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Abstract
Synaesthesia, a rare cognitive style characterized by the projection of images in one sensory mode in response to a stimulus in another mode, has been known to science for over a century. After the 1883 publication of Arthur Rimbaud's poem "Voyelles," many Symbolist writers became fascinated with the form of synaesthesia known as audition coloree, or color hearing. Widely celebrated by artists as a uniquely creative mode of cognition, synaesthesia and a closely related anomalous form of mental imagery--eideticism--became embroiled in the fin de siecle debate over "degeneration"; Romantics championed synaesthesia and eideticism as desirable, while positivists denounced them as primitive and irrational. With the emergence of schemas of human consciousness evolution at the turn of the century, synaesthesia and eideticism continued to be cast as either "higher" or "lower" forms of consciousness, the proponents of the former position, such as Wassily Kandinsky, frequently adapting occult (e.g., Theosophical and Anthroposophical) doctrines of the astral body to explain these forms of perception. A complicated and largely inaccurate Romantic genealogy of synaesthesia came to hold as synaesthetes a variety of individuals--Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Kandinsky, Alexander Scriabin, Andrei Bely, and others--who were not in fact synaesthetic.
In the twentieth century, a variety of thinkers, including A. R. Luria, Charles Hartshorne, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roman Jacobson, Marshall MacLuhan, and Sergei Eisenstein--have given synaesthesia a central place in their theoretical approaches, and synaesthesia has in the past three decades continued to fascinate "liberatory" Romantics like Gene Youngblood, Jose Arguelles, and Terence McKenna. Vladimir Nabokov's literary renderings of his synaesthetic and eidetic percepts have been widely interpreted as privileged glimpses of an other, non-physical world. These writers, and their readers, continue to see synaesthesia as leading to transcendental forms of knowledge. In contrast to this transcendental interpretation, phenomenological psychologists, beginning with R. H. Wheeler and Thomas Cutsforth in the 1920s, and emerging recently in Harry Hunt's research into altered states of consciousness, have viewed synaesthesia as a fundamental mechanism of consciousness, not restricted to a small number of "advanced" individuals, but universal. The relative popularity of the Romantic view and the virtual ignoring of the phenomenological explanation of synaesthesia suggest synaesthesia is a lens through which one can more clearly see the limits of modern and postmodern attempts to formulate alternatives to materialistic conceptions of consciousness.
