The Elemental Genealogies: 2 Air — Breath, Spirit, and the Field of Relation

If Earth construes stability, Air construes relation. It is never still, never fully contained; it moves, circulates, binds. To breathe is to participate in its flow — to join in the collective medium that sustains life. Air, in its elemental genealogy, symbolises the unseen but pervasive field through which connection and possibility are actualised.

Mythic Atmospheres

Air appears in ancient cosmogonies as the invisible yet essential medium of life. The Hebrew ruach and Greek pneuma both mean “breath” and “spirit,” linking the act of inhaling with the presence of vitality itself. In Vedic hymns, prana is both breath and cosmic force: the circulation that unites body, mind, and universe. Air is never just a physical phenomenon; it is always already relational, tying the individual to the collective, the body to the cosmos.

Philosophical Ether

Presocratic thinkers such as Anaximenes construed air as the fundamental principle: infinite, subtle, and capable of transformation into all other forms. Later philosophy transposed this into the idea of ether: the pervasive, binding medium through which forces act and light travels. Though ether fell away in modern physics, its metaphoric role persists — air as the subtle relational field that carries resonance, communication, and connection.

Scientific Atmosphere

Meteorology and atmospheric science reframed air as dynamic system: flows, currents, turbulence, the invisible architecture shaping climates and conditions of life. Air became measurable, analysable, yet no less elusive — for it is never static, always in flux. Ecology situates air as medium of exchange: oxygen, carbon dioxide, pollen, spores — circulations that link species, ecosystems, and planetary scales.

Ontological Thread: Relation and Circulation

Through myth, philosophy, and science, air construes possibility as circulation. Unlike Earth’s persistence, air emphasises movement, permeability, and connection. To be within air is to be always already connected: to breathe is to partake in a shared medium. In relational ontology, air can be read as the construal of interdependence — the invisible fields of relation that sustain, transform, and constrain life and meaning.

Key Insights:

• Medium of relation: Air symbolises the shared atmosphere of possibility, enabling circulation across bodies and systems.

• Invisibility as condition: Its presence is often unnoticed until disrupted, yet it always shapes the horizon of potential.

• Permeability and exposure: Air is that in which we are immersed, never entirely separate — a construal of exposure as condition of being.

Air, then, is the element of shared possibility. It is the field in which construal circulates, spreads, and intertwines — the relational horizon that binds without binding, the unseen presence that holds open the possibility of breath, spirit, and communication.