Knowing is Sensing: Aural and Olfactory Modes of Knowing

February 24th, 2008 Fred McVittie Posted in Embodiment, Hearing, Metaphor, Presence, Rock, Sense, Smell |

Sight and touch make an appearance on the sense which is coterminous with the origins of those sights and touchings. The object and the sight of that object are simultaneous. See a tree on the horizon, hold a rock in your hand, the rock and the feel of that rock are inseparable. The sight of a tree on the horizon does not signal the impending presence of a tree at some point in the future. The tree that we see is present at the moment of our seeing it. Similarly, the feel of a rock in one’s hand is not an indication that we may be in the presence of a rock at some undisclosed time, or have been in its presence in the past. The rock is here, now. The tree is there, now.

This immanence afforded by sight and touch is not shared by other sensory modes, particularly hearing and olfaction. Typically we hear the impending emergence of an entity prior to its physical manifestation. The crashing in the trees precedes the arrival of the bear into the clearing where we have pitched out tent. The sound may also persist after its departure as we hear its retreat. The ‘beingness’ of the bear which is indicated by the sounds we hear is smudged across a patch of time which extends some way in the future and the past. The scent of a bear, if we had the olfactory abilities of a dog, would show an even greater smearing of being. The lingering scent would not only spread the bear across space but across days of time. The bear would, in this sense, extend into the past, parts of itself clinging to trees and tentpoles and torn canvas and broken crockery, and the long trail of paw-shaped patches of ground that lead through the forest to the here and now of the visible touchable bear.

Applying this logic to the use of sensory modes as metaphors for knowledge there is a logical difference between phenomena which are sensed aurally or through smell than that which is accessed through sight and touch. Whereas seeing and touching refer to the now, hearing and smell also refer to the then of past and future. This difference in the way sensory modes operate should show up in the specifics of their application to the metaphor. It is well established that we use the concepts of felt and seen knowledge to specify that which is evidentially immanent; we say ‘I see what you mean’ and the time of that seeing is assumed to be immediate. We say ‘I feel bad about this’ and again the bad feeling is assumed to be taking place in the moment. When we use words which connect to olfactory or sound metaphors there is not the same self-evident immediacy. If we say ’something smells funny about this plan’ we are not making a claim that something is clearly (sic) amiss that anybody should be able to ’see’. Rather we are claiming some kind of intuitive knowledge about the status of the plan; we are indicating that we have sensed something about it which, although not presently obvious, will make itself obvious later, as the bear crashing through the woods eventually appears in the clearing. We cannot point to the source of our knowing such that it might appear in the senses of others because it is not visualisable in this way. We might say that we ‘just got wind of it’, or it is just ’something in the air’. Olfactory and auditory metaphors tend therefore, to be applied to knowledge which is outside of the subjective/objective dimension and is displaced in time. This is the sort of knowledge which is prescient, which speaks of premonitions, intuition, and ghosts from the past.