Carolyn Purnell - "The Sensational Past" - ​Irina Ruvinsky

Carolyn Purnell discusses The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses. She will be joined in conversation by  Irina Ruvinsky.

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About the book: In The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses, Carolyn Purnell dives deep into the fascinating, illuminating, and occasionally bizarre history of sensation in the eighteenth century, exploring both the complex theoretical developments of the Enlightenment philosophes and the surprising ways new developments in trade and technology altered the daily sensory experience of regular people. Along the way, we learn about grief and caffeine addiction, a seedy Parisian marketplace that operated entirely in the pitch-black of night, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s woefully unsuccessful stint as a tutor using a sense-based pedagogical technique.

One hundred forty-four years before Marcel Proust’s narrator famously bit into a madeleine, causing him to experience a rapturous overflow of taste-induced memories, nostalgic feelings, and intellectual reflections, the Genevan philosopher and naturalist Charles Bonnet declared, “There are no ideas except through the intervention of the senses.” While he may have unknowingly anticipated one of the great moments of 20th-century literature, Bonnet was not alone in his conviction regarding the singular power of sensation. A philosophe of the Enlightenment, Bonnet was among a grand milieu of thinkers, writers, and squabblers that formed the intellectual spine of 18th-century Europe. He subscribed to a doctrine was called sensationalism, and among its proponents were some of the Enlightenment’s biggest names. John Locke, for one, could never have supported his famously influential theory of the tabula rasa—the notion that the mind is a blank slate at birth—without the complementary belief that sensory experience is essential to “filling in” that slate throughout an individual’s life. And Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, in a cleverly philosophic and distinctly French turn, imagined a senseless marble statue equipped with a human mind in an attempt to illustrate the primacy of sensation.

Indeed, the question of the senses was on everyone’s mind during the Enlightenment, as theorists from across Europe and burgeoning America debated such abstract notions as reason, knowledge, and fundamental rights. Senses, by contrast, were concrete: you could, quite literally, feel them. And yet, many Enlightenment theorists came to believe, these mediating forces were somehow inexorably linked to the lofty concepts that informed their intellectual mission.

Purnell acknowledges that many Enlightenment ideas about the senses have been more or less disproven by modern science, but The Sensational Past aims for something beyond scientific rigor. The book’s title not only denotes Purnell’s subject matter, but also refers to the extravagant, often humorous nature of its setting and context. Throughout this compulsively readable romp, Purnell brings to life famous, brilliant figures such as Rousseau and Locke, as well as perhaps less well known but equally fascinating individuals such as Jean-Bernard Mérian and Christian Reil. Mérian yearned to raise up poor and neglected children in a life of imposed blindness, making use of a “special blindfold to ensure that the children’s sight would be completely checked.” The motivation, apparently, was that once “disencumbered of sight… [their] touch would acquire the most exquisite finesse.” Reil,  a psychologist who used methods that, by modern standards, would be rather unorthodox, proposed making use of a “cat piano”—a keyboard-based torture device for cats—as a way of curing (human) daydreamers. “Sensory jolts like the cats’ yowls and their pained expressions,” writes Purnell, “had the power to bring the mind back to itself.” Or so thought Christian Reil.

Not all of the ideas that the Enlightment yielded regarding sensation were especially inspired, to say the least. But in The Sensational Past, Carolyn Purnell spins out of this intellectual patchwork a tremendously entertaining and informative history of a particularly eccentric attempt to answer some of our most fundamental human questions: how do our senses work? What effect do they have on us? And how many are there, anyway? As niche as some of the tangential examples may seem, the prevailing Enlightenment consensus on the subject is an optimistic notion that has proved surprisingly resilient in modern society. For the sense-obsessed Enlightenment philosophes, writes Purnell, “there was a deep, resounding belief that it was possible to become better with each passing moment.”

About the author: Carolyn Purnell  received her PhD from the University of Chicago. She is a history instructor, an interior design writer, and a lover of bizarre facts. This is her first book.

About the interlocutor: Irina Ruvinsky is a Professor of Philosophy and Literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago and she studied French Literature at Sorbonne IV and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.