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

by David Abram

Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This is a major work of ecological philosophy that startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Nature, Spirituality, Psychology, Ecology, Environment

326 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

David Abram is an American philosopher, cultural ecologist, and performance artist, best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues. He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, published in 2010 and of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, for which he received, among other awards, the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Abram is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE); his essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological disarray have appeared often in such journals as Orion, Environmental Ethics, Parabola, Tikkun, and The Ecologist, as well as in numerous anthologies.

Reviews

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the wonderful opportunity to meet David Abram on a number of occasions while living in Santa Fe. My poetry professor was having us read this book, partly because David Abram was a personal friend of his and partly because the book is just remarkable on a thousand different levels. It has a poetry to it, to be sure, but no other phrase works quite as well as "Spell Binding" when describing this book. It's wordy, you can't read it in one sitting like some pulp fiction book. But I still found myself engrossed in it, even obsessed a little. It inspired me and my artwork (well, when I used to do art) so much. But however I felt about his book turned out to be just a pale shadow of how I felt about David Abram the man. He came to speak to our class, not formally, just participated in a round table discussion of sorts. No one wanted to leave the class. As he talked he performed sleight of hand tricks with coins and other such shiny objects, which was a very good way to get anyones attention. Above all, David is a story teller and lives and breathes for stories. He reminds us what stories once were and what they can still be. This book is not for the weak of heart, or the fickle of mind. You just have to "get it". And i think I got it. After I read the book i saw David roaming around Santa Fe constantly. To be sure, SF is a small town and a mountain community that's very tight knit. But it was serendipitous to run into him of all people in places like movie theaters, bars, and book stores all over town, as if he was some sort of little gnome turning up in odd places to remind me of something. I hope to see him again one day.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book has two significant flaws:

1) Abram is far too quick to succumb to reducing Judeo-Christian sensibilities to the villainous role here. In doing so, he's exacerbating the dialectic gulf he's making otherwise noteworthy leaps toward bridging. I had a hunch he'd be headed down this path, though, when he summarily blacklisted the Genesis creation account as narrative of oppression and dominion, ignoring its long tradition, in various theological circles, as an account emphasizing relational stewardship of land. He - and his argument - would've been much better off with a fairer treatment of this prevailing tradition, with giving dialogue a little encouragement as opposed to giving those within the Judeo-Christian tradition inclined to think his view hot air reason for thinking it.

2) He tries too hard to make his usually very good points, and in doing so weakens his argument. For instance, on page 252, within the space of two paragraphs, he writes:

a) "For by using visible characters to represent the sounded breath, the Greek scribes effectively desacralized the breath and the air."

b) "By providing a visual representation of that which was - by its very nature - invisible, they nullified the mysteriousness of the enveloping atmosphere..."

c) "By breaking this taboo, by transposing the invisible into the register of the visible, the Greek scribes effectively dissolved the primordial power of the air."

It reminded me of Neal Gabler's assertion that "Walt Disney was no racist" - the kind of overzealous statement that immediately makes one think Disney may very well have been. Similarly, beating your point into your reader over and over, however beautifully sculpted the sentences, bespeaks anxiety in the author that his point might not hold much water after all (it is this that I find so humorous and telling about Christopher Hitchens's anti-religious fervor). But the thing is: Abram's position is provocative, convincing, utterly fascinating and could generate a seismic shift in Western perspectives on language. His writing, too, is often gorgeous - it merely needed a booster shot of confidence now and then.

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Chinese medicine, disease is defined as that which goes against the Breath of Nature (Bian Hua變化). This statement begs the question: If human disease is that which goes against the breath, how are we going against the breath? Or more specifically, how did we get to this point of widespread cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, allergies, and depression? David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous offers some important insight.

Once upon a time, humans were inherently tied to the land as hunter-gatherers – to survive they were required to follow the laws of nature and the land that they inhabited. With the advent of agriculture and the ability to store surplus grain and consequently generate wealth, a separation arose. No longer did man have to toil day in and day out for food and his survival, but with smart farming techniques and the eventual domestication of grain, the more wealthy could pursue intellectual pursuits: the creation of the aleph-beth emerged as a technology that could transmit some of these intellectual constructs.

Abram discusses the consequences of this gradual transformation from oral to written culture as a divorce from the embodied sensorial experience of time-space to a domain that is referent only to the human domain. “Only with the emergence of the phonetic alphabet, and its appropriation by the ancient Greeks [from the Hebrews who consciously did not encase the majestic air as written vowels] did the written images lose all evident ties to the larger field of expressive beings. Each image now came to have a strictly human referent: each letter was now associated purely with a gesture or sound of the human mouth.” (p.138, italicized comments mine). Instead of seeing language in everything around us – the birds, the wind, the trees, the earth itself – encapsulating speech into written words divides humans from the very world in which we depend on for our well-being. The written word is no longer a transient mutating form, but a fixed non-breathing non-living reference to be analyzed, discussed, and returned to for all time. In short, the written word divides us from nature because it is in and of itself completely unnatural; simply a construction, a technological advancement, of the human mind.

When I go to write something down, I do so to preserve the present moment so that in some future time it can again be accessed. But my words, no matter how poetic or successful at describing some part of a scene or mood must fail to express the entirety of the scene. The pure infinite nature of the present is incapable of being recorded in this linear, discrete fashion, exported into the future to be re-experienced. So language itself, and written language even more-so, is limited*.

Besides the wealth generation of agriculture, the invention of the phonetic written word can be seen as the grandmother of the technologies we enjoy today. But these technologies come at a price. Because they are invented for humans instead of for the world in which humans live, using these inventions inherently reinforces this division. In this way man can then manipulate the environment for his gain. Thus, man is not required to observe, much less follow, the breath of nature. Sometimes we do follow the breath, and we are healthy and vibrant. But often we go against the breath, and we develop diseases that ultimately kill us.

Abrams describes the healer's role (in shamanic cutures) existing at the edge of society, constantly nourishing the border between human beings and the other beings – the animate and seemingly inanimate creatures of nature. For it is through this membrane that nature communicates with us, and where the answers lie to cure disease and live in the balance that is necessary to sustain life.

[Carmine · Rating 5 out of 5]

My reaction to this book—and even more so to Abram's later book, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology—is akin to the gratitude of a drowning person toward he who tosses her a lifeline. To have someone so lyrically articulate the intense sadness and sense of loss I and others feel about humanity's disconnection from our fellow animals and our home planet was enormously validating. Abram serves the role of a shaman, an intermediary between the natural world and the spiritual world: he is a scholar, a poet, a storyteller, a trickster and a visionary.

These are questions I've asked myself for a long time: "Why do I passionately love the natural world yet feel so apart from it, even when I am in its midst? What is this barrier between my mind and the rest of the sentient world? How is it that animals fully inhabit themselves and this world, while I feel so detached, so in-my-head, so strangely un-present? Why do I feel broken, not whole?"

The Spell of the Sensuous revealed many answers, answers that feel profoundly true. This book is a synthesis of the scholarly and poetic, the factual and a passionate call to action. The evolution of thought concerning perception and language were interesting; but what I found enthralling were his conclusions. My copy of this book is full of underlinings on dog-earred pages. On almost every page I found soul-level nourishment. Just one of many thoughts that helped me begin healing from that terrible separation we have wrought:

"…we are situated in the land in much the same way that characters are situated in a story…along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world."

David Abram has inspired me to start my own wild-honoring blog, to become part of that wider conversation. And I truly believe that our collective consciousness is undergoing a shift, and that David Abram is one of its leading voices.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Welcome to the 1990's. Bill Clinton is president, the budget is balanced, Dances with Wolves is the #1 movie, houses are stucco, and turquoise is the new jewelry craze. Taking a walkabout through the Spirit of the Sensuous is like taking a walk down the same nature trails of the 90's mind.

Although it comes upon the reader gradually, David Abram takes the reader through a tour de force of a fashion through an ecology of experience in the natural world, a phenomenology of our senses in the lifeworld, a history spoken language and the written word as well as their scope and limits, and a tour of native cultures and their relations to the past, future, and present. All of this is in service of a thoroughgoing naturalism and realism that Abram weaves out of these various cloths. One of the main arguments and themes running throughout is the contention that in the modern world of advanced industrial societies we have lost touch with the more primordial experience of space, presence, and location in the natural environment of which we still are a part. This is what Abram explores with curiosity and reverence for native wisdom.

In one of the main arcs, Abram discusses the transition from oral to written language and the evolution of written languages. The first written languages, like Sumerian or ancient Egyptian, used pictograph symbols and cuneiform to depict the objects in the real world. We’ve all seen pictures of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. As Abram recounts, the first language to change this was ancient Hebrew, which turned the symbols into letters. In ancient Hebrew, like its modern Hebrew reincarnation, the first two letters in the language were Aleph and Bet. Ancient Hebrew turned and rotated the symbol for bull or ox to make the letter Aleph and turned and rotated the symbol for house to make the letter Bet. The ancient Hebrew language was transported by the Phoenicians to ancient Greece, where the ancient Greeks adopted and adapted it, and the first two letters became Alpha and Beta. (As an intriguing aside, the letters went from Aleph and Bet in ancient Hebrew, to Alpha and Beta in ancient Greek, and later were combined into our English word 'alphabet'.) At this point, the first full fledged written alphabets were in use based on letters rather than symbols.

Central to his argument, Abram paints a tale that the transition from spoken language to written language led to an estrangement and alienation from the rootedness of the natural world that gave rise to the first spoken languages. The effect of alienation from the natural environment is real enough. However, Abram’s placement of the cause in the transition from the spoken word to the written word seems to misplace the material driver of change for one of its technologies and cultural infrastructures. The real cause is probably the development of civilization and the concomitant development in the economy and the increasingly specialized labor of the populations. It's labor and the development of mechanized technology--agriculture, monetized work, cities; and later factories, cars, hi-tech --that made the natural world humankind's instrument as opposed to their natural home and environment.

This is a fairly common attribution error in philosophy. Rather than seeing causes in the changes in the material conditions in the economy and society, philosophers are prone to attribute changes in society stemming from a change in ideas or, as in this case, the media of their dissemination. The development of civilization is the primary driver; communication media are technologies that accompany the development of civilization. In this case, the early development of civilization was accompanied by the early technological advance from the spoken word to the written word; subsequently, the development of civilization out of feudal to industrial society was accompanied by the invention of new media technologies, e.g. the printing press, radio, film, television, the internet, and social media.

Although Abram seems to have misplaced the material development of civilization for one of its epiphenomena, the effect is real enough. Through the development of civilization, we as the inhabitants of those societies have become estranged and alienated from the natural home and environment out of which civilization arose. In showing the ecology of native cultures, Abram recounts the role of the shaman, serving as the boundary and link between society and the more than human world outside of it, i.e. the natural world. The beauty of this work is that Abram pauses to smell the flowers and the richness of the natural world. He uses native wisdom as antidote to our compulsion to be sucked into the machine that we as humans invented. Some of the richest discussions in the last third of the book detail and narrate the relationship in native cultures between the natural world embodied in the wind and how they as its inhabitants imbibe it through the breath. The wind is both the literal wind and the great spirit (wakan tanka) and the breath is both literal breath and animistic life force. This is the spell of the sensuous through one of its manifestations. As Abram laments early on, the spell is so easily broken when returning to our advanced industrial societies. If we are to find a better balance and integration with the natural world, we will have to find a way to respect the natural world as its inhabitants while continuing to advance the other political and economic goals of civilization.

