The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

Abram explores the impact of alphabetic writing on humanity’s relationship with the natural world, suggesting that the transition to a literate society marked a significant shift away from an animistic engagement with the environment. He contrasts Indigenous cultures’ respect and reverence for nature, maintained through oral traditions and a participatory sense of reality, with the ecological disregard characteristic of European civilization, which he attributes to a written culture that devalues sensory experience and direct engagement with the animate landscape.

Abram traces the origins of this disconnection to both the Hebraic and Greek traditions, which, despite their differences, both rely on the written word through the alphabet. This technology of writing, he argues, originated from an interplay between human communities and their landscapes, wherein natural phenomena and animal tracks once served as the first scripts. However, with the development of the alphabet, particularly its adaptation by the Greeks from the Semitic “aleph-beth,” language became abstracted from the more-than-human world, instead focusing on human-made signs and the sounds they represented. This shift, according to Abram, marked the beginning of humanity’s estrangement from the natural world, as language and knowledge became increasingly human centric.

The alphabet reduced the complexity of written symbols to a manageable set of characters representing sounds rather than direct experiences or entities, thus facilitating human disconnection from nature.