Understanding the Roots of Thinking

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's Roots of Thinking explains the conceptual origins of fundamental human practices and beliefs that arose far back in evolutionary human history: tool-making, counting, upright walking, language, the concept of death, and art. All concepts necessarily involving thinking and it is her thesis that for each of these foundational concepts the living body served as a semantic template. "Concepts were either generated or awakened by the living body in the course of everyday actions such as chewing, urinating, striding, standing, breathing, and so on. As everyday actions gave rise to new concepts, so new concepts gave rise to new possibilities, new possibilities to new ways of living, and new ways of living to the establishment finally of those revolutionary new practices and beliefs which are definitive of hominid evolution."

It is through thinking based on lived and felt experienced that humans evolved.

The Evidence

A great deal of evidence based on fossil and artifactual remains supports this trajectory of a thoughtful evolution. These discovered remains span roughly a period of three and a half million years, beginning upright walking. Over this period stone artifacts testify to the practice of hominid tool-making and tool-using, fossil remains attesting to the possibility of certain linguistic practices, artifactual and fossil remains testifying to hominid burial practices. Finally, cave paintings dating as far back as 30,000 years ago testify to the hominid practice of drawing.

All this evidence indicates that "hominid evolution was shaped by hominid thinking". For example, tool is not made without intention, by definition it is a thing that is used for a purpose and a purpose must have been in mind. Similarly, the dead are not carefully buried by accident. The same evidence that supports hominid evolution supports that this thoughtfulness is modelled on the body. Stone implements, burial remains, cave paintings, skeletal fragments, attest to various behaviors such as upright posture and locomotion, tool-making, pictorial depiction, and suggest others--the possibility of language and counting. But attest to specific tactile-kinesthetic (feeling-moving) concepts subtending the behaviors and/or generated by them: the concept of edges, of death, of numbers, and of oneself as a sound-maker, for example.

Hominid thinking thus developed not as a result of divine creation or space-alien intervention but in the course of organic evolution which in turn was shaped by hominid thinking. The body, in all its life and movement and feeling, was the drive and origin of bodily concepts which established certain behaviors and hominid styles of living. "Just as without evolution there would be no human thinking, so without thinking, there would have been no hominid evolution." This is not testimony to great intelligence, souls in God's image, or sophisticated consciousness, but to the kinds of bodies we had (and have!), which inspired new ways of thinking.

The Moving Feeling Body

The body is the locus of evolution and thinking. It is in analysis of the body that we will understand ourselves. This analysis takes place on two intimately related levels:

Animate Form which is "a species-specific body with all its various spatial conformations, and attendant everyday postures, modes of locomotion, movements, and gestures. In broad terms, animate form is equivalent to the spatiality of the body in all its dimensions."

The Tactile-Kinesthetic Body which is "the sentiently felt body, the body which knows the world through touch and movement. It is not the body which simply behaves in certain observed or observable ways, but the body which resonates in the first-person, lived-through sense of any behavior. It is the experienced and experiencing body."

"The thesis that thinking is modeled on the body thus links thinking to spatial and sentient-kinetic life."

Basic concepts

Basic concepts lies behind tool-making, counting, language, the concept of death, and art. The concept of edges and of flaking (one stone with another) necessarily anchored the invention of stone tool-making; the concept of numbers necessarily anchored the invention of counting; the concept of sound, of articulatory gestures, and of oneself as a sound-maker necessarily anchored the invention of a verbal language; the concept of punctuated existence necessarily anchored a belief in death; the concept of drawing necessarily anchored the invention of engraving and painting. "But where did these concepts come from--the concept of edges, of flaking?, of a spoken language?, of numbers?, of a punctuated existence?, of drawing?"

"In each instance, insight was discovered by the tactile-kinesthetic body--the body which through touch and movement distinguishes not only a rubble of stones from no rubble at all as it walks the earth, or the making of sound from no making of sound as it conceals itself from danger, but the body which distinguishes a sharp-edged stone from a blunt one, a quadrupedal stride from a bipedal one, a touching of lips in making the sound "m" from a touching of lips in making the sound "p", and so on. That sensorily felt and sensorily feeling body was the cognitive source of those fundamental and pre-eminently human concepts that shaped human thinking and human evolution. That body functioned as a semantic template. It was the standard upon which each new practice or system of beliefs was forged.

"Thinking, whether complex or simple, necessarily originated and evolved in accordance with a conceptual standard of some kind. This means that what is thought is structured in and by some previously experienced system(s) of meanings. This explains why recognising something can be designated a fundamental mode of thinking and why children can learn a verbal language. They learn it on the basis of the system of meanings already engendered in past perceptual experiences. They thereby recognize a heretofore nonverbal world in another, verbal one. Without this pre-verbal conceptual standard they could not learn words at all. Similarly, numbers function as just such a previously experienced system of meanings in forms of mathematical thinking. Perceptual experience functions as just such a previously experienced system of meanings in dream-thinking and in imagic thought generally. Words function as just such a previously experienced system of meanings in linguistic thinking. Bodily powers function as just such a previously experienced system of meanings in kinetic thinking.