[Janie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. David Abrams covers enormous ground, delving into philosophy, cultural anthropology, the environment, phenomenology, and spirituality. I read this book in NYC and it helped convince me (as did 9/11) to leave the city for an island off the coast of Maine where I lived for five years reconnecting with the natural world and my place in it. This is an important book for anyone concerned about the contemporary society's disconnect from nature.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

Abram starts out strong by providing a fresh perspective about the separation of humans from nature. Anchoring his work first in Husserl's phenomenology and then Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, Abram says that we think more about the world than experience it. He writes that we are first and foremost physical bodies that complete themselves only through active relationships with nature. There is, in other words, a visceral circuit of energy with the world and it is this that gives us meaning and a sense of engagement and fulfillment.

So far, so good. But then in a somewhat complicated argument, Abram goes on to argue that humans increasingly abstracted themselves from nature through language, transforming nature into something that was external because we were no longer integrated with it. To put it bluntly, the alphabet removed us, deterministically, from nature. Along with this linguistic argument, Abram references magical and native cultural practices to illustrate how indigenous peoples, not us, remain true to nature.

Abram denies that his thesis involves a "going back" and acknowledges that other factors are relevant as well. Despite his denial, the book nevertheless has the feel of a "return to nature" as his thesis is that we become impoverished when nature becomes "less." This is a point of debate. His book idealizes the indigenous person and suggests that all of the modern conveniences of life (health, leisure, etc) somehow are not (or "should not be"?) desired by indigenous cultures. From the outside looking in, that may be easy to say. These conveniences also may be the very reason developed societies are removed from nature. This, not language, may provide the stronger argument about why our direct engagement with nature has become less relevant. Whether our move from the world of magic to science is good or bad remains, however, a fair debate and Abram offers some interesting and helpful insights.

[Clayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't say how much I enjoyed reading this. This is one of those books where you feel continuously enlightened as you move through it's wondrous realms of experience and ancestral wisdom. I highly recommend to anyone interested in moving beyond atheism into a spirituality that makes much more sense (pun not intended, but well-appreciated). Recommended for anyone interested in indigenous cultures and animism in general, and people who follow anti-civ philosophy but have not yet examined spirituality.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spell of the Sensuous is two things in one book. In the bright light of the academic world, it is a treatise that attempts to illustrate, if not prove, a rather ambitious thesis: that the advent and development of writing, from ideograms to Hebrew un-voiced phonetic script to the complete-with-vowels Greek alphabet, has been in large part responsible for the gradual estrangement of agricultural and now industrial humans from the living, speaking world evidenced to them through their senses.

Abram begins with a rhetorical question. If at one point, humans obtained wisdom from all facets of their land, if they once held the trees and the rivers and the stars holy, how did anyone ever allow the land to be attacked with the fervor found in industrial humans today? The story, of course, begins with agriculture, and its course is intimately tied with the transition to life indoors. The discovery and use of fossil fuels has been another key element in the story. But Abram focuses on an under-explored aspect of this millenial transition: writing. It began innocently enough, with pictographic characters that constantly called their readers' attention back to the living world around them. The phonetic script of the Hebrews allowed them to lift their entire culture off the land that had sustained it and take it into exile with them - one of the first cultures thus abstracted. The final step was taken by the Greeks, when they went one step further than the Hebrew alphabet and added vowels, thus removing the need for constant for constant reinterpretation that made the Hebrew text in some ways still alive.

One of my favorite images from the book came at this point. At the cusp of the Greek discovery of phonetic writing, as they begin the transition from a deeply oral culture to a somewhat literate one, two philosophers came along and made a breakthrough. Socrates seized upon the abstraction of a word like justice, which had formerly been deeply ensconced in provisional, situational meaning, and began to quiz his fellows on what the word might mean outside of those specific contexts. Here was the word on a page, so clearly it had to have some meaning of its own, and inherent, rather than a contextual being. This is what Socrates sought, and explains why his interlocutors are so often baffled by his inquiries. Plato goes many steps further. He is so taken with these abstractions that he believes they are the ONLY true reality. Since the trend of Western thought has been dominated by the same influences that got Plato started down this track, it's no surprise that this initial mistake has dogged our culture ever since.

Abram proves his thesis methodically, clearly, and with an expert command of his resources. It is the kind of thesis that you believe or you don't believe, but can't really ever be proven. But Spell doesn't stand or fall on the strength of this argument. For it is also another book. Every word breathes a beautiful expression of the way of perceiving he attributes to oral cultures. Every sentence is an invitation, an exhortation, to return, a little or a lot, to this way of being in the world, to this way of living. Abram's charm (http://www.mythicimagination.org/home...) and persuasion make the book dance.

Some of the key revelations that come from this side of the work:

The ways that indigenous people have of seeing the world, the stories they tell about the origins of things, the way their ethics and aesthetics map intimately onto the land they call home, can be partially and usefully understood as elegant mnemonic devices to pass on an incredible store of information. How else could you wrap your mind around the uses of thousands of plants, and internalize the behavior and personalities of countless prey animals? How else do you bury deeply in all of your actions the accumulated wisdom needed to live with *this* land in perpetuity and happiness? Transferring this kind of knowledge into human-digestible forms - anthropomorphized dramas - is the only way to remember all of it. These cultures are not crude imitations of the kind of explanation provided by our science. It is instead our land ethic (or lack thereof) that is revealed as crude. It is thus somewhat clear why many indigenous stories seem empty or weak - abstracted from the land that is a crucial character in all of them, why would you expect them to be good stories?

