from performing their vital functions, right? So like you actually cannot even know if your hit succeeded until you wait and see whether the cloud is moving in their direction. And what effects it has. So it introduces an element of temporal deferral and waiting into warfare.

Ellie: 30:12

And on the other end, there's also a sense of having been exposed to that then. Will lead to consequences even if you're not experiencing them in the very moment, or even to think about moments before that. If you see a huge cloud of chlorine gas coming your way, the writing's on the wall and you need to retreat. Even though you haven't yet been defeated. Technically, there's this sort of sense of impending doom and you might not even be able to get out. You might see it approaching and not have enough time.

David: 30:41

More than doom. Actually, I would say, following the title of this book. Terror. I mean, that's why the book is called Terror From the Air, because according to Sloterdijk, this is the origin of the modern concept of terrorism, which is a defining feature of 20th century international politics. The goal of a chemical attack is not immediate death, it's actually terror because when you are subject to a gas attack, you lose faith in the things that are preconditions for living, right? In the things that support life, like air or water. And so the environment and the body becomes suspect and one phrase that really stuck with me was his claim that when you are the victim of terror from the air, what ultimately kills you is your own breathing reflex, right? Because you can hold your breath for a while, but eventually your reflex will kick in. And so that's how terrorism is created. And so he says, terrorism is not the creation of non-governmental or non-state actors. It was created by the German state on this date.

Ellie: 31:56

I'm also thinking about the way that the Germans used just a couple of decades later. Gas in the gas chambers during the Holocaust, and yeah, this is, wow, this got really heavy, really quick.

David: 32:09

Yeah, and for him, this really is a Watershed event in the history of politics, at least recent history of politics. And aside from being the birth of terror, he says it's also the origin of climatology as a science, which I found initially kind of weird and bizarre as a claim. But then I was more open to the argument because he says that our desire to predict weather movements, especially like wind currents, really exploded after 1915 because being able to do so became a matter of life and death. And so a lot of technologies that come after 1915 that have to do with the control of air, and he does mention actually air conditioning. Ellie, which you brought up earlier, They owe their existence to toxic clouds and their use in combat.

Ellie: 33:02

Yeah, I'm actually just remembering. We also talked about air conditioning and schlader dike in our comfort episode briefly. I like totally forgot about that. But if we agree that a lot of the technologies we have for controlling air emerge out of this war scene, I wonder how far we can take this because there are a lot of technologies we use today that hinge on mastery of the air. So you could think about personal use airs sprays like hairspray and mosquito repellents. On a larger scale, I learned from this article called Spray by Vanessa Agard Jones, that crop dusting, which is the practice of using airplanes to apply pesticides or fertilizers or what you do when you're trying to quickly move away from an individual or group after having passed gas because you don't wanna take responsibility for it. I can never take crop dust seriously. I can only think about that. But hey, this is the air episode and gas is part of that, so, so be it. Anyway, when Crop Dusting was first pioneered by the Ohio Department of Agriculture, they turned World War II bombers into agricultural spray planes.

David: 34:15

Yeah, and although of course the focus here is on air and warfare, it's also the case that all these technologies, whether we're talking about small scale ones or large scale ones, they really highlight our dependence on the environment because of our need for air. So for example, I'm thinking about the fact that Hairsprays contribute to the hole in the ozone layer. That's a discussion that we've been having since the 1990s.

Ellie: 34:41

Not the ladies using their hairspray, killing the ozone layer.

David: 34:44

Yes, exactly. Or you know, there are also a lot of concerns about the impacts on human and animal health from crop dusting operations.'cause you're just spraying pesticides all over very large areas without being able to control where they end up. And obviously the case of chlorine gas is, is, it's evident. It's obvious, right, that the fact that chlorine gas is extremely bad for human health and it will result in people. Literally spitting blood and what all of these technologies have in common is that I think they invite us to think in a perverse way since they are bad for the body, they make us think about the health of the body almost as an extension of the health of the milieu, or at the very least, as something that is dependent upon the health of the environment and is not simply dependent on the health of my individual body with its membrane.

Ellie: 35:40

Yeah, and in fact, the anthropologist, Elizabeth Povinelli argues that part of the problem is that we think of the body in this membrane like way we think about the body from the standpoint of the skin. The skin being considered almost a seal, but our view would be radically altered, she suggests if we thought of ourselves from the perspective of the lungs, because the lungs take in what is outside and that rather than the skin highlights the porosity of the boundary between the self and the environment.

