(Text of the lecture given by Manuel Fernández Lorenzo
at the Jovellanos Athenaeum in Gijón (Spain) on March 27, 2025. The text is a
subsequent transcription of the audio of the lecture, based on a brief script
and some written notes, in which typos have been corrected and some textual
modifications added, in addition to a bibliography. Some initial paragraphs and
the final part, which deal in more detail with the relationship of the
philosophy of hands with the work of Gustavo Bueno, have been removed from the
text because it is scarcely known outside the Spanish-speaking world and has been
very little translated into English).
I
began my philosophical research in the Department of Philosophy at the University
of Oviedo (Spain), within the Historical-Philosophical Research Program
proposed by Gustavo Bueno (a renowned Spanish philosopher in the second half of
the 20th century), applying his systematization of Philosophical Materialism in
my doctoral thesis, directed by Bueno himself and published as a book entitled La última orilla. Introducción a la Spätphilosophie
de Schelling (1989). After my initial research as a historian, I was
particularly struck by Bueno's thesis on the manual origin of human
intelligence. This thesis had already been put forward by Charles Darwin in his
work The Descent of Man, where he argues that human intelligence differs
from that of apes due to bipedalism and the emergence of a free hand that
enables human technology. These are characteristic theses of the biological
evolutionism from which Bueno drew. But what obsessed me was this idea, so I
partly abandoned my historical-philosophical research related to ontological
themes, which had been my area of specialization
for years in German Idealism, to focus on the subject of hands. In a way, I
became interested in empirical science again, returning in some sense to my
original science background from high school and my early university studies in
engineering and natural sciences. I then became familiar with the existing body
of literature at hands, which, especially from the 1980s onward, was rapidly
expanding, particularly in the field of Paleoanthropology. I began to follow
this research alongside other professors in the Philosophy Department of the
University, such as Julián Velarde and Eva Martino, who, coming from Bueno's
group, shared an interest in the subject of hands. Eva Martino's doctoral
thesis, ¿De la mano a la razón? Cuerpo,
Mano, Cerebro y Conciencia. supervised by
Julián Velarde and published by the University of Oviedo (2009), contains an
extensive bibliography on the topic. Furthermore, Julián Velarde himself
published the book La mano Humana. De como la mano ha
hecho al hombre (Punto Rojo Libros, Seville, 2021), in which he uses
the most current sources on the subject with great erudition and in-depth
analysis of the most recent scientific literature. Therefore, given this
bibliographic information, I will limit myself to talking about my research conducted
over the years with the study of this existing literature at hand.
The hand
has been historically considered, since antiquity, a source of religious
symbols, from palm reading in chiromantic divination, such as that practiced in
the popular palm reading of Spanish gypsies; healing practices through the
laying on of hands; to entertainment in magicians' sleight of hand, and so on.
This has been of a very ancient
interest. These treatments of the hand as a magical amulet, for example, make
it a very special organ in ancient traditions that date back to the ancient
mythological religions of India. However, it was with the Greeks that a
rational investigation of the hand took place with the start of Hippocratic
medicine. In this system, a rational explanation of diseases began to develop,
abandoning the superstitious beliefs that considered them the product of
demonic possession or divine punishment. The explanation had to be based
exclusively on experience and methodical reasoning. Thus began the systematic
dissections of bodily organs. Furthermore, Hippocrates formulated the theory of
humors, whose combination in rational proportions was believed to underlie the
body's physiological functioning. While the theory of humors is considered
pre-scientific today, Greek physicians made the most effective advances in
traumatological techniques developed to treat broken bones made in battle.
However, many died from infections despite these techniques. Consequently,
physicians were popularly regarded as quacks in Europe until the 19th century.
It wasn't until the discovery of cell theory, which allowed for the effective
fight against bacteria, that medicine truly began to cure patients on a large
scale.
However, where Greek medicine was most successful and
developed most effectively was in the anatomical research and study of bodily
organs. They even anticipated the path to the development of modern physiology.
In Alexandrian medicine, the human body was interpreted as a kind of puppet
whose organs were moved by the strings of the spinal cord nerves, by a sort of
puppeteer, or Cartesian homunculus, residing in the brain, who sent
"animal spirits" carrying the instructions that induced the movements
of the body organs. In reality, these explanations are a kind of "science
fiction" that can be criticized today, as is done, for example, by the
neurologist Antonio Damasio in his well-known book, Descartes' Error:
Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994). Damasio criticizes Descartes
for speaking of a disembodied mind or homunculus, and for viewing the brain as
something purely intellectual, separate from emotions, which, in Descartes'
view, are linked to the passions of the heart. Today, scientific medicine has
been more accurate in addressing these issues than Descartes was in his
treatise De Homine. This is certainly true, but it would not have been
achieved without the speculative organization of Descartes' rational conception
of brain physiology, which posits a homunculus sending animal spirits that
travel along the nerves in two directions, carrying sensations that leave
traces (engrams) in certain parts of the brain and, simultaneously, in response,
organizing the organism's responses by means of animal spirits that travel in
the opposite direction to the organs. These were certainly philosophical or
metaphysical ideas, not scientific ones. But dismissing them can lead to a
positivist critique of philosophy that reveals confusion and ingratitude for
services rendered. Damasio forgets that he wouldn't have a better and more
precise understanding of brain physiology if philosophers like Descartes hadn't
begun to outline an idea of it, pointing
to the pathways of reception and action of animal spirits through the nerves.
Descartes practiced dissections, as we know because a visiting friend asked to
see his personal library, and he opened a door, revealing a dissection table
and said, "This is my library." We also know from Descartes himself
that he dedicated only one day a month to philosophical questions, devoting the
rest to scientific experimentation. Today, instead of "animal
spirits," we say electrochemical currents. Descartes couldn't have had
that precise concept for the obvious reason that electricity had not yet been
investigated.
Kant already stated, in his work The Conflict of
the Faculties, that philosophy is not a science. The conflict, then, was
with the Faculty of Theology, which, since the Middle Ages, had been considered
the Faculty of Supreme Science. Kant refers to it ironically, because
theologians had censored his book Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason,
as "Lady Theology," before whom Philosophy stands as its servant (Philosophia
ancilla Theologiae).
As a servant, Kant says, Philosophy cannot be equated
with Lady Science, and therefore cannot walk alongside her. Sometimes she goes
before, carrying the torch to illuminate her path, and other times she follows
behind, holding her dress so that it does not get dirty. But she can never be
equated with such a Lady. We find ourselves in this situation today again
because modern Faculties of Science are considered, and in fact treated, as
Higher Faculties, in contrast to the Faculty of Philosophy, which is considered
an Inferior Faculty and on the path to extinction. Scientists are emboldened by
the impressive power they have acquired in modern industrial societies. In
Kant's time, the Faculty of Theology held the most power, along with the
Faculties of Law and Medicine, due to their obvious usefulness to the
Government in controlling society. The Faculty of Philosophy was not useful to
the Government, and therefore of less interest to it, and within the University
it was considered an Inferior or merely auxiliary Faculty, serving as
preparation for admission to the other Faculties. Medicine was useful for
public health, Law for resolving legal conflicts, and Theology for the
salvation of the soul. Philosophy served none of these purposes. But, in
return, Kant says, it enjoyed the freedom to think, to seek the truth without
coercion stemming from the Government's interests. Today, science is being
seriously hampered, as its research, especially in the natural sciences,
depends on immense amounts of money. Even universities can no longer fund it,
so most of the resulting scientific and technological research and advances
take place at NASA, multinational corporations, and so on. Scientists remain
linked to universities, but their research is primarily conducted and funded
outside of them. This new extra-university economic dependence forces them to
research gasoline or electric cars based on non-scientific interests. And let's
not even mention the tremendous controversies surrounding climate change, in
which scientists are divided and pressured by powerful economic and political
interest groups.
That is why we must remember Kant when he said that
the two functions of Philosophy, which remain necessary today, were the
anticipatory function, sometimes guiding Science itself with the torch of new
ideas that allow us to better understand reality, and at other times exercising
the critical function of scientific knowledge, so that what is scientific and
what is not is not confused within it. For it is Philosophy, with its long
academic tradition in such investigations, that is best able to define and discuss
what is science and what is not. Kant himself already stated that the sciences
can answer many questions, but they cannot, as sciences, scientifically answer
the question: What is science? This is an answer that can only be produced
through a second-order reflection, which is proper to Philosophy in a long and
complex tradition dating back to the time of Aristotle. In fact, many
scientists today discuss these issues without ever having read or studied
Aristotle or Kant, thus demonstrating a profound ignorance of philosophy, even
if they are brilliant Nobel laureates in their respective fields. Furthermore,
the role of carrying the philosophical torch is clearly illustrated by the
medical and anatomical knowledge that emerged among the Greeks and reached
Descartes, who outlined a relationship between the soul and the body, different
from the traditional Platonic view dominant in the Middle Ages. According to
Descartes, the soul resides in the body, but not like Plato's captain in a
ship, since he does not feel the damage to the ship's hull as his own, while
the soul suffers and endures the injuries to the body. Therefore, Descartes
emphasizes "animal spirits," seeking a connection through the pineal
gland. He does not find it, and that is why scientists come later and begin to
say that they are not "spirits", but electrochemical currents,
developing a Physiology that reaches Ramon y Cajal, with the study of brain
tissue.
