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Loading... The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human…by David Abram
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Beautiful language, refreshing insight, inspirational descriptions and lines of thinking... Right from the first sentence, the writing reverberates with the awe Abram has for the world around him, a world he explores and helps us to understand. His work comes to focus on _how the hell_ we could have forgotten this innate sense of wonder and enchantment, how we could have grown so apart from the natural world, and in so doing gives us a path and the means to reunite with it again. (  ) moiraji | Feb 28, 2008 |  "...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." Sisällysluettelosta: 1. The Ecology of Magic A Personal Introduction to the Inquiry 2. Philosophy on the Way to Ecology A Technical Introduction to the Inquiry; Part I: Edmund Husserl and Phenomenology; Part II: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the Participatory Nature of Perception 3. The Flesh of Language 4. Animism and the Alphabet 5. In the Landscape of Language 6. Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth Part I: Abstraction; Part II: The Living Present 7. The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air Coda: Turning Inside Out tyrnimehu | Aug 31, 2007 | A dense but fascinating account of how we lost and can regain a close relationship with the natural world. Abram combines science and mysticism to rekindle an animistic dimension of perception and feeling without jettisoning rationality. ( ) pansociety | Oct 25, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
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"Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient associations with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air," writes Abram of the separation caused by the proliferation of the written word.
In writing The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram consulted an engaging collection of peoples and works. He uses aboriginal song lines, stories from the Koyukon people of northwestern Alaska, the philosophy of phenomenology, and the speeches of Socrates to paint a poetic landscape that explains how we became separated from the earth in the first place. With minimal environmental doomsaying, Abram discusses how we can begin to recover a sustainable relationship with the earth and the nonhuman beings who live among us--in the more-than-human world. --Kathryn True
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400)
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