SAPER VEDERE

Saper Vedere, Knowing How to See, is Leonardo da Vinci’s concise description of the dominant skill of his own genius. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is one of the greatest geniuses of Western Civilization, and as such, he definitely merits a large entry of his own among these other entries. Moreover, aside from being a titan in his own straightforward right, there is a web of intrigue and innuendo spun around his figure, which includes various wild conspiracy theories and the so-called Da Vinci Code of the most recent fame.

Not that I should bow to the authority of gossip, be that even the mega-gossip of the kind spread out about him, but leaving Leonardo without an entry seems like a shameful omission by any measure. And yet, if my reader believes that this will be an entry about da Vinci, he may be disappointed. Perhaps, I must write an entry like that, indeed, in the future, but at any rate and at the present moment this isn’t it.

I might have titled this entry Saper Vedere, Or A Tractatus About Senses. Having looked at this possibility, I, however, decided that it will be enough to mention it as such a possibility, but that the short but profound Saper Vedere should amply suffice. This entry is about our senses, five or six of them, to be ‘exact.’ And let it be formally registered now, in what seems like a needless repetition, that the spark for this discussion has been provided by Leonardo da Vinci’s complex phrase Saper Vedere.

There are, of course, five traditional senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, and whatever is omitted by these five is referred to as the sixth sense. What it really is has been a subject of disagreement. There is a good case being made by parapsychology that the sixth sense is ESP, for the details of which discussion we ought to consult the parapsychologists, as I have no intention to get into this here or probably anywhere.

Had I been hard-pressed to come up with my own sixth-sense alternative, I would have gone for the sense of association and metaphorization, which is developed to the highest degree in poets, as well as the sense of imagination and intuition and I even might not have stopped at that but gone on and on, except that all these exceptional qualities ought to be considered each by itself and within itself, but, if taken in conjunction with our familiar five senses, this may both dilute our normal understanding of sense as a physical phenomenon, and preclude us from referring to the legitimate parapsychological ESP as our sixth physical sense, which, in varying degrees of intensity, is immanent in human nature.

The last mention of the “degrees of intensity” brings us back to the traditional five senses, and Leonardo’s phrase. What’s wrong with the five that we have to look for the sixth, before we have exhausted our search of the “terra cognita,” which, for all higher intents and purposes, remains very much “incognita”?

In other words, why don’t we go after the five traditional physical senses of our nature, but “kicking it up a notch,” that is, at a much higher level of intensity than what the average man has been accustomed to.

Hence, Leonardo’s use of the qualifier saper, indicating the ability to function at the higher, or the highest levels of intensity in the exercise of our traditionally outlined sensory perception.

Ironically there are serious disagreements in principle, concerning the superiority of certain senses over the rest. Leonardo’s saper vedere specifies the sense of sight as superior, at least, within his own list of talents. Furthermore, he puts his aesthetic preferences very explicitly in this note from his Notebooks:

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things. (Reminding the reader again that seeing, apparently, ranks far above hearing, with Leonardo.)

A different set of priorities comes out of Schopenhauer’s Third Book of The World as Will and Idea, ##42-52. Putting architecture at the bottom of his pyramid of aesthetic impressions, he ascends it via plastic and pictorial arts, with poetry nearly at the top, surpassed only by music, his highest aesthetic impression. We may wonder, however, whether he would agree with Leonardo da Vinci’s qualifier saper, transposing it to knowing how to hear. Most likely, music to Schopenhauer is not an art of hearing sounds first and making them later, but a kind of primeval scream, an aural self-expression, testing the knowledge of the listener’s ear, rather than that of the creator of the musical sound.

So far we have been dealing with only two of the senses: visual and aural. It can be argued, though, that a third sense, of touch, is involved in the plastic arts, and in some other creative expressions. The senses of smell and taste play key roles in the art of cooking, and we may rightfully ascribe the laurels of genius to a particularly great chef, but generally, they appear not to play a role in artistic production of all other kinds, although it is said that a refined sense of smell may be a telltale sign of superior intellectual development and discernment.

Our next point of interest is to contemplate the comparative value, with regard to artistic communication, of one single sense versus a complex combination of senses. If the involvement of several senses should be deemed superior to the involvement of a single sense, then we must agree with Richard Wagner in that his concept of a musical drama with a specially designed theater and visual stage effects is superior to straight music, and also with his claim that Beethoven was trying to find Wagner’s path before Wagner, but could not find it. There may be different opinions on this account, I assume, but this is where I wish to leave the argument: in the realm of opinions and personal preferences.

As far as I am concerned, I do not see any particular advantage in a combination of participating senses as opposed to just one. It is well known in the world of classical music, for instance, that Alexander Scriabin, the eminent Russian composer, had a highly peculiar innate sense of mental association between sight and sound (different colors corresponding to different tonal chords). He represented his complex “aural vision” in a number of compositions that combined lights and sounds. I like Scriabin’s music as such, but I never found his complex compositions superior in any way even to those of his own works which did not involve sensual experimentation.

The question of art and aesthetic expression raises yet another intriguing question. Does the artist need to think in order to express? In a previous entry, I was quoting Leo Tolstoy, who defined art as an expression of the artist’s feelings, rather than thoughts. Without any disrespect to feelings and emotions, I must argue that the definition of art ought to be expanded, in this case, to include the expression of thought as well. To express thoughts artfully (like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche do it in philosophy, and like great writers do it in creating great works of literature) is just as much an art as any other visual, or aural, or tactile, and, yes, even olfactory and gustatorial arts are.

In that case, the qualifier saper should not only be applied to the five senses, but to the art of thinking, just as much, and so we come up with a most useful expanding variation on Leonardo da Vinci’s saper vedere, which is saper cogitare, knowing how to think.