The Intimate Phenomenology of Tenderness

My cat Assia, in her old age, did not lose any of her tenderness Persian cats are known for. She purrs just as much, and her nuzzle is no less gentle than in its youth. She curls into the warmth of my arm, not from need but from affection. The aging cat does not grow cynical, resentful, or withdrawn. She is half blind, her legs are affected by arthritis, yet she still purrs every night and every morning.

She remains what it always was: a creature of caprice, tenderness, and dolce far niente. A great sentiment of peace and perhaps even wisdom emanates from her.

By contrast, humans often age into hardness. Affection, once freely given, becomes guarded, calculated, or altogether abandoned. Where the young child clutches and coos, the elder withdraws, suspects, oscillating between paranoia and boredom. Why is this?

The answer is not biological decline as much as semiotic excess.

Human affection is rarely raw or pure. It is quickly colonized by language, identity, expectation, and memory. The moment one loves, one begins to interpret—to doubt, to fear, to possess, to compare. Over time, these sediments of experience accumulate until the wellspring of affection is dammed by the very structures that made it meaningful.

Unlike the cat, the human lives both in nature and in the "human artifice of the world"— the domain of language, law, and meaning.¹ Every gesture of love becomes a sign, every embrace a memory, every touch a possible betrayal. We age not merely in body, we also age in semiotic burden.

The cat, in its wordless life, remains untouched by this wound. It does not name its affection. It does not rehearse betrayal. It does not armor its heart against future loss. Its affection is phenomenological, rooted in sensation, in contact, in breath, and warmth.

Thus, the cat becomes an emblem of what humans lose not by necessity but by the way we are. It is the loss of immediacy and presence. The cat does not mourn its youth because it never left the present. The human mourns constantly because it cannot help but live elsewhere—in time, in memory, in anticipation.

Perhaps the task is not to reclaim youth —it's too ambitious and the outcome too uncertain. Perhaps we simply need to disarm the Symbolic. To find again a mode of affection not mediated by ego, not filtered by ideology, and not bound to time. To purr again—not as cats do, but as humans could, if they allowed themselves the risk of unprotected tenderness. In this sense, the cat is not beneath us, it is beyond us. A quiet sage of the body, reminding us that love, to endure, must not always mean.

There is something disarming about the way a cat, even in its advanced years, continues to seek out warmth, softness, and proximity. Its purr does not diminish with age. Its movements may slow, its vision may blur, but its gestures of affection remain intact, persistent, calm, and complete. This constancy in tenderness offers a silent rebuke to the human condition, in which affection so often wanes with time, replaced by distance, suspicion, or hostility.

Why is it that humans, unlike cats, often lose access to tenderness as they age? Perhaps the answer lies in the way we see the world, in the existential situation that defines human consciousness. Whereas the cat remains a creature of the flesh, in Merleau-Ponty's sense—a being interwoven with the world—the human becomes increasingly a creature of abstraction. Affection, for the cat, is immediate and phenomenological. For the human, it becomes entangled with memory, with loss, angst, and fear.

Tenderness, then, is not a moral virtue or an emotional surplus. It is a mode of openness. It is the willingness to be touched, not only in a physical sense, but existentially—to be moved, to be affected, to be changed.

The cat retains this openness into old age. Its body remains porous to the world. It does not retreat into memory or abstraction. It seeks out presence—the sunlit floor, the familiar pillow, the warmth of another. It does not defend itself against tenderness. It lives through it.

Human beings begin life immersed in this same openness. The infant knows no separation between self and world, between sensation and being. Affection is total, immediate, and unmediated. Yet as we acquire language and develop our identity, we begin to step outside the world. We learn to interpret our experience rather than inhabit it. And with this interpretation comes the seed of isolation. As we grow old, this isolation thickens.

To age as a human is often to accumulate layers of defense against vulnerability. We come to associate tenderness with risk—with loss, betrayal, need. Affection becomes conditional, tentative, or ironic. Where the cat lies open, the human draws closed.

What hardens us is not just existential numbness, but the fear of contamination—of something breaching the boundaries we’ve so painstakingly built. To open oneself to tenderness is to risk the dissolution of identity, the infiltration of otherness, the undoing of the sterile distance we take for maturity.

In this sense, aging in humans, their biological decline, is also an existential retreat—a process of walling off the flesh, insulating it from the world's textures. We come to fear affection not because it threatens to overwhelm us with feeling, but because it threatens to unseal the borders of the self.

