The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and the Soul. Eric McLuhan

is the “place” where the exterior (“proper”) senses meet: it is identical with touch, for us the enveloping sense, the environment of the whole body.

      The proper sense judges of the proper sensible by discerning it from other things which come under the same sense; for instance by discerning white from black or green. But neither sight nor taste can discern white from sweet: because what discerns between two things must know both. Wherefore the discerning judgment must be assigned to the common sense; to which, as to a common term, all apprehensions of the senses must be referred: and by which, again, all the intentions of the senses are perceived; as when someone sees that he sees. For this cannot be done by the proper sense, which only knows the form of the sensible by which it is immuted, in which immutation the action of sight is completed and from which immutation follows another in the common sense which perceives the act of vision.²⁹

      Touch, then, as all of the bodily senses at once, is the locus of what we call synesthesia;³⁰ equally, anagogy is the locus of intellectual synesthesia, the scriptural sense that is home to, and that consists of, all of the senses of Scripture taken together. Ergo, just as the bodily senses are particulars of the common sense of touch, so the other scriptural senses are particulars of the anagogical sense. The home of both modes of synesthesia is of course the human soul, that which animates the body and makes it human. There, the two modes of synesthesia are in active interface, active interchange.

      Gilson argues that “there are not two conceivable solutions of the problem of knowledge, one for the [physical] senses, another for the intelligence”:

      Sensible knowledge and intellectual knowledge can be, and indeed are, two different species or two different steps of the same kind of operation, so they rest inevitably upon a single explanation. If it were necessary to introduce an ideal cleavage in universal order, it would fall between the animal and the plant, not between the animal and man. Restrained as is its field of operation, the animal is still increased by the being of others through the sensation it experiences. It is, therefore, sharply, though still incompletely, disengaged from pure materiality.³¹ Hence we have to explain cognitive operations in such a way that we can attach both intelligence and sensation to the same principle and judge them by the same rules.³²

      We have five exterior senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell; they are articulations of / divisions of tactility, the common sense.

      Five is the number for expression, for the exterior world. The science of rhetoric has five divisions. Words are modes of experience,³³ and are themselves experiences; a language is an organ of perception (poetic knowledge).

      Aquinas equates the common sense with the soul,³⁴ the “common” sense, meaning all of the senses at once. I now take this understanding to apply to the four inward senses: together they form a complementary kind of common sense.

      It is essential to bear in mind that there are not two human souls, one inward and one outward, but one human soul with twin sensitivities. St. Thomas deals with this and the related matters in the Summa Theologica as follows:

      According to the Philosopher, Metaphysics viii (Did. vii. 2), difference is derived from the form. But the difference which constitutes man is rational,which is applied to man on account of his intellectual principle. Therefore the intellectual principle is the form of man.³⁵

      Then the Respondeo:

      We must assert that the intellect which is the principle of intellectual operation is the form of the human body. For that whereby primarily anything acts is a form of the thing to which the act is to be attributed: for instance, that whereby a body is primarily healed is health, and that whereby the soul knows primarily is knowledge; hence health is a form of the body and knowledge is a form of the soul and as life appears through various operations in different degrees of living things, that whereby we primarily perform each of all these vital actions is the soul. For the soul is the primary principle of our nourishment, sensation, and local movement; and likewise of our understanding. Therefore this principle by which we primarily understand, whether it be called the intellect or the intellectual soul, is the form of the body. This is the demonstration used by Aristotle (De Anima,ii, 2).... It follows therefore that the intellectual principle is the proper form of man.³⁶

      Latin had no single word for the Greek word logos, so the phrase ratio atque oratio was used, and with this translation the alliance of Grammar (literary encyclopedism) and Rhetoric (transformation) was cemented. De Lubac positions Grammar as follows:

      “The art of Donatus,” indeed, that “fundamental discipline,” “the origin and foundation of the liberal arts,”³⁷ was more than a simple technique concerned with language, more too than that “explication of the poets” about which Saint Isidore of Seville was still talking. In the form of culture that prevailed in the first Middle Age, as a result of a process to which christianity was otherwise alien, the whole life of the mind develops, so to speak, under its sign. “Grammar” here has become a “tool of intellectual research,”³⁸ comprising the totality of the rules that govern discourse and thereby those that govern thought. “It is necessary,” says a capitulary of charlemagne, whose influence was immense, “to know the figures of words and thoughts to comprehend the mysteries of Holy Scripture.”³⁹ The discussion instituted about the modi significandi therefore extended, in fact, albeit in a still indirect manner, implicit or ill-perceived, to the modi intelligendi. The “science of speaking correctly” was close to the “science of speaking truly.”⁴⁰ Under Grammar, “the most elaborated form of profane knowledge,” logic was concealed,⁴¹ and the latter was already heavy with metaphysics.⁴²

      The grammatical logos⁴³ (the logos spermatikos), on the one hand, has four divisions: the four senses of Scripture-historical, allegorical, moral, and anagogical—and, on the other hand, has four causes: formal, efficient, material, and final (for reading and interpreting the Book of Nature).

      The soul is as it were a medium, so structured to accept, to house, the logos of faith. That the soul is the formal cause of the body can be realized by elimination: the soul is not the material cause of the body inasmuch as the soul is immaterial. It is not the final cause of the body. And it is not the efficient cause of the body.⁴⁴ In addition, consider these observations by Gilson:

      The notion of soul is much wider than that of a human soul. In its wide sense soul is defined as the first act of an organized body capable of performing the functions of life. Thus, like all form, a soul is an act.⁴⁵

      For St. Thomas, following Aristotle, the soul does not first make a body move, it first makes it a body. A corpse is not a body. The soul makes it exist as a body. It is the soul which assembles and organizes what we call today the bio-chemical element...in order to make a living body from them. In this complete sense, the soul is its first act; that is, is what makes it to be.⁴⁶

      ...Therefore human knowledge is the operation of a form which, insofar as it is fitted for knowing bodies, is essentially a stranger to all corporeity. Since the human soul performs operations in which the body has no part, it is a form in which the body has no part. To operate by itself it must subsist by itself, because being is the cause of operation, and everything acts according as it is. What subsists by itself is a substance. The human soul, therefore, is an immaterial substance.⁴⁷

      ...The rational soul, as a substance, is not affected by the corruption of the body. Indeed the body only exists by the soul whereas the soul does not exist by the body.⁴⁸

      ...That by which a being passes from potency to act is, indeed, the proper form and the act of this being. Now the living body is only alive in potency until the soul has come to inform it. Only while it is vivified and animated by its soul does the human body really deserve its name. The eye or the arm of a corpse is no more a real eye or arm than if painted on canvas or sculptured in stone. It is the soul that places the body into the species of human body. It is the soul that confers upon it in act the being it possesses. The soul, then, is really its form as we have supposed. Not only can we deduce this conclusion from a consideration of