Clicking through the available portions of Mark David Johnston’s The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull: Lay Learning and Piety in the Christian West (London: Oxford University Press, 1996) I stumbled onto Llull’s concept of affatus, which makes the unusual claim that language is a ’sense’, a sixth sense. Now, while I can’t say that I’m familiar with ‘Scholastic physiological and psychological doctrines’, Llull’s theory nonetheless strikes me as remarkable for its close identification of language with the body. (Compare this to more modern theories where language and speech are either disembodied, ‘emitted’ productions of the mind, rationality, consciousness, etc. or ‘expressive’ translations of feeling, emotion, affect, soul.) Generally speaking, eloquence, oration, delivery are typically considered secondary characteristics ‘attached’ to an otherwise abstract, signaletic material.
With the exception of Derrida’s text On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, I can think of no recent work that rigorously conceives of language – in particular, speech – as quite literally a form of contact, touch, or ‘interface’ (and not simply as reductively material or physical, of which there are many examples from the analytics). Nevertheless, for Llull it would seem that language is more an interior than social sense; it is primarily a relation formed within the self, as the self. Trading in some of the ’spontaneity’ typically associated with language production (in more ‘naturalist’ theories), Llull’s affatus stresses a willful, inwardly turned dialectic between the rational faculty and the body. (Speaking here approaches singing, and involves a kind of muscular training, of the voice.) This dialectic, or discipline, is accordingly cast as extra-representational, in that this form of language is not produced solely in terms of its ability to signify but in terms of eloquence and oration. Prefiguring Nietzsche’s ‘phenomenology of the mind’, Llull even describes the sixth sense as working upon a representational order existing entirely within the subject. “Where touch, taste, vision, hearing, and smell are all ‘exteroceptive’ (i.e., they apprehend objects outside the mind), Llull’s sixth sense is ‘interoceptive’ (i.e., it apprehends objects within the mind.” (Johnston 67). Needless to say, much could be made of this concept; but for now two passages from Johnston will have to do.
“The Libre de contemplació, the Rethorica nova, and the Liber de praedicatione all offer psychological and epistemological explanations of eloquence that rely on the same basic strategy, namely, rectifying the exercise of language by making the exercise of language serve as closely as possible the moral finality of human existence. Around 1294, Llull attempted to seek this same rectification through a different tactic, the integration of language into human nature itself. The result is his extraordinary proposal to classify speech as a sixth sense, which he calls affatus. Some modern scholars have sought ancient or medieval sources for Llull’s unusual theory, but these efforts must ignore his own insistence that affatus is a new discovery. In fact, careful review of Llull’s discussions of language prior to 1294 show that his new theory largely arises through his own revision of received doctrines. Affatus especially results from his conflation of Scholastic physiological and psychological doctrines regarding the apprehensive and motive powers. Llull treats these very freely because he rarely includes them in his model of human nature. As Vincent of Beauvais’s compilation (Spec. nat. 25.104) shows, various authorities associate the production of vocal sounds with the sensitive motive power. Among Llull’s Scholastic contemporaries, Robert Grosseteste derives this expressive power from the combined action of the sensual motive power’s control of voice and the rational faculty. Llull especially exploits this connection in classifying speech as a sense. At the same time, his explanations of affatus still appeal to his preferred epistemological and psychological doctrines: the division of the soul into sensitive, imaginative, and intellective powers; the explanation of cognition through resemblance and of intellection as interpretation; and the distinction between oral and mental language. Llull’s attempt to make the operation of affatus parallel the functioning of the other [page] five senses creates some especially difficult and confused arguments.” (Johnston 66–67)
“Thanks to its interoceptive nature, affatus functions chiefly as a means of communication among the powers of the soul. It performs an intrasubjective, rather than an intersubjective function. In this regard, affatus extends (and perhaps replaces) the mental language mentioned so often in Llull’s earlier writings. In its communication with the higher faculties, affatus plays an instrumental role. That is, affatus serves as a mediator, conceiving imaginable or intelligible concepts and manifesting them in speech (Liber de affatu 294). Indeed, the operation of the Imagination is better manifested through affatus than any other sense (Liber de affatu 290). The Liber de praedicatione (2.B.1.26.1) explains that affatus also represents ‘corporeal delights’ to the Imagination, which in turn represents them to the soul; touch likewise ‘manifests’ its sensations to the Imagination (Liber de affatu 294). One of the most quintessentially Lullian arguments of the entire Liber de affatu explains this function of affatus in the following sequence of propositions (289). First, there is greater Concord (the Lullian Relative Principle) between a sense and an intellectual power than between two sense powers, because the intellectual power predominates in the union of body and soul (this Concord is evidently a relationship of necessary dependence). Second, only affatus manifests the operations of Memory, which is a [page] faculty of the rational soul that informs the body (this seems to be special pleading, since it is hard to understand how another Sense like touch or taste could ‘express’ memories).” (Johnston 67–68)
* See also: Johnston, M. D. “Affatus: Natural Science as Moral Theology.” Estudios Lulianos 30, No. 1 (1990): 3-30; 30, No. 2 (1990) 130-159.
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