Losing Our Touch - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
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?
-
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
-
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.
- ...6 more annotations...
-
Western philosophy thus sprang from a dualism between the intellectual senses, crowned by sight, and the lower “animal” senses, stigmatized by touch.
-
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.
-
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
-
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 In war, hand-to-hand combat has been replaced by “targeted killing” via remote-controlled drones.
-
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.
-
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.”