ABSTRACT
In a famous aphorism amid the discussion of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx claimed that ‘the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.’ The notion of ‘five senses’ is usually attributed to Aristotle, although it is found that, in De Anima, taste and seeing are described as forms of touch. Pliny contended in his Natural History that touch and taste were superior in man to the senses of animals, but that in all the other senses man is surpassed: eagles see more clearly; vultures smell more sharply; moles hear more distinctly. The subject invented by disinterested desire, Hercules the scholar as opposed to Hercules tempted, is a kind of ideal picture of evolved, upright, man vision and hearing directed toward the horizon and hence a spatialization of progress and self-consciousness.
