gr. ἁφή, aphe: tocar, tato

Le passage du registre de la vue à celui du toucher n’est pas inconséquence de la part de Plotin  , mais souligne la parfaite immanence dans le monde intelligible entre l’âme qui voit la beauté et la beauté qui est vue. L’idée que l’âme « touche » la vérité est d’origine platonicienne (Phédon  , 65b9 ; République  , IX, 572a8, X, 600e6, 608a7) et aristotélicienne (Métaphysique, Λ, 7, 1072b20-21). Le toucher mystique entre le sommet de l’âme et la réalité la plus haute se retrouve dans le traité 9 (VI, 9), 4, 27, puis chapitre 8, 25-30, chapitre 9, 19 sq., chapitre 11, 24 ; et enfin le traité 38 (VI, 7), 36, 4 sq. et 39, 19. Plotino - Tratado 1 (I,6) - Sobre o belo (estrutura)

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Touch is, however, the most corporeal of the senses, since its objects are the most corporeal, and are varieties of body qua body (not qua body with a soul). For what produces forms in the elements, which are primary, are heat and coldness, and dryness and fluidity, all discussed in detail in On Coming to be and Perishing. The sense organ for objects of touch (the [organ] in which the sense called ‘touch’ exists primarily) should be called ‘capable of touching’, just like ‘capable of hearing’, ‘capable of seeing’ and ‘capable of smelling’, but it should be realised that the part in which this capacity of the soul exists primarily has potentially the character that objects of touch actually have. So it is potentially hot and potentially cold, etc., and that is why I said that it was itself also the most corporeal [capacity]. It has, in fact, been stated in general terms that perceiving is [by definition] being affected in a certain way, and that what is affected is also in one way the same as the object that produces the affection, in another is not the same; for it is not the same while it is being affected, but is the same after it has been affected. This is why the organ of touch does not perceive what is equally hot, cold, hard or soft [as itself] (and indeed not just the internal [organ], but not even the medium, i.e. the flesh), but [the organ perceives] the excesses and deficiencies, since the sense organ is like a mean between the extremes [found] in the objects of perception. But it is not a mean in the way that we speak of the moral excellences as means in relation to vices, for they are, and are spoken of, as means by [reference to] their equidistance from the vices. Here, by contrast, [we speak of a mean] because the mean is potentially either extreme. And touch is not like the other senses, because it is also not a mean in an identical way, for in their case what the capacity for sight [for example] primarily exists in is totally colourless, and what the capacity for hearing primarily exists in is entirely without sound. But [what touch primarily exists in] cannot fail to share in every quality that can be an object of touch. That is because anything that can touch is a body, and it has been stated that the qualities that can be touched are qualities of body qua body. Touch and the [48] remaining [senses] are, therefore, means in quite different ways: the [other senses are so] by possessing none of the [qualities] that they accept, whereas touch [is a mean] because it already possesses the intermediate [state] between the [opposites] hot and cold, , and hard and soft. [In the case of touch], that is, the medium [itself] can discern the extremes because it becomes one of the actual extremes relative to the other, and is affected by each of the extremes not through being like it, but through being [in itself] unlike it. [Themistius   in De Anima 76,32-77,22; SorabjiPC1  :48-49]

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LÉXICO: tato