The hand as the generating root of human knowledge

     In what follows we will attempt to apply the new operatiological philosophical procedures to which we referred in a previous article ("For a refundation of the positivist Philosophy" (21-11-2012) published in this Blog), in order to come closer to a strictly philosophical comprehension of human knowledge. Already Kant considered the problem of finding a bridge that would allow him to overcome the dualism of Aristotelean origin between sensible natural (phenomenal) and the intelligible moral (noumenal) knowledge. He even wrote in the Critique of Judgement about an unknown common root that would permit to connect both the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds. But the task to find such a common root would begin to be solved by his immediate successors, Reinhold and Fichte. The first, formulated the so-called Principle of Consciousness (Satz von Bewusstsein) understood as an empirical fact from which he defined, based on conscious Representation, the relation between (phenomenal) subjective and the (noumenal) objective representations of reality. Fichte understood such Principle of Consciousness, not as an empirical fact, but as an act-fact (Tathandlung), reconstructing human knowledge with his famous Three Principles. Fichte's great discovery was to relate the Kantian a priori forms with the actions of the subject, privileging the so-called “active side” of knowledge that Kant introduced against the “passive side”, which he subordinated to sensations.

     Such an “activist” or dynamical conception of knowledge that is opposed to “empiricism” as well as to “innatism”, will arrive to Piaget through a tradition of nineteenth-century French philosophy that goes from Maine de Biran to Bergson, through Felix de Ravaisson, very influenced by Fichte and Schelling. Such a tradition puts the essence of knowledge in action as a reaction against Condillac's empiricist “sensism”. However, Piaget positions himself far from the “spiritualist positivism”, moved by the behaviorist turn of the scientific psychology in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, against Watson's and Skinner's American Behaviorism, he inserts between the Stimulus and the Response the Operatory Subject, understood now, not as the Kantian Consciousness, but rather as a biological Organism, therefore, given in a milieu in which it is capable of evolutionarily adapting, assimilating and accommodating itself to it. In harmony with the Kantian Primacy of Practical Reason, knowledge is seen by Piaget as an instrument more for the evolutive adaptation, which maintains a logic in continuity with other biological adaptive mechanisms, such as the logic of instinctive devices or that of “neuronal circuits”.

     However, maybe what has been most characteristic of Piaget is his genetic and dialectical-positive approach in the explanation of knowledge. Such an approach rises from the need of finding, not so much an ultimate cause for knowledge (God, sensations, consciousness, etc.), but rather of explaining the laws and structures of its functioning. A way of observing scientifically and positively how such structures generate and change is to observe how the increase of knowledge is produced in children. This is on what Piaget focused during his long life as a researcher. His discoveries and explanations of the Stages of Knowledge are nowadays well-known. What we intend here is to exploit its philosophical sense. In this case, more concretely, we will sketch a vision, which we believe to be new, of human knowledge as a whole using the “Plotinean” conception of the philosophical essences of Gustavo Bueno, in the same ways as we presented it in a previous article (“Fenomenología y Operatología” also in this Blog). According to such conception, the traditional Platonic/Aristotelic Essences, fixed and eternal, must be considered as mobile and evolutionarily temporal, in the sense in which Plotinus said that “One might refer to the family of the Heraclids as a unity in the sense, not of a common element in all its members, but of a common origin” (Enneads, VI, 1,3). This way, it is necessary to fix, following the novel Buenist conception of essences which we presented in a precious article, the “origin” or Nucleus from which the Essence of knowledge comes from, the Course or development which follows and the Body which it generates.

     In Piaget, as in Fichte, the Essence of knowledge is action. But the Nucleus from which such knowledge takes off or streams is not interior or “mental” conscious action, nor is it the sensations coming from the external objects, but rather the unconscious actions, in the sense of pre-linguistic, of very determinate corporal organs such as the mouth, the feet and the hands, during the first months of a baby. This is common to the rest of mammal animals, but unlike those closest to us, such as chimpanzees, what distances us from them ontogenetically is of course a superior brain, but phylogenetically it is our much more skillful hands, as Frank R. Wilson has pointed up in the recent years in his splendid book: The Hand: How its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (Vintage, 1998). For this reason we must consider now that the nucleus or generating root of human knowledge dwells in something so disregarded by classical theories of knowledge as the hands. Two great figures of the twentieth century, Piaget and Heidegger with his conception of the “ready-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit), have rescued from traditional oblivion the essential and primordial role of the hands in our relation to the world. Piaget himself points out to the handling of objects in children as the origin of the intentional knowledge that aims at objects through mediating actions as simple as dragging a carpet when a child wants to reach a distant object. In such a sense the locus of operatory actions and abilities proper to human intelligence is the hands.

     Such abilities, according to Piaget, go through a Course or variational development of the manipulatory operatory possibilities covered by the famous evolutive Three Stages: the Sensory-Motor, that of Material Operations and that of Formal Operations. In the first the child constructs through her actions the basic operatory categories and structures of intelligence: that of Substance (Permanent Object), of Cause, of Space and of Time. In the Stage of Material Operations, the child knows the physical objects themselves by constructing with them classes, series and means, qualitatively and quantitatively. In the third Stage, that of Formal Operations, the child reaches knowledge of Necessity, Possibility, etc., through abstract combinations of symbols by means of which purely formal relations are established, which, as in the deduction of geometrical theorems, are achieved after a process of elimination and neutralization through algebraic “closures” of the operations or intermediate steps. In this sense, such course acquires a character which we can call dialectical, in so far as it tends at its end to a negation or neutralization of that which is essential to human knowledge, of the actions or operations in the consecution of the ultimate equations or identities, as scientific truths that allow us to have a firm knowledge of reality. Furthermore, such dialectic leads to the final reduction of the rich originary actions and operations to manipulation of symbols through writing, the “mind”, the pressing of keys on a computer or the buttons of a console, matter of growing concern among pedagogues because of the abandonment on the part of children of traditional games, substituted from a corporal point of view, by the mere compulsively pushing buttons.

     However the essential Course is developed, according to G. Bueno, through a Body, a “crust” or external medium which surrounds it and which keeps growing through cumulative layers. The crust that surrounds the child in her learning is formed by three different educational institutions: the household (or kindergarden), in the First Stage; the School from six year olds up, in the Second Stage; in the Secondary Education Centre from eleven year olds to fourteen year olds, in the Third Stage, at which Piaget considers that, on average, the maturity of human intelligence is reached.

     Complementarily, we should consider, in order to have not only an ontogenetic understanding of knowledge, but also phylogenetic, the knowledge that evolutionist anthropology provides us with. This is a task that Piaget also considered himself in his beginnings, as he expresses in a interview ( J.C. Bringuier, Conversations with Piaget, Chicago, 1980), but that he did not undertake because of the lack of paleoanthropological knowledge of his time. Today, such knowledge has abundantly increased, making such task much more feasible. In the first place, the originary cause of the properly human has been established, his greater capacity in intelligent behavior, in respect to other animals, in the appearance of distinguishing features such as bipedestation, the exempt hand, the increase of the brain's size, the articulate language, the socialization through characteristic institutions, etc. All of this would result in the appearance of technical inventions that, although with precedents in other animal species, they would have acquired, starting from the so-called homo habilis two million years ago, a transcendental importance, because of their consequences, in the struggle for evolutive life, such as is the gradual control over the natural environment together with the increasing growth and expansion of the population around the terrestrial globe.

     This increase in human intelligence was successfully put in relation with the appearance, not only of the exempt hand, but also of the extremely skilled hand in comparison to the hands of apes, which was the case of the famous australopithecus Lucy and her hand which had a grip ability unprecedented in previous species of apes and hominids, and was equivalent to that of a baseball pitcher. Furthermore, language would have appeared first as a gesturally articulated language, before that it did vocally, which gives again a central interest to the hands in so far as it is the human organ, excluding the pharynx – whose vocal tract took longer time to develop into a sound articulatory capability –, with more possibilities of undertaking complicated symbolic operations, as the present language of deaf people shows. In such a sense it has been remembered the saying credited by Aristotle to the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, that “the man is the most intelligent of living beings because it has hands”. Aristotle accepted the phrase, but he interpreted it in a different sense by deriving the superiority of the human hand from the existence of a more developed brain. Hence the forgetfulness, in the ulterior philosophical tradition dominated by Aristotelianism, of the essential role that Anaxagoras gave to the hands. Role which only began to emerge again thanks to evolutionary Anthropology, which finally attributes the growth and progressive configuration of the human brain, that clearly takes off with the homo habilis, essentially to the exempt and extremely skilled hand for the ulterior struggle for existence.

     In such sense, we can claim, now from a phylogenetic standpoint, that manual activity is, as in the case of ontogenesis, the generating differentiating nucleus of human intelligence, in this case of technic, that would essentially distance the human species from the rest. The development of this new ability or technical capacity of the hominids would follow a course which has being theorized in various ways in the twentieth century, with the works of Childe, Munford, etc. and, specially, after the interest shown by philosophy in the “essence” of technic, as in Heidegger or Ortega y Gasset. The latter proposes to distinguish, in Meditación de la técnica (1939), three phases in its historical development: the “technic of chance” (técnica del azar) which corresponds to casual inventions, such as fire, made by societies in a savage estate, underdeveloped in regard to the division of labor; the “technic of the craftsman” (técnica del artesano), which appears in societies with a division of labor in professions and crafts, and a large production of instruments; the “technic of the technician” (técnica del técnico), which would be derived from the sciences and involves machines based on scientific theories. Accordingly, the development of technic, after going through the phase of the “technic of chance”, and through that of the “technic of the craftsman”, would lead, in a third phase, to the appearance of science and the posterior “technic of the technician”.