Further, this conception of culture grants a more insightful understanding of human-caused environmental catastrophes. The relevant contrast is not in the mode of production - hunter-gatherer vs. agricultural or industrial - but rather whether the culture is deeply attuned to the land. Peoples moving into a new land haven't had time to realize, for example, that the North American or Australian mammals haven't evolved to deal with hunting pressure from humans, so you should only take so many. This problem fixes itself with time. Agricultural peoples were more permanently handicapped. Their culture prevented them from responding to the damage they did to their land, so the damage just continues to grow.

Perception and awareness are inherently reciprocal. It is a mistake to regard the land as inanimate, unable to perceive us and respond to our presence. This is most persuasively understood through his metaphor of the hand: in order for your hand to feel physical objects in the world around you, it must itself be physical, touchable. As he puts it in Becoming Animal, "As breathing involves a continual oscillation between exhaling and inhaling, offering ourselves to the world at one moment and drawing the world into ourselves at the next, so sensory perception entails a like reciprocity, exploring the moss with our fingers while feeling the moss touching us back, at one moment gazing the mountains and at the next feeling ourselves seen, or sensed, from that distance."

Just as humans are not the sole bearers of awareness, perception, and consciousness, nor are we the sole producers of expression. This is something I'd realized in many specifics (trees, in particular) but just barely avoided seeing the forest. For example, in music. Music is clearly communication, often deep communication, a kind of expression that doesn't translate into thoughts but remains its own, inherent meaning. The same, I'd already known, was true of the dance of clouds in that ultimate canvass, the sky - a writing that reveals all human scribblings as crass and uninspired. As I came to know trees, I saw that their bodies, both the individual forms of their branches and the patterns of textures and growth that distinguished species. It is indeed possible to recognize tree species 'as old friends,' and it is their embodied expression that allows us to do so. Abram's revelation is to expand this to include our whole environment. The whole earth is speaking to us, all the time, and it is to our own impoverishment if we decline to listen and engage with it.

David Abram is, in my mind, the principle philosopher of the modern age. He has brought us out of the limited philosophical scope of Western tradition, and combined the most relevant insights it has produced with the wisdom of happier cultures. Most importantly, his philosophy and scholarship engages the most pressing issues and provides us a felicitous route back to a healthy relationship with the land and with each other, and to an ultimately fulfilling way to live.

[Evan Puschak · Rating 3 out of 5]

The 5-star rating system on Goodreads is too limiting. Maybe I should stop using it. For me, David Abram's The Spell of The Sensuous is a strong three, but a weak four. A 7 out of 10, which sounds a lot better than 3 out of 5. This book defies easy categorization. It's hard to say how I felt about it. At times Abram frustrated me -- more than once I rolled my eyes at the text -- and yet his work certainly affected me, provoked internal arguments. Sometimes I wonder if being able to elicit any reaction is a sign of some quality.

The Spell of The Sensuous is about animism, the value of a "more-than-human world." It's about the necessity to re-connect with the environment around us, and a philosophical, historical journey through the gradual loss of that connection. He makes the best possible version of the (often silly) argument that the Earth has a "mind" of its own, carefully crafting it so there is little to no contradiction with scientific truth. He's not saying the Earth is conscious (ok, maybe he is), he's saying that the earth -- the animals, the trees, the waterfalls, the stones -- can be expressive in the way humans are expressive, participating in a give-and-take that we've lost touch with. We can bestow meaning onto the world, but it's not a one-way-street; the world can (and should) bestow meaning onto us as well. We don't live on Earth, we live with it.

I spend so much of my life in the digital world, and in the built environment of a city, that each small taste of nature I get seems unbearably sweet. I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way. I think there's probably a collective regret coursing through many of us, like something has been taken too far, like we're being disconnected from something essential which might soon be impossible to get back. The Spell of The Sensuous, 20 years after its publication, articulates this feeling and traces the long journey that brought us to it.

As I write this, I'm feeling worse about giving it a three. It should probably be four, and if it sticks in my head for much longer I might change it. Yet, for as good as its arguments can be, some of the logical steps feel more like leaps that don't bridge the gap. And there's a sense of amateurism that permeates the project. But those criticisms are small. In all, I learned a lot about animism, language, shamanism, phenomenological philosophy. And I leave the experience with a greater appreciation for the more-than-human world. Now I think I'll go outside.

[Tom · Rating 1 out of 5]

Try as I might, I can't get myself to finish this book. Every time I pick it up, the rapidly compounding fallacies produce a visceral rage, and I'm unable to continue.

Essentially, Abram's argument is based upon two things: 1) reifying a linguistic metaphor of agency, and 2) brashly asserting the non-arbitrariness of language (despite evidence to the contrary, which he does not cite). Upon this shaky foundation, he tells us that all things in the world, sentient and non-, should be seen as "subjects," i.e., beings with full interiority. He then goes on to say that "oral, indigenous" cultures realize this, while literate cultures have forgotten this because written language separates us from nature.

Not convinced? Neither am I. To make just one objection, the whole orality/literacy dichotomy is not nearly as neat as Abram makes it out to be. Just read Oral Poetry by Ruth Finnegan or nearly any book by John Foley or any other scholar who addresses the question of oral literature. Heck, even the slightly dated work of Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy could correct a lot of this.

[Andrea McDowell · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book makes absolutely no sense.

Look, I understand that the alphabet is a phenomenal technology that has transformed human thought and consciousness, but if you are able to make your argument using that technology then obviously the technology is not mutually exclusive with that argument.

The thesis of the book--so far as it has one--is that closeness with and participation with the earth as a thing with value in its own right was, for many cultures, enacted within a spiritual system that saw breath, air and spirit as all-encompassing and synonymous; and that, as the alphabet codified breath, it must also be responsible for the separation of breath and spirit, and our divisions from each other and from the world around us. But if you are capable of making that argument with the alphabet then obviously the alphabet is not to blame. He makes outright nonsensical assertions such as: "It was not enough to preach the Christian faith: one had to induce the unlettered, tribal peoples to begin to use the technology [alphabet] upon which that faith depended." To which I can only say: oh please. The vast majority of christian converts throughout history have been illiterate, and for a good chunk of that time the bible was only available in a language none of them could read or understand!