Well, the brain was the most difficult anatomical part
to understand, unlike other organs such as the heart, which was already
interpreted as a hydraulic machine in Descartes' time. With Servet, Harvey, and
others, its functioning began to cease being a mystery, and today it is one of
the organs that is transplanted and can even be produced artificially. It's
impressive how medical technologies have advanced in relation to this vital
organ. But brain tissue was much more difficult to investigate. Very powerful
microscopes were needed, like those used by Cajal, who realized that the brain
is basically an electrochemical network of neuronal cells, representing them
graphically with his famous drawings. For this reason, Cajal is considered a
kind of Galileo of neurophysiology. A science that today uses the metaphor of
the brain as a kind of computer. If you take apart a computer, you'll find
wires and chips. If you take apart a brain, you'll find cells and neuronal
networks. You won't find any homunculus. The mystery of the brain, as with the
heart, begins to be solved, at least, with the understanding of the basis of
its internal workings and the purpose of its main functions. At the beginning
of the last century, when Broca's area, associated with language, and other
areas of the cerebral cortex that control movement were beginning to be
explored, the French philosopher Bergson used a brilliant metaphor to explain
its functioning, comparing it to a telephone exchange, like those of the time,
where young women, upon receiving a call requesting to speak to someone who
said "put me on to such and such number," would switch a plug from
one socket to another, saying, "I'll put you on right away." Thus,
when a projectile, such as a stone or a ball, approaches our head, Bergson said
that a part of the brain receives a sensory signal from the optic nerve, which,
traveling to the cerebral cortex, activates our attention. Therefore,
immediately, through a reverse pathway, we send the order to "lower our
head" to the corresponding muscles and organs. Today we know that the
brain, essentially, is structurally more complex; it's a kind of computer, with
operating systems, memory, and so on. In this sense, all these philosophical
speculations, which began with the Greek and modern philosophers, guided
science. Scientists usually end up catching the prize, but it's the
philosophers who first flushed out the hare. It's like how some hunters are
expert marksmen, but they don't see where the hare will appear. When it does
appear, the first one to spot it might be a poor shot and miss, while a better
shooter ends up catching it; but if the hare hadn't been flushed out, they
wouldn't know where to shoot. Kant already valued philosophy in this way, as
the torch that illuminates the path to science, even though it can't be
compared to science in precision and effectiveness in hunting the truth.
Aristotle versus Anaxagoras
Greek
physicians, in their anatomical studies, already perceived the anatomical and
functional complexity of the human hand. But it was the philosophers who
offered their assessments of the relationship between the hands and other
bodily organs, such as the brain. Thus, as Aristotle tells us, Anaxagoras, a
pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, said:
“…that man is the most intelligent of all animals
because he has hands; but in reality, it is more reasonable to suppose that he
has hands because he is the most intelligent. The hands are an instrument
(organon), and nature always distributes everything like an intelligent man,
giving each one what he is capable of using” (Aristotle, De Partibus
Animalium IV, 10, 687 a7-11).
Herein lies a problem in Aristotle's interpretation of
Anaxagoras's assertion regarding the superiority of human intelligence over
that of other animals due to the possession of hands. For Anaxagoras, the
superiority of human intelligence stemmed from the hands. But Aristotle, while
acknowledging Anaxagoras's merit in identifying the hands as the essential
characteristic of humans compared to animals, disagreed with him, stating that
humans are more intelligent because they have a larger brain than animals, and
it is because of this larger and more perfect brain that they have a more
perfect hand. Herein lies a conflict in the interpretation of Anaxagoras's
statement that persists to this day. This is a far-reaching philosophical
conflict because it is not simply an anatomical question, but rather affects
the very general or philosophical Idea of Man. Historically, the hands were considered a
secondary and merely auxiliary organ of the cerebral mind. Sensorially linked
to touch, they were not as valued as sight, which Aristotle and Plato
considered the primary sense for human intelligence. The very term
"Idea" meant "vision" in Greek. Therefore, we can say,
paraphrasing Heidegger when he said that Western Ontology had forgotten Being
by confusing it with an entity (God), that the explanation of knowledge
centered on the study of human intelligence has forgotten the hands, relegating
them to a merely auxiliary organ of the brain.
Anaxagoras was therefore misinterpreted, because the
dominant model or paradigm in the West until practically the 19th century was
that derived from Aristotle. Julián Velarde very well summarizes this
Aristotelian model as a teleological model in which the final cause precedes
the efficient cause, so there is a kind of design of the hands originating from
the brain. Aristotle assumed that there is a Prime Mover that precedes
everything as a final cause. This leads to the so-called Intelligent Design Theory
(see Francisco Ayala, Darwin y el diseño inteligente. Creacionismo, cristianismo y
evolución, Alianza
Editorial, Madrid, 2007), as proof of the survival of this Aristotelian
tradition. It is a reworking of this tradition based on current scientific
knowledge, as occurs with the hermeneutical renewal of religion when
interpreting biblical texts that contradict current science. There is always a
way to save the biblical texts, even if it means twisting the meaning of the
words.
Aristotle's text was already known to physicians like
Galeno, who began to understand the functional anatomical complexity of the
hand, composed of muscles and nerves that enable a wide variety of movements.
No animal organ, such as a beak or a claw, can compete with the hand, in the
sense that, as Aristotle says, we can dominate animals with our hands through
the weapons and tools we can create. In his book, La mano humana (2021),
Julián Velarde has studied, with philosophical precision, the existence of two
paradigms of philosophical interpretation that have emerged throughout the
history of Western philosophy: he calls them the Aristotelian Teleological
Paradigm and the Anaxagoras Naturalistic Paradigm..
The Aristotelian Teleological Paradigm
The
Aristotelian Teleological Paradigm dominated, above all, during the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance. We can illustrate it with a famous fresco by Michelangelo
in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo painted the Creation of Adam, in which God
is seen touching one of Adam's fingers with another. Here, the idea of God's Creation
and Design of the World, applied to the Creation of Man, appears pictorially.
God had previously created each of the animal species, according to the
biblical account. Finally, He creates man.
The fresco of The Creation is perhaps the best-known
and most striking image that Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel in the Vatican. The Creation of Adam represents a biblical episode where
God, accompanied by a court of angels, creates man (Adam), giving him the
"breath of life" through the joining of their two index fingers.
Frank Lynn Meshberger, a surgeon, published his article “An Interpretation of
Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy” in a leading
international medical journal in 1990 (Meshberger, 1990). In it, he suggests
that Michelangelo attempted to depict the image of a human brain in his
painting, as it contains a kind of double image in which the silhouette of the
human brain is clearly discernible, formed by the shroud enveloping the God who
gives life to Adam, as well as other anatomical structures.
The
use of double images in painting is characteristic of some of Dalí's works,
such as Slave Market wiht the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940), in
which, through the effect of double perceptual images, popularized at the time
by Gestalt psychology, Dalí makes us see the invisible image of Voltaire's bust
appear in the market. This is done with the paranoid-critical intention of
denouncing the fact that the champion of the Enlightenment and human rights was
investing part of his vast fortune in the then-booming slave trade. It is a
paranoid effect because the viewer experiences a kind of schizophrenia due to
the irruption of a double image; and at the same time, it is a critical image,
as it aims to discredit the sacralized figure of Voltaire held by the
progressive intelligentsia. Michelangelo, a practitioner of anatomical
dissections, must have been well-versed in the parts of the brain, as
Meshberger maintains by comparing the drawing of the cloak enveloping the
divine figure and its angelic companions with a cross-section of the left side
of the cerebral hemisphere. Furthermore, the connection between the brain and
God could stem from Aristotle, according to the text we have cited (De
Partibus Animalum IV, 10, 687 a7-11), who is said to have misinterpreted
the phrase attributed to Anaxagoras that "man is more intelligent than
animals because he has hands," suggesting that having hands depended on
having a superior brain. The Greek physician Galen, whom Michelangelo must have
known in order to perform his dissections, cited and followed the philosopher
on this point. Aristotle also maintained that the brain is the part of the
human body that makes us resemble divinity. That is why Michelangelo paints the
cloak that envelops the divine figure in a veiled way, perhaps to avoid
conflicts with the Inquisition, like a brain.
