Episode 63 - Touch
Transcript
David: 0:09
Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán.
Ellie: 0:11
Hey everybody, this is Ellie Anderson.
David: 0:14
Welcome to Overthink, the podcast where two buddies hang out and talk about philosophy.
Ellie: 0:20
It's not just two buddies, David. The key part is that we're friends who are also professors.
David: 0:26
The key is that we are buds. That's what people love about our podcast, Ellie.
Ellie: 0:31
Buddies. How about bros? I'm going to see Bros the movie tomorrow.
David: 0:34
I prefer sis.
Ellie: 0:37
That's true. That's true. That is a more fitting term for us. In any case, today is the first of a five episode series on the five senses, and we're starting with touch. We also want to let you know that we are pairing this podcast series with some YouTube interviews over on our YouTube channel. And over there we are interviewing a bunch of different experts on the five senses, many of whom are philosophers, but some of whom are experts in other fields, including, uh, perfumer, neuroscientist, people in the medical profession. Fascinating stuff. So if you wanna sort of supplement the philosophical discussions that David and I are having between each other in these episodes on the series, you can check out our YouTube channel for the fun interviews that we are doing with experts.
David: 1:26
And let me just say that it was so much fun talking with all these people about their areas of expertise in connection to the senses. So please do tell us what you think about them and what other experts have to say on our YouTube channel.
Ellie: 1:37
All right, David, let's get into the material for today. The first of this series on the five senses.
David: 1:45
Now we understand that there are a lot of debates in the philosophy of perception about whether we can even speak of there being five different senses and about there being fundamental differences between them. But we are punting that for the future, for the time being. Maybe we'll do an episode at some point on the very nature of sensibility. We'll see. And going straight to the experiences of what have historically been considered the five senses we are beginning with touch.
Ellie: 2:15
I'm not gonna start singing "Touching Me, Touching You," which I did recently in our Self Knowledge episode, and it was not my best work. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna refrain from beginning with some flat singing. I wanna start instead David, with a fairy tale.
David: 2:29
Ooh, I do love fairy tales. Which one are you gonna talk about?
Ellie: 2:34
It's that classic Cinderella, which incidentally I played in my middle school musical in eighth grade, which was my crowning achievement. I was a huge nerd when I was in elementary school, and then in middle school I got contact lenses instead of glasses, and I got to star in the middle school musical Cinderella.
David: 2:52
Who were you? Were you Cinderella?
Ellie: 2:55
Yeah. That's why I said I starred in it.
David: 2:56
Oh, oh, you, yeah. Well, like when there aren't many stars in a, in a particular theater performance.
Ellie: 3:03
I think when you say you starred in Cinderella, you mean you played Cinderella.
David: 3:06
I would be like, I starred in Cinderella and I was the mouse. I was the slipper.
Ellie: 3:13
Well, speaking of, I actually want to talk about the slipper, in a moment, because in preparation for this series on the senses, I've been reading a book by the French philosopher, Michel Serres, called The Five Senses. Um, very fitting, and he talks in a book about how the Cinderella story reveals the importance of the sense of touch. So after Cinderella leaves her slipper on the steps of the palace, a slipper that, by the way, Serres points out, was originally fur, not glass. That'd be a little bit easier for you to play David, right? The fur slipper, glass slipper.
David: 3:47
What?
Ellie: 3:51
Close, closer to Cuban skin and hair. But anyway, so it's it's original fur slipper. A much more sensual material than glass, right?
David: 3:58
Depends on what you're into, yeah.
Ellie: 3:59
Well let's say, okay, I'm gonna leave that aside. Um, but the, the point is that the prince cannot recognize Cinderella by sight. And he seeks, in going on the hunt to find Cinderella, not to find the princess who looks like the one he danced with at the ball, but rather the princess whose shoe fits the slipper. The prince incases Cinderella's foot with the first slipper and understands through that experience that she is the right fit. So Serres says, recognition works by touch, not sight.
David: 4:35
Mm. Okay. I mean, there is definitely a non-visual component, although in itself that's kind of weird, that the Prince cannot recognize Cinderella by her face in the absence of a fancy dress and makeup and a hairdo. You know, we might have questions there about what exactly. Oh, of what exactly it is that he fell in love with.
Ellie: 4:52
I mean, she did look really different.
David: 4:55
Yeah, but to the point that it's like, I can't recognize you except by the foot. Um, you know, it just, it takes it to a whole other level.
Ellie: 5:03
The shoe though is the prosthesis by which he recognizes her. He wouldn't recognize her foot. He has something that belongs to her, that fits her perfectly, that allows him to recognize her.
David: 5:12
Yeah. And I have not read this Serres book, but I wonder whether this really is a story about touch though. And I'm not sure that I am convinced because it's not as if he wants to touch Cinderella's feet and recognize them by their contours, by their shape. He is just thinking about their size as if there's only one woman in the kingdom with this particular shoe size. And so for me, that's not really a particularly good example of touch because it lacks basically all the components of the phenomenology of touching, which is attending to the textures and the sensations of a particular object.
Ellie: 5:54
But I think that's exactly what's going on. It's not mechanical at all.
David: 5:57
It's a mechanical, can your foot be shoved into the slipper?
Ellie: 6:01
But this is part of why he focuses on the fur rather than the glass, because he says that the fur slipper itself is a sort of, vehicle for the touch, right? It is this sensuous material. And now this is me riffing a little bit off of what he says, but this idea that the slipper in the prince's hands, this fur slipper, which has precisely this texture to it, that fur then when he puts it on her foot, has this kind of perfect fit to it. And I think that idea of fit of medium is actually pretty interesting when we think about touch.
David: 6:37
Yeah, and I, I guess that's something that gets lost in translation when we think about the slipper as being made of glass, because glass is not supple. It does not adapt to the contours of the body. And so maybe thinking about it in terms of a fur slipper that has been touched by the foot and that has been molded by it, and that being the form of recognition that is at, at at stake here. It's interesting. What would make it a particularly good indicator of touch for me is if there's some sense that the Prince is attending to the footprint that has been marked into or etched into the original first slipper.
Ellie: 7:15
During the one night that she wore it.
David: 7:16
Yeah. Well, no, but he has it. He has it afterwards. Is he like, ooh, my precious like touching the shape and just waiting for the one that fits.
Ellie: 7:24
Take us away from the Wiki feet territory, David.
David: 7:27
You got it. Today we are talking about touch.
Ellie: 7:31
Why did some ancient philosophers consider touch the primary sense?
David: 7:36
What do different tactile experiences, such as tickling, for instance, tell us about where our bodies begin and end?
Ellie: 7:43
And what do we learn about the nature of the self from the phenomenology of touching and being touched? Much of the philosophical tradition has been influenced by Aristotle's account of the five senses. Touch has a unique place among the senses for Aristotle. He says that it is the primary sensation that belongs to all animals, and in this sense, touch is the most basic sense, perhaps even the origin of the other senses. Life comes into being with the presence of the power of touch and ends when the body no longer has this power of touching. And Aristotle, of course, had an overwhelming influence on subsequent classical philosophy in Greece and Rome, as well as on the medieval tradition in Christianity and Islam. He was literally called the philosopher in the medieval era.
David: 8:37
The philosopher? Yes.
Ellie: 8:39
And one of the books that I read in researching this, okay, fine, I haven't finished it yet, but I, I got to, I read the Aristotle parts, it's called The Inner Touch and the author, it's a contemporary book, the author continually refers to Aristotle as the philosopher, sort of trading on this old, you know, old nickname that he had.
David: 8:59
I think moving forward, if we wanna make a name for ourselves, we just need to like sign our papers and books as the philosopher.
Ellie: 9:08
Okay, I'll, I'll consider it. But for now, the nickname is taken by Aristotle, and because Aristotle had such an influence on these classical and medieval traditions, these traditions also frankly inherit the weirdness of Aristotle's view because Aristotle identified a paradox in the sense of touch that others subsequently struggled to figure out.
David: 9:29
I want to know what the weirdness or the paradox here is, because the way you described Aristotle's position as touch being fundamental to animals, maybe to all of the living, maybe even marking the distinction between the living and the dead seems pretty coherent and easy to follow to me. So I wanna know what that paradox is that he introduces that then becomes a problem moving forward.
Ellie: 9:56
Okay.
David: 9:56
For people trying to figure out what touch is.
Ellie: 9:59
There are actually a few, but I wanna focus on one. Aristotle thought that each of the five senses has an organ, an object, and a medium.
David: 10:12
Okay.
Ellie: 10:13
If we were to use the example of Cinderella's slipper, we would say the Prince's hand is the organ, Cinderella's foot is the object, and the medium maybe is the slipper, but let me use an actual Aristotle example so we don't run the risk of attributing things to him that he wouldn't agree with. Actually, yeah, I think that probably isn't going to work. The slipper wouldn't be the
David: 10:35
Yeah, no, it would not be the medium.
Ellie: 10:37
Okay, maybe this is actually gonna help highlight what the weird paradox is. So think about vision. The eyes are the organ that allow us to see the visible objects in the surrounding world. So we have eyes, organ. Whatever is visible, object. And then the medium of vision is what Aristotle calls the transparent, that is the air around us that is either light or dark. So that is the medium here. Right. And Aristotle thinks that you can go through this for each of the five senses. You can identify the sense organ, you can identify the object, and you can identify it's medium.
David: 11:14
Okay.
Ellie: 11:14
Except that touch is weird because it's tricky to figure out not only what its medium is, but also what its sense organ is. So he says that the medium of touch is the flesh, right? I mentioned a moment ago the prince's hand, right? And so flesh plays a similar role in touch as air does in sight because it's the element in which touching can emerge. Yet, flesh also seems to be the sense organ of touch. Again, the prince's hand that I mentioned a moment ago, and this is where things get weird because he says that the sense organ and the medium can't be the same thing because anytime there's direct contact between the sense organ and the object of the sense, sensation cannot occur, there has to be some distance between the sensing and the sensed. That is, there has to be a medium that connects the two, right? So in the case of vision, air is the medium that gives you distance, right between the seeing and the seen. Whereas if you were to put something directly on top of my eye, I wouldn't be able to see it, right? I need that medium of air, that distance that air provides. So Aristotle ends up in this super weird position in which he says that the flesh is the medium of the sense of touch. But there has to be some inner organ that is actually the sense organ of touch. Because if flesh is the medium of touch, it can't also be the sense organ of touch.
David: 12:44
There has to be another organ?
Ellie: 12:46
Yeah.
David: 12:46
So there's gotta be like, like an inner eye for touch?
Ellie: 12:49
Well, an inner flesh for touch maybe?
David: 12:52
Yeah. Like another organ.
Ellie: 12:53
And he says no more about this. But in the medieval, Islamic and Christian traditions, interpretations of this point in Aristotle are part of what gave rise to the theory of consciousness.
David: 13:04
Okay. So understood then here as some inner space that registers what is happening in the medium of the flesh.
Ellie: 13:13
Inner organ, right? Not space. Space would be more medium like.
David: 13:16
Yeah, so there would be a space inside the body that would be the organ. For the sense of touch, like there would be a place where consciousness is housed.
Ellie: 13:26
Yeah. I see, I see. I thought you meant space in the sense of like being hollow.
David: 13:30
No, no, no. Opposite. Just like literally somewhere in the body. Now, I definitely want us to come back to this idea of the interior or interiority later in the episode because there are some really interesting implications to thinking about that. But on the point of object and medium in Aristotle I'm just not sure that I agree with him, that you need a medium that is separate from the organ of a particular sensory modality and, and in fact, it seems like Aristotle's reasoning here seems to be based on maybe an unconscious privileging of vision, because as you point out, yes with vision, if something gets really, really close to the eye, then I stop seeing it. I lose perspective. There is no medium that mediates the organs relationship to its object.
Ellie: 14:18
Yeah.
David: 14:19
But that's only true of vision. It's not true of the other senses. So for example, you can put something in your ear and still hear it no problem. Like my headphones at this moment, you can put something literally on the skin and touch it no problem. That's the nature of touch. And I would even say it's the same thing with smell, right? Like smells impregnate our nose, they get inside the nasal canals, and at that point there is probably no differentiation between the sense organ and the medium very much. And so I just wonder to what extent Aristotle's insistence that there has to be a difference between the organ. and the object, which is the medium. That gap or that space comes from thinking about all the senses on the model of the visual one.
Ellie: 15:12
Okay. Yeah, because one thing we will talk about in our vision episode is how vision is really considered the sort of sense that involves a distance between the seen and the seer. I can't remember offhand what his examples are for the media of the other senses, hearing, smell, and taste. But I do know that there's not a sense in the literature that there was much of a paradox there. But in the absence of that, I, I do think I would be inclined to go along with your suggestion, David, which is precisely that this idea of the medium as providing a distance is implicitly based on the model of vision, which was Aristotle and other ancient Greek philosophers favorite of the senses.
David: 16:02
Yeah. Who's the philosopher now, Aristotle? And I mean, we might want to think a little bit here about the difference between Aristotle's interpretation of touch and the paradox that it generates, and maybe think about it in connection to another thinker who is the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. Because in some ways, Lucretius echoes Aristotle's claims about the importance of touch, but he doesn't seem to inherit that paradox or that weirdness, that puzzles Aristotle. And the reason that he doesn't inherit that is because in his book, On the Nature of Things, he presents us with a fundamentally materialist view of the universe that doesn't give rise to this paradox. In short, for Lucretius, reality is nothing more than atoms bouncing around in what he calls the void or the empty. And he makes an interesting philosophical point when he's laying out his interpretation of the universe, which is that nothing can exist which is not a body. The only thing that doesn't have a body is the void itself. But the void is just a gap and a non being, it is not a presence. And so that's fine. And from this relatively simple philosophical affirmation that nothing can exist, which is not a body other than the void. Lucretius draws the conclusion that everything that we sense, we sense because we are being touched by atoms that have arranged themselves through their motion into different kinds of shapes in order to create objects. And so atoms get together, they form objects, and those objects touch us with their particles or their atoms, and they bring about different experiences. And in book two of On the Nature of Things, he says that all differences of sensation, so hearing, smelling, seeing, even pain and pleasure, are ultimately the result of our bodies being touched by particles that, again, take different shapes. And so the point here is, everything is touch. So there, there's always an elimination of the medium.
Ellie: 18:24
This is so trippy. So is the idea that all differences in perception and sensation are just because we're being poked and prodded by different particles with different shapes?
David: 18:36
Yes. So I mean, it's not that the particles themselves have different shapes.
Ellie: 18:40
Okay.
David: 18:40
But, but particles in different shapes that they, you know, form these assemblages that, that look otherwise
Ellie: 18:48
Oh my God.
David: 18:48
Perhaps, yes.
Ellie: 18:51
I wonder which shapes cause different kinds of sensations.
David: 18:55
Well that's, that's interesting because he does have pretty large sections of the book devoted to talking about this.
Ellie: 19:02
Oh, okay. Incredible. Tell us some.
David: 19:04
I wasn't planning on talking about this, but it is really funny. Uh, he says,
Ellie: 19:07
Well, give us the juicy stuff, David. Come on.
David: 19:09
Well, speaking about juice, he does talk about like milk and honey, for example. And he says, the reason that milk and honey, taste nicely and smoothly is due to the particles that constitute them taking a round and smooth shape that doesn't scratch our sense organs when they touch them. So what we experience as like the smoothness of milk on the tongue is because milk, I guess molecules, are themselves round and they don't hurt us. And so it feels good.
Ellie: 19:44
Okay. Okay. Just, just based on, I can see how an ancient philosopher with no microscope could get to that kind of conclusion. Like, there's a roundish sensation to milk and honey.
David: 19:55
Yeah. Why not? Um, and he also gives the example of wormwood, which is an herb that later I found out is also used in vermouth which is bitter to the taste. And he says, When you consume wormwood, and you sense that bitterness, it's because it's made up of hooked particles. So they have these like hooks coming out of them and when they come into contact with our sense organs, they tear away at us. So they like, like vermouth cuts you.
Ellie: 20:23
Obviously never eaten Thai food. It's like vermouth is so bitter, and like never tasted spicy food, the real hook particles.
David: 20:30
Yes. No, the other one will just wreck you. But he also does talk about something that exists in between the round molecules or particles of milk, and then the hooked ones of wormwood, which tingly sensations like wine are produced by tiny little spikes, so they're not big hooks that will cut at your sense organs, but they're not perfectly smooth and round. There are some particles that just have tiny little spikes, and so they're not offensive and they're not nice. They just feel a little tingly. And so when you consume wine and you know, you, you taste a little like, mmm, that's a little bit tanniny, he says that's because of the tiny spikes in the particles. Yeah, there's a lot there.
Ellie: 21:17
Kombucha's got a lot of little tiny spikes. Or maybe they're, they're little semi circles like pop pop.
David: 21:22
I know. I want, like, isosceles triangles in my particles.
Ellie: 21:29
So this is interesting though, cause it seems like you've been giving an extended example of taste, right? But the point is that taste for him is ultimately reducible to touch because taste involves these particles touching our tongue or our mouth in different ways. And here, then there's a reversal of the privileging of vision over touch that we found in Aristotle that we just kind of briefly addressed. Right?
David: 21:52
And I mean, not only is there a reversal here, but there is also the initiation, I would say, of an entire counter history of the senses. That begins with Lucretius.
Ellie: 22:03
Because Aristotle's far from the only person who privileges vision. That's a very
David: 22:07
Oh yeah.
Ellie: 22:07
The privileging and vision is very common in the history of philosophy.
David: 22:10
And that's why I say counter history because this would be a minoritarian view. The notion that everything is actually touch first and foremost, or at least that touch is the noblest of the senses. And if you trace this alternative history of the senses through the history of Western philosophy, I think one place that's really interesting where you find this legacy at work is in the practice of medicine. And of course nowadays we differentiate between philosophy and medicine, but historically we never did. Right. Uh, physicians were natural philosophers or philosophers of the body.
Ellie: 22:45
Or historically, up to a point we didn't.
David: 22:48
Yes, of course. Now we do. So at some point we introduced that. But think about somebody like Galen, who is the father of physiology, the most famous Roman physician of antiquity. And he gives such a very important role in his medical philosophy because he believes that a good physician needs to cultivate not just the eyes, but also the fingertips because your fingertips reveal critical information that the eye cannot provide. And so the fingertips are a crucial diagnostic tool for anybody who is interested in healing because you have to touch the body of the patient. And in Galen, at the very least, vision and touch. Equal, they're equally important and they mutually support one another. But if you move forward a few centuries, I mean a bunch of centuries, and jump to the early modern period, you discover somebody like William Harvey, who was the first person to understand the circulation of the blood and to try to map it. And he also makes references to the significance of touch because touch gives you a kind of knowledge that complements the wisdom of vision, but that is not interchangeable with it. And that is knowledge of the interiority of the body. So when you touch a patient, and especially if you're an anatomist, trying to understand the organization of literally the physical organs inside, like whereas the stomach, whereas the liver, how do they interact? You have to pierce the surface of the human body.
Ellie: 24:24
Yeah.
David: 24:24
And sort of touch your way through the inside with your hands.
Ellie: 24:28
Whoa.
David: 24:29
Mapping the internal structure of, of the body with its inner relationships. And its processes. And Harvey himself arrived at the discovery of the circulatory system largely by feeling his way through, uh, living bodies. Because he would notice, for example, the the pulsation of arteries or the pumping of the heart by literally touching them.
Ellie: 24:54
So dude's just sticking his hand into living people's hearts?
David: 24:59
Well, I mean, doctors nowadays do that as well. That's what surgery is.
Ellie: 25:03
Okay. True. I guess I'm just thinking about how, like what was the, what was the anesthesiology of the time, like?
David: 25:12
Oh, there was probably none.
Ellie: 25:14
I think that's what is kind of weirding me out, right. Because nowadays people do that when, when doctors do that, when people are under anesthesia.
David: 25:22
Yeah. I don't know what the history of anesthesia is.
Ellie: 25:24
William Harvey's just like here's a swig of whiskey.
David: 25:26
Yes.
Ellie: 25:27
Bite. You know, bite this cloth and I'm gonna stick my hand in your heart. David, you said yes really confidently. Are you like actually sure of that or is this a moment where you're like, I think maybe?
David: 25:39
That was an emphatic yes that only indicates my willingness to want, like the fact that I want to believe that that's true. That they would just be like, take some whiskey.
Ellie: 25:46
That's such a David. That's such a David move. You're like, yep, that's exactly what he did. And then I'm like, wait, are you sure? And you're like, okay well, maybe.
David: 25:53
Maybe, maybe. No. But I mean, it is true that they would perform pretty serious surgeries without modern day anesthesia, right?
Ellie: 26:02
Yeah, of course.
David: 26:03
Even, even into the 1980s, we used to do surgery on newborns without anesthesia. So like I assume in the 1600s it was not the most advanced domain of the sciences.
Ellie: 26:13
Yeah. But as somebody who is not particularly well educated on the subject of anatomy, I guess I just first off, think of the interior of the body as very abstract and second off when I do probe that a little bit further, I guess probe is already a sort of, you know, metaphor for touch, um, touching the body.
David: 26:36
And for entering for penetration, right?
Ellie: 26:38
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then I just think of it is the, of the interior of the body as a sort of mass of guts that are undistinguished. I don't, I'm not really considering the textures actually, David, I'm imagining an image from a movie that you recommended to me in one of our Patreon hangs, which was the Cronenberg movie, about the future.
David: 26:59
Crimes of the Future. Yes.
Ellie: 27:00
Yes. That has some pretty graphic images
David: 27:03
Yes.
Ellie: 27:03
of the interior of the body, just pulsating, but I just pictured it as kinda like slippery in there. I can't imagine actually really being able to feel my way around and recognizing what's at work I want just like an abstract visual diagram of the body.
David: 27:17
Yeah, and I mean, what's interesting philosophically about Harvey is that he is sort of feeling his way around the organs, like you say, from the movie. But he also does say that in the end, vision still has a role to play as a way of confirming things that are suggested by touch, but that can be confused. And so for instance, at some point says if, if you just rely on touch alone, this is a really weird example, but he does say this. He says, by touch alone, the womb and the brain actually have the same kind of texture and feeling.
Ellie: 27:51
Woah.
David: 27:52
So you would need to, you would need to compliment your touch epistemology with visual epistemology.
Ellie: 28:00
Yeah. I mean, it also reminds me of that story of people who are trying to learn what an elephant is like by just touching it. Right? And they each come to different conclusions about what kind of object the elephant is, because they're each feeling a different part of its body. Right? Like the side or the tusk or something like that.
David: 28:21
And that may be why we experience touch us fundamentally intimate because it gives us very concrete parts, but not the whole at a distance. That's the function of vision. I said I wanted to come back to the question of interiority because this is something that philosophers in a tradition that both you and I, Ellie work in and have been particularly attentive to, and that is phenomenology.
Ellie: 29:05
We stan phenomenology here at Overthink, and it's certainly been a tradition that has thematized the bodily experience of the senses quite a lot, especially touch, I associate phenomenology generally with a resistance to the privileging of vision and the history of philosophy and with the kind of taking up, again, the notion of touch because of its focus on embodiment or a particular kind of embodiment, let's say. But I think the please to start here is really with the founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl who we've talked about on some previous episodes, and for Husserl, touch is the sense that gives us a reflexive sense of our own body, and in this way it's privilege above the other senses. Husserl uses the example of your own two hands, and unless you're driving right now, in which case don't do this, I'm going to suggest that you try this out. Clasp one of your hands in the other.
David: 29:57
I'm doing it right now.
Ellie: 29:59
Okay, cool. Or you can even sort of gently rest it on top. You could give yourself a nice little caress . Actually, don't give yourself a caress, because I think the point is that you want both hands to be at rest. When you do this, you are both touching and touched.
David: 30:16
Yeah, it definitely feels like I'm touching and being touched. It feels like a mutual pressure from the hands that produces a slight spike in temperature, perhaps.
Ellie: 30:26
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.
David: 30:27
And a little bit of a sense of comfort I would say. But I'm doing it over my head, so it's also tiring.
Ellie: 30:33
Why are you doing it over your head?
David: 30:34
Because I have a microphone directly in front of me, so I cannot do it in front of my chest.
Ellie: 30:39
David, I have a microphone directly in front of me and I'm doing it in front of my chest.
David: 30:43
I know. I look like a ballerina. Ready to like leap . Ellie: Yeah. Honestly, you look ridiculous. Um, okay, I'm taking a screenshot. Just gimme a sec. This is too good. Okay. You look like a small child, like your, your t-shirt sleeves are kind of falling around your arms. Look at me. Mommy, I'm touching and being touched.
Ellie: 31:06
I'm touching myself. Next. All right, so the cool thing about your two hands touching is that they are in principle, both able to touch and be touched, right? So your right hand can touch your left hand, in which case the left hand is the touched and the right hand is the touching. And then you can also reverse. And later phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, who's very much inspired by Husserl, points out that even when both of your hands are touching each other, there's gonna be a differentiation between one that is touching and one that is touched. Even though we can reverse the sensation, Merleau-Ponty doesn't think that we can experience simultaneously both hands as touching and touched. Rather, what happens is our consciousness switches back and forth between the two. And I want to give you a quote from Merleau-Ponty here where he says quote reversibility is always imminent and never realized in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching things, but I never reach coincidence. Coincidence is eclipsed at the moment of occurring. Merleau-Ponty is such a beautiful writer depending on which translation you read. Thank you to our friend Don Landes for doing an amazing translation of the Phenomenology of Perception, uh, about 10 years ago, because the one before that was crap. Anyway, this one's from a different text. In any case, coincidence Merleau-Ponty uses to mean a fusion between the touching hand and the touched hand, and he says that this is impossible. The identity of each of the two hands is distinct at any given moment, which I made a lot of in my dissertation because I argued that this is one way that we reveal the multiplicity of the self on a bodily level.
David: 32:59
Okay, so the body draws distinctions by itself at the level of touch, and it never reaches coincidence in self touching. But I don't know. I think it depends on what we mean by coincidence, which is a term that he uses. We don't get coincidence in the sense that the hands become literally one, and that I then command them as a unity that can no longer be differentiated.
Ellie: 33:25
Yeah.
David: 33:25
I don't think that ever happens or has been on the table. But I do believe that there can be a blurring of the subject-object dichotomy in the case of self touch or auto touch, especially when the, when the limbs are allowed to rest for an extended period of time. So you gave us this exercise of holding our hands. I wanna give you a counterexample to that.
Ellie: 33:49
Okay.
David: 33:49
So you're sitting down and so am I. If you are to put your hand on your thigh, and then not move it for 10 minutes.
Ellie: 34:00
Do I actually have to do this for 10 minutes?
David: 34:03
No, no, no.
Ellie: 34:04
Like that's a long time.
David: 34:05
No, we don't have time. But I think the, the extended period of time is essential.
Ellie: 34:09
Yeah.
David: 34:10
At some point it actually becomes really hard for you to intellectually or even physically, locate where your hand begins and your thigh ends.
Ellie: 34:21
Yeah.
David: 34:21
Because it just creates a zone of sensible excitability where the boundaries are kind of blurred. And you would need something like movement in order to be like, oh, there is the difference between hand and thigh. Or you would need the testimony of vision. And so,
Ellie: 34:38
Yeah, yeah.
David: 34:38
Here there's no coincidence per se, but there is a zone of sensibility where the parts cannot be individuated and. They can be individuated if I see them or move them. But you know, before that it's just a zone of ambiguity.
Ellie: 34:54
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, and I think the kind of motion there, David would be key. This idea that when we're at rest for a long period of time, we might lose that sense of the distinction between the two areas of the body. But yeah, all we have to do is slightly move the hand and then that changes. And I think this is also a kind of indicative of the overlap or ambiguity between proprioception, which is the sense that we have of our own body and the sense of touch. Right?
David: 35:27
For sure. And maybe we can think here of touch us having this duality built into it, where in some cases it reveals what you earlier called multiplicity. The multiplicity of the self, the hand. The other hand can never reach coincidence, but then there are other cases where touch moves in the opposite direction and it blurs the distinction between hand and thigh or even between the two hands, again, depending on for how long the physical touch has been maintained.
Ellie: 35:54
Yeah. And I think if we focus on that aspect of that differentiation, that's what for Merleau-Ponty will reveal the reflexivity or even the multiplicity within the self. And we often think about reflection, uh, which involves a separation between reflected and reflecting as an abstract act of thought or imagination. You might even think about some of the stuff we discussed recently in our self knowledge episode about reflection, but for Merleau-Ponty, there is a bodily reflection that is rooted in the sense of touch.
David: 36:28
Yeah, and I think this is so interesting because it really goes along with Merleau-Ponty's general philosophical project, which is to ground philosophy in the experiences of the living body, and it sounds like here then the experience of boundaries within our own body, like the skin on the left hand and the skin on the right hand, helps generate a sense of self. I become aware of myself as the kind of person that has those two different hands. Here's one, here is the other. And there is those, this kind of differentiation within the self by virtue of there being different areas of sensible skin. Whereas what I was alluding to, and this is the, the other side of that equation is that the skin can also make those distinctions go away depending on how we are experiencing touching versus being touched. It might depend on context, on temporality, on situation, and so on and so forth. But this blurring of the lines can, I think even happen between self and others. So think about the experience of sleeping with another person. Some people like myself like to sleep with another person. Like fully embracing them, um, you know, like no separation between self and other at night. And there are cases where your bodies can produce those same zones of indeterminacy and ambiguity that I mentioned earlier. It's just that they're not particularly stable. They don't last a long time, right? You at some point move your leg and you realize, ah, that's where my leg begins, and the other person's leg ends.
Ellie: 38:13
Yeah. I can't say I've really experienced that the way that you have David, because I, I don't like to sleep entangled with other people. But I think, I think what you point out is that, you know, at most, those experiences are very fleeting, right. And I, I think in general, I kind of like to go for the different side of things than the sameness side of things.
David: 38:36
Mm-hmm.
Ellie: 38:37
But that is like an interesting thing to think about. An interesting example, because certainly I think a lot of people attest to those zones of ambiguity between self and other. And there's also things that plastic hand experiment in psychology, I can't remember exactly what it's called.
David: 38:52
Yeah, the rubber hand experiment.
Ellie: 38:54
The rubber hand, Yeah. Yeah. Where you start to feel like a rubber hand is your hand, because you see it being stroked, which actually is a very interesting example of the kind of implication of vision and touch.
David: 39:06
Yes, yes.
Ellie: 39:06
Right. Because you have to see the rubber hand being stroked in order to eventually start feeling like your hand is being stroked. Anyway, I want to move away from that, even though we could totally go in some interesting directions there. But for purposes of time, I want to mention how Serres sort of transforms the Husserl and Merleau-Ponty example of the two hands touching because in his kind of cheeky fashion, he talks about the experience of cutting one's nails. And so takes this, you know, sort of highfalutin notion of the coincidence or non coincidence of the two hands touching is like, hey, so I'm cutting my nails. And he talks about how in this experience, the location of the eye moves around as he cuts his nails. So here he is, cutting his nails and asking, Where am I? Where is the subject? He's a lefthander like myself. So he takes the nails.
David: 40:02
You're lefthanded?
Ellie: 40:04
Yeah.
David: 40:05
You're lefthanded?
Ellie: 40:06
Why?
David: 40:06
What? I did not know this.
Ellie: 40:08
What is so special about that? Are you one of those people who thinks like if you're lefthanded, you're innately creative?
David: 40:15
I, I do not. Um, no. I just, I'm, I'm shocked that I didn't know. The basic feature of your existence. Continue.
Ellie: 40:24
I guess I just don't think of it as a basic feature of my existence, but I'll, I'll take it. You know, in any case, so he, like me, is lefthanded. So he takes the nail clippers in his left hand and he places the open blades at the tip of his right index finger. He says, I place myself in the handle of the scissors. And so that implies that the eye is now in the handle of the scissors. Maybe it's the nail that's about to be cut, but there's also the sense in which the left hand is the subject that is cutting at the right finger, which is the object, right? The left hand is taking over the subjectivity or selfhood of the eye, and the right finger is sort of out there. And then he says, if the scissors change hands, everything changes or nothing changes.
David: 41:17
Umm.
Ellie: 41:18
So cutting hand, touching, cut, hand touched.
David: 41:22
Or nothing, or both? Uh, but I think this is the kind of example of what people who are not familiar with philosophers think philosophers spend their their time thinking about like, I'm cutting my nails right now. Where am I? Who am I? Did everything change or nothing change? Although on a more substantive point, I will say that I think it's quite bizarre that Serres uses this example for thinking about touch, because in the act of nail cutting, what is coming into contact ultimately are two pieces of inanimate matter. It's the nail and the steel blade. I understand that I'm using my hands to move them, but it's actually not skin to skin contact.
Ellie: 42:07
Mm-hmm.
David: 42:07
Um, it's skin to skin contact doubly mediated by something that is not living.
Ellie: 42:12
Yeah.
David: 42:13
Although some people would say that a nail, much like a hair, is a kind of touch receptor because we do sense in an extended way through them.
Ellie: 42:22
Really, we do?
David: 42:24
Yeah. I mean, if somebody touches your hair, you feel it because it moves, uh, it moves the skin.
Ellie: 42:28
It moves your skin. Yeah.
David: 42:29
Yeah, yeah. So it is, it, it receives touch and transmits it.
Ellie: 42:32
Ah, I see.
David: 42:39
If you're enjoying, Overthink, please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self-supporting podcast, and as a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to our exclusive digital library of bonus content, and more. Ellie, I love the example of the hands touching each other, even if I did not love the example of the nail cutting. But this has me now thinking about how different kinds of touch can do very different things when it comes to the experience of self and other. So for example, there are cases where hand touching hand, or hand touching thigh, or leg touching leg can blur the distinction between self and other, we talked about that a little bit. And then there are forms of touching that go in the exact opposite direction. They not only reveal multiplicity within myself, but actually institute a very sharp distinction between I and not I. And I think a really good example of this is tickling.
Ellie: 43:47
Oh my God. Tickling.
David: 43:50
Yes.
Ellie: 43:51
No, it's a great example. It's fantastic. It's just bringing up a lot for me because I am extraordinarily ticklish, and you're right, it's definitely experience with very little ambiguity. There is no way that I am ever going to be confused about where my own self ends and another self begins when I am being tickled.
David: 44:11
Yes. No, exactly. That's right. And when I started thinking about tickling initially, it was as a throw away comment for this episode, but then I got obsessed with thinking about the nature of touch from the perspective of tickling.
Ellie: 44:26
Love it.
David: 44:26
And it helped me think about the duality of touch much more clearly, because I do think that touch can do two things separately. It can erase those boundaries between self and other, but it can also erect them, and in fact, they can police them. And tickling is particularly interesting because it institutes a boundary that is absolute. And the reason that I say that is because as most people know, we cannot tickle ourselves. It's a kind of experience that forecloses reflexivity. There is zero kind of self feedback that happens with tickling. To be tickled, we need to not only be passive, but in some sense, we need to be out of control.
Ellie: 45:12
Yeah.
David: 45:13
Because one thing that is essential for the experience of being tickled is that we have to be uncertain about how we're being touched, and the movement of somebody else's fingers on our ribcage or on our feet has to be unpredictable.
Ellie: 45:31
I definitely feel like the experience of tickling is terrifyingly unpredictable and makes me feel extremely out of control.
David: 45:39
And do you. Okay, I suspect I know the answer to this now based on what you've said, but do you like being tickled? Cause you know, you could imagine saying yes to that, even though you're like, I'm out of control, but I love it.
Ellie: 45:50
No, I hate it. I absolutely hate it.
David: 45:53
You, okay? You hate it. You are not into like, tickling like your, your friends for fun or being tickled by your friends?
Ellie: 46:01
Nope. Nope, nope. If I never got tickled again, that would be amazing.
David: 46:05
Okay. Fair enough. I also kind of hate it. Um, but one thing that I found in the literature on tickling, and yes, there is a scientific literature out there on tickling, is that tickling also is appealing in a number of ways. For instance, children love it. You know, children come to adults and they want to be tickled because it's a form of play.
Ellie: 46:30
Not all children.
David: 46:32
Actually most children do.
Ellie: 46:34
Okay. Maybe I was just a weirdo. We've already established that I was a weirdo. So
David: 46:37
Just like a melancholic little brilliant girl in the corner being like, don't touch me.
Ellie: 46:42
Well, I still had my glasses before I starred in Cinderella.
David: 46:46
Yes. And children will often ask for more. And one thing that anthropologists and primatologists have discovered is that it's not only humans who like being tickled, other apes also really like it and they use it as a kind of social bonding. And recently there was a lot of controversy over research showing that rats also really enjoy the experience of tickling and they just like crack up. That's how we discovered rat laughter.
Ellie: 47:15
Rat laughter?
David: 47:18
Yes. Rat laughter.
Ellie: 47:20
Oh goodness.
David: 47:22
So it is pleasurable for a number of animals.
Ellie: 47:25
Yeah. Well, and I mean for some humans too, like there's a tickle fetish.
David: 47:30
Yes. And so this is what I was alluding to. You could say, it's awful and I'm out of control.
Ellie: 47:34
Yeah.
David: 47:34
But I kind of like it.
Ellie: 47:36
Yeah.
David: 47:36
And it seems like it's not our fetish.
Ellie: 47:38
Absolutely.
David: 47:38
But it is one of them. And this is a good example to think of another kind of duality that I think is crystallized by tickling, and that is the duality of pain and pleasure. Because one of the things that we know about tickling again, is that it can be deeply pleasurable for some children, other animals, adults with this particular fetish. Even light tickling can be enjoyable to a point, but at some point, and it's an ambiguous point, it crosses a threshold and it becomes truly awful. I mean, it becomes kind of tortuous. I read that it was used by, uh, the Chinese and by the Japanese, and there were a couple of references also that I found to Europeans using what is known as tickle torture during the Middle Ages.
Ellie: 48:29
Whoa. The Middle Ages is like anything they could possibly use to torture people they were using. It's like, oh, this thing that children love? Let's make it a torture device.
David: 48:40
Either we behead you or we tickle you. Either way, you will die.
Ellie: 48:43
Or we draw and quarter you. We can, we can go on, David.
David: 48:47
I know, but that's the shocking thing, right? That something so basic, pleasurable, maybe fundamental for social bonding, can also be so intense that according to some of the sources that I found, it can lead you to urinate and defecate yourself from discomfort.
Ellie: 49:05
I can totally picture that.
David: 49:06
And also it can kill you by obstructing breathing. So at some point you just cannot breathe properly and sufficiently, and so you die from being tickled. So think about what kind of absolute distinction between self and other it introduces.
Ellie: 49:24
Whoa.
David: 49:24
Such that it actually,
Ellie: 49:26
Individuates you to the moment of death.
David: 49:28
Yes, exactly.
Ellie: 49:29
Whoa.
David: 49:30
What I find quite fascinating here is that it's not as if there are positive and negative kinds of tickling. All tickling has this ambiguity built into it, and so I would consider tickling something akin to a limit experience where core boundaries of the living are pushed, and that can be the boundary between self and other, or the boundary between life and death, or the boundary between pain and pleasure.
Ellie: 49:59
Mm. That is a great account of tickling David, and I also feel like very Overthink the fact that you're giving this amazing account of tickling. Like I'm grateful to you for just bringing that in. It is also fully cementing my idea that tickling is awful and that I would like never to be tickled again. Because I think sometimes when I hear the term limit experience, I think about positive things like mystical experiences or openings to new ways of seeing. But you're absolutely right that that's not. Really a true characterization that what limit experiences are doing is instead pushing on the boundaries of what we usually think of as the limits that is of everyday experience, and often that's a profoundly ambiguous space to be in effectively and so forth. But I like thinking about these dualities being part of the experience of tickling, like you said, of pleasure and pain, rather than trying to classify, tickling into different kinds based on the phenomenon like torture, tickling versus pleasurable tickling, et cetera. Does that make sense?
David: 51:05
Yeah, no, no, that makes perfect sense. And that's the point that any tickling can be either playful, tickling, or death by torture, tickling. Although I, I will say there is one distinction that is referenced a lot in the literature of two different kinds of tickling, and it is a distinction that was made in 1897 by a psychologist named G. Stanley Hall, and he differentiates between what he calls knismesis which is light tickling, and gargalesis which is heavy tickling.
Ellie: 51:37
I literally didn't, do not know what I just heard. I cannot picture how you spell those words. I don't know what they mean, please explain.
David: 51:45
I know one has a silent K too. So let's just go with light tickling and heavy tickling for now. So light tickling is just a tickling sensation, like the one that you might have if I put a feather to the back of your neck. It's just a tickling sensation. Heavy tickling is laughter inducing. Tickle the one that just like drives you out of yourself and you feel out of control. And even when you don't want to, you cannot but break into laughter. And so it has an element of uncontrollability and exaggerated bodily movements. And so everything that I've said about tickling being a kind of limit experience presupposes the heavy type of tickling. Right. We're now talking about the way in which this sweater
Ellie: 52:34
I see.
David: 52:34
Tickles my arms.
Ellie: 52:35
I see. Although I also find that very uncomfortable. I had a light sensation of tickling, uh, a few months ago, and then I.
David: 52:42
A few months ago?
Ellie: 52:44
Yeah. And then I on my back and like I went to go feel what it was and it was this mean ass bug that then bit me. And I later found out by Googling it that it was called an assassin bug, horrible experience of tickling that then led to an actual bite that was very painful and giving me a huge welt on my back.
David: 53:01
Oh my God. This is like the medieval torture taken to the animal kingdom. The assassin bug giving you light tickling.
Ellie: 53:07
I seem to have virtually no actual philosophical opinions to offer in this part of the episode. I'm just sharing my hatred of tickling. But no, maybe I actually do have a point because one thing I experience is that, even when somebody is not actually touching me, um, even in the light tickling sense that you're talking about like the lightness of a feather, but is making the gestures of tickling maybe a couple of inches away, for me, it still feels extremely ticklish. In fact, there's some of the most ticklish experiences I've ever had when somebody is tickling near me, right? Like I think my sister used to torment me by doing this as a kid. Would that count as light tickling?
David: 53:48
So I, I don't think it would count as either. I think in this case it's an instance of memory, a memory of an experience being activated and therefore evoking some of the sentiments associated with those experiences in the past.
Ellie: 54:01
Okay. Okay.
David: 54:02
And so you wouldn't actually be feeling anything on the skin, so maybe it wouldn't produce that?
Ellie: 54:09
Yeah. Yeah.
David: 54:09
It's in the same way that like I can remember like when I crushed my ankle at a volleyball tournament and it feels kind of weird in my ankle, but right now my ankle actually doesn't hurt.
Ellie: 54:18
Okay. And yeah, also I hear you, that it, it definitely wouldn't be the light tickling sensation, just in the sense that it was the stronger tickling sensation that actually induces that uncontrollable laughter. So, okay, I, I buy that, that it's neither of those, but it might have a little bit more similar paradoxically to the stronger tickling. This leads me to think about something that one of the experts that we interview for touch on our YouTube series has written a lot about, and that's Matthew Fulkerson who writes about the concept of distal touch. And so I, I've been wanting to bring this up and I think this is kind of the perfect place to do this because Fulkerson argues that we usually think about touch as involving direct contact, which is something we talked about earlier in the episode when we were discussing Aristotle. But in fact, Fulkerson says that there are genuine experiences of touch that don't involve direct contact with the thing that is touching me. And so I wonder if maybe that experience of tickling from a distance is an example of that.
David: 55:19
Yeah. Maybe. Does he give any examples of what he means by distal touch?
Ellie: 55:23
Yeah. Oh yeah. So this is actually one of the things that I really like best about Fulkerson's work. I'm thinking about his book, The First Sense here, which, so he, he thinks like Lucretius that touch is the foundational sense, hence the title of the book, The First Sense. The example that he uses to open his chapter about distal touch is that of being on a road picture. You are closing your eyes as you ride in the passenger seat in a car. And at a certain point, you feel that the road has transitioned from being smooth to being rough. Suddenly you experience the sensation of bumps on the road. And when you do that Fulkerson argues even though what you are directly in contact with is the seat of the car, it's not the seat of the car that you are touching in a true sense here. It's the road that you are touching through the car and through the seat of the car.
David: 56:22
Okay. I mean, there is a version of this in the Phenomenology of Perception by Merleau-Ponty, where he gives the example of somebody who uses a walking cane.
Ellie: 56:33
Yeah.
David: 56:33
And touches the bumps on the ground. And for a Merleau-Ponty, it's not as if the person is simply using an object in order to sense at the hand, the walking cane becomes incorporated into that person's body schema and so it becomes part of the lived body.
Ellie: 56:53
Yeah.
David: 56:53
Uh, and so you could imagine something like a car also potentially being a form of extended perception or extended mind whereby we touch through the wheels.
Ellie: 57:04
Yeah, but I take Fulkerson's point to be different because he's not saying that the car becomes an extension of our bodies. He actually says pretty explicitly that what this example shows is that we can have an experience of the road that is not at the same time an experience of our own bodies, and it is the road that is the object of the experience. We project our tactile experience beyond the approximate stimulus, which is the vibration of the seat to the object that's causing the vibration, which is the road.
David: 57:34
Okay, that's an interesting point. Although in order for something to be truly distal touch, I think it would have to be an example of me being affected sensorially and tactally by an object that is not physically in contact with my body and that is not sending vibrations through a medium like the ground, becuase those are just cases of proximate rather than distal touching, for me. But it depends on what he means by that concept.
Ellie: 58:06
Well, I, I just think that the point is that we are not in direct contact with what we are touching, and that in and of itself is enough to show that there is this distance, right.
David: 58:21
Sure, but then the question is whether I am touching truly the road. Because if I were to, to truly touch the road, I would not only have a sense of its texture and its bumps, I would also have other information that I can never have when I am only experiencing it through the vibrations that are traveling through the car. Is it wet? Is it dry? Is it hot? Is it cold? All of these are properties of touch that are denied to me, so maybe I'm okay calling it distal, but it is definitely, uh, restricted form of touching.
Ellie: 58:50
Yeah. But I guess I don't think that touch is only touch when you can touch every element of a thing all at once.
David: 59:00
Well, no, not all at once. But that in principle, those other things would have to be there. Right. We never touch an object that doesn't have a temperature.
Ellie: 59:08
Yeah. I wonder how he'd respond to that. Can we ask him in the interview? We haven't interviewed him yet.
David: 59:17
Yes, we should. We hope you enjoy today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Ellie: 59:29
You can subscribe to our Patreon for exclusive access to bonus videos, Live Q and As, and more.
David: 59:35
To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthinkpodcast.com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram @overthink_pod
Ellie: 59:44
We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Clare A'Hearn, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.
David: 59:52
And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.