ABSTRACT
Human knowledge begins with sensation. For Schelling sensation and reason alike are impotent in the mind's ascent to God. Philosophy, intellectually-oriented prophecy and theology are all dependent on religious images, the elements of which clearly originate in ordinary sensation, even if they are recast and recombined in a way which endows them with a higher meaning. Within the Aristotelian tradition, sensation is an act of the soul, and must therefore be understood in the context of psychology. Animals have the additional capacity for sensation, including both sense-perception and sensual appetite – and, in some cases, for locomotion. According to the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition, therefore, both sensation and the sensory appetites are ordered to the good, at least in so far as that good is accessible to the senses. The effort to reground the objectivity of sensation is a vitally important contribution to the task of rebuilding the ideological framework necessary for a credible critique of the market order.
