Rée, Jonathan. I See a Voice.
Rée, Jonathan. I See a Voice: Deafness, Language and the Senses–A Philosophical History. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1999. Print.
In the twentieth century, meditations on the voice were hitched to another popular theme: the fate of "modernity" or the "Western world', and its relation of art, science and bodily experience. The philosopher of history Oswald Spengler spent the period following the first World War announcing a catastrophic 'decline of the West' and tracing tragedy to the historic defeat, thousands of years before, of an auditory culture attuned to the life giving voice, and the victory of an ocular civilization focused n an impersonal external world. (4)
Voices thus encode an intriguing human tension, even a contradiction: they are both expression and communication, both feeling and intellect, both body and mind, both nature and culture. The whole of use, it would seem, is included in the compass of the human voice. (16)
You cannot collect and keep a beloved sound, as you can a letter or a flower or a lock of hair. You may have a recording of it of course – a recording on a wax cylinder or magnetic tape, or, if you lac these technical facilities, directly in your heart (the word recording literally means learning by heart, after all). But recording is not the same as preservation: it is a technique for generating copies of an original, rather than maintaining it in existence. Recording is a tehnique of mimicry, imitation, or reproduction...It is a peculiarity of sounds, it seems, that they cannot be conserved, but only recorded and reproduced. (23)
Sonus lucis simia: sound is light's ape or monkey. That was the motto of the ingenius German Jesuit Anthanasius Kircher, author of a bulky treatise on music published in 1650. Sound was the earthly counterpart to heavenly light, a ponderous and imperfect translation of it, a fleshly analogue for its spiritual purity – a point which Kircher illustrated in a practical way by developing a 'hearing lens' or 'speaing trumpet' which made distant sounds seem close, just as a telescope does with distant sights. And if sound corresponded to light, it was reasonable to suppose that different tones corresponded to different colors. Furthermore, since musical harmony was already the topic of a well-established branch of mathematica, it should not be difficult to work out a mathematical basis for the higher harmonies of light, and even to base a new, visual music on them. (26)
Newton 1669 - harmonies of colors lectures. establishes roy g biv (27)
In other words, light and its sources are not, as a rule, the objects that you see: you look at the things light makes visible, rather than at the light itself. But the grammar of hearing is quite different: the objects which concern your hearing are always either sounds or sources of sound. (43)
[Rousseau] admitted that hearing might be lazy, inert, and beyond our voluntary control; but he pointed out that it had a unique advantage over all other bodily senses, since it alone was paired with an "active organ" "We have an organ which corresponds to hearing, namely, that of the voice," he said. (He was in fact taking his cue from Buffon, who argued in his Natural History than an animal's sense of hearing is a 'passive property', whereas the human faculty of hearing 'becomes active through the organ of speech.) The pivotal position of vocalization in the experience of sounds meant that in their case active production and passive reception grew up in the closest possible connection: the voice was educated through hearing, and hearing through the voice. "We have no such thing corresponding to vision,' Rousseau observed, because 'we cannot give forth colours as we can sounds." [from Emile] (55)
[Hegel] decided to raise these instinctive insights to the level of a science of the bodily action of the soul, or what he called psychic physiology. The task of this science would be to explain how inward sensations become objectified within the 'circle of coporeity' and for this purpose it was necessary to interpret the human body not as a biological organism, but as the 'systematic embodying of what is spiritual" (59)
...[Herder] argued that the origins of human vocalizing could be traced to an instinct that we share with apes; a drive to play with the affinities of sounds and imitate them with out voices, as thoughlessly as birds calling to each other, or strings resonating in spontaneous harmony. This inborn 'organic sympathy', Herder said, was the sole law of human infancy, and it still pervaded amongst the 'savage nations, the children of nature.' (66)
This idea that speech is a precondition for human consciousness, and not just an expression of it, enabled Herder to open a gap between two themes that had always been thoroughly intertwined in ordinary folk metaphysics, and which the theories of Helmont and Amman had completely fused together. Vocality and speech, to Herder, were not one and the same phenomenon: they belonged at opposite poles, speech being what happens when the voice takes on the artificial inflections of a human institution, whilst the voice in itself was simply the medium for the spontaneous animal exuberance of shouts, exclamation, and song. 'Speech alone awakens slumbering reason, as Herder put it, not mere 'voice.' It was only when the artificial sounds of speech had become a skinf o second nature that coherent experience could begin:
By speech alone the eye and ear, nay the feelings of all the sense, are united in one, and centre in commanding thought, to which the hands and other members are only obedient instruments...The delicate organs of speech, therefore, must be considered as the rudder of reason, and speech as the heavenly spark, that gradually kindles our thoughts and senses to a flame.
....For it was only by articulating the words of a human language that human beings became participants in a community – members of a people, holders of a nationality, and possessors of a tradition. (67)
Mutism, in short, was a state of utter spiritual dereliction, the atrophy and death of the soul. So it would seem probable that the eulogies to the voice that keep surfacing in the history of metapysics are really just covers for a corresponding fear: the fear of being struck dumb. (90)
Civilization, however, was bound up with the temporal or sequential character of spoken language, and human progress had therefore been bought at the expense of the immediacy and directness of gestural signs. By adoptin the habit of communicating by sounds, we had broken the immediate link between expression and fee;ing, and fallen into a world of dissimulation and delay. (133)
Echoing Herder, Heinicke affirmed that 'we think by means of sounds', and that our thoughts 'resonate within us through the sounds of their names'. The problem facing te uneducated deaf was that – they had no 'names' either for things or concepts, which meant that they lived like infants or animals, their various 'impressions and representations' passing straight through them in uncontrollable confusion, leaving no mental trace behind them. (163)
[Heinicke] devised a special scate relating the experience of speech to a table of flavours...the secret turns out to consist in associating each vowel with a different flavour, using a feather to apply appropriate liquids to the tongue. (164)
