Here’s the opening salvo from David Abrams’s The Spell of the Sensuous:

Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations. The simple premise of this book is that we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

As for me, I’ve always found the natural world frighteningly arbitrary and strange. Mushrooms, animals, galaxies: it’s all so weird. Far from the clean abstractions of mathematics and computer code. Except, Abrams suggests, our concepts themselves are inextricably rooted in our conviviality with our environment.

The complex interchange that we call “language” is rooted in the non-verbal exchange always already going on between our own flesh and the flesh of the world.

The overarching theme is exchange and reciprocation between the human mind and other beings in its environment. That’s not an ideal formulation, because it fails to go beyond the kind of dualism that Abram is trying to bridge, namely the dualism between mind and environment. Structurally, this dualism assumes one special entity–the mind–ensconced within an outer reality, mostly inert except for other humans–the environment. That’s what Descartes found reasonable, and when Abram tries to trace the origin of this conception, he arrives at a linguistic theory involving the transformations between orality and writing, and between hieroglyphs and alphabets:

In contact with the written word a new, apparently autonomous, sensibility emerges into experience, a new self that can enter into relation with its own verbal traces, can view and ponder its own statements even as it is formulating them, and can thus reflexively interact with itself in isolation from other persons and from the surrounding, animate earth. […] Within alphabetic civilization, virtually every human psyche construes itself as just such an individual “interior,” a private “mind” or “consciousness” unrelated to the other “minds” that surround it, or to the environing earth. For there is no longer any common medium, no reciprocity, no respiration between the inside and the outside.

In this depiction, alphabetic writing becomes something like a house of mirrors. This reminds me of a quote I read in a Swedish textbook about medieval intellectual history, there attributed to an “Adso of Melk (ca. 1305–1380),” which actually (as I discovered when looking for an English translation) turns out to be a fictional character from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (“Il nome della rosa,” 1980), a monk who wrote:

“I had thought each book spoke of things, human or divine, that lie outside of books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind.”

Abram is an ecological writer, and always returns to the fundamental point that we are manifestations of nature. We partake of language, but this is not a spontaneous creation of humanity, but shared with the language of birds and even rivers, onomatopoetic, animal, and material. Language arises as we express our natural conviviality using sounds, in a kind of remix culture with birdsong and other material. But alphabetic civilization has forgotten these relations, and gives rise to a detachedly human symbolic realm.

Only when the written characters lost all explicit reference to visible, natural phenomena did we move into a new order of participation. Only when those images came to be associated, alphabetically, with purely human-made sounds, and even the names of the letters lost all worldly, extrahuman significance, could speech or language come to be experienced as an exclusively human power.

One of the interesting historical sources regarding this shift is the record of Plato and Socrates, who operated when alphabetical literacy was reshaping Athens. Here Abram draws on the influential (and apparently controversial) classicist Eric Havelock, who claims that

“the invention of the Greek alphabet, as opposed to all previous systems, including the Phoenician, constituted an event in the history of human culture, the importance of which has not as yet been fully grasped.”

In Abram’s reading, Socrates is an avatar of the alphabetically induced world, using language in way that’s new for the other Athenians, who are not used to sustained reflection on abstract ideas, but use concepts in a more poetic or rhetorical way.

By continually asking his interlocutors to repeat and explain what they had said in other words, by getting them thus to listen to and ponder their own speaking, Socrates stunned his listeners out of the mnemonic trance demanded by orality, and hence out of the sensuous, storied realm to which they were accustomed.

Abram suggests that Western philosophy–and Western culture generally–is founded in this rift. He looks to the tradition of phenomenology, especially Merleau-Ponty, for a style of philosophy that tries to come to terms with this heritage.

But the book is written with two different voices, interlaced as different chapters, sometimes intertwining from sentence to sentence. One is rather abstract, and speaks authorially within the tradition of Western philosophy. The other is an embodied human being telling his stories from travels in Asia and home life in North America.

At the root of the book is a plea. Abram thinks that we can’t approach the basic issue of ecology if we don’t renew our conviviality with the nonhuman world. One way of doing this is by rekindling our attitudes with respect to other beings, things, and environments: seeing these others as also sentient and possessing various kinds of intelligence. And seeing ourselves not as free-floating souls only incidentally mingling with the natural world, but as processes that light up into being only in our contact with the others.

Reading The Spell of the Sensuous has made me pay more attention to the singing of sparrows and seagulls, to the powerful presence of the mountain Ramberget which towers above my home, to the way in which even potted plants demand a kind of empathy. And it’s nudged my attention towards myself as a material body and an animal. I think it’s going to shape my thinking in a big way, not necessarily by its specific arguments and reasonings, but by its dogged insistence in pointing towards the sensuous, the embodied, the way our all-too-human minds are only aware by virtue of their fleshly participation.