Abstract
Touch is the most intimate of the senses. Through it, we find contact, feel, caress, affect, pressure, and convergence. And as has been written, touch is a double gesture whereby in touching we may be touched. Touch may also occur in its physical absence to reveal a sensuality beyond what we feel for. We may experience touch through our eyes, ears, mouth, and nose even. In this way, we may consider touch as a sensibility, a sensuality of sense. And yet, for qualitative inquiry, we do not necessarily talk about touch methodologically. What happens when the aim of research is shifted to touch and being touched? If textuality is oriented toward the convergence of feeling rather than the precision of definition, clarification, or explication? In this manuscript, I explore moments of methodical touch, and how we may specifically understand touch as constitutive of a phenomenological research approach.
A Walk My eyes already touch the sunny hill, going far ahead of the road I have begun. So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; it has an inner light, even from a distance – and changes us, even if we do not reach it, into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are; a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave . . . but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
“My eyes already touch” begins Rilke (1981), invoking the theme of touch. He tells us of a touch that knows no limit of reach, far ahead of the road, to afford a sense of a being which is grasped by what cannot be grasped: at a distance yet nonetheless felt. And yet, we tend to think of touch through our hands, fingers, or skin, the most intimate of the senses. How can it be that my eyes already touch?
Is it not true that touch needs contact, pressure, caress, affect, and convergence? That, as Buytendijk (1970) suggested, touch is expressive of a direct kind of intimacy, establishing in a “feeling” way a close relation (p. 102). And, as has been written, touch is known as a double gesture—in touching, we are also touched (see, e.g., Husserl, 1989; Merleau-Ponty, 2012). What is the meaning of touch if it is not dependent on direct contact? How do we experience touch at a distance? What sensuality may touch afford so that we are grasped by what we cannot grasp? How is it that the world may be given in touch when we do not reach it? What is the sense of touch as a gesture beyond its physicality?
In touch, it would seem that we are afforded a sense of something; and yet, if we are asked to articulate our impression, it may be challenging to put into language just what we feel. It may be as if words only touch on it, as our body feels itself touched by the thing it touches. Indeed, we may
I would like to turn to ask what comes about when we foreground touch as constitutive of a methodological approach? Here, I am interested in the sensibility more than the physicality of touch; recognizing touch as a physical gesture provides an experiential, concrete grounding to reflect on its phenomenality. In particular, I would like to explore how we may specifically understand touch as constitutive of a phenomenological research approach that conditions writerly reflection (see van Manen, 2023, for a description of a human science approach to phenomenology that recognizes the methodological value of writing).
We may say that shared across traditions of phenomenology is a preoccupation to access “the excess” from which reflection is drawn (whether described as experience, Being, the concrete, the ethical, the trace, and so on) (Bernasconi, 2000, p. 6):
Because phenomenology is always concerned with questions of access and particularly questions of gaining access to what is largely inaccessible, that retreats as we approach it, is almost always struggling with language. (Bernasconi, 2000, p. 3)
Perhaps by placing touch to the fore as a methodical gesture, we rejoin this challenge. We may acknowledge that there also exist those experiences that seem on the edges, thresholds, or limits of the language: ambiguous, elusive, or tacit. Alternatively, experiences may feel so full of meaning that they cannot be fully put into words. Jean-Luc Marion (2002) describes saturated phenomena—events or experiences whose intuition overflows our ability to conceptualize or grasp them. Perhaps such experiences may only be approached, rather than understood, through a methodology of humility, wonder, and care attuned in a touching way to the affective givenness of phenomena.
We may realize touch as formative of inquiry when, as a sensuality, it conditions how we approach phenomena in language. Language is understood as contacting yet also constituting an experience as lived through (Waldenfels, 2007). So, to be clear, my focus is not on touch in its empirical physical sense, but rather how we might understand its phenomenality methodologically. Here, my aim is not simply to tell but rather also to show what a qualitative inquiry may look like that places in the fore the sensibility of touch. In other words, in this phenomenological paper, I aspire for the reader to experience aspects of the textuality of the quoted texts in addition to the reflections on these texts in their tactility. So, at the risk of being equivocal, can we consider what happens when, instead of aiming to grasp in inquiry, we aim to touch and be touched? If textuality is oriented toward the convergence of feeling rather than the precision of definition, clarification, or explication? Can we recognize an attentiveness to touch as formative of qualitative inquiry?
Reading in a Feeling Way
I remember the first time that I held my child’s fingers, or rather that he grasped my index finger and held it. The nurse had put him in my arms. He seemed so fragile. I just stared at him. As his head turned, his eyes seemed to be looking for something to hold onto. And his arms were jittery fingers groping at the air until they found and grasped my finger. I was struck by his face. I looked at him, somewhat confusedly stunned. I felt taken aback. I was holding this baby in my arms who was my child. I cradled him so carefully, keeping everything tucked in and safe—the feeding tube and monitoring wires, just so. Although I held him in very close, it felt like he was really holding me, so firm was the grip of his little fingers. As he moved his arms, I moved my hand within his reach, allowing his fingers to close around mine. I did not even think about these subtle gestures until they had already happened. As my child was holding me with his fingers and his gaze, I experienced a powerful and overwhelming sensation: this little baby was making me a father. (van Manen, 2012, p. 92)
If we read these fathers’ words in a feeling way, we may sense their sensuality. Certain words seem to stand out, elevated, vitalized—
But what does it mean to feel the texture of a text? Concretely, the physicality of touch is impressional: rough, smooth, soft, hard, gritty, slippery, hot, cool, firm, squishy, rigid, flexible, wet, damp, dry, sticky, light, heavy, dense, hollow, prickly, tingling, numbing. Whether our touch is light or heavy, our tegument (pores, hairs, corpuscles, and all those features of our bodily surfaces) is affected by touch as if we are of a common flesh of what we touch (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). Is consciousness itself not impressional? Would the Husserlian answer not be in the affirmative? We feel it, and yet, such a feeling at times seems to transcend our own direct affect.
Perhaps we may say this manner of reading feels for the poetics of the text, provided the text is more than a declaration, report, or explanation. This does not mean we read an anecdote as a poem, attending to rhyme, meter, or verse. Rather, as readers, we are sensitive to the text’s affectivity, which affords access to meaningfulness, beyond character and form, of which the text speaks. The text, after all, is created: an inaugural event of meaning. “Poetic” from Latin “Poetry” refers indiscriminately to a type of language, a particular artistic genre, and a quality that may be present elsewhere, and indeed may be absent from works of this type of genre altogether. (Nancy, 2006, p. 3)
For Nancy, not all poetry should be properly considered poetry, and the opposing, poetry is not confined to the mode of discourse named as poetry (p. 5). In comparison, Gadamer (1986) writes, “poetic language stands out as the highest fulfilment of that revealing which is the achievement of all speech” (p. 112). We do not seek verification as to whether a poem is true because a poem is not dependent on empirical corroboration. Instead, it evokes meaning: “the word summons up what is ‘there’ so that it is palpably near” (Gadamer, 1986, p. 113). In this sense, poetic language gives us access to human experience in its meaningfulness: “where the word fulfills itself and becomes language, we must take it at its word” (p. 139). And yet, it is up to us to read a text as poetry. To feel the text, to experience touch, we allow it to do something with us. For we do not grasp a poem; if anything, it grasps us.
We may read:
Now, we may identify with the father’s words, feel a sense of kinship, or otherwise resonate with their sentiment, yet the words do not belong to us. Even as the text makes an experience like becoming a father palpable, we cannot fully grasp its depth. Similarly, just as we cannot help but incompletely comprehend this father’s experience, the father himself cannot fully grasp the being of his child. Instead, we can say that he is touched by it. In cradling his child, the father experiences both the child’s touch and his own. This reciprocity is a double aspect of responsiveness and sensitivity, as touch allows a moment of being moved by the otherness of the child.
Nancy (2008) reflects, “Writing in its essence touches” (p. 11). But not all of us readily feel the muse’s touch. A tactile reading, like a tactile writing, necessitates affective sensitivity. We must develop a feeling ear attuned to the poetic qualities of language—the tonality of words and phrases and how textuality relates to meaning. Neither loudness, pitch, timbre, nor other characteristic of sound guarantees a sense of proximity. The squealing breaks of an old truck heard down the road are not necessarily sensually closer than the faint, rhythmic clicks of a noisy wrist watch. Across such experiences, we may recognize how the audibility of sounds tends to distinguish them from us as hearing subjects. Yet, is this quite right? Are there not moments when what we hear literally seems to resonate with us, as our body feels it?
While a text consists of words, what we feel may transcend them, provided we are not deaf, blind, or otherwise numb to the meaning expressed by way of a text. In a different way, the musician Brad Mehldau reflects on how early experiences of music may serve as a harbinger for emotions and experiences yet to come. He recalls how, in his childhood, “singers and songwriters made solitude palpable even if I didn’t understand their words at first” (Mehldau, 2023, p. 15). Later in life, he lived through such experiences, reflecting how it was as if the music had sensitized his subjectivity for feeling this meaning. Said differently, in hearing music, we may feel as though we have always already been prepared for it; we hear echoes of where we have been and glimpses of where we are going. Without such, we may wonder how we could possibly sense lyric, melody, harmony, or rhythm. Yet this listening remains unfinished; with each encounter, we may hear more, less, or simply differently. 2
By pointing to this subjective quality of reading, we are not dismissive of what we feel, but rather we are aware that our readerly feeling of a text is interpretative, reflecting our momentary affect, readerly sensibilities, life experiences, situational context, and so forth. In a different way, for qualitative inquiry, a writer may bring out possible interpretations that go deeper than a surface-level, explicit, or stated meaning of words and phrases. These considerations do not diminish the possibility for an insightful study of human experience, but place demands on both the reader and writer for the reading and writing of text.
The Superficial Depth of Touch
And then it happened. I was driving home from work, caught in traffic, when I felt a painless but unmistakable punch in the gut. My hand went to my tummy reactively. These were the first movements of my child. I just held my hand there waiting, feeling to feel. (van Manen, 2021, p. 23)
These short sentences describe a bodily moment: for a pregnant mother, the first felt movements of her baby within. Touch as
By light of the anecdote, we may say that these words Words evoke images, which may well accumulate, intersect with one another, and cancel one another out, but which remain images nevertheless. There is not a single word in a poem that does not intend what it means. (Gadamer, 1986, p. 136)
But we want to say more, to read more, and to write more. We want more depth to our understanding of the meaning of phenomena. So, we may try to abstractly explain the text or excavate what is beneath the words. However, we must be careful because neither going above or beneath a text necessarily gets us closer to its meaning. For if we theorize, psychologize, code, summarize, paraphrase, or otherwise try to package meaning into something graspable or conceptual, then our reflections may become disconnected and tactless. Contact from Latin
So, perhaps we should say that we are limited to feeling the surfaces, to feel meaning:
For Jean-Luc Nancy (1997), we exist in a constant state of touching and being touched. And yet, as sense, touch is beyond physical contact. We feel through our eyes, ears, mouth, and nose, experiencing touch as a sensibility rather than a mere sensation. Still, touch as a sense distinguishes itself: yes, it is possible to see without being seen, to hear without being heard, to smell without being smelt—but it is impossible to touch in a feeling way without being touched in return. Touching has immediacy as a non-mediated sensing. Nancy writes,
Touch is proximate distance. It makes one sense what makes one sense (what it
For Nancy (1993), when we consider the sensuality of touch, there is no hidden interior, no essence beneath the surface, no meaning concealed (p. 274). When the mother lays her hand on her belly to feel, it is touch that discloses. In other words, touch does not encounter the skin as impenetrable. For even if an ultrasound were to be done, to show the fetus inside, what the ultrasound would disclose is something quite different from what touch reveals. Touch reveals an embodied presence: The caress does no set upon anything tooth and nail. It is tender in that it does not push to take anything. It won’t even let itself be pushed by the flesh. Rather, it tends to give, extend, tender further the tender: “Tiens,” hold, take what I do not possess, not you, what we do not and shall never possess. (Derrida, 2005, p. 93)
And yet, Derrida knows even this touch touches. The word caress literally holds the word care, so we should already know that caress may be expressive of a particular caring touch. Derrida reminds us, “one should understand tact, not in the common sense of the tactile, but in the sense of knowing how to touch without touching, without touching too much, where touching is already too much” (p. 67). Perhaps here it is appropriate to consider the aporia of touching what is untouchable, a contact without contact, a barely touching, a hiatus at the core of contact, where all it touches is other, touch touching its limits only to exceed the touch. Methodologically, we recognize that reflecting on meaning always risks reducing what is given by succumbing to abstracting, psychologizing, conceptualizing, or other tendencies of language. We may say that a method that attends to touch also attends to tact as touch, which tactfully encounters a limit of what can and cannot be felt. Lingis tells us,
The word “tact” designates a light touch, supple and agile, a holding back. It contrasts with the touch involved in the apprehension, appropriation, and manipulation of tangible things and also of others. (Lingis, 2007, p. 4)
And later,
With words we stay in touch with things. We also recognize and respect those who have long and deep experience with things. Thought that has dwelt long and intimately with a painting by Rembrandt, a temple in Cambodia, a willow tree in one’s back yard finds the right words with which to speak of them. Tact, that finding the right words and the right silences, is not only a relationship with real people; it is also a relationship with real things. The language that seeks to make contact and stay in touch with the Colca Canyon, with the baobab plains of the Sahel, with Angel Falls, with the Kalahari desert, with a hamlet glowing in the Himalayan twilight, finds the right tone and the right silences and is laconic. It is not the web site that stores everything anyone has been able to say about them, but poetry or words of a song that keeps us in touch with the real things we have made contact with. Unrestrained garrulousness is as much a lack of tact about things as it is about people. How coming into the real presence of sequoias, opals, fossils silences us. (Lingis, 2007, p. 6)
In comparison, in reading Levinas, Derrida (2005) reminds us, “With a caress, nothing is attained or touched” (p. 90). 3 For the caress as contact is beyond contact bearing the very structure of ethics, so “the caress is also enough to send shivers throughout a whole idea of phenomenology, and precisely there where the caress might be experience itself, pure experience, experience before any concept” (p. 82).
Returning to the above anecdote, we must clarify that it is not the anecdote itself that touches. After all, are they not only words? Yes and no. For it is meaning which gives rise to the anecdote in its textuality, yet also the words that call forth such meaning. When we reflect, there is always something about an experience that evades our grasp; a difference remains between the lived and the understood (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). With touch, we cannot have one without the other. We cannot have reflection without a prereflective life: an echo without sound, a mirror without image. But it is at this point of reverberation, this folding back, this interface, that we are directed. And so, the anecdote is not simply the site of touch but rather a textual relief for meaning feeling. 4
In a parenthesis, Nancy brings together touch with writing and reading as embodied phenomena:
(Or we clearly have to understand reading as that which is not deciphering, but rather touching and being touched, having to do with body mass and bulk. Writing, reading, a tactful affair. But there again—and this, too, has to be clear—only upon the condition that tact does not concentrate, does not lay claim—as Descartes’s touching does—to the
We consider the humility of touch—not as a gesture that reduces the other to the same, but as an encounter that respects the possibility of otherness (van Manen, 2024). If we regard touch as an incomplete gesture, one without grasping contact, one that ultimately reaches a surface, edge, or border, then perhaps this is all there is to touching. Touch as in-between—a border, an interface, a limitrophe—it stops short, held in an everlasting movement of touching.
Touch as an Opening to Interpretation
It’s a small town where we lived. The whole community knew I was having this baby. You go shopping, they see that you’re pregnant. But, when we came home, we didn’t know what to tell people, and I don’t think they knew what to say to us. The day we came home, two neighbor kids, as soon as we were getting out of the vehicle, they came running. They’re like, “You had your baby. Is it a girl or a boy?” And I’m like, “It’s a girl and her name is Jon.” And I just remember saying, “She’s not healthy.” And they were kind of like, “Oh.” The kids were like, I don’t know 11 and 14 years old. So, they just kind of scampered back home. The news travelled fast. The whole community knew. They knew that she was a girl and she was born but they knew something was wrong. And so, people just . . . it was like they never . . . they just kept their distance because they didn’t know what to say. My husband’s best friend, he brought us over a cheese and meat tray and that meant a lot to me because he wasn’t afraid to come. My friends never called. And that was awful because, it was like, I needed them the most. I needed them to show up for me. And then, in time, around our small town to some of the people that didn’t know me well, I was known as the lady who lost her baby. (Armour et al., 2025, p. 6)
There are certain stories we return to again and again. When we read their words, they touch us in ways we cannot fully grasp—unstated, subtle, tacitly. Perhaps this is because they do not point to a single phenomenon but resonate across multiple meaningful dimensions. This anecdote, for example, evokes
Methodologically, we may become preoccupied with questions such as: How do we describe phenomena? Where do the margins of one phenomenon end and another begin? How much clarity can we achieve while respecting ambiguity? How do we approach phenomena that seem not merely adjacent but intertwined? What are the limits of qualitative inquiry? Surely these are important questions. But in a sense, these questions also pass over a more fundamental affair that deserves reflection: in reading text, we may experience a moment of being touched whereby we find ourselves affected: pausing, thoughtful, and reflective. Is this originary encountering a source of touch?
To read attending to that tact of textuality is to contact with ambiguities, opacities, and indeterminacies of language that point to meaning: the “open realm of interpretation” (Gadamer, 1986, p. 73). And yet, Wittgenstein (1953) reminds us, “Any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations themselves do not determine meaning” (p. 80). Perhaps this is where we find contact:
Contact as sensation is part of the world of light. But what is caressed is not touched, properly speaking. It is not the softness or warmth of the hand given in contact that the caress seeks. The seeking of the caress constitutes its essence by the fact that the caress does not know what it seeks. This “not knowing,” this fundamental disorder, is the essential. It is like a game with something slipping away, a game absolutely without project or plan, not with what can become ours or us, but with something other, always other, always inaccessible, and always still to come [
We may say that contact is revealing without showing, disclosing without exposing, and yet also fundamentally never quite touches what is untouchable. While a tactile reading may allow us to feel something, even inviting us into the textuality of an experience, meaning is allowed to remain subtle, elusive, and at times intangible. Perhaps unavoidably, we may experience a text not as a single, cohesive narrative but as a constellation of fragmented meanings— a writer doesn’t touch by grasping, by taking in hand (from
There is a story in the jazz world encircling the pianist Herbie Hancock, his teacher Mrs. Jordan, and the great Miles Davis. As the story goes, as a child when Herbie first went to play for Mrs. Jordan, she praised him for his reading of music. But when it came to his feel, she said that his “hands were terrible.” Mrs. Jordan then proceeded to play for him. “She had this touch,” remembers Hancock (2017), “And this incredible feeling to her playing that moved me in a way that I hadn’t experienced before.” This was a pivotal moment in his musical life, whereby he reoriented his practice to develop not so much his technique but rather his touch. Years later, he auditioned for Miles Davis:
One afternoon, we drove over to Miles’ house, and Miles said, “Play something.” He was a man of few words but he sure knew how to listen. I was so scared. My whole body was trembling. My hands were literally shaking, so I decided I better play a ballad. I played
We should pause and reflect, what is expressed in the short phrase “Nice touch”? Is it technical skill, precision, control, musicality, emotional nuance, dynamics, or sensitivity? Is touch founded in one or a combination of all of these aspects? Or perhaps not quite any, but also not quite none? For when we hear a musician really play, at some point, their piano, horn, or other instrument is superfluous to expression. In a way, the instrument disappears, so our experience is of the music itself. For a qualitative inquiry that aspires to touch, perhaps the text too needs to disappear, fade, or otherwise recede to reveal that which it contacts. And yet, we are aware that this cannot help but belong in a fundamental way to the touch of the text.
Concluding Thoughts
If we understand phenomenological qualitative inquiry as oriented toward meaning as it arises in experience, we take the notion of experience as fundamental. Can we speak of a pure experience? An experience that does not pass into any concept, which remains blindly experience? An experience that we can only touch, or perhaps better to say be touched by? Perhaps if qualitative inquiry calls us to attend to experience as it is lived, then touch offers a way of encountering meaning that resists reduction, containment, or finality. Still, as we engage with experience interceded by text, we may wonder are we destined to deal with experience distanced from what we aspire to near?
Merleau-Ponty reminds us how the tapestries of perception and significations are not linear in relation, but woven, whereby each threads the other to reshape the other:
Far from harboring the secret of the being of the world, language is itself a world, itself a being—a world and a being to the second power, since it does not speak in a vacuum, since it speaks
Here, we are given the world of language as separate yet not sovereign. As we are caught up in the world, language dimensions our being. It bears meaning without resolving the expression of which it speaks. In this way, we do not view language as layered over experience, but instead as a site of different threads of meaning coming together in and through expression.
Attentiveness to touch as formative of textual research expresses a sensitivity to contacting those ambiguities, complexities, and other aspects woven into the language we use to explore them. Here, an orientation to the tactility of a text resists abstracting beyond a text or objectifying a text into component units to direct focus toward a text’s affect. Still, this does not obfuscate the need for a methodological approach to privilege humility, wonder, and care to touch phenomena. We need to acknowledge that there exist those meanings that seem on the edge or limits of the language, including the experiences of those who live without words or those whose words we struggle to understand.
Orienting methodology to touch is not without its challenges. Touch as a gesture both discloses and withholds through contact. If the desire is for a clear, defined, systematic approach to phenomenological analysis, for example, touch cannot help but be a rather ambiguous and elusive gesture. Still, is it not touch which we aspire to? Wittgenstein (1980) writes, “philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition. It must, so to speak, be touched with the lightest hand” (p. 24). It is not that Wittgenstein urges philosophers to literally write poems, but instead to aim for the precision of poetry:
The clarity that I am aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. The clarity that we bring is similar to the clarity that comes from a good poem: it does not remove questions by answering them but by letting them be. (Wittgenstein, 1980, p. 25)
Perhaps the writer, whether philosopher or not, can indeed learn from the poet, the musician, or other artist to approach textuality with similar attunement—sensitive to its rhythms, its textures, its silences. We do not extract meaning from words but allow ourselves to be touched by them. This is not about arriving at certainty but about dwelling in ambiguity, about attending to meaning as it emerges in the spaces between what is said and what is left unsaid. We may appreciate the experience of textuality, like the experience of touch, as both immediate and unfinished. It is an opening rather than a conclusion.
And so, just as we cannot fully grasp another’s experience, we cannot fully touch meaning itself. But this does not mean we do not encounter it. Instead, we feel it—sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, sometimes only in its absence. Perhaps it is in this uncertainty, in this openness, that qualitative inquiry may find its deepest resonance. To touch is to be touched. To read is to be moved. And to engage in qualitative inquiry is, ultimately, to remain open to the world, to the other, and to the possibility of meaning that is always unfolding. Indeed, touch is all the more important to recognize when we live under the threat of populism, the leveling of diversity, and the disregard of difference.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
