The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

This is one of the most scholarly treatments of the of human disconnect from Nature I have read. From early indigenous peoples to Socrates and beyond, Abrams takes us on a journey in time to find where the disconnect from Nature begins and spells it out not only in terms of the first "civilized" humans, but also how language began to sophisticate, yet distance itself and us from that part of Nature reality or "life-world" when we knew where our sustenance and life support came from and we had a more direct and reverent sensibility of it.

Realizing the dynamics of the disconnection leads us back to the reconnection and is seen in many passages throughout this book such as: "SO THE RECUPERATION OF THE INCARNATE, SENSORIAL DIMENSION of experience brings with it a recuperation of the living landscape in which we are corporeally embedded. As we return to our senses, we gradually discover our sensory perceptions to be simply our part of a vast, interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations borne by countless other bodies- supported that is, not just by ourselves, but by icy streams tumbling down granitic slopes, by owl wings and lichens, and by the unseen, imperturbable wind." (p 65)

"The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm." (p 95)

"THE SENSE OF BEING IMMERSED IN A SENTIENT WORLD IS preserved in the oral stories and songs of indigenous peoples- in the belief that sensible phenomena are all alive and aware, in the assumption that all things have the capacity of speech. Language, for oral peoples, is not a human invention but a gift from the land itself." (p 262-3)

This beautiful book is full of such passages and I keep it handy for continuous reference and enjoyment- it is one of the most marked-up and highlighted books in my possession. Thank you David Abrams!

This book lays out, in a very clear and readable, yet sophisticated, manner something that I have been struggling with for years. When I was younger I spent a lot of time with animals and loved to be in the forest. I learned a lot about human nature by learning about animal nature. Since then, it seems all of my education (a bachelor's, master's, and about to enter a PhD program) has "taught" me that all of that learning I did was useless, illusory. Something in that never quite sat right with me. It seemed, and still seems, arrogant, ignorant, unrealistic, and self-aggrandizing. Abrams does an excellent job of summing up what that feeling was about for me, while also providing a compelling argument for how the state of our (industrialized civilization's) knowledge gaining and knowledge sharing processes came to be what they currently are. He then frames the problems with this state of affairs and suggests, but does not fully outline, a solution.

This book does not espouse that we return to mythologizing as a means of relaying knowledge from one generation to the next. Abrams does not hold that native, oral-based cultures possessed the "truth" in their worldviews, as some other reviewers seem to think he does. (Anyone who is still looking for "the truth" has clearly missed the boat that sailed 100+ years ago with Hume and Nietzsche.) Instead, what he is saying is that in the transition from an oral-based language, one that referred back to the world in its sounds and characters, to a purely written, phonetic language that refers back to nothing but itself, we have lost a vital link with our earth. Losing this vital link via language has led us to be estranged from the places that we live, forever locked into ourselves, in a near-constant internal dialogue about our own beliefs and ideas. If one doubts that this is the case, consider only the view of human nature that philosophers as varied as Descartes and Sartre have held, and even the current "cognitive science" model of human cognition: all are grossly self-involved. Our purely phonetic language encourages us to dwell on our own internal problems and processes, while also not encouraging us to look outward to deal with problems and processes outside of ourselves. I think it is fairly obvious that this has a very real, and very important, applicability to the current crisis we face, especially in industrialized nations, where it seems that all anyone has any interest in is self-realization, self-actualization, and self-fulfillment. What if all that focus on "self" has caused us to forget that our "selves" are really nothing at all without other "selves," including the non-human selves we depend on for oxygen and energy?

Finally, Abrams does not suggest that language alone is responsible for this current state of affairs. For example one other influence he cites is the switch from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society. He mentions this, and others, at the end of the book, noting that the purpose of the book is to speak only to the language piece of the puzzle.

Like Calvin Luther Martin's The Way of the Human Being, this book lays out a vastly different way of seeing the world and interacting with it: both are phenomenologies of our species' place in our world. The work of these two men I think will be crucial to our continued flourishing as a species.