Oh but that's ok, because, as he says later on, "It is a style of thinking, then, that associates truth not with static fact, but with a quality of relationship .... A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relationship with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth."

How about not. How about you say that, and I throw rotten tomatoes at you for doing so.

First off: truth is a perfectly good word already with a good, valuable, and necessary meaning of its own. You want a word that means "living in a good relationship with the earth?" Come up with a new one.

Second: Who gets to define what "mutually beneficial relationship" is or looks like? And how is that determined without reference to "static fact," or outside, objective reality? How would anyone ever arrive at this relationship from the place we currently inhabit WITHOUT reference to truth using its current meaning?

Third: Even once that relationship has been arrived at, we are going to need to be able to reference "truth" as we currently understand it to pursue other important goals, such as human equality. For centuries now women and people of colour have had to fight slowly and with incredible push-back against inequitable and incredibly unjust systems by referencing external facts such as "in fact no black people are not stupid or violent" and "woman are not motherbots." And let's be clear: it is entirely possible, and has been the case for much of human history, that it is very possible for a human civilization to treat its constituent members like disposable shit while still maintaining their local environments in a fairly serviceable condition, so figuring out the earth-relationship part is no guarantee that it will lead to a just, equitable, meaningful or fair way of life for the people who make up that society.

But the whole book is like this, and his attitude toward "truth" as a concept worth preserving in its current state may be why he plays so fast and loose with actual truth.

Like this one:

"Of course, not all stories are successful. There are good stories and mediocre stories and downright bad stories. How are they to be judged? If they do not aim at a static or 'literal' reality, how can we discern whether one telling of events is any better or more worthy than another? The answer is this: a story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And 'making sense' must here be understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses."

Yeah. Ok. Find your nearest MRA or Nazi sympathizer and ask them what stories "enliven their senses."

So you may be asking yourself then why I gave the book even two stars.

There are parts of it that are written beautifully, and I do feel that I learned a fair bit about the cosmology and spiritual systems of a great number of societies worldwide, which was interesting, though I'm not sure I trust his representations and I'd want to double-check his references before assuming that the information is fair or accurate. After all, maybe they were just stories that properly enlivened his senses. He presents a way of thinking in parts of the book that is fascinating--not his own, to be sure, but that of the cultures he writes about.

So that's worth a star. And I do believe, as he does, that we need to re-embed ourselves with the rest of nature (conceptually and psychologically--we have never actually severed ourselves from it, but our belief that we have is responsible for most if not all of our environmental problems). But I believe that we need to do so with proper respect and relationship to the relevant facts, not on the backs of insubstantial just-so stories that can't bear the weight.

[alex angelosanto · Rating 5 out of 5]

every couple years a book comes down the shoot into your hands that can only be described as a vibe shift. when i was younger i thought vibe shifts were about things "clicking into place" or gaining some kernel of knowledge that clarifies the mysteries of life. "Another great Chekov book of short stories? Great, I am now just that much more home in the world now."

but as I've gotten a bit older, it seems more like you don't actually gain anything from reading good books. instead, you lose something. you lose some sort of quick fix you've told yourself on how the world works. Some old crutch gets kicked out from under you. a vibe shift book isn't something that explains the world to you, it undoes what you think you know. Like the masterpiece hidden in a block of marble, the longer you live the more you are being chiseled away at.

With books like this you don't gain understanding, you gain wonder. Wonder at a world that's more than you, and even more than human.

[Cynthia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of my favorite books in the world, a brilliant discussion of language and how humans are deeply cognitively, emotionally, spiritually connected with the landscape, the earth.

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I mean WOW! This book is like nothing I've ever read. It's part philosophy, part meditation, part anthropology, dialect, religion, environmentalism, social commentary. And yet it works and it feels right and true. The thesis sounds bland: writing severed the link that existed between our language and the language of the earth and other animals. Not only that, but in that same process (which we're going to blame Plato for), we also began to conceive of time and space separately as well as our bodies and our minds. The cartesian split would not have been possible in a pre-written world culture. There is just so much in here that a short review will not do it justice. Just read it.

[Bob Hamilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not an easy book to review. Indeed, I'm not sure if I've ever read a book that has left me with quite so much to think about. That we in the modern technological world have become disconnected from the natural world is really beyond argument. Focusing on language, Abram offers a radical approach to an understanding of why this happened, and also just a hint at how we can begin to reconnect - because it is common sense, of course, that humankind cannot continue this process of disconnection from its sustaining source indefinitely.

He suggests the adoption of a way of thinking that is in accordance with our senses, one that "associates truth not with static fact, but with a quality of relationship." We can only live in truth by living in harmony with the rest of the natural world. "A civilization that relentlessly destroys the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with truth, regardless of how many supposed facts it has amassed regarding the calculable properties of its world."

I refer to Abram's approach as radical because he calls for nothing less than a paradigm shift in our perception of the world around us. This resonates with me strongly. I have long believed that our sentience is not just to be associated with the self, but has to be regarded as continuous with the sentience of the whole living world. This is not an easy concept to get across however, and it is at this point, in his discussion of the philosophical tradition known as phenomenology, that the book can get quite difficult. We are so familiar with living entirely in our heads that it is nearly impossible to grasp that experience of pure perception before our conceptualising minds internalise it. After dealing with the work of the phenomenologists (Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty), Abram goes on to discuss at length the relationship of our indigenous peoples to the animate world, to try to give us some feel for their culture of sensuous participation, before the advent of written, phonetic language.

