The Spell of the Sensuous

Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

By: David Abram

Narrated by: Sean Runnette

For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people but with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patterns) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate". How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relationship with the breathing earth?

In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which - even at its most abstract - echoes the calls and cries of the earth. In this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.

©1996 David Abram (P)2017 Tantor

Mind blowing

This book should be added to the top 5 must read book list. Absolutely mind blowing

Be ready to engage your intellect!

This book traces philosophical and spiritual routes that humans have tread over our existence. Not a "fun" read, it is complex and takes attention to listen to, but I found that I could go in and out without losing the thread. I so appreciate the importance of the points made. I highly recommend it.

interesting ideas terrible narration

this is s good book from an ideas, philosophy, and principles perspective. they couldn't have chosen a poorer narrator. if I had it to do over, I would have read the book.

this narrator should president over funerals.

Dense but worth it!

This is a LONG and varied book. Much of it is written in very poetic language, and the author spends significant time on evocative descriptions of animals, places, and experiences. These can be really beautiful, and the narrator does a great job of reading them in a moving way. On the other hand, parts of it are extremely academic, and the author spends a lot of time quoting and picking apart the writings of other historians, philosophers, anthropologists, etc. Those parts can get really dry and read like a PhD thesis, although they contain some really eye opening information.

I think it's very unlikely that anyone will love ALL of this book. Some people will really like the anthropological/scientific/historical rigor and learning about human language and history, and will get a little impatient with the flowery descriptions. Others will like the poetic and "big picture" parts and get a little bored with the nitty-gritty academic sections. But if you stick with it, it really does all come together in the end and it's totally worth it, so I encourage people to be patient and keep an open mind, either way!

There is no book as poetic as intellectual aa this

This book is a long arduous walk through words come back to earth to rise again in the breeze of deep knowing of modern life in search of ancient connection with sound and sensors sense.

The Spell of the Sensuous is a book that could cha

The Spell of the Sensuous is a book that could change the way you see the world. It shines a detailed yet poetic laser-focused light on one moment in the development of the human species - that time around the 10th Century BCE when we transitioned from an animistic sense of ourselves as living parts of a living environment to suddenly experiencing ourselves as beings separate from Nature, with an "interior life." We went rapidly from being experientially embedded in the local landscape to being part of a "human world" that witnesses Nature but stands apart from it. Abrams makes the case here that this transition was triggered by the development of phonetic written language.

The first written languages were pictographic or idiomatic, using symbols that represented aspects of the natural world (wavy lines represent flowing water, for example). But with phonetic writing, the symbols with which we recorded our experience and observations stopped representing what they described, and began to represent instead the sounds of the human voice. The letters of the alphabet do not describe Nature; they tell us how to say the words humans use to describe Nature. The subtle yet historically profound consequence is that we traded our direct I-Thou relationship with reality for a primary relationship with written text, with the sound of our own voice. Our sense of I-Thou was transferred from the ocean, the forest, the mountain, the gazelle, to the written page describing those things.

Abrams makes the startling point that we did not transition at that point from animism to materialism; we did not become "no longer animistic." Rather we transferred our animism from the world to the word. From Nature to the written page. Consider that, as I type this review, I am filling pixels with shapes and scratches (letters that represent sounds made by the human mouth/tongue/voice). That's not what your brain is experiencing, though, looking at these scratches. You are hearing a voice in your head. You may be seeing images stirred by these words. You are in an animistic relationship with these written words, this electronic text. According to Abrams we once had that same kind of relationship with the natural world. We understood the voices of wind and water, birds calls and animal behavior, as directly as you and I agree on the meaning of these written words. Now we are trapped in a mental world one step removed from the natural reality we still depend on for physical survival. A world made rigid, frozen in time and space, by the unchangeability of text, the fixedness of recorded history, the "factuality" of material science, the unshakeable literalness of shared canons of knowledge.

I am reminded, writing this review, of the theory that has become popular lately that we are living in a computer simulation. The universe is not what it appears to be, but is rather a complex computer program designed to mimic reality, created by some ancient aliens or ultradimensional intelligences. Well, maybe our simulacrum isn't quite so high-tech, and maybe no aliens are necessary to explain it. Maybe we have written ourselves into a textual human world divorced from Nature, and stepped into that world as if it were real. Maybe we are the aliens. Maybe the simulation is a story we're writing, phonetic word, by word, by word.

Lots of food for thought here . If the concepts I've outlined in this review resonate with you, put The Spell of the Sensuous on your must-read list.

Stellar introduction to a revolutionary approach to language, nature and the human embedded in the natural world.

This book, exquisitely written and perfectly narrated, presents the impact phenomenology - as developed by Merleau-Ponty - has on our understanding of the language of humans and the roles language has played in both archaic and contemporary times as a controlling expression of our embeddedness in the natural world.

wonderful

I've just finished and am ready to listen again. It started a little slow for me, but gained speed till the finish.

Spellbound

This is one of my favorite books. Whenever I feel the need for inspiration and a transportive experience, I revisit The Spell of the Sensuous and I feel renewed with new insights into life. The author’s poetic prose is unmatched. And the narrator’s textured voice is a perfect complement to this earth wise book.

Phenomenal

Illuminating and gracious. One of the best philosophy books I’ve read. Performance was gentle and easy to listen to even in the denser areas