sensuality
In colloquial terms, sensuality refers to the devotion to (pleasant) experience through the senses . Often sensuality is also seen as a form of eroticism , but is not limited to it. Through the opened senses one can experience the beautiful and stimulating of this world. Sensuality has a free character, while desire implies wanting to own.
Scientifically, the sensual is differentiated from the spiritual or from the soul. Sensuality then denotes the susceptibility to the various sensory perceptions - but especially to those psychological events which initially follow sensory perceptions. On the one hand, this includes the perception of the world of appearances that surround us according to substance and form, the perception and differentiation of things outside of us, their properties and changes. On the other hand, this includes the totality of those inner drives , desires and passionswhich are either directly based on the needs of the bodily organism (such as the urge to eat and sex) or on the feeling of pleasure and displeasure that certain sensual sensations arouse in us.
Opposite to sensuality in the latter sense is pure intellectuality and spirituality (spiritualization).
With Kant
In the transcendental aesthetics of Kant is the sensibility of the ability ( receptivity ) to be addressed by means of a sensory apparatus by sensations of objects and stimulated. Opposed to it is the spontaneity of the mind. According to Kant, only the form of perception (namely space and time) is present a priori in the mind, all sensory impressions are a posteriori and can only be a source of knowledge because of the classification in space and time .
In the “Critique of Pure Reason” (KrV), the systematic place of the “transcendental aesthetics” of 1781, Kant defines space and time as necessary a priori ideas on which all views are based. The following applies to space: “The apodictic certainty of all geometrical principles and the possibility of their a priori constructions is based on this necessity a priori.” (Kant, KrV, p. 32) And for time, Kant states: “On this necessity a Priori there is also the possibility of apodictic principles of the relations of time or axioms of time in general. It has only one dimension: different times are not at the same time, but one after the other (just as different spaces are not one after the other but at the same time). ”And Kant adds immediately and unequivocally:“ These principles cannot be drawn from experience, because this would neither strict generality, still giving apodictic certainty. We would only be able to say: this is how common perception teaches it, but not: this is how it must behave. These principles apply as rules under which experiences are possible at all, and teach us before and not through them. "(Kant, KrV, p. 36)
At Feuerbach
In Ludwig Feuerbach's anthropological materialism , sensuality plays an emancipatory role.
Quotes
"Sensuality is neuro-biological the ability to associate sensory perception with sexuality in the subconscious."
literature
- Gisela Engel, Gisela Notz, (Ed.): Lust and change of heart: On the history of sensuality. trafo verlag, Berlin 2001, (= contributions to legal, social and cultural criticism, volume 1), ISBN 3-89626-291-2 , table of contents
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Diane Ackerman : A Natural History of the Senses Random House, New York 1990, ISBN 9780307763310 .
- German: The beautiful power of the senses: a cultural history '. Translated by Antoinette Gittinger, Kindler-Verlag, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-463-40167-3 .
Web links
- Wolfram Pfreundschuh: Sensuality on Kulturkritik.net
Individual evidence
- ^ Sensuality in Rudolf Eisler's Kant Lexicon
- ↑ Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason. The transcendental elementary teaching first part. The transcendental aesthetic. In: Kant's works. Akademie Textausgabe, Volume IV , Verlag Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 1968, pp. 1–252.
- ^ Alfred Schmidt : Emancipatory sensuality. Ludwig Feuerbach's anthropological materialism. Hanser, Munich 1973.