David: 36:09

That porosity, I think is embodied on the plane of our living functions by breath, right? Like we take a breath and draw air into the body, and then we exhale, pushing what is inside outside. And so it seems like if we remember what we said about breath being our first fundamental act as subjects and also the condition for a life, that life is this dynamic coupling of air going in and out. It is a dance between inhalation and exhalation. Overthink is a self-supporting independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one-time tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website overthink podcast.com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay our student assistance a fair wage.

Ellie: 37:08

There's a very well known French, I would say post-structuralist feminist philosopher, although one could debate who wrote a couple of books on the elements, and we actually haven't really talked about her until now. I think I mentioned briefly in another episode that she also wrote this book called Elemental Passions, but that is Luce Irigaray. I'm kind of chuckling here because I feel like Irigaray is sort of like my aunt that I have mixed feelings about.'cause I was super obsessed with her when I was in grad school and then I kind of got over her and like really moved away from the kind of philosophy that she's writing, which is super lyrical. Kind of like trading on a lot of connotations of embodiment and yeah, it's just a whole thing. We'll get into it. But anyway, she wrote this book called The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heiddeger, which is about air, and I have been really excited to talk about this with you, David 'cause it was a chance for me to revisit the book, which I hadn't read in a very long time. And I don't know, was this your first time reading it?

David: 38:05

It was my first time reading this book, but I also I had my Irigaray phase, especially in my two years of grad school, where I was really into, but primarily

Ellie: 38:14

What do you mean your two years of grad school? We were in grad school for a

David: 38:16

No, I had my two year period of being into her at the start of grad school. Sorry if that was unclear.

Ellie: 38:21

I think, I think we missed each other on that 'cause I think Yeah, you were over it by the time I got there. So sad.

David: 38:27

Yeah and I was more into her writing on liquids and goo and muck, which she writes a lot about. And so I was really curious about how she would translate or apply some of her philosophical insights to the domain of air. And so I'm really happy about this also because it's articulated as a critique of Heiddeger, which I came to the realization in reading this, Ellie, that I relate to Heidegger, like you relate to Freud. Like I just don't really care. And so as I was reading this, I was like, yeah, yet another criticism of Heiddeger. I automatically

Ellie: 39:03

Oh my gosh. Well, yeah, I actually, I don't know whether I agree or disagree so much with her critique of Heidegger as like, I think the Heidegger that she's talking about is not a Heidegger that I find particularly compelling either.

David: 39:14

Yeah, so let, let's begin then talking about this book, which is about Heidegger's attempt to overcome metaphysics and Irigaray's claim that the way in which Heiddeger goes about overcoming metaphysics ultimately re inscribes a certain history of metaphysics because of his understanding of the relationship between being and Air and Ellie as the in-house Heiddeger specialist. I wanna hear you maybe say something a little bit about what it is that Irigaray is objecting to in Heiddeger.

Ellie: 39:51

Yeah, I would not call myself the in-house Heidegger specialist. I would say I'm the Heiddeger guy of Overthink. That's like a, that's an epithet that I'm very comfortable with the Heidegger guy because to be a Heidegger specialist is like a whole other thing. However, I will also say I don't think it's so much about the relationship between being and air, as the relationship in between being and earth that she's focusing on, because the whole problem with Heiddeger for her is that he forgets air. So yeah, I can say a little bit about how Heiddeger views being and earth, but for Heiddeger philosophy has forgotten, over the thousands of years of its history, starting in ancient Greece, it's forgotten being because it has equated being with beings. This difference between being and beings is what Heidegger calls ontological difference beings are what we see all around us, right? What we interact with, but being itself isn't reducible to the being of objects or entities, and so Heidegger wants to reawaken the question of the meaning of being. He famously not only never quite defines what being is, but he doesn't even get to the point of talking about the meaning of being let alone being itself because he only barely raises the question of the meaning of being in being in time, which yeah, I think is an amazing book, even though Heidegger. As a person truly sucked and I think part of what Irigaray is picking up on in this work in particular is the fact that Heidegger talks about being as a clearing. He very often uses metaphors of a clearing, let's say, in the middle of the forest. When I went to the Black forest in grad school, I was like, oh, now I know what Heidegger's talking about. Because in the black forest, which is where Heidegger lived, there are all of these really, really dense foresty areas of dark trees. And then periodically there will be a little clearing in the middle where there is light. And Heidegger also describes truth as aletheia, which is a ancient Greek way of thinking about truth, which is a kind of an uncovering or an uncon concealment. And so he's also conceiving of truth as something that exists in the clearing. So if we think about it in those terms, I think we can say that clearings, yeah, they're clearings within space. They're clearings on the earth, but they're also made possible by air. And so clearings aren't just like empty, they're occupied by air. And that's maybe sort of an entry point into some of what Irigaray will say.

