Philosophy of the Hands

 

(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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Bueno, G., Ensayos materialistas, Taurus, Madrid, 1972.

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Bueno, G.,  Sciences as categorical clousures, Pentalfa, Oviedo, 2013.

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Fernández Lorenzo, M., Filosofía de las manos, Lulu, Morrisville (North Carolina), 2023.

Fernández Lorenzo, M., “La filosofía de Gustavo Bueno. Una interpretación crítico-asimilativa”, Eikasía, nº127, 2025, vol.1.

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Piatelli-Palmarini, M., Edit., Language and Learning: Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, ‎ Routledge & Kegan Paul PLC, 1980.

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