Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa is an assistant professor of philosophy at Vassar College and a current Mellon New Directions Fellow for her project exploring Mesoamerican indigenous philosophy. She specializes in philosophy of mind, psychology, and psychiatry and also Latin American philosophy, particularly colonial-era New Spain (1500-1800).
A post by Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s (1648-1695) Primero Sueño (First Dream) is an astonishing epistemological poem that follows the flight of an intellectual soul, freed from its body by the sleep of reason, as it seeks to understand all of creation. Of the many subjects worthy of philosophical interest in the epic poem, my focus will be the way its incredible imagery hints at a psychological ontology. Quotations of Sor Juana’s [SJ] Spanish-language verse in the following are my own English glosses.
The poem opens with the image of night, a “pyramidal … earth-born shadow” rising into the sky – the cone of shadow cast by the sun shining on the earth – and “plotting to scale the stars” (SJ, First Dream, lines 1-4). Then a chorus of ghastly nighttime creatures – two humans-turned-owl and three humans-turned-bat drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses – sing a song so phlegmatic that it puts even the wind to sleep. The god of silence orders all living things to be silent. The images of deep darkness and supernatural silence continue throughout, as the central protagonist falls asleep and dreams of her soul rising to the loftiest heights in order to try to intellectually ‘see’ all of creation, only to fail, crash back down, and try to ascend again using a stepwise method. The poem ends after Night is chased to the opposite hemisphere by the Sun and the protagonist awakens. I will attempt to draw out some of the power and meaning of the images of silence and darkness in Sor Juana’s writing by attending in particular to how silence and darkness are experienced as both positive percepts – perceptions of negation – but also as synesthetic. This “negative” synesthesia invites us into the realm of the conceptual, fully beyond sense-perception. I suggest that contemporary philosophers of mind consider Sor Juana’s to be a potentially novel approach to the amodal and multimodal debate about concepts.
Let us first address the two perceptual modalities of hearing and sight, then synesthesia, and finally, what can be learnt from Sor Juana about the contemporary dispute between representationalists about the structure of mental representations.
Terrific scholars have already contextualized the poetic Baroque, feminist, and early modern scientific sensibilities of Sor Juana’s poem. For example, Ruth Hill’s (2000) commentary finds evidence of Sor Juana’s familiarity with and affinity for Gassendi’s theories of optics, visual perception, auditory phenomena, and music. Elena Del Río Parra (2000) explains how Sor Juana inverts Baroque tropes from Luis de Góngora’s Soledades: Sor Juana substitutes Góngora’s imagery of instruments, birdsong, and singing poets for images of silence, dissonance, and the mute text, on the one hand, and substitutes his images of daylight for nighttime darkness on the other, with an intent to emphasize her own embodiment as a female poet. Emilie Bergmann (2012) highlights how Sor Juana’s work grounds cultural tropes about visual depiction in embodied language and also presents sound as visual.
When we put all of these analyses together, we begin to see the impact of these poetic choices.
For Sor Juana, silence is a negation, but also an embodied reality: women were instructed to “keep silence in the Church,” and Sor Juana herself was criticized for her public writing and constantly advised to stop. Sor Juana’s defiance is evident throughout her work, where she underscores silence’s capacity to communicate (ex., Ludmer 1984, 1991; Bokser 2006). To give just two of many possible examples: in First Dream, the silent mute senses “dispute” the “testimony” of the movement of the vital spirits that suggest the body is alive, “defending themselves without reply” (lines 226-233); in one of her sonnets, the silence of tears communicate better with a jealous lover than speech can (SJ, Obras Completas [OC], poem 164).
