A Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity by Toner Jerry;

Author:Toner, Jerry; [Toner, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2014-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

it would be a very strange thing if there were a number of senses (aisthēseis) sitting inside us as if we were Wooden Horses, and there were not some single form, soul or whatever one ought to call it, to which all these converge—something with which, through the senses (dia tōn aisthēseōn), as if they were instruments (organa), we perceive all that is perceptible.

Plato’s portrayal of the soul (psuchē) perceiving “through the senses” (dia tōn aisthēseōn) recalls the popular model of perception also exploited in the Regimen, where similarly, the soul is affected by perceptions “through” the eyes and the ears (1.35.59). But unlike the schēmata of the senses in that text, Plato’s use of the word organa here describes the senses not as identified with the physical “sense-organs” of the body, but rather, in their role as “utilities” of the soul (Burnyeat 1976: 41–2). The implication is that even if perceptions arise from passive affections of the body and necessarily fall short of the status of knowledge, and the senses do not perceive on their own, they can yet be used by the soul actively to ascertain the sensible qualities of things.15

Plato’s fullest treatment of sensible qualities and the mechanics of perception is given in the Timaeus, a text that stands at the end of the grand tradition of Presocratic cosmologizing (it was probably written c. 350s BCE). In response to the challenges of Parmenides’ Doxa, it presents a “likely” or “probable” (eikōs) creation account that, within the constraints of Platonic metaphysics, redeems the value of cosmology, and the world of perceptibles that it describes, as a likeness of intelligible reality (Bryan 2012: 174–5). Its account of perception is physicalist: perceptions are engendered when “affections” (pathēmata) caused by objects impinging upon the body from outside are transmitted through a receptive sense-organ to the mortal part of the Timaeus’ tripartite soul (on Plato’s pathēmata, see O’Brien 1984: 124–43). Sound, for instance, is defined as “a stroke transmitted through the ears, by the action of the air upon the brain and the blood, and reaching to the (sc. rational) soul”; and “hearing” is therefore “the motion caused thereby, which begins in the head, and ends about the seat of the liver” where the non-rational mortal part of the soul in charge of perception resides (67b). Of the three other senses Timaeus theorizes (sight, smell, taste), sight is unique because its organ is said to contribute to this physical process by emitting a visual ray (sight, the most active of Plato’s senses, provides the model for intellection, see Nightingale 2004). It is when this ray meets a stream of light whose structure is complementary to it and both coalesce that external “movements” (kinēseis) are transmitted to the soul and the sensation (aisthēsis) called “seeing” (horan) occurs (45b–d). In parallel to the Theaetetus, Timaeus’ account of sensible qualities, in turn, stresses that what is actually seen, the perceptible, is itself merely a product of the physical interaction of the sense-organ and the elemental properties of the object.

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