Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54340 in Books
• Published on: 1997-03-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Synopsis
Describes the influence of spoken and written language and rational thinking on man's perception of the natural world around him.

From the Author
Interview with the author under "related articles."
This is just to let readers know that there is an interview with Dave Abram, to be accessed by clicking "related articles" in the upper left corner of this book page. In case folks are curious, here are some of the published comments on this book by other authors from various fields:

"A truly original work. Abram...puts forth his daring hypothesis with a poetic vigor and argumentative insight that stimulate reconsideration of the technological commonplace. . .With Abram anthropology becomes a bridge between science and its others." ~Science (journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science)

"The Spell of the Sensuous does more than place itself on the cutting edge where ecology meets philosophy, psychology, and history. It magically subverts the dichotomies of culture and nature, body and mind, opening a vista of organic being and human possibility that is often imagined but seldom described. Reader beware, the message is spell-binding. One cannot read this book without risk of entering into an altered state of perceptual possibility." ~Max Oelschlager, author of The Idea of Wilderness

"A masterpiece — combining poetic passion with intellectual rigor and daring. Electric with energy, it offers us a new approach to scholarly inquiry: as a fully embodied human animal. It opens pathways and vistas that will be fruitfully explored for years, indeed for generations, to come." ~Joanna Macy, Buddhist scholar and activist

"Speculative, learned, and always 'lucid and precise' as the eye of the vulture that confronted him once on a cliff ledge, Abram has once of those rare minds which, like the mind of a musician or a great mathematician, fuses dreaminess with smarts." ~The Village Voice

"David Abram's passionate knowledge of language, mythology, landscape — and his meditations on the human senses — all make for highly-charged, memorable reading. Without sermon, dogma, or academic bluster, The Spell of the Sensuous deftly tours us through interior and exterior terrains of the spirit, right up to the present. This is a major work of research and intuitive brilliance, an archive of clear ideas. At the end of our century of precarious ecology, the Spell of the Sensuous strikes the deepest notes of celebration and alertness — an indispensible book!" ~Howard Norman, folklorist and novelist, author of The Bird Artist

"I am breaking a vow to cease all blurb-writing for three years, but Abram's Spell must be praised. It's so well done, well-written, well thought. I know of no work more valuable for shifting our thinking and feeling about the place of humans in the world. Your children and their children will be grateful to him. The planet itself must be glad." ~James Hillman, author of ReVisioning Psychology and The Soul's Code

"Disclosing the sentience of all nature, and revealing the unsuspected effect of the more-than-human on our language and our lives, in unprecedented fashion, Abram generates true philosophy for the twenty-first century." ~Lynn Margulis, co-originator of the Gaia Hypothesis, author of Symbiosis in Cellular Evolution

"A tour-de-force of sustained intelligence, broad scholarship, and a graceful prose style that has produced one of the most interesting books about nature published during the past decade." ~ Jack Turner, writing in Terra Nova

"When rumor had it that David Abram was writing a book, we expected it to be very special and very powerful. Those expectations were justified. This book has the ability to awaken us. . ." ~Arne Naess, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Oslo; originator of deep ecology

"Brilliant in its own field of environmental philosophy, it is destined to change the way we think about linguistics, literature, anthropology, and comparative religion, as well as the living landscape around us. . . . Beautifully written, elegantly argued, immensely original, The Spell of the Sensuous is the kind of book that comes along once in a generation. Like Carson's Silent Spring, it will become the touchstone for environmental literacy in the years to come." ~Christopher Manes, author of Other Creations, writing in Wild Earth

"This book by David Abram lights up the landscape of language, flesh, mind, history, mapping us back into the world. . ." ~Gary Snyder

"The outer world of nature is what awakens our inner world in all its capacities for understanding, affection and aesthetic appreciation. The wind, the rain, the mountains and rivers, the woodlands and meadows and all their inhabitants; we need these perhaps even more for our psyche than for our physical survival. No one that I know of has presented all this with the literary skill as well as the understanding that we find in this work of David Abram. It should be one of the most widely read and discussed books of these times." ~Thomas Berry, author of The Dream of the Earth

"Abram shows that it is possible to reawaken the animistic dimension of perception and feeling without renouncing rationality and intellectual analysis. . . The Spell of the Sensuous is a joy to read and a brilliant gift to our rapidly darkening world." ~Shambhala Sun

"Nobody writes about the ecological depths of the human and more-than-human world with more love and lyrical sensitivity than David Abram." ~Theodore Roszak, author of Where the Wasteland Ends

"Read it and get your gourd rattled smartly." ~ Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and Dalva

Customer Reviews

A compelling, important book, despite its flaws
One day I spotted a bird at my feeder that I didn't recognize. I got out my field guide, identified the bird, mentally patted myself on the back, then looked out at him again. He was a perky handful of mottled brown fluff, with delicate feet and shiny black eyes -- and it suddenly struck me that whatever name I applied to him was utterly irrelevant to the living reality of the bird himself.
Another pertinent story: I live in high desert country, where a fragile ecosystem has evolved over millennia, perfectly adapted to the region's harsh soil and scarce water. In recent years, a number of people have bought plots of land near my house and put mobile homes on them. They've then scraped every hint of vegetation off the lot. The ambitious ones do things with gravel and railroad ties and bags of fertilizer. But most just leave the soil bare, as if possession is exemplified by their victory over "weeds."
So I read Abram's book with a shock of recognition. His concepts aren't particularly original (I kept being reminded of the English Romantic poet Wordsworth), and he often takes for granted that his readers accept his assumptions. I find it ironic, too, that such an eloquent and persuasive writer should devalue language. While I think he takes that argument too far, he's absolutely right that by defining "knowledge" and "civilization" as "distance from the non-human," we've lost a sense of our place in nature that is endangering our planet's health and our survival as a species. It's unfortunate that the book is being marketed through New Age and ecological sources; it deserves a much wider readership.

A surprising look at nature and the alphabet
David Abram argues persuasively that the alphabet and written language have alienated us from the world in which we live. He compares our platonism, which imprisons intelligence and subjectivity within humans and denies them to other creatures, to the animism of oral cultures, which regards all beings as intelligent subjects. The alphabet, invented by Semites and perfected by the Greeks, was instrumental in this great change. The knowledge and wisdom that our ancestors learned from other creatures we now find in the printed word. Abram, an ecologist and philosopher now living in New Mexico, says we are intelligent, subjective beings because we are part of an intelligent, subjective universe. The unfinished task he leaves us with is to reconcile the beauty of the written language of books with the living language of our environment.

A magical, soulful book
I read this book because I met the author at a magicians' conference and was fascinated by his study of shamanism. When I read it I connected with it totally. I felt that FINALLY someone is talking about the world as something that isn't just about people. I'm very tired of being so human-focused all the time. This book was very refreshing and wonderful.