"Hearing, which, by the motion of the air, informs us of the motion of sounding or vibrating bodies"
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An oddly mechanical definition from a man best known for sensuality is the tell. Brillat-Savarin, the gastronomic philosopher who made taste into a worldview, frames hearing like a lawyer drafting a statute: precise, causal, almost cold. “By the motion of the air” reads like expert testimony. No romance, no metaphor, just a chain of transmission that turns the invisible into admissible evidence.
That legal temperament matters in context. Brillat-Savarin lived through the French Revolution, exile, and a career spent navigating institutions that demanded proof and procedure. In that world, the senses aren’t mystical portals; they’re instruments that “inform us.” The verb is bureaucratic. Hearing isn’t enjoyment, it’s notification - the ear as a clerk logging external facts. The phrasing also performs a quiet Enlightenment confidence: reality is legible if you trace its mechanics. Vibrations become knowledge. The body becomes a reliable receiver.
The subtext, though, is less austere than it looks. By emphasizing mediation - air moving between source and listener - he sneaks in an argument about distance and trust. You don’t touch the sounding body; you infer it. Hearing is already interpretation, a sensory form of reading the world at one remove. That’s why the sentence works: it collapses aesthetics into physics, then physics into epistemology. A definition of hearing becomes a miniature philosophy of how modern people convince themselves that what they can’t see is still real.
That legal temperament matters in context. Brillat-Savarin lived through the French Revolution, exile, and a career spent navigating institutions that demanded proof and procedure. In that world, the senses aren’t mystical portals; they’re instruments that “inform us.” The verb is bureaucratic. Hearing isn’t enjoyment, it’s notification - the ear as a clerk logging external facts. The phrasing also performs a quiet Enlightenment confidence: reality is legible if you trace its mechanics. Vibrations become knowledge. The body becomes a reliable receiver.
The subtext, though, is less austere than it looks. By emphasizing mediation - air moving between source and listener - he sneaks in an argument about distance and trust. You don’t touch the sounding body; you infer it. Hearing is already interpretation, a sensory form of reading the world at one remove. That’s why the sentence works: it collapses aesthetics into physics, then physics into epistemology. A definition of hearing becomes a miniature philosophy of how modern people convince themselves that what they can’t see is still real.
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| Topic | Science |
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