Apparently, a pathic and atmospherologic aesthetics, i.e. based on the idea that the human being is first and foremost, before any reflection and sometimes even any explicit awareness, involved by feelings that are diffused in the surrounding space and sometimes so authoritative that they do not allow any critical reaction, could not but recognise the centrality of the nowadays widespread theme of immersiveness. But the meaning of 'immersion' is widely disputed, as is that of 'atmosphere'. In fact, it is one thing, to give just one emblematic example, to think that atmosphere is only the feeling in action, while one is experiencing it and by which one is deeply involved (which obviously implies immersion), and quite another to admit the possibility that an atmospheric feeling, while presenting itself as a direct affordance to our situated perception, can instead be detected even without implying any personal involvement, thus allowing the percipient an ex-centricity which could also become an effective critical distance. Having assessed some of the different types of atmospheric experience and some of the many paradoxes that invalidate the very notion of 'immersion', we must also ask ourselves whether an 'atmospheric competence', in the case of atmospheres that are actually involving and for which the felt body is a precise sounding board, does not also, if not above all, imply the possibility that an initial immersion is followed by a relatively critical (re)emersion