Sensibility, as it traverses the depth-psychology corpus, names no single faculty but rather a contested zone of receptivity situated between raw sensation and reflective cognition. The term carries at least four overlapping registers across the library's voices. In the classical-philosophical tradition — Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus — sensibility designates the soul's capacity for perceptual attunement to the world, a power prior to and distinct from intellect yet constitutive of all knowledge; Aristotle's 'general sensibility' for common qualities and Plato's aisthesis as the contested ground of opinion both establish the problematic early. In the Romantic-literary tradition mediated through Abrams and Havelock, sensibility becomes the organic, creative responsiveness of the self to nature — Wordsworth's 'infant sensibility' and 'first creative sensibility' marking the developmental root of poetic consciousness. In depth-psychological and archetypal registers — Hillman, Romanyshyn, Miller — sensibility is elevated to a mode of soul-awareness: 'mythic sensibility,' 'metaphoric sensibility,' and 'modern sensibility' each name a quality of attending that exceeds mere sense-data and opens the invisible. Finally, in contemporary clinical-interoceptive research, sensibility re-emerges as a technical construct — self-reported interoceptive sensibility — distinguishable from accuracy and awareness, indexing an individual's habitual propensity to notice bodily signals. The central tension runs between sensibility as passive receptivity and as active, poetic, or mythic responsiveness; between physiological substrate and ontological orientation.
In the library
14 passages
'I saw them feel' shows a softer sensibility in intellect itself that can receive and understand the authentic tidings of invisible things. Just this sensibility intellect, which I am also calling mythic sensibility, allows you to notice the quickening soul
Hillman identifies a 'mythic sensibility' as the mode of intellect capable of perceiving the soul's invisible presence within visible things, distinguishing it from ordinary rational cognition.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
The base is established in the 'infant sensibility' of the babe in his mother's arms who, since he perceives a world altered by a pervasive awareness of his mother's love, inhabits an 'active universe'... He retained this 'first creative sensibility,' so that his soul remained 'unsubdu'd'
Abrams traces Wordsworth's developmental account in which 'infant sensibility' and 'first creative sensibility' name the original, generative perceptual alliance of mind and world from which poetic consciousness grows.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
the structure of the argument in the Republic shows how 'opinion' and 'sensibility' and 'mimetic experience' are all bound up together... In Book Seven it is sensibility that reports conflicting judgments on size and smallness, hard soft, heavy and light.
Havelock demonstrates that for Plato, sensibility (aisthesis) is epistemologically entangled with opinion and mimetic experience, making it the problematic lower register of cognition that philosophical knowledge must transcend.
I will describe what I call a metaphoric sensibility as the kind of consciousness that one needs for a poetics of the research process. A metaphoric sensibility is necessary for a psychology that has no name
Romanyshyn positions 'metaphoric sensibility' as the epistemological prerequisite for soul-centered research, a mode of consciousness irreducible to empirical method or rational analysis.
Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis
All of these qualities characterize the metaphoric sensibility, in which the appeal of metaphor is through an image that it evokes, which is neither an empirical fact nor a rational idea.
Romanyshyn elaborates metaphoric sensibility as a mode of apprehension occupying the liminal space between empirical fact and rational idea, oriented by image rather than concept.
Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting
the new polytheism is a modern sensibility... The more basic feeling is that the Gods and Goddesses are reemerging in our lives. But the new polytheism is not only a contemporary sensibility. It is also a way of rethinking the past tradition
Miller frames polytheism primarily as a sensibility — a felt, pre-conceptual orientation toward multiplicity — before it becomes a theological or philosophical position.
Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis
in the case of the common sensibles there is already in us a general sensibility which enables us to perceive them directly; there is therefore no special sense required for their perception
Aristotle posits a 'general sensibility' as the unifying perceptual faculty through which common qualities are directly apprehended without requiring a dedicated special sense organ.
the relevant notion of intentionality is not so much object-directedness as openness to the world, here in the bodily form of an implicit sensibility or sentience that does not have any clear subject-object structure.
Thompson, drawing on phenomenology, defines sensibility as a pre-reflective bodily openness to the world — an anonymous sentience prior to the subject-object dichotomy — that grounds all higher intentional acts.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Mehling W (2016): Differentiating attention styles and regulatory aspects of self-reported interoceptive sensibility. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 371:20160013.
This citation marks the clinical-research operationalization of sensibility as self-reported interoceptive propensity, a measurable construct distinct from accuracy and metacognitive awareness.
Khalsa, Sahib S., Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap, 2018supporting
Forkmann T et al. (2016): Making sense of what you sense: Disentangling interoceptive awareness, sensibility and accuracy. Int J Psychophysiol 109:71–80.
The reference identifies the technical parsing of interoceptive sensibility as a self-report dimension that must be analytically separated from objective accuracy and metacognitive insight in psychiatric research.
Khalsa, Sahib S., Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap, 2018supporting
There is then a nature which holds together and sustains the universe, and it possesses both sensibility and reason... we see that in certain parts of the cosmos sensibility and reason abide.
Jonas, drawing on Stoic sources, presents sensibility as a cosmological principle co-present with reason in the governing nature of the universe, not merely a property of individual organisms.
Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958supporting
It is entirely characteristic of Schiller's psychology that he should conceive the expression of this instinct as sensation, and not as active, sensuous desire. This shows that for him sensuousness has the character of reactiveness, of affectivity
Jung reads Schiller's typological account of the sensuous instinct as evidence that sensibility, in the introvert's mode, takes the character of receptive affectivity rather than active desire.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
we dare not keep ourselves set towards the sensuous principle, following the images of sense, or towards the merely vegetative, intent upon the gratifications of e
Plotinus cautions against subordinating the soul to the sensuous principle, positioning sensibility as the lowest rung of soul-life from which ascent toward the Intellectual-Principle is required.