However,
the center of the pictorial composition is occupied by the divine and human
hands. This allows us to use it as a hinge to invert the Aristotelian meaning
that might lie in Michelangelo's veiled intention. For works considered
geniuses often escape the conscious intentions of the artist, allowing for new
and surprising interpretations. Therefore, it has been suggested that inverting
the meaning of the image could lead to the thesis that it is man, a
devitalized, finite, and earthly Adam, who has created with his imagination the
God-brain, the superior divine intelligence itself as an extrapolation of the
excellent human brain. It suffices here to refer to the hand-brain
relationship, regarding which modern Paleoanthropology and Neurology have confirmed,
as we will see later, that Anaxagoras would ultimately be right against
Aristotle when he maintains that intelligence comes from an anatomically
extraordinary hand that gave us superiority over the rest of the animals.
The
proof lies in studies on the evolution of the brain itself, which was not
created all at once by God, but rather several brains have emerged
evolutionarily: the so-called reptilian brain, the midbrain, and the cerebral
cortex. The spectacular growth of the latter seems to be primarily connected to
the appearance of a free hand capable of techniques for crafting flint axes and
other tools of the technical industry, which no previous ape could perform. The
leap in brain capacity from 250 cc in a chimpanzee to 1250 cc in Homo sapiens
occurred gradually, with the Rubicon being reached at Homo habilis with 700 cc,
in whom a stone tool industry is first observed. Therefore, it can be said
today with certainty that the hand made the brain intelligent, associated by
Aristotle and Michelangelo, due to its excellence, with an imagined divine
intelligence.
This
Aristotelian Teleological Paradigm continued to develop in the 19th century
with studies by English anatomists, such as Charles Bell with his work The
Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design (1833), in
which he argues, with very detailed anatomical studies, that the human hand is
worthy of a divine design.
The
Anaxagoric Naturalistic Paradigm
According to Julián Velarde, the
Anaxagoric Naturalistic Paradigm was developed, after Aristotle, by Epicurus,
who returned to pre-Socratic materialism or naturalism. Anaxagoras, who
followed this atomistic materialism with his notions of the Migma and the
Homeomeries, had nevertheless introduced the Nous into the explanation
of the world, because the random collision of atoms was insufficient; rather,
there had to be an ordering principle, a spirit (Nous), an Idea found in
the Platonic Demiurge and in Aristotle's God. Therefore, Anaxagoras's
materialism is ambiguous because it requires a spirit. But Epicurus focuses
more on Democritus's materialism, in which there is no creation or spiritual
intervention; rather, the world arises from a combination of atoms that, upon
colliding, produce bodies. There is no design; chance creates bodies.
Initially, the atoms would fall like parallel raindrops (a kind of anticipation
of the principle of inertia). But Epicurus supposes that collisions would only
occur if one deviated from its necessarily rectilinear trajectory. Therefore,
he posits the so-called clinamen, that is, a free deflection of an atom
that would cause the chain of collisions that form bodies.
Today
we might smile at the attribution of freedom to atoms. However, it doesn't
occur to just anyone to say that a table is not what we see with our senses,
but is composed of invisible atomic particles. It was a matter of imagination,
since the Greeks didn't really know what atoms truly were. Democritus himself
imagined that some atoms are smooth and others hooked; therefore, the former
give a sensation of sweetness when eating, and the latter a sensation of
sourness. Atoms were not operationally controlled until Lavoisier, with the
isolation of oxygen and, later, with particle tracers and accelerators. But it
was these Greek philosophers who first raised the question, which would not be
solved until the 19th century with the advent of advanced technological tools
like those mentioned. Even modern theories on the origin of the Universe, such
as Kant and Laplace, or the Big Bang Theory itself, are philosophically
foreshadowed here. Although Kant was referring to the formation of solar
systems and not the Universe itself, since he considered the Universe to be a
philosophical Idea and not a scientific Concept. In this critique, which could
be made of the all-encompassing claims of the Big Bang, lies the philosophical
servant's concern that Lady Science not stain the train of her impressive gown.
Simply because we don't know the limits of the Universe. We can scientifically
understand celestial bodies, like the Sun or the planets, because they are
finite and limited objects. That's why astronomy is scientific. But cosmology
cannot be, since the cosmos or universe is unlimited. What is presented today
as such is, at best, a mixture of philosophical and scientific ideas, because
sometimes it's pure metaphysics, as when we ask what existed before the Big
Bang. The only answer is to repeat the same thing: that what existed before was
another universe that collapsed, and from its contraction came the birth of our
own. It's returning to the myth of eternal return and "once upon a
time." Kant said that we cannot know these questions, although they give
us much to think about. We cannot know them now, nor with the progress of
science, because our knowledge is inherently limited. Nor is it necessary,
since Philosophy is not the desire for knowledge for its own sake, but is
subordinate to practical, more vital rationality, which for Kant was the
survival and progress of Humanity in the struggle against Nature, building the
Island of Reason where we can be relatively safe. All of this is a development
of philosophers' ideas.
Epicurus,
moreover, had a conception of experience different from the Aristotelian
paradigm. For him, perceiving through the senses is not passively receiving
copies of things, as in Aristotle, but rather something active, like grasping,
apprehending, touching (Epibolé). For Epicurus, sight is not the primary
sense, but touch. Epicurus's influence would be strong in the Renaissance,
especially due to his defense of Descartes by Pierre Gassendi. In Spain, Juan
Huarte de San Juan, with his *Examen de ingenios para las ciencias* (1575),
considered today as the Patron Saint of Spanish Psychology Faculties, argued
that to explain the mind one must start from the body, anticipating the
Embodied Mind theory of the Chilean biologists Varela and Maturana, which gained
significant traction in the USA and refers to the study of a corporeal soul or
mind. Giordano Bruno, with his cosmic vitalism, and Francis Bacon, with his
thesis that science is technological power, also contributed to this
understanding. The Enlightenment continued the influence of the Anaxagoric
paradigm with the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D'Alembert. In France itself,
during the 18th century, a great advance in biology occurred with Bouffon, who,
in his study of animals, began to propose an alternative to the still
Aristotelian Linnaeus with what he called Transformism of Species, the basis of
later evolutionary theory. However, it seems that Bouffon eventually abandoned
this hypothesis, perhaps due to its conflict with the Bible. But Diderot, a philosopher
of a more heterodox spirit, has a very significant text, Thought XII of his
Pensées sur L’Interpretation de la Nature, in which he argues for evolutionary
transformism, when he asks whether, from a first animal, through
transformation, the different species would arise:
“…
qu'il n'y a jamais eu qu'un premier animal prototype de tous les animaux dont
la Nature n'a fait qu'allonger , racôurcir , transformer , multiplier,
oblitérer certains organes?” (“… has there never been more than a first animal,
prototype of all animals, from which Nature has done nothing but lengthen,
shorten, transform, multiply, obliterate certain organs?”).
Diderot
had read Leibniz and was familiar with the idea of the Monad, a kind of unit that contains, like a biological
cell, all the pre-established information necessary for its development in
relation to the external environment. This concept of transformism was passed
on to Lamarck, a biologist during Napoleon's time, who wrote his Zoological
Philosophy (1809), the first exposition of the Theory of Evolution before
Darwin. Lamarck was certainly wrong to say that acquired characteristics are
inherited, implying that a son of a father with "Popeye arms," the result of a hard life at sea, would be born with
"Popeyin arms," which we know is not the case. The mixture
introduced by evolutionary Neo-Darwinism is also unsatisfactory because it
opens the door to a kind of genetic lottery dominated by irrational chance.
Jean Piaget referred to biologists like Waddington (Piatelli-Palmarini, M.,
Ed., Language and Learning: Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky,
Routledge & Kegan Paul PLC, 1980, p. 55 ff.) who attempted to consider some
kind of indirect environmental influence on gene development. Therefore, the
question remains open, meaning that Darwin would not be the Newton of
evolutionary biology, in the sense that Newton is generally accepted as having
brought classical physics to a close.
Which
Paradigm to Choose?
But then, what about the two
philosophical-scientific paradigms, Aristotelian and Anaximanderic, that have
come down to us? Which one should we choose as true? This is not merely a
controversy among scientists. These are two positions that remain philosophical.
The scientific aspect can be clarified as research progresses, but the
philosophical aspect, which guides it, raises another question. It asks whether
Philosophy can be considered independent and as objective as science. Kant
considered Philosophy not to be a substantive and independent form of
knowledge, as he believed the Metaphysics that preceded him to be. And Fichte
went so far as to say that Philosophy is not like a suit that one can put on or
take off at will, but rather that the Philosophy that each person holds depends
on the kind of person they are. A conservative person who believes that
everything is predetermined, that there is no freedom to change the world, is
very different from a person who believes that not everything is necessarily
predetermined, that freedom exists, and who will therefore try to change the
world. According to Fichte, the former will choose a dogmatic philosophy and
will be considered a realist; the latter a critical philosophy and will be
considered an idealist. This could be seen as arbitrary subjectivism on
Fichte's part, given his defense of idealism, were it not for the fact that
Fichte was considering the events of the French Revolution, an objective event
followed with hopeful interest by both him and Kant, who closely followed the
events in Paris through the gazettes delivered by the stagecoach. Fichte is
correlating his arguments with the events of the French Revolution, with
historical facts that would prove the validity of his philosophical choice, because
they demonstrate that liberty exists. It is not a mere subjective desire, since
the proponents of liberty succeeded in overthrowing the conservative Ancien
Régime, which was not based on liberty, but on the imposition of the dogmatic
authority of the Bourbon absolute monarchy. The Revolution paved the way for
the supporters of liberty, despite the somewhat negative English narrative
surrounding the French Revolution, stemming from the outbreak of violence
perpetrated by the Jacobins with the guillotine. The English also experienced a
bloody Civil War during the outbreak of revolutionary processes between
Parliament and the King, in which Charles I himself succumbed, before the
triumph of the so-called Glorious Revolution. The process in France was longer.
Even Robespierre, responsible for the Jacobin Terror, was finally guillotined
and did not die in his bed, by decision of the French revolutionaries
themselves. This, in a way, honors them by curbing the extreme terrorist
violence of its beginnings. But the Revolution did not stabilize, finally,
after various advances and setbacks, until the Third Republic at the end of the
19th century. Therefore, Fichte's decision to choose the Philosophy of Freedom
over Dogmatism has an objective foundation, based on what he called Tathandlungen
(actions) and not merely on Tatsachen (empirical facts).
But
what can be said in the case at hand, regarding the choice between the
Aristotelian and Anaxagorian philosophical paradigms? The question isn't about
morality or politics. It's a question of natural science: Is the hand prior to
the brain, or is the brain prior to the hand? Here, a choice must be made, but
what rational and objective criteria do we use? The answer lies in the
emergence of scientific facts and demonstrations that support one paradigm more
than the other. In this sense, as we will see, we must choose the Anaxagorian
naturalistic and evolutionary paradigm based on what we know today. However,
there is still resistance against the Theory of Evolution in religious groups
protected by state education laws in the USA. But this is more of a religious
than a scientific issue.
Why
do we argue that intelligence originates in the hand and not the other way
around? We do this because of a series of fairly recent discoveries that affect
the two aspects that biologists consider essential for understanding an
organism: phylogeny, which deals with the development of the species, and
ontogeny, which deals with the development of the individual. Regarding the
hand, we already have scientific developments and explanations in both aspects.
In the phylogenetic aspect, we have the abundant and precise research of
Paleoanthropology. Regarding the second, we refer to the evolutionary
ontogenetic research of Jean Piaget. We will begin with the ontogenetic aspect.
Ontogenetic
Evolutionary Development
Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist,
somewhat forgotten today among young students, but who was fashionable in the
1970s, at the end of which I joined the Philosophy Department, headed by
Gustavo Bueno, as an assistant professor. At that time, the bodily-operational
approach that Piaget introduced in the evolutionary explanation of children's
acquisition of the structures of intelligence was of great interest. It is
relevant now in our presentation to explain how the most abstract structures
and ideas are generated from bodily actions and the manipulation of objects.
Piaget had been a child prodigy who became interested in the biology of
mollusks, collaborating at the age of 15 with the director of the Natural
History Museum in his hometown of Neuchâtel. In his adolescence, he discovered
philosophy through reading Bergson's Creative Evolution, which
apparently resolved his religious problems by replacing the Idea of God with Life, as he recounts in his *Autobiography*..
Therefore, he set out to build a systematic philosophy based on life. In his
early work, Piaget developed a project for a new philosophy, although toward
the end of his life he partly abandoned his youthful enthusiasm for philosophy.
He then proposed to begin, as had been done since Descartes and Kant, with the
Theory of Knowledge or Epistemology. He considered the philosophical theories
developed up to that point in this field to be purely speculative. He intended
to create a Theory of Knowledge based on the advances and methods of the
emerging cognitive sciences, such as psychology and anthropology, within a
biological-evolutionary conception of humankind. His project for a Genetic
Epistemology, to explain the origin and development of human knowledge, was to
be carried out by studying the two aspects that biology addresses when studying
any living organism: ontogeny and phylogeny. Starting with phylogeny required
the paleo-anthropological study of fossils that indicated the origin of the
human species; however, at that time, paleoanthropology was very underdeveloped
and full of gaps. Therefore, as he recounts in his long interview with
Bringuier (Bringuier, J. C., Conversaciones con Piaget, Gedisa,
Barcelona, 1977), he decided to begin with ontogeny,
that is, with the genesis and development of knowledge in the human individual.
For this, he had psychology at his disposal, in which there were no such
problems because, unlike the discovery of anthropological fossils dependent on
the chance of excavations, children are born every day whose ontogenetic
development can be observed experimentally in a constant and repeated manner.
Paleoanthropology developed steadily primarily in the last third of the second
half of the 20th century, with Piaget dying in 1980 at a very old age.
Furthermore, Piaget initially planned to dedicate about three years to
ontogenetic studies in Psychology, which he began in Paris working with Binet's
School; however, he ended up being absorbed by them for three decades,
specializing in Child Psychology and establishing a research center in Geneva
funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
The most important thesis resulting from this research is that, according
to Piaget, a child is already intelligent before learning to speak and
acquiring conscious knowledge. Therefore, intelligence is not limited to
language, as Wittgenstein and Logical Positivism assume. A child already
acquires the idea of geometric space before learning to speak, since they already know how to
orient themselves in their movements. How do they do this? To explain it,
Piaget turned to a French mathematician, Henri Poincaré, who had pondered how
to understand Kant when he said that space, as a form of intuition, is a priori
and already present in some form in consciousness. Poincaré considered how such
an idea could be generated and resolved it by understanding space not as
something primarily mental, but as something material, a terrain where we move,
thus configuring it as the result of a series of movements following rational
principles. Both animals and children exhibit exploratory behaviors driven by a
kind of instinct. Poincaré understands space, then, not as something mental,
but as the set of physical displacements. When these displacements cease to be
chaotic and are governed by rational principles characteristic of what are
called algebraic groups—as when we can add them in such a way that a
displacement AB added to another BC results in a larger displacement AC—we then
endow them with a law of internal composition, because the operation is
"closed," since the result AC is another displacement that, therefore,
belongs to the set of displacements. Furthermore, there is the reverse
displacement, when we go from A to B and then back to A, recognizing it as the
same place we were, thus having a kind of neutral element. We can take
shortcuts when we know, by the associative law, that if we move from A to B and
from B to C, then we can take a shortcut and avoid the detour by going directly
from A to C. Therefore, understanding what a space is requires a certain
material logic in the coordination of displacements. This logic, as Poincaré
discovered, has the structure of an algebraic group. A child acquires this
operational structure when learning to move around, without having to
consciously represent what they are practically doing. For it is not only
formal operations with numbers that are grouped algebraically, but also
physical, practical movements.
It's interesting to see how
Piaget discovers these algebraic structures of closed operations in different
formal and material actions and operations of children. For example, to explain
how children acquire the concept of Substance or Permanent Object. Everyone
knows that if I leave a book on this table and walk away, even if it disappears
from sight, I know the book continues to exist. But, according to Piaget, a
child doesn't innately possess this knowledge. If you show them a rattle and
they like it, they'll try to pick it up. But at a certain age, if you cover it
with a curtain, they lose interest and don't look for it. Yet at a later age,
they're able to lift the curtain to get it again. This means that children, at
first, don't know that fixed things, permanent objects, exist independently of
them. When do they acquire this knowledge, and how do they acquire it? Piaget
gives the example of children who need to be fed with a bottle. At first, the
child is helped, but if left alone and loses the pacifier, they will try to
retrieve it by manipulating the bottle with twists. By coordinating their
actions, they will eventually learn the basic logic of a bottle's twists: a
180° turn takes the pacifier as far away as possible, but with another twist in
the opposite direction, they can retrieve it again. A 360° turn leaves the
pacifier in the same place it started, and so on. The operational structure of
these twists also constitutes an algebraic group, like displacements. Thus, the
child, in the same way they construct objective geometric space as something
with a logic that must be learned to avoid getting lost in their movements,
also learns that a bottle is a permanent object, a kind of substantial object
with a logic independent of their desires, which they must obey to handle it
properly. According to Piaget, this is how these seemingly abstract concepts
(Geometric Space, Physical Substance) are generated before the age of two,
before children even learn to speak. Then, around age six, other concepts are learned,
such as the identity of mass, as demonstrated by the famous example of
transforming a ball of modeling clay into a sausage shape. When a
three-year-old child, performing the transformation, is asked where there is
more clay, they sometimes answer that it's in the sausage because it's longer,
and other times in the ball because it's wider. Only around age six can they
coordinate the transformations within a new algebraic group to realize that the
identity of mass remains after the changes, since the sausage is longer but
narrower than the ball, and vice versa. But they only learn this
experimentally, by performing the transformations themselves with their hands.
In this sense,
according to Piaget, these abstract concepts derive from bodily manipulations.
To say that they come from a divine "spark," or from the
determinations of genes subject to molecular and atomic laws, is to go back to
an ultimate Cause that we cannot explain. Therefore, Piaget begins with the
analysis of effective cognitive processes already underway (in medias res).
A child is born with purely instinctive knowledge, characteristic of animals.
Biology already studies this. What must be studied is how this instinctive
knowledge is transformed into intelligent knowledge or mere habits. A newborn
child, like all mammals, has the instinct to suckle. Its body movements are
chaotic, but the slightest touch to its mouth triggers sucking. Like a calf, which
does the same in search of food, because otherwise it would die. If you put a
finger in its hand, it closes it, due to a grasping instinct. It is said to be
an inheritance from apes, since the young acquired it when, faced with a
predator, the mother tries to escape quickly, and only those infants that
manage to cling tightly to their mother survive and pass it on to us through
evolution. Thus, for a newborn child, due to this initial sucking reflex,
Piaget says, the world is something worthy of being sucked. Later, when the
child gains control of hand movements and accidentally touches their thumb to
their mouth and sucks, they realize there is no food, but between sucks, this
entertains them and relieves their anxiety, thus creating the habit of thumb-sucking.
With this habit comes a direct, circular feedback behavior. Later, more complex
behaviors appear that are indirectly reinforced through a means-end structure,
such as when a child who cannot reach a toy located far away but on a nearby
rug decides to pull the rug closer to reach it. This marks the beginning of a
type of knowledge that uses means to achieve ends, which is properly considered
intelligent knowledge. Therefore, a child who sat still and did not move
through these bodily actions would not develop their intelligence or would
experience serious developmental delays.
In this sense, Piaget maintains that intelligence is essentially related to
bodily actions. The origin of intelligent knowledge, therefore, according to
Piaget, lies in the coordination of actions according to certain operational
structures and not merely in sensations. Aristotle's theory of knowledge placed
the senses as the source of knowledge, considering sight especially as the
primary sense. Through sensations, the first ideas are formed in the mind as
copies of those sensations. Piaget does not deny the influence of sensations on
the origin of knowledge, but considers them as something auxiliary in the
construction of concepts, which derive primarily from the coordination of
actions. This is a complete shift that Piaget inherited from the German philosophy
of Kant, Fichte, and Husserl. Piaget, who had taught courses in the History of
Philosophy in his early career, was nevertheless more familiar with Kant and
Husserl than with Fichte, whom he practically ignores in his writings, as far
as I know, although Fichte's thesis that knowledge derives from actions is
already present in the Tathandlungen of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre.
Starting from actions, Piaget explained, in a novel and rigorous way,
genetically and structurally, the entire ontogeny of knowledge, from the
simplest concepts of Space, Time, Substance, and Cause, generated before the age
of two, to the concepts of Quantity, Quality, Necessity, etc., from ages six to
fourteen. Concepts that, as Piaget demonstrates, are not a priori, as Kant
maintained, nor biologically innate, as Chomsky maintained when considering
human language as an articulated language, very different from the animal
language based on mere signals, like traffic signals for us.
Well, animal language doesn't have the complexity of human language. An
animal, a duck in the experiments of Konrad Lorenz, the father of ethology,
when with the rest of its flock and perceiving the silhouette of a predatory
eagle, looks upwards, pointing at it and accompanying its gesture with quacks,
causing the other ducks to understand the danger and take flight. The
silhouette of the predator is seen by ducks and other animals as a sign of
danger. But this language is not articulated, nor does it have a syntax to form
sentences like a child. So where does the logic necessary for syntax come from?
Chomsky claims it comes from genes. Piaget maintains that the syntactic logic
that organizes the order of words in a sentence comes from the logic that a child
learns by manipulating objects before they can speak. The position of an object
in front or behind is applied to the order of words in a sentence, whereby the
subject comes first, the predicate last, and the verb in the middle. This
manipulative logic of sounds does not necessarily originate from language
genes; rather, it is the same logic that children learn when they manipulate
objects. Piaget discussed this with Chomsky at a conference in 1975 at the
Abbey of Royaumont in Paris. The proceedings of this conference (Language
and Learning: Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, Routledge &
Kegan Paul PLC, 1980) reveal how Chomsky was unable to understand Piaget,
perhaps due to his philosophical limitations, centered on Cartesian innatism.
In contrast, understanding Piaget requires knowledge of later philosophers such
as Kant, Hegel, and Husserl.
In fact, Piaget, through his project of a Genetic Epistemology, has strong
philosophical components. Piaget aimed to go beyond Kant, rejecting, as Kantian
criticism had already done, both empiricism and innatism. But there is an
important difference with Kant, which we can quickly formulate by recalling
that Kant himself described his contribution as a Copernican Revolution. To
grasp this difference, we can say that Piaget carried out a "Kepler
rectification" of the Copernican Turn introduced by Kant. Kepler
considered Copernicus's Turn, which placed the Sun at the center of the Solar
System and not the Earth, as the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology maintained,
to be correct. However, he clarified that the Earth's orbits around the Sun are
not circular, as Copernicus believed. They are elliptical, and the ellipse is a
different curve from the circle, as it does not have a center, but rather two
foci. It is a very different figure, which is why the mathematical calculations
didn't quite fit with Copernicus's. But with Kepler, the three famous exact
laws could finally be established. Piaget takes Kant as his starting point,
maintaining his own shift in perspective, since he does not consider it
possible to return to the Greek positions that everything comes from the senses
or from God, as Descartes still does. But Kant must be corrected in the sense
that there is not a single focus of knowledge, but two: one is Consciousness,
but the other is the Body. And it is precisely in the Body that the Sun of
knowledge resides. For the origin of human rationality is not in Consciousness,
which is nothing more than the result of an internalization of all the
structures of intelligence, generated corporeal-operationally, by working with
symbols through linguistic capacity. It is in this sense that we consider
Piaget's work.
However,
despite the philosophical components of his Epistemology, Piaget, at the end of
his life, renounced giving his work a systematic philosophical foundation as
Kant had attempted to do. Piaget abandoned this path because he believed that
the Theory of Knowledge, traditionally the domain of philosophers, should be
developed by the new Cognitive Sciences, which Kant did not know, thus
relegating Philosophy to questions of Morality or Value Theory. Piaget then
published a book, Sagesse et
illusions de la philosophie (1972), in which he expressed his
disillusionment with his youthful passion for being a philosopher of knowledge,
preferring to be a scientist. In fact, Piaget was at odds with certain dominant
phenomenological currents in France, such as that represented by Sartre, which
sought to develop a philosophical psychology in competition with scientific
psychology. Piaget rejected this philosophical psychology as merely
speculative. This is partly the source of his critique of the illusions and
deceptions of this philosophy.
Phylogenetic
Evolutionary Development
Having briefly
outlined the importance of manipulation in the development of human
intelligence from an ontogenetic perspective, we must now briefly discuss its
importance in phylogenetic development, that is, in the development of the
human species. Darwin is the starting point here, arguing in The Descent of
Man (1871) that bipedalism and the free hand gave us our supremacy over
animals. Today, from the perspective of scientific evolution, we can
reconstruct the original situation of hominids sheltering in caves like
Altamira and harassed by formidable predators. This situation could only be
overcome gradually with the development of techniques that allowed us to hunt
and subdue such fearsome predators, to the point that we have reversed this
primitive situation. Today, we are the ones who have large predatory animals
surrounded and confined in reserves and zoos, as Gustavo Bueno often pointed
out. But how does this reverse situation come about? Darwin had already pointed
out that the human hand, unlike those of apes, allows us to build weapons and
tools with which we dominate animals. Friedrich Engels, who along with Marx
became acquainted with Darwin's theories in London, extended this manual skill
to economic production in his work, "The Part Played by Labour in the
Transition from Ape to Man" (1876), as another distinguishing
characteristic from animals.
