ENTER
CREATIVE CONSULTANCY X EXPERIENCE DESIGN
EXPLORING HUMAN AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN IMAGINATION AT THE INTERSECTION OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY
BY KEREN BESTER
“My genius lies in my nostrils”. So claims Nietzsche in his autobiography Ecce Homo, his last original book – a satirical survey of a life’s work. “I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies – smelling them out”, he writes. Nietzsche completed this book just weeks before his mental collapse in January 1889, leading many to dismiss its contents as the grandiose delusions of a man on the brink of madness. However, a sophisticated and extended treatment of this olfactory metaphor recurs through a number Nietzsche’s previous works and, I would argue, plays a central role in Nietzsche’s revaluation of values.
Adopting the lowliest and most animal of the senses as the source of his genius is characteristically subversive for Nietzsche. It stands in defiant opposition to Christianity’s denial of the body and rationalism’s discrediting of the senses. But is it mere literary flourish, a rhetorical device that gains provocative power by exploiting the deep connection between our sense of smell and feelings of moral disgust? Or is it possible that Nietzsche really was thinking olfactorily?
This notion would strike the majority of history’s most notable thinkers as, in a word, unthinkable. Our sense of smell is usually consigned to the very bottom of the sensory hierarchy: Aquinas was of the opinion that smell is the least cognitive of the senses. Condillac agreed, noting in his Treatise on the Sensations that “of all the senses smell is the one that seems to contribute least to the operations of the human mind”. Similarly, Kant thought of smell as “the most dispensible” of the senses, owing to the fact that it is “more a representation of enjoyment than of cognition”, and therefore more subjective than objective.
Olfactory historian, Annick Le Guérer points out that there are many explanations for this mistrust of smell, “but all of them converge on its animal nature”. Smell was dismissed by evolutionary theorists in the 19th century as a vestigial trait in humans, with Darwin remarking that it is “...of extremely slight service, if any, even to savages, in whom it is generally more highly developed than in the civilised races”. Freud concurred, considering this a consequence of our upright stance putting our noses at greater distance from the scent trails on the ground. The sublimation of smell was considered a crucial factor of civilisation. Correspondingly, a keen sense of smell was a sign of latent animality, psychopathy and perversion – a failure of the socializing process.
***
This sceptical position on the intellectual capacity of the smell sense is seen as early as Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato regards smell as only “half-formed”, ambiguous and vulgar. Because smells arise from substances in the process of change – intermediate states such as liquefaction, decomposition, and evaporation – instability is an originating condition of odours and they cannot conform to Plato’s notion of the ideal Forms. It also makes them difficult to name or classify. “The only clear distinction to be drawn here is twofold: the pleasant and the unpleasant” – the latter of which could “violently affect the whole of our bodily cavity”.
Instead, Plato favours the sense of sight. He considers it the worthiest and most important, and hence treats it separately to the other senses, which are instead a feature of our material being. Sight, in contrast, is closely connected to human intelligence and the soul, and the intellect is “the eye of the mind” for Plato. Since then, Western philosophers have largely followed suit. Thinking is a kind of seeing, and it seems so natural to speak in these terms that it hardly feels like a metaphor at all. However, metaphor it is, and is just one subset of “thinking as perceiving” – one of the most fundamental conceptual metaphors identified by linguistic philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
Traditionally, analytic philosophy views language as the primary vehicle of meaning, and metaphors are understood to hold meaning only insofar as they can be reduced to literal concepts that correspond to actual or objective state of affairs in the world. On this basis, and in light of the foregoing discussion of the supposed impoverishment of smell, “my genius is in my nostrils” could only be interpreted as absurd and incoherent.
In contrast, Lakoff and Johnson hold that all meaning – and therefore all language – arises from the embodied experiences of human brains in living human bodies interacting within a physical, social and cultural human environment. According to their Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the meaning of abstract concepts is only made possible by the fact that they borrow from and build on the very same neural structures that underpin the sensorimotor experiences of the body. On this account, metaphors are not symbolic nor do they simply express similarities between one thing and another. Rather, metaphors are “experiential correlations”. “Thinking” – the abstract domain – builds on “perceiving” – the concrete domain. There is no separate rational faculty that receives and makes sense of sensory inputs. “Reason” is not an entity or discrete function, but an activity of the human organism. All thinking is bodily; and the senses are themselves organs of thinking.
Smells tend to hint at something, the source of which needs to be sought out. You might have a sniff around if you’re suspicious. To get a whiff of, or be on the scent of something, is to have an intuition – to know, without quite knowing how you know. No doubt, Nietzsche had a nose – an instinct – for philosophy and in some ways the sense of smell seems especially apt to describe the process of the creative philosopher seeking out original ideas or the sceptical one sniffing out lies. If clarity is the ideal output of philosophy, isn’t obscurity the ideal input? A realisation is something that dawns on you, and you are enlightened when it comes into full view. But it is smell that alerts you to what you don’t know you don’t know. The philosopher seeking to uncover something hidden from view must surely use their nose.
Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s nostril proposition seems still to have a deeper core. He may have used olfactory metaphors extensively and forcibly, but he also had great reverence for the nose. The most explicit statement of this admiration can be found in his critique of reason in Twilight of the Idols. This excerpt is a clear defence of the value of our sense of smell and the intelligence of our embodied sensory experiences:
And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical concentrations that even elude a spectroscope. Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses – to the extent to which we sharpen them further, arm them, and have learned to think them through.
One of the key goals of Nietzsche’s project was to naturalise man – to reconcile him with his animality. To this end, he set out to rehabilitate the body and the senses, both unjustly vilified by a long tradition of philosophers, going back to Ancient Greece, and in so doing, he claims to be able to sniff out their lies. It is his discerning “flair” that scents out the lie of a metaphysics – that there is a “real” world distinct from the “apparent” world available to the senses.
In the section of Twilight of the Idols titled “On Reason in Philosophy”, Nietzsche accuses traditional philosophers of turning everything they touch into “concept mummies”. They take living things, real things, and suck the life out of them – turning bits of reality into inert concepts, and then treating concepts (the “mummies”) as real and the living thing as imperfect copies! The context for this accusation is Plato’s distinction between the real world of changeless Being and the unstable, inferior world of Becoming, which is available through the senses. By elevating Being over Becoming, Nietzsche claims that his opponents divorce ideas from their historical context and seek to view them, unchanging, from the perspective of the eternal. But, since Being – which is supposed to be universally and eternally true – remains outside their grasp, they cast blame on the senses for being deceptive, for offering mere appearance and for concealing the “real” world from them.
To Nietzsche, this reverence for Being entails a hatred of life and the living because it denies the reality of evolution and change. It is not the senses that lie, according to Nietzsche, but what reason makes of the testimony of our senses. “Insofar as the senses show Becoming, passing away and change, they do not lie”, Nietzsche claims. Rather, “‘Reason’ is what causes us to falsify the testimony of the senses”. From here, “the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence” emerges.
For Nietzsche, philosophers in thrall to this picture confuse the order of things: they cannot accept that their higher concepts – the Good, the Truth, the Perfect – grow out of the lower – the immoral body and the deceptive senses – so they assert that their higher concepts are causa sui – without cause. This, according to Nietzsche, is how they arrive at the idea of God – “that which is last, thinnest and emptiest is put first, as the cause”.
***
At the very heart of the distinction between Being and Becoming lies a striking contrast between the phenomenologies of sight and smell. Plato’s reverence for the visual is pitted against the genius in Nietzsche’s nostrils.
With eyes closed, we can imagine the world as a world of smells. This is a world of constant change and flux. It is not a world of “things” – at least not clearly boundaried “things” that stay where you left them. Rather, they are things-in-process – building up and breaking down, ripening and rotting, dispersing across space and through time. Nothing is fixed. Everything is permeable, a sea of intermingling processes. We too are a swirl of smells – in sickness and in health. We participate in the world as the world participates in us: we breathe the world in and commune with it. We know immediately and without hesitation if something is good or bad – for me. We perceive it to be so, rather than judge it to be so.
With eyes re-opened and re-engaged in sight, we might notice how everything stops. We can pay attention to stillness, to stasis. We may notice how reality becomes detemporalised and fixed. Things are things – solid, separate things, all laid out before us. We notice too how we recede from the scene and become separate to it. We look out onto the world and, as we survey it, it feels as though it really is our choice as to whether we participate in it or not.
In his seminal paper, “The Nobility of Sight”, Hans Jonas seeks out the properties that might qualify the sense of sight for the supreme philosophical honour afforded to it by Greek thinkers and beyond. He identifies three core characteristics that illustrate the peculiar phenomenology of sight, and starts to elucidate how it has come to shape some of the key ideas in Western philosophy, making clear how the “higher” arises from the “lower”, reason from vision.
The first characteristic is the simultaneity of visual experience. Sight takes in the whole visual field at once – it is surveyed in an instant. This simultaneity marks sight sharply from the other senses, which are all otherwise temporal. A single momentary visual snapshot can hold a wealth of information and tell a detailed and complex story. But to arrest the flow of any other sensory experience captures “not a snapshot but an atomic fragment of it, and strictly speaking nothing at all”.
“With sight”, Jonas points out, “all I have to do is open my eyes, and the world is there, as it was all the time”. Visual experience thus provides the basis upon which we are able to conceive of the eternal because, as Jonas says, it enables the beholder to “come to rest and possess an extended now”. This enables us to see all possible encounters ahead, and affords us a significant sense of freedom to select a number of possible intervening actions. No other sense is able to hold a “static present”. The visual world is an atemporal world; it has no flow.
The second characteristic Jonas identifies is dynamic neutralization. The external orientation of sight means that you can encounter something without having to be engaged with it directly (unless you choose to do so). This aspect of visual experience is what underpins the conceptual distinction between subject and object. Even more significant is that the visual image can be called up in imagination, enabling complete detachment from the original object. Jonas asserts that this “detachability of the image … is at the bottom of abstraction and therefore all free thought”.
However, Jonas identifies that this cleft between subject and object entails a corresponding loss. The absence of dynamism in the relation between subjects and objects obscures a clear sense of causality. To be in contact with an object, to touch it, already entails a change in the situation between me and the object. In the case of hearing, objects do not emit sounds by themselves; something has to happen. Smells and tastes produce an instant reaction. Vision, on the other hand, enables us to stand back from a situation and observe it, neutrally. The visual world is a world of represented objects, rather than causal processes.
The third characteristic Jonas identifies is distance. The fact that sight enables the apprehension of great distances has had a profound impact on how we think. The ability to survey over great distances gives us the ability to think ahead. Knowledge gained at great distance affords us the time to make the most advantageous choice. While simultaneity gives rise to the idea of the eternal, distance gives rise to the Greek idea of infinity.
Sight does not bring the distant near. Rather, what is “out there” remains in the distance. It is the only sense for which distance can be an advantage: the greater the distance the more comprehensive the visual survey. Distance further lends the visual experience the potential of “disinterested beholding”, as no sense is more outwardly focused – and therefore less aware of its own bodily origin – than vision. Jonas concludes, “the mind has gone where vision points”.
The very notion some higher faculty of reason that is able to see from the perspective of the eternal, that is objective and able to remain unaffected – actually arises from the very specific nature of our embodied visual experiences. Far on the other end of the spectrum, at the bottom of the hierarchy, lies the lowly sense of smell. It is said to lack the structure and order necessary to be cognitive, to be too ephemeral to represent a world independent of itself, and to provide nothing more than sensory enjoyment. These criticisms map neatly onto the three characteristics of vision outlined by Jonas:
1) Smell is not simultaneous; it is temporal;
2) Smell is not attuned to the identification of objects – it detects changing states and is therefore attuned to processes;
3) Smell experiences are intimate, inherently evaluative and often emotionally charged.
***
Smell is not impoverished, it’s different. It lies on the other end of the spectrum to vision but there is no good reason to assume the spectrum is a hierarchy. Reason is not a discrete function or entity; it is not some neutral, disembodied arbiter of what makes a particular sensory modality inferior or superior. Reason is an activity of the body-mind. Each of the senses gives us access to different aspects of reality. So, if one can think visually, then one can think olfactorily – even if it is difficult to capture in words, or typically happens outside of or conscious awareness.
Historian of the senses, Constance Classen asks us to consider “what different modes of consciousness are created by treating smell … as a fundamental way of knowing?” Taking Nietzsche’s claim that his genius lies in his nostrils, at face value, here are some possible answers:
1. Nietzsche had a nose for process metaphysics. Smell thinks by being sensitive to change – to change as a feature of the living world, in particular. Anthropologist and sensory researcher David Howes notes that the kinds of molecules we are particularly sensitive to are those that are associated with transitions and processes of the biological – ripening, rotting, flowering, fruiting, decomposition and decay. The living world available to the sense of smell is a world of Becoming – it is not a world of things, but a world of things-in-process.
2. To Nietzsche, the ‘nose’ stands in for the body as a whole, and smell reflects the deep connection between thought and the body. Smell thinks in a way that bridges the subject and object divide. With every breath we participate in our environment, and it participates in us. Once we start to see the world, and ourselves, as a set of intermingling and intersecting processes, it becomes quite arbitrary to separate the smell of a “thing” (a property that I experience) from smell as a “thing” (the object – the cloud of molecules that catches my breath, that ‘causes’ my experience of it).
3. Nietzsche nosed out the naturalistic foundations of morality. Smell thinks by instinctive evaluation, distinguishing good (for me) from bad (for me) based on the physiological needs of the living organism. Nietzsche was highly critical of 19th century Europe’s regressive culture and repressive morality. He argued that denying our innate human instincts – be they aggressive urges or bodily desires – would only make us sick, claiming he could sniff out such decadent ideals. Decadence, in Nietzsche’s sense, is best understood as a form of “decayingness”, a degeneration into illness, something to which the nose is especially sensitive.
In Nicholas More’s analysis of Ecce Homo, he observes that “an advance in wisdom comes by new methods for Nietzsche, not by new concepts”. Metaphor seems to have been one such method. Nietzsche reaches for new language and his work is saturated in vivid, visceral descriptions of embodied experience. The same metaphors repeated over and over, especially when mistaken for truths become the concepts Nietzsche so lamented. They hem us in to the same philosophical territories, herd us down the same narrow paths. New metaphors take leaps, liberate our thinking, launch intellectual revolutions.
By inverting the sensory hierarchy, Nietzsche opens up a new way of thinking. He doesn’t merely assert the wisdom of smell, he demonstrates it in the sophistication of his ideas about metaphysics, mind/body dualism and morality. By revaluing the sense of smell, he revalues those realms of experience that are ambiguous, ephemeral, implicit, unconscious, that are not easily expressed in language, that are emotional, relational, and attuned to temporal flow and changing states rather than static objects, that are part of Becoming rather than Being. He isn’t simply using an olfactory metaphor to express his thinking. Nietzsche is thinking olfactorily. Therein may lie his genius.
