Aisthesis as Organ of the Heart

Hillman’s name for the heart’s native perceptual activity: not abstract sensation, not detached intuition, but the unified taking-in of the world by image. “In the ancient world the organ of perception was the heart. The heart was immediately connected to things via the senses. The word for perception or sensation in Greek was aisthesis*, which means at root a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, ‘aha,’ the ‘uh’ of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response to the image (eidolon) presented”* (Hillman 1992).

The doctrine has classical-medical and Renaissance roots. “In ancient Greek physiology and in biblical psychology the heart was the organ of sensation: it was also the place of imagination. The common sense (sensus communis) was lodged in and around the heart, and its role was to apprehend images. For Marsilio Ficino, too, the spirit in the heart received and transmitted the impression of the senses” (Hillman 1992). The heart’s function was aesthetic in the strict etymological sense — the function of aisthesis.

The Cartesian-Scholastic inheritance broke this organ in two: “sensing facts on one side and intuiting fantasies on the other, leaving us images without bodies and bodies without images, an immaterial subjective imagination severed from an extended world of dead objective facts” (Hillman 1992). The recovery of the heart’s aisthesis is the recovery of an organ that senses by imagining and imagines by sensing. It is the organ by which the soul of the world becomes perceptible — the world’s own image-making received by the only organ that can receive it.

Relationships

• thought-of-the-heart
• reason-of-the-heart
• anima-mundi
• image-as-psyche

Primary sources

• hillman-thought-heart (Hillman 1992)