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The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation
This book presents the archaeology of a single the sense of being sentient. Aristotle was perhaps the first to define this faculty when, in his treatise On the Soul , he identified a sensory power irreducible to the five senses, by which animals perceive that they are the simple “sense,” as he wrote, “that we are seeing and hearing.” After him, thinkers returned, time and again, to define and redefine this curious sensation.
The classical Greek and Roman philosophers as well as the medieval Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin thinkers who followed them all investigated a power they called “the common sense,” which one ancient author likened to “a kind of inner touch, by which we are able to grasp ourselves.” Their many findings were not lost with the waning of the Middle Ages. From Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Locke, Leibniz, and Rousseau, from nineteenth-century psychiatry and neurology to Proust and Walter Benjamin, the writers and thinkers of the modern period have turned knowingly and unknowing to the terms of older traditions in exploring the perception that every sensitive being possesses of its life.
The Inner Touch reconstructs and reconsiders the history of this perception. In twenty-five concise chapters that move freely among ancient, medieval, and modern cultures, Daniel Heller-Roazen investigates a set of exemplary phenomena that have played central roles in philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts of the nature of animal existence. Here sensation and self-sensation, sleeping and waking, aesthetics and anesthetics, perception and apperception, animal nature and human nature, consciousness and unconsciousness, all acquire a new meaning.
The Inner Touch proposes an original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into a problem that has never been more what it means to feel that one is alive.
The classical Greek and Roman philosophers as well as the medieval Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin thinkers who followed them all investigated a power they called “the common sense,” which one ancient author likened to “a kind of inner touch, by which we are able to grasp ourselves.” Their many findings were not lost with the waning of the Middle Ages. From Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Locke, Leibniz, and Rousseau, from nineteenth-century psychiatry and neurology to Proust and Walter Benjamin, the writers and thinkers of the modern period have turned knowingly and unknowing to the terms of older traditions in exploring the perception that every sensitive being possesses of its life.
The Inner Touch reconstructs and reconsiders the history of this perception. In twenty-five concise chapters that move freely among ancient, medieval, and modern cultures, Daniel Heller-Roazen investigates a set of exemplary phenomena that have played central roles in philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts of the nature of animal existence. Here sensation and self-sensation, sleeping and waking, aesthetics and anesthetics, perception and apperception, animal nature and human nature, consciousness and unconsciousness, all acquire a new meaning.
The Inner Touch proposes an original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into a problem that has never been more what it means to feel that one is alive.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
386 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2007
7 people are currently reading
249 people want to read
About the author
Daniel Heller-Roazen
17 books33 followersDaniel Heller-Roazen is the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Council of the Humanities. He is the author of The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations; The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (2007), which was awarded the Modern Language Association's 2008 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature Studies; Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (2005); and Fortune's Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (2003). These books have been translated or are forthcoming in translation in Arabic, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. He has also edited the Norton Critical Edition of The Arabian Nights and has edited, translated and introduced Giorgio Agamben's Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (1999). Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2000, he studied philosophy and literature in Toronto, Baltimore, Venice and Paris (BA in Philosophy, University of Toronto; MA in German and PhD in Comparative Literature, Johns Hopkins University). He has received fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He teaches courses on classical and medieval literature, aesthetics and the philosophy of art.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 7, 2009
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.
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.
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November 24, 2022Take copious notes. It rewards very close attention.
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June 13, 2013Daniel 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.)
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.)
January 26, 2010
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."
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."
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews