Senses and the inside

Ong explores how the various senses handle the distinction between inside and outside. Sight “presents surfaces,” depending on reflected light. We can see inside a body only by opening it up. Sight of an interior has to be invasive, surgical; that invasion can be healthy, but it often has the effect of stripping or violation or rape.

Smell, he says, deals in “presences and absences,” and hence it tied to memory and to “the attractiveness (especially sexual) or repulsiveness of bodies which one is near or which one is seeking.” It is a “come-or-go signal.” Taste discriminates between “agreeable or disagreeable” for the body or the mind. Here Ong misses an opportunity to expand on the observation that smell and taste breach the divide of interior and exterior by accepting the outside in. We smell and taste only by interiorizing the exterior. Taste is normally part of incorporation; we don’t lick most foods, but chew or drink and swallow. Taste doesn’t necessary break into the interiority of the thing tasted, but it typically does. Smell is similarly receptive, but it also catches whiffs of what is coming from within another body (bad breath, body odor, etc). So there is often access to another’s interior through smell and taste.

Touch gives us some sense of interior and exterior. We feel ourselves inside our skin, and we can feel things going on within our bodies, and we feel that the world is “outside” us.” But actually to touch the interior of another, we have to invade. Touch is analogous to sight in its access to the interior of another.

Ong things that sound is different from all the other senses in this regard. His comments are illuminating, though I would say that smell and taste share some features with sound:

“Sound . . . reveals the interior without the necessity of physical invasion. Thus we tap a wall to discover where it is hollow inside, or we rink a silver-colored coil to discover whether it is perhaps lead inside. To discover such things by sight, we should have to open what we examine, making the inside an outside, destroying its interiority as such. Sound reveals interiors because its nature is determined by interior relationships. The sound of a violin is determined by the interior structure of its strings, of its bridge, and of the wood in its soundboard, by the shape of the interior cavity in the body of the violin, and other interior conditions. Filled with concrete or water, the violin would sound different.”

Sound, thus, is a preeminently personal sense. We can gaze at other persons without knowing much of anything about them; so too with touch. Smells and tastes reveal more about the physical interior, but not much about the soul. Sound is the sense by which we perceive and receive other persons. Personal relations are thus built on revelation.