“53% of young people would sooner lose their sense of smell than access to their smartphone or laptop.”
Reading this statistic created the tightly wound tension that I have come to recognise as the intellectual equivalent of an X on a treasure map, instructing: dig deep here.
So I’m following my nose and pursuing a PhD at the University of Dundee.
SMELLING METAPHYSICAL LIES: the Digital as a 21st Century ‘Hinterwelt’
1. Introduction and potential significance
Vision has been valorised as the highest and most intellectual of the senses by a long history of Western philosophers many of whom have, correspondingly, denigrated the sense of smell, pegging it on the lowest rung of the sensory hierarchy. This visuocentrism, coupled with the relative ease with which the visual system can be studied empirically, has led to a conflation of perception with visual perception. Visuocentrism hasn’t just skewed our understanding of perception, however. It has also deeply influenced how we conceive of our relationship to reality by impacting how we think about metaphysics.
A wealth of new scientific research in olfaction over the last three decades demands that we broaden our understanding of perception beyond the visual model. These findings also raise significant ontological challenges to the prevailing metaphysical view – that carves reality into a series of bifurcations: between essence and appearance, subject and object, objects and their properties, and objects and events. New insights suggest that olfaction resists such birfurcations, and this could have considerable implications, especially for our technologically driven future.
Not only are we visually dominant, but we live in an increasingly visual world made possible through digital technologies. These technological developments are themselves propelled by the visuocentric biases of Western philosophy. Against this backdrop an intriguing challenge arises: smell cannot be digitised (Keller, 2020). This calls into question notions such as the substrate neutrality of information and multiple realisability of mental states, both of which underpin digital posthumanism – the 21st century’s most fervent promise of transcendence. As such, our technological projects have inadvertently become a testing ground for the very theories and philosophical assumptions that led to their development in the first place.
This research seeks to move past the visuocentric biases we have inherited by investigating the contrast between the visual and the olfactory and exploring the role they play in the development of particular metaphysical ideas. The aim is to open up new ways of thinking – about ourselves and our relationship to reality – revealing the limits of the digital and reframing the challenges we face in the 21st century digital world.
2. Research question(s):
How does our conception of the world change if our starting point is olfaction rather than vision?
What are the metaphysical implications of an olfactory orientation to reality?
What might an olfactory-led metaphysics mean for our relationship with the digital world we are so rapidly building?
Could Nietzsche’s philosophy provide us with a case study of how embodied olfactory thinking contributes to an alternative conception of reality?
3. Literature Review
This project will connect three bodies of literature by (1) applying contemporary olfactory science and philosophy of perception to (2) a critique of the prevailing metaphysics that underpins digital posthumanism, by way of (3) a case study assessing the life and work of Nietzsche.
3.1 The ontological challenges raised by the science of olfaction
Cognitive scientist and ‘smellosopher’ Ann-Sophie Barwich (2020, p13), remarks that “the scientific biography of olfaction can be summarised in one sentence: odors have always presented an ontological problem”. The identification of this challenge can be noted as far back as Plato, who regards smells as “half-formed”, arising from substances in the process of change – the instability of which precludes them from conforming to his notion of the ideal Forms.
Today, the intermediate[1] nature of smell continues to confound contemporary philosophers. Are smells objects or properties of objects? Do they represent material things or things-in-process? Are they objective – furnishing us with information about the external world, or subjective – merely phenomenological sensations? Debate about the status of olfactory objecthood runs a continuum from Lycan’s (2000, p. 281), assertion that “a smell is just a modification of consciousness, a qualitative condition or event in us” to Young’s (2016, p.520) claim that “smells are the molecular structures of chemical compounds”.
Barwich and Smith (2022) note that neither a phenomenologically-oriented approach to understanding olfaction, nor one that primarily looks to the material nature of odour sources, is able to provide a satisfactory account of the sense of smell without adequately considering the biological function(s) of olfaction. Barwich’s (2018, 2019, 2020) process model of perception therefore seeks to overcome the challenges faced in contemporary philosophy of olfaction by paying more attention to the biology of the sensory system itself (viz. the body). She proposes that olfaction doesn’t represent objects at all; it measures chemical situations.
