On October 7th, Eva Horn, professor of German literature, history, and cultural theory at the University of Vienna and Max Kade Visiting Professor in UC Berkeley's Department of German, delivered a lecture on A Sense of Air: For an Aesthesis of Climate. This event, attended by 40 people, was organized by the Townsend Center for the Humanities Collaborative Research Seminar on “Rethinking Futures.” The lecture, based on her forthcoming book, explored how we can perceive and experience climate, moving beyond typical dystopian narratives of climate change.
Horn began by recounting her experience with James Turrell’s installation Meeting at the PS1 MoMA in New York, where the sky is framed as a work of art. She used this example to discuss how air and climate are seen as mediums that do not really relate to our everyday life. Horn referenced Robert Hook’s description of air as “next to nothing,” explaining that air exists between material and immaterial. Quoting Tim Ingold’s Earth Sky Wind and Weather, she emphasized how air, wind, light, and moisture shape life, asking us to consider air as a medium, through the lens of western transmission, rather than inert matter.
Central to Horn’s argument was the idea of aesthesis—a term she defined as the wholeness of perception, the way we are affected by what we perceive. She connected this to “mingling with” the air around us, calling for a deeper, immersive engagement by “placing oneself as inhabitant of the weather world.” For Horn, climate is not merely something we understand scientifically, but something we experience through our senses and inhabit in our everyday lives; rather than looking into the future of climate, Horn looks back into history and asks “what was climate?”
Horn then structured her lecture into three thematic sections: Climate, Location, and the Body; Climate and Society; and Climate and Cosmos
In Climate, Location, and the Body, Horn revisits Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters, Places, which argued that humans are profoundly shaped by their environment, particularly the air they breathe. She discussed miasma theory—the idea that air transports the exhalations of life and death, and thus was historically blamed for pandemics. Air in densely populated cities, Horn argued, becomes “social,” influencing health and community life. By the 18th century, there was a growing vocabulary to describe different states of air.
In the second section, Climate and Society, Horn connected the natural world with the development of societies. She quoted Aristotle’s Politics, which argued that “the members of a community must jointly possess a certain good of the same kind, regardless of whether they have equal or different shares in it” and extended this to include climate and air as part of that shared identity. Horn also referenced Herder, suggesting that cultures also shape and alter their climates just as climates shape human societies. Political and social institutions, she contended, must adapt to local environments in order to serve their communities.
The final section, Climate and Cosmos, highlighted how, in earlier cosmologies, climate was understood as part of the cosmic order. Drawing parallels between the human body and the world made up of the same four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—Horn argued that climate once represented both “a sense of place and a sense of cosmos,” integrating time, place, and nature.
Horn concluded the lecture by discussing the impact of modern technologies, such as air conditioning, which relates to the “culture of insulation” which insulates humans from climate and natural rhythms. This, she argued, marks the “end of climate” in everyday life, as fossil fuels allow for constant availability of goods and comforts, erasing the need to adapt to seasonal changes. However, Horn advocated for a return of seeing air as a medium, a shared common good, and as an object of protection in climate policy. Horn ended by stating that “we see our modelization as understanding the planet as consisting of very simple and yet very complexly organized entities,” calling for a rethinking of climate not as a distant future scenario but as an atmospheric reality that we live in and can perceive.