“Sunaisthēsis is the distant origin of the modern “synaesthesia”; the verb from which it was drawn, sunaisthanesthai, can be found in two passages of Aristotle’s treatises. “Formed by the addition of the prefix ‘with’ (sun-) to the verb ‘to sense’ or ‘to perceive’ (aisthanesthai), the expression in all likelihood designated a ‘feeling in common,’ a perception shared by more than one. It is telling that the Stagirite invoked it in his analysis of friendship in the Eudemian as well as the Nicomachean Ethics. [Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics H.12.1254b24, and Nicomachean Ethics 9.9.1170b4] At this point in the development of the Greek language, the term applied to the communal life of many, and its meaning lay far from the one that would later be attributed to it by the commentators.” (Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation. New York: Zone Books, 2007: 81.)
Modern philosophy’s focus on consciousness and cognition has in certain ways served to obscure prior ’corporeal’ conceptions of experience, a fact reflected in translators’ persistent grappling with Aristotle’s terminology, which seems to have no precise modern correlate. Translations of sunaisthēsis tend to opt for terms that connote its opposite, a mental, cognitive faculty. Thus, in “contemporary discussions of Alexander, Simplicius, Damascius, Philoponus, and Priscian, one very often finds the Greek expression [sunaisthēsis] rendered by ‘consciousness’ and ’self-consciousness’”, even though, to be sure, “other choices have also been made. In his English version of Alexander’s Quaestiones, Robert W. Sharples consistently translates the term as ’self-awareness,’ and in his edition of Alexander’s commentary on the De sensu, Alan Towey opts for another expression, further still from the modern idiom: ‘joint perception.’” (Heller-Roazen Touch 83) These textual decisions seem all the more important when we consider the fact that Aristotle doesn’t seem to have a term for ‘consciousness’ even when he’s not talking about sunaisthēsis.
”It has been noted more than once that Aristotle, a child of his times, seems to have lacked any exact equivalent for the modern term. At times, the fact has been presented simply as a matter of linguistic means, as when Charles H. Kahn remarked that ‘the [page] Greek of Aristotle’s day has no term which really corresponds to the modern usage of “consciousness,” for the process or condition of awareness as such,’ or when Richard Sorabji observed that ‘Aristotle has no word corresponding to “mental act,” or to Descartes’ cogitatio (consciousness),’ or when, finally, Deborah K.W. Modrak noted that ‘Aristotle has no general term for consciousness.’ (Kahn, “Sensation and Consciousness in Aristotle’s Psychology,” p. 22; Sorabji, “Body and Soul in Aristotle,” p. 68; Modrak, Aristotelian Theory of Consciousness?” p. 160.)” (Heller-Roazen Touch 38–39)
Modern mistranslations aside, the concept of sunaisthēsis can be seen to have split, and taken on new meanings, over the centuries since Aristotle first introduced the word. For one, beginning with Galen, the original empathetic and communal connotations were overtaken by a more physiological, perceptual register, which remains to this day. Indeed, as Heller-Roazen describes it, sunaisthēsis became a word for sense as consciousness, a collaboration of the senses that produces awareness, attention, or ‘registration’.
“One of the earliest indications of a shift in the sense of the expression can be found in the medical literature that flourished after the beginning of the Christian era. It has been noted that Galen, for instance, employs sunaisthēsis to designate a sensation ‘in common,’ not in that it is shared by many but in that it reaches a single body all at once, while consisting, in effect, of multiple physiological affections: the physician can characterize [page] pain, for example, as being ‘felt simultaneously with the perception of the seething of the blood’ (meta sphugmou sunaisthēseōs). [Galen, On the Therapeutic Method 8.1 (10.875.14 Kühn)] In other medical authors of the period, such as Aretaeus, one finds the nominal and verbal forms of the expression used in a much more general sense: here the word appears to designate the acts of ‘detection,’ ‘registration,’ and ‘realization’ of any sensation. [Aretaeus, Arataeus 2.9.2] The word in this broad meaning soon left the terrain of medicine and entered common usage, and it was not long before authors as diverse as Philo Judaeus and Sextus Empiricus could invoke it to refer to the process of ‘noticing’ or ‘remarking’ upon a felt fact. [Polybius 5.72.5; Philo Judaeus, De virtutibus 76; Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos 9.68]“ (Heller-Roazen Touch 81–82)
This concept, and its historic tension with theories of consciousness, seems especially relevant today, in that the contemporary ‘practical sciences’ — behavioral advertising, product testing, user-based design, etc. — rely on a conception of the subject that seems closer, in principle, to synaesthesia than to, say, the intellect. Though the former now for the most part refers to an ‘inappropriate’ transfer between senses — where, for instance, you see what you hear — it also refers to the normal developmental process of ‘integrating your senses‘. However, in a much wider sense, synaesthesia is regularly induced, or manipulated, through artistic and commercial practices. “The way the brain buys” is, as the phrase suggests, in many ways the result of a complex orchestration of stimuli, environmental conditions, and subjective desires. It is now well-understood that conscious mental acts are only one, small part of the puzzle.
Indeed, product experience, for instance, is increasingly shown to rely upon subliminal, or at least less-than-attentive, sensory factors. Ludden & Schifferstein’s remarkable paper on the “Effects of Visual-Auditory Incongruity on Product Expression and Surprise” is the case in point. “Product experience,” they conclude, ”is influenced by information from all the senses.
Our experiments provide insight into how sounds contribute to the overall experience of a product’s expression. We manipulated the sounds of dust busters and juicers so that they either did or did not fit the expressions of the products’ appearances. In some, but not all cases, we found an inverse relationship between the degree-of-fit of a sound and the degree of surprise evoked. Furthermore, we found in some cases that the expression of a product’s sound influenced the overall expression of that product.
Though it’s a little odd that Aristotle would be vindicated in this way, the point to be grasped here is that, beyond deliberation and decision-making, experience is also, in a deeper sense than expected, a complex, sub-conscious negotiation of sensory material. What is noticed, what might seem the most important feature, may, thus, be a decoy or constitutive distraction from a more elaborate interplay of explicit and subordinate affects and features. You might think you’re buying the juicer for its juicing abilities when, in fact, it’s that and more — its sound, its look, and the degree of fit between the two. Which is precisely why Harley Davidson has been trying to trademark the Harley-Davidson roar. They’ve realized that it’s a bigger factor than you might think in the appeal of their product and your decision to buy it.
All of this points the way to a recovery of the ‘communal’ aspect of Aristotle’s sunaisthēsis – if only because, ultimately, the relative correlation between a sound and an image, between the juicer’s look and its whir, is cultural, emergent, and short-lived. Though we can’t go into it here, this forgotten dimension to sunaisthēsis, and synaesthesia, constitutes that other ‘common sense’ – the general, widespread, uncharted folk knowledge base that defines a people and their shared aesthetic sensibilities.
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