David: 42:20

Yeah, no, that's a really good summary of Heidegger on being, on the German that's often used by Irigaray and you know, by Heiddeger is the es gibt that there is. there is being the closest we get to a definition of being in Heiddeger. Understood as an opening or as a clearing.

Ellie: 42:40

Well, don't forget about his middle period when you decided to change the spelling of being to B-E-Y-N-G.

David: 42:46

Yes. And so the way I read Irigaray's book is that she's arguing that Heiddeger conceives of the clearing or this opening, you know, that maybe was inspired by his walks through the Black forest. In too abstract of terms such that when Heidegger is thinking about the clearing of being or being as a clearing slash unconcealing the unconcealing of Aletheia, it ultimately ends up turning being into a kind of vacuum because it's just this kind of concept that's not filled with the materiality that being has in the real world. And so Heidegger is transforming the materiality of air into the vacuum of the clearing, almost as if he was like taking the air out of the room and putting in place a purely abstract conceptualization that doesn't allow us to understand the meaning of being as air and for Irigaray specifically, who is pulling from a long tradition of other people thinking about the meaning of air. Air means a number of things. It means life and breath. It means speech, right? Like the reason why we can speak and make arguments and philosophize is because we have the capacity to move air. And finally, air also means that logic of presencing or appearing that makes possible beings in the plural for us.

Ellie: 44:21

Yeah, and that shows that she's thinking about the air as a bit different from just, yeah, this sort of void or absence, the non being that we talked about earlier in the episode, but she also acknowledges that that is the way that we usually do think about air, right? She says that this element, which is irreducibly, constitutive of the whole compels neither the faculty of perception nor that of knowledge to recognize it always there, it allows itself to be forgotten. And so it's not just like we are ignoring air, but air is by and large imperceptible. And so it allows itself to be forgotten. And there's always a sense in Irigaray's writings because she's a poetic feminist thinker associated with this style of writing coming out of French post-structuralism, known as ecriture feminine or feminine writing, which has a lot of connotations that we won't get into right now. Hélène Cixous is another major thinker of that movement. But there's always a sense for her that what is forgotten is ultimately also gonna be the feminine. That man lives on the earth and forgets air. And that also means that man is forgetting his dwelling place and the place from which he came. And so there's also this sense of like ungrateful men forgetting air. Right? Whereas the air, she says, is the whole of our habitation as mortals, which is literally true when you think about the fact that the air is the element that we breathe and that we subsist on, right? This is something that we talked a little bit even about in our water episode where we talked about the move from being creatures that live in water to being creatures that live on land. To live on land is to live by air.

David: 46:02

Yeah, and I like that you allude to this sense of debt. No. What was the term that you used?

Ellie: 46:08

Ingratitude.

David: 46:10

Yeah. Uh, in gratitude, yes, because for Irigaray, air represents materiality, it represents the earth, it represents the source from which we come. It's kind of this like maternal element that conditions our existence, but then we forget. And in this book she does talk about how existence and being are a gift to us from her, from heir, and she refers to air in the feminine. And in her critique of Heidegger, she says, it's better for us to think about being now conceived as air with its, let's say, feminine materiality intact, not as the as gift as something that is there or there is, but rather as that from which. From which we come from which we draw sustenance from which we get life. And that underscores the fact that we are in an unpayable debt to nature and the elements. Because nature makes us, the elements create us, and we will never be able to repay that debt much like we'll never be able to repay our mothers for the gift of life.

Ellie: 47:27

And not only are we indebted to air for our life, but we're also indebted to it philosophically, but she thinks we tend to forget this. And so metaphysics study of ultimate reality, which Heidegger also links to a long history of the traditional philosophy, which involves the forgetting of being, forgets air. She writes that metaphysics always poses a solid crust from which to raise a construction. So think about what a lot of philosophers are trying to do. They're trying to start from the most solid possible foundations and build a system, right, that involves earth construction, not air. But in fact the appearance of things at all, which is definitely a requirement for metaphysics happens through the medium of air. Air, she suggests is the condition of the possibility or the groundless ground of our very philosophical questioning in our understanding of phenomena. And so she actually describes the meta physician as a trafficker in heirs, which would remain unthought by him.

