Five senses... and five wits?
Lateral Saturday: A little thought archaeology, and why it matters
With historical ebb and tide and the shifting of thought comes changes in categories.
Recognizing them brings to mind new ways of framing the details and ideas of our world.
Shakespeare, as that immortal Bard, holds several of the neglected notions in the idea-tapestries that are his plays.
You may notice one of those slicing-dicing Shakespearean insults from Beatrice served up to Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing.
In our last conflict four of his five wits went halting off, and now is the whole man governed with one, so that if he have wit enough to keep himself warm, let him bear it for a difference between himself and his horse, for it is all the wealth that he hath left to be known a reasonable creature.
He again makes mention of the five wits (and contrasts them with the five senses) in his 141st Sonnet:
In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But ’tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who, in despite of view, is pleas’d to dote;
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted;
Nor tender feeling, to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone:
But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,
Who leaves unsway’d the likeness of a man,
Thy proud heart’s slave and vassal wretch to be:
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain.
So what’s up with these “five wits”?
Well, as we see, they are an adjacent category of faculty to the senses.
Where there is an external side — touch, taste, hearing, seeing, smelling — there is an internal side.
Stephen Hawes, an English poet from aroundabouts the Tudor era, spelled out these “five wits”:
Common wit
Imagination
Fantasy
Estimation
Memory
Some of these words we’d consider fairly synonymous today — which also demonstrates where words lose a weight and distinction over time.
Common wit, it seems fair to say, is common sense.
The good folks over at Etymonline have some more for us regarding “imagination,” that we may suss out any textures to the word that have been lost with time:
"faculty of the mind which forms and manipulates images," mid-14c., ymaginacion, from Old French imaginacion "concept, mental picture; hallucination," from Latin imaginationem (nominative imaginatio) "imagination, a fancy," noun of action from past participle stem of imaginari "to form an image of, represent"), from imago "an image, a likeness," from stem of imitari "to copy, imitate" (from PIE root *aim- "to copy")
So, as we might have inferred from the word root, “imagination,” though it may connote a variety of things today, distinctly here has to do with mental imagery.
Which is a helpful contrast as, just by looking, we’re bound to wonder: what’s the difference between imagination and fantasy?
Again, we’re drawing on an Old French and Latin heritage, with Greek at the base of it.
early 14c., "illusory appearance," from Old French fantaisie, phantasie "vision, imagination" (14c.), from Latin phantasia, from Greek phantasia "power of imagination; appearance, image, perception," from phantazesthai "picture to oneself," from phantos "visible," from phainesthai "appear," in late Greek "to imagine, have visions," related to phaos, phōs "light," phainein "to show, to bring to light" (from PIE root *bha- (1) "to shine").
Sense of "whimsical notion, illusion" is pre-1400, followed by that of "fantastic imagination," which is first attested 1530s. Sense of "day-dream based on desires" is from 1926. In early use in English also fantasie, phantasy, etc. As the name of a fiction genre, by 1948.
While imagination refers to drawing up mental pictures — what we might think of as visualizing — fantasy would specifically be about the desire-powered.
As a man sits at his table, fist to his face and elbow to tabletop as a brace, he engages in his favorite and practiced hobby — thinking of a beautiful woman.
He imagines her insofar as he calls to mind her face.
He engages in fantasy by picturing her bringing him a cup of coffee.
Common wit would tell him it’s time to get up and get it himself already.
Meanwhile, we’re fairly able to tell where the lines are to be drawn around estimation.
late 14c., "action of appraising; manner of judging; opinion," from Old French estimacion "evaluation, value; calculation, planning," from Latin aestimationem (nominative aestimatio) "a valuation," from past participle stem of aestimare "to value" (see esteem (v.)). Meaning "appreciation" is from 1520s. That of "process of forming an approximate notion" is from c. 1400.
When one is estimating, that’s when you’re figurin’ about value.
Evaluation seems to be the biggest thing here.
Memory as a faculty contains many different covalent layers.
Historically, there’s also been the “ars memoriae,” or the “art of memory.'“
The aim of this was to develop strong recall.
Giordano Bruno developed systems in this area.
Why then should this category of the five wits, a box full of blurred lines, interest us?
When thinking about the history of ideas and the history of creativity, it’s the glow of the concepts that have fallen by the wayside that cast the most light on the familiar, ingrained concepts and make us think about them more critically.
They help us to reawaken curiosity about things we take for granted.
How should we think about mental faculties?
Are they a particular category like this?
Should they be revised?
Those are just a few questions raised when engaging with the thinkers of the past.