Breath is the beginning and the end. The arc of every human life is initiated by breath and ends with breath. Conceived and born of breathing human beings, the first breath sets in after birth and marks the beginning of independent life. Breathing continues until the last exhalation.
This realization forms the starting point for respiratory philosophy. In what follows, I refer to Petri Berendtson, a leading representative of this philosophical approach. He calls his approach a phenomenological ontology of breathing. He sees human life not only as “being-in-the-world”, as Martin Heidegger put it, but much more fundamentally as “breathing-in-the-world”. The encounter with being is always an encounter with the breath, or rather, this encounter takes place in the breath. Thus, the breath is being, in which the experience of being takes place.
Consequently, in the breath the act of being takes place, before any perception (which is at the center of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology) and before any thinking (according to Descartes). We breathe even when we perceive nothing (e.g. in deep sleep) or when we think nothing. This breathing “being-in-the-world” happens before any consciousness and reflection, and every consciousness and reflection is breathing. Thus, in Merleau-Ponty's respiratory philosophy, “perceptive faith” (foi perceptive) becomes breathing faith. This faith has nothing to do with religion. Rather, it denotes a preconscious conviction that the world is there, confirmed with every breath. The realization that there is a world is always at the same time the realization that it is a breathing world in which we exist by breathing. Breathing faith is not a mere psychological phenomenon, but an existential structure – we only exist through and with the air, which becomes our source of life through breathing.
In breathing, we experience that inside and outside cannot be strictly separated. A breathing being-in-the-world is characterized by a constant merging of inside and outside. The incoming and outgoing air is both one's own and foreign, always intermingled. With each breath, the inside becomes the outside and the outside becomes the inside. Life is a dynamic process of exchange in which breathing is the fundamental organizing principle and forms the medium in which everything takes place. We are in the world in every moment and the world is in us, through the air that flows in and out of us. The air we take in changes us, and we change the world around us with the air we exhale.
Breathing in the world is an embodied way of being, because breathing is a physiological process that cannot take place without a body. On the other hand, the breathing process of life is not limited to a physical process, but also contains an immaterial component. For every breath is an exchange of information. Every air molecule that enters our body through breathing contains information that is received and processed in us; every exhaled particle, in turn, enters the external world and unfolds its effect there. We are aware of this information content of air when we perceive odors, but it contains many more other dimensions, most of which we are unaware of and which nevertheless have an effect on us.
In Eastern philosophies, these invisible energies play an important role, whether as qi in Taoism or as prana in Hinduism. Both of these terms are closely related to breathing. Thus, respiratory philosophy also combines Western and Eastern traditions of thought.
