Philosophical Postscript
– Touch and the Essence of Bodyhood
“The tactile realm of perception is
the same thing as the body.”
Samuel Avery
So far in this book I have used terms
such as ‘lived body’, ‘felt body’ or ‘body of feeling
awareness’ to present another understanding of what we call ‘the
body’ or ‘a body’. I have also argued that the ‘body of our
feeling awareness’ as a whole – our ‘soul’ – embraces the
entire field or space of experiencing that we perceive as the ‘world’
around us. Here I wish to go a little further in exploring the single
word ‘body’.
To most people, of course, this word has
a self-evident meaning which is rarely questioned. They see the human
body, like any other ‘body’, as a bounded ‘material’ object
in space. I stress the word ‘see’, for it hints at the way in
which the dimension of visual experiencing has come to dominate both
our perception and conception of the body and of bodies, i.e. of
‘bodyhood’ as such, leading us also to think of bodies as
‘material’ objects ‘in’ space.
In reality however, nobody (‘no-body’)
can see, hear or even touch ‘matter’. For what we call ‘matter’
is actually a purely abstract
concept to which there
corresponds no ‘objective’ reality we can directly experience or
prove the existence of. Instead, what we think of as properties of
‘matter’ are simply qualities of subjective
experiencing – in particular
those qualities of tactile
experiencing such as hardness
or softness, weight and density, roughness or smoothness etc. In
other words, it is only because something that we actually see in
space is also sensed as something that can be potentially
felt in a tactile way that we come to think of it as
a ‘material’ body.
‘Space’ itself however, is no
objective ‘physical’ dimension but rather the principal dimension
of subjective visual experiencing.
So again, what we ‘see’ in it is also only what we can also
potentially feel or touch. Indeed we could go so far as to say that
visual experiencing
of and in ‘space’ is itself a sensory and spatial interpretation
of tactile experiencing
in all its dimensions, actual and potential - which include hearing,
taste and even smell. For hearing is vibration that touches
us - and gives us a sign of
something that can potentially be touched. Similarly, smell gives us
a sign of something that can potentially be tasted - taste itself
being a form of touch. That is why a dog’s experience of space is
shaped as much - if not more - by their acute sense of hearing and
smell than by sight alone.
As human beings, whilst we can see a
plant or even a single-celled organism under a microscope – neither
the cell nor the plant can either see, hear or even smell. What the
plant senses, it senses only in a directly tactile way – whether as
a breeze, insect or chemical on its surface. What a single cell
experiences – even a cell of our own ‘body’ and its multiple
‘sense organs’ (a retinal cell for example) it experiences
through touch and feeling awareness alone. It is only through the
sense of sight that has been developed by ‘multicellular organisms’
that they come to interpret their tactile experience in a visual and
spatial way – or that human beings in particular come to perceive
and conceive ‘cells’ themselves (and the tissues, organs and
bodies composed of them) principally as visual and ‘material’
objects – rather than feeling
them subjectively in the tactile way that they feel themselves.
Yet given the fundamentally tactile
nature of cellular experiencing it is no surprise that both touch and
herbal remedies are amongst the oldest forms of healing – affecting
the very consciousness
of our cells, tissue and organs, which is what I have termed ‘the
physical soul’. For our cells themselves know of no other mode of
experiencing but
touch and taste, i.e. tactile experiencing and what Samuel Avery
calls ‘chemical’ experiencing on the other.
The radical conclusion that all these
reflections inexorably lead to is that bodyhood as such is
touch, i.e. tactile
experiencing in general and
per se.
The radical conclusion that all these
reflections lead to is that bodyhood as such is
touch, i.e. tactile
experiencing in general and
per se.
It is not just that our bodies are an instrument
or object of touch. Instead, the very ‘body’ that we think of as
touching or being touched is, in itself, a felt shape or pattern of
tactile experiencing.
It is not sight but touch
then, that can be said to be
the true essence of all sensory
and bodily experiencing. Thus not only sensations of hardness and
softness, roughness or softness, lightness or heaviness, weight and
density, warmth and coolness but also of air and respiration, taste
and digestion, lightness or heaviness, movement and stillness,
tension and relaxation, sound and silence, even pleasure, pain and
emotional states, that are felt in a principally tactile
way; as also are such senses
as ‘pressure’ of time, of spatial expansiveness or confinement,
closeness or distance – not to mention our sense of how inwardly
close or distant, ‘in touch’ or ‘in contact’ we feel with
ourselves and others.
All that we see from the outside and call
‘a body’ is in essence nothing but a realm of actual and
potential modes of tactile
experiencing –
proprioceptive and kinaesthetic, respiratory, auditory, olfactory
(smell) or gustatory (taste and digestive sensations), emotional and
relational. There are many people however, whose consciousness is so
much dominated by sight that these dimensions of tactile experiencing
may be almost totally subsumed by visual perception – by objects
that are ‘seen’ in three-dimensional space - or, as they
increasingly are, only as two-dimensional images on an electronic
screen – including medical images created through CAT and MRI
scans. One can link the general decline of tactile awareness and
experiencing to the way in which screen technology has markedly
accentuated a primary identification of the human body (not least the
female body) with something ‘seen’, a mere visual image and to
which the realm of actual or potential touch, whether in the form of
handling objects or sexual touch, is either subordinated to or, in
the case of both pornography and medical scans for example, made
dependent upon. As a result, one may ask whether the very word
‘body’, with its immediate connotation of something seen in the
form of a visual, mental or technological image, has itself become an
obstacle to a more basic understanding of what ‘a body’
essentially is.
The same can be said of the word ‘soul’
– which is why I prefer the term ‘feeling awareness’. In this
context however, it is important to distinguish ‘feeling’ and
‘touch’. If we touch something we of course 'feel' it. On the
other hand we can be 'touched' in a feeling way and not just in the
physical way implied by
the term 'tactile' – just as feelings can also 'touch' us in a
non-physical way. What we call ‘soul’, therefore, can be
understood precisely as this feeling
dimension of tactile experiencing.
To say that “the tactile realm of
perception is the same thing as the body” is to say that not just
what we call ‘body’ but also
what we call ‘soul’ are, in essence, anything
‘in the world’ that we
experience as ‘touching’ us in a manner that is felt
in what may be more than just a ‘tactile’ way – whether this be
a visual image or perception, a sensation of pleasure or pain, a look
on a person’s face or in their eyes, a sound, word or tone of
voice, a painting, poem or piece of music – or a lived experience,
event or encounter of any sort.
This is what makes it impossible to
separate the ‘lived body’ and bodily self-experience from our
lived or experienced world. For what most essentially constitutes our
‘life world’ is
all that has the potential to touch us in a feeling
way. Indeed any ‘world’
consists of nothing but particular potentials of felt, tactile
experiencing – none of which arise from some ‘thing’ called
‘the body’ or
‘the soul’, but rather from ‘feeling awareness’ – an
awareness which knows no bodily boundaries and yet is the essence of
both ‘body’ and
‘soul’ – both of which consist essentially of felt shapes,
patterns, tones and textures of
awareness.
What we call ‘a feeling’ (singular
noun) or ‘feelings’ (plural noun) is one thing. ‘Feeling’
(verb) on the other hand, is another. ‘Feelings’ are something we
experience ourselves as ‘having’. Feeling
on the other hand is something we do.
Or rather not something that ‘we’ do but that awareness itself
‘does’ – for without a feeling awareness of a self or selves –
of an ‘I’, ‘you’, or ‘we’ – there could be no self or
selves to experience, just as without a feeling
awareness of all there
is to potentially experience, there would be nothing to experience –
and so also no field or felt world of experiencing, tactile or
otherwise. The terms ‘feeling awareness’ and ‘body of feeling
awareness’ therefore remain an important reminder that it is
not the visually perceived and
seemingly ‘physical’ or ‘material’ forms (cellular and
bodily, thingly and worldly) that feel or touch, but rather awareness
itself in all its different
shapes, patterns, tones and textures – and that what
awareness feels and ‘touches’ are essentially nothing but other
such shapes and patterns, tones and textures of
awareness.
Furthermore, since it is only through an
awareness of
experiencing that we first come to experience any ‘self’, ‘body’
or ‘world’ whatsoever, it follows that this awareness itself
cannot – in principle
– be the property or
product
of
any self, body or world we are aware of
– let alone enclosed within the apparent boundaries of what we see
as ‘a body’ or ‘brain’. This argument ‘in principle’,
i.e. the recognition that awareness is fundamentally irreducible to
any experienced phenomena – being itself the precondition or ‘field
condition’ for experiencing in all its infinite modes and
potentials – is what I call ‘The Awareness Principle’.
Acknowledgements to Samuel Avery for his insights into the relation between visual and tactile dimensions of sensory experiencing and their relation to the myth of ‘matter’.
References:
Avery, Samuel The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness Avery, Samuel Transcendence of the Western Mind Wilberg, Peter The Awareness Principle
Avery, Samuel The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness Avery, Samuel Transcendence of the Western Mind Wilberg, Peter The Awareness Principle
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