Originally published in The Philosopher
“My genius lies in my nostrils”. So claims Nietzsche in his autobiography Ecce Homo, his last original book – a satirical survey of a life’s work. “I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies – smelling them out”, he writes. Nietzsche completed this book just weeks before his mental collapse in January 1889, leading many to dismiss its contents as the grandiose delusions of a man on the brink of madness. However, a sophisticated and extended treatment of this olfactory metaphor recurs through a number Nietzsche’s previous works and, I would argue, plays a central role in Nietzsche’s revaluation of values.
Adopting the lowliest and most animal of the senses as the source of his genius is characteristically subversive for Nietzsche. It stands in defiant opposition to Christianity’s denial of the body and rationalism’s discrediting of the senses. But is it mere literary flourish, a rhetorical device that gains provocative power by exploiting the deep connection between our sense of smell and feelings of moral disgust? Or is it possible that Nietzsche really was thinking olfactorily?
This notion would strike the majority of history’s most notable thinkers as, in a word, unthinkable. Our sense of smell is usually consigned to the very bottom of the sensory hierarchy: Aquinas was of the opinion that smell is the least cognitive of the senses. Condillac agreed, noting in his Treatise on the Sensations that “of all the senses smell is the one that seems to contribute least to the operations of the human mind”. Similarly, Kant thought of smell as “the most dispensible” of the senses, owing to the fact that it is “more a representation of enjoyment than of cognition”, and therefore more subjective than objective.
Olfactory historian, Annick Le Guérer points out that there are many explanations for this mistrust of smell, “but all of them converge on its animal nature”. Smell was dismissed by evolutionary theorists in the 19th century as a vestigial trait in humans, with Darwin remarking that it is “...of extremely slight service, if any, even to savages, in whom it is generally more highly developed than in the civilised races”. Freud concurred, considering this a consequence of our upright stance putting our noses at greater distance from the scent trails on the ground. The sublimation of smell was considered a crucial factor of civilisation. Correspondingly, a keen sense of smell was a sign of latent animality, psychopathy and perversion – a failure of the socializing process.
***
This sceptical position on the intellectual capacity of the smell sense is seen as early as Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato regards smell as only “half-formed”, ambiguous and vulgar. Because smells arise from substances in the process of change – intermediate states such as liquefaction, decomposition, and evaporation – instability is an originating condition of odours and they cannot conform to Plato’s notion of the ideal Forms. It also makes them difficult to name or classify. “The only clear distinction to be drawn here is twofold: the pleasant and the unpleasant” – the latter of which could “violently affect the whole of our bodily cavity”.
Instead, Plato favours the sense of sight. He considers it the worthiest and most important, and hence treats it separately to the other senses, which are instead a feature of our material being. Sight, in contrast, is closely connected to human intelligence and the soul, and the intellect is “the eye of the mind” for Plato. Since then, Western philosophers have largely followed suit. Thinking is a kind of seeing, and it seems so natural to speak in these terms that it hardly feels like a metaphor at all. However, metaphor it is, and is just one subset of “thinking as perceiving” – one of the most fundamental conceptual metaphors identified by linguistic philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
Traditionally, analytic philosophy views language as the primary vehicle of meaning, and metaphors are understood to hold meaning only insofar as they can be reduced to literal concepts that correspond to actual or objective state of affairs in the world. On this basis, and in light of the foregoing discussion of the supposed impoverishment of smell, “my genius is in my nostrils” could only be interpreted as absurd and incoherent.
In contrast, Lakoff and Johnson hold that all meaning – and therefore all language – arises from the embodied experiences of human brains in living human bodies interacting within a physical, social and cultural human environment. According to their Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the meaning of abstract concepts is only made possible by the fact that they borrow from and build on the very same neural structures that underpin the sensorimotor experiences of the body. On this account, metaphors are not symbolic nor do they simply express similarities between one thing and another. Rather, metaphors are “experiential correlations”. “Thinking” – the abstract domain – builds on “perceiving” – the concrete domain. There is no separate rational faculty that receives and makes sense of sensory inputs. “Reason” is not an entity or discrete function, but an activity of the human organism. All thinking is bodily; and the senses are themselves organs of thinking.
Smells tend to hint at something, the source of which needs to be sought out. You might have a sniff around if you’re suspicious. To get a whiff of, or be on the scent of something, is to have an intuition – to know, without quite knowing how you know. No doubt, Nietzsche had a nose – an instinct – for philosophy and in some ways the sense of smell seems especially apt to describe the process of the creative philosopher seeking out original ideas or the sceptical one sniffing out lies. If clarity is the ideal output of philosophy, isn’t obscurity the ideal input? A realisation is something that dawns on you, and you are enlightened when it comes into full view. But it is smell that alerts you to what you don’t know you don’t know. The philosopher seeking to uncover something hidden from view must surely use their nose.
Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s nostril proposition seems still to have a deeper core. He may have used olfactory metaphors extensively and forcibly, but he also had great reverence for the nose. The most explicit statement of this admiration can be found in his critique of reason in Twilight of the Idols. This excerpt is a clear defence of the value of our sense of smell and the intelligence of our embodied sensory experiences:
And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical concentrations that even elude a spectroscope. Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses – to the extent to which we sharpen them further, arm them, and have learned to think them through.
One of the key goals of Nietzsche’s project was to naturalise man – to reconcile him with his animality. To this end, he set out to rehabilitate the body and the senses, both unjustly vilified by a long tradition of philosophers, going back to Ancient Greece, and in so doing, he claims to be able to sniff out their lies. It is his discerning “flair” that scents out the lie of a metaphysics – that there is a “real” world distinct from the “apparent” world available to the senses.
In the section of Twilight of the Idols titled “On Reason in Philosophy”, Nietzsche accuses traditional philosophers of turning everything they touch into “concept mummies”. They take living things, real things, and suck the life out of them – turning bits of reality into inert concepts, and then treating concepts (the “mummies”) as real and the living thing as imperfect copies! The context for this accusation is Plato’s distinction between the real world of changeless Being and the unstable, inferior world of Becoming, which is available through the senses. By elevating Being over Becoming, Nietzsche claims that his opponents divorce ideas from their historical context and seek to view them, unchanging, from the perspective of the eternal. But, since Being – which is supposed to be universally and eternally true – remains outside their grasp, they cast blame on the senses for being deceptive, for offering mere appearance and for concealing the “real” world from them.
To Nietzsche, this reverence for Being entails a hatred of life and the living because it denies the reality of evolution and change. It is not the senses that lie, according to Nietzsche, but what reason makes of the testimony of our senses. “Insofar as the senses show Becoming, passing away and change, they do not lie”, Nietzsche claims. Rather, “‘Reason’ is what causes us to falsify the testimony of the senses”. From here, “the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence” emerges.
For Nietzsche, philosophers in thrall to this picture confuse the order of things: they cannot accept that their higher concepts – the Good, the Truth, the Perfect – grow out of the lower – the immoral body and the deceptive senses – so they assert that their higher concepts are causa sui – without cause. This, according to Nietzsche, is how they arrive at the idea of God – “that which is last, thinnest and emptiest is put first, as the cause”.
***
At the very heart of the distinction between Being and Becoming lies a striking contrast between the phenomenologies of sight and smell. Plato’s reverence for the visual is pitted against the genius in Nietzsche’s nostrils.
With eyes closed, we can imagine the world as a world of smells. This is a world of constant change and flux. It is not a world of “things” – at least not clearly boundaried “things” that stay where you left them. Rather, they are things-in-process – building up and breaking down, ripening and rotting, dispersing across space and through time. Nothing is fixed. Everything is permeable, a sea of intermingling processes. We too are a swirl of smells – in sickness and in health. We participate in the world as the world participates in us: we breathe the world in and commune with it. We know immediately and without hesitation if something is good or bad – for me. We perceive it to be so, rather than judge it to be so.
With eyes re-opened and re-engaged in sight, we might notice how everything stops. We can pay attention to stillness, to stasis. We may notice how reality becomes detemporalised and fixed. Things are things – solid, separate things, all laid out before us. We notice too how we recede from the scene and become separate to it. We look out onto the world and, as we survey it, it feels as though it really is our choice as to whether we participate in it or not.
In his seminal paper, “The Nobility of Sight”, Hans Jonas seeks out the properties that might qualify the sense of sight for the supreme philosophical honour afforded to it by Greek thinkers and beyond. He identifies three core characteristics that illustrate the peculiar phenomenology of sight, and starts to elucidate how it has come to shape some of the key ideas in Western philosophy, making clear how the “higher” arises from the “lower”, reason from vision.
The first characteristic is the simultaneity of visual experience. Sight takes in the whole visual field at once – it is surveyed in an instant. This simultaneity marks sight sharply from the other senses, which are all otherwise temporal. A single momentary visual snapshot can hold a wealth of information and tell a detailed and complex story. But to arrest the flow of any other sensory experience captures “not a snapshot but an atomic fragment of it, and strictly speaking nothing at all”.
“With sight”, Jonas points out, “all I have to do is open my eyes, and the world is there, as it was all the time”. Visual experience thus provides the basis upon which we are able to conceive of the eternal because, as Jonas says, it enables the beholder to “come to rest and possess an extended now”. This enables us to see all possible encounters ahead, and affords us a significant sense of freedom to select a number of possible intervening actions. No other sense is able to hold a “static present”. The visual world is an atemporal world; it has no flow.
The second characteristic Jonas identifies is dynamic neutralization. The external orientation of sight means that you can encounter something without having to be engaged with it directly (unless you choose to do so). This aspect of visual experience is what underpins the conceptual distinction between subject and object. Even more significant is that the visual image can be called up in imagination, enabling complete detachment from the original object. Jonas asserts that this “detachability of the image … is at the bottom of abstraction and therefore all free thought”.
However, Jonas identifies that this cleft between subject and object entails a corresponding loss. The absence of dynamism in the relation between subjects and objects obscures a clear sense of causality. To be in contact with an object, to touch it, already entails a change in the situation between me and the object. In the case of hearing, objects do not emit sounds by themselves; something has to happen. Smells and tastes produce an instant reaction. Vision, on the other hand, enables us to stand back from a situation and observe it, neutrally. The visual world is a world of represented objects, rather than causal processes.
The third characteristic Jonas identifies is distance. The fact that sight enables the apprehension of great distances has had a profound impact on how we think. The ability to survey over great distances gives us the ability to think ahead. Knowledge gained at great distance affords us the time to make the most advantageous choice. While simultaneity gives rise to the idea of the eternal, distance gives rise to the Greek idea of infinity.
Sight does not bring the distant near. Rather, what is “out there” remains in the distance. It is the only sense for which distance can be an advantage: the greater the distance the more comprehensive the visual survey. Distance further lends the visual experience the potential of “disinterested beholding”, as no sense is more outwardly focused – and therefore less aware of its own bodily origin – than vision. Jonas concludes, “the mind has gone where vision points”.
The very notion some higher faculty of reason that is able to see from the perspective of the eternal, that is objective and able to remain unaffected – actually arises from the very specific nature of our embodied visual experiences. Far on the other end of the spectrum, at the bottom of the hierarchy, lies the lowly sense of smell. It is said to lack the structure and order necessary to be cognitive, to be too ephemeral to represent a world independent of itself, and to provide nothing more than sensory enjoyment. These criticisms map neatly onto the three characteristics of vision outlined by Jonas:
1) Smell is not simultaneous; it is temporal;
2) Smell is not attuned to the identification of objects – it detects changing states and is therefore attuned to processes;
3) Smell experiences are intimate, inherently evaluative and often emotionally charged.
***
Smell is not impoverished, it’s different. It lies on the other end of the spectrum to vision but there is no good reason to assume the spectrum is a hierarchy. Reason is not a discrete function or entity; it is not some neutral, disembodied arbiter of what makes a particular sensory modality inferior or superior. Reason is an activity of the body-mind. Each of the senses gives us access to different aspects of reality. So, if one can think visually, then one can think olfactorily – even if it is difficult to capture in words, or typically happens outside of or conscious awareness.
Historian of the senses, Constance Classen asks us to consider “what different modes of consciousness are created by treating smell … as a fundamental way of knowing?” Taking Nietzsche’s claim that his genius lies in his nostrils, at face value, here are some possible answers:
1. Nietzsche had a nose for process metaphysics. Smell thinks by being sensitive to change – to change as a feature of the living world, in particular. Anthropologist and sensory researcher David Howes notes that the kinds of molecules we are particularly sensitive to are those that are associated with transitions and processes of the biological – ripening, rotting, flowering, fruiting, decomposition and decay. The living world available to the sense of smell is a world of Becoming – it is not a world of things, but a world of things-in-process.
2. To Nietzsche, the ‘nose’ stands in for the body as a whole, and smell reflects the deep connection between thought and the body. Smell thinks in a way that bridges the subject and object divide. With every breath we participate in our environment, and it participates in us. Once we start to see the world, and ourselves, as a set of intermingling and intersecting processes, it becomes quite arbitrary to separate the smell of a “thing” (a property that I experience) from smell as a “thing” (the object – the cloud of molecules that catches my breath, that ‘causes’ my experience of it).
3. Nietzsche nosed out the naturalistic foundations of morality. Smell thinks by instinctive evaluation, distinguishing good (for me) from bad (for me) based on the physiological needs of the living organism. Nietzsche was highly critical of 19th century Europe’s regressive culture and repressive morality. He argued that denying our innate human instincts – be they aggressive urges or bodily desires – would only make us sick, claiming he could sniff out such decadent ideals. Decadence, in Nietzsche’s sense, is best understood as a form of “decayingness”, a degeneration into illness, something to which the nose is especially sensitive.
In Nicholas More’s analysis of Ecce Homo, he observes that “an advance in wisdom comes by new methods for Nietzsche, not by new concepts”. Metaphor seems to have been one such method. Nietzsche reaches for new language and his work is saturated in vivid, visceral descriptions of embodied experience. The same metaphors repeated over and over, especially when mistaken for truths become the concepts Nietzsche so lamented. They hem us in to the same philosophical territories, herd us down the same narrow paths. New metaphors take leaps, liberate our thinking, launch intellectual revolutions.
By inverting the sensory hierarchy, Nietzsche opens up a new way of thinking. He doesn’t merely assert the wisdom of smell, he demonstrates it in the sophistication of his ideas about metaphysics, mind/body dualism and morality. By revaluing the sense of smell, he revalues those realms of experience that are ambiguous, ephemeral, implicit, unconscious, that are not easily expressed in language, that are emotional, relational, and attuned to temporal flow and changing states rather than static objects, that are part of Becoming rather than Being. He isn’t simply using an olfactory metaphor to express his thinking. Nietzsche is thinking olfactorily. Therein may lie his genius.
Originally published in The Philosopher
Keren Lucy Bester is a PhD researcher, creative strategist and scent explorer. Smelling Metaphysical Lies - the title of the project she's undertaking at the University of Dundee - is a work of Smellosophy: ask not what philosophy can tell you about smell, but what smell can tell you about philosophy. It is aimed at understanding our instincts, developing our intuitions, and revealing our dynamic, transcorporeal relationship with the world. Keren is also the founder of Chemical Poetry - a platform for philosophy and fragrance collaborations.
