The little essay I finished the day before yesterday, “Aristotle’s Tactile World,” was an assignment for Teacher Sun’s course in Selected Readings from Original Works in Natural Philosophy. This semester we’ve been reading the first two parts of The Mechanization of the World Picture. I should say that I chose the topic in close relation to the course theme. I also kept the length to four thousand characters, which for me is rather unusual.
Although this paper itself only touches the matter lightly, I believe it points to a huge problem. Behind all kinds of philosophical questions about causality, reality, modernity, and so-called embodied phenomenology, there lies a profound connection with “touch.”
The question of causality was the subject of last semester’s article “The Mechanization of ‘Force’,” except that at the time I did not make the place of touch explicit in the main text. This time I had originally wanted to continue, using touch as a basis, to reinterpret Aristotle’s kinematics of “push, pull, and carry” as well, but since I’ve already gone over the limit, I won’t ramble on about it any further.
As for the question of modernity, I already hinted at the beginning of the article that the key point of modernity is not, first and foremost, the mechanization of the world, but the picturing—and “flattening”—of the world. And the reason human beings’ epistemological position has retreated outside the world, the reason people are no longer able to feel the richness of the world in a direct, lived way, is ultimately the withdrawal of touch. What is meant by human existence in the world is precisely the participation in the activities of the whole world, and the sensing of them, through the tactile experience of the entire body.
As for the problem of realism, a little further explanation is possible here: what is reality? When people say that something is real, what do they mean?
In a certain sense, reality and perceptibility are linked: something that cannot directly or indirectly stimulate the human senses in any way is either a theoretical construction or an abstract concept, or else an entity that will be cut away by Occam’s razor—entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.
But if reality is related to perceptibility, then which sense is decisive? Sight or touch?
At least in ordinary understanding, touch is the dominant sense for confirming reality.
For example, you see a stone in front of you, but when you reach out to touch it you cannot feel anything at all, and then you would say: this is a “virtual image.” Perhaps there is a mirror there, and the real thing is not there but elsewhere; or perhaps what is seen there is merely an illusion (for example, a rainbow).
However, if you feel a hard object in front of you, but when you open your eyes you see nothing, then you would say: this is a transparent object, perhaps a pane of glass; in any case, there is a real object blocking my way, or else I am seeing poorly and cannot make it out.
It can thus be seen that when judging the reality of something and determining the spatial and temporal location of some entity, it is always touch, not sight, that has the final say.
Perhaps we can also understand why “fire” in antiquity was long regarded as a real substance, whereas in modern times it became a phenomenon. In fact, it seems that before combustion was properly explained by oxidation-reduction theory, people had already begun to tend toward regarding “fire” as appearance rather than substance. This is precisely because touch, which had held the dominant position in antiquity, was gradually being overpowered by sight. We notice that “fire” is something tangible; it is “hot,” a property most typically felt by touch, and for touch fire is the most unmistakable thing. Yet in visual perception, fire is the most flickering and unstable of presences, and it also has no definite spatial extent (although air and water drift and diffuse, they are not as flickering and unstable as fire). Therefore, once sight came to dominate human cognition, fire naturally became a “phenomenon” rather than a material thing.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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