RICHARD KEARNEY - Losing Our Touch
Are we losing our senses? In our increasingly virtual world,
are we losing touch with the sense of touch itself? And if so, so what?
I recently had occasion to pose these questions to students
in a college class I teach on eros — “from Plato to today.” Not surprisingly,
the topic of physical contact and sex came up, and the conversation turned very
much to “today.” A number of the students said that they regularly messaged
online before having “real contact” with partners, perhaps using online dating
and mating services like Match.com, OkCupid, SpeedDate.com and Tinder. They
shared messaging acronyms that signaled their level of willingness to have sex,
and under what conditions. They admitted to enjoying the relative anonymity of
the one-off “hook up,” whose consummation required no preliminary
close-quarters courtship rites or flirtation ceremonies, no culinary seduction,
no caress, nothing — apart from the eventual “blind rut,” as James Joyce put it
— requiring the presence of a functioning, sensitive body.
We noted the rather obvious paradox: The ostensible
immediacy of sexual contact was in fact mediated digitally. And it was also
noted that what is often thought of as a “materialist” culture was arguably the
most “immaterialist” culture imaginable — vicarious, by proxy, and often
voyeuristic.
Is today’s virtual dater and mater something like an updated
version of Plato’s Gyges, who could see everything at a distance but was
touched by nothing? Are we perhaps entering an age of “excarnation,” where we
obsess about the body in increasingly disembodied ways? For if incarnation is
the image become flesh, excarnation is flesh become image. Incarnation invests
flesh; excarnation divests it.
In perhaps the first great works of human psychology, the
“De Anima,” Aristotle pronounced touch the most universal of the senses. Even
when we are asleep we are susceptible to changes in temperature and noise. Our
bodies are always “on.” And touch is the most intelligent sense, Aristotle
explained, because it is the most sensitive. When we touch someone or something
we are exposed to what we touch. We are responsive to others because we are
constantly in touch with them.
“Touch knows differences,” Aristotle insisted. It is the
source of our most basic power to discriminate. The thin-skinned person is
sensitive and intelligent; the thick-skinned, coarse and ignorant. Think of
Odysseus and the Cyclops, Jacob and Esau. The power of touch. Even the Buddha,
when challenged by Mara to reveal his authority, simply touches the ground. Our
first intelligence is sensory refinement. And this primal sensibility is also
what places us at risk in the world, exposing us to adventure and discovery.
Aristotle was challenging the dominant prejudice of his
time, one he himself embraced in earlier works. The Platonic doctrine of the
Academy held that sight was the highest sense, because it is the most distant
and mediated; hence most theoretical, holding things at bay, mastering meaning
from above. Touch, by contrast, was deemed the lowest sense because it is
ostensibly immediate and thus subject to intrusions and pressures from the
material world.
Against this, Aristotle made his radical counterclaim that
touch did indeed have a medium, namely “flesh.” And he insisted that flesh was
not just some material organ but a complex mediating membrane that accounts for
our primary sensings and evaluations.
Tactility is not blind immediacy — not merely sensorial but
cognitive, too. Savoring is wisdom; in Latin, wisdom is “sapientia,” from
“sapere,” to taste. These carnal senses make us human by keeping us in touch
with things, by responding to people’s pain — as when the disguised Odysseus
(whose name can be translated as “bearer of pain,”), returning to Ithaca, is
recognized by his nursemaid, Eurycleia, at the touch of his childhood scar.
But Aristotle did not win this battle of ideas. The
Platonists prevailed and the Western universe became a system governed by “the
soul’s eye.” Sight came to dominate the hierarchy of the senses, and was
quickly deemed the appropriate ally of theoretical ideas. Western philosophy
thus sprang from a dualism between the intellectual senses, crowned by sight,
and the lower “animal” senses, stigmatized by touch. And Western theology —
though heralding the Christian message of Incarnation (“word made flesh”) — all
too often confirmed the injurious dichotomy with its anti-carnal doctrines;
prompting Nietzsche’s verdict that Christianity was “Platonism for the people”
and “gave Eros poison to drink.” Thus opto-centrism prevailed for over 2,000
years, culminating in our contemporary culture of digital simulation and
spectacle. The eye continues to rule in what Roland Barthes once called our
“civilization of the image.” The world is no longer our oyster, but our screen.
For all the fascination with bodies, our current technology
is arguably exacerbating our carnal alienation. While offering us enormous
freedoms of fantasy and encounter, digital eros may also be removing us further
from the flesh.
Pornography, for example, is now an industry worth tens of
billions of dollars worldwide. Seen by some as a progressive sign of post-60s
sexual liberation, pornography is, paradoxically, a twin of Puritanism. Both
display an alienation from flesh — one replacing it with the virtuous, the
other with the virtual. Each is out of touch with the body.
THIS movement toward privatization and virtuality is
explored in Spike Jonze’s recent movie “Her,” where a man falls in love with
his operating system, which names itself Samantha. He can think of nothing else
and becomes insanely jealous when he discovers that his virtual lover,
Samantha, is also flirting with thousands of other subscribers. Eventually,
Samantha feels so bad for him that she decides to supplement her digital persona
with a real body by sending a surrogate lover. But the plan fails miserably —
while the man touches the embodied lover he hears the virtual signals of
Samantha in his ears and cannot bridge the gap. The split between digital
absence and carnal presence is unbearable. Something is missing: love in the
flesh.
The move toward excarnation is apparent in what is becoming
more and more a fleshless society. In medicine, “bedside manner” and hand on
pulse has ceded to the anonymous technologies of imaging in diagnosis and
treatment. In war, hand-to-hand combat has been replaced by “targeted killing”
via remote-controlled drones. If contemporary warfare renders us invulnerable
to those who cannot touch us, can we make peace without a hand to shake? (Think
of Mandela-de Klerk or Begin-Sadat).
Moreover, certain cyber engineers now envisage implanting
transmission codes in brains so that we will not have to move a finger — or
come into contact with another human being — to get what we want. The touch
screen replaces touch itself. The cosmos shrinks to a private monitor; each
viewer a disembodied self unto itself.
Full humanity requires the ability to sense and be sensed in
turn: the power, as Shakespeare said, to “feel what wretches feel” — or, one
might also add, what artists, cooks, musicians and lovers feel. We need to find
our way in a tactile world again. We need to return from head to foot, from
brain to fingertip, from iCloud to earth. To close the distance, so that eros
is more about proximity than proxy. So that soul becomes flesh, where it
belongs. Such a move, I submit, would radically alter our “sense” of sex in our
digital civilization. It would enhance the role of empathy, vulnerability and
sensitivity in the art of carnal love, and ideally, in all of human relations.
Because to love or be loved truly is to be able to say, “I have been touched.”
Richard Kearney is a philosophy professor at Boston
College whose books
include “The Wake of Imagination” and the forthcoming “Carnal Hermeneutics.”