BY KEREN BESTER
“My genius lies in my nostrils”. So claims Nietzsche in his autobiography Ecce Homo, his last original book – a satirical survey of a life’s work. “I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies – smelling them out”, he writes. Nietzsche completed this book just weeks before his mental collapse in January 1889, leading many to dismiss its contents as the grandiose delusions of a man on the brink of madness. However, a sophisticated and extended treatment of this olfactory metaphor recurs through a number Nietzsche’s previous works and, I would argue, plays a central role in Nietzsche’s revaluation of values.
Adopting the lowliest and most animal of the senses as the source of his genius is characteristically subversive for Nietzsche. It stands in defiant opposition to Christianity’s denial of the body and rationalism’s discrediting of the senses. But is it mere literary flourish, a rhetorical device that gains provocative power by exploiting the deep connection between our sense of smell and feelings of moral disgust? Or is it possible that Nietzsche really was thinking olfactorily?
This notion would strike the majority of history’s most notable thinkers as, in a word, unthinkable. Our sense of smell is usually consigned to the very bottom of the sensory hierarchy: Aquinas was of the opinion that smell is the least cognitive of the senses. Condillac agreed, noting in his Treatise on the Sensations that “of all the senses smell is the one that seems to contribute least to the operations of the human mind”. Similarly, Kant thought of smell as “the most dispensible” of the senses, owing to the fact that it is “more a representation of enjoyment than of cognition”, and therefore more subjective than objective.
Olfactory historian, Annick Le Guérer points out that there are many explanations for this mistrust of smell, “but all of them converge on its animal nature”. Smell was dismissed by evolutionary theorists in the 19th century as a vestigial trait in humans, with Darwin remarking that it is “...of extremely slight service, if any, even to savages, in whom it is generally more highly developed than in the civilised races”. Freud concurred, considering this a consequence of our upright stance putting our noses at greater distance from the scent trails on the ground. The sublimation of smell was considered a crucial factor of civilisation. Correspondingly, a keen sense of smell was a sign of latent animality, psychopathy and perversion – a failure of the socializing process.
***
This sceptical position on the intellectual capacity of the smell sense is seen as early as Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato regards smell as only “half-formed”, ambiguous and vulgar. Because smells arise from substances in the process of change – intermediate states such as liquefaction, decomposition, and evaporation – instability is an originating condition of odours and they cannot conform to Plato’s notion of the ideal Forms. It also makes them difficult to name or classify. “The only clear distinction to be drawn here is twofold: the pleasant and the unpleasant” – the latter of which could “violently affect the whole of our bodily cavity”.
Instead, Plato favours the sense of sight. He considers it the worthiest and most important, and hence treats it separately to the other senses, which are instead a feature of our material being. Sight, in contrast, is closely connected to human intelligence and the soul, and the intellect is “the eye of the mind” for Plato. Since then, Western philosophers have largely followed suit. Thinking is a kind of seeing, and it seems so natural to speak in these terms that it hardly feels like a metaphor at all. However, metaphor it is, and is just one subset of “thinking as perceiving” – one of the most fundamental conceptual metaphors identified by linguistic philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
Traditionally, analytic philosophy views language as the primary vehicle of meaning, and metaphors are understood to hold meaning only insofar as they can be reduced to literal concepts that correspond to actual or objective state of affairs in the world. On this basis, and in light of the foregoing discussion of the supposed impoverishment of smell, “my genius is in my nostrils” could only be interpreted as absurd and incoherent.
In contrast, Lakoff and Johnson hold that all meaning – and therefore all language – arises from the embodied experiences of human brains in living human bodies interacting within a physical, social and cultural human environment. According to their Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the meaning of abstract concepts is only made possible by the fact that they borrow from and build on the very same neural structures that underpin the sensorimotor experiences of the body. On this account, metaphors are not symbolic nor do they simply express similarities between one thing and another. Rather, metaphors are “experiential correlations”. “Thinking” – the abstract domain – builds on “perceiving” – the concrete domain. There is no separate rational faculty that receives and makes sense of sensory inputs. “Reason” is not an entity or discrete function, but an activity of the human organism. All thinking is bodily; and the senses are themselves organs of thinking.
Smells tend to hint at something, the source of which needs to be sought out. You might have a sniff around if you’re suspicious. To get a whiff of, or be on the scent of something, is to have an intuition – to know, without quite knowing how you know. No doubt, Nietzsche had a nose – an instinct – for philosophy and in some ways the sense of smell seems especially apt to describe the process of the creative philosopher seeking out original ideas or the sceptical one sniffing out lies. If clarity is the ideal output of philosophy, isn’t obscurity the ideal input? A realisation is something that dawns on you, and you are enlightened when it comes into full view. But it is smell that alerts you to what you don’t know you don’t know. The philosopher seeking to uncover something hidden from view must surely use their nose.
Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s nostril proposition seems still to have a deeper core. He may have used olfactory metaphors extensively and forcibly, but he also had great reverence for the nose. The most explicit statement of this admiration can be found in his critique of reason in Twilight of the Idols. This excerpt is a clear defence of the value of our sense of smell and the intelligence of our embodied sensory experiences:
And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical concentrations that even elude a spectroscope. Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses – to the extent to which we sharpen them further, arm them, and have learned to think them through.
One of the key goals of Nietzsche’s project was to naturalise man – to reconcile him with his animality. To this end, he set out to rehabilitate the body and the senses, both unjustly vilified by a long tradition of philosophers, going back to Ancient Greece, and in so doing, he claims to be able to sniff out their lies. It is his discerning “flair” that scents out the lie of a metaphysics – that there is a “real” world distinct from the “apparent” world available to the senses.
In the section of Twilight of the Idols titled “On Reason in Philosophy”, Nietzsche accuses traditional philosophers of turning everything they touch into “concept mummies”. They take living things, real things, and suck the life out of them – turning bits of reality into inert concepts, and then treating concepts (the “mummies”) as real and the living thing as imperfect copies! The context for this accusation is Plato’s distinction between the real world of changeless Being and the unstable, inferior world of Becoming, which is available through the senses. By elevating Being over Becoming, Nietzsche claims that his opponents divorce ideas from their historical context and seek to view them, unchanging, from the perspective of the eternal. But, since Being – which is supposed to be universally and eternally true – remains outside their grasp, they cast blame on the senses for being deceptive, for offering mere appearance and for concealing the “real” world from them.
To Nietzsche, this reverence for Being entails a hatred of life and the living because it denies the reality of evolution and change. It is not the senses that lie, according to Nietzsche, but what reason makes of the testimony of our senses. “Insofar as the senses show Becoming, passing away and change, they do not lie”, Nietzsche claims. Rather, “‘Reason’ is what causes us to falsify the testimony of the senses”. From here, “the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence” emerges.
For Nietzsche, philosophers in thrall to this picture confuse the order of things: they cannot accept that their higher concepts – the Good, the Truth, the Perfect – grow out of the lower – the immoral body and the deceptive senses – so they assert that their higher concepts are causa sui – without cause. This, according to Nietzsche, is how they arrive at the idea of God – “that which is last, thinnest and emptiest is put first, as the cause”.
***
At the very heart of the distinction between Being and Becoming lies a striking contrast between the phenomenologies of sight and smell. Plato’s reverence for the visual is pitted against the genius in Nietzsche’s nostrils.
With eyes closed, we can imagine the world as a world of smells. This is a world of constant change and flux. It is not a world of “things” – at least not clearly boundaried “things” that stay where you left them. Rather, they are things-in-process – building up and breaking down, ripening and rotting, dispersing across space and through time. Nothing is fixed. Everything is permeable, a sea of intermingling processes. We too are a swirl of smells – in sickness and in health. We participate in the world as the world participates in us: we breathe the world in and commune with it. We know immediately and without hesitation if something is good or bad – for me. We perceive it to be so, rather than judge it to be so.
With eyes re-opened and re-engaged in sight, we might notice how everything stops. We can pay attention to stillness, to stasis. We may notice how reality becomes detemporalised and fixed. Things are things – solid, separate things, all laid out before us. We notice too how we recede from the scene and become separate to it. We look out onto the world and, as we survey it, it feels as though it really is our choice as to whether we participate in it or not.
In his seminal paper, “The Nobility of Sight”, Hans Jonas seeks out the properties that might qualify the sense of sight for the supreme philosophical honour afforded to it by Greek thinkers and beyond. He identifies three core characteristics that illustrate the peculiar phenomenology of sight, and starts to elucidate how it has come to shape some of the key ideas in Western philosophy, making clear how the “higher” arises from the “lower”, reason from vision.
The first characteristic is the simultaneity of visual experience. Sight takes in the whole visual field at once – it is surveyed in an instant. This simultaneity marks sight sharply from the other senses, which are all otherwise temporal. A single momentary visual snapshot can hold a wealth of information and tell a detailed and complex story. But to arrest the flow of any other sensory experience captures “not a snapshot but an atomic fragment of it, and strictly speaking nothing at all”.
“With sight”, Jonas points out, “all I have to do is open my eyes, and the world is there, as it was all the time”. Visual experience thus provides the basis upon which we are able to conceive of the eternal because, as Jonas says, it enables the beholder to “come to rest and possess an extended now”. This enables us to see all possible encounters ahead, and affords us a significant sense of freedom to select a number of possible intervening actions. No other sense is able to hold a “static present”. The visual world is an atemporal world; it has no flow.
The second characteristic Jonas identifies is dynamic neutralization. The external orientation of sight means that you can encounter something without having to be engaged with it directly (unless you choose to do so). This aspect of visual experience is what underpins the conceptual distinction between subject and object. Even more significant is that the visual image can be called up in imagination, enabling complete detachment from the original object. Jonas asserts that this “detachability of the image … is at the bottom of abstraction and therefore all free thought”.
However, Jonas identifies that this cleft between subject and object entails a corresponding loss. The absence of dynamism in the relation between subjects and objects obscures a clear sense of causality. To be in contact with an object, to touch it, already entails a change in the situation between me and the object. In the case of hearing, objects do not emit sounds by themselves; something has to happen. Smells and tastes produce an instant reaction. Vision, on the other hand, enables us to stand back from a situation and observe it, neutrally. The visual world is a world of represented objects, rather than causal processes.
The third characteristic Jonas identifies is distance. The fact that sight enables the apprehension of great distances has had a profound impact on how we think. The ability to survey over great distances gives us the ability to think ahead. Knowledge gained at great distance affords us the time to make the most advantageous choice. While simultaneity gives rise to the idea of the eternal, distance gives rise to the Greek idea of infinity.
Sight does not bring the distant near. Rather, what is “out there” remains in the distance. It is the only sense for which distance can be an advantage: the greater the distance the more comprehensive the visual survey. Distance further lends the visual experience the potential of “disinterested beholding”, as no sense is more outwardly focused – and therefore less aware of its own bodily origin – than vision. Jonas concludes, “the mind has gone where vision points”.
The very notion some higher faculty of reason that is able to see from the perspective of the eternal, that is objective and able to remain unaffected – actually arises from the very specific nature of our embodied visual experiences. Far on the other end of the spectrum, at the bottom of the hierarchy, lies the lowly sense of smell. It is said to lack the structure and order necessary to be cognitive, to be too ephemeral to represent a world independent of itself, and to provide nothing more than sensory enjoyment. These criticisms map neatly onto the three characteristics of vision outlined by Jonas:
1) Smell is not simultaneous; it is temporal;
2) Smell is not attuned to the identification of objects – it detects changing states and is therefore attuned to processes;
3) Smell experiences are intimate, inherently evaluative and often emotionally charged.
***
Smell is not impoverished, it’s different. It lies on the other end of the spectrum to vision but there is no good reason to assume the spectrum is a hierarchy. Reason is not a discrete function or entity; it is not some neutral, disembodied arbiter of what makes a particular sensory modality inferior or superior. Reason is an activity of the body-mind. Each of the senses gives us access to different aspects of reality. So, if one can think visually, then one can think olfactorily – even if it is difficult to capture in words, or typically happens outside of or conscious awareness.
Historian of the senses, Constance Classen asks us to consider “what different modes of consciousness are created by treating smell … as a fundamental way of knowing?” Taking Nietzsche’s claim that his genius lies in his nostrils, at face value, here are some possible answers:
1. Nietzsche had a nose for process metaphysics. Smell thinks by being sensitive to change – to change as a feature of the living world, in particular. Anthropologist and sensory researcher David Howes notes that the kinds of molecules we are particularly sensitive to are those that are associated with transitions and processes of the biological – ripening, rotting, flowering, fruiting, decomposition and decay. The living world available to the sense of smell is a world of Becoming – it is not a world of things, but a world of things-in-process.
2. To Nietzsche, the ‘nose’ stands in for the body as a whole, and smell reflects the deep connection between thought and the body. Smell thinks in a way that bridges the subject and object divide. With every breath we participate in our environment, and it participates in us. Once we start to see the world, and ourselves, as a set of intermingling and intersecting processes, it becomes quite arbitrary to separate the smell of a “thing” (a property that I experience) from smell as a “thing” (the object – the cloud of molecules that catches my breath, that ‘causes’ my experience of it).
3. Nietzsche nosed out the naturalistic foundations of morality. Smell thinks by instinctive evaluation, distinguishing good (for me) from bad (for me) based on the physiological needs of the living organism. Nietzsche was highly critical of 19th century Europe’s regressive culture and repressive morality. He argued that denying our innate human instincts – be they aggressive urges or bodily desires – would only make us sick, claiming he could sniff out such decadent ideals. Decadence, in Nietzsche’s sense, is best understood as a form of “decayingness”, a degeneration into illness, something to which the nose is especially sensitive.
In Nicholas More’s analysis of Ecce Homo, he observes that “an advance in wisdom comes by new methods for Nietzsche, not by new concepts”. Metaphor seems to have been one such method. Nietzsche reaches for new language and his work is saturated in vivid, visceral descriptions of embodied experience. The same metaphors repeated over and over, especially when mistaken for truths become the concepts Nietzsche so lamented. They hem us in to the same philosophical territories, herd us down the same narrow paths. New metaphors take leaps, liberate our thinking, launch intellectual revolutions.
By inverting the sensory hierarchy, Nietzsche opens up a new way of thinking. He doesn’t merely assert the wisdom of smell, he demonstrates it in the sophistication of his ideas about metaphysics, mind/body dualism and morality. By revaluing the sense of smell, he revalues those realms of experience that are ambiguous, ephemeral, implicit, unconscious, that are not easily expressed in language, that are emotional, relational, and attuned to temporal flow and changing states rather than static objects, that are part of Becoming rather than Being. He isn’t simply using an olfactory metaphor to express his thinking. Nietzsche is thinking olfactorily. Therein may lie his genius.
