Feeling colors and emotions
After reading some sections of A Cultural History of Touch by Constance Classen I was made aware of how much our two senses of sight and touch are intertwined. Before, reading this I thought it was going to talk about the importance of touch and how we as living creatures need it, but it went in a whole new direction. Now that I think of it subconsciously, I always thought of touch and color. For example, when I see bright colors like red and yellow we think something is going to be warm. The same is true with blue and purple where we think something is cool. Not only that, but when I think of bright green I think of feeling something slimy. This is nothing new either because the author mentioned how back in the day silks and certain cloths were named after colors in an essence of the way they felt. However, today when we think of touching something we do think of how something feels.
Going back to my last point about feeling and touch we as humans combine a lot of the sensations we have gathered from touch and combine them into metaphors. This idea came from the reading about sacred pain. In this reading the author talked about how when we feel pain we usually associate it with a sense of touch we have already experienced. Let's say that I had stomach pains. I could say that my insides were burning and everyone knows what heat feels like so they would hear that metaphor and realize what type of sensation I am feeling. It doesn’t stop there though we use this metaphor for our emotions as well. The sense of touch is so universally understood that it is also a basis for emotional metaphors as well. Although to some extent the sense of touch is looked down upon it is still one of the most important senses for our speech and emotion than we realize.
Going back to my last point about feeling and touch we as humans combine a lot of the sensations we have gathered from touch and combine them into metaphors. This idea came from the reading about sacred pain. In this reading the author talked about how when we feel pain we usually associate it with a sense of touch we have already experienced. Let's say that I had stomach pains. I could say that my insides were burning and everyone knows what heat feels like so they would hear that metaphor and realize what type of sensation I am feeling. It doesn’t stop there though we use this metaphor for our emotions as well. The sense of touch is so universally understood that it is also a basis for emotional metaphors as well. Although to some extent the sense of touch is looked down upon it is still one of the most important senses for our speech and emotion than we realize.
This is so true! Like you said about colors we describe them in ways we feel them through touch or in relations to other objects we see but we couldn't actually describe the color itself. Like a majority of us may agree that blue is a cool color or that water and the sky are blue, but our descriptions dance around the color itself because language only allows to describe colors in relation to other things and feelings and not as something separate.
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