El órgano del placer es la inteligencia.
The organ of pleasure is the intellect.
(Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un Texto Implícito, 2.84)
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Thank you for providing some of the better scholia of Gomez Davila, some of his other writings he is a reactionary Catholic.
Donne, in a youthful exercise, discourses on the nose as the organ of love.
NGD may have been a fine philosopher for all I know, but to call “intelligence” an “organ” is about as strange in Spanish as in English. Granted, there are less common acceptions, as in “party organ” for a political party’s newspaper, but organs usually have an element of the concrete. The rhetorical point of using the word órgano at all is that it sets up the expectation of a physical organ and then puts in an unexpected organ. Spanish-speakers do this all the time, but most do it correctly, by saying that “el órgano del placer es el cerebro” vel sim.
Possibly — I wouldn’t know — NGD’s odd usage reflects familiarity with the
original Greek sense of organ as `tool.’