Originally published in The Philosopher
“My genius lies in my nostrils”. So claims Nietzsche in his autobiography Ecce Homo, his last original book – a satirical survey of a life’s work. “I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies – smelling them out”, he writes. Nietzsche completed this book just weeks before his mental collapse in January 1889, leading many to dismiss its contents as the grandiose delusions of a man on the brink of madness. However, a sophisticated and extended treatment of this olfactory metaphor recurs through a number Nietzsche’s previous works and, I would argue, plays a central role in Nietzsche’s revaluation of values.
Adopting the lowliest and most animal of the senses as the source of his genius is characteristically subversive for Nietzsche. It stands in defiant opposition to Christianity’s denial of the body and rationalism’s discrediting of the senses. But is it mere literary flourish, a rhetorical device that gains provocative power by exploiting the deep connection between our sense of smell and feelings of moral disgust? Or is it possible that Nietzsche really was thinking olfactorily?
This notion would strike the majority of history’s most notable thinkers as, in a word, unthinkable. Our sense of smell is usually consigned to the very bottom of the sensory hierarchy: Aquinas was of the opinion that smell is the least cognitive of the senses. Condillac agreed, noting in his Treatise on the Sensations that “of all the senses smell is the one that seems to contribute least to the operations of the human mind”. Similarly, Kant thought of smell as “the most dispensible” of the senses, owing to the fact that it is “more a representation of enjoyment than of cognition”, and therefore more subjective than objective.
Olfactory historian, Annick Le Guérer points out that there are many explanations for this mistrust of smell, “but all of them converge on its animal nature”. Smell was dismissed by evolutionary theorists in the 19th century as a vestigial trait in humans, with Darwin remarking that it is “...of extremely slight service, if any, even to savages, in whom it is generally more highly developed than in the civilised races”. Freud concurred, considering this a consequence of our upright stance putting our noses at greater distance from the scent trails on the ground. The sublimation of smell was considered a crucial factor of civilisation. Correspondingly, a keen sense of smell was a sign of latent animality, psychopathy and perversion – a failure of the socializing process.
***
This sceptical position on the intellectual capacity of the smell sense is seen as early as Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato regards smell as only “half-formed”, ambiguous and vulgar. Because smells arise from substances in the process of change – intermediate states such as liquefaction, decomposition, and evaporation – instability is an originating condition of odours and they cannot conform to Plato’s notion of the ideal Forms. It also makes them difficult to name or classify. “The only clear distinction to be drawn here is twofold: the pleasant and the unpleasant” – the latter of which could “violently affect the whole of our bodily cavity”.
Instead, Plato favours the sense of sight. He considers it the worthiest and most important, and hence treats it separately to the other senses, which are instead a feature of our material being. Sight, in contrast, is closely connected to human intelligence and the soul, and the intellect is “the eye of the mind” for Plato. Since then, Western philosophers have largely followed suit. Thinking is a kind of seeing, and it seems so natural to speak in these terms that it hardly feels like a metaphor at all. However, metaphor it is, and is just one subset of “thinking as perceiving” – one of the most fundamental conceptual metaphors identified by linguistic philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
Traditionally, analytic philosophy views language as the primary vehicle of meaning, and metaphors are understood to hold meaning only insofar as they can be reduced to literal concepts that correspond to actual or objective state of affairs in the world. On this basis, and in light of the foregoing discussion of the supposed impoverishment of smell, “my genius is in my nostrils” could only be interpreted as absurd and incoherent.
In contrast, Lakoff and Johnson hold that all meaning – and therefore all language – arises from the embodied experiences of human brains in living human bodies interacting within a physical, social and cultural human environment. According to their Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the meaning of abstract concepts is only made possible by the fact that they borrow from and build on the very same neural structures that underpin the sensorimotor experiences of the body. On this account, metaphors are not symbolic nor do they simply express similarities between one thing and another. Rather, metaphors are “experiential correlations”. “Thinking” – the abstract domain – builds on “perceiving” – the concrete domain. There is no separate rational faculty that receives and makes sense of sensory inputs. “Reason” is not an entity or discrete function, but an activity of the human organism. All thinking is bodily; and the senses are themselves organs of thinking.
Smells tend to hint at something, the source of which needs to be sought out. You might have a sniff around if you’re suspicious. To get a whiff of, or be on the scent of something, is to have an intuition – to know, without quite knowing how you know. No doubt, Nietzsche had a nose – an instinct – for philosophy and in some ways the sense of smell seems especially apt to describe the process of the creative philosopher seeking out original ideas or the sceptical one sniffing out lies. If clarity is the ideal output of philosophy, isn’t obscurity the ideal input? A realisation is something that dawns on you, and you are enlightened when it comes into full view. But it is smell that alerts you to what you don’t know you don’t know. The philosopher seeking to uncover something hidden from view must surely use their nose.
Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s nostril proposition seems still to have a deeper core. He may have used olfactory metaphors extensively and forcibly, but he also had great reverence for the nose. The most explicit statement of this admiration can be found in his critique of reason in Twilight of the Idols. This excerpt is a clear defence of the value of our sense of smell and the intelligence of our embodied sensory experiences:
And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical concentrations that even elude a spectroscope. Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses – to the extent to which we sharpen them further, arm them, and have learned to think them through.
One of the key goals of Nietzsche’s project was to naturalise man – to reconcile him with his animality. To this end, he set out to rehabilitate the body and the senses, both unjustly vilified by a long tradition of philosophers, going back to Ancient Greece, and in so doing, he claims to be able to sniff out their lies. It is his discerning “flair” that scents out the lie of a metaphysics – that there is a “real” world distinct from the “apparent” world available to the senses.
In the section of Twilight of the Idols titled “On Reason in Philosophy”, Nietzsche accuses traditional philosophers of turning everything they touch into “concept mummies”. They take living things, real things, and suck the life out of them – turning bits of reality into inert concepts, and then treating concepts (the “mummies”) as real and the living thing as imperfect copies! The context for this accusation is Plato’s distinction between the real world of changeless Being and the unstable, inferior world of Becoming, which is available through the senses. By elevating Being over Becoming, Nietzsche claims that his opponents divorce ideas from their historical context and seek to view them, unchanging, from the perspective of the eternal. But, since Being – which is supposed to be universally and eternally true – remains outside their grasp, they cast blame on the senses for being deceptive, for offering mere appearance and for concealing the “real” world from them.
To Nietzsche, this reverence for Being entails a hatred of life and the living because it denies the reality of evolution and change. It is not the senses that lie, according to Nietzsche, but what reason makes of the testimony of our senses. “Insofar as the senses show Becoming, passing away and change, they do not lie”, Nietzsche claims. Rather, “‘Reason’ is what causes us to falsify the testimony of the senses”. From here, “the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence” emerges.
For Nietzsche, philosophers in thrall to this picture confuse the order of things: they cannot accept that their higher concepts – the Good, the Truth, the Perfect – grow out of the lower – the immoral body and the deceptive senses – so they assert that their higher concepts are causa sui – without cause. This, according to Nietzsche, is how they arrive at the idea of God – “that which is last, thinnest and emptiest is put first, as the cause”.
***
At the very heart of the distinction between Being and Becoming lies a striking contrast between the phenomenologies of sight and smell. Plato’s reverence for the visual is pitted against the genius in Nietzsche’s nostrils.
With eyes closed, we can imagine the world as a world of smells. This is a world of constant change and flux. It is not a world of “things” – at least not clearly boundaried “things” that stay where you left them. Rather, they are things-in-process – building up and breaking down, ripening and rotting, dispersing across space and through time. Nothing is fixed. Everything is permeable, a sea of intermingling processes. We too are a swirl of smells – in sickness and in health. We participate in the world as the world participates in us: we breathe the world in and commune with it. We know immediately and without hesitation if something is good or bad – for me. We perceive it to be so, rather than judge it to be so.
With eyes re-opened and re-engaged in sight, we might notice how everything stops. We can pay attention to stillness, to stasis. We may notice how reality becomes detemporalised and fixed. Things are things – solid, separate things, all laid out before us. We notice too how we recede from the scene and become separate to it. We look out onto the world and, as we survey it, it feels as though it really is our choice as to whether we participate in it or not.
In his seminal paper, “The Nobility of Sight”, Hans Jonas seeks out the properties that might qualify the sense of sight for the supreme philosophical honour afforded to it by Greek thinkers and beyond. He identifies three core characteristics that illustrate the peculiar phenomenology of sight, and starts to elucidate how it has come to shape some of the key ideas in Western philosophy, making clear how the “higher” arises from the “lower”, reason from vision.
The first characteristic is the simultaneity of visual experience. Sight takes in the whole visual field at once – it is surveyed in an instant. This simultaneity marks sight sharply from the other senses, which are all otherwise temporal. A single momentary visual snapshot can hold a wealth of information and tell a detailed and complex story. But to arrest the flow of any other sensory experience captures “not a snapshot but an atomic fragment of it, and strictly speaking nothing at all”.
“With sight”, Jonas points out, “all I have to do is open my eyes, and the world is there, as it was all the time”. Visual experience thus provides the basis upon which we are able to conceive of the eternal because, as Jonas says, it enables the beholder to “come to rest and possess an extended now”. This enables us to see all possible encounters ahead, and affords us a significant sense of freedom to select a number of possible intervening actions. No other sense is able to hold a “static present”. The visual world is an atemporal world; it has no flow.
The second characteristic Jonas identifies is dynamic neutralization. The external orientation of sight means that you can encounter something without having to be engaged with it directly (unless you choose to do so). This aspect of visual experience is what underpins the conceptual distinction between subject and object. Even more significant is that the visual image can be called up in imagination, enabling complete detachment from the original object. Jonas asserts that this “detachability of the image … is at the bottom of abstraction and therefore all free thought”.
However, Jonas identifies that this cleft between subject and object entails a corresponding loss. The absence of dynamism in the relation between subjects and objects obscures a clear sense of causality. To be in contact with an object, to touch it, already entails a change in the situation between me and the object. In the case of hearing, objects do not emit sounds by themselves; something has to happen. Smells and tastes produce an instant reaction. Vision, on the other hand, enables us to stand back from a situation and observe it, neutrally. The visual world is a world of represented objects, rather than causal processes.
The third characteristic Jonas identifies is distance. The fact that sight enables the apprehension of great distances has had a profound impact on how we think. The ability to survey over great distances gives us the ability to think ahead. Knowledge gained at great distance affords us the time to make the most advantageous choice. While simultaneity gives rise to the idea of the eternal, distance gives rise to the Greek idea of infinity.
Sight does not bring the distant near. Rather, what is “out there” remains in the distance. It is the only sense for which distance can be an advantage: the greater the distance the more comprehensive the visual survey. Distance further lends the visual experience the potential of “disinterested beholding”, as no sense is more outwardly focused – and therefore less aware of its own bodily origin – than vision. Jonas concludes, “the mind has gone where vision points”.
The very notion some higher faculty of reason that is able to see from the perspective of the eternal, that is objective and able to remain unaffected – actually arises from the very specific nature of our embodied visual experiences. Far on the other end of the spectrum, at the bottom of the hierarchy, lies the lowly sense of smell. It is said to lack the structure and order necessary to be cognitive, to be too ephemeral to represent a world independent of itself, and to provide nothing more than sensory enjoyment. These criticisms map neatly onto the three characteristics of vision outlined by Jonas:
1) Smell is not simultaneous; it is temporal;
2) Smell is not attuned to the identification of objects – it detects changing states and is therefore attuned to processes;
3) Smell experiences are intimate, inherently evaluative and often emotionally charged.
***
Smell is not impoverished, it’s different. It lies on the other end of the spectrum to vision but there is no good reason to assume the spectrum is a hierarchy. Reason is not a discrete function or entity; it is not some neutral, disembodied arbiter of what makes a particular sensory modality inferior or superior. Reason is an activity of the body-mind. Each of the senses gives us access to different aspects of reality. So, if one can think visually, then one can think olfactorily – even if it is difficult to capture in words, or typically happens outside of or conscious awareness.
Historian of the senses, Constance Classen asks us to consider “what different modes of consciousness are created by treating smell … as a fundamental way of knowing?” Taking Nietzsche’s claim that his genius lies in his nostrils, at face value, here are some possible answers:
1. Nietzsche had a nose for process metaphysics. Smell thinks by being sensitive to change – to change as a feature of the living world, in particular. Anthropologist and sensory researcher David Howes notes that the kinds of molecules we are particularly sensitive to are those that are associated with transitions and processes of the biological – ripening, rotting, flowering, fruiting, decomposition and decay. The living world available to the sense of smell is a world of Becoming – it is not a world of things, but a world of things-in-process.
2. To Nietzsche, the ‘nose’ stands in for the body as a whole, and smell reflects the deep connection between thought and the body. Smell thinks in a way that bridges the subject and object divide. With every breath we participate in our environment, and it participates in us. Once we start to see the world, and ourselves, as a set of intermingling and intersecting processes, it becomes quite arbitrary to separate the smell of a “thing” (a property that I experience) from smell as a “thing” (the object – the cloud of molecules that catches my breath, that ‘causes’ my experience of it).
3. Nietzsche nosed out the naturalistic foundations of morality. Smell thinks by instinctive evaluation, distinguishing good (for me) from bad (for me) based on the physiological needs of the living organism. Nietzsche was highly critical of 19th century Europe’s regressive culture and repressive morality. He argued that denying our innate human instincts – be they aggressive urges or bodily desires – would only make us sick, claiming he could sniff out such decadent ideals. Decadence, in Nietzsche’s sense, is best understood as a form of “decayingness”, a degeneration into illness, something to which the nose is especially sensitive.
In Nicholas More’s analysis of Ecce Homo, he observes that “an advance in wisdom comes by new methods for Nietzsche, not by new concepts”. Metaphor seems to have been one such method. Nietzsche reaches for new language and his work is saturated in vivid, visceral descriptions of embodied experience. The same metaphors repeated over and over, especially when mistaken for truths become the concepts Nietzsche so lamented. They hem us in to the same philosophical territories, herd us down the same narrow paths. New metaphors take leaps, liberate our thinking, launch intellectual revolutions.
By inverting the sensory hierarchy, Nietzsche opens up a new way of thinking. He doesn’t merely assert the wisdom of smell, he demonstrates it in the sophistication of his ideas about metaphysics, mind/body dualism and morality. By revaluing the sense of smell, he revalues those realms of experience that are ambiguous, ephemeral, implicit, unconscious, that are not easily expressed in language, that are emotional, relational, and attuned to temporal flow and changing states rather than static objects, that are part of Becoming rather than Being. He isn’t simply using an olfactory metaphor to express his thinking. Nietzsche is thinking olfactorily. Therein may lie his genius.
Originally published in The Philosopher
Keren Lucy Bester is a PhD researcher, creative strategist and scent explorer. Smelling Metaphysical Lies - the title of the project she's undertaking at the University of Dundee - is a work of Smellosophy: ask not what philosophy can tell you about smell, but what smell can tell you about philosophy. It is aimed at understanding our instincts, developing our intuitions, and revealing our dynamic, transcorporeal relationship with the world. Keren is also the founder of Chemical Poetry - a platform for philosophy and fragrance collaborations.
BY KEREN BESTER
“My genius lies in my nostrils”. So claims Nietzsche in his autobiography Ecce Homo, his last original book – a satirical survey of a life’s work. “I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies – smelling them out”, he writes. Nietzsche completed this book just weeks before his mental collapse in January 1889, leading many to dismiss its contents as the grandiose delusions of a man on the brink of madness. However, a sophisticated and extended treatment of this olfactory metaphor recurs through a number Nietzsche’s previous works and, I would argue, plays a central role in Nietzsche’s revaluation of values.
Adopting the lowliest and most animal of the senses as the source of his genius is characteristically subversive for Nietzsche. It stands in defiant opposition to Christianity’s denial of the body and rationalism’s discrediting of the senses. But is it mere literary flourish, a rhetorical device that gains provocative power by exploiting the deep connection between our sense of smell and feelings of moral disgust? Or is it possible that Nietzsche really was thinking olfactorily?
This notion would strike the majority of history’s most notable thinkers as, in a word, unthinkable. Our sense of smell is usually consigned to the very bottom of the sensory hierarchy: Aquinas was of the opinion that smell is the least cognitive of the senses. Condillac agreed, noting in his Treatise on the Sensations that “of all the senses smell is the one that seems to contribute least to the operations of the human mind”. Similarly, Kant thought of smell as “the most dispensible” of the senses, owing to the fact that it is “more a representation of enjoyment than of cognition”, and therefore more subjective than objective.
Olfactory historian, Annick Le Guérer points out that there are many explanations for this mistrust of smell, “but all of them converge on its animal nature”. Smell was dismissed by evolutionary theorists in the 19th century as a vestigial trait in humans, with Darwin remarking that it is “...of extremely slight service, if any, even to savages, in whom it is generally more highly developed than in the civilised races”. Freud concurred, considering this a consequence of our upright stance putting our noses at greater distance from the scent trails on the ground. The sublimation of smell was considered a crucial factor of civilisation. Correspondingly, a keen sense of smell was a sign of latent animality, psychopathy and perversion – a failure of the socializing process.
***
This sceptical position on the intellectual capacity of the smell sense is seen as early as Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato regards smell as only “half-formed”, ambiguous and vulgar. Because smells arise from substances in the process of change – intermediate states such as liquefaction, decomposition, and evaporation – instability is an originating condition of odours and they cannot conform to Plato’s notion of the ideal Forms. It also makes them difficult to name or classify. “The only clear distinction to be drawn here is twofold: the pleasant and the unpleasant” – the latter of which could “violently affect the whole of our bodily cavity”.
Instead, Plato favours the sense of sight. He considers it the worthiest and most important, and hence treats it separately to the other senses, which are instead a feature of our material being. Sight, in contrast, is closely connected to human intelligence and the soul, and the intellect is “the eye of the mind” for Plato. Since then, Western philosophers have largely followed suit. Thinking is a kind of seeing, and it seems so natural to speak in these terms that it hardly feels like a metaphor at all. However, metaphor it is, and is just one subset of “thinking as perceiving” – one of the most fundamental conceptual metaphors identified by linguistic philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
Traditionally, analytic philosophy views language as the primary vehicle of meaning, and metaphors are understood to hold meaning only insofar as they can be reduced to literal concepts that correspond to actual or objective state of affairs in the world. On this basis, and in light of the foregoing discussion of the supposed impoverishment of smell, “my genius is in my nostrils” could only be interpreted as absurd and incoherent.
In contrast, Lakoff and Johnson hold that all meaning – and therefore all language – arises from the embodied experiences of human brains in living human bodies interacting within a physical, social and cultural human environment. According to their Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the meaning of abstract concepts is only made possible by the fact that they borrow from and build on the very same neural structures that underpin the sensorimotor experiences of the body. On this account, metaphors are not symbolic nor do they simply express similarities between one thing and another. Rather, metaphors are “experiential correlations”. “Thinking” – the abstract domain – builds on “perceiving” – the concrete domain. There is no separate rational faculty that receives and makes sense of sensory inputs. “Reason” is not an entity or discrete function, but an activity of the human organism. All thinking is bodily; and the senses are themselves organs of thinking.
Smells tend to hint at something, the source of which needs to be sought out. You might have a sniff around if you’re suspicious. To get a whiff of, or be on the scent of something, is to have an intuition – to know, without quite knowing how you know. No doubt, Nietzsche had a nose – an instinct – for philosophy and in some ways the sense of smell seems especially apt to describe the process of the creative philosopher seeking out original ideas or the sceptical one sniffing out lies. If clarity is the ideal output of philosophy, isn’t obscurity the ideal input? A realisation is something that dawns on you, and you are enlightened when it comes into full view. But it is smell that alerts you to what you don’t know you don’t know. The philosopher seeking to uncover something hidden from view must surely use their nose.
Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s nostril proposition seems still to have a deeper core. He may have used olfactory metaphors extensively and forcibly, but he also had great reverence for the nose. The most explicit statement of this admiration can be found in his critique of reason in Twilight of the Idols. This excerpt is a clear defence of the value of our sense of smell and the intelligence of our embodied sensory experiences:
And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical concentrations that even elude a spectroscope. Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses – to the extent to which we sharpen them further, arm them, and have learned to think them through.
One of the key goals of Nietzsche’s project was to naturalise man – to reconcile him with his animality. To this end, he set out to rehabilitate the body and the senses, both unjustly vilified by a long tradition of philosophers, going back to Ancient Greece, and in so doing, he claims to be able to sniff out their lies. It is his discerning “flair” that scents out the lie of a metaphysics – that there is a “real” world distinct from the “apparent” world available to the senses.
In the section of Twilight of the Idols titled “On Reason in Philosophy”, Nietzsche accuses traditional philosophers of turning everything they touch into “concept mummies”. They take living things, real things, and suck the life out of them – turning bits of reality into inert concepts, and then treating concepts (the “mummies”) as real and the living thing as imperfect copies! The context for this accusation is Plato’s distinction between the real world of changeless Being and the unstable, inferior world of Becoming, which is available through the senses. By elevating Being over Becoming, Nietzsche claims that his opponents divorce ideas from their historical context and seek to view them, unchanging, from the perspective of the eternal. But, since Being – which is supposed to be universally and eternally true – remains outside their grasp, they cast blame on the senses for being deceptive, for offering mere appearance and for concealing the “real” world from them.
To Nietzsche, this reverence for Being entails a hatred of life and the living because it denies the reality of evolution and change. It is not the senses that lie, according to Nietzsche, but what reason makes of the testimony of our senses. “Insofar as the senses show Becoming, passing away and change, they do not lie”, Nietzsche claims. Rather, “‘Reason’ is what causes us to falsify the testimony of the senses”. From here, “the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence” emerges.
For Nietzsche, philosophers in thrall to this picture confuse the order of things: they cannot accept that their higher concepts – the Good, the Truth, the Perfect – grow out of the lower – the immoral body and the deceptive senses – so they assert that their higher concepts are causa sui – without cause. This, according to Nietzsche, is how they arrive at the idea of God – “that which is last, thinnest and emptiest is put first, as the cause”.
***
At the very heart of the distinction between Being and Becoming lies a striking contrast between the phenomenologies of sight and smell. Plato’s reverence for the visual is pitted against the genius in Nietzsche’s nostrils.
With eyes closed, we can imagine the world as a world of smells. This is a world of constant change and flux. It is not a world of “things” – at least not clearly boundaried “things” that stay where you left them. Rather, they are things-in-process – building up and breaking down, ripening and rotting, dispersing across space and through time. Nothing is fixed. Everything is permeable, a sea of intermingling processes. We too are a swirl of smells – in sickness and in health. We participate in the world as the world participates in us: we breathe the world in and commune with it. We know immediately and without hesitation if something is good or bad – for me. We perceive it to be so, rather than judge it to be so.
With eyes re-opened and re-engaged in sight, we might notice how everything stops. We can pay attention to stillness, to stasis. We may notice how reality becomes detemporalised and fixed. Things are things – solid, separate things, all laid out before us. We notice too how we recede from the scene and become separate to it. We look out onto the world and, as we survey it, it feels as though it really is our choice as to whether we participate in it or not.
In his seminal paper, “The Nobility of Sight”, Hans Jonas seeks out the properties that might qualify the sense of sight for the supreme philosophical honour afforded to it by Greek thinkers and beyond. He identifies three core characteristics that illustrate the peculiar phenomenology of sight, and starts to elucidate how it has come to shape some of the key ideas in Western philosophy, making clear how the “higher” arises from the “lower”, reason from vision.
The first characteristic is the simultaneity of visual experience. Sight takes in the whole visual field at once – it is surveyed in an instant. This simultaneity marks sight sharply from the other senses, which are all otherwise temporal. A single momentary visual snapshot can hold a wealth of information and tell a detailed and complex story. But to arrest the flow of any other sensory experience captures “not a snapshot but an atomic fragment of it, and strictly speaking nothing at all”.
“With sight”, Jonas points out, “all I have to do is open my eyes, and the world is there, as it was all the time”. Visual experience thus provides the basis upon which we are able to conceive of the eternal because, as Jonas says, it enables the beholder to “come to rest and possess an extended now”. This enables us to see all possible encounters ahead, and affords us a significant sense of freedom to select a number of possible intervening actions. No other sense is able to hold a “static present”. The visual world is an atemporal world; it has no flow.
The second characteristic Jonas identifies is dynamic neutralization. The external orientation of sight means that you can encounter something without having to be engaged with it directly (unless you choose to do so). This aspect of visual experience is what underpins the conceptual distinction between subject and object. Even more significant is that the visual image can be called up in imagination, enabling complete detachment from the original object. Jonas asserts that this “detachability of the image … is at the bottom of abstraction and therefore all free thought”.
However, Jonas identifies that this cleft between subject and object entails a corresponding loss. The absence of dynamism in the relation between subjects and objects obscures a clear sense of causality. To be in contact with an object, to touch it, already entails a change in the situation between me and the object. In the case of hearing, objects do not emit sounds by themselves; something has to happen. Smells and tastes produce an instant reaction. Vision, on the other hand, enables us to stand back from a situation and observe it, neutrally. The visual world is a world of represented objects, rather than causal processes.
The third characteristic Jonas identifies is distance. The fact that sight enables the apprehension of great distances has had a profound impact on how we think. The ability to survey over great distances gives us the ability to think ahead. Knowledge gained at great distance affords us the time to make the most advantageous choice. While simultaneity gives rise to the idea of the eternal, distance gives rise to the Greek idea of infinity.
Sight does not bring the distant near. Rather, what is “out there” remains in the distance. It is the only sense for which distance can be an advantage: the greater the distance the more comprehensive the visual survey. Distance further lends the visual experience the potential of “disinterested beholding”, as no sense is more outwardly focused – and therefore less aware of its own bodily origin – than vision. Jonas concludes, “the mind has gone where vision points”.
The very notion some higher faculty of reason that is able to see from the perspective of the eternal, that is objective and able to remain unaffected – actually arises from the very specific nature of our embodied visual experiences. Far on the other end of the spectrum, at the bottom of the hierarchy, lies the lowly sense of smell. It is said to lack the structure and order necessary to be cognitive, to be too ephemeral to represent a world independent of itself, and to provide nothing more than sensory enjoyment. These criticisms map neatly onto the three characteristics of vision outlined by Jonas:
1) Smell is not simultaneous; it is temporal;
2) Smell is not attuned to the identification of objects – it detects changing states and is therefore attuned to processes;
3) Smell experiences are intimate, inherently evaluative and often emotionally charged.
***
Smell is not impoverished, it’s different. It lies on the other end of the spectrum to vision but there is no good reason to assume the spectrum is a hierarchy. Reason is not a discrete function or entity; it is not some neutral, disembodied arbiter of what makes a particular sensory modality inferior or superior. Reason is an activity of the body-mind. Each of the senses gives us access to different aspects of reality. So, if one can think visually, then one can think olfactorily – even if it is difficult to capture in words, or typically happens outside of or conscious awareness.
Historian of the senses, Constance Classen asks us to consider “what different modes of consciousness are created by treating smell … as a fundamental way of knowing?” Taking Nietzsche’s claim that his genius lies in his nostrils, at face value, here are some possible answers:
1. Nietzsche had a nose for process metaphysics. Smell thinks by being sensitive to change – to change as a feature of the living world, in particular. Anthropologist and sensory researcher David Howes notes that the kinds of molecules we are particularly sensitive to are those that are associated with transitions and processes of the biological – ripening, rotting, flowering, fruiting, decomposition and decay. The living world available to the sense of smell is a world of Becoming – it is not a world of things, but a world of things-in-process.
2. To Nietzsche, the ‘nose’ stands in for the body as a whole, and smell reflects the deep connection between thought and the body. Smell thinks in a way that bridges the subject and object divide. With every breath we participate in our environment, and it participates in us. Once we start to see the world, and ourselves, as a set of intermingling and intersecting processes, it becomes quite arbitrary to separate the smell of a “thing” (a property that I experience) from smell as a “thing” (the object – the cloud of molecules that catches my breath, that ‘causes’ my experience of it).
3. Nietzsche nosed out the naturalistic foundations of morality. Smell thinks by instinctive evaluation, distinguishing good (for me) from bad (for me) based on the physiological needs of the living organism. Nietzsche was highly critical of 19th century Europe’s regressive culture and repressive morality. He argued that denying our innate human instincts – be they aggressive urges or bodily desires – would only make us sick, claiming he could sniff out such decadent ideals. Decadence, in Nietzsche’s sense, is best understood as a form of “decayingness”, a degeneration into illness, something to which the nose is especially sensitive.
In Nicholas More’s analysis of Ecce Homo, he observes that “an advance in wisdom comes by new methods for Nietzsche, not by new concepts”. Metaphor seems to have been one such method. Nietzsche reaches for new language and his work is saturated in vivid, visceral descriptions of embodied experience. The same metaphors repeated over and over, especially when mistaken for truths become the concepts Nietzsche so lamented. They hem us in to the same philosophical territories, herd us down the same narrow paths. New metaphors take leaps, liberate our thinking, launch intellectual revolutions.
By inverting the sensory hierarchy, Nietzsche opens up a new way of thinking. He doesn’t merely assert the wisdom of smell, he demonstrates it in the sophistication of his ideas about metaphysics, mind/body dualism and morality. By revaluing the sense of smell, he revalues those realms of experience that are ambiguous, ephemeral, implicit, unconscious, that are not easily expressed in language, that are emotional, relational, and attuned to temporal flow and changing states rather than static objects, that are part of Becoming rather than Being. He isn’t simply using an olfactory metaphor to express his thinking. Nietzsche is thinking olfactorily. Therein may lie his genius.