David: 48:26

Yeah, that would remain on that. That's the key point because she says that basically metaphysics has two maneuvers that define it. So if you wanna be a meta physician, this is the basic guide, based on Irigaray. Right? Interpretation of the history of metaphysics. I. First you empty nature of its elemental qualities and then you try to create a bridge between human thought and being using language, which is also what Heidegger does, right? Like language becomes this thing that connects thought and being, and the problem for Irigaray there is twofold that. First of all, emptying nature of its materiality is already a masculinist prejudice, but secondarily that this focus on language, where language is understood as this like abstract body of science and symbols that disclose a world rather than the material dimensions of language. Literally the breathiness of the voice, the fact that we take air into our lungs in order to be able to speak. That's the forgetting that she sees specifically in Heidegger, in his understanding of language and the way she puts it in page 37 is that there is a bridge between thinking and being, but the bridge is not language. It's the body, like our body, our lungs, our blood, our skin, and all of those are fundamentally material.

Ellie: 49:56

But so wait, that has to, that seems to have to do more with the earth than with air though. What's the air connection there specifically?

David: 50:02

Well, the, the body understood also as air because of the lungs.

Ellie: 50:06

I see, I see. Yeah. And so maybe I'm pulling the metaphysical move of just thinking about the body in terms of earth. And indeed that's what she thinks Heiddeger does as well. She thinks part of the forgetting of air for him has to do with the fact that he's all about these things that use that same kind of earthly metaphor as metaphysics, whether it's like, it might not be the construction metaphors that we get from some people, like building an edifice of the system, but more in terms of clearing and such. And to that extent, she says Heidegger does not leave the earth. He does not leave metaphysics. Because for Heidegger, our own existence is outside itself. He very often uses these spatial metaphors of being outside oneself, and that happens on the earth, not in the air.

David: 50:52

Well, and I think that's a really important thing because it also highlights the horror of air from the standpoint of the male slash masculinist meta physician who wants to keep existence out there. And the reason there is because Earth, whether we conceive it as ground or as like wall or structure is something outside of me. But air, as we talked about earlier, is something that rushes inside of me each time I take a breath. And so there is a logic of penetration with air, where the male meta physician wants to forget that he is penetrated by nature each moment that we breathe. And so there is, that's the horror of the elemental that it, it highlights our porosity, which of course Masculinism wants to conceal. And she uses a really wonderful phrase that I just want to, share with our listeners. She uses this phrase in French that confused me, the phrase is,  un coup d'appel d'air, and I was like, oh my God, that's a really weird French saying. And I asked my partner what that meant, and he said, oh, she's playing with words. She's playing with idioms because it's combining two expressions. It's combining, un cri d'appel which means like a cry for help, like a baby. When you first take your breath of air and you cry

Ellie: 52:11

we know what a cry for help is.

David: 52:13

No, but but specifically connected to the moment of birth. Yeah. So our first act is not just to breathe, it's actually to cry. And so it's feminized and secondarily, the second part of that expression, A is a rush or a gush of wind that breaks in. And the way my partner explained it to me is if you're in an airplane and somebody suddenly opens a window, you would have an  an appel d'air.

Ellie: 52:43

Oh, I didn't know that.

David: 52:44

Yeah, me either. And so our relationship to air is both of those things at once. It is us crying out for help because we are suddenly vulnerable and we are outside of the womb. And it is also the experience of this penetration by the aerial element into our bodies, both of which are the condition for the possibility of human life.

Ellie: 53:09

And this also brings to mind something that you mentioned earlier, which is that it's all well and good for us to forget air, to see air is invisible when it's surrounding us, and specifically when the kind of air that we can breathe is surrounding us, right? But if that gets taken away and we find ourselves struggling to breathe, then suddenly we're not forgetting air anymore. It's becoming the most salient thing in our environment. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider joining our overthink community on Patreon for bonus content zoom meetings and more. And thanks to those of you who already do.

David: 53:44

To connect with us, find episode transcripts and make one-time tax deductible donations, please check out our website, overthink podcast.com. We also have a thriving YouTube channel as well as TikTok, Instagram and Twitter accounts at Overthink_Pod.

Ellie: 53:59

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan. Our production assistants Bayarmaa, Bat-Erdene, and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.