Welcome to Making Sens(ibl)e

A newsletter on the demands of perceptibility and publicness

In Summa Theologiae, 1a, 107.1, as part of a delineation of the supercelestial beings and their powers, Thomas Aquinas explains how the angels communicate with one other. What distinguishes angelic from human communication, he says, is that an angel is “under no such obstacle” as the body. With the softhearted envy of anyone who has found himself frustrated in understanding another, or in making himself understood, Aquinas notes that the angels can therefore “make a concept known to another at once.”

The tacit assumption here is that perceptible signs, such as facial expressions, bodily gestures, artifacts, and symbols, linguistic and otherwise, are intercessions in what could be unmediated communion. This thought draws upon the possibility of hermeneutic innocence: grasping the bare λόγοι or ἰδέαι — the rational, graspable principles or patterns of things — without having to “read” any of their embodiments.¹ When Aquinas invokes angelic communication, then, he invokes it as a model of ethereal understanding: distanceless, durationless, frictionless, bodiless.

The idea of supercelestial, hermeneutically innocent νόησις is an old and venerable one, of course, its influence on the Western imagination hard to overstate.² The idea has long served to illuminate the hermeneutic nature of its opposite, namely, human understanding. In those passages from the Summa, Aquinas is simply bequeathing the inheritance he has since made his own.

The idea having taken hold, though, it becomes nearly impossible to resist the temptation to compare human understanding with the divine and find the former inferior precisely in virtue of its mediatedness. How immaculate by comparison is angelic grasp — how direct, how clear, how certain!

The idea of unmediated grasp is indeed alluring, but it is a siren call that elicits the commission of a category error. The error lies in conscripting the instructive categorial distinction between human and divine understanding and forcing it to do prescriptive work within the human sphere alone. Divine grasp then looms on this side of the human horizon as simultaneously, but paradoxically, an achievement we are constitutionally barred from enjoying and one in light of which we cannot help condemning our own properly exercised hermeneusis.

The result is a kind of secular gnosticism, according to which the corporeal mediation we experience can only be obstruction, distortion, or concealment. Expressions, symbols, and other material formations keep us from achieving our rightful, unmediated grasp and communication of graspables and communicables. This gnosticism contrives to redescribe as trafficking in illusion that which is in fact the properly human way of communing with graspable patterns.

According to this gnosticism, your expression of joyfulness is but a perceptible effect that gets in the way of my perceiving your joyfulness in its pure form. My words are unfortunately necessary noises you must decode in order to find the concepts reposing, concealed, behind those noises. The chair a woodworker builds is not a concrete crystallization of her understanding; instead, it is an external consequence, and thus a mere indication, of the understanding that imperceptibly resides inside her head. To witness me repairing the sink or typing an essay is not to witness an instance of reasoning consummated but to witness the bodily concomitants and outcomes of reasoning completed secretly behind my eyes.

The essays of this newsletter will collectively represent a challenge to this gnosticism, whose profile I assume is recognizable enough. Though residing deep in a certain common Weltanschauung, the reverberations of this gnosticism are tangible and myriad. I will therefore come at it from several different directions, occupying myself with several of its different facets, and allowing myself to be inspired in the endeavor by several different philosophers.

Concordantly, the constructive task of my newsletter is to articulate an alternative picture and perhaps trace some of its consequences. I do not yet have a name for this alternative, and I know neither the exact shape it will take nor the details it will contain. But I can offer a preliminary, provisional sketch.

The picture I have in mind establishes a point of view from which human gesture, speech, artifact, action, and the like count as expressions of the graspables we grasp in and through them. Or, if you like, they are, variously: realizations, manifestations, actualizations, objectivizations, materializations, embodiments, incarnations, completions, consummations. They give graspable patterns a definite appearance — a form, a character — suited specifically to human sensibility. For there is no more direct way for us to grasp and to communicate these patterns than through the material formations in which they appear. We are not angels, and so we are compelled to make our understanding sensible.

But this demand is, fatefully, constitutive of our power to understand anything at all. We cannot be found to have understood unless we have held our understanding out for public recognition and assessment; and we cannot have held our understanding out for others without having given it perceptible form. Were it not for the demands of public perceptibility, then, our power of understanding would come to nothing.³ And as it is with our understanding, so it is with our desiring, intending, and willing.

After all, in the beginning was the word. Or, if we follow Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, it was the deed. Not the naked idea; not the hidden will. In the beginning was the rational principle of things, sure. But it came embodied in, and was given definite character by, a perfecting breath, a consummating gesture.

1. Almost two millennia before Aquinas, we can find Augustine of Hippo, addressing God in Book 13 of Confessions, using the metaphor of reading to speak of angels who “have no need to gaze upon the firmament, or by reading, to know of Thy Word. For they always behold Thy face, and there read, without any syllables in time, what willeth Thy eternal will.” Like Aquinas, Augustine is giving fresh articulation to an old idea.

2. I am not ashamed to have drunk deeply of, and to love, the tradition that has shaped me. I am ashamed, however, not to have learned more about Eastern traditions. I am slowly putting that right.

3. What publicness comes to is a matter for another post. But let me ward off misunderstanding by saying right away that the public recognizability I have in mind is, roughly, recognizability by a fellow human being. This kind of publicness tends to be in tension with what we might call institutional legibility: recognizability according to bureaucratic or algorithmic criteria, which are largely context-insensitive and perception-deprived and thus, in those respects at least, inhuman. As modernity has evolved, the demands of institutional legibility have metastasized, and it would be folly to deny the extent to which our understanding has molded itself to them. I will focus more on the demands of human, perceptual recognizability, though. This is not only because I think they are more fundamental than the demands of institutional legibility. It is also because I think our hermeneutic powers are better served by and fitted to them.