Originally published in The Philosopher
“My genius lies in my nostrils”. So claims Nietzsche in his autobiography Ecce Homo, his last original book – a satirical survey of a life’s work. “I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies – smelling them out”, he writes. Nietzsche completed this book just weeks before his mental collapse in January 1889, leading many to dismiss its contents as the grandiose delusions of a man on the brink of madness. However, a sophisticated and extended treatment of this olfactory metaphor recurs through a number Nietzsche’s previous works and, I would argue, plays a central role in Nietzsche’s revaluation of values.
Adopting the lowliest and most animal of the senses as the source of his genius is characteristically subversive for Nietzsche. It stands in defiant opposition to Christianity’s denial of the body and rationalism’s discrediting of the senses. But is it mere literary flourish, a rhetorical device that gains provocative power by exploiting the deep connection between our sense of smell and feelings of moral disgust? Or is it possible that Nietzsche really was thinking olfactorily?
This notion would strike the majority of history’s most notable thinkers as, in a word, unthinkable. Our sense of smell is usually consigned to the very bottom of the sensory hierarchy: Aquinas was of the opinion that smell is the least cognitive of the senses. Condillac agreed, noting in his Treatise on the Sensations that “of all the senses smell is the one that seems to contribute least to the operations of the human mind”. Similarly, Kant thought of smell as “the most dispensible” of the senses, owing to the fact that it is “more a representation of enjoyment than of cognition”, and therefore more subjective than objective.
Olfactory historian, Annick Le Guérer points out that there are many explanations for this mistrust of smell, “but all of them converge on its animal nature”. Smell was dismissed by evolutionary theorists in the 19th century as a vestigial trait in humans, with Darwin remarking that it is “...of extremely slight service, if any, even to savages, in whom it is generally more highly developed than in the civilised races”. Freud concurred, considering this a consequence of our upright stance putting our noses at greater distance from the scent trails on the ground. The sublimation of smell was considered a crucial factor of civilisation. Correspondingly, a keen sense of smell was a sign of latent animality, psychopathy and perversion – a failure of the socializing process.
***
This sceptical position on the intellectual capacity of the smell sense is seen as early as Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato regards smell as only “half-formed”, ambiguous and vulgar. Because smells arise from substances in the process of change – intermediate states such as liquefaction, decomposition, and evaporation – instability is an originating condition of odours and they cannot conform to Plato’s notion of the ideal Forms. It also makes them difficult to name or classify. “The only clear distinction to be drawn here is twofold: the pleasant and the unpleasant” – the latter of which could “violently affect the whole of our bodily cavity”.
Instead, Plato favours the sense of sight. He considers it the worthiest and most important, and hence treats it separately to the other senses, which are instead a feature of our material being. Sight, in contrast, is closely connected to human intelligence and the soul, and the intellect is “the eye of the mind” for Plato. Since then, Western philosophers have largely followed suit. Thinking is a kind of seeing, and it seems so natural to speak in these terms that it hardly feels like a metaphor at all. However, metaphor it is, and is just one subset of “thinking as perceiving” – one of the most fundamental conceptual metaphors identified by linguistic philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
Traditionally, analytic philosophy views language as the primary vehicle of meaning, and metaphors are understood to hold meaning only insofar as they can be reduced to literal concepts that correspond to actual or objective state of affairs in the world. On this basis, and in light of the foregoing discussion of the supposed impoverishment of smell, “my genius is in my nostrils” could only be interpreted as absurd and incoherent.
In contrast, Lakoff and Johnson hold that all meaning – and therefore all language – arises from the embodied experiences of human brains in living human bodies interacting within a physical, social and cultural human environment. According to their Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the meaning of abstract concepts is only made possible by the fact that they borrow from and build on the very same neural structures that underpin the sensorimotor experiences of the body. On this account, metaphors are not symbolic nor do they simply express similarities between one thing and another. Rather, metaphors are “experiential correlations”. “Thinking” – the abstract domain – builds on “perceiving” – the concrete domain. There is no separate rational faculty that receives and makes sense of sensory inputs. “Reason” is not an entity or discrete function, but an activity of the human organism. All thinking is bodily; and the senses are themselves organs of thinking.
Smells tend to hint at something, the source of which needs to be sought out. You might have a sniff around if you’re suspicious. To get a whiff of, or be on the scent of something, is to have an intuition – to know, without quite knowing how you know. No doubt, Nietzsche had a nose – an instinct – for philosophy and in some ways the sense of smell seems especially apt to describe the process of the creative philosopher seeking out original ideas or the sceptical one sniffing out lies. If clarity is the ideal output of philosophy, isn’t obscurity the ideal input? A realisation is something that dawns on you, and you are enlightened when it comes into full view. But it is smell that alerts you to what you don’t know you don’t know. The philosopher seeking to uncover something hidden from view must surely use their nose.
Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s nostril proposition seems still to have a deeper core. He may have used olfactory metaphors extensively and forcibly, but he also had great reverence for the nose. The most explicit statement of this admiration can be found in his critique of reason in Twilight of the Idols. This excerpt is a clear defence of the value of our sense of smell and the intelligence of our embodied sensory experiences:
And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical concentrations that even elude a spectroscope. Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses – to the extent to which we sharpen them further, arm them, and have learned to think them through.
One of the key goals of Nietzsche’s project was to naturalise man – to reconcile him with his animality. To this end, he set out to rehabilitate the body and the senses, both unjustly vilified by a long tradition of philosophers, going back to Ancient Greece, and in so doing, he claims to be able to sniff out their lies. It is his discerning “flair” that scents out the lie of a metaphysics – that there is a “real” world distinct from the “apparent” world available to the senses.
In the section of Twilight of the Idols titled “On Reason in Philosophy”, Nietzsche accuses traditional philosophers of turning everything they touch into “concept mummies”. They take living things, real things, and suck the life out of them – turning bits of reality into inert concepts, and then treating concepts (the “mummies”) as real and the living thing as imperfect copies! The context for this accusation is Plato’s distinction between the real world of changeless Being and the unstable, inferior world of Becoming, which is available through the senses. By elevating Being over Becoming, Nietzsche claims that his opponents divorce ideas from their historical context and seek to view them, unchanging, from the perspective of the eternal. But, since Being – which is supposed to be universally and eternally true – remains outside their grasp, they cast blame on the senses for being deceptive, for offering mere appearance and for concealing the “real” world from them.
To Nietzsche, this reverence for Being entails a hatred of life and the living because it denies the reality of evolution and change. It is not the senses that lie, according to Nietzsche, but what reason makes of the testimony of our senses. “Insofar as the senses show Becoming, passing away and change, they do not lie”, Nietzsche claims. Rather, “‘Reason’ is what causes us to falsify the testimony of the senses”. From here, “the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence” emerges.
For Nietzsche, philosophers in thrall to this picture confuse the order of things: they cannot accept that their higher concepts – the Good, the Truth, the Perfect – grow out of the lower – the immoral body and the deceptive senses – so they assert that their higher concepts are causa sui – without cause. This, according to Nietzsche, is how they arrive at the idea of God – “that which is last, thinnest and emptiest is put first, as the cause”.
***
At the very heart of the distinction between Being and Becoming lies a striking contrast between the phenomenologies of sight and smell. Plato’s reverence for the visual is pitted against the genius in Nietzsche’s nostrils.
With eyes closed, we can imagine the world as a world of smells. This is a world of constant change and flux. It is not a world of “things” – at least not clearly boundaried “things” that stay where you left them. Rather, they are things-in-process – building up and breaking down, ripening and rotting, dispersing across space and through time. Nothing is fixed. Everything is permeable, a sea of intermingling processes. We too are a swirl of smells – in sickness and in health. We participate in the world as the world participates in us: we breathe the world in and commune with it. We know immediately and without hesitation if something is good or bad – for me. We perceive it to be so, rather than judge it to be so.
With eyes re-opened and re-engaged in sight, we might notice how everything stops. We can pay attention to stillness, to stasis. We may notice how reality becomes detemporalised and fixed. Things are things – solid, separate things, all laid out before us. We notice too how we recede from the scene and become separate to it. We look out onto the world and, as we survey it, it feels as though it really is our choice as to whether we participate in it or not.
In his seminal paper, “The Nobility of Sight”, Hans Jonas seeks out the properties that might qualify the sense of sight for the supreme philosophical honour afforded to it by Greek thinkers and beyond. He identifies three core characteristics that illustrate the peculiar phenomenology of sight, and starts to elucidate how it has come to shape some of the key ideas in Western philosophy, making clear how the “higher” arises from the “lower”, reason from vision.
The first characteristic is the simultaneity of visual experience. Sight takes in the whole visual field at once – it is surveyed in an instant. This simultaneity marks sight sharply from the other senses, which are all otherwise temporal. A single momentary visual snapshot can hold a wealth of information and tell a detailed and complex story. But to arrest the flow of any other sensory experience captures “not a snapshot but an atomic fragment of it, and strictly speaking nothing at all”.
“With sight”, Jonas points out, “all I have to do is open my eyes, and the world is there, as it was all the time”. Visual experience thus provides the basis upon which we are able to conceive of the eternal because, as Jonas says, it enables the beholder to “come to rest and possess an extended now”. This enables us to see all possible encounters ahead, and affords us a significant sense of freedom to select a number of possible intervening actions. No other sense is able to hold a “static present”. The visual world is an atemporal world; it has no flow.
The second characteristic Jonas identifies is dynamic neutralization. The external orientation of sight means that you can encounter something without having to be engaged with it directly (unless you choose to do so). This aspect of visual experience is what underpins the conceptual distinction between subject and object. Even more significant is that the visual image can be called up in imagination, enabling complete detachment from the original object. Jonas asserts that this “detachability of the image … is at the bottom of abstraction and therefore all free thought”.
However, Jonas identifies that this cleft between subject and object entails a corresponding loss. The absence of dynamism in the relation between subjects and objects obscures a clear sense of causality. To be in contact with an object, to touch it, already entails a change in the situation between me and the object. In the case of hearing, objects do not emit sounds by themselves; something has to happen. Smells and tastes produce an instant reaction. Vision, on the other hand, enables us to stand back from a situation and observe it, neutrally. The visual world is a world of represented objects, rather than causal processes.
The third characteristic Jonas identifies is distance. The fact that sight enables the apprehension of great distances has had a profound impact on how we think. The ability to survey over great distances gives us the ability to think ahead. Knowledge gained at great distance affords us the time to make the most advantageous choice. While simultaneity gives rise to the idea of the eternal, distance gives rise to the Greek idea of infinity.
Sight does not bring the distant near. Rather, what is “out there” remains in the distance. It is the only sense for which distance can be an advantage: the greater the distance the more comprehensive the visual survey. Distance further lends the visual experience the potential of “disinterested beholding”, as no sense is more outwardly focused – and therefore less aware of its own bodily origin – than vision. Jonas concludes, “the mind has gone where vision points”.
The very notion some higher faculty of reason that is able to see from the perspective of the eternal, that is objective and able to remain unaffected – actually arises from the very specific nature of our embodied visual experiences. Far on the other end of the spectrum, at the bottom of the hierarchy, lies the lowly sense of smell. It is said to lack the structure and order necessary to be cognitive, to be too ephemeral to represent a world independent of itself, and to provide nothing more than sensory enjoyment. These criticisms map neatly onto the three characteristics of vision outlined by Jonas:
1) Smell is not simultaneous; it is temporal;
2) Smell is not attuned to the identification of objects – it detects changing states and is therefore attuned to processes;
3) Smell experiences are intimate, inherently evaluative and often emotionally charged.
***
Smell is not impoverished, it’s different. It lies on the other end of the spectrum to vision but there is no good reason to assume the spectrum is a hierarchy. Reason is not a discrete function or entity; it is not some neutral, disembodied arbiter of what makes a particular sensory modality inferior or superior. Reason is an activity of the body-mind. Each of the senses gives us access to different aspects of reality. So, if one can think visually, then one can think olfactorily – even if it is difficult to capture in words, or typically happens outside of or conscious awareness.
Historian of the senses, Constance Classen asks us to consider “what different modes of consciousness are created by treating smell … as a fundamental way of knowing?” Taking Nietzsche’s claim that his genius lies in his nostrils, at face value, here are some possible answers:
1. Nietzsche had a nose for process metaphysics. Smell thinks by being sensitive to change – to change as a feature of the living world, in particular. Anthropologist and sensory researcher David Howes notes that the kinds of molecules we are particularly sensitive to are those that are associated with transitions and processes of the biological – ripening, rotting, flowering, fruiting, decomposition and decay. The living world available to the sense of smell is a world of Becoming – it is not a world of things, but a world of things-in-process.
2. To Nietzsche, the ‘nose’ stands in for the body as a whole, and smell reflects the deep connection between thought and the body. Smell thinks in a way that bridges the subject and object divide. With every breath we participate in our environment, and it participates in us. Once we start to see the world, and ourselves, as a set of intermingling and intersecting processes, it becomes quite arbitrary to separate the smell of a “thing” (a property that I experience) from smell as a “thing” (the object – the cloud of molecules that catches my breath, that ‘causes’ my experience of it).
3. Nietzsche nosed out the naturalistic foundations of morality. Smell thinks by instinctive evaluation, distinguishing good (for me) from bad (for me) based on the physiological needs of the living organism. Nietzsche was highly critical of 19th century Europe’s regressive culture and repressive morality. He argued that denying our innate human instincts – be they aggressive urges or bodily desires – would only make us sick, claiming he could sniff out such decadent ideals. Decadence, in Nietzsche’s sense, is best understood as a form of “decayingness”, a degeneration into illness, something to which the nose is especially sensitive.
In Nicholas More’s analysis of Ecce Homo, he observes that “an advance in wisdom comes by new methods for Nietzsche, not by new concepts”. Metaphor seems to have been one such method. Nietzsche reaches for new language and his work is saturated in vivid, visceral descriptions of embodied experience. The same metaphors repeated over and over, especially when mistaken for truths become the concepts Nietzsche so lamented. They hem us in to the same philosophical territories, herd us down the same narrow paths. New metaphors take leaps, liberate our thinking, launch intellectual revolutions.
By inverting the sensory hierarchy, Nietzsche opens up a new way of thinking. He doesn’t merely assert the wisdom of smell, he demonstrates it in the sophistication of his ideas about metaphysics, mind/body dualism and morality. By revaluing the sense of smell, he revalues those realms of experience that are ambiguous, ephemeral, implicit, unconscious, that are not easily expressed in language, that are emotional, relational, and attuned to temporal flow and changing states rather than static objects, that are part of Becoming rather than Being. He isn’t simply using an olfactory metaphor to express his thinking. Nietzsche is thinking olfactorily. Therein may lie his genius.
Originally published in The Philosopher
Keren Lucy Bester is a PhD researcher, creative strategist and scent explorer. Smelling Metaphysical Lies - the title of the project she's undertaking at the University of Dundee - is a work of Smellosophy: ask not what philosophy can tell you about smell, but what smell can tell you about philosophy. It is aimed at understanding our instincts, developing our intuitions, and revealing our dynamic, transcorporeal relationship with the world. Keren is also the founder of Chemical Poetry - a platform for philosophy and fragrance collaborations.
