Common Sense, Synesthesia, and the Soul

My introduction to a new edition of Eric McLuhan's book

I’m thrilled to be able to share the new introduction that I recently wrote for a republication of an important book by Eric McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan’s son, titled The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and the Soul: An Odyssey. The book will be out this summer from Assembly Press. Subscribers here are getting this introduction first (with kind permission from Assembly) ahead of the release. If it intrigues you, you can pre-order the book here.

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Introduction is Induction

In our electronic age, it’s easy to fool and to be fooled. Trust in media and institutions is disintegrating, and many of us feel disoriented, finding it difficult to perceive the truth of things. That is because our organs of perception have been under attack for years—and these organs have become sclerotic in people who engage with media uncritically. It is as if, having binged on fast food for years, we have lost the ability to taste a good wine, or a bad wine, and to know which is which. Common sense has become uncommon. And yet it seems like it should be abundant—it is called common, after all.

At a time when our attention is scattered by screens and our senses scrambled by the cacophony of media, Eric McLuhan dares us to rediscover a deeper harmony of perception—a harmony that unites the body, intellect, and spirit. He breaks new ground by weaving insights about communications into a unified theory of the senses and their role in human experience—particularly religious experience. This short book is an exploration into the heart of what it means to be human, a journey toward recovering the lost art of soulcraft. It has done more to help me understand the modern challenge of both communicating and receiving truth than any other book written so far in the twenty-first century.

McLuhan dedicated his life to continuing the groundbreaking work of his father, Marshall McLuhan, to understand media and, through it, to rediscover new depths of human experience. Marshall once said that he “didn’t think it was worthwhile to say anything unless it was controversial.” The reader of today must be made to feel as if he’s in a foreign land; he must be stirred and shaken and have his perception pricked so that he might see something beyond the normal hues, something beyond the frames which he has been habituated to. And so it makes sense that The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and The Soul appears to be a strange text. Especially because Eric, like Marshall, was a multidisciplinary thinker who applied his insights deftly across many domains. The Sensus Communis disjoints the reader, leaving one wondering what the ‘form’ of the writing is. Is it a book? An essay? A collection of notes? Upon one’s first reading it is hard to say. Eric McLuhan acknowledges the strangeness and answers the question about its form at the end. In the meantime, he allows you to feel defamiliarized by design. Standard forms are lulling us to sleep. This text—an odyssey—requires the reader to become dislocated, to experience it in order to understand.

The deepest form of knowing requires what Eric McLuhan refers to as a sensus communis, or common sense. In the modern world, the fragmentation of the senses make it difficult to grasp the whole. This leaves us disjointed, extended in different places, in a rapidly disincarnating world. It has contributed to what my colleague Jon Askonas has called a post-consensus reality. It seems as if nobody is even seeing the same things. Understanding how we got here, and how we can live well in a world like this, is a matter of urgent importance.

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All of us are familiar with the five bodily senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. As McLuhan notes, there are also intellectual senses that correspond to both our exterior and interior worlds. When reading scripture, for instance (this book takes scriptural interpretation as its starting point), the literal or historical sense of the text anchors our interpretation of the text in reality—it conveys what the human author intended to communicate based on the historical, cultural, and linguistic context of the time. The Israelites, under Moses’ leadership, crossed the Red Sea to flee from Pharaoh’s army.

The allegorical sense enables us to discern meaningful connections, such as seeing the crossing of the Red Sea as a type of baptism that symbolizes liberation, adding to the narrative's spiritual depth.

There are also moral and anagogical senses, which allow us to understand how the scripture is living and active, and how to encounter it. In the moral sense, the story of leaving Egypt and crossing the Red Sea challenges us to reflect on our own journey: What is the "Egypt" in my life—those forces of sin or oppression—that I must leave behind?

Anagogically, crossing the Red Sea points to an ultimate destiny: just as the Israelites journeyed toward the Promised Land, I am on a pilgrimage through this world. The eschatological meaning of my journey is revealed to me. By engaging all four senses, scripture becomes not just a story or a lesson but a nexus of meaning and real encounter.

Eric McLuhan goes on to take us even deeper. He notes that there are also spiritual senses—faith, hope, and love—each having its own sensus communis, or locus of sense-making, which provides a way of knowing reality. Faith, according to McLuhan, is a “supernatural, experiential knowing of supernatural matters,” a form of unmediated contact with ultimate things. Likewise, hope and love provide their own form of knowing the metaphysical. Together, the spiritual senses provide a knowledge of God so that we may see “through a glass, darkly” in this life‑‑but see nonetheless.

Each of these three areas of sensory perception—the corporal, intellectual, and spiritual—has its own sensus communis. In the pages that follow, Eric McLuhan shows how deeply the different three primary domains of senses are interrelated to form an even richer sensus communis. When operating together, they provide a person with a single, unified experience of reality that is not fragmented or stunted. The result is a mode of being rarely experienced in our world today.

