The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation by Daniel Heller-Roazen

The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation Reviews

• 
  Patrick McIntyre

  This is a not so common history of "the common sense". Heller-Roazen starts in ancient Greece, where he shows that the pre-Socratics and the Peripatetics used the same term, "aisthesis," to cover what we moderns now split into two separate and usually opposed faculties, that of "consciousness" and "sensation." From there he brilliantly surveys late antiquity and the Islamic and Christian Middle Ages and their respective treatments of what the Stoics called "the inner touch," or the master sense that underlies and makes possible all sensations, including memory and imagination, in general. One of the most fascinating moments comes when he introduces us to Tommaso Campanella's early modern theories of sensation and contrasts them to Descartes'.
  
  Although this book is an extremely rich and rewarding historical study, I have one objection to Heller-Roazen's scholarship: He gets Descartes dead wrong on sensation. Descartes, of course, is best known for his Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Heller-Roazen has a grasp of these works and also cites Descartes' textbook, the Principles of Philosophy, and briefly cites his final published work, The Passions of the Soul, but he largely neglects Descartes' works that contain mechanist (read: "scientific") theories of cosmology and physiology. I am principally speaking of The World, which contains extended discussions of the nature of light and the workings of the nervous system, and also of The Optics, which contains an extended account of visual perception. Descartes' physiological studies are completely at odds with the stereotypical "cogito ergo sum"-Descartes that, sadly, often figures as a culprit and evil mastermind of all negative aspects of modernity in critical histories of philosophy. Anyone approaching Descartes' corpus on the topics of the senses and the body free of this prejudice and aware of the historical context of his writings will find that he doesn't render the body the slave of the mind, and that, in fact, the opposite is often a truer proposition.
• 
  Jacob Wren

  Daniel Heller-Roazen writes:
  
  Setting a clear boundary between human and inhuman beings, the classical definition of man as rational animal clearly aimed, among other things, to dispel this undifferentiated dimension of all animal life. It may have largely succeeded. But the truth is that in the history of thought, the positing of a distinction between man and animal has been followed, not only preceded, but its absence, and even when human nature and animal nature have been most strenuously distinguished, a region in which they cannot be told apart has continued to recur. The reason is one of necessity, and it can be found in the logical operation that lies at the root of the specification of what one might term, with a somewhat cumbersome phrase, “human animal nature.” Since man is, among other things, himself an animal, the procedure by which one determines his proper quality must separate him not only from other living beings but also from himself. Even as it distances him from the animals around him, the defining operation must distinguish man, in other words, from the nonman within him, separating the element in him that participates in human nature from the element that partakes of a nature common to all beasts.
  
  Consider, as an example, the specification of man as a rational animal. From the living, feeling, speaking being that is man, one abstracts a quality to be termed “human” with propriety: the possession of reason (however one may then wish to define the faculty). As conclusive as it may seem, such an operation invariably produces a remainder, which cannot be attributed with any exclusivity to either human or inhuman beings. It is, quite simply, the element that is left over in human beings once one has withdrawn from them what is particularly human: everything in man, for example, that remains after, or before, the life of reason, everything in him that cannot be said to owe its existence to the activity of thought. This is an element that persists in human nature without altogether coinciding with it. By definition, it cannot be said to be strictly human, since it remains distinct from the activity judged proper to man. To the degree to which it can, however, still be found in human beings, it also cannot be said with any exactitude to be inhuman. One could call it the inhuman aspect of humanity or, alternately, the human aspect of inhumanity, but such appellations are needlessly complex and disguise a more elementary fact. The remaining element testifies to a dimension of the living being in which the distinction between the human and the inhuman simply has no pertinence: a region common, by definition, to all animal life.
  
  In the idiom of classical philosophy, the name of this shared region is “sensation” (aesthesis.)
  
• 
  Scott

  So far so good. I have good luck with Zone Books for some reason. Zone published "Death & the Idea of Mexico" which I loved so much. I picked up The Inner Touch from Unnameable Books in Brooklyn while visiting NYC with Emily. Adam Tobin, super-cool proprietor, has a great little book shop. Check out his store if you're ever.
  
  Heller-Roazen has a mirthful style, and he successfully resists academizing some very dense ideas. Sense, perception, cognition, as derived from Aristotle, the Stoics, the Skeptics, take center stage in the first half of the book, showing us that "Beasts perceive themselves continuously."