BY KEREN BESTER
“My genius lies in my nostrils”. So claims Nietzsche in his autobiography Ecce Homo, his last original book – a satirical survey of a life’s work. “I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies – smelling them out”, he writes. Nietzsche completed this book just weeks before his mental collapse in January 1889, leading many to dismiss its contents as the grandiose delusions of a man on the brink of madness. However, a sophisticated and extended treatment of this olfactory metaphor recurs through a number Nietzsche’s previous works and, I would argue, plays a central role in Nietzsche’s revaluation of values.
Adopting the lowliest and most animal of the senses as the source of his genius is characteristically subversive for Nietzsche. It stands in defiant opposition to Christianity’s denial of the body and rationalism’s discrediting of the senses. But is it mere literary flourish, a rhetorical device that gains provocative power by exploiting the deep connection between our sense of smell and feelings of moral disgust? Or is it possible that Nietzsche really was thinking olfactorily?
This notion would strike the majority of history’s most notable thinkers as, in a word, unthinkable. Our sense of smell is usually consigned to the very bottom of the sensory hierarchy: Aquinas was of the opinion that smell is the least cognitive of the senses. Condillac agreed, noting in his Treatise on the Sensations that “of all the senses smell is the one that seems to contribute least to the operations of the human mind”. Similarly, Kant thought of smell as “the most dispensible” of the senses, owing to the fact that it is “more a representation of enjoyment than of cognition”, and therefore more subjective than objective.
Olfactory historian, Annick Le Guérer points out that there are many explanations for this mistrust of smell, “but all of them converge on its animal nature”. Smell was dismissed by evolutionary theorists in the 19th century as a vestigial trait in humans, with Darwin remarking that it is “...of extremely slight service, if any, even to savages, in whom it is generally more highly developed than in the civilised races”. Freud concurred, considering this a consequence of our upright stance putting our noses at greater distance from the scent trails on the ground. The sublimation of smell was considered a crucial factor of civilisation. Correspondingly, a keen sense of smell was a sign of latent animality, psychopathy and perversion – a failure of the socializing process.
***
This sceptical position on the intellectual capacity of the smell sense is seen as early as Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato regards smell as only “half-formed”, ambiguous and vulgar. Because smells arise from substances in the process of change – intermediate states such as liquefaction, decomposition, and evaporation – instability is an originating condition of odours and they cannot conform to Plato’s notion of the ideal Forms. It also makes them difficult to name or classify. “The only clear distinction to be drawn here is twofold: the pleasant and the unpleasant” – the latter of which could “violently affect the whole of our bodily cavity”.
Instead, Plato favours the sense of sight. He considers it the worthiest and most important, and hence treats it separately to the other senses, which are instead a feature of our material being. Sight, in contrast, is closely connected to human intelligence and the soul, and the intellect is “the eye of the mind” for Plato. Since then, Western philosophers have largely followed suit. Thinking is a kind of seeing, and it seems so natural to speak in these terms that it hardly feels like a metaphor at all. However, metaphor it is, and is just one subset of “thinking as perceiving” – one of the most fundamental conceptual metaphors identified by linguistic philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
Traditionally, analytic philosophy views language as the primary vehicle of meaning, and metaphors are understood to hold meaning only insofar as they can be reduced to literal concepts that correspond to actual or objective state of affairs in the world. On this basis, and in light of the foregoing discussion of the supposed impoverishment of smell, “my genius is in my nostrils” could only be interpreted as absurd and incoherent.
In contrast, Lakoff and Johnson hold that all meaning – and therefore all language – arises from the embodied experiences of human brains in living human bodies interacting within a physical, social and cultural human environment. According to their Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the meaning of abstract concepts is only made possible by the fact that they borrow from and build on the very same neural structures that underpin the sensorimotor experiences of the body. On this account, metaphors are not symbolic nor do they simply express similarities between one thing and another. Rather, metaphors are “experiential correlations”. “Thinking” – the abstract domain – builds on “perceiving” – the concrete domain. There is no separate rational faculty that receives and makes sense of sensory inputs. “Reason” is not an entity or discrete function, but an activity of the human organism. All thinking is bodily; and the senses are themselves organs of thinking.
Smells tend to hint at something, the source of which needs to be sought out. You might have a sniff around if you’re suspicious. To get a whiff of, or be on the scent of something, is to have an intuition – to know, without quite knowing how you know. No doubt, Nietzsche had a nose – an instinct – for philosophy and in some ways the sense of smell seems especially apt to describe the process of the creative philosopher seeking out original ideas or the sceptical one sniffing out lies. If clarity is the ideal output of philosophy, isn’t obscurity the ideal input? A realisation is something that dawns on you, and you are enlightened when it comes into full view. But it is smell that alerts you to what you don’t know you don’t know. The philosopher seeking to uncover something hidden from view must surely use their nose.
Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s nostril proposition seems still to have a deeper core. He may have used olfactory metaphors extensively and forcibly, but he also had great reverence for the nose. The most explicit statement of this admiration can be found in his critique of reason in Twilight of the Idols. This excerpt is a clear defence of the value of our sense of smell and the intelligence of our embodied sensory experiences:
And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical concentrations that even elude a spectroscope. Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses – to the extent to which we sharpen them further, arm them, and have learned to think them through.
One of the key goals of Nietzsche’s project was to naturalise man – to reconcile him with his animality. To this end, he set out to rehabilitate the body and the senses, both unjustly vilified by a long tradition of philosophers, going back to Ancient Greece, and in so doing, he claims to be able to sniff out their lies. It is his discerning “flair” that scents out the lie of a metaphysics – that there is a “real” world distinct from the “apparent” world available to the senses.
In the section of Twilight of the Idols titled “On Reason in Philosophy”, Nietzsche accuses traditional philosophers of turning everything they touch into “concept mummies”. They take living things, real things, and suck the life out of them – turning bits of reality into inert concepts, and then treating concepts (the “mummies”) as real and the living thing as imperfect copies! The context for this accusation is Plato’s distinction between the real world of changeless Being and the unstable, inferior world of Becoming, which is available through the senses. By elevating Being over Becoming, Nietzsche claims that his opponents divorce ideas from their historical context and seek to view them, unchanging, from the perspective of the eternal. But, since Being – which is supposed to be universally and eternally true – remains outside their grasp, they cast blame on the senses for being deceptive, for offering mere appearance and for concealing the “real” world from them.
To Nietzsche, this reverence for Being entails a hatred of life and the living because it denies the reality of evolution and change. It is not the senses that lie, according to Nietzsche, but what reason makes of the testimony of our senses. “Insofar as the senses show Becoming, passing away and change, they do not lie”, Nietzsche claims. Rather, “‘Reason’ is what causes us to falsify the testimony of the senses”. From here, “the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence” emerges.
For Nietzsche, philosophers in thrall to this picture confuse the order of things: they cannot accept that their higher concepts – the Good, the Truth, the Perfect – grow out of the lower – the immoral body and the deceptive senses – so they assert that their higher concepts are causa sui – without cause. This, according to Nietzsche, is how they arrive at the idea of God – “that which is last, thinnest and emptiest is put first, as the cause”.
***
At the very heart of the distinction between Being and Becoming lies a striking contrast between the phenomenologies of sight and smell. Plato’s reverence for the visual is pitted against the genius in Nietzsche’s nostrils.
With eyes closed, we can imagine the world as a world of smells. This is a world of constant change and flux. It is not a world of “things” – at least not clearly boundaried “things” that stay where you left them. Rather, they are things-in-process – building up and breaking down, ripening and rotting, dispersing across space and through time. Nothing is fixed. Everything is permeable, a sea of intermingling processes. We too are a swirl of smells – in sickness and in health. We participate in the world as the world participates in us: we breathe the world in and commune with it. We know immediately and without hesitation if something is good or bad – for me. We perceive it to be so, rather than judge it to be so.
With eyes re-opened and re-engaged in sight, we might notice how everything stops. We can pay attention to stillness, to stasis. We may notice how reality becomes detemporalised and fixed. Things are things – solid, separate things, all laid out before us. We notice too how we recede from the scene and become separate to it. We look out onto the world and, as we survey it, it feels as though it really is our choice as to whether we participate in it or not.
In his seminal paper, “The Nobility of Sight”, Hans Jonas seeks out the properties that might qualify the sense of sight for the supreme philosophical honour afforded to it by Greek thinkers and beyond. He identifies three core characteristics that illustrate the peculiar phenomenology of sight, and starts to elucidate how it has come to shape some of the key ideas in Western philosophy, making clear how the “higher” arises from the “lower”, reason from vision.
The first characteristic is the simultaneity of visual experience. Sight takes in the whole visual field at once – it is surveyed in an instant. This simultaneity marks sight sharply from the other senses, which are all otherwise temporal. A single momentary visual snapshot can hold a wealth of information and tell a detailed and complex story. But to arrest the flow of any other sensory experience captures “not a snapshot but an atomic fragment of it, and strictly speaking nothing at all”.
“With sight”, Jonas points out, “all I have to do is open my eyes, and the world is there, as it was all the time”. Visual experience thus provides the basis upon which we are able to conceive of the eternal because, as Jonas says, it enables the beholder to “come to rest and possess an extended now”. This enables us to see all possible encounters ahead, and affords us a significant sense of freedom to select a number of possible intervening actions. No other sense is able to hold a “static present”. The visual world is an atemporal world; it has no flow.
The second characteristic Jonas identifies is dynamic neutralization. The external orientation of sight means that you can encounter something without having to be engaged with it directly (unless you choose to do so). This aspect of visual experience is what underpins the conceptual distinction between subject and object. Even more significant is that the visual image can be called up in imagination, enabling complete detachment from the original object. Jonas asserts that this “detachability of the image … is at the bottom of abstraction and therefore all free thought”.
However, Jonas identifies that this cleft between subject and object entails a corresponding loss. The absence of dynamism in the relation between subjects and objects obscures a clear sense of causality. To be in contact with an object, to touch it, already entails a change in the situation between me and the object. In the case of hearing, objects do not emit sounds by themselves; something has to happen. Smells and tastes produce an instant reaction. Vision, on the other hand, enables us to stand back from a situation and observe it, neutrally. The visual world is a world of represented objects, rather than causal processes.
The third characteristic Jonas identifies is distance. The fact that sight enables the apprehension of great distances has had a profound impact on how we think. The ability to survey over great distances gives us the ability to think ahead. Knowledge gained at great distance affords us the time to make the most advantageous choice. While simultaneity gives rise to the idea of the eternal, distance gives rise to the Greek idea of infinity.
Sight does not bring the distant near. Rather, what is “out there” remains in the distance. It is the only sense for which distance can be an advantage: the greater the distance the more comprehensive the visual survey. Distance further lends the visual experience the potential of “disinterested beholding”, as no sense is more outwardly focused – and therefore less aware of its own bodily origin – than vision. Jonas concludes, “the mind has gone where vision points”.
The very notion some higher faculty of reason that is able to see from the perspective of the eternal, that is objective and able to remain unaffected – actually arises from the very specific nature of our embodied visual experiences. Far on the other end of the spectrum, at the bottom of the hierarchy, lies the lowly sense of smell. It is said to lack the structure and order necessary to be cognitive, to be too ephemeral to represent a world independent of itself, and to provide nothing more than sensory enjoyment. These criticisms map neatly onto the three characteristics of vision outlined by Jonas:
1) Smell is not simultaneous; it is temporal;
2) Smell is not attuned to the identification of objects – it detects changing states and is therefore attuned to processes;
3) Smell experiences are intimate, inherently evaluative and often emotionally charged.
***
Smell is not impoverished, it’s different. It lies on the other end of the spectrum to vision but there is no good reason to assume the spectrum is a hierarchy. Reason is not a discrete function or entity; it is not some neutral, disembodied arbiter of what makes a particular sensory modality inferior or superior. Reason is an activity of the body-mind. Each of the senses gives us access to different aspects of reality. So, if one can think visually, then one can think olfactorily – even if it is difficult to capture in words, or typically happens outside of or conscious awareness.
Historian of the senses, Constance Classen asks us to consider “what different modes of consciousness are created by treating smell … as a fundamental way of knowing?” Taking Nietzsche’s claim that his genius lies in his nostrils, at face value, here are some possible answers:
1. Nietzsche had a nose for process metaphysics. Smell thinks by being sensitive to change – to change as a feature of the living world, in particular. Anthropologist and sensory researcher David Howes notes that the kinds of molecules we are particularly sensitive to are those that are associated with transitions and processes of the biological – ripening, rotting, flowering, fruiting, decomposition and decay. The living world available to the sense of smell is a world of Becoming – it is not a world of things, but a world of things-in-process.
2. To Nietzsche, the ‘nose’ stands in for the body as a whole, and smell reflects the deep connection between thought and the body. Smell thinks in a way that bridges the subject and object divide. With every breath we participate in our environment, and it participates in us. Once we start to see the world, and ourselves, as a set of intermingling and intersecting processes, it becomes quite arbitrary to separate the smell of a “thing” (a property that I experience) from smell as a “thing” (the object – the cloud of molecules that catches my breath, that ‘causes’ my experience of it).
3. Nietzsche nosed out the naturalistic foundations of morality. Smell thinks by instinctive evaluation, distinguishing good (for me) from bad (for me) based on the physiological needs of the living organism. Nietzsche was highly critical of 19th century Europe’s regressive culture and repressive morality. He argued that denying our innate human instincts – be they aggressive urges or bodily desires – would only make us sick, claiming he could sniff out such decadent ideals. Decadence, in Nietzsche’s sense, is best understood as a form of “decayingness”, a degeneration into illness, something to which the nose is especially sensitive.
In Nicholas More’s analysis of Ecce Homo, he observes that “an advance in wisdom comes by new methods for Nietzsche, not by new concepts”. Metaphor seems to have been one such method. Nietzsche reaches for new language and his work is saturated in vivid, visceral descriptions of embodied experience. The same metaphors repeated over and over, especially when mistaken for truths become the concepts Nietzsche so lamented. They hem us in to the same philosophical territories, herd us down the same narrow paths. New metaphors take leaps, liberate our thinking, launch intellectual revolutions.
By inverting the sensory hierarchy, Nietzsche opens up a new way of thinking. He doesn’t merely assert the wisdom of smell, he demonstrates it in the sophistication of his ideas about metaphysics, mind/body dualism and morality. By revaluing the sense of smell, he revalues those realms of experience that are ambiguous, ephemeral, implicit, unconscious, that are not easily expressed in language, that are emotional, relational, and attuned to temporal flow and changing states rather than static objects, that are part of Becoming rather than Being. He isn’t simply using an olfactory metaphor to express his thinking. Nietzsche is thinking olfactorily. Therein may lie his genius.
