Book review: The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram
Oh wow. The first thing I have to say is that I do, in fact, want all my friends to read this book so that I can discuss it with them (as one of the blurbs on the cover suggested).
The main theme: how has Western civilisation reached the point where it is so cut off from the natural world that it can continue to stand idly by while so much damage is being done to it? Abram asserts that it is due to a kind of learned inability to perceive the nonhuman and sensory world, perpetuated in part by language, especially the adoption of alphabetic writing, and by the concept of linear time, along with well-known other factors such as the spread of agriculture and the evolution of numerical systems with their propensity for quantification.
That sounds fairly high-falutin', doesn't it? To be sure, there are some bits of the book that would read easier with a degree in philosophy - the treatment of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger, to name three - but they are by far the smaller proportion of the book.
I especially liked the idea of language as necessarily forming a kind of perceptual filter (nothing new here to fans of Chomsky or Whorf), but that non-literate or non-alphabetic cultures create a more permeable filter than do their alphabetic counterparts, especially those that have gone phonetic. The argument goes somewhat as follows: when there is no writing, knowledge is preserved in the form of stories that are constructed specifically to be easily memorable, and language is not seen to be an exclusively human gift. Because they are orally transmitted, the important parts can be emphasised differently under different conditions over time, and new information is easily incorporated. With a written tradition, once set down, it's harder to adapt, particularly if the text itself is unambiguous as to literal meaning. Some writing is more amenable to interpretation than others: Chinese characters, based on early pictographs, may be interpreted any of a dozen ways; Hebrew and Arabic, though alphabetic, absolutely require active engagement with each reading just to make sense of the text because of the lack of letters representing vowel sounds; while Romance languages require no such cognitive effort - and therefore, are much more likely to take on inalterable authority.
I was also particularly struck by the idea of oral cultures' not making distinctions between human communication and that of the natural world, with many nonhuman sounds being integrated into human language. This shapes the reality filters of all speakers of that human language, and culminates in the skills of the shaman. It's the ability to go back and forth between human and nonhuman language (and the worlds represented by those languages) that gives the shaman power, according to Abram, who spent several years studying with shamans in Bali and Nepal. This power, he says, "keeps human discourse from rigidifying". This spoke to me very strongly because of a dream I had several years ago in which I was continually stoking a giant furnace - there were quite a few of us doing it, and we were told that it was our job to "keep reality fluid - if it gets cold and crystallizes, everything will stop".
Abram is not advocating abandonment of writing, or of linear time sense, but calls for a reintegration of the sensory world with rational thought. Like for most things, wherever there is a stark black-and-white contrast, the most useful place to be is in the gray middle.
The main theme: how has Western civilisation reached the point where it is so cut off from the natural world that it can continue to stand idly by while so much damage is being done to it? Abram asserts that it is due to a kind of learned inability to perceive the nonhuman and sensory world, perpetuated in part by language, especially the adoption of alphabetic writing, and by the concept of linear time, along with well-known other factors such as the spread of agriculture and the evolution of numerical systems with their propensity for quantification.
That sounds fairly high-falutin', doesn't it? To be sure, there are some bits of the book that would read easier with a degree in philosophy - the treatment of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger, to name three - but they are by far the smaller proportion of the book.
I especially liked the idea of language as necessarily forming a kind of perceptual filter (nothing new here to fans of Chomsky or Whorf), but that non-literate or non-alphabetic cultures create a more permeable filter than do their alphabetic counterparts, especially those that have gone phonetic. The argument goes somewhat as follows: when there is no writing, knowledge is preserved in the form of stories that are constructed specifically to be easily memorable, and language is not seen to be an exclusively human gift. Because they are orally transmitted, the important parts can be emphasised differently under different conditions over time, and new information is easily incorporated. With a written tradition, once set down, it's harder to adapt, particularly if the text itself is unambiguous as to literal meaning. Some writing is more amenable to interpretation than others: Chinese characters, based on early pictographs, may be interpreted any of a dozen ways; Hebrew and Arabic, though alphabetic, absolutely require active engagement with each reading just to make sense of the text because of the lack of letters representing vowel sounds; while Romance languages require no such cognitive effort - and therefore, are much more likely to take on inalterable authority.
I was also particularly struck by the idea of oral cultures' not making distinctions between human communication and that of the natural world, with many nonhuman sounds being integrated into human language. This shapes the reality filters of all speakers of that human language, and culminates in the skills of the shaman. It's the ability to go back and forth between human and nonhuman language (and the worlds represented by those languages) that gives the shaman power, according to Abram, who spent several years studying with shamans in Bali and Nepal. This power, he says, "keeps human discourse from rigidifying". This spoke to me very strongly because of a dream I had several years ago in which I was continually stoking a giant furnace - there were quite a few of us doing it, and we were told that it was our job to "keep reality fluid - if it gets cold and crystallizes, everything will stop".
Abram is not advocating abandonment of writing, or of linear time sense, but calls for a reintegration of the sensory world with rational thought. Like for most things, wherever there is a stark black-and-white contrast, the most useful place to be is in the gray middle.