How Many Senses Do We Have?

Sometimes I wonder what I actually learned during my philosophy studies in Heidelberg (and yes, perhaps I should have attended more of the Spinoza and Bergson seminars).

In all the discussions about perception and consciousness, we always addressed the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. These, we learn in enlightened philosophy, are all we have. When I then learned in a seminar that proprioception, the inwardly directed perception of the body, might be a sixth sense, it was considered a revolution.

In theory, these senses are conceived as extending from consciousness to the point where the outer boundaries of the body interact with the world:
– Sound waves strike the eardrum
– Odor substances the nasal mucous membranes
– Taste substances the tongue
– The sense of touch objects
– Light the retina

About what lies beyond the body’s interfaces in the outer world, the world in itself, we can say nothing other than what is made available to us through the senses (Descartes). It is constructed (Kant), bracketed out in an epoché (Husserl), beyond language (Wittgenstein), falsifiable (Popper), structure (Saussure), etc….

Language

Supposedly, in cultural evolution, we have extended those five senses, reduced to something banal: with glasses and microscopes or telescopes, with robotic exoskeletons or microphones and loudspeakers (I am thinking of Marshall McLuhan).

Within consciousness, then, there is a supplier of data (the senses), which consciousness unites to produce an inward image, a likeness of the outer world. These likenesses of the outer world are given to an I of whatever kind. At the very least, this is a self-referential structure (“The: I think, must be able to accompany all my representations“, Kant)

Within consciousness itself, we can then make finer distinctions: How are the contents of consciousness composed, what is recollection and expectation, dream and insight. How are contents of consciousness assigned to language, and which consciousness correlates with which sentences, and when can we then speak of true sentences and when of false ones? There you can finally penetrate deeply into language, or phenomenology, or the neurosciences, etc…

Back to the beginning

I would like to start again with the five senses, because something has gone wrong here, and thinking then goes in the wrong direction too.

The Upanishads are much clearer about this. Here they speak of 11 senses: 5 senses of knowledge—nose, tongue, eyes, ears, skin—and 5 senses of action—hands, feet, anus, sexual organ, speaking—and the eleventh sense, knowledge, which then brings everything together.

Here the senses are not already conceived as a skeptical worst-case catastrophe (as a brain in an aquarium deceptively fed five types of sensory information; I am thinking of Descartes here), but as the real points of contact between our body and the world.

That is an entirely different starting point for describing the world. The body is taken seriously here; it is in the world, interacts with it, through at least 11 points of contact. Knowledge is knowledge of being in the world, of one’s own body and the possibility of acting and knowing, but also knowledge of a greater consciousness. The problem of dualism in Western philosophy following Descartes is stretched here, pulled apart, made clearer. It loosens, does not dissolve, but is transformed, fluid, flowing into one another (intermiscence).

Between the extremities and sense organs and thinking itself is the body. The body is conceived not only materially but biologically, as a living body that has a life force (I am thinking of Bergson here). We cannot really deny this either; we experience it all the time. It has its origin in Purusha – the world soul, pure consciousness (Chit). Purusha is the starting point of everything.

Opposed to Purusha is Prakriti. Nature in its primordial matter, endowed with three qualities: inertia (matter?), energy and harmony. And it would really be too simple to open up such a schema; Purusha and Prakriti are two sides of Shiva….

In the Upanishads there is an incredibly complex system of 7 levels:

1. Matter
2. Life
3. Mind
4. Knowledge (Vijnana)
5. Bliss (Ananda)
6. Pure consciousness (Chit)
7. Pure existence (Sat)

And that is only the beginning. Why do we think so banally in the West, purely within the duality of mind and matter?

Who thinks in thinking?

Things become really interesting in Aurobindo’s commentaries on the Kena Upanishad (Vol 18 Upanishads-II : Kena and Other Upanishads) and the commentaries in the Hymns to the Mystic Fire (Vol 16).

More about this later, behind the concept of Intermiscence (flowing into one another).

p.s. Can it really be that in Western philosophy, for centuries or even millennia, the sexual organs were not included as senses?