     The emergence of science occurred, as it is generally acknowledged, with Greek Geometry, which was constituted on the base of technical knowledge coming from surveying, measurement techniques of fields developed especially by the Egyptians. The Greeks, from Thales of Miletus, developed demonstration procedures though purely symbolic operations about spatial relations that culminated in Theorems, which were expression of truths independent of experience. Such truths were obtained through a deductive process, algebraically “closed”, in which subjectual operations were eliminated or neutralized, as G. Bueno claims, in order to obtain equations that expressed universal and necessary relations between objects. Thereby the “secure path of science”, to which Kant referred when talking about Newton, was reached for the first time in the History of Humanity. But such course of human knowledge (technic, crafts, science) has been covering itself, in its development, of a crust which respectively corresponds with the institution of the wizard-sorcerer in savage societies, the craftsman workshop in the second phase and the School of Pythagoras or the scientific Academies in the third.

     Finally, science itself must be considered from a perspective of purely “internal” development, that is, independently of individual and social pressures or needs; it has to be addressed in a manner which has been, since Kant, called “transcendental”, that is, in a way that addresses the proper “internal” conditions of possibility for its development. In such sense, the Theories of Science appears, after Kant, with Saint-Simon's and Comte's positivism, who propose a reflexion about the “positive” methods of the sciences and to order and classify them, They also propose an originary nucleus of the sciences. Comte refers to the Cartesian metaphor of the tree of knowledge, whereby the sciences are branches that derive from the metaphysical philosophical trunk. In turn, Metaphysics would derive from the originary religious mentality of Humanity, according to the law of the Three Stages. But, today we know that the sciences do not derive from Philosophy, but rather from technics which they in turn improve (Geometry derives form land surveying (Agrimensura), etc.). On the contrary, we could also say that Philosophy itself emerged in Greece from the reflexion about Geometry (Plato). Philosophy, as Positive Philosophy, doesn't appear until the “positive” and not purely rational sciences, such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology, are constituted in the modern world, precisely in Comte's period. In such sense, what follows science is not properly scientific knowledge, which is in its nature specialized, multiple and particular, but rather Positive Philosophy, which is the proper occupation of positive philosophers, named by Comte “specialists in generalities.”

     Each science has, therefore, a particular technique or generating nucleus of its own. But, if we consider that which essentially characterizes scientificity, as a new form of knowledge essentially characterized by a categorized and algebraically “closed” demonstration form constituted by the “theorems”, according to Gustavo Bueno ( ¿Que es la ciencia?, Pentalfa, Oviedo, 1995, p. 68 s.s. There is an English translation in Gustavo Bueno, Sciences as Categorical closures, Pentalfa Oviedo, 2013), then the generating nucleus of the gnoseological figure of the “theorem”, is the Greek Geometry of Tales, Pythagoras, etc. The first objective scientific truths were created in it, although purely “formal”, under the figure of identities and equations such as Pythagoras's Theorem, “a2 +b2= c2”, as the result of a construction, which Bueno calls alpha-operatory (alfa-operatoria), in which an objective and valid truth for all right triangles is obtained as a necessary result, after the elimination or neutralization of the purely subjectual operations of the mathematician. Geometry constituted itself, then, as a “formal” model of scientificity which marks the first development of the course that the constitution of the sciences will follow. The second moment of such course doesn't take place until the so-called scientific Revolution of the Renaissance, when the physical sciences begin to be constituted. In this case, the novelty consists in that the alpha-operatory constructions extend themselves to physical, material entities, such as planets (Kepler's Laws), or projectiles (parabolic trajectories of projectiles in Galileo). Such a demonstrative model will extend itself to Chemistry in the eighteenth century. A third phase in the course of scientificity takes place with the emergence of the biological and human sciences, in which, nevertheless, due to the presence in their fields of subjects whose operational trajectories are unpredictable, they pose a serious limitation to the possibility of closed alpha-operatory constructions, which at most can reach a form of statistical, functional structuralist or purely conditional (Game Theory) probability, just like it happens with social or historical laws. Such Human and Ethological Sciences, as they are usually called, tend to move themselves principally in what G. Bueno calls beta-operatory methodology, in which the subjectual operations are not only not eliminated in the results, but they are demanded by this results in so far as they are planes, projects, decisions, etc., without which the results themselves would not be comprehensible. In such sense scientificity degenerates here in technologies or praxeologies, as it occurs with Jurisprudence, Ethics or economical Politics. Thereby the snake of knowledge bites its tail, in a sort of return to its initial conditions.

     This way the great circle in which knowledge moves and evolves is transcendentally closed. A circle that puts transcendental limits, in the Kantian sense, to so many futurist dreams of which scientist themselves are often the victims because they don't have a well founded Idea of scientificity, even though they put it into practice in an admirable way. A circle that we, nevertheless, cannot consider as “vicious”, but rather as completely virtuous, for it is thanks to it that our knowledge has advanced and advances more each time, even within the basic anthropological-transcendental limits, those principally marked by our humble upper extremities, the hands, that far from disappearing, appear as necessary and indispensable in order to understand those sciences which appeared the last, but which Comte himself considered to be the first because of the higher dignity of their objects, human beings themselves.

Manuel F. Lorenzo, Meditaciones fichteanas, Logos Verlag, Berlin, 2014, p.p. 73-81.

(English translation by Luis Fernández Ponton, University of Copenhagen)

Hand and ability (Habitude) in Merleau-Ponty

The philosophical work of the Frenchman Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), in many aspects intellectual companion and collaborator of Sartre, although also divergent critic of his famous dualism of the being in-itself and for-itself, recently returns to the philosophical arena, not so much because of his relation to the already slightly forgotten Sartre, but because of his conceptions about the “embodied consciousness” that interest today the philosophical movement known as Embodied Mind, so influential in the so-called North American Philosophy of Mind, with representatives known world wide such as George Lakoff. For, with Merleau-Ponty a new path is opened for the influence of Phenomenology in the existentialist movement which tries to rectify the Sartrean horizon of a Being in-itself opposed in a dualist form to the Consciousness for-itself, as if it were the Fichtean opposition of an I and Not-I, with the introduction of an intermediate term that Merleau-Ponty thematizes as “own body” through analyses of the last Husserl about the Lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and the habitualities. The inspiration now comes from the Schellingean Identity as a unity that tries to overcome the Fichtean dualism, looking for an intermediate term with his proposal of regarding the biological nature not as a mere Not-I, as Fichte did, but as a “sleeping Spirit”, as Schelling would say. This way, Merleau-Ponty will pose as a program of the existential phenomenology a description of the “own body” understood, following his own words, as an “in-between two”, as that which is precisely found in between the for-itself and the in-itself, in between the consciousness and the thing, in between freedom and nature.

To bridge the gap in between the in-itself and the for-itself Merleau-Ponty undertakes from his fist work, The Structure of Behavior (1942), an exploration through the Biology and Psychology of the Gestalt, trying to break the Cartesian dualism between res extensa and res cogitans, still active in Sartre's in-itself and for-itself. The world must now be reorganized through a tripartition in Matter, Life and Spirit. As Vincent Descombes points out:

“With this triad, Merleau-Ponty accepts the legacy of what has held, in France, the role of a Naturphilosophie, via the reading of Aristotle by Ravaisson (who also corresponded with Schelling)” (V. Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. 58). We need to remember that Ravaisson, influenced by the Schellingean Idea of the Identity as a unity of the Nature and the Spirit, looked in the Habit, in his worked De l'habitude (1938), for a positivized version of the abstract and more speculative Schellingean Identity, understanding it as something intermediate between the mechanic nature and the consciousness, in so far as the habit, understood as a psychological category, has a conscious origin but ends up mechanizing itself and forming part of an unconscious behavior. Felix de Ravaisson inaugurates this way a bio-psychological organicism tradition that is updated and reinforced in Merleau-Ponty with the contributions of the Gestalt theory and, especially, in the work of Goldstein: human behavior possesses a global structuration or organization whose explanation is not reached from the simple physiological description that is constantly reduced to a mechanistic atomism, nor from the pure psychological description which tends towards the pure and absolute substantialization of the psychic. In between Nature and Consciousness, being in-itself and for-itself, human behavior is configured as an intermediate structure that arises in media res with the perceptive act. For the perceptive activity is for Merleau-Ponty a true original experience, which he tries to describe with the help of the phenomenological method in his most important work, Phenomenology of Perception (1945).

It is in this work where we find the key notion of habitude (which should be translated as ability, not as habit, following the translation to English of the term, not as habit, but as skill or ability, which Hurbert L. Dreyfus proposes in “Merleau-Ponty and Recent Cognitive Science”, en The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, T. Carman, Mark B.N. Hansen edit., Cambridge University Press 2005, p. 145, n. 3), notion used by Merleau-Ponty as the “in-between two” that allows to overcome the traditional dualism. In it he finds the key category to talk about the body not as a mere physical mechanism, a mere object in between two objects, but as a motor being, as the “vehicle of the being-in the world”. So writes the French Philosopher:

“Even if subsequently, thought and the perception of space are freed from motility and spatial being, for us to be able to conceive space, it is in the first place necessary that we should have been thrust into it by our body, and that it should have provided us with the first model of those transportations, equivalents and identifications which make space into an objective system and allow our experience to be one of objects, opening out on an 'in itself'” (M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1962, reprinted 2002, trans. by Colin Smith, p. 164)

In order to clarify what he understands by habitude, as “the acquisition of a habit as a rearrangement and renewal of the corporal schema presents great difficulties to traditional philosophies, which are always inclined to conceive synthesis as intellectual synthesis” (op. cit., p. 164), Merleau-Ponty uses the example of dance:

“For example, is it not the case that forming the habit of dancing is discovering, by analysis, the formula of the movement in question, and the reconstructing it on the basis of the ideal outline by the use of previously acquired movements, those of walking and running? But before the formula of the new dance can incorporate certain elements of general motility, it must first have had, as it were, the stamp of movement set upon it. As has often been said, it is the body which 'catches' (kapiert) and 'comprehends' movement. The acquisition of a habit is indeed the grasping of a significance, but it is the motor grasping of a motor significance” (op. cit., p. 165).

The example of dance will be taken and analyzed in deepness as a social habitus by PierreBourdieu, who many times declared to be influenced by Merleau-Ponty's habitude, in his known book The Bachelor's Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Bearn (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Bourdieu undertakes in sociology a reflection about the corporal abilities (habitus) as an explanatory genesis of social structures (of class, intellectual, cultural, etc.) comparable and, in great part, complementary to the Piagetean reflection about the constitutive role of children's corporal abilities in the genesis of the structures of intelligence. In such a sense, it constitutes for the philosophical reflection about Ability as a philosophical Idea common to various scientific, artistic, etc., categorizations -which we have been developing with our proposal of the Pensamiento Hábil-, a privileged field of novel modes of sociological-operational analyses.

After the example of dance Merleau-Ponty continues in the Phenomenology of Perception generalizing the sense of the bodily abilities:

“To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power of dilating our being-in-the-world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments. It is possible to know how to type without being able to say where the letters which make the words are to be found on the bank of keys. To know how to type is not, then, to know the place of each letter among the keys, nor even to have acquired a conditioned reflex for each one, which is set in motion by the letter as it comes before our eye. If habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action, what then is it? It is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort” (op.cit., p. 166).

Likewise, according to Merleau-Ponty, an organist, for example, has such a big operatory familiarity with his instrument that it easily persists when he has to change it for a different one. For Merleau-Ponty this example of the organist, as it is the case of instruments in general, clearly shows how the habitude doesn't reside in the mind, nor in the body understood as something purely mechanic, but in the body as a mediator of a world:

“It is known (Cf. Chevalier, L’Habitude, pp. 202 and ff.) that an experienced organist is capable of playing an organ which he does not know, which has more or fewer manuals, and stops differently arranged, compared with those on the instrument he is used to playing. He needs only an hour's practice to be ready to perform his programme. Such a short preparation rules out the supposition that new conditioned reflexes have here been substituted for the existing sets, except where both form a system and the change is all-embracing, which takes us away from the mechanistic theory, since in that case the reactions are mediated by a comprehensive grasp of the instrument. Are we to maintain that the organist analyses the organ, that he conjures up and retains a representation of the stops, pedals and manuals and their relation to each other in space? But during the short rehearsal preceding the concert, he does not act like a person about to draw a plan. He sit on the seat, works the pedals, pulls out the stops, gets the measure of the instrument with his body, incorporates within himself the relevant directions and dimensions, settles into the organ as one settles into the house” (op.cit., p.168).

The body in such sense, as operatory body, is for this reason, for Merleau-Ponty, a new way of understanding the human individual in opposition to the way it is commonly understood in mechanistic materialism or Cartesian mentalism:

“What we have discovered through the study of motility, is a new meaning of the word 'meaning'. The great strength of intellectualist psychology and idealist philosophy comes from their having no difficulty in showing that perception and thought have an intrinsic significance and cannot be explained in terms of the external association of fortuitously agglomerated contents. The Cogito was the coming to self-awareness of this inner core. But all meaning was ipso facto conceived as an act of thought, as the work of a pure I, and although rationalism easily refuted empiricism, it was itself unable to account for the variety of the experience, for the element of senselessness in it, for the contingency of contents. Bodily experience forces us to acknowledge an imposition of meaning which is not the work of a universal constituting consciousness, a meaning which clings to certain contents” (op.cit., p. 170).

Against it, “it will perhaps be objected that the organization of our body is contingent, that we can 'conceive a man without hands, feet, head' (Pascal, Pensées et Opuscules (ed. Brunschvicg), Section VI, No. 339, p. 486) and a fortiori a sexless man, self-propagating by cutting or layering. But this is the case only if we take an abstract view of hands, feet, head or sexual apparatus, regarding them, that is, as fragments of matter, and ignoring their living function. Only, indeed, if we form an abstract notion of man in general, into which only the Cogitatio is allowed to enter. If, on the other hand, we conceive man in terms of his experience, that is to say, of his distinctive way of patterning the world, and if we reintegrate the 'organs' into the functional totality in which they play their part, a handless or sexless man is as inconceivable as one without the power of thought” (op. cit., p. 197).

Manuel F. Lorenzo

(Translated into English by Luis Fernández Pontón)

We don’t know what a hand can do

      The philosophical systematic reflection about the abilities, that characterizes what we have been calling Pensamiento Hábil (skillful Thinking), has a special attraction to manual ability, in the sense that manipulations would occupy a very important place in the origin of our own rationality, as Piaget's Evolutionary Psychology would have proved, mainly. But the great Swiss psychologist's obsession would have been, in his researches about children's psychology, the bodily abilities in general (buccal, locomotive, manual, linguistic, etc.). The manual ability is very important in Piaget, but it is not obsessively thematized. The exclusive study of the hand is more recent. Its fundamental role in learning began to be emphasized in the last third of the past century by the paleoanthropology, neurology, linguistics, when they approached questions about the manual changes brought about by the construction and the use of tools in hominids, or the role played by the proto-linguistic symbolic gestures that served to organize and transmit the construction procedures of axes and other technical instruments that became transcendental for the survival of hominids.

     Frank R. Wilson's book The Hand. How its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (Pantheon, New York, 1999), was an important landmark by reaching the general public (the book was nominated as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category of science popularization) with the scientific thematization of this humble part of the body, to which not much importance was ascribed when dealing with such important issues as culture or human intelligence. This traditional understatement of the hands is now presented to us, after this new scientific contributions, as a long-standing prejudice that would take us back to Aristotle, who would have distorted the phrase attributed to Anaxagoras that “man is the most intelligent of animals because he has hands” (Aristotle, De Partibus Animalum IV.10, 687 a5-b24). The evolutionary paleoanthropology has pointed in the opposite direction to Aristotle by claiming that the human brain could have made a decisive jump from the size of a monkey brain to the much bigger size of the human brain, due mainly to the use of tools made possible by the transformations in the hands. Therefore, that the brain grew when the hands improved and not that the hand came from a superior brain previous to them.

     Frank Wilson, who relates in his book in a rigorous and entertaining way a lot of these scientific findings in the evolution of hominids, came across the theme of the hands as a consequence of his profession as neurologist at his practice in the Peter F. Ostwald Health Program for Performing Artists of the University of California in San Francisco. Treating professional musicians who suffered serious injuries or cramps in their hands that stopped them from continuing their profession or a brilliant career as a pianist or guitarist, he was obliged to understand the hand as an organ much more complex and mysterious as it used to be seen by classical medicine. Because the cause of the hand movements of a musician cannot be explained without going further than the wrist, for there are tendons and nerves under the skin extended over the arm, which is a sort of very complex crane equipped with its own biomechanics. But the nerves don't end in the arm, they rather continue until the spinal cord, which is in connection with the brain. In turn, we know that injuries and illnesses that affect certain zones of the brain can have characteristic effects in manual mobility. For this reason, Wilson concludes:  “

     “We need go no further than this to realize that a precise definition of the hand may be beyond us. Although we understand what is meant conventionally by the simple anatomic term, we can no longer say with certainty where the hand itself, or its control or influence, begins or ends in the body”. (p. 9).

     The relation between the hand and the brain, that part of the brain which continues to be little known, despite the advances of the last decades, causes that we cannot know what a hand can do. In a similar way, the philosopher Spinoza, when dealing with the philosophical relation between the body and the soul, approached in a dualist manner by Cartesianism, wrote:

      “ … I can scarcely believe, until the fact is proved by experience, that men can be induced to consider the question calmly and fairly, so firmly are they convinced that it is merely at the bidding of the mind, that the body is set in motion or at rest, or performs a variety of actions depending solely on the mind's will or the exercise of thought. However, no one has hitherto laid down the limits to the powers of the body, that is, no one has as yet been taught by experience what the body can accomplish solely by the laws of nature, in so far as she is regarded as extension. No one hitherto has gained such an accurate knowledge of the bodily mechanism, that he can explain all its functions” (The Ethics by Benedict de Spinoza, Part. III, Prop. II, translated from the Latin by R. H. M. Elwes, 1883).

     Today, like in the times of Spinoza, we could say that we don't know what a hand can do because we still don't know completely the factory of the body, above all the complicated brain functions. But Wilson goes beyond and pretends to carry on a deeper consideration than the merely scientific, a more basic consideration that affects the sense of human life:

      “Bodily movement and brain activity are functionally interdependent, and their synergy is so powerfully formulated that no single science or discipline can independently explain human skill or behavior. In fact, it is not clear that what we have asked can be called a scientific question. The hand is so widely represented in the brain, the hand's neurologic and biomechanical elements are so prone to spontaneous interaction and reorganization, and the motivations and efforts which give rise to individual use of the hand are so deeply and widely rooted, that we must admit we are trying to explain a basic imperative of human life”. (p. 9).

      The hand appears here in relation to a basic imperative of human existence, with something which may hide its deeper meaning, for, as Wilson writes:

      “... the hand is not merely a metaphor ora n icon for humanness, but often the real-life focal point –the lever or the launching pad- of a successful and genuinely fulfilling life” (p. 14).

     To justify such statement Wilson refers to the experiences in treating the musicians to whom their manual, widely developed and exercised, constitutes a source of immense satisfaction which fills fully a whole life. A satisfaction that can be related with the one searched by so many office workers or those who carry out repetitive and automatized tasks who try to vent their impulses and residual manual abilities during their leisure with spectacle sports, hunting, fishing, computer games, filmic violent phantasies, etc.

     The hands can be seen, then, as a lever or a springboard with a deep and basic philosophical meaning, in the same sense in which Descartes saw the cogito, in the mental activity, the springboard, the safe rock or fundamentum inconcusum, that allows us to reach the existence of a loving and wise God who acts as the guarantor of the rationality of the world in which we live. The hands, a sort of “I”, of flesh and bone ("de carne y hueso"), as the spanish philosopher, Unamuno, said, appears now to us, in a critic philosophical position of idealism and dualist mentalism, – which brought Cartesianism as its sequel, so denounced by the present neuroscience –, as the new springboard or firm foundation from which we can rediscover the rational and hidden sense of the living everyday world, – what Husserl called Lebenswelt and understood as the foundation or base of the world of the consciousness –, in which we unconsciously move and adapt ourselves everyday, abiding the tough law of our existence. Wilson reminds us about this in the Prologue of his book:

      “Each morning begins with a ritual dash through our own prívate obstacle course: objects to be opened or closed, lifted or pushed, twisted or turned, pulled, twiddled, or tied, and some sort of breakfast to be peeled or unwrapped, toasted, brewed, boiled, or fried. The hands move so ably over this terrain that we think nothing of the accomplishment. Whatever your own particular early-morning routine happens to be, it is nothing short of a virtuoso display of highly choreographed manual skill. Where would we be without our hands? Our lives are so full of commonplace experience in which the hands are so skillfully and silently involved that we rarely consider how dependent upon them we actually are” (p. 3)

 

Manuel F. Lorenzo

 

(Translated into English by Luis Fernández Pontón)

The “embodied image” of Juhani Pallasmaa

Reflection about the city and the city's architecture is currently one of the most imperative topics, not only because of increasing population density, ecological or economical reasons, but also because of aesthetic and philosophical reasons. Especially since the irruption of the steel, glass and concrete architecture, called modern, of the Mies van der Rode, Le Corbusier, etc, which has evolved strongly enough since the second half of the past century, going from a plain classical Functionalism free of useless ornaments to the Mannerist turn of the deconstructive architecture, like Frank Gehry's, in which the Euclidean geometry of buildings starts to be twisted, curving and bending capriciously the walls, or to the post-modern architectonic baroquism in which ornamentation tends to impose itself over function.

In turn, a new critique seems to emerge from these late modern death throes that doesn't try to twist them capriciously anymore, causing a greater dehumanization of art, as Ortega would say, but that seeks to reject and overcome them in a vitalist return to the essential human sources that characterize us in a transcendental way, not longer as metaphysically idealized subjects and fully computerised, but as existential subjects, imperfect, finite and unpredictable, given in relation with a difficult and always dangerous surrounding natural world, since millions of years. Inside this new critique stands out strongly, since the last few years, the figure of Juhani Pallasmaa, a Finish architect of international prestige, who has started with a small book The eyes of the skin. Architecture and the senses (2005), - translated into Spanish as Los ojos de la piel by Editorial Gustavo Gil (Barcelona. 2012) and well received as a necessary lecture in numerous architecture schools around the world – a penetrating critique to the presently predominant architecture in the most developed cities over the world, characterizing it as a predominantly visual architecture, largely made to be looked at. This implies a predominance of image in this new spectacle architecture that converges with the so-called culture of spectacle, the politics that aim to take care of the candidates image, etc., characteristic to the late modern societies.

Pallasmaa's book was followed by other two books which continue and examine the critique to what the author calls architectonic “ocularcentrism”, forming a sort of trilogy. This books are: The Thinking Hand. Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture (2009) and The Embodied Image. Imagination and Imagery in Architecture (2011). This set of three books, conceived by the author itself as a triptych, as he points out in the Acknowledgements chapter of his last book, can be interpreted as forming a structure which exemplifies the journey that every theoretical philosophical reflection must do, according to the academic model established by Plato in the famous Allegory of the Cave: critique to appearances, exit of the cave searching the true foundation and return to the cave to reinterpret the appearances from the new point of view acquired with the discovery of the truth. The first aspect of criticism to the purely visual architecture of the city “for the eyes” is approached by Pallasma in The Eyes of the Skin. The way out of this deceitful and alienating world of the present architecture, that seeks to impact with pure imagery, is found, in The Thinking Hand, returning to a new explanation of knowledge developed by contemporary philosophers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre or Lakoff, that remits to the body and, more precisely to the manual actions, to the Heideggerian “ready to hand”, as original source of our immediate relation to the world (see on this Blog, “The Thinking Hand of Juhani Pallasmaa”, 4-4-2012).

His third book, The Embodied Image. Imagination and Imagery in Architecture (John Wiley & Sons, London, 2011), which culminates the triptych, deals exclusively with the production of images in the present city's architecture reinterpreting the artistic world of image, not visually, substantially and exempt from the rest of the body, but in its necessary connection with the corporality of the subject that creates, or the one who is merely a receptor or spectator of the art that inhabits the city and its sophisticated architectonic buildings. After the rejection and critique of the ocularcentric imagery, which causes the departure of the deceitful world characteristic of Plato's cave and the ascension to the manual hapticity, as the very Platonic “Sun” revealer of our true human condition, Pallasmaa is able now to develop a new liberating point of view. Such a point of view is substantiated in the systematical proposal of constructing a new image of the city, an “embodied image” that doesn't lose its own existential roots in the manual hapticity. As the author itself writes:

  “This book was written with the belief that we can liberate and sensitise ourselves through a re-mythicised and re-poeticised understanding of the world, and that human imagination is autonomous, self-generative and limitless. It is encouraging that during the past few decades, scientific imagery seems to have approached poetic imagery, and vice versa. We live in an imaginative world –or worlds- of our own making, and the future of humanity rest entirely on our capacity for imagination. The following chapters analyse the essence of the mental image and imagination, and suggest ways in which we might go about re-rooting the art of architecture in its existential soil” (Pallasmaa, J., The Embodied Image. Imagination and Imagery in Architecture, John Wiley & Sons, London, 2011, p. 24).

To do so, the author carries out in the first chapter an analysis of the image's hegemony in contemporary culture, in which he repeats his diagnosis about de predominance of ocularcentrism in publicity, the numbing and loss of imagination, in the spectacle architecture, etc., with the consequent loss of the sense of reality. In the second chapter we find an analysis of the relation between images, language and thought, in light of new knowledge, like that provided, e.g. by linguists like George Lakoff, with his revaluation of the body's role in the metaphorical images that configure our way of thinking or the advances of neuroscience concerning the localization of the brain functions connected with the verbal and plastic images:

     “The relationships and interactions between imagery and language, perception and thought, are fundamental to the understanding of the human mind and creativity. In the past, the prevailing views of language neglected the role of images. During the last few decades, however, psychological and psycholinguistic experiments have revealed and proved the crucial role of the mental images, or neural representations, in language and thought. These views have a crucial significance especially in the philosophies and methodologies of education” ( Op.cit., p. 26).

In the third chapter, the longest in the book, he addresses the multiple types of images (images of matter, multi-sensory, condensed, archetypical, unconscious, metaphorical, empathetic, incomplete, illusory, iconic, epic, poetic images as worlds, etc.) trying to understand what actually happens in the process of imagination, specially when viewed from the new manual bodily perspective, that is, from the new perspective of analysis achieved with the notion of a “lived and embodied image”:

   “The notion of the image is commonly attached to a schematised visual representation or picture. Yet in our mental life, we constantly deploy mental or imaginary images. The crucial faculty of the image is its magical capacity to mediate between physical and mental, perceptual and imaginary, factual and affectual. Poetic images, especially, are embodied and lived as part of our existential world and sense of self. Images, archetypes and metaphors structure our perceptions, thoughts and feelings, and they are capable of communicating messages of deep time as well as mediating epic narratives of human life and destiny” (Op.cit, p. 40).

In the fourth chapter he tries to carry out an anatomy of the poetic and creative image, considering that in such images two realities coexist simultaneously, the physical and the “unreal” caused by the imagination. In such sense, according to Pallasmaa, it is necessary to bear always in mind this duality without reducing the artistic experience to something merely physical or visual. Therefore,

     “The mental or lived image is a central notion in all the arts, although neither artists nor theorists often allude to it. When mentioned, the word ‘image’ usually refers to purely perceptual or visual phenomena. However, the image is the experimental entity, the synthetic perceptual, cognitive and emotional singularity of the artistic work that is perceived, embodied and remembered” (Op.cit.,p. 93).

In the fifth and last chapter, he deals specifically with the image in architecture. His essential idea is that architecture's authentic experience is not a purely visual or gestaltic experience, in the way that the dominant Post-Bauhaus fashion suggests, but rather:

      “….confrontations, encounters and acts which Project and articulate specific embodied and existential meanings. A building is encountered, not only viewed; it is approached, confronted, entered, related to one’s body, moved about, and utilized as a context and condition for activities and things. A building directs, scales and frames actions, interrelations, perceptions and thoughts. Most importantly, it articulates our relations with other people as well as with the ‘human institutions’, to use a notion put forward by Louis Kahn. Architectural constructions concretise social, ideological, cultural and mental order by giving them metaphorical material form” (Op., cit., p. 124).

Lastly, we will only refer here, to end this brief review, to what Pallasmaa considers the most primary images of architecture:

     “In the order of their ontological emergence, the primal images of architecture are: floor, roof, wall, door, window, hearth, stair, bed, table and baths. This view significantly assumes that architecture is born with the establishment of the floor, a horizontal surface, rather than the roof. As was pointed out earlier, profound architectural images are acts rather than formal entities or objects. These entities permit and invite: the floor invites movement, action and occupation; the roof projects shelter, protection and experiences of insideness; the wall signifies the separation of various realms and categories of spaces, and it creates, among other things, privacy and secrecy. Each one of the images can be analysed in terms of its ontology as well as its phenomenological essence.

     Architectural experience arises ontologically from the act of inhabiting, and consequently, the primal architectural images can be most clearly identified in the context of the house, the human dwelling” (Op. cit., p.129).

To conclude, Pallasmaa's proposal, in this third book, falls within the consideration of the architectonic images, or artistic in general, not anymore as substantial entities or purely visual representations, but as embodied images, given in their genetic relation with very complex actions, understudied to date, of bodily organs, obstinately relegated in such a sense, like our own hands.

Manuel F. Lorenzo

(Translated into English by Luis Fernández Pontón)

The Thinking Hand of Juhani Pallasmaa

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.

Manuel F. Lorenzo

(Translated into English by Luis Fernández Pontón)