The cat, by contrast, does not conceive of the world as polluted or hostile. Its body remains porous, unsealed. It lives through contact and shows no desire to purify itself of the world. Its tenderness is a state of being, a soft cosmos in which boundaries remain soft and otherness is less a danger than an attraction.

To grow old without losing tenderness is a rare form of grace. It is a passage beyond ego—a recovery of the flesh. It's a cultivation of ontological courage, not weakness. To remain affectionate is to resist the cultural closure that so often accompanies aging.

To be human and tender in old age is to become more like the cat in posture toward the world. It is to rediscover affection as an expression of presence. It is to move from concept to contact. This is not regression, but return: a return to the touch of being that we knew before we knew ourselves.

The cat belongs to the elemental order. It has not exiled itself from the world. It does not demand metaphysical guarantees. It purrs not because it remembers a time when purring made sense, but because it still feels the warmth of the now.

In the phenomenology of tenderness, smell is not incidental—it is ontologically charged. It is the most intimate of the senses, bypassing cognition to register in the deepest folds of memory and instinct. To smell another is to encounter their interiority made external. It is to be exposed to the involuntary truth of the body.

Human beings, paradoxically, are repelled by their scent. We deodorize, sterilize, perfume, and seal the body in layers of synthetic cleanliness. The human smell is treated as an offense against society, a reminder that we are still animals, still mortal, still porous. This is why aging bodies, with their unavoidable smells, become sites of cultural discomfort and social isolation. The aging human is feared for the odor of decomposition — the leak of the ultimate reality.

Dogs, for their part, smell unabashedly. They are of the earth. Their scent is a tapestry of encounters, pleasures, and instincts. They live in the olfactory realm without shame. They are not clean, they are excessive, joyfully immersed in the world's decay and exuberance.

Cats are different. They are clean creatures, as Joseph Brodsky intuited when he called them the most gracious of all animals. Their bodies do not betray them. Their scent, when it exists, is of light, lavender, and secret gardens. A cat smells, if at all, of something uncorrupted, as though it had passed through the world without absorbing its filth.

This is no accident. The cat's compulsive grooming is not vanity—it is ontological hygiene. It is the preservation of a certain self-contained tenderness, a refusal to let the world stick. While it remains open to contact, it does not become what it touches. The cat maintains its essence through a rhythm of touch and withdrawal, contact and cleansing. It is intimate without being contaminated.

For humans, affection often carries with it the threat of exposure—of being smelled and therefore known too closely, too truthfully. This fear feeds the retreat from tenderness. To embrace another is to risk being revealed, not only emotionally, but corporeally.

But the cat, poised and odorless, glides through the world unviolated by scent. It is a lesson in how to touch without corruption, how to inhabit the flesh without falling into defilement. The cat shows that there is a mode of being clean without being sterile, open without being defiled. It is the middle path between the excess of dogs and the antisepsis of modern humanity.

Wilhelm Reich's notion of armor as a muscular and emotional defense, can be reframed in philosophical terms as the sedimentation of defensive postures—the slow hardening of the body against the touch of the world. Reich, in his analysis of neurosis and the body, argued that modern humans live in a state of chronic contraction. This contraction, both muscular and psychic, forms what he called bodily armor—a defensive mechanism embedded in the musculature, designed to protect the self from vulnerability, sensation, and pleasure. But this armor does not merely protect—it imprisons. It blocks what Reich called orgone energy, the vital flow of life and contact.

Reich's language was physiological, yet his insight is metaphysical: the armored body is a body at war with openness. To be armored is to refuse the world's touch, to resist penetration-not in a sexual sense—in a deeper existential sense. The armored subject no longer receives the world; it filters it through layers of tension, vigilance, and cultural constraint. The body becomes a fortress, and tenderness becomes a threat—because tenderness is the undoing of armor.

This is precisely where the cat differs. The cat is unarmored. It carries no sedimented fear in its musculature. It does not live in anticipation of violation. Even in flight or alertness, the cat is fluid, poised, never clenched. It retains the ability to rest fully, to collapse in sunlit repose, to surrender without fear of invasion. This is not naïveté, but perfect intelligence of the body—a knowing that has not been alienated into defense.

Reich's armor corresponds to what Merleau-Ponty saw as the forgetting of the body as a mode of being. In armored life, we no longer live through the body—we live against it, through it as an obstacle. Touch becomes threat; movement becomes effort. The armored human becomes a contradiction of flesh: embodied, but no longer inhabiting embodiment.

Tenderness, then, is the force that melts the armor, or more precisely, it is the condition that the armored self no longer tolerates. To receive affection—to allow oneself to be touched—is to risk a breakdown of defenses, a momentary suspension of the self's illusions of independence and control.

This is why affection becomes so rare in aging humans. Not because they love less (although that is too), but because they are afraid to be unarmored. The years have brought betrayals, losses, contaminations—and with them, layers of invisible steel. To be touched is no longer a signal of comfort, but a risk of collapse.

And yet the cat, curled in sleep, offers a counter-image — that of trust, attunement, and vulnerability. Perhaps what we call grace is simply the absence of armor.

If affection is merely the sugar-coating of nature's biological imperative, then it is an evolutionary lie: a clever chemical manipulation that, as Darwinians explain, drives animals to nurture, bond, copulate, and protect, without ever meaning it. In this view, what we call love—human or feline—is simply a neurochemical strategy for survival and replication. Oxytocin replaces Orpheus. The purr becomes a manipulation, the embrace —a reproductive conspiracy.

And yet, something in us resists this reading because it leaves something out.

Your cat, long past mating years, still climbs into your lap. It still seeks contact, not to reproduce, not even to survive, but for her being near you feels right. It does not love in the way humans speak of love. Yet, it remains near, with warmth, softness, attention, and repose. This nearness cannot be dismissed as utility.

The body is not an object—it is a presence, a site of expression, openness, and gesture. The cat's body, in its affectionate gestures, is not lying; it is not hiding some ulterior evolutionary purpose. Its nuzzle is its truth.

Love, at its most elemental, may be nothing more than this: the unarmored nearness of one being to another.

The question of whether cats can love is often posed from the perspective of human abstraction: love as declaration, sacrifice, and narrative. It seems, though, that we have confused the language of love with its ontology. If love is not what is said, but what is lived in contact, in presence, in tenderness, then yes: cats can love. They love without the mediation of language, and therefore without the distortions language introduces—without lies, expectations, or symbolic debt.

Humans love with minds full of questions and projections. We ask: does he/she love me back? Will this last? Is this real? We build complex architectures of promise, expectation, and betrayal. And yet—when these uncertainties fall away, when one sits quietly beside another, when one hand touches another with no motive but presence—something unmistakable appears. A moment of pure tenderness, unowned, unmanipulated, unarmored. It is fragile, yes, and brief—yes, yet it is real.

Is this moment a trick of nature? Perhaps. If so, it is the most efficient trick ever played.

What if tenderness is not the deception, but the only interruption of deception? A window in the fortress of survival—a moment where being becomes available, where self and world are not at war. In such moments, the human becomes like the cat: a body not against the world, but with it. The moment we rediscover the cat within. The animal that is wiser than the human.

Love, then, may not be eternal, nor perfect, nor pure. But it is not meaningless. It is the refusal of armor, the acceptance of risk, the openness to be touched without defense.

The cat shows us this not in theory, but in gesture.

In the end, love does not save. It does not preserve, redeem, or repay. It collapses. It leaves behind its ruins: lovers turned strangers, shared memories turned to static, children who sniff cocaine in your bathroom and call you a loser. Old birthday cards rot in drawers. The hands that once touched with tenderness grow cold or indifferent. Love dies, and it teaches nothing.

And yet—there was something other, something real. A moment of openness. An interval in which one body allowed another to approach without armor. A shared warmth on a winter morning. A sleeping cat holding your elbow under the blanket, asking for nothing.

This is not the ultimate meaning, it does not endure. It is a form of nearness without metaphysics, a gesture that dissolves as it is made. Unlike humans, cats do not pretend that love is forever. They do not pretend, nor do they expect reciprocation. They know how to live in the fugitive grace of presence, and then move on. They love like the world itself: without reason, without future, without debt, and their love is so touching.

Perhaps this is the final lesson: love is not a substance, it is not a bond. It is a rhythm, a brief pulse in the blood flow through your heart. And when it stops—when the rhythm fades—what remains is not bitterness or wisdom.

What remains is a cat, still purring softly on your pillow, smelling faintly of garden flowers. The air does not remember your names. The touch is gone.

But for a time, it was not.

And even though it is not enough, that's what the greedy supervisor of the soul plantation allocated to you for this life cycle. If you are good to your cat, in the next one, you might get more.

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, 1958, p.2

© A.K.Mayr, 2025