What philosophy worthy of the name has truly been able to avoid the link between poem and theorem?
Michel SerresRead
Smell and taste differentiate, whereas language, like sight and hearing, integrates.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that our sensory perceptions are distinct but our ability to communicate through language unifies our experiences.
Michel Serres highlights the differences between our sensory perceptions and the unifying power of language. While smells and tastes are experienced in isolation, language brings together various sensory inputs, allowing us to articulate and share the complexity of our experiences, thus integrating them into a cohesive understanding of the world.
Themes
LanguageSensesIntegrationPerceptionCommunication
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about the importance of communication skills in personal interactions.
More from Michel Serres
All quotes βSimilar quotes
I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.
Edmund HusserlRead
All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives in NY were experiencing with twelve Scotch & Sodas in Stouffers before they made the drunkard's train to Westchester---but without hangovers.
Jack KerouacRead
Whom neither shape of danger can dismay, Nor thought of tender happiness betray.
William WordsworthRead
An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
Margaret AtwoodRead
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
Eugene IonescoRead
All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonRead