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Out of Touch (Part 3)

By Asher Crispe: June 6, 2012: Category Decoding the Tradition, Inspirations

A Phenomenology of Involvement without Interference in the Rabbinic and Philosophic Traditions

Relevance—Possession

—The stem of both perceive and conceive is the Latin capere, which means to take, to seize. Even the word “apprehend” has the same active rather than passive quality, coming as it does from prehendere, to seize with the hand.

Rollo May (22)

In Hebrew, the root that means to touch נגע [nega] also means that which relates or pertains to me [(נוגע לי) nogaya li]. It approaches me and I relate it to myself. This connection generates the idea of an object’s relevance to me and underscores my capacity to possess it. (23) The hands are instruments of the hunt. Trapping “wildlife,” skinning and stuffing it, are the work of skillful hands. Appropriation in the gathering to the self all that is within reach constitutes a basic danger that grips us.

Of the many philosophers of the body, Michel Henry sums up this power of the hand: “Each time that an object is given to my body, it is given not so much as an object of a present experience but as something which my body can attain, something which is submissive to the power which my body has on it.” (24) Henry hits upon the hand as an image of power, the power to subjugate its objects. The hand as raw capability expresses the measure of all that a person can obtain.

Likewise, we find expressions in a similar vein in Heidegger for whom the hand expands to indicate a broad scope of phenomenon: “In its familiarity with significance Da-sein is the ontic condition of the possibility of the disclosure of beings encountered in the mode of being of relevance (handiness) in a world that can thus make themselves known in their in-itself.” (25) As “relevance” or “handiness” we can envision the parallels with the Hebrew expression על-יד [(al had) literally ‘on-hand’ but used to signify that which is near, close by or beside] and על-ידי [(al yadei) literally ‘on-hands’ meaning ‘by’ or ‘by means of’]. That which is present at hand in turn becomes a “by means of,” in the event of appropriation where all hands turn into intermediaries.

As a measure, as work, as an instrument or tool, the hands symbolize an economy of power. In touching someone the tendency would be to discover something. We can imagine conditions such that, for a given individual, all that he or she touches becomes relevant in some way to that individual. In order words, the new contact becomes meaningful as pleasurable touch (ענג [(oneg) ‘pleasure’ and נגע (nega) ‘affliction’ or נגיעה לי (negiya li) ‘bears upon me’ or is ‘relevant to me’] where the experience of the object is deposited as pleasure for the benefit of the apprehending subject.

Living provisionally in a world of surfaces, does not the untouchable object of desire become unmeaningful or irrelevant to its solicitor? Human beings have this capability to deny meaning to that which denies them pleasure, to erase the relevance of all that is not handy.

On the flip side, our potential to experience inner life, not only of ourselves but of others, may in the final analysis display the greatest attachment to the unattainable. The untouchable, ungraspable mystery creates more than a passive interest. We are touched by it without having touched it at all. It may strike us at our core as pertaining to a more burning relevance that camouflages its external object only to reveal an inner one. In the economy of representation and the metaphysics of presence, would not “touching and not touching” refer to the presence of absence, conspicuous absence, that should not be confused with the absence of presence?

Rabbinic thinking reverberates with many of the same sentiments. The hands in their legality are referenced as “עסקניות” [(uskanniot) meaning the hands are ‘busy’ in the sense of automatically touching things] for their role in “public work and dealings.” (26) This implies not only that we are busy with them, but rather they refer to work itself and to the economy of things present at hand, the in-order to, the at-hand of relevance mentioned above by Heidegger.

The root evoked here is עסק [asak]which concerns trade and business—they facilitate the transfer of economic value by taking part in exchanges, substitutions, and replacements. They interact with the public domain, creating commonality and community. They function incessantly. Never idle from productive activity, might we also get carried away and traded with our hands. At times we are instructed to be “hands-on” i.e. involved, at others we are expected to obey the “hands off” command that guards against interference. For Derrida: “…in the experience of an economy—symbolic or imaginary, conscious or unconscious, all these values remaining precisely to be reelaborated from the precariousness of that opposition of the gift and of the grip, of the gift that presents and the gift that grips or holds or takes back….” (27)

The handshake is perhaps the site of all “taking for granted.” There is a great deal of “perceptual faith” (to borrow a wonderful expression from Merleau-Ponty) invested in the hands. They grope for the real. It is not surprising then to discover that the Torah, in at least one context, equates the hands with faith. The episode revolves around the war with Amalek where success requires that Moses continuously keep his hands raised (relating to the power element of the hands) as they embody the concept of faith itself. When his hands were let down, the enemies prevailed, when they were raised up, Israel prevailed. (28)

Consequently, the relationship of the hands to the head, to the seat of cognition and consciousness, influenced the concrete unfolding of events in reality. As faith, the hands feel for that which exceeds the mind’s capacity to comprehend—wherefore, we can reach out for that which was previously elusive. Fallen hands betray the power of touch to the inquisition of the mind. Its sensory input is no longer to be believed on its own but must act in a subservient fashion to the dictates of logic and reason. What we feel with our hands must in some original way correspond to a concept in the mind as motions passed in Congress must also be approved by the Senate.