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E T H I C S  O F  B R E A T H : 
T O W A R D S  N E W 
E T H I C A L  S P A C E S  O F 
I N T E R S U B J E C T I V I T Y
L e n a r t  Š k o f
I n t r o d u c t i o n
My aim in this presentation is to establish a platform for an ethics of 
otherness, ethics of breath/life, an ethics as a place for the future con-
versation of (mild) gestures – such as compassion, forbearance and care. 
While we all know and recognize radically the need of others (includ-
ing animal others, and, in a way, even nature) to take in and give out 
breath, at each and every moment, we still reside in our life-worlds, in 
the grip of most elemental fears of losing the ground beneath our feet, 
constantly protecting ourselves and taking more than we possibly need 
(of ourselves, of nature) for ourselves, and causing others to suffocate by 
not getting their food of life – air. We always realize too late that there 
was a life. Already for Marx it was clear that “alle Naturkräfte aus- und 
einatmende Mensch” is an aspect of humanity that has been radically 
forgotten in the course of history.1 But why do we keep forgetting air in 
philosophy? Luce Irigaray once wrote: “I breathe, therefore I am.”2 Why 
are then we still evading this phenomenon, perhaps the only one that 
could bring us closer to our own becoming as ethical beings, towards a 
new form of mutual conversation, a conversation of humanity perhaps, 
as also implied in this becoming? It is from our bodies, impregnated as 
they are by the air we breathe, that we can perceive another being in 
pain, a being living at the edge of their body-self, a body of which “arith-
metic of breathing” (J. Butler) is dangerously threatened. This economy 
is sacred because it is related to the question of forming a community, 
looking thus at something that is bigger than we are, and yet, something 
that is only possible within and for ourselves. My analyses in this short 
presenatation are based on the so called ‘sacred economy of breath’, in-
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formed both by Indian philosophy (prana) as well as by French femi-
nist philosopher Luce Irigaray (Between East and West, “The Age of the 
Breath”).
1. Breath as intercultural phenomenon
Breath is arguably the most prominent anthropological constant for 
human beings of the world, carrying rich epistemological and ethical 
implications. Different macrocosmic and microcosmic designations for 
wind/breath (or wind/spirit) in the history of religions and philosophies 
(mana, orenda, ka, ruah, prana, atman, aer, psyche, pneuma, anima, spiri-
tus, ik’, ki/qi etc.) point to a common physico-anthropological phenom-
enon of life and, more importantly, to our common physiological roots, 
which are not conceived as a substance of human nature but as a primal 
phenomenon prior to any philosophical or metaphysical theory. Accord-
ing to Tadashi Ogawa, ‘breath’ has an intercultural potential, for “all 
humanity is aware of this phenomenon.”3 Be it ‘qi/ki’ as ‘breath/expira-
tion/inspiration,’ ‘pneuma’ or ‘prana’ etc., they all point to our human, 
common and communal relatedness. But to take this argument as the 
“old metaphysical idea concerning the relation between microcosmos 
and macrocosmos (…) is not correct.”4 As a phenomenological phe-
nomenon, breath is related to the coexistence of world and I (Ogawa re-
lates it to Heidegger’s “mood” [Stimmung], Schmitz’s “Atmosphere” and 
K. Held’s “Fundamental Mood” [Grundstimmung]), thus overcoming 
the dualist-substantialist thought: “[T]hese phenomena preceding all 
other moments of the lifeworld (…) make it possible for human beings 
to be in the world.”5 Apart from its implications for phenomenology, 
breath as a primal cosmological-biological phenomenon also precedes 
all ethical (and social/political) reflection: as we will see t is ‘breath’ that 
provides the human community with its first and primal experience and 
act of communication (both in the pragmatic sense), i.e. of the being-in-
the-world(-with-others) mode.
