Breathing the Landscape in: Reading Bashō with Schmitz

In this paper I will consider together the work of a premodern Japanese poet, the haikai master Matsuo Bashō, and that of a contemporary German phenomenologist, Hermann Schmitz, letting them dialogue on the act of breathing, its role in spatial consciousness, and the aesthetic constitution of landscapes. The great distance between these two figures (one European, the other Asian, one contemporary, one early-modern, one a poet, one a philosopher) creates hermeneutical difficulties but also a free conceptual space, including not static “perspectives” but living concepts involved in a dialectical breath: a moment of expansion towards commonality and universality, and one of contraction onto uniqueness of different languages, experiences, places.