It is the contention of this project that the troubling puzzle of olfactory objecthood owes largely to philosophical assumptions that arise from applying visual thinking to non-visual perception. In his seminal paper, The Nobility of Sight, Jonas (1954) contends that sight is peculiar when compared to the other senses. Through it we experience the world in one simultaneous visual field, as clearly external to us and over great distances – over ‘there’. Arguably, this leads to the conception of a static world of stable external objects that we can experience objectively, or in a disinterested, unaffected manner. In contrast, smells are temporal, attuned to changing states and processes rather than objects and are experienced ‘here’, often affecting us physically and emotionally.
Following Barwich’s lead, this research aims not to overcome olfaction’s troubling ‘intermediacy’, but to embrace it and investigate how this very feature of smell leads to a process-informed ontology that resists the bifurcations of substance metaphysics, with implications for the postulations of digital posthumanism.
3.2 Hinterwelt metaphysics and Nietzsche’s olfactory insights
Unusual as it may be, the idea that olfaction could furnish us with profound insights is not without precedent. In the final survey of his life’s work, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche declares, “My genius resides in my nostrils”. He claims he sniffed out the metaphysical lies expressed in Platonism, Christianity and Kantianism, all of which promise a world beyond the material one available to our senses, coining the term “Hinterwelt” (meaning ‘behindworld’ or ‘afterworld’) to denote this common theme.
Nietzsche’s extensive use of olfactory metaphor throughout his work is typically interpreted as a literary device (von Tevenar, 2019) – one that viscerally expresses his distaste for “Hinterwelt” metaphysics. However, Nietzsche clearly claims that his nose is the source of his insights. “I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies – smelling them out”, he writes. He is also the only philosopher to have spoken highly of the sense of smell and the discriminating powers of the nose[2].
The notion that one might be able to smell metaphysical lies finds support in Strawson’s (2015) treatment of Nietzsche’s metaphysics. He asserts that Nietzsche’s ontological critique is founded upon a series of negations. Nietzsche sought to negate the distinctions between objects and properties, objects and processes, and causes and effects – the same distinctions or bifurcations that olfaction appears to resist. In light of the intermediacy of olfaction, these negations need not be interpreted as the dogmatically antithetical view that is so often attributed to Nietzsche.
Nonetheless, Nietzsche did not write about the metaphysics of smell, nor did he explicitly make the connections I am suggesting here. Rather, Nietzsche used the nose to expose “the deceptions of those who ignore the body’s role in thinking” (Shiner, 2020, p.17). If his opponents were thinking visually, to what extent can it be argued that that Nietzsche was thinking olfactorily?
Nietzsche was visually impaired from age 12 and, by the time of his death, was almost completely blind. It is an hypothesis of this project that this distinctive phenomenology played a role in shaping Nietzsche’s insights; that his distaste for Hinterwelt metaphysics wasn’t just expressed in olfactory metaphor, but was informed by olfactory perception – and by his diminished reliance on visual perception.
3.3 Digital Posthumanism
The 21st century has seen the emergence of a new Hinterwelt: the posthumanist vision of a new level of life beyond this one, made possible through digital technologies: such as virtual reality, mind uploading and artificial consciousness. Here we see echoes of the disembodied ‘beyond’ that underpins Platonism, Christianity and Kantianism: speculation that mind can be realised in all sorts of materials beyond the organic (Hayles, 2000), a dissolution of the boundaries between biological and postbiological intelligence (Moravec, 1990) and transcendence of the biological entirely (Kurzweil, 2005).
More recently, Chalmers’ (2022) argument for virtual realism – which holds that virtual reality is a genuine reality and will be indistinguishable from ordinary physical reality in the future – relies heavily on the assumption that we are not in direct, unmediated contact with reality. In my recent MA dissertation, I use new scientific knowledge about the sense of smell to argue that Chalmers’s visuocentrism leads him to make a crucial error. Even though we may not be in direct perceptual contact with reality, we are in direct metabolic contact with it. Since olfaction is intimately tied to metabolism, and the body is left outside of simulated realities, I argue VR is an elaborate, largely visual illusion – one that will remain easily distinguishable from ordinary physical reality.
It is precisely this metabolic contact that calls into question the substrate neutrality of information and multiple realisability of mental states. This project seeks to expand on these ideas by investigating the epistemology of an olfaction-led metaphysics: to