But it was
necessary to wait until the second half of the 20th century to find more
refined and experimentally validated scientific studies capable of explaining,
with greater precision, the significance of the evolutionary emergence of the
human hand. A pivotal episode involved the so-called "Lucy", an
Australopithecus afarensis whose skeletal remains, dated to 3.5 million years
ago, were found in Ethiopia in 1974. She was named Lucy after the John Lennon
song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," which was playing at the camp
when the discoverers retired to their tent at nightfall. The skeletal remains
of Lucy's hand were remarkably well-preserved, allowing anatomists to confirm
that her hand was already functionally very different from that of earlier
apes. Until then, the closest thing to a human hand was that of chimpanzees,
with five fingers and an opposable thumb. But by analyzing Lucy's hand with
greater anatomical and functional precision, they realized that Lucy could
already do things that earlier apes could not. For example, picking up a stone
like a baseball pitcher catches a ball, with a three-finger pincer grip, making
a swinging motion with the arms to throw it and hit a target with force and
accuracy, turning the stone into a deadly projectile. A monkey cannot do this
because it is incapable of a pincer grip, as the opposable thumb of monkeys is
longer and cannot touch the tips of the other fingers. A monkey also cannot
grip a hammer, applying strong pressure with the thumb and the rest of the fingers
to drive a nail accurately, as we do. Therefore, it cannot make an axe by
shaping flint stones, because it cannot make a strong pincer grip with one hand
and strike, as if with a hammer, with the other to shape it. Another important
discovery made in South Africa (Kenya and Tanzania) was the remains of Homo
habilis, a hominid from 2 million years ago, which is already being
associated with a stone tool industry. And also the so-called Homo erectus
from 1.5 million years ago, which had a more developed stone tool industry. A
very important change is present in these two specimens because it affects the
growth of brain size. This increase could have been caused by various factors.
Changes in diet are mentioned, among others, but the influence of the new hand,
capable of new actions and operations, is especially highlighted.
The metaphor of the brain as a
computer, used by neurologists, helps us understand how a kind of increase in
the neural tissue of the cerebral cortex and the rewiring of this brain
circuitry were necessary to create the new manual operating devices, as Frank
Wilson argues in his well-known book, The Hand. His work as a
neurologist at the Peter F. Ostwald Program for Performing Artists at the
University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine led him to treat
musicians with hand articulation problems, such as professional guitarists and
pianists, for whom these problems were a tragedy because they affected the
professional careers to which they had dedicated their lives. Many of these
artists fainted when he showed them videos of hand injuries in his practice.
For them, their hands were vital; they were their life. Impressed by this,
Wilson began to investigate what a hand truly is. Classical anatomy studies the
hand, but only goes as far as the wrist, since that is where the arm begins.
Wilson also tried to learn to play the piano himself, at an advanced age, in
order to understand the process of musical manual dexterity from the patient's
perspective. He realized that when you start playing, you learn chords like C,
D, etc., by coordinating three fingers. At first, it's difficult, but with
practice, you notice you're progressing, sometimes faster, sometimes slower,
depending on the methods you use. But there comes to a point when, like a
professional pianist, you don't even look at your fingers anymore. They fall
automatically onto the keys without conscious thought. What happened then?
Well, the brain, acting like a computer, generates neural routines in such a
way that when you activate one, it triggers an automatic response that allows
increasingly complex performances, like those of professional pianists or
guitarists, to be executed with impressive speed and perfection. The brain is
plastic, modifying and reinforcing mental routines with continued practice,
while simultaneously declining or losing precision or speed when that practice
ceases. Therefore, the study of manual skills is inevitably linked to the
nerves that activate them and that transmit signals directly to the arm. The
hand, therefore, cannot be understood without the arm.
But what is the arm? Wilson
says it's a crane. It therefore has a biomechanics that must be studied. In his
book, Wilson includes interviews with crane operators who work with large booms
in ports, whose operation is complicated because they must consider the load's
center of gravity during movement; an error in balancing the load can lead to
the crane collapsing, with the consequent tragedy. Phylogenetically, this led
him to analyze the movement of the monkey Lucy standing upright, throwing a
stone as a projectile. In the Lucy sculpture, Lucy uses her arm, like a crane,
in a swinging motion, which presupposes the brachiation of monkeys leaping in
trees. In this throwing motion, Lucy must maintain her body balance, without
falling to one side or the other, to launch the stone with precise aim. This
movement is similar to that classically depicted in Myron's Discobolus. But the
nerves don't stop at the arm; they reach the cerebral cortex. Today, we know
that the left side of the cortex was the first to be programmed to control hand
movements, and later other neurons were programmed to control linguistic
abilities, which began to develop in a more complex way precisely with the
development of the stone tool industry. For example, to make an axe, it was
necessary to teach others this technical skill, which is more complex and
persistent than that of monkeys. Monkeys, for instance, can learn by imitation
to eat sweet potatoes by washing them with water instead of eating them dirty
with soil. But these skills don't go beyond that point and don't progress to
the development of a technique like cooking, which requires fire control, the
use of sharp knives or axes, etc., impossible to make with their limited hands.
Washing sweet potatoes isn't vital for monkeys either. But the construction of
axes and other tools proved vital for the survival of the hominid species once
they descended from the trees, acquiring bipedalism for their movements across
the savanna. The development of human technology required the development of
language due to the need to teach and transmit manufacturing rules that were
constantly being refined and required institutionalized preservation and
maintenance (Donald, M., Origins of the Modern Mind, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991). This is even supported by more recent research
(Jonathan Birch, “Toolmaking and the evolution of normative cognition”, Biol (Age & Philosophy, 2021, 36:4), that social norms derive from technical
norms, because when hominids realize the advantages of institutionalizing
technical norms, they do the same with the creation of social norms, which are
institutionalized in marriage, family, tribe, etc. These marriage norms, for
example, determine who should marry whom, etc. Gustavo Bueno has especially
emphasized that it is these normative institutions, and not so much technology
considered in the abstract, that separate us from animals. But
institutionalization is linked, in its origin, to technology.
In this sense, the origin of
specifically human reality from manual and surgical operations, as Bueno says,
is increasingly confirmed. But, moreover, for the development of technology and
the understanding and transmission of its norms, the development of a more
complex language than that of monkeys was necessary. The origin of language in
a child depends on being taught by their parents. But the origin of human
language in our species implies its creation through the transformation of
animal language prior to hominization. Paleoanthropology, aided by cognitive
and linguistic sciences, must answer this question. The literature on this
subject is now extensive (see J. Velarde, La mano humana, Chapter V, “Manos
y Lenguage”). According to such research, it seems that human language, in its
origin, was predominantly gestural. The oral tract that allows us to articulate
vowels and consonants clearly and distinctly does not appear until Homo
sapiens. Monkeys do not have it. The human larynx is a muscular organ that
requires a skill similar to that of the hands for finely carving stone, but now
for achieving the finely articulated resonance of sounds in the palate. This
creates an articulated vocal language, which would have been preceded by a
gestural language that we still use today when people in a foreign country do
not understand our language and we communicate with hand gestures. Italians,
for example, use it today to accompany their words, more so than Germans, who
are more reserved in personal communication. By far the most developed form of
body language is hand gestures. While the face can express some basic emotions,
such as joy, sadness, fear, etc., the hands, as evidenced by the now
institutionalized sign language of the deaf, can communicate phrases and
sentences. Therefore, it can be said that human language derives from the
hands. This reinforces Gustavo Bueno's thesis that human rationality derives
from the hands. I won't elaborate further on this, but I highly recommend
reading books like Frank Wilson's The Hand, which, published around
2000, masterfully compiles all this information on the transcendental
importance of our hands, thanks to its clarity, conciseness, and engaging
style, earning it a Pulitzer Prize nomination for popular science. What
personally caught my attention was that in the USA, the topic of hands had
garnered significant attention among researchers and science communicators.
Therefore, I contacted Frank Wilson by email, expressing interest in his
research and exchanging knowledge. He replied promptly, telling me that I was
the first reader of the Spanish translation of his work with whom he had made
contact, and we maintained an email correspondence for a while. However, in
Spain, our research at the University of Oviedo went completely unnoticed. I
found no support here to establish a broader relationship and bring Wilson to
our country as a lecturer, as he had almost come to visit the Altamira Cave.
Only in Barcelona did the Tusquets publishing house translate his work for a
popular science collection edited by the late Jorge Wagensberg, who was
interested in the topic of hands. It is now out of print. I know this because,
due to a review I wrote of the book, I received emails from the Canary Islands
and Argentina requesting a copy. The University of Oviedo Library has a copy of
this book in addition to the original in English.
