The Spell Of The Sensuous By David Abram: Chapter Analysis

There is no question that the digital world has transformed the way humans think, act, and most importantly form relationships with the people,animals,and natural settings around them. However David Abram in Chapter 4 “ Animism and the Alphabet” from his novel The Spell of the Sensuous , brings our attention to the idea that literacy and the process of becoming a species that depends on the written word to communicate has pushed us into the environmental crisis which we encounter today. Abram begins his discussion with a reflection of cultures who used orality as a means of communication and expression hundreds of years ago and even today, their outlook on the earth, and their way of thinking. He then slowly transitions to the evolution of
Many would preferably read a novel such as Walden by Henry David Thoreau in the safety of their living room to feel as if they are one with nature, rather than step into the wilderness and experience the sensorial awareness of the untamed earth itself. The once natural connection humans had with their surroundings, has withered away in many people’s consciousnesses. A disconnect from nature is the biggest concern for people such as Abram, who are striving to reach out and grab what is left of their instinctual being. As Abram discusses the many sources of where human’s neglect towards the natural world may have begun, he states that “a style of awareness that disparages sensorial reality, denigrating the visible and tangible order of things on behalf of some absolute source assumed to exist entirely beyond” is what can be observed today in the Western World. What he is attempting to explain is that no longer do we use the physical world as a guide to life, instead we are solely aware of ourselves and our kind. This has led to a very selfish society that does not include a concern for the well being of our environment. Or if it does, it is simply because the decline of the environment would jeopardize humans themselves. On one hand, humans think of themselves as advanced because they can communicate through written words, sometimes even “shaming” or labeling those who
If a discussion arises about one, a discussion of the other will soon follow. Yet it Abram discusses the vast difference sin the effects these two individuals had on the generations that came after them .While Socrates did not write a word of his teachings, Plato recorded everything he learned. His motivation for doing this was most likely to pass down Socrates’s ideas. However he unknowingly changed the future of communication in a way that Abram argues negatively affected mankind's tendencies a largely oral culture and transitioned it to a culture based upon literacy. "Plato, or rather the association between the literate Plato and his mostly non literate teacher Socrates (469?-399 B.C.E.), may be recognized as the hinge on which the sensuous, mimetic, profoundly embodied style of consciousness proper to orality gave way to the more detached, abstract mode of thinking engendered by alphabetic literacy. Indeed, it was Plato who carefully developed and brought to term the collective thought-structures appropriate to the new technology" (Abram 109). While Socrates struggled to break the way of thinking that was largely mimetic which means “relating to, constituting, or habitually practicing mimesis” according to dictionary.com he was not criticizing it, rather he was attempting to bring attention to the way people were communicating and how people defined things that were not