For Sor Juana, darkness is also both a negation-as-substantial and an embodied reality. Night is the realm of the unseen, but it is also where the intellect, with the aid of imagination, can focus with “the keen / sight, free of spectacles, of her beautiful / intellectual eyes” (SJ, First Dream, lines 440-2) on her attempt to comprehend the created world. Additionally, darkness itself serves “as an instrument” of sight, so that “bedazzled eyes … might recover” from being blinded by their attempt to take in the infinite objects before them (ibid., lines 495-515). Although light is the paradigmatic instrument of sight, darkness is equally necessary for successful vision. In Sor Juana’s hands this same darkness is also an embodiment of women’s identity, maligned status, and epistemic and political power. The cover of night protects the girl-turned-owl Nyctimine as she sneaks into a church and steals Minervan olive oil from holy lamps (ibid., lines 25-38). Night herself is a character in the poem, a tyrant queen who flees to the opposing hemisphere as the Sun conquers her former kingdom (ibid., 924-966). Incidentally, black was also the color of Sor Juana’s nun’s veil, scapular, and mantle.
Del Río Parra evocatively suggests that Sor Juana’s choices to provide negations of sensation situate the poem in an “abstract mental space, that of knowledge” (2000, 312-3).
It is important that Sor Juana not only negates color-vision and sound in the poem in order to draw out the way darkness and silence are also substantial or positive; she also makes them inter-substitutable and synesthetic. After all, why wouldn’t a negation of sound and a negation of light have something in common? Sarah Finley points out a synesthetic poem that Sor Juana likely encountered in Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis (1650): “Music is not only the one that we see, / but all that is smelled and touched, / and all that the mouth ever tasted, / … and so much more we never see…” (translation by Finley, 2019). Sor Juana’s own version of cross-modal synesthesia is no less striking. In one lyric poem, Sor Juana entreats the recipient to, “Hear me with your eyes, since your ears are so far away … and since my crude voice does not reach you, hear me despite your deafness, since my complaints are mute” (SJ, OC, poem 211). Written words record sound, but only mutely, in a way accessible to sight. So they enable the deaf to ‘hear’, and they enable someone to ‘see’ a sound even though its emitter is far away, and thus in fact invisible. Therefore the world of the concept, the world of linguistic abstraction, is inter-modal, and perhaps best exemplified in or represented by the negation of positive percepts.
The same, of course, is implied in First Dream, which is conveyed in silence “heard” by the reader because the creatures of night are “intonating… rests more than notes” (SJ, First Dream, lines 56-9): rests as musical notations are visible analogues for the otherwise un-heard and un-hearable. The words of the poem are themselves “mute voices,” like the mute communication of the unmoving limbs and tongue (ibid., lines 226-233). So, in the poem, we “see” sound – or, rather, its absence – and we don’t-see because we grasp invisibles, objects of intellection. We “hear” words – words are typically spoken, but here un-spoken as pure text – that represent abstract objects.
In philosophy of mind, representationalists debate whether mental representations that ground language and cognition – call these “concepts” – are a-modal and unstructured, as in a paradigmatic “language of thought” model (ex., Fodor 1975, 2008; Quilty-Dunn, Porot, and Mandelbaum 2023), or perhaps multi-modal or imagistic in structure, as in a “perceptual symbol systems” model (ex., Barsalou 1999; Prinz 2004; Nanay 2018). These are, of course, not the only available positions in logical space, and the debate spills over into, or sometimes falls out of, questions about the cognitive basis of mental imagery or about the cognitive processing of physical symbols like text, diagrams, and images.
Separately, there is the question of whether darkness or silence are entities in their own right (ex., Sontag, 1966; Dauenhauer, 1980), and whether we perceive them directly or only inferentially, which comes up in the related dispute about whether we can hallucinate something like silence (ex., Phillips 2013).
Sor Juana’s writing suggests that there may be a surprising new way for the a-modal concept theorists and multi-modal concept theorists to “meet in the middle.” The idea may be clearer if we invert it: in the way that text is an envisioning of the un-seen, or that words can mutely stand for otherwise un-heard, the way we externalize or communicate abstract mental concepts is to frame them through one or more sensory modalities, like vision or sound, which will not exhaust but will help evoke the abstract concepts in their recipients. In order to do this, the recipients must implicitly be setting aside – negating? – some aspect of the way or mode in which they were received. So in some ways, the only way to represent a genuine abstraction is by way of negation. Could the most abstract of concepts also be the most multi-modal, multisensory negations? For Sor Juana, at least, the abstract realm of intellection is a conceptual space best accessed by way of multimodal, synesthetic imagery of absences. Untasted food for thought.
References
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