Principles for a
Systematization of the Philosophy of Hands
Let us return, finally, to Gustavo Bueno's
thesis that the origin of human rationality lies in the hands, which led us to
these investigations, which constitute an experimental scientific fact that is
very difficult to ignore. Anaxagoras would then be right in the face of
Aristotle. This is somewhat reminiscent of Heidegger when he said that we had
to return to the Pre-Socratics, in the face of the Platonic-Aristotelian
distortions that considered them children or inexperienced soldiers who struck
misplaced blows. Anaxagoras's thesis is the one that prevails with modern
evolutionism, which Bueno adopts. Bueno develops a new foundation for
epistemology that is no longer based on the mentalist analysis of knowledge
stemming from the classic Subject/Object opposition between Consciousness and
external objects. Instead, it takes as its model the so-called
"transformational technological complex" through which instruments of
evolutionary adaptation, such as flint axes, are constructed with the emergence
of Paleolithic human technology. This constructive activity is better
understood when we analyze it not as the dual Subject/Object relationship of
classical epistemology, but as the interaction between the manual operations of
a corporeal subject and elements such as stone slabs found in the natural
environment. Through successive transformations, following technical rules, an
axe emerges that exhibits new relationships between its parts (greater cutting
ability, easier handling, etc.). In analyzing the most basic existence of
Dasein in the world, Heidegger described it in terms of "hand skills"
(Zuhandensein), such as a carpenter wielding a hammer. These skills did
not pass through consciousness (Vorhandensein), as Husserl supposed, but
rather were characteristic of pre-conscious practical knowledge. Piaget
demonstrated this knowledge in a child's practical bodily skills for orienting
themselves before being able to consciously represent their situation in the
world through language.
This new foundation of
knowledge could be called the establishment of the Principles of Production (Poiesis).
It is Aristotle's technical-artistic poiesis, as opposed to
political-moral praxis or the theory as scientific knowledge of
physicists or mathematicians. This structure of the Principles of Production
would then be a transformational poietic or technological foundation from which
human rationality arises. This rejects classical epistemology based on the
Subject/Object opposition. This epistemology functions by focusing
dualistically on the subject/object opposition up to Kant. But his successors,
such as Reinhold and Fichte, break with this dualism by introducing
representation (Vorstellung) as a third term. This concept begins to
acquire a central role, due to its constitutive complexity, in Husserl's
phenomenology, where representations result from correlative actions between
noesis and noema, necessary for representation to occur, through epoché
and reductions. Husserl sought precisely to overcome the subject/object
opposition by focusing on noematic representations, which presupposed actions
of consciousness in correlation with sensory data. Therefore, a triad of terms,
operations, and relations is already clearly differentiated here,
albeit without abandoning an idealism of consciousness. Piaget himself was
influenced by Husserl, whose descriptive phenomenological method of
consciousness he rejected, replacing it with a genetic-evolutionary constructivist
method focused on the external behavior of cognitive subjects. However, he
incorporated Husserl's epoché by bracketing sensations to concentrate on
the actions and operational structures grasped through an intuition that is not
merely empirical, but reflective, as he called it. The task before us, then, is
to offer a new systematization of the so-called Theory of Knowledge based on
these principles. But we must be clear about what we mean by philosophical
systematization.
According to Bueno, a
philosophical system is not merely a generic, hypothetical-deductive construct,
but rather requires first distinguishing and properly analyzing the various
scientific, technological, and other systems to differentiate them from traditional
philosophical systems. Bueno went so far
as to outline the concept of a scientific system as a kind of fabric of threads
and knots, calling them “stroma” in comparison to the threads used to weave a
tapestry, etc., which form a Platonic symploké, since they are not all
connected to each other, nor are any of them connected to any other. In his
book El sentido de la vida (Pentalfa, Oviedo, 1996, p. 191 ff.), Bueno
analyzes Newton's scientific system by applying the concepts of Terms,
Operations, and Relations to interpret the famous Three Principles of Newtonian
Mechanics: the first, the Principle of Inertia; the second, the Principle of
Force in relation to Mass and Acceleration; and the third, the Principle of
Action and Reaction. He considers Newton's system not to be hypothetical-deductive,
since its Three Principles are calculated in medias res to organize the
entire explanation of physical phenomena and arrive at the Law of Gravitation.
Bueno interprets them as Principles of Terms, Operations, and Relations. The
First Principle deals with physical Terms understood as "inertial
masses." The Second deals with the Principle of Operations, which govern
collisions according to the formula F=m.a. The Third Principle deals with the
Relations of Action and Reaction. Every action of one body upon another
produces an equal and opposite reaction. Bueno considers these Three Principles
to constitute a System.
Bearing in mind this System
structure based on Three Principles, Bueno finds in the political field another
Three Principles that would govern its systematic functioning. These are the
famous Three Principles proclaimed in the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality,
and Fraternity. The first would be the Principle of Terms, the second that of
Operations, and the third that of Relations. I refer to section 2 of El sentido de la vida: “Los tres principios
de la revolución política y los tres axiomas de la revolución científica”, (p.
91ff.).
Following these analogies
proposed by Bueno, I immediately thought of the famous Three Principles with
which Fichte organizes his Theory of Knowledge in the Wissenschaftslehre of
1894. By the First, the Self posits the Self (I=I). According to the Second
Principle, the Self is opposed by a Not-Self (Self/Not-Self), and according to
the Third Principle, only in the Self is the opposition Self/Not-Self ( Self (Self/Not-Self))
possible. From this last Principle, Fichte derives all cognitive
representations, both theoretical and practical. To create this system, Fichte
relied not only on Kant, but especially on the philosophy of Spinoza, which he
considered the most perfect philosophical system of modern rationalism
originating with Descartes. However, Fichte did not take Descartes or Leibniz
as a model for his system. This was due to the reappraisal of Spinoza's figure
in Germany at the time, a figure who had been treated for a century as a
"dead dog," in Lessing's words. Spinoza would also be reclaimed by
Schelling, the Romantics, and Hegel as essential for understanding their new
philosophical systematizations. This is why Bergson went so far as to say that
everyone has two philosophies: Fichte's own philosophy and Spinoza's. It's
somewhat like what Hegel said about how anyone who hasn't bathed in the
crystalline waters of the Spinozist system won't understand a word of modern
philosophy. Fichte drew on Spinoza, but he made a critical transformation of
his philosophy, since Spinoza has a pre-Kantian metaphysical system, starting
from God or Nature as a Substance and deriving everything from it in a
mechanistic way. Therefore, he has problems explaining human freedom, reducing
it to an awareness of necessity. But it can be transformed into a Kantian
critical system, in which the question is no longer how the world is derived
from a Substance, be it God or Nature, but how our cognitive representations of
the world are generated. For, according to Kant, we cannot know, neither now
nor ever, what the world is in itself, since our knowledge is constitutively
limited and finite, so we don't know things as they are in-themselves, but only
as they are for us. We must, therefore, limit ourselves to explaining how our
representations of the world are possible. But representations do not emerge
passively or mechanically from nature; they are produced by the activity of
Consciousness, according to Kant. Fichte then replaces Spinoza's First Principle,
which refers to God or Nature as substantial terms, causing themselves, with
the Principle of self-producing Consciousness. Fichte expresses his
representations of the world with the formula "the Self posits the
Self." In the Second Principle, Fichte refers to the Spinoza opposition
between the Attributes of Thought and Extension as opposing and parallel
realities, expressing it as the Self/Not-Self, opposition that generates the
actions and operations of Consciousness. Fichte's Third Principle is the one
from which Spinoza derives what he calls the Modes, now understood as
Theoretical and Practical representations, according to a correlative relationship:
assuming the Not-Self is active and the Self passive, theoretical
representations are generated (e.g., when I cannot help but hear thunder).
Conversely, practical representations are generated (e.g., when I actively
struggle against a nature that resists me). In my books, I expound in greater
detail on Fichte's Theory of Knowledge, especially in Meditaciones Fichteanas
(Logos Verlag, Berlin, 2014). In them, I have attempted to construct a new
philosophical systematization of Gustavo Bueno's philosophy. To this end, I
have considered Fichte's systematization as a model, just as Fichte considered
Spinoza's in his time, transforming it into a critical, rather than
metaphysical, system. The spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset considered Fichte
the model of an Idealist system for overcoming German Idealism, rather than the
more well-known Hegelian system, which Engels used as a model for constructing
the scholasticism of DIAMAT. Hegel falls into the monistic logomachy of God or
the Idea that moves the world. But Fichte does not do this; instead, he begins
with the Self, with Consciousness. Another matter is that, after being accused
of atheism, Fichte tried to reintroduce the Idea of God into his philosophy under
the influence of Schelling. Although it is the pantheistic God of the
philosophers, a metaphysical God like Hegel's own, not the God of positivist
religion.
Fichte's system could also be
transformed, as he did with Spinoza's, but now in a non-idealist sense. For
this, we consider the First Principle, the Principle of Terms, which in Fichte
is Consciousness, the Self positing the Self. Drawing on Piaget's Theory of
Knowledge, the Principle of Terms is a Corporeal, Operative Subject given in an
environment. It is a living organism. It is not originally a Consciousness.