But I would first like to discuss the role of breath (prana) in Indian 
thought. It is in Indian Vedic thought, approximately four centuries 
before the Samkhya-Yoga system (i.e. between 900–700), that we find 
the most ancient elaborations of the concepts of cosmic wind/breath 
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outside the Semitic area. Indian concept of prana (etymologically from 
*an, ‘to breathe’; later in Indian philosophy replaced by atman) is both 
the original cosmological as well as an epistemological concept. We find 
references to wind and breath in the Samhitas (the oldest parts of Ve-
dic collections), but the most ancient testimony and elaboration for the 
so-called 'Wind-Breath Teaching' ('Wind-Atem-Lehre')6 we can find in 
the philosophy of nature of Jaiminiya upanishad brahmana 3.2.2. and 4 
(JUB). The teaching is an example of a typical Vedic macro-microcos-
mic analogy between the macrocosmic Wind (vayu) and microcosmic 
breath (prana). From the cosmological point of view, the wind is the 
only 'complete' deity since all other deities/gods/elements/phenomena 
(sun, moon, stars, fire, day, night, waters etc.) return to him during the 
enigmatic stillness of the night, while he never stops blowing. But at 
the most abstract level, it is the difference between the perishable (day, 
night… ) and imperishable or ‘eternal’ (Wind) that had led to the so-
called Wind-Breath Teaching, and later to the concepts of atman and 
brahman in Indian thought. In an epistemological sense, breath in (wo)
man is the most important of the five vital powers (breathing, thinking, 
speech, sight, hearing) since it is only breath that is present during deep 
sleep. Of course, in the moment of death, breath returns to its macro-
cosmic eternal origin, the Wind. In an idiosyncratic Vedic plural all five 
vital powers are called pranas (i.e. ‘breaths’; this marks the very begin-
ning of Indian epistemology) – after the first of them, breath. Breathing 
as the most important vital power is thus equated with life itself and 
later with person's self (atman). Finally, as a term for life, prana is the 
essence of a living body. It is from this natural constellation that we can 
search for new (inter)subjective modes of thinking/feeling in the process 
where ethics of breath will enable us to think beyond (post)metaphysi-
cal ethical modes, based on reason and/or justice, even compassion as 
a virtue.
2. Towards the epistemology of breath
In his Essays on Radical Empiricism William James, departing from 
his philosophic predecessors and paving the way also for the rise of phe-
nomenology in Europe,7 gives an epistemological prominence to the 
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universal and anti-metaphysical (and anti-representational) phenom-
enon of breath:
I cannot help that, however, for I, too, have my intuitions and must obey 
them. Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as I am of any-
thing that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically 
as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals 
itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The ‘I think’ which Kant 
said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually 
does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides breathing (intra-
cephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my larger 
Psychology), and these increase the assets of ‘consciousness,’ so far as the latter 
is subject to immediate perception; but breath, which was ever the original of 
‘spirit,’ breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am 
persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity 
known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the 
concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as 
things are.8
As a pragmatist, I find James’ contention to be one of the key features 
in the long process of dethroning Kantian and related philosophical ar-
guments from the past. It can serve our goal to develop an embodied 
ethics of breath and philosophy of religion, the latter being based on 
breath’s closest cosmological kin – the spirit. Recently, one of the leading 
American pragmatist scholars, Richard Shusterman, has critically point-
ed to the above James’ elaboration on breath in his Body Consciousness.9 
Shusterman finds James’ argument as “not convincing” – moreover, he is 
convinced that James “seems to confuse the question of how conscious-
ness is felt with the questions of how and whether consciousness exists. 
That we feel something through our breathing movements does not 
mean that this something is essentially no more than such movements”. 
Shusterman thus takes James’ definition of breath as the essence of con-
sciousness as an “exaggeration”.10 Given Shusterman’s appreciation of 
Eastern (Indian) philosophy and different mind-body techniques (yoga, 
Zen), this stubborn insistence on technical details (‘did James decide 
to limit the breath of thought to exhalation?’ etc.) strikes one as odd. 
While on the one hand he is willing to grant breath (as understood by 
James) a certain, if limited, value (for example, breathing contributes 
“to sharpening consciousness so that one can perceive and think more 
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clearly and deeply” for Shusterman)11 he does not realize its full episte-
mologico-ethical significance. But the stream of our breathing deserves a 
more sensible approach. One of my goals is thus to open the new episte-
mological plane for an ethical elaboration of breath as a spiritual gesture.
3. Ethics of breath: A dialogue with Luce Irigaray
Let me begin this concluding part with an excerpt from Judith But-
ler’s Frames of War:
What I sense is that the ultimate source of these poems from Guantanamo 
is the simple, almost primeval, arithmetic of breathing in and out. The origin 
of life and the origin of language and the origin of poetry are all there, in the 
first breath, each breath as if it were our first, the anima, the spirit, what we 
inspire, what we expire, what separates us from extinction, minute after min-
ute, what keeps us alive as we inhale and exhale the universe.12
There is a task still to come and to be realized: namely, being attuned 
to the process of a new spiritual transformation of humanity in order to 
become enlightened enough to be able to hear the voices of the other, to 
discern the signs and gestures inviting us to begin a dialogue with her or 
him, or with the Nature in one of her beautiful incarnations. And last 
but not least, it is a task to respond to the call of the other person, or a 
nonhuman animal and their breathing in an ethical way. For to breathe 
is to be alive and to feel the living around us. Let me cite from Irigaray’s 
essay “The Age of the Breath”:
Miming the living, the diabolic does not breathe, or does not breathe 
any longer. It takes away air from the others, from the world. It suffo-
cates with its sterile repetitions, its presumptuous imitations, with its 
wishes deprived of respect for life.13
I think the introduction of a breath into the ethics and philosophy or 
theology in general is perhaps one of the most important events in con-
temporary thought. ‚Breath‘, as William James has observed, was ever 
the original of ‚spirit‘. But it was a classical tradition from Plato to He-
gel, even Heidegger, that has repressed and obscured this essential link 
and transformed it to a metaphysical thought that suffocated the world 
of the other, and of the Nature. It is one of Irigaray‘s greatest merits to 
bring the cultivation of breath to the forefront of philosophical analyses, 
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also in a dialogue with Yoga, an ancient Indian wisdom of ethical and 
spiritual respiration.
We all live in a global civilization where a certain plenitude is govern-
ing our lives. It is not a spiritual plenitude but rather a mass of voices, 
gestures and signs that allows us Westerners to posses various goods and 
to live our lives, but also constantly to produce our lifeworlds where 
there is no more space for a silence, where we take a deep breath only 
to egoistically accomplish our new tasks; and consequently, to impose 
them to others, including other cultures. A truly intercultural dialogue 
cannot begin on this ground.
Before we proceed to the ethics of breath, in order to understand the 
relation between macrocosm and microcosm, it is necessary to introduce 
the middle term, namely mesocosm (expressed in a ritual as a third term 
of the triangle structure the ritual-the cosmic realities-the human body/
person in the Vedic-Upanishadic context). I also propose to imagine a 
possible contemporary ethical term for the mesocosm: a gesture.14 For 
to approach breath in an ethical sense we need to imagine and construct 
new ethical plane. In his analysis of ancient Vedic texts Michael Wit-
zel pledges for the reconstruction of this term. As already mentioned, 
within the Vedic magical interpretation of the world, we face different 
analogies or magical ‘identifications’ between the macrocosmic and mi-
crocosmic realities or gods (for example Sun-eye, Wind-breath, Earth-
body, Waters-semen, Fire-speech etc.). This is a thought using different 
obvious (such as between Sun and the eye or Wind and breath) or some 
more hidden and esoteric, (between Moon and mind) ‘mystic’ links/
correlations and equivalents/identities. There exists a nexus (bandhu, 
upanishad) between two single entities in the Vedas. In my opinion, it 
is crucial to understand these ancient magical correlations between the 
human and 'divine' realms to accomplish our task, i.e. to be able to for-
mulate an outline for a contemporary embodied ethics as a new econo-
my of our intersubjective-'mesocosmic' rituals, i.e. of emobodied ethical 
gestures, based on breath as vital power. Only this way gestures will have 
the potential to connect the intersubjective realms of our existence.
I would finally like to turn to Luce Irigaray's philosophy and eth-
ics of breath. In Sharing the World Luce Irigaray wrote that it is “to her, 
as living nature, that I have to abandon myself in order to preserve my 
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own life”. For Irigaray, we have “to seek help in nature”15 in order to be 
able to survive. Our past and our future meet in one single moment of 
a new sensitivity for our breath and life, two key phenomena to which 
we need to pay attention in our times. But how is body related to this 
economy of ethical gestures? What is an ethical gesture springing from 
the embedded and embodied life of an individual, man or woman? A 
gesture, like the ancient rituals, is now a presence of a touch, a word, or 
thought in the space of proximity – within the mesocosm. Here there 
is presence of us and nature. For Irigaray, this proximity is explained as 
a “communion with the real presence of the living”. Furthermore, with 
'being in nature' I bear the other(s) within me. This is the [e]mbody-
ing, for a moment, an unlimited life in order to make him present to 
me, with me. Which is not without the mystery, the enthusiasm and 
the reserve, but also the risk, that inspire such a human, and more than 
human, gesture. We were, we are, two.16
In Between East and West, a text encapsulating her idiosyncratic rela-
tion to Indian religions, we can read that the first and last gesture of both 
natural and spiritual life is to breathe (by oneself ).17 Elsewhere Irigaray 
explains how important the role of the mother/woman is in this process:
The divine appropriate to women, the feminine divine, is first of all 
related to the breath. To cultivate the divine in herself, the woman, in 
my opinion, has to attend to her own breathing, her own breath, more 
even than to love … Becoming divine is accomplished through a con-
tinuous passage from nature to grace, a passage that everyone must real-
ize by oneself, alone … The feminine breath seems at once more linked 
with the life of the universe and more interior. It seems to unite the sub-
tlest real of the cosmos with the deepest spiritual real of the soul. Which 
inspires a woman appears to remain joined with the universe’s breath, 
related to the wind, to the cosmic breathing … In this way, the woman 
can welcome the other in her soul.18
Woman shares her breath preeminently by keeping it ‘inside’. By a 
‘feminine economy of the breath’ she is keeping (and cultivating) breath 
inside the body and sheltering in herself the first seed of nature, the 
Warmth or Love, which is the eternal longing in Nature for Spirit (in Iri-
garay this is the spiritualization of the body, or nature). The first breath 
of the world we share, both in nature (macrocosm) and in woman (mi-
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crocosm) is at the same time the possibility of a space-between, inter-
subjective or intercorporeal (in the widest sense of the term) space/plane 
of gestures (mesocosm) where our lives coexist in a community beyond 
all differences (culture, sex, age, even species). A bodily-spiritual gesture 
of keeping and sharing the breath is an ethical gesture of respecting the 
life of the universe, for Irigaray.
In “Ethical Gestures toward the Other”, Irigaray explains in a new 
context the key feature of the third phase of her work, namely ethical 
gestures. According to the human body, the first autonomous gesture is 
breath, air being the very first food of life. In Genesis, it is said that God 
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (Gen 2.7).19 For Irigaray, to be-
come spiritual it is necessary to transform this vital breath “into a more 
subtle breath” (of loving, etc.) which corresponds to our transformation 
of natural life into a spiritual life.20 I find the most important element in 
Irigaray‘s third phase of the work in the incipient relation with the other 
as a woman – a relation based in her respect for life. There is yet another 
element present in Irigaray: silence. It is “the laying out of a space-time 
that must remain virgin in order for a meeting to happen. It is openness 
that nothing occupies or preoccupies – no language, no values, no pre-
established truth”.21 Silence is a threshold still (or again) to be revealed 
to us. I understand it as a substratum of a ‚mesocosm‘, a pure gesture 
of a deserted intercorporeal space-between still to be inhabited by us.22
I have already argued that the mesocosm is a space-between (for the 
intercorporeality) and that it could be understood as a place (like the 
ancient rituals, for example) of a mysterious transition from pure gesture 
to the first ethical gesture of (wo)man. The economy of ethical gestures, 
and later the way to the embodied ethics, has its origin in the macro/
microcosmic awakening of life that comes to us as breath or is breathed 
into us. This is then the origin of any embodied ethics, claiming to en-
ter into the intercorporeal realm of humans (and the living nature) via 
gestures.
* Lenart Škof is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Primor-
ska, Koper, Slovenia.
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N o t e s
1 K. Marx, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (“Kritik der Hegelschen Dialektik und 
Philosophie Überhaupt”). English translation: R. C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx – Engels Reader, 
Second Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, New York/London 1978, p. 115.
2 L. Irigaray, The forgetting of air in Martin Heidegger, tr. Mary Beth Mader. The University 
of Texas Press, Austin, TX 1999, p. 163.
3 T. Ogawa, “Qi and phenomenology of wind”, Continental Philosophy Review, 31, 1998, p. 
324.
4 Ibid., p. 325.
5 Ibid., p. 326.
6 See M. Boland, Die Wind-Atem-Lehre in den älteren Upanisaden. Ugarit-Verlag, Münster 
1997.
7 Cf. Patrick L. Bourgeois, “From Common Roots to a Broader Vision: A Pragmatic Thrust 
of European Phenomenology”, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 70, 3, Summer 1996, 
pp. 381–397.
8 W. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1976, 
p. 19. For my citation see “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist”, in: W. James, Writings 1902–1910. The 
Library of America 38, New York 1987, pp. 1157–1158. James‘ italics.
9 R. Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfullness and Somaesthetics. Cam-
bridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2008.
10 Ibid., p. 154. Shusterman underpines his argument also with the fact that “we clearly con-
tinue to breathe when we are unsonscious” Interestingly enough (as we will see later in the sec-
ond section of my paper), Indian Upanishadic philosophy defines the preeminence of breath 
over other vital powers of (wo)man (such as speech, sight, touch etc.) precisely on the grounds 
that breathing does not wane during the sleep).
11 Ibid., p. 155.
12 J. Butler, Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? Verso, London 2009, p. 60. This passage 
originally appeared in M. Falkoff, Poems from Guantánamo. The Detainees Speak, University of 
Iowa Press, Iowa City 2007, p. 72 (from A. Dorfman´s Postscript).
13 L. Irigaray, “The Age of the Breath”, in: Key Writings. Continuum, London 2004, p. 166.
14 See Upanishads (tr. and introduced by P. Ollivele), Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996, 
p. lii (Introduction): “The central concern of of all vedic thinkers, including the authors of the 
Upanisads, is to discover the connections that bind elements of these three spheres to each other. 
The assumption then is that the universe constitutes a web of relations, that things that appear 
to stand alone and apart are, in fact, connected to other things.”
15 L. Irigaray, Sharing the World. Continuum, London 2008, p. 42.
16 Ibid., p. 43.
17 L. Irigaray, Between East and West. New Age Books, Delhi 2005, p. 5 (Introduction).
18 L. Irigaray, “The Age of the Breath”, op.cit., pp. 165, 166 and 167.
19 For an analysis of Irigaray‘s elaborations on the Spirit see Part IV of Teaching (ed. by L. Iri-
garay and M. Green, Continuum, London 2008).
20 L. Irigaray, “Ethical Gestures Toward the Other”, Poligrafi, 14, 57, 2010 (forthcoming). The 
manuscript in with the author. Cf. p. 1ff.
21 Ibid., p. 9.
22 Cf. for pure gesture and its relation to a life in G. Agamben, Potentialities. Stanford Uni-
verstiy Press, Stanford/California 1999, p. 79 (in his essay on M. Kommerell's criticism “Kom-
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merell, or On Gesture”): “Beyond the gestures of the soul and gestures of nature there is a third 
sphere, which one may call pure gestures … This 'pure gestures' have given up all claim to real-
ity”. According to Kommerell, with Agamben, what is at issue now is to find a way to the pro-
fane mystery as an intimacy of living here and now, a new initiation “into life itself ” (p. 84).
B i b l i o g r a p h y
1. Agamben, G. (1999), “Kommerell, or On Gesture”, in: Agamben, G., Potenti-
alities. Stanford/California, Stanford Universtiy Press, 77–88.
2. Boland, M. (1997), Die Wind-Atem-Lehre in den älteren Upanisaden. Münster, 
Ugarit-Verlag.
3. Bourgeois, P. L. (1996), “From Common Roots to a Broader Vision: A Prag-
matic Thrust of European Phenomenology”, American Catholic Philosophical 
Quarterly 70, no. 3 (Summer 1996), 381–397.
4. Butler, J. (2009), Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? London, Verso.
5. Irigaray, L. (1999), The forgetting of air in Martin Heidegger, tr. Mary Beth 
Mader. Austin, TX, The University of Texas Press.
6. Irigaray, L. (2004), “The Age of the Breath”, in: Irigaray, L., Key Writings. Lon-
don, Continuum, 165–170.
7. Irigaray, L. (2005), Between East and West. Delhi, New Age Books.
8. Irigaray, L. (2008), Sharing the World. London, Continuum.
9. Irigaray, L. (2010), “Ethical Gestures Toward the Other”, Poligrafi 14, no. 57, 
3–23.
10. James, W. (1987), “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist”, in: W. James, Writings 1902–
1910. New York, The Library of America 38, 1141–1158.
11. Karl Marx, (1978), Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (“Kritik der Hegels-
chen Dialektik und Philosophie Überhaupt”). English translation: Tucker, R. C. 
(ed.) (1987), The Marx – Engels Reader, Second Edition. New York / London, W. 
W. Norton & Company.
12. Ogawa, T. (1998), “Qi and phenomenology of wind”, Continental Philosophy 
Review 31, 321–335.
13. Ollivele, P. (tr.) (1996), Upanishads. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
14. Shusterman, R. (2008), Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfullness and 
Somaesthetics. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.