The question of the “being of the hand”,
philosophically said, is a question that has begun to be considered in the
twentieth century philosophy. However, already Anaxagoras had highlighted the
importance of the hands as organs of the human body that have made us more
intelligent than animals. But it is, above all, in Heidegger’s famous work Being and Time, where the importance of
the hands returns to the philosophical foreground, given that in this work the
German philosopher introduces the hand to confront it to sight, in the sense
that our immediate relation to the world does not take place through that which
is available to us “before our eyes” or present-at-hand (vor-handen), but
ready-to-hand (zu-handen). This way Heidegger criticizes the so called Western
Metaphysics, which, since Plato, would had hampered the understanding of our
relation to the world by considering objects as something which is understood
inasmuch as they are essentially related to sight, Ideas or visions that we
have of them, not through the senses, but through reason, understood as a
vision or ideal contemplation of the prototypes of things.
For Heidegger,
influenced by Husserl’s Phenomenology, a more fitting description of
humans’ relation to the things that surround them, understanding humans
essentially as beings “being-there” (Da-sein),
is not mainly a mere visual relation, but a relation through utensils (hammers,
axes, etc.), whose handling requires consideration of manual abilities. For
these reason, for Heidegger, the understanding of the world is before manual
than purely “mental”. The world is pre-understood when we unconsciously handle
ourselves in it, before than when we subsequently represent it consciously in
our “mind” through images from the brain. That is why the sense of tact must
precede the sense of sight in the genesis of our position in the world. The
world as what is ready-to-hand must precede the world understood as what is
before our eyes. The Western Philosophy, according to this, has been marked by
a visual prejudice, taking the shape of what Heidegger calls a “metaphysic of
presence”, generated by Platonism. However it was also held and enforced by the
realist Aristotle, who interpreted Anaxagoras’ well-known claim about the
importance of the hands for the superiority of human’s intelligence in the
sense that the extraordinary manual abilities of humans could only be explained
as derived from the greater capacity and size
of the human brain, where principally a mind dwelled, in which ideas as
copies of things came inside through sight and by a process of abstraction.
However, modern Evolutionary Anthropology has corrected Aristotle in favor of
Anaxagoras, given that the greater size and capacity of the human brain
compared to that of our closest relatives, the simians, would be due to the
appearance of an exempt and progressively more skillful hand following the
consolidation of bipedalism in hominids, as the reconstructed hand of the
famous Australopithecus Lucy. Frank R. Wilson’s book The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture
(Pantheon, 1998) offers plenty information about the actual consideration of
the study of the hand in modern biomechanical, neurological and functional
Anatomy, and at the same time notes the most recent developments of
Evolutionary Paleoanthropology (see on this blog : “We don't know what a hand can do”, 9-1-2013).
To all of this has joined recently the
publication in Spanish of an extraordinary book of an important and
internationally recognized Finnish architect, Juhani Pallasmaa, titled: The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied
Wisdom in Architecture (John Wiley & Sons, 2009; Spanish edition: La mano que piensa, Gustavo Gili,
Barcelona 2012), in which it is analyzed the important role of the hand in
handicrafts, in literary writing, and in architecture. Pallasmaa relies on the
analysis of The Hand, of Frank Wilson
-who’s importance for the compilation of the materials and themes for his book
is highlighted in the Acknowledgements chapter-, to write this book, in which
he analyzes, quoting his own words, “the essence of the hand and its seminal
role in the evolution of human skills, intelligence and conceptual capacities.
As I argue – with the support of many other writers – the hand in not only a
faithful, passive executer of the intentions of the brain, rather, the hand has
its own intentionality, knowledge and skills. The study of the significance of
the hand is expanded more generally to the significance of embodiment in human
existence and creative work.” (p. 21)
What is new about this book about the hand, is
a deepening of his critic against the dominant visual paradigm of today’s most
influential architecture, already analyzed in his previous work, The eyes of the skin (Academy Press,
2005), in the sense of correcting the mistaken belief that spatiality is
something that ends in vision and can do without the tactile senses or
kinesthetic, who’s main focal point is constituted by the hand. For this reason
the hand is the main theme of a book that, after an approach to a scientific
updated understanding of what a human hand is, accompanied by quotes from
artists and philosophers like Goehte, Heidegger, Sartre or Merleau-Ponty,
Lakoff & Johnson, among others, explores its relation to architecture and
other auxiliary trades, like drawing, handicraft trades, and even computer
designs, today indispensable for architecture, although not exempt of dangers,
for they tend to eliminate the manual and tactile aspects of the designed
spaces, in favor of the purely visual.
In this sense, Pallasmaa, professor as well as
architect, proposes a deep reform of the teaching imparted in Architecture
Schools so that manual knowledge’s directing point of view prevails over the
merely visual: “Western consumer culture continues to project a dualistic
attitude towards the human body. On the one hand we have an obsessively
aestheticized and eroticized cult of the body, but on the other, intelligence
and creative capacity are equally celebrated as totally separate, or even
individual qualities. In either case, the body and the mind are understood as
unrelated entities that do not constitute an integrated unity… This division of
the body and mind has, of course, its solid foundation in the history of
Western philosophy. Prevailing educational pedagogies and practices also
regrettably continue to separate mental, intellectual and emotional capacities
from the senses and the multifarious dimensions of human embodiment.
Educational practices usually provide some degree of physical training for the
body, but they do not acknowledge our fundamentally embodied and holistic
essence. The body is addressed in sports and dance, for instance, and the
senses are directly acknowledged in connection with art and music education,
but our embodied existence is rarely identified as the very basis of our
interaction and integration with the world, or of our consciousness and
self-understanding. Training of the hand is provided in courses that teach
elementary skills in the handicrafts, but the integral role of the hand in the
evolution and different manifestations of human intelligence is not
acknowledged. To put it simply, today’s prevailing educational principles fail
to grasp the indeterminate, dynamic and sensually integrated essence of human
existence, thought and action.” (pp. 11-12)
The key is then in not having grasped the
manual essence of human existence. But Pallasmaa is not alone in this new
understanding which demands the formation of a new educational and
philosophical paradigm, indispensable, in his view, to “shake the foundations”
(p. 22) of the erroneous paradigm actually dominant, not only in architecture,
but also in philosophy. For a philosophical trend parallel to Pallasmaa’s
proposal of an embodied image would
be the philosophy of the embodied mind
advocated by Lakoff, Thompson or Dan Zahavi. For our part, though lectures
imparted in the Universidad de Oviedo (Spain) and publications, we have made an
effort to develop the foundations of a philosophical thought about the manual
ability as the core which yields human knowledge in what we call Pensamiento Hábil (see Manuel F.
Lorenzo, Introducción al Pensamiento
Hábil) and as a base for a new philosophy which needs a new method, in this
case inspired by the manual operativity
or surgical (see in this blog: “Fenomenología y Operatiología” (I-II), 8-8-2011
and 9-1-2012; also, “La mano como raíz generadora del conocimiento humano”,
5-9-2011). With other colleagues of the Universidad de Oviedo, it looks like we
are pioneers in Spain of what we could call the development of “the philosophy
of the hands”.
Juhani Pallasmaa, for his prestige and
international influence as an architect, and moreover, his wide and well
assimilated philosophical culture, is called to open again the doors of the
Architecture Schools and Faculties, and of Art in general, to the need to
incorporate this new trend of philosophical thought related to what he names thinking hand, to try to reform the
actual too computerised and technified education, and what is worst, dominated
by a bad philosophy unconscious of the alienating visual architecture so in
vogue. Read his important book.
(Translated into English by Luis Fernández Pontón)
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