Originally published in The Philosopher
“My genius lies in my nostrils”. So claims Nietzsche in his autobiography Ecce Homo, his last original book – a satirical survey of a life’s work. “I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies – smelling them out”, he writes. Nietzsche completed this book just weeks before his mental collapse in January 1889, leading many to dismiss its contents as the grandiose delusions of a man on the brink of madness. However, a sophisticated and extended treatment of this olfactory metaphor recurs through a number Nietzsche’s previous works and, I would argue, plays a central role in Nietzsche’s revaluation of values.
Adopting the lowliest and most animal of the senses as the source of his genius is characteristically subversive for Nietzsche. It stands in defiant opposition to Christianity’s denial of the body and rationalism’s discrediting of the senses. But is it mere literary flourish, a rhetorical device that gains provocative power by exploiting the deep connection between our sense of smell and feelings of moral disgust? Or is it possible that Nietzsche really was thinking olfactorily?
This notion would strike the majority of history’s most notable thinkers as, in a word, unthinkable. Our sense of smell is usually consigned to the very bottom of the sensory hierarchy: Aquinas was of the opinion that smell is the least cognitive of the senses. Condillac agreed, noting in his Treatise on the Sensations that “of all the senses smell is the one that seems to contribute least to the operations of the human mind”. Similarly, Kant thought of smell as “the most dispensible” of the senses, owing to the fact that it is “more a representation of enjoyment than of cognition”, and therefore more subjective than objective.
Olfactory historian, Annick Le Guérer points out that there are many explanations for this mistrust of smell, “but all of them converge on its animal nature”. Smell was dismissed by evolutionary theorists in the 19th century as a vestigial trait in humans, with Darwin remarking that it is “...of extremely slight service, if any, even to savages, in whom it is generally more highly developed than in the civilised races”. Freud concurred, considering this a consequence of our upright stance putting our noses at greater distance from the scent trails on the ground. The sublimation of smell was considered a crucial factor of civilisation. Correspondingly, a keen sense of smell was a sign of latent animality, psychopathy and perversion – a failure of the socializing process.
***
This sceptical position on the intellectual capacity of the smell sense is seen as early as Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato regards smell as only “half-formed”, ambiguous and vulgar. Because smells arise from substances in the process of change – intermediate states such as liquefaction, decomposition, and evaporation – instability is an originating condition of odours and they cannot conform to Plato’s notion of the ideal Forms. It also makes them difficult to name or classify. “The only clear distinction to be drawn here is twofold: the pleasant and the unpleasant” – the latter of which could “violently affect the whole of our bodily cavity”.
Instead, Plato favours the sense of sight. He considers it the worthiest and most important, and hence treats it separately to the other senses, which are instead a feature of our material being. Sight, in contrast, is closely connected to human intelligence and the soul, and the intellect is “the eye of the mind” for Plato. Since then, Western philosophers have largely followed suit. Thinking is a kind of seeing, and it seems so natural to speak in these terms that it hardly feels like a metaphor at all. However, metaphor it is, and is just one subset of “thinking as perceiving” – one of the most fundamental conceptual metaphors identified by linguistic philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
Traditionally, analytic philosophy views language as the primary vehicle of meaning, and metaphors are understood to hold meaning only insofar as they can be reduced to literal concepts that correspond to actual or objective state of affairs in the world. On this basis, and in light of the foregoing discussion of the supposed impoverishment of smell, “my genius is in my nostrils” could only be interpreted as absurd and incoherent.
In contrast, Lakoff and Johnson hold that all meaning – and therefore all language – arises from the embodied experiences of human brains in living human bodies interacting within a physical, social and cultural human environment. According to their Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the meaning of abstract concepts is only made possible by the fact that they borrow from and build on the very same neural structures that underpin the sensorimotor experiences of the body. On this account, metaphors are not symbolic nor do they simply express similarities between one thing and another. Rather, metaphors are “experiential correlations”. “Thinking” – the abstract domain – builds on “perceiving” – the concrete domain. There is no separate rational faculty that receives and makes sense of sensory inputs. “Reason” is not an entity or discrete function, but an activity of the human organism. All thinking is bodily; and the senses are themselves organs of thinking.
Smells tend to hint at something, the source of which needs to be sought out. You might have a sniff around if you’re suspicious. To get a whiff of, or be on the scent of something, is to have an intuition – to know, without quite knowing how you know. No doubt, Nietzsche had a nose – an instinct – for philosophy and in some ways the sense of smell seems especially apt to describe the process of the creative philosopher seeking out original ideas or the sceptical one sniffing out lies. If clarity is the ideal output of philosophy, isn’t obscurity the ideal input? A realisation is something that dawns on you, and you are enlightened when it comes into full view. But it is smell that alerts you to what you don’t know you don’t know. The philosopher seeking to uncover something hidden from view must surely use their nose.
Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s nostril proposition seems still to have a deeper core. He may have used olfactory metaphors extensively and forcibly, but he also had great reverence for the nose. The most explicit statement of this admiration can be found in his critique of reason in Twilight of the Idols. This excerpt is a clear defence of the value of our sense of smell and the intelligence of our embodied sensory experiences:
And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical concentrations that even elude a spectroscope. Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses – to the extent to which we sharpen them further, arm them, and have learned to think them through.
One of the key goals of Nietzsche’s project was to naturalise man – to reconcile him with his animality. To this end, he set out to rehabilitate the body and the senses, both unjustly vilified by a long tradition of philosophers, going back to Ancient Greece, and in so doing, he claims to be able to sniff out their lies. It is his discerning “flair” that scents out the lie of a metaphysics – that there is a “real” world distinct from the “apparent” world available to the senses.
In the section of Twilight of the Idols titled “On Reason in Philosophy”, Nietzsche accuses traditional philosophers of turning everything they touch into “concept mummies”. They take living things, real things, and suck the life out of them – turning bits of reality into inert concepts, and then treating concepts (the “mummies”) as real and the living thing as imperfect copies! The context for this accusation is Plato’s distinction between the real world of changeless Being and the unstable, inferior world of Becoming, which is available through the senses. By elevating Being over Becoming, Nietzsche claims that his opponents divorce ideas from their historical context and seek to view them, unchanging, from the perspective of the eternal. But, since Being – which is supposed to be universally and eternally true – remains outside their grasp, they cast blame on the senses for being deceptive, for offering mere appearance and for concealing the “real” world from them.
To Nietzsche, this reverence for Being entails a hatred of life and the living because it denies the reality of evolution and change. It is not the senses that lie, according to Nietzsche, but what reason makes of the testimony of our senses. “Insofar as the senses show Becoming, passing away and change, they do not lie”, Nietzsche claims. Rather, “‘Reason’ is what causes us to falsify the testimony of the senses”. From here, “the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence” emerges.
For Nietzsche, philosophers in thrall to this picture confuse the order of things: they cannot accept that their higher concepts – the Good, the Truth, the Perfect – grow out of the lower – the immoral body and the deceptive senses – so they assert that their higher concepts are causa sui – without cause. This, according to Nietzsche, is how they arrive at the idea of God – “that which is last, thinnest and emptiest is put first, as the cause”.
***
At the very heart of the distinction between Being and Becoming lies a striking contrast between the phenomenologies of sight and smell. Plato’s reverence for the visual is pitted against the genius in Nietzsche’s nostrils.
With eyes closed, we can imagine the world as a world of smells. This is a world of constant change and flux. It is not a world of “things” – at least not clearly boundaried “things” that stay where you left them. Rather, they are things-in-process – building up and breaking down, ripening and rotting, dispersing across space and through time. Nothing is fixed. Everything is permeable, a sea of intermingling processes. We too are a swirl of smells – in sickness and in health. We participate in the world as the world participates in us: we breathe the world in and commune with it. We know immediately and without hesitation if something is good or bad – for me. We perceive it to be so, rather than judge it to be so.
With eyes re-opened and re-engaged in sight, we might notice how everything stops. We can pay attention to stillness, to stasis. We may notice how reality becomes detemporalised and fixed. Things are things – solid, separate things, all laid out before us. We notice too how we recede from the scene and become separate to it. We look out onto the world and, as we survey it, it feels as though it really is our choice as to whether we participate in it or not.
In his seminal paper, “The Nobility of Sight”, Hans Jonas seeks out the properties that might qualify the sense of sight for the supreme philosophical honour afforded to it by Greek thinkers and beyond. He identifies three core characteristics that illustrate the peculiar phenomenology of sight, and starts to elucidate how it has come to shape some of the key ideas in Western philosophy, making clear how the “higher” arises from the “lower”, reason from vision.
The first characteristic is the simultaneity of visual experience. Sight takes in the whole visual field at once – it is surveyed in an instant. This simultaneity marks sight sharply from the other senses, which are all otherwise temporal. A single momentary visual snapshot can hold a wealth of information and tell a detailed and complex story. But to arrest the flow of any other sensory experience captures “not a snapshot but an atomic fragment of it, and strictly speaking nothing at all”.
“With sight”, Jonas points out, “all I have to do is open my eyes, and the world is there, as it was all the time”. Visual experience thus provides the basis upon which we are able to conceive of the eternal because, as Jonas says, it enables the beholder to “come to rest and possess an extended now”. This enables us to see all possible encounters ahead, and affords us a significant sense of freedom to select a number of possible intervening actions. No other sense is able to hold a “static present”. The visual world is an atemporal world; it has no flow.
The second characteristic Jonas identifies is dynamic neutralization. The external orientation of sight means that you can encounter something without having to be engaged with it directly (unless you choose to do so). This aspect of visual experience is what underpins the conceptual distinction between subject and object. Even more significant is that the visual image can be called up in imagination, enabling complete detachment from the original object. Jonas asserts that this “detachability of the image … is at the bottom of abstraction and therefore all free thought”.
However, Jonas identifies that this cleft between subject and object entails a corresponding loss. The absence of dynamism in the relation between subjects and objects obscures a clear sense of causality. To be in contact with an object, to touch it, already entails a change in the situation between me and the object. In the case of hearing, objects do not emit sounds by themselves; something has to happen. Smells and tastes produce an instant reaction. Vision, on the other hand, enables us to stand back from a situation and observe it, neutrally. The visual world is a world of represented objects, rather than causal processes.
The third characteristic Jonas identifies is distance. The fact that sight enables the apprehension of great distances has had a profound impact on how we think. The ability to survey over great distances gives us the ability to think ahead. Knowledge gained at great distance affords us the time to make the most advantageous choice. While simultaneity gives rise to the idea of the eternal, distance gives rise to the Greek idea of infinity.
Sight does not bring the distant near. Rather, what is “out there” remains in the distance. It is the only sense for which distance can be an advantage: the greater the distance the more comprehensive the visual survey. Distance further lends the visual experience the potential of “disinterested beholding”, as no sense is more outwardly focused – and therefore less aware of its own bodily origin – than vision. Jonas concludes, “the mind has gone where vision points”.
The very notion some higher faculty of reason that is able to see from the perspective of the eternal, that is objective and able to remain unaffected – actually arises from the very specific nature of our embodied visual experiences. Far on the other end of the spectrum, at the bottom of the hierarchy, lies the lowly sense of smell. It is said to lack the structure and order necessary to be cognitive, to be too ephemeral to represent a world independent of itself, and to provide nothing more than sensory enjoyment. These criticisms map neatly onto the three characteristics of vision outlined by Jonas:
1) Smell is not simultaneous; it is temporal;
2) Smell is not attuned to the identification of objects – it detects changing states and is therefore attuned to processes;
3) Smell experiences are intimate, inherently evaluative and often emotionally charged.
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Smell is not impoverished, it’s different. It lies on the other end of the spectrum to vision but there is no good reason to assume the spectrum is a hierarchy. Reason is not a discrete function or entity; it is not some neutral, disembodied arbiter of what makes a particular sensory modality inferior or superior. Reason is an activity of the body-mind. Each of the senses gives us access to different aspects of reality. So, if one can think visually, then one can think olfactorily – even if it is difficult to capture in words, or typically happens outside of or conscious awareness.
Historian of the senses, Constance Classen asks us to consider “what different modes of consciousness are created by treating smell … as a fundamental way of knowing?” Taking Nietzsche’s claim that his genius lies in his nostrils, at face value, here are some possible answers:
1. Nietzsche had a nose for process metaphysics. Smell thinks by being sensitive to change – to change as a feature of the living world, in particular. Anthropologist and sensory researcher David Howes notes that the kinds of molecules we are particularly sensitive to are those that are associated with transitions and processes of the biological – ripening, rotting, flowering, fruiting, decomposition and decay. The living world available to the sense of smell is a world of Becoming – it is not a world of things, but a world of things-in-process.
2. To Nietzsche, the ‘nose’ stands in for the body as a whole, and smell reflects the deep connection between thought and the body. Smell thinks in a way that bridges the subject and object divide. With every breath we participate in our environment, and it participates in us. Once we start to see the world, and ourselves, as a set of intermingling and intersecting processes, it becomes quite arbitrary to separate the smell of a “thing” (a property that I experience) from smell as a “thing” (the object – the cloud of molecules that catches my breath, that ‘causes’ my experience of it).
3. Nietzsche nosed out the naturalistic foundations of morality. Smell thinks by instinctive evaluation, distinguishing good (for me) from bad (for me) based on the physiological needs of the living organism. Nietzsche was highly critical of 19th century Europe’s regressive culture and repressive morality. He argued that denying our innate human instincts – be they aggressive urges or bodily desires – would only make us sick, claiming he could sniff out such decadent ideals. Decadence, in Nietzsche’s sense, is best understood as a form of “decayingness”, a degeneration into illness, something to which the nose is especially sensitive.
In Nicholas More’s analysis of Ecce Homo, he observes that “an advance in wisdom comes by new methods for Nietzsche, not by new concepts”. Metaphor seems to have been one such method. Nietzsche reaches for new language and his work is saturated in vivid, visceral descriptions of embodied experience. The same metaphors repeated over and over, especially when mistaken for truths become the concepts Nietzsche so lamented. They hem us in to the same philosophical territories, herd us down the same narrow paths. New metaphors take leaps, liberate our thinking, launch intellectual revolutions.
By inverting the sensory hierarchy, Nietzsche opens up a new way of thinking. He doesn’t merely assert the wisdom of smell, he demonstrates it in the sophistication of his ideas about metaphysics, mind/body dualism and morality. By revaluing the sense of smell, he revalues those realms of experience that are ambiguous, ephemeral, implicit, unconscious, that are not easily expressed in language, that are emotional, relational, and attuned to temporal flow and changing states rather than static objects, that are part of Becoming rather than Being. He isn’t simply using an olfactory metaphor to express his thinking. Nietzsche is thinking olfactorily. Therein may lie his genius.
Originally published in The Philosopher
Keren Lucy Bester is a PhD researcher, creative strategist and scent explorer. Smelling Metaphysical Lies - the title of the project she's undertaking at the University of Dundee - is a work of Smellosophy: ask not what philosophy can tell you about smell, but what smell can tell you about philosophy. It is aimed at understanding our instincts, developing our intuitions, and revealing our dynamic, transcorporeal relationship with the world. Keren is also the founder of Chemical Poetry - a platform for philosophy and fragrance collaborations.