Heidegger coined the expression "Being-in-the-world" to indicate
this. Sartre followed him in this. It is not a Consciousness that then falls
Platonically into this world. It makes no sense to separate the consciousness
of a living being from the world. Ortega himself referred to this with his
famous formula, “I am myself and my circumstances,” and if I don't save them, I
cannot save myself. I cannot say that I leave this world and the world remains.
Therefore, the Terms of the First Principle would now be “living organisms,”
endowed with hands and feet, just as in Physics they are “inertial masses,” or
in revolutionary Politics, “free subjects.” But Fichte said that the Self was
autonomous and, therefore, free. That is idealism, since the human organism is
not truly autonomous. It exists in relation to an environment from which it
draws the energy to survive. It cannot isolate itself from the environment. But
it can self-regulate its behavior without separating itself from the
environment, developing closed operational structures that enable its freedom
or relative autonomy. For operational closure does not mean total closure, as
occurs with thermodynamic feedback systems, for example, a heating system with
a thermostat, which, without isolating itself from the environment, allows for
maintaining a stable temperature in a room. A living organism self-regulates in
a similar way through circular causality.
As his Second Principle, Fichte
posited a Not-Self opposed to the Self. However, Fichte considered the natural
environment as a mere Not-Self and was criticized for this by Schelling, who
maintains that Nature is not reducible to a mere Not-Self, which is a negative,
purely logical-formal formula, but rather that nature is something positive,
also a mixture of Self and Not-Self, as is evident in the animal world.
Therefore, the Second Principle, insofar as it deals with a living organism in
its relationship with the natural environment or with other organisms, is a
Principle of the actions and operations of Adaptation, as biological
evolutionism points out. And it is not purely a logical-formal principle, but a
logical-material one, since each organism has a special form of adaptation to
the environment that must be investigated through positive experimentation. A
cow is adapted to a meadow. But a cow would die at the North Pole, where a
different animal, such as the reindeer, survives. To explain dialectically the
relationship of an animal or a child with the environment, as Piaget does,
requires investigations into the functionality of organs adapted through very
precise and positively differentiated material actions and operations.
The Third Principle, the
Principle of Relations, from which Fichte derived the different cognitive
representations, is developed by Piaget in his Genetic Epistemology through the
two reciprocal functions of Adaptation: Assimilation and Accommodation. Piaget
takes this Principle from Biology, which states that the organism must
assimilate food by preparing it with gastric juices so that it passes into the
bloodstream, but at the same time, it must adapt to begin assimilation through
bodily actions, such as opening the mouth to chew an apple. When the
environment changes, the accommodation must also change to assimilate it,
because without accommodation, assimilation is not possible. The relationship
between Accommodation and Assimilation is therefore dialectical. Piaget
transfers these concepts to the epistemological realm. Thus, for example, a
child who knows how to recognize a horse. Or, his mother takes him to the zoo.
The child sees a giraffe for the first time and exclaims, "Mommy, look, a
horse!" His mother corrects his understanding of the horse by explaining
that, although it has four legs and a similar head, its neck is much longer.
The child then constructs a new understanding, by adapting the previous one, to
grasp the difference between a giraffe and a horse. Therefore, for Piaget, the
entire dialectic of knowledge consists of the fact that, if the environment
changes, we must adapt to assimilate it, changing our understandings so that we
can comprehend and adapt to it after the changes. These processes are
dialectical because they involve the negation or breakdown of previous
understandings. They are the way in which our knowledge, both theoretical and
practical, increases, allowing us to survive and master nature. Just as animals
survive primarily through their instinctive knowledge, we survive mainly
through our rational knowledge, with which we develop a technical culture that
allows us to continue living in the face of natural disasters. Well, in them
animal species may disappear, but we, in the face of an ice age, can survive,
because we have energy techniques and sciences, as the Eskimos prove by
adapting to the glacial environment with their thermal housing systems of the
Igloos.
Piaget derives the different
types of human knowledge, such as technology, science, and art, from the
relationship between Assimilation and Accommodation. In technology, according
to him, Assimilation predominates over Accommodation. For example, if I want to
heat the house, I have to adapt my body to make fuel assimilable by the
fireplace, splitting tree trunks into pieces with an axe, making a more or less
strenuous accommodative effort. But if I invent electric heating using new gas
or electricity technologies, that accommodation is practically reduced to a
minimal effort in the house, such as flipping a switch, and yet the
assimilation of the heat produced is much greater. Therefore, Technology is
said to be comfort, because it reduces the effort of accommodation and
increases the capacity for assimilation. Piaget posits that the opposite occurs
in Art, defining it as the predominance of Accommodation with minimal
Assimilation. For example, a child who has just seen his mother talking on the
phone picks it up and imitates her, beginning to speak, gesturing his body into
a fictitious, assimilative telephone dialogue, since there is no interlocutor
or it is reduced to the child himself imaginatively splitting into the other
interlocutor. No one actually answers him, only the child himself theatrically
splitting into two. Here we see that Art, as a theatrical representation, for
example, which can be complex and well or poorly executed, is above all
Accommodation with minimal Assimilation, since the conversation only
assimilates part of what he has heard from his mother, imagining the other's
response. It is in Science that Piaget supposes equilibrium is reached between
Assimilation and Accommodation, neutralizing the predominance of one or the
other, through operational closures.
I believe all of this can be
used to construct a new philosophical systematization, starting from the
corporeal-operative Ego and establishing a Foundation that would be
technical-manual production, but deriving from this manual Foundation first
Epistemology, then, or simultaneously due to their dialectical relationship,
Ontology; then Anthropology, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion,
Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Culture. I have developed this in part
in my philosophical work of the last few decades, which I have published in my
books: Introducción al Pensamiento Hábil, Principios del Pensamiento
Hàbil, Pensar con las manos, La Razón Manual, Filosofía de
las manos, and Fronteras en el Origen. These books are primarily
intended for my students as texts for the explanations I developed in my
Foundations of Philosophy courses, taught at the University of Oviedo over the
last few decades. The approach to the subject was somewhat new and, lacking
manuals, I carried out all these publications with the intention of helping
students understand the subject and at the same time, with greater precision
and calm exposition, refining its more academic content.
These books, due to the
so-called "cancel culture" of dissent, which infects not only the
political landscape but also the cultural and philosophical ones in a sectarian
way, and because of their potential appeal—not to the masses, precisely, but to
the few remaining "distinguished" minorities that Ortega y Gasset
called "distinguished" in our country—had to be self-published. My
brief experience with publishers has been quite bad, as is often the case,
because they pay royalties late, poorly, or not at all, and offer little
promotion, etc. In contrast, today, with on-demand publishing systems, the
traditional publishing monopoly held by traditional publishers has been broken.
In the Renaissance, the Church lost its monopoly on reading, which its
libraries had held, due to the invention of the printing press. Today, another
technological development is taking place with computers and the internet,
causing publishers to lose their centuries-old monopoly. An author today can
publish practically anything they want and put it on a vast market through the
internet. The prestige of certain publishing houses is maintained solely
through their influence on the evaluation of scientific or academic curricula,
which is often denounced as a kind of postmodern cronyism in universities,
referring to the connection between certain publishing groups and academic
trends linked to dominant political interests. A book is a book, and it was
written to be read regardless of where it is published. I was once criticized
for self-publishing my books. I could have published them by paying for the
publishing services of some less influential publishers. But I considered the
required cost exorbitant. Furthermore, I followed in the footsteps of my
mentor, Gustavo Bueno, who self-published many of his works, some central to
his extensive body of work, by creating his own publishing house, Pentalfa Ediciones. In my case, I didn't
need to become a publisher to publish my work, thanks to the current
technological revolution. My works can thus be made available to any interested
reader or researcher. My philosophical research and publications on the
philosophy of hands will continue as long as my health allows and I feel
sufficiently motivated and enthusiastic, although I am already in a sort of
final stretch due to my age.
But I mustn't prolong this
lecture any longer, and so I wanted to conclude by addressing the audience, who
have honored me with their attendance and attentive listening, with the
following appeal:
In contrast to St. Augustine's "Do
not go outside, for truth resides within" (Noli foras ire, in te ipsum
redi. In interiori homine habitat veritas), we must say, given our current
knowledge: do not remain absorbed in yourself, go outside; but do not linger
either, gazing in rapture at the distant, Kantian starry sky above you, as
Aristotle and the ancients did, "raising their eyes to heaven," but
rather direct your attention closer; look at your hands, move them, do things
with them. Truly feel things and transform them by working with them. You will
see and understand how these are the things that generate the practical
benefits and theoretical truths that allow us to improve and extend our
personal lives and the lives of our loved ones, improving our environment,
surviving as a species, creatively transforming the world, and preventing, to
the extent possible, future catastrophes.
Manuel F. Lorenzo
(English translation revised by Ana Garvín)
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