"But numbers, for instance, cannot simply be taken for granted in an explanation of mathematical thinking. The concept of numbers must be accounted for just as must the concept of bodily powers, of language, of pictorial depiction, and so on. The basis of these concepts is a system of bodily meanings; they revert to the body as semantic template. "What was-- and is--originally thought was--and is--founded on a bodily logos."

Cultural Relativism

The theory of cultural relativism does not allow for the getting back to the conceptual origins of human thought. In this school of thought there is no way of thoroughly detaching oneself from that culture, there is no way of obtaining a point of view on it. There is thus no way of analysing the layers of meaning--the strata of thought--embedded in its practices and beliefs. In brief, cultural relativists adhere to the belief that it is impossible to 'get back'. They would thus declare the roots of thinking unexposable. But given animate form and the tactile-kinesthetic body, and given bona fide evolutionary theory and sound reasoning therefrom, the roots of thinking can be uncovered and understood.

Dualism

The division of life into 'the mental' and 'the physical' has a long Western history, Plato and Descartres are the best known dualists. The division is held in place by academic practice: minds are treated by philosophers, bodies are treated by scientists, and rarely does the twain ever meet. In the traditional dualism of things, bodies provide little more than a dumb show of movement, and minds are privileged shrines vouchsafed to humans alone, any resemblance between ancestral hominids and present-day ones is purely physical. Furthermore, because this tradition privileges minds over bodies, the bodily behaviors of reconstructed hominid creatures seems nothing more than mindless shells of "doings." These thoughtless doings are applied in the same way to all nonhuman animals. Although they are clearly hominids, these reconstructed ancestral forms are not members of the human species. "Thus, unless lower mental processes can be shown not to explain their behavior--their burial practices, for instance, or their tool-making, each of which, it should be noted, has correlates among nonhuman animals--no "higher mental processes" can be postulated of the reconstructed hominids any more than they can be postulated of any nonhuman animals."

Metaphysical dualism and academic practice similarly give rise to a piecemeal, reductive approach to the body. Separate physical characters are singled out and their separate evolutionary histories told, each one in turn being given an adaptive role. Little if any acknowledgement is given of anything beyond the physical. This is a failure to think in "persistent wholes" to tie one's thinking to intact living organisms. It is to do injustice to the living, intact creatures in question and the body is not given its due. These academically-propogated creatures are mindless bodies on the one hand and disembodied minds on the other - an unnatural species!

Philosophical Anthropology

"The thesis that thinking is modelled on the body provides in skeletal form the outlines of a bona fide philosophical anthropology. The corporeal analyses--the paleoanthropological case studies--provide its backbone." Philosophical anthropology demands a more equitable view of the body than that current in a western Cartesian view. The living body is more than a visual thing, it is center of a tactile-kinesthetic world which, unlike the visual world, is always in touch, always resounding with an intimate and immediate knowledge of the world about it. Reduced to a visual object, the body loses this quintessential sensorium. Stripped from the inside of a mind, it becomes an empty shell of 'doings'. Purely visual bodies are not real, they do not reflect the feel of things, nor radiate a sense of their own life.

Cultural relativism and metaphysical dualism diminish the body and fail to give it its living due, thus these ideas stand in the way of a bona fide philosophical anthropology. Our understanding of evolutionary history must recognise tactility and movement not just as brain and nerve activity but as ways of knowing the world.

Tactile-Kinesthetic Invariants

Present-day hominids like humans have "two legs of a certain form, teeth of a certain kind, tongues of a certain shape, all of which are, in essential respects, no different from those of ancestral hominids said to be capable respectively of bipedal locomotion, of chewing, of speaking." Bodily uniformities like these are the foundation of fundamental tactile-kinesthetic invariants, universal ways of feeling and moving. "Ancestral hominids and humans today share more than an essentially similar anatomy, a similar physical form and corresponding functional abilities. "They share certain fundamental sensory-kinetic experiences, and potential conceptual meanings deriving from those fundamental experiences. These meanings arise in the simple act of noticing oneself. For example, the transfer of weight from one leg to the other in walking gives rise to a tactile-kinesthetic uniformity of felt impact and rhythm; the hardness of teeth to a tactile-kinesthetic uniformity of felt resistance; the mobility of tongue to a tactile-kinesthetic uniformity of possible patterns of articulation." We have essentially similar neuroanatomