Touch
by Rex Nielson
Touch accompanies us from our earliest moments of life. Before we learn language, before we formulate ideas, before we acquire knowledge through study or reflection, we encounter the world through contact. We grasp, hold, reach, press, and feel our way into existence. The sensation of touch is produced by one of the most sophisticated systems in the human body. Contemporary neuroscience estimates that the human hand alone contains approximately 17,000 mechanoreceptors, sensory structures that detect pressure, vibration, movement, and texture and relay countless signals to the brain. Yet touch is far more than a physiological process. It is also a spiritual, emotional, cultural, and intellectual experience. Touch comprises an intricate interface through which we encounter the material world and register its significance in the mind.
As scholars in the humanities, we are especially interested in the ways touch helps us understand what it means to be human. Touch invites us to consider embodiment itself. It reminds us that we do not simply think our way through the world; we inhabit it. We experience reality through bodies that move, perceive, and interact with other bodies. As the literary scholar Gabriel Josipovici writes, “At least part of what enters into this apprehension [of others and of the world] is our common bodily and kinesthetic reaction to a physical world which we both inhabit. For we are embodied, and it is our bodies which give us common access to the physical world.” Touch grounds perception and makes possible our shared participation in a common world.
Touch also offers a powerful language for thinking about human relationships. We speak of being touched by a work of art, by an act of kindness, by a conversation, or by a spiritual experience. We describe ourselves as reaching out to others, feeling our way forward, or grasping an idea. These metaphors reveal how deeply tactile experience structures human thought. Touch conveys vulnerability and intimacy. It marks the boundary between self and other while simultaneously allowing that boundary to be crossed through connection, empathy, and love.
For this reason, touch occupies an important place in religious life as well. Sacred texts and traditions frequently employ the language of touch to describe encounters with the divine. We read in the New Testament of the woman with an issue of blood who “Came behind him, and touched the border of his garment” (Luke 8:43) and was immediately healed. In the Book of Mormon, those gathered at Bountiful hear a voice that is not loud and not harsh, but nevertheless it “did pierce them … to the center,” causing “their hearts to burn.” Thes passage describes an experience that is at once sensory and spiritual, one that reaches beyond hearing to affect the whole embodied person. Such moments suggest that touch may provide one of our richest vocabularies for understanding revelation, transcendence, and the presence of God in human life.
This year, “touch” will serve as a leitmotiv in the BYU Humanities Center and we will explore touch from a wide range of perspectives, including the representation of touch in literature and art, the role of tactile experience in religious thought and practice, the relationship between touch and material culture, and the significance of touch as a hermeneutic principle for interpretation and close reading. We will also consider a question of growing importance in our technological age: what does touch reveal about the limits of artificial intelligence and the boundaries of the human? In a world increasingly mediated by screens, algorithms, and virtual interactions, touch may help us articulate what remains uniquely embodied about human experience.
I hope you will join us at our weekly research colloquium or other events sponsored by the Humanities Center as we consider new questions, new collaborations, and new ways of thinking about how touch helps us understand ourselves, one another, and the world we share.