The inner touch: archaeology of a sensation

Abstract

The Inner Touch presents archaeology of single sense: sense of being sentient. Aristotle was perhaps first to define this faculty when in his treatise On Soul he identified sensory power, irreducible to five senses, by which animals perceive they are perceiving: simple as he wrote, that we are seeing and hearing. After him, thinkers returned, time and again, to define and redefine this curious sensation. The classical Greek and Roman philosophers as well as medieval Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin thinkers who followed them all investigated power they called the common sense, which one ancient author likened to a kind of inner touch, by which we are able to grasp ourselves. Their many findings were not lost with waning of Middle Ages. From Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Locke, Leibniz, and Rousseau, from nineteenth-century psychiatry and neurology to Proust and Walter Benjamin, writers and thinkers of modern period have turned knowingly and unknowing to terms of older traditions in exploring perception every sensitive being possesses of its life.The Inner Touch reconstructs and reconsiders history of this perception. In twenty-five concise chapters move freely among ancient, medieval, and modern cultures, Daniel Heller-Roazen investigates set of exemplary phenomena have played central roles in philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts of nature of animal existence. Here sensation and self-sensation, sleeping and waking, aesthetics and anesthetics, perception and apperception, animal nature and human nature, consciousness and unconsciousness, all acquire new meaning.The Inner Touch proposes an original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into problem has never been more pressing: what it means to feel one is alive.Winner of Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies