The Ontology of Olfaction

Written by Adill Ali; Read time: 25 mins.

Abstract

This essay examines olfaction as a privileged entry into questions of being, drawing together phenomenology, classical and contemporary metaphysics, Islamic philosophical traditions, cognitive science, and computational research in artificial intelligence. Against the familiar hierarchy of the senses inherited from Greek and Enlightenment thought, smell emerges not as an inferior modality but as an ontological tutor: it reveals that being is not primarily substance, but atmosphere; not stability, but unfolding; not essence, but relation. I argue that olfaction’s phenomenological structure, its diffuseness, temporality, dependence on context, and permeability with the body, forces a reconsideration of the metaphysical assumptions that have shaped Western thought. Through this lens, scent appears as atmospheric-temporal-relational being: a mode of appearance that dissolves objecthood, challenges essentialism, and makes explicit the primacy of relation in the structure of reality. Near the end, I briefly gesture toward the implications for perfumery, including the relational methodology pursued at Hunayn, understood not as a stylistic choice but as an ontological necessity.

Introduction: Why Smell Was Overlooked, and Why It Matters Now

Philosophy has long constructed a hierarchy of the senses, and smell was almost always placed near the bottom. The reasons often reveal more about philosophical temperament than about olfaction itself. Greek metaphysics favoured what could be seen and articulated. Aristotle defined knowledge through form, through what can be grasped, and thus scent, formless, shifting, resistant to delimitation, was excluded from the highest ranks of experience. Kant went further, calling smell the most dispensable of the senses, too bound to personal preference, too incapable of supporting “disinterested” aesthetic judgement.

It is not hard to guess why scent troubled these frameworks. Smell refuses to be stabilised. It cannot be fully separated from the perceiver. It lacks edges, boundaries, and sharp distinctions. It is not easily subjected to analysis without vanishing. In a tradition that privileged permanence, clarity, and distance, scent was almost destined to be treated as philosophically inconvenient.

But the very features that made scent unwelcome in classical metaphysics now appear philosophically instructive. In phenomenology, cognitive science, Islamic metaphysics, and in the newest experiments in artificial intelligence, we see a growing appreciation for relational, temporal, and atmospheric structures. Smell exemplifies these structures with a directness that other senses obscure. Olfaction becomes a pressure point where several intellectual traditions converge. It is precisely its instability that makes it metaphysically productive.

This essay proceeds on that premise. It treats olfaction not as a curiosity but as a serious philosophical site. Smell becomes a way to rethink ontology itself: a challenge to substance-based metaphysics, an invitation to relational thinking, a demonstration of atmospheric disclosure, and a sensory proof that being is more process than permanence.

 

1. Atmosphere and the Pre-Objective World

 

1.1 Atmosphere as the Horizon of Appearance

Phenomenology begins not with objects but with lived experience. If one abandons the abstracted gaze and attends to the actual structure of perception, something quite striking becomes clear: the world does not first appear as discrete items. It presents itself as atmosphere, a spread of qualities, a tonal field.

Merleau-Ponty insisted that the visible world is not a collection of solids placed before a spectator but a “flesh,” a continuum of relations between perceiver and perceived. Scent amplifies this idea to such a degree that it becomes unavoidable. Vision can deceive us into believing that the world is a set of units. Smell allows no such misinterpretation. It does not “give” us objects. A single inhalation can contain dozens of intermingling cues, air humidity, distant smoke, the faint resinous trace on someone’s clothes, a hint of soil after rain. Yet these cues do not appear as separable components; they appear as a condition of the space.

This atmospheric mode of disclosure is not secondary. It is ontologically prior. Before one recognises “jasmine,” “dust,” “wood,” or “smoke,” one is immersed in an affective horizon, a “way the world is” at that moment. Scent is the world announcing itself, not as object but as ambience.

1.2 The Limits of Object Ontology

Western metaphysics has long assumed that reality consists of things with properties. Smell exposes the limitations of this assumption. It is nearly impossible to locate a smell in the same way one locates a chair or stone. Scent is everywhere and nowhere; it is distributed across the space; it does not allow a pinpointing gesture. Its being is not positional but atmospheric.

This poses a challenge to substance ontology. If something real cannot be located, cannot be bounded, cannot be separated from the air that holds it, then the object-based approach fails to capture it. Scent’s way of existing forces us to consider another metaphysical category: presence as field rather than presence as item.

1.3 The Islamic Philosophical Notion of Subtle Reality

The Islamic philosophical tradition contains conceptual resources largely absent in Greek thought. One of these is al-Latīf, the subtle, the fine, the barely perceptible yet deeply influential. Al-Latīf refers to the layer of existence that is real yet not defined by visible form. It is the realm of the delicate, the interstitial, the atmospheric.

Scent belongs unmistakably to this category. It participates in the world without being contained by it. It mediates between inside and outside. It transforms the environment without imposing a visible structure.

Suhrawardi’s illuminationist metaphysics describes reality as graded intensity rather than fixed substance. Scent aligns with this view: it manifests more strongly or weakly, more brightly or dimly, depending on relation. Ibn Arabi’s ontology of the imaginal (alam al-mithāl) likewise accepts that the real may appear in subtle, non-physical forms. Smell becomes a direct sensory example of this subtle existence, a material phenomenon that behaves like an imaginal one.

Atmosphere is not derivative. It is a mode of being. And smell is the most atmospheric signal we possess.

 

2. Temporality as the Essence of Scent

 

2.1 From Substance to Event

If atmosphere is one half of scent’s ontology, time is the other. Smell does not persist. It unfolds. It becomes. It declines. It passes. To freeze a scent in time would be to destroy the phenomenon itself.

Here, olfaction becomes a phenomenological tutor. Being, as Heidegger argued, is temporal. But much of our sensory life disguises this. A table’s identity does not shift across moments. A stone remains a stone. The senses that present objects allow us to forget temporality. The senses that present atmosphere force us to remember it.

A scent is always moving. Even at the moment of strongest intensity, it is already fading. Each inhalation contains a slippage between what is present and what is disappearing. Smell is the only modality whose very identity is constituted by its transience.

Thus olfaction reveals that being is not primarily what remains but what emerges and dissipates.

2.2 Ephemerality as Ontological Truth

Husserl described consciousness not as a sequence of instants but as a flow in which retention (the just-past) and protention (the about-to-occur) shape every moment. Smell makes this structure palpable. The act of smelling is an encounter with the phenomenological now: each inhalation folds memory, expectation, and presence into one inseparable event.

This helps explain why scent is linked so strongly with memory. The temporal structure of olfaction mirrors the structure of consciousness itself. Smell is not a static perception but a temporal curve. It therefore imprints itself on the mind through resonance, not representation.

2.3 Tajaddud: Continuous Creation as Metaphysics of Scent

Islamic philosophy provides another powerful model. In Mulla Sadra’s doctrine of substantial motion (al-haraka al-jawhariyya), being itself is in motion; the world is renewed moment by moment. There are no static substances underneath change; change is the deepest structure of existence.

Smell is a sensory instantiation of this principle. A scent does not merely change; its changing is its being. It is a process that cannot be separated from the moment that produces it. It evaporates, recombines with air, enters the body, departs again. Smell reveals a world in which nothing stands still, in which being is inseparable from becoming.

2.4 Time as Medium of Art

Perfumery is therefore an art not of objects but of temporal structures. The traditional pyramid, top, middle, base, is too crude to capture the real dynamism. A perfume is not layered vertically but flows horizontally through time: it rises, opens, diffuses, folds back, reveals hidden notes, then sinks into quiet persistence.

Perfume is closer to choreography or music than to sculpture. It takes place not in space but in time. And because smell penetrates the body, because the world enters us through inhalation, this temporality becomes intimate. Unlike music, which reaches us through distance, scent reaches us by crossing into our interior.

Hunayn’s emphasis on temporal mapping, viewing a perfume as a field unfolding over time, aligns with this ontological insight. It treats scent as an event rather than a substance, a movement rather than an object. This is not innovation for its own sake; it is fidelity to the nature of scent itself.

 

3. Relational Identity: Scent Without Essence

 

3.1 The Neuroscientific Collapse of Essentialism

If classical metaphysics assumed that objects have essences, olfaction contradicts this at every level. Neuroscience shows that molecules do not “contain” smells. A single molecule activates multiple receptors; a single receptor responds to multiple molecules. The smell is not in the substance but in the pattern of activation across dozens or hundreds of receptors. This distributed representation means identity is relational from the start.

Two molecules that smell identical may share almost no chemical similarity. Two molecules that are chemically similar may smell utterly different. The nose does not track essence; it maps relation.

3.2 Context as Ontological Determinant

Even outside the body, context determines identity. Jasmine absolute smells differently in humid heat than in cold air, differently on skin than on cloth, differently when paired with citrus than with incense. Its “identity” is not intrinsic but relational.

This aligns with Ibn Arabi’s doctrine that entities have no fixed essence, only states of manifestation that shift depending on the relational field. It also parallels contemporary relational metaphysics, in which beings are nodes in a network rather than carriers of inherent properties.

Scent has no self-enclosed identity. Its identity is a function of its relations.

3.3 AI and Odour Space: High-Dimensional Relationality

Recent advances in machine learning have modelled scents in high-dimensional vector spaces. Neural networks trained on molecular structure and perceptual data place odours as points on a manifold where similarity corresponds to distance. In such models:

• There are no categories (floral, woody, oriental)
• There are only regions, gradients, and clusters
• Accords are neighbourhoods in this space
• Perfume is a trajectory carved across this manifold

This computational representation is astonishingly close to the metaphysical one suggested earlier. Scent exists in relation, not essence. It is a structure in a field, not a self-identical entity.

Hunayn’s relational approach, treating materials as vectors, accords as clusters, and perfumes as time-paths, is not simply stylistic. It mirrors the best models of reality offered by neuroscience and AI.

 

4. Distributed Being and Embodied Presence

 

4.1 Where Does a Scent Exist?

If one pushes the ontology of scent to its limit, an unusual but revealing question emerges: where does a scent actually exist? Not chemically, chemistry can tell us where molecules are, but phenomenologically and metaphysically.

It is not in the object: a sealed bottle of perfume is not yet a scent. It is not in the air alone: without a perceiving body, it remains inert possibility. It is not in the nose alone: the same molecular stimulus yields different experiences depending on context and memory. It is not in the brain alone: olfactory activation is distributed, entangled with emotional and autobiographical regions.

Thus scent’s “location” is not localisable.

It is a distributed phenomenon, a process extended across body, air, memory, world.

It exists in the relation between these elements, in their ongoing coupling, not in any one place.

Philosophically, this undermines the subject/object split. Smell enters the body; the world crosses into the perceiver. Olfaction erodes the boundary between inner and outer, reminding us of Merleau-Ponty’s claim that perception is always an intertwining, a chiasm. The perceiver and the perceived do not stand at opposite ends of a line; they form a reversible figure.

To smell is to participate in the world’s presence, not observe it from a distance.

4.2 Embodiment and the Dissolution of Distance

Vision and hearing operate at a distance. Scent collapses distance. It requires proximity, not always spatial proximity, but a proximity of medium. This collapsing of distance gives olfaction an intimacy unlike any other sensory mode.

This is why certain smells provoke visceral reactions, and why scent is tangled so deeply with memory. Smell does not simply “inform” the mind; it enters the body, becomes part of one’s breath. The phenomenology of embodiment, discussed by philosophers like Merleau-Ponty and later cognitive scientists, appears clearly in olfaction. To smell is to be physically altered by the world.

Islamic metaphysics captures this through the concept of rūḥ, the breath or animating subtle presence. Because scent travels via breath, it belongs to the domain of what is most intimate yet most expansive. Breath connects the body to the world; scent rides along that fragile threshold.

Embodiment is not incidental to olfaction; it is constitutive of it.

4.3 Smell as Distributed Cognition

Cognitive science increasingly recognises that the mind is not confined to the skull. Perception, memory, and meaning all extend into the body, environment, and social world. Smell is a paradigmatic case of this extended cognition.

• Identity emerges through receptor patterns.
• Interpretation emerges through context and memory.
• Meaning emerges through historical, cultural, and personal associations.
• The experience occurs in a field that exceeds any one site.

Thus scent is not an object of cognition; it is a network state.

Its ontology is distributed, multi-layered, embedded.

 

5. Synthesis: Scent as Atmospheric–Temporal–Relational Being

 

The three strands, atmosphere, temporality, relation, form a coherent ontological account of olfaction.

Atmosphere: shows that scent is world-disclosure.

Temporality: shows that scent is becoming.

Relation: shows that scent has no essence.

Together they reveal:

Scent is a mode of being that exists only through relation, only in time, and only as atmosphere.

This is not poetry; it is metaphysics.

Olfaction makes explicit what is true but concealed in other domains: that being is fluid, interdependent, transient, and open-ended. Phenomenology provides the methods of description. Islamic metaphysics provides the conceptual categories of subtlety, continuous creation, and relational disclosure. Neuroscience provides the mechanisms of distributed activation. AI provides the high-dimensional models of relational identity. Olfaction sits at the intersection of all these domains. It is the sense that, more than any other, exposes the relational fabric of existence.

 

6. Implications for Perfumery: Ontology Into Practice

 

6.1 Perfume Is Not the Arrangement of Materials

If scent is relational rather than essential, then perfumery cannot be the art of ingredients. This is the illusion that underlies material fetishism, the belief that rare ingredients confer intrinsic value. But if identity arises from relation, then a material is meaningful only insofar as it contributes to a coherent relational field.

Ingredients are variables, not substances. They gain significance only through the structures they form together in time.

6.2 Perfume as Temporal Architecture

If scent is becoming, perfumery is temporal design. A perfume is not a list but a curve. It is not a thing but an event. It is a choreography whose medium is air and body.

This should change how perfumers think. Instead of constructing vertical layers (“top, heart, base”), one composes horizontal movements across time: emergence, expansion, inflection, deepening, dissipation.

Hunayn’s relational methodology, mapping vector behaviours, arranging clusters in odour space, shaping temporal fields, is thus more than a creative framework. It is an ontological alignment with what scent actually is.

6.3 Ihsān as Structural Ethic

Because scent is relational, the principle of iḥsān, excellence expressed through proportion, harmony, and sincerity, becomes an ontological guideline. A just perfume is one in which no element dominates unnecessarily; in which tension is balanced with resolution; in which the temporal arc expresses coherence rather than noise.

A perfume composed with iḥsān is not merely aesthetically pleasing. It is metaphysically truthful: it mirrors the relational order of being.

 

Conclusion

 

Scent as the Breath of Being

Olfaction, long dismissed by philosophers, turns out to reveal something essential about reality. It illuminates modes of being that object-based metaphysics cannot capture. Through smell, we encounter:

• A world that discloses itself atmospherically
• A world that exists through unfolding rather than permanence
• A world in which identity arises from relation, not essence
• A world in which intimacy dissolves the subject/object divide
• A world renewed moment by moment, as Islamic metaphysics insists
• A world whose meaning is distributed, not contained

To smell is to encounter being at its most subtle, most dynamic, most relational.

Perfumery, when practiced with philosophical seriousness, becomes an art of shaping this being, an architecture of atmosphere, time, and relation.

Hunayn’s work, though only lightly referenced here, stands at the frontier of these insights: treating perfume not as luxury but as relational form; not as substance but as becoming; not as commodity but as a mode of understanding.

Smell is not trivial.

It is the world’s way of appearing as relation.

Its fleetingness is not a weakness but a lesson.

Its subtlety is not an absence but a depth.

Its intimacy is not intrusion but participation.

Scent is the breath of being itself, vanishing, revealing, returning, the most delicate and the most profound signal of what it means for a world to be alive.