Abram's tract compares literate & pre-literate cultures, laments the loss of sensuous contact to the 'inside' and 'underneath' of our world's being and our 'presence' in it. In a bid to recover that contact, or even pose the question of its loss at the requisite depth, Abrams traces the western intellectual and linguistic structure through to twentieth phenomenologists, Husserl, Heidegger & Merleau-Ponty.It's a lucid presentation with enough personal experience to communicate to a reader coming to these big thinkers for the first time.I hope he reaches beyond converted environmentalists already actively redressing the deterioration of primal life and primary contacts. The penultimate chapter on our relationship to air is worth the price of the book alone; rhapsodic and persuasive. The Greeks, says Abrams, effectively desacrilised breath & air by introducing vowels into their written language. Vowels certainly have not impaired Abram's poetic utterances. This is a learned,sensuous and spell-binding book. I don't want to overclaim the author's importance in trepidation that he may be seen as yet another avatar of millenial disquiet. I worry, somewhat, that in areas he has not encountered first hand, he has trusted sources such as Bruce Chatwin, who himself was interpreting other people's field work. Given the largesse of the author's riches, this is a minor quibble.

I heard the author in a spirited public debate between him and biologist E.O. Wilson a couple years ago, at the old Town Hall in Boston. The mutual respect between the two men was palpable (perhaps because they are both outspoken advocates for wild nature). Yet they hold richly contrasting views regarding human society and its relation to the earth. Abram's eloquence there moved me to order this book. Upon reading it I was, in a word, stunned. It's easily one of the most important works I've come upon in thirty years of serious reading.

A few of the reader reviews below are absurdly off the mark. One of them claims that the book is anti-science. That's simply inane; I'm a working biologist, and can avow that this book is entirely consonant with the best of contemporary natural science. Indeed "The Spell of the Sensuous" got a rave review in "Science" (the journal of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science). Here's a brief excerpt from that review: "A truly original work. Abram puts forth his daring hypothesis with a poetic vigor and argumentative insight that stimulate reconsideration of the technological commonplace...With Abram anthropology becomes a bridge between science and its others." (Science, vol. 275)

In any case, this is a book that NEEDS to be much more widely known. (I've just read it a second time, and I'm still reeling at the implications.) A bunch of other reviews by a range of well-known thinkers are printed in the paperback edition. I'll copy them here, since they give a fine sense of both the depth and the span of Abram's book:

"This is a landmark book. Scholars will doubtless recognize its brilliance, but they may overlook the most important part of Abram's achievement: he has written the best instruction manual yet for becoming fully human. I walked outside when I was done and the world was a different place."

~Bill McKibben, author of "The End of Nature"

"A masterpiece - combining poetic passion with intellectual rigor and daring. Electric with energy, it offers us a new approach to scholarly inquiry: as a fully embodied human animal. It opens pathways and vistas that will be fruitfully explored for years, indeed for generations, to come."

~Joanna Macy, Buddhist scholar and author

"Speculative, learned, and always 'lucid and precise' as the eye of the vulture that confronted him once on a cliff ledge, Abram has one of those rare minds which, like the mind of a musician or a great mathematician, fuses dreaminess with smarts."

~The Village Voice

"Long-awaited, revolutionary. . . This book ponders the violent disconnection of the body from the natural world and what this means about how we live and die in it."

~The Los Angeles Times

"The outer world of nature is what awakens our inner world in all its capacities for understanding, affection and aesthetic appreciation. The wind, the rain, the mountains and rivers, the woodlands and meadows and all their inhabitants; we need these perhaps even more for our psyche than for our physical survival. No one that I know of has presented all this with the literary skill as well as the understanding that we find in this work of David Abram. It should be one of the most widely read and discussed books of these times."

