ABSTRACT
“I shall now close my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall call away all my senses,” Descartes declares, and sits down to discover what is left. He still exists: “I exist, I am, that is certain.” Later, he rewrites: cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am” (Descartes 1973: 151, 157, quoted in Synnott 1991: 70). Descartes has made a jump. He now equates the awareness of existence to “thinking.” But from where did Descartes’ awareness of existing come? Had the European tradition of excluding from the “five senses” proprioception, the perception of one’s own sensations, tricked Descartes into believing that he could think without benefit of sensation and its traces? “What if there exist different forms of reasoning, memory, and attention for each of the modalities of consciousness (seeing, smelling, speaking, hearing, etc.) instead of reasoning, memory, and attention being general mental powers?” asks sensory anthropologist, David Howes (1991a: 10). The “what if” is unnecessary. Richard Bandler and John Grinder, students of linguistic anthropologist Gregory Bateson (and originators of the popular therapy “neurolinguistic programming”), discovered that not only do different people think in terms of different “representational systems” (such as internally seeing images, hearing sounds/talking to themselves, or feeling kinesthetic sensations), the same individual is likely to rely on one sensory modality to “go after” information (visually searching, aurally questioning, kinesthetically groping) and another to “check out” what comes up (looks good, sounds true, feels right) (Bandler and Grinder 1979: 14). There can be no “thinking” that does not depend on one or another or a combination of sensings.
