1. From comfort as luxury to comfort as necessity
Traditionally, comfort is thought of as a surplus, a superfluous luxury to the human condition. It evokes the settled bourgeois, the plush sofa, the ideal ambient temperature. However, when we talk about thermal comfort, it is often not about indulging oneself, but about avoiding suffering, even death. At -20°C or +45°C, the human body is threatened, and "comfort" becomes a condition for the possibility of bodily existence.
What is then called "thermal comfort" is a trick of language: it is no longer a comfort, but a vital minimum, a fragile physiological and psychological balance, without which no human activity or thought is sustainably possible.
2. The threshold of discomfort as an existential experience
The extreme temperature acts on the subject as a limit experience, in the sense of Karl Jaspers or Georges Bataille: it confronts man with his finitude, with his radical dependence on the material world. Where thought believes it can become autonomous, the body calls it to order:
- Excessive heat prevents sleeping, thinking, and moving.
- The cold bites, paralyzes, folds the subject back on its organic condition.
Thus, the "thermal risk" is not just a biological danger: it is also ontological. It calls into question the very idea of self-control, rationality, and autonomy.
3. Thermal Normativity and Its Cultural Biases
Thermal comfort is also standardized, culturally and historically. What is "comfortable" for a Scandinavian may be uncomfortable for an Indian, and vice versa. The "neutral" thermal point, often defined between 20 and 24°C, is actually a Western, bourgeois, air-conditioned artifact.
Behind the apparent neutrality of thermal comfort lies a symbolic violence: that of imposing a "normal," artificial climate that overlooks the ecological, economic, and bodily realities of other peoples.
4. Energy poverty as an ethical issue
Thinking about thermal comfort requires considering social discomfort. Access to a "livable" temperature is not universal. Millions of people live in poorly insulated housing, without heating or air conditioning, and are therefore exposed to potentially deadly discomfort.
Thus, talking about thermal comfort also raises a political and moral question:
Who has the right to a livable temperature? At what ecological cost? At whose expense?
5. Towards a Threshold Ethics
Can we conceive of an ethics of thermal comfort that is neither consumerist nor utopian? A thermal sobriety that respects bodily limits, without succumbing to the technocratic illusion of total climate control?
Perhaps we need to relearn how to live with temperature fluctuations, to adapt to them, without denying or enduring them. This would require a bodily education, a climate solidarity, and a redefinition of what is livable, no longer as an optimization of well-being, but as cohabitation with human fragility.