~Thomas Berry, author of "The Dream of the Earth"

"I am breaking a vow to cease all blurb-writing for three years, but Abram's Spell must be praised. It's so well done, well-written, well thought. I know of no work more valuable for shifting our thinking and feeling about the place of humans in the world. Your children and their children will be grateful to him."

~James Hillman, author of "Revisioning Psychology"

"The Spell of the Sensuous does more than place itself on the cutting edge where ecology meets philosophy, psychology, and history. It magically subverts the dichotomies of culture and nature, body and mind, opening a vista of organic being and human possibility that is often imagined but seldom described. Reader beware, the message is spell-binding. One cannot read this book without risk of entering into an altered state of perceptual possibility."

~Max Oelschlager, author of "The Idea of Wilderness"

"Read it and get your gourd rattled smartly."

~ Jim Harrison, author of "Legends of the Fall"

"Disclosing the sentience of all nature, and revealing the unsuspected effect of the more-than-human on our language and our lives, in unprecedented fashion, Abram generates true philosophy for the twenty-first century."

~Lynn Margulis, co-originator of the Gaia Hypothesis,

"When rumor had it that David Abram was writing a book, we expected it to be very special and very powerful. Those expectations were justified. This book has the ability to awaken us. . ."

~Arne Naess, University of Oslo, founder of "deep ecology"

"A tour-de-force of sustained intelligence, broad scholarship, and a graceful prose style that has produced one of the most interesting books about nature published during the past decade."

~ Jack Turner, in "Terra Nova"

"Nobody writes about the ecological depths of the human and more-than-human world with more love and lyrical sensitivity than David Abram. "

~Theodore Roszak, author of "Where the Wasteland Ends"

"This book by David Abram lights up the landscape of language, flesh, mind, history, mapping us back into the world..."

~Gary Snyder, author of "Turtle Island"

"David Abram's passionate knowledge of language, mythology, landscape and his meditations on the human senses - all make for highly-charged, memorable reading. Without sermon, dogma, or academic bluster, The Spell of the Sensuous deftly tours us through interior and exterior terrains of the spirit, right up to the present. This is a major work of research and intuitive brilliance, an archive of clear ideas. At the end of a century of precarious ecology, "The Spell of the Sensuous" strikes the deepest notes of celebration and alertness - an indispensible book!"

~Howard Norman, folklorist, author of "The Bird Artist"

"Brilliant in its own field of environmental philosophy, it is destined to change the way we think about linguistics, literature, anthropology, and comparative religion, as well as the living landscape around us. . . . Beautifully written, elegantly argued, immensely original, The Spell of the Sensuous is the kind of book that comes along once in a generation. Like Carson's Silent Spring, it will become the touchstone for environmental literacy in the years to come."

~ Christopher Manes, in "Wild Earth"

Spell of the Sensous is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.David Abram's book The Spell of the Sensuous would not be one of the best books I've read recently; I'm also quiet certain that I don't agree with some of Dr. Abrams' philosophical assertions or hermeneutical views. Both Dr.Abrams' philosophical and ecological visions seem themselves hopelessly rooted in an ancient form of mysticism that curiously resembles the same sort of manmade abstractions that he much maligns throughout the book and that he subsequently blames for our societies current disassociation and estrangement from nature. This "oral culture" sensibility that Dr. Abrams seems so inclined to champion lacks any real world objectivity, instead it relies heavily on the same purely subjective and primitive mental processes that gave us many of the erroneous myths, fables and superstitions that used to plauge early mankind's world view.
On a more positive note, I must however acknowledge the powerful argument he makes for reestablishing a participatory relationship with the "others", and I whole-heartedly endorse the common sense environmental activism that he promotes in his book. Abram's new age sensibility seeks to place humanity firmly enmeshed within a highly complex and mutually reciprocal relationship with the rest of creation.
Dr.Abram's book introduced me to a whole new way of looking at language and especially writing in relation to the sensuous earth, and for that I am grateful (and that is why i rated it a 3 out of 5). I would definitely recommend this book for anyone interested in the study of language, philosophy or the environment.