One person who seemed to experience reality with a fully active common sense is the blind French resistance fighter Jacques Lusseyran. When Lusseyran was seven, he was blinded in a schoolyard accident. Later in life, he wrote a memoir about how he regained his sight—not optical sight, but a form of seeing in which everything was “bathed in light.” It allowed him to grasp the essence of things through an unmediated, faith-like knowing. He perceived interior realities without being able to see the exterior of things. He grew amused at the descriptions of the clothes people wore, because they rarely corresponded to the interior reality that he had gained the ability to see.

“Immediately, the substance of the universe drew together,” Lusseyran writes in his autobiography, And Then There Was Light. “I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place which might as well have been outside me as within.” Lusseyran seemed to have developed what modern psychologists call synesthesia, a condition in which people “taste shapes” or “see sounds,” and other apparent paradoxes of perception—which is closer, Mcluhan argues, to what the human experience might be like if we possessed a fully developed sensus communis.

The phenomenon of synesthesia began to fascinate Eric McLuhan soon after he learned about it. We might be able to understand the effects of modern media and technology by understanding how it prevents the sensus communis from ever occurring in the vast majority of people. Is synesthesia our birthright, a way of reclaiming the sensus communis?

To understand this question, we must turn to the question of mimesis. I first read The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and The Soul at the recommendation of Andrew McLuhan (

The McLuhan Newsletter

), Eric’s son. I had just published a book, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, about the ways in which mimesis shapes what we want. The concept of mimesis, according to the French thinker René Girard, refers to the subconscious and often hidden forms of imitation that humans engage in constantly. We take cues from other people, even when it comes to our desires and sense of identity. Mimesis lets us participate in others’ lives, fostering communion of the senses, and ultimately of desires, which can be healthy or unhealthy. Mimesis is ultimately about a form of social fusion that can distort our perception of reality. And because the primary subject of The Sensus Communis is the fusion of the senses, it is no surprise that mimesis has a central role to play.

There has been a longstanding debate in philosophy, going back at least to Plato, about the relationship between mimesis and truth. Plato thought that mimesis was dangerous, and he waged the first media war against the poets because he believed they encouraged a type of pre-rational, unmediated experience of reality that he thought was unequivocally bad. The poets and playwrights performed their works so that the distinction between actors and audience collapsed. The viewer became one with the performance through a mode of participation that Plato called mimesis: that is, a mode of participation that led to interiorization, a putting-on of something so as to become it.

As an alternative to mimesis, Plato preferred writing and logic, which help to keep the powerful forces of mimesis from consuming a person. To paraphrase the nineteenth century personalist John Henry Newman: no one’s heart is inflamed by a syllogism, and no one loses themself in the cold logic of the textbook; it is concrete persons who captivate us in the fullness of our sensory experience. That is why the move away from orality and toward the written word was, for Plato, a step in the right direction: it stripped mimesis of its power over us by making it harder for us to get swept up in the action.

Plato was partly right. Mimesis is dangerous if we allow ourselves to be fused with evil or base things. Mimesis is dangerous when it leads to the loss of self-possession, which may explain why it is so easy to fool and to be fooled these days—perhaps we live during the greatest spike of mimesis the world has ever seen, with social media fusing people together in ways they can scarcely understand, unable to know where one person or thing ends and another begins.

Yet mimesis is also the pathway to communion. Saint Paul says to put on Christ. Mimesis is the process through which a person comes to total identification, complete communion, with Jesus, which is the goal of the spiritual life for a Christian. This positive sense of mimesis should be recovered in its full depth, as Paul and Eric McLuhan both understood.

The deepest reading of scripture requires mimesis, or communion with the text through lived experience. The sacramental life too invites people to a deep form of mimesis— that is, communion with spiritual realities. The communion happens through participation at the level of the sensus communis. If a person’s senses are totally fragmented or dulled, how could they understand the mystery of the Eucharist? The sacrament appears as bread and wine—but faith, hope, and love reveal its reality. Thomas Aquinas, in his hymn to the Eucharist, still sung during Eucharistic adoration in Catholic churches across the world today, gave Eric McLuhan the greatest support for his thesis: “may faith supply a supplement for the defect of the senses.”

The sacraments transform us. But not only that: they are mysteries that develop the sensus communis in us in the first place. The fundamental massage (yes) that I have received from this book has limbered me up to see that the sacraments, which are visible signs of invisible realities, are the key to understanding communication at its most profound level.

Eric McLuhan himself described this work as a "prologue" or "set of notes" to a larger and deeper exploration he hoped others, especially theologians, might continue. Its urgency lies in the task it presents: to restore a sense of wholeness in a world increasingly fragmented by the forces of modern media. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins. To the extent that we develop the organ of common sense, our lives will become charged to meet it.