He does an incredible job of transporting us into this so very different, almost alien world, conjuring meaning out of the written word to offer us a glimpse of a world without the written word. The rhythm of his writing is such that it reads more like poetry than prose. It's quite spellbinding. And that actually directs us straight to Abram's central thesis, that the written word has indeed cast us under a kind of spell. He argues that the development of written language has played the key role in cutting us off from our original "sensuous bearings", isolating the human world from the rest of the earth, the "more-than-human" world to use his own turn of phrase. Our language, rooted at the very beginning in the fauna and flora of the land and the very air we breathe, and evolving over time from pictograms and icons to the phonetic system of abstract symbols that we use today, has served to dislocate us from the shapes and sounds and smells of the living earth.

Having had a few days to think about this book now, I keep revisiting the thought that Abram's writing is so elegant, so seductively beautiful, that he actually swept me away from my normal reasoning state of mind to the extent that I wasn't willing to question his ideas enough. I didn't want to break the spell. It was almost as if I had indeed succumbed to a kind of magic!

With a little perspective I can now say that I'm not entirely convinced that a story read can be that different from a story heard in terms of the way that the language and ideas are processed. But this is really not to take anything away from the book. If I was forced to come up with one word to describe it then that would be audacious. It's not often a book makes you question your very deepest assumptions. There is so much wonderful insight here, into the nature of perception, the almost lost culture of our aboriginal peoples, the story of the evolution of written language, that I can thoroughly recommend it, quite independently of the extent to which I buy into Abram's main thesis.

It is, quite simply, an audaciously good read!

PS Blogging at Goodreads here

[Ana Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book was just one of those experiences that is so personal and revelatory and beautiful that it's hard to fully put into words. Abram brings together the voices of indigenous oral storytellers, ancient Jewish rabbis and scribes, contemporary phenomenologists and ecologists, the great romantic poets, and even tribal shamans to reveal a way of experiencing reality that is vastly different from our modern Western abstract dualism which has it's roots all the way back in Plato. Not only has Abram done his research, but he is also a remarkable wordsmith and I often found myself transported right into the heart of the scenes and experiences that he describes. To me, the way of living that Abram proposes feels incredibly similar to the Way that Christ proposes -a way that is not founded in the letters of the law but in a personal, incarnational relationship with the very Spirit (breath, wind, life) of God. Christ says that he himself is the way, the truth, and the life, and through him all things were made and in him they all hold together. If Abram had grasped this final, central piece of the puzzle, rather than dismissing new testament Christianity as hopelessly corrupted by Hellenistic dualism and a lust for individualistic power (although certainly streams of Christianity are) --I think this would have been a perfect book.

[Brandy LaChapelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abrams is incredibly adept at rolling language, the landscape, magic and sexy breathing life into ...philosophy? Phenomenology is the most intelligent philosophical notion I have ever come across. Abrams' translates the writings of Marleau Ponty and reminds us of our responsibilities to the cycle of life. In this time of going green we should all be talking to the bugs and the trees and grass and the dirt to see what they think would be the best course of action.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just recently finished reading The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram a while ago. I really took my time with this book. Not only because it was dense and complex and full of interesting and varied ideas that made meaningful progress slow, but also because I so thoroughly enjoyed this book. I wanted to live in its world as long as I could, to envelop myself in it completely.

In The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram brings together his academic knowledge of continental philosophy (and more specifically, phenomenology), insights derived from his familiarity with oral, indigenous cultures, and descriptions of his own personal, spiritual connection with the Earth. He claims that we have become disconnected from the Earth. We have come to view ourself as the only significant agents in the world, whose actions take place upon a stage of the inanimate world we inhabit. He argues that this way of viewing the world as a static place that only has meaning insofar as it provides the context over (not truly in) which our actions can take place inhibits our ability to understand our world and our place in it. Part of this he attributes to the decline of oral cultures and the rise of alphabetic writing. Part of this he attributes to the fact that we spend most of our lives in thoroughly human-designed and human-referencing places. We no longer experience the Earth as she naturally exists without our coercion and direction. And all of this, he argues, contributes to our willingness to degrade the Earth and kill off any of the other non-human life forms that get in the way of our destructive and misguided human goals.

The book is beautifully written. It is a triumph. He makes even Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty seem clear and accessible. Anyone whose read those philosophers will know what an achievement that is! Abrams book was not only clearly written, but also deeply inspiring. I loved it. And I mean that I loved it in the Simon May sense of the word love: it made me feel at home in the world.

One of my favorite passages was this:
“Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are “true” or “false,” but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth. The ways of speaking common to that community—the claims and beliefs that enable such reciprocity to perpetuate itself—are, in this important sense, true. They are in accord with a right relation between these people and their world. Statements and beliefs, meanwhile, that foster violence toward the land, ways of speaking that enable the impairment or ruination of the surrounding field of beings, can be described as false ways of speaking—ways that encourage an unsustainable relation with the encompassing earth. A civilization that relentlessly destroys the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with truth, regardless of how many supported facts it has amassed regarding the calculable properties of its world.”

I think everyone should read this book. But I think it is especially enjoyable and meaningful, probably, for Pagans of the pantheist, animist, and naturalist persuasion.

[Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though it reads as speculation, it's engrossing speculation--

Probably showing my ignorance in these subjects, but what I found most interesting is the way Abram is able to drape a reverant spiritual framework onto hard matter; in my experience, the arguments for "everything is exactly as it is" tend to be rather bleak in their conclusions, ignoring the subject of mystery completely.

Thankfully, the book isn't spirituality justified by the terrible new-age "we're all energy" mantra; instead, Abram lays out his philosophy carefully (well, not "his" per-se), each chapter building on the prior to ensure the reader is in the correct state of mind to understand the subsequent topic.

Ok, so I've made this sound really boring. It's not.

His descriptions of various tribes and the way they seamlessly combine the physical world into a working language and culture make the book worth reading by themselves; more than that, however, the book generated quite a few mind-racing moments for me, as Abram covers much ground while trying argue how we've lost the simplicity of experience.

It's a very good book.

[gk · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those books that I had to read slowly, to have time to stop & reflect. It introduced me to a lot of ideas which at first glance seemed strange, but on further thought made such sense that I wondered how for so long I had thought differently. (And even the ideas and theories I ended up not agreeing with, I liked thinking about.)

The book induced a paradigm shift, made me look at the world in a new way - it seemed much richer, afterwards, much more vibrant.

[Scot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic work that explores how our disconnection from the living/sensual world has made us incomplete and therefore led to the massive need for a course correct that would help us grow spiritually and put an end to the madness that pervades modern society.

Abram explores many themes and comes at the work as a philosopher, an "anthropologist," and a sleight of hand magician. Whereas I enjoyed his background story, I really dug the philosophical exploration of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Heidegger more than the average reader probably would.

His deep dive into the foundations of language and how the further development of the written word moved us further and further away from our connection to the Earth. He spent a lot of time on specific indigenous tribes from around the world to illustrate how connected we have been and then showed how disconnected we have come through the development of Western and Judaic writing and language.

I liked his close look at the aboriginal people of Australia who had such a connection to the land that all of their myths and stories are based directly on places and led him to ask us to look away from the horizon and down into the Earth. I also loved his look at our relationship with presence and the present and how we can shift away from getting lost in the past or too worried about the future and see them all as one living, dynamic field.

I had 5 star expectations for this one, and it almost made it. If Abram had dug deeper into some of his conclusions, especially around air, and not waited until the Coda and the afterward to the 20th anniversary edition to bring this home with how our relationship with the planet is causing massive degradation, I would have given it 5.

Recommended for nature lovers, those interested in the deeper wisdom of indigenous communities, phenomenology and philosophy fans, or anyone looking for a short but deep read.

[Elina T.C.]

We truly take everything for granted! A masterful exploration of the sensible world.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram is a magnificent book, beautifully written and powerfully argued. More importantly, it is intellectually ambitious, attempting to give the reader unique insight into the human condition. I will do what I can to reduce its "point" to a few sentences and then offer some personal thoughts.

Abram contends that humanity is alienated from its role within nature, as a feature of nature, not an arbiter of nature. He posits that this alienation is deeply wounding and that it is sourced, broadly speaking, in the human predilection for abstraction. He traces abstraction to the ancient Greek alphabet, whose letters do not represent anything (the Greek alphabet's semitic precursor does, in fact, represent things). He then ties this abstraction to Plato's idealism, wherein the world of appearances (our world) is devalued against the world of ideal forms, and he moves on to the whole Cartesian/scientific revolution wherein what we "know" is limited to our capacity to count, to measure, to quantify and replicate with exactitude.

He then introduces Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, two 20th century phenomenologists, who reacted against the premise that our interior ratiocination is the foundation of reality. Their thinking trended toward exploring the ways in which we do not, in fact, think alone but can only think in relation to our physical circumstances (let us amend that to say our "natural circumstances.) Husserl and Merleau-Ponty would go further, suggesting that the tree about which we think participates in our thinking, likewise the wind, etc. This is an assault on the solipsistic dead-end of philosophy as an exercise in proposing reality as a metaphysical construct.

Going beyond Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (and of course Descartes), Abrams then engages in a far reaching anthropological assessment of ways in which humanity has existed in the context of its animal nature, i.e., how it has made use of rituals and myths and beliefs that tie humanity to the earth from which it has arisen, literally the physical places, the currents of the oceans, and the winds.

Generally considering such beliefs as primitive, modern humanity (let's say the last 2500 years) has done everything in its power to divorce itself from the caprices of the natural world. As a consequence, it has trashed the earth, the seas, and the skies. This, of course, is indisputable. Our rationally developed science has told us that again and again, and many of us know it firsthand, having flown over West Virginia or lived in smoggy Los Angeles or picked our way through the plastic-strewn beaches for a dip in the oily waters of the Gulf Coast.

Abrams' book does not resolve the tensions and disasters it describes. The notion of "undoing" modern civilization is a thought too big to think. There is no way to unlearn the ancient Greek alphabet and its successor formulations. The digital world takes us further into abstraction even as it ingeniously offers us virtual realities. Abrams does not say so--he is more hopeful--but to read his book is to conclude that the evolution of humanity inevitably leads to its extinction. Marx's version of alienation, extensive as it is, encompasses far less than Abrams's version. He gets at our disenchantment, our anxiety, our internecine hostilities, our materialistic sterility and highly productive modes of self-destruction.

But the question is whether you would want to hear this news or ignore it, whether you would want to think about it or pretend that there is nothing to think about.

Oddly I found E.O. Wilson's "Consilience" much more depressing. His concept of the unity of knowledge, good and bad, hinges so much on the rational that it is asphyxiating. In the end, Wilson gives me a sense that we're material shaped in one way and eventually will be shaped in another and that's that because the laws of physics and chemistry and biology say so. Abrams probes and elevates a counterpoint to the rational (and abstract) by suggesting that the human experience can be much enlarged by accepting its limitations. Certain familiar winds matter, certain moments spent daydreaming matter, certain hikes matter, certain encounters with fish matter, the oceans and the skies matter. We are, in fact, much more wedded to our natural environment than we might suspect, down to the way in which we breathe. In sum, "experience" matters, which is why everything idiosyncratic and unique in our lives stands out for us and probably nothing more than childhood memories which encompass what might be called phenomenological encounters with reality that are not at all metaphysical or transcendent or abstract but are, in fact, keys to our unrehearsed, unprogrammed, unmediated, individual "selves," participating in time and space without knowing how to measure either.

[Leslie Wexler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been reading this book for the last 4, if not 7, years. It was first recommended to me in the second year of my undergraduate degree in a course on Shakespeare. The professor in one of his quiet moments suggested that my writing was very "sensitized". At the time, I had no way of fully understanding what he meant and whether it was a compliment or not. When I asked him later, he only directed me to continue my self-work, go to graduate school, and always carry Abram's Spell of the Sensuous with me. Over the intervening years I tried reading the introduction many times and found it so dastardly and hard that it shut me out every time. Yet, I still kept the book near me as a nice green item with a lovely crane on its cover. As I entered graduate school I tried again with the book, but found that I had become increasingly skeptical and arrogant about knowledge. I thought the book was a joke and I wouldn't even read the introduction anymore, I simply mocked its precepts outright as a kind of declaration of my own insecure self-possession and dismissiveness, and it was at this time that that book began to haunt me. Why couldn't I understand it? Why couldn't I feel its resonances? Why did it remain so aloof that the best I could accomplish was to cling to its meaning with barely my fingernails? I was supposed to be educated and capable. Now, two years later I have read the book in its entirety over the last 6 months. I am deeply humbled and contrite by its deeply holistic message. This book has teachings, not knowledge. You cannot possess or acquire what this book offers, it is a life-way that requires commitment. I continue to carry this lovely green book with the white crane on its cover and hope that one day it will unfold and enfold its spirit within my own life path and academic journey.

The academic in me provides this rather dry summary that does not do this important book justice:
Abram examines the significance of linguistics, animism, the history of written language, and the connection between the landscape and the human, and posits language as one of the factors responsible for humanity’s sensorial disassociation from nature. Language, once used to "enhance and accentuate the sensorial affinity between humans and the environing Earth" has evolved into a way of speaking to the world and not with it. Abram suggests that the power of written language separates human beings from their experiential relationship to the nonhuman environment, permitting, in the process, the abuse of nature. Abram’s arguments are rooted in the philosophy of phenomenology, with specific emphasis on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Abram provides ecological theorists a conceptual basis for querying both text and its constituent parts (including the alphabet and the written character) so as to examine how words no longer refer the user "to any sensible phenomenon," and thus further widen the gap between the senses and the natural world.

[KA · Rating 5 out of 5]

A densely written book that takes the phenomenological intersubjectivity and concept of the life-world of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of the participatory nature of perception as its jumping-off point, builds on Heidegger's horizonal and grounded understanding of time, critiques the rise of written language as that which gradually loosened our hold on the sensual and sensuous world, and ultimately puts forward a sense-based, animistic, and story-based understanding of the human relationship with the more-than-human world. I'd need a day or two to write a review that does justice to the complexity of Abram's argument and its phenomenological groundings, but I must mention now that this is a book that rewards close study and patience, revealing its poetic soul little by little, and coming to full fruition only in the 15-page Coda at the end of the book. It was like a little bit of found poetry to finish this book just as I was also finishing Crow Planet; Haupt clearly relies on Abram's work, specifically his way of speaking about the "more-than-human world," and the two books complement each other beautifully. There are certainly things I wish Abram had done differently, or concepts I wish he'd fleshed out more, but this is a ground-breaking book of philosophy that gives readers a lot to mull over. And it is a rare book of philosophy that is best read outdoors or with many breaks for contemplative walks. I look forward to reading Abram's more recent Becoming Human.

[Keith]

Onto something awesome

Suits me because the thought connections are in line with other thinkers I've been fueled by: Paul Shephard (Nature and Madness, Coming Home to the Pleistocene), Joseph Chilton Pearce (the Magical child, Exploring the crack in the Cosmic Egg)
Aldous Huxley (doors of perception, marriage of heaven and hell) ; Guy Debord (society of the spectacle)
and last but certainly not least Derrick Jensen the writer, inspirer, killer culture criticizing Earth activist for the radical Black and Green Neverland Kids

but mostly this book is a philosophical inquiry detailing specifically semantic psyche splits, our need for direct perception, synaesthaesia as the only real Perception possible, Phenomenology. Phenomena -ology. The study of Phenomenon. Perception without deception purified inside looking outside to see Origin.

Left out a bit too much about the Secret of Psychic splitting through semantic spider trap webs, as well as the newborn entity "Entheogen" lit: God made manifest within our mind. Entheogen can help us, she is our healer and helper. He also left out the Mage of the New Page, the mysterious mystic leader who always appears to Teach Transcendence. Also Greek is my favored language over Hebrew. I'm very picky. love French, french over German, but nothing beats the beauty of Depeche Mode lyrics.

[Owen Brush · Rating 5 out of 5]

"By denying that birds and other animals have their own styles of speech, by insisting that the river has no voice and that the ground itself is mute, we stifle our direct experience. We cut ourselves off from the deep meanings in many of our words, severing our language from that which supports and sustains it. We then wonder why we are often unable to communicate even among ourselves." Pg 263

"A story must be judged acording to whether it makes sense and 'making sense' must here be understood in it's most direct meaning - to make sense is to enliven the senses." Pg 265

[Ali Eastley · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the MOST pivotal books in my personal development; beautiful writing, flooring substance. (non-fiction)

[Brady Heyen]

Took me like a year and half to get through this in fits and starts, even though it’s less than 300 pages (which should be the max length of all books! If you can’t say what you need to in that time, call it a day or write a sequel!). But wow was this worth it.

This is, for me, right on the edge of bearable philosophy. Yes, it is dense, but every paragraph is rewarding. And you feel the heart of the writer behind all the headiness, which keeps it from being exhaustingly eyeroll-worthy.

I think this book would greatly benefit the lived experience of any reader, but at the very least it offers an educational wealth of metaphysical perspectives from various people groups across place and time. The argument is pretty singular throughout, but with every fat chapter Abram just drives the point home harder.

And finally a nonfiction book that can bring it home at the end! Truly beautiful stuff. Immediately ordered his other book.