Being a body 2
Thigmotaxis
It didn’t really occur to me until two or three years ago when a friend asked about my “love language” just how important touch is to me. In answering my friend’s question about love languages, I realized that touch is a major one for me and I started noticing how much I enjoy the feel of clothing, the tightness of a hug, the solidity and heat of a warm mug, cuddling, holding hands, the feel of water when floating on my back in a lake and gazing up at the sky.
This summer I learned a fancy word for this: like many creatures, it turns out that I’m positively thigmotactic. Thigmotaxis refers to an organism’s response to touch. Positively thigmotactic creatures seek contact with objects and surfaces, and negatively thigmotactic ones avoid it. (I learned this term in Alaska in connection with sea lions’ tendency to lie in piles on rocks and beaches. They’re very positively thigmotactic.)
Touch is our most embodied sense, our most connecting one. One of the readings I give students in my Human Nature class is Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric.” (I encourage you to go read it!) The poem is a celebration of the body, connecting it with the soul: “And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? / And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” The poem extols the miraculousness of bodies and what they can do. The last—stanza? I don’t know the term when it comes to Whitman’s poetry—is a recital naming all the body parts (including bowels) that ends with “O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, / O I say now these are the soul!”
This reading is part of a unit we do on souls. In the West, at least, we’re not used to thinking of the soul as inherent in, or even inherently connected to, the body. There’s a deep tradition, amplified by Christianity, that the soul is an intangible, “ghosty” thing that lives in the body while we’re alive but eventually moves elsewhere at death. To suggest that the body is the soul is Not An Orthodox View.1 But Whitman gives the body a clear-eyed, sensual look and makes what is to my mind a pretty convincing case2 for why the body deserves to be elevated to the level of the soul.
Whitman sees the soul when he sees the body. It makes sense. How else are we at all acquainted with who a person is?3 The only information we get about others comes from their bodies. We pick up on tiny signals that we may not even notice consciously. Of course, as I’ve said in a previous post, we’re never fully transparent to one another. But our bodies do communicate a great deal.
This is certainly true visually, but for Whitman, touch plays a prominent role in the celebration of the body. In the third stanza Whitman describes an eighty-year-old man “of wonderful vigor, beauty of person,” who is loved by everyone he knows. “You would wish long and long to be with him,” he writes, “you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.” And in the next stanza he writes that “To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, / To pass among them or touch any one… / I do not ask any more delight”. I’m gonna go ahead and guess that Whitman was also positively thigmotactic.
Touch is our most intimate sense,4 and perhaps therefore the most meaningful, which is surely why there are rules for when we can and cannot touch one another in what ways, on which parts, at what times and in what spaces or situations.5 Roughly speaking, the closer the relationship we have with someone, the more we can touch each other. Thinking of the body as the soul makes a lot of sense out of the intimacy of touch and the need for these rules. It also makes touch something sacred,6 as Auguste Rodin captures in his sculpture “The Cathedral”, whose title I’ve always loved:
In my class, I pair Whitman’s piece with a column philosopher Richard Kearney wrote ten years ago about the ways in which our online life deprives us of the rich realities of the flesh. Recently Kearney did an absorbing interview7 with Jack Russell Weinstein on Why? Radio discussing the importance of touch in our lives. Kearney reminds us that unlike any of our other senses, touch is always reciprocal: any time you touch something or someone, you are touched in return. This makes us uniquely open to the world through touch, in part because we have bare skin, and this makes us vulnerable, sensitive, and ultimately also—this surprised me—curious. We want to get to know the world around us, and we do this through touch, especially when we’re young. At one point in the interview, Weinstein asks Kearney, “When we touch things, are we touching stuff, or are we touching meaning?” It’s a strange thing to think, but also strangely right. When we touch something (like a dog, as Weinstein and Kearney discuss), we’re having that haptic experience of fur and maybe wiggliness, but also all the things it means: there’s fuzziness, warmth, joy, connection, comfort.
In pointing out the knowledge and meaning we get from touch, Kearney is drawing on Aristotle’s arguments in De Anima that touch is our primary sense. The contrast here is to Plato’s belief—which actually won out historically and pervades Western culture—that sight is the primary sense because it is the least material and most detached. “Optocentrism” is fundamentally dualist, separating and making an ideal of separating mind/soul and body. It urges us up and away from the material world and our messy bodies. And (as I detail in Chapter 3 of my yet-to-be-published book!) this has had enormous consequences for Western values: we value mind/soul over body, and the things associated with minds/souls (e.g. men, justice) over things associated with bodies (e.g. women, care).
By contrast, Kearney argues, touch is anti-dualist: “[S]pirit and matter are one in and through touch. It’s at once sensible and sensitive. It’s at once intelligible and receptive to our empirical experience. And that’s the wonder of touch. It overcomes dualism.” As Whitman asserts: the body is the soul. Touch is, well, the touchstone of our embodied cognition. It is how we know the world in a connected, visceral way. It’s no coincidence that touch is the most grounding sense and grounding in the here and now is key to calming anxieties. Good touch is care.
And this brings me back to the sea lions. They’re secure with each other. Like them, we’re mammals, warm and fuzzy. From what I’ve read about what anthropologists know about ancient humans, we used to sleep in piles too. We need touch. We need the trust and understanding that comes with a handshake or a hug. That’s what it means to be a body.8
The other reading in the souls unit that is Not An Orthodox View—at least to most students—is an excerpt from Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, in which he claims that the soul is a physical thing, made up of tiny particles. The argumentation is brilliant. His argument fits what we now know of brain and nervous system.
I learned this summer that Lucretius’ Epicurean view has had more influence on the West than I used to think. If you want to read more, check out Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.
Not that a poem is an argument. It’s a lens, an illumination, a frame. But sometimes a way of presenting something is itself an argument, or so I’m willing to claim.
I’ve left the term “soul” undefined here, since it’s not easy to pin down (hence a whole unit in a college class), but I think there’s pretty widespread agreement that the concept contains at least “who you are,” your identity as a person.
After writing this, I stopped to wonder whether taste might actually be more intimate—after all, if you’re tasting another person, that’s a very close encounter, and the only circumstances I can think of for that are breastfeeding and sex. (Maybe CPR?) But a lot of what we experience in taste is actually tactile, and outside of breastfeeding if we’re tasting others that’s also mostly tactile, so I’m going to stick with the claim that touch is the most intimate sense.
These rules vary by culture and over time. But they exist.
This in turn explains the severity of violations of bodily integrity—when touch is abused.
The conversation was fascinating, with a lot of great moments, and I promise it’s worth a listen to the whole thing.
Among other things. Here are some of my previous thoughts on embodiment:
What a beautiful essay provoking so many thoughts!
With regards to the body and the soul being one and the same, I very much like Spinoza's view of human mind being the idea of the human body. Both mind and body are attributes of God with God showing her/his essence in the only two different ways that are available to us to appreciate. The only way a human mind is able to experience the extended world is via the human body's modifications by the world. When we touch something, the modification to our body imposed by the touch allows us to experience the material world in a unique and, as you pointed out, often underappreciated way. According to Spinoza, we experience pleasure each time we learn something new about nature that, based on some interpretations of his work, is identical to God. Experiencing the extended world through touch for those of us largely ignoring this unique way of experience, is a sure way to get immense pleasure if we focus and meditate enough on it!
On another note, as a physician I am witnessing how the avoidance of touch in medical practice has lead to some degree of deterioration of a doctor-patient relationship. In my training in the early 2000s we were still trained to hold a patient's hand and to hug the patient when giving the bad news. We were advised not to wear gloves when seeing an HIV positive patient to put the patient at ease by letting them know without saying a word that we don't see them as an infectious threat. I don't see much of it happening these days, not in my field of neurology anyway. We see patients masked up and gloved up. Holding a patient's hand or hugging a patient is considered to be inappropriate and unadvisable in many cases from the medicolegal standpoint. We tend to treat our patients as customers rather than fellow human beings who suffer and are in a dire need of physical and emotional help. Most doctors certainly display genuine empathy and care with their faces and the tone of voice, but there is something truly unique and intimate about holding a sick person's hand in one's own UNGLOVED hand that the facial expression or voice would never be able convey...
Two things came to mind for me as I read this. One - the impact of touch (or lack) on early childhood physical and emotional development. Huge. So important. I read a news-human-interest (not rigorous science) type story about "kangaroo care," cuddling premature or drug-addicted infants on bare skin. I think some thoughts on the impact were about temperature regulation, maybe microbiome, and probably some skin-skin chemical signals.
I was also reminded in reading this about my acupuncturist's description of the body as a big sensor array. If we paid attention we can feel the impact of specific touch (location, temperature, texture, etc) on seemingly unrelated well-being. She'd often place needles and ask me what came to mind. A recurring theme was feeling like a superhero, or images of sunshine on my face. Placebo? Maybe! But did I feel better? Yes!!!