Diderot, Herder, and the Dichotomy of Touch and Sight

Performing Beethoven’s musical dynamics

“…In their introduction to a recent special issue of German Life & Letters on "Embodied Cognition around 1800", Engler-Coldren, Lore Knapp and Charlotte Lee write that "The period around 1800 offers sophisticated, diverse accounts of how the body shapes thought and knowledge" and that the ways the authors debated the mind-body problem in the early nineteenth century "bear marked affinities with the key premises of modern cognitive science" (Engler-Coldren et al, 2017, p. 413 & p. 417). Stirrings of anti-dualist epistemological tendencies that hinted at the crucial role of the corporeal within the mental can already be identified during the eighteenth century, particularly in discussions concerning the sense of touch -for example, in the writings of the English philosopher David Hartley (1705-1757), the French philosophers Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714-1780) and Denis Diderot (1713-1784), and the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) (Immerwahr, 1978;Riskin, 2002;Wade, 2005;Paterson, 2006Paterson, , 2007Waldow & DeSouza, 2017). While these discussions typically treated touch as an exteroceptive, that is outwardly-oriented sense functioning primarily at the cutaneous level, the early nineteenthcentury witnessed a decisive shift of emphasis towards the interoceptive or inwardlyoriented somatic and muscular sensations in conceptualizations of the sense of touch.…”

Tactility and the Body in Early Chinese Medicine

“…Thus, in ancient Greece, touch was considered the "primary form of sense" that belonged to all animals (Aristotle, De Anima, cited in Lloyd 1996, 135). While optical illusions are easily produced, veracity is often ascertained through touch: in the bible, Thomas did not trust his eyes when he saw Christ, who had been crucified and buried, he had to touch Christ's wounds to be assured of the veracity of resurrection (Immerwahr 1978); and in the Sistine Chapel, God, by touching Adam's finger, intends to transmit the breath of life (Boyle 1998). In the hierarchy of senses, vision became associated with the superior masculine, and touch with the inferior feminine (Classen 1997).…”

“…On the other hand, touch has also been respected for the authoritative knowledge it generates and the divine powers it can transmit. While optical illusions are easily produced, veracity is often ascertained through touch: in the bible, Thomas did not trust his eyes when he saw Christ, who had been crucified and buried, he had to touch Christ's wounds to be assured of the veracity of resurrection (Immerwahr 1978); and in the Sistine Chapel, God, by touching Adam's finger, intends to transmit the breath of life (Boyle 1998).…”