THE
SENSUS COMMUNIS,
SYNESTHESIA,
AND THE SOUL
An Odyssey
ERIC McLUHAN
Copyright © 2015 Eric McLuhan.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in 2015 by BPS Books
Toronto and New York
A division of Bastian Publishing Services Ltd.
ISBN 978-1-77236-022-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-77236-023-3 (ePDF)
ISBN 978-1-77236-024-0 (ePUB)
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available from Library and Archives Canada.
Cover and text design: Daniel Crack, Kinetics Design, www.kdbooks.ca
Special thanks to Dr. Steven Miller, for encouragement and assistance in publishing this essay
Table of Contents
Appendix One: Aristotle's Media War
Appendix Two: Communication Arts in the Ancient World
Appendix Three: Paradoxes of the Mass Audience
Appendix Five: Effects of the Discarnate
Appendix Six: The Blindfold Exercise
Appendix Seven: A Catholic Theory of Communication
Appendix Eight: The Future of Humanity, Etc.
Foreword Is Forewarned
When I came across a description of the experience of mysticism in Henri de Lubac’s magisterial Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, I found myself on familiar ground. It brought forcefully to mind the experience of mimesis in ancient Greek poetics.
Mimesis is the technique of interiorization: knowing by putting-on, knowing by becoming, intellectually and emotionally, the thing known. That is, integral, interiorized knowing instead of conceptual knowing: unmediated, direct perception by the body and the emotions and the intellect of the hearer, that is, by the hearer’s soul. Direct experience by total submergence. (p. 22, infra.)
Fifty years ago, Eric Havelock wrote in Preface to Plato about Plato’s “war” with the bards over their use of mimesis.Their approach engendered the total, the almost pathological involvement of the hearer in the poetic performance, an involvement so profound that the hearer effectively became the poem. He put on the characters; he spoke their words; he performed their actions; he suffered, triumphed, exulted, despaired as they did, and he did this so completely that a single exposure fixed the recitation perfectly in his memory for the rest of his life.
Thirty years later you could automatically quote what Achilles had said or what the poet had said about him. Such enormous powers of poetic memorization could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity...This then is the master clue to Plato’s choice of the word mimesis to describe the poetic experience. It focuses initially not on the artist’s creative act but on his power to make his audience identify almost pathologically and certainly sympathetically with the content of what he is saying...(p. 23, infra)
Plato was determined to break the spell and inculcate instead the exotic new skills of abstract thought and objectivity that accompanied the alphabet. Abstraction was essential to the new science of philosophy, so Plato waged the first media war. Aristotle continued the campaign with an immensely powerful technology of his own devising: the syllogism.
Fifteen hundred years after Plato and Aristotle, as de Lubac reveals, mimesis can again be found at work, albeit in a totally separate context, that of the interpretation of Scripture. More particularly, interpretation at the level of mysticism, the “anagogical” level. Unlike the historical, allegorical, and tropologiical senses of Scripture, the anagogical sense does not consist of ideas: it is constituted as direct experience, one generally regarded as ineffable and beyond words or explanation. The reader puts on, or enters into, the passage of Scripture so completely as to become it. He transcends mere intellectual understanding and attains, through contemplation, a state of knowing through his whole being.
Perhaps equally surprising, mimesis is everywhere in evidence in our contemporary world, particularly in the arts and in advertising, and in modern media. This reversal has implications for the Church and the sacraments, implications that need to be addressed without delay.
Accordingly, this essay concerns both experience and the several kinds of sense: intellectual, corporeal, and spiritual. As far as possible I have tried to avoid theory and stick to a common sense approach. Moreover, the ancient and medieval doctrine of common sense, the human sensus communis, is particularly relevant to contemporary experience. It is evident, for example, in the condition psychologists call synesthesia, which also has much to tell us about mimesis.
These pages, then, treat of: the four senses of exegesis mentioned above (particularly anagogy); the bodily senses; and mimesis as experiences and as modes of insight, not in terms of ideas or theories. Experiences can be checked, shared, verified by anyone. These considerations naturally bring into the discussion the notion of the