The Spell of the Sensuous

Summary

Philosopher David Abram once worked as a sleight-of-hand magician among Indigenous cultures. Drawing on that and on phenomenology, he argues that perception is a two-way exchange between our bodies and a living, expressive world. Alphabetic writing, he suggests, moved that sense of aliveness from the land to the page, estranging the West from what he names the more-than-human world.

Rationale

Abram finds separation somewhere we hadn’t looked: the alphabet. If a writing system can change how a culture perceives, then even our medium, words on a page, carries a disposition.