Animal Pneuma: Reflections on Environmental Respiratory Phenomenology

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article is excellent, it breaks new ground on animal respiratory philosophy; I have not seen anything like this before, and I have been to 2 respiratory conferences (in Finland and Slovenia).

My small gripes (very small ) are the following:

The author calls the thesis of breath in the Upaniṣads a "archaic and idiosyncratic doctrine". And then goes on to laud its wonderful ideas on breath, breathing, prāṇa, etc.  Chronologically, the Ṛgveda hymn of  Nāsadīya-sūkta (please check transliteration error on second last page) would be rendered 'archaic' by the timeline of Western Gregorian calendar, but would be deemed 'very recent' according to Australian Aboriginal or African calendars. And why 'idiosyncratic' any more than Plato's 'ideas' are taken an stock-trade of Western philosophy? I would avoid value judgments. I know the author means well, just that English might not be their first language.  

"Merleau-Ponty actually describes phenomenologically the immersion of Upanishadic vital powers (thinking, speech, sight, and hearing) into the breath (prāṇa). ".  I don't  imagine for a moment that M-P was referring to the Ups doctrine as this this implies;  M-P was actually very hostile to Indian philosophy (following Husserl and not Heidegger), seeing nothing of value in it. A parallel is what the author be seeing  and meaning to underscore, unless M-P surreptitiously steals from the Ups passage.  Could the author clarify.
I don't think we have to keep using Upanishadic, and not Upaniṣadic, as particularly Upaniṣads are given proper spelling.

I do not believe the Nāsadīya and final passage from the Vedas actually fit this paper which is specifically on animal breath rather than on cosmic breath; besides, it takes the wings out of the papers which I have presented at the aforementioned Respiratory Philosophy Conferences where I have drawn the connection of thinking on breath in the Hindu-Brāhmaṇic tradition from the same ṚgVeda passage to later elaborations.  Pity that either the author was not present to hear my papers or has not been inclined  to cite or acknowledge them.

Also, I understand the author has analyzed the hymns elsewhere, but I would be cautious as without Vedic or classical  Sanskrit one can fall into the trap of using whatever translation is around; the latest translation cited from S.W. Jamison and  J. P. Brereton (good colleagues of mine), though philologically sound and remarkably an advancement on previous translation, has philosophical flaws and defects, in that they take the whole of Vedas to be simply and purely sacrificial-ritual texts and not of much philosophical sophistication (a prejudicial view that has prevailed in Indology since the 18th century; one just has to read Max Müller et al on this).

A slight improvement is recommended.

Apart from that, the paper is good for publication. 

Best wishes

 

 

Author Response

I thank reviewer 1 for his/her comments.

My response: 

• I will explain why I was using the 'archaic' and 'idiosyncratic' terms with the Rgvedic hymn;
• a transliteration error will be corrected;
• will clarify about Merleau-Ponty and pranas (I did not think that M-P was thinking of pranas, but only wanted to show the proximity of his thought to upanishadic philosophy);
• I will reconsider if Nasadiya fits into the concluding part of my paper, including the translation issue.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This piece is nicely done, commenting on some exciting and original ground between older notions of pneumatology and a timely ethical thrust into ecophilosophy, making this a work of great relevance. The author does a fine job of incorporating relevant critical literature (some classics like Klages, Derrida, Irigaray) and non-Western metaphysics as background to a needed take on animality. The section connecting the phenomenology of sleep to discourses on breath was both surprising and necessary. I also quite enjoyed the bit on cetaceous breathing as well, an occurrence outside the norms of traditionally anthropocentric pneumatological assumptions that I plan to reference in an article I'm crafting on oceanic metaphysics as soon as this piece is published.

I have one small conceptual comment, not so much a criticism but something to consider that I didn't see directly referenced in this piece. The section "The Unfortunate Transition for Soul to Geist" rests upon Abrams' analysis of Platonic discourse extracting psyche from the realm of the sensual and setting the stage for the trajectory of pneumatological thought in the West that is outlined in the next paragraph. (I do think there's some wiggle room on the sensual connections in Neoplatonists ideas about divine breath, as Aldis Uzdavinys has written, but that's a side question to this author's overall argument). However, I believe there's some relevant context from the other side offered by Aristotle that may be worth referencing alongside Abrams. In De Anima, Aristotle also detaches the circulation of soul from the carnal mechanism of breath, but on the grounds that not everything considered living actually breathes. Indeed, the physically anaerobic loomed in my mind toward the conclusion of this article. The "covenant of a new respiratory alliance" and all of its ethical and metaphysical implications is well-founded, but the author builds it through the mechanism of physical breath among dogs and whales to create a moral corollary with phenomenological import. I think a true "animal pneuma" must account for the breath of entities like the spider, the amoeba, and others whose respiration cannot be so easily allegorized or become sites of intimate connection.

This is by no means a deal-breaker for this wonderful article, but I wonder if such a consideration might flesh the implications of their intervention more fully in the end. It was a pleasure to read and I thank you for the opportunity to do so.      

Author Response

I thank reviewer for his/her beautiful response.

My response:

• yes, I was thinking of evaluating the possibility of breath in spiders, the amoeba, etc. and will try to navigate through this field in my revisions;
• regarding Aristotle and De Anima - I already wanted to add and analyse some of the excerpts from this work as well as from De respiratione (although this work might only had been attributed to Aristotle). I then decided that the current context is not the best for this; will still try to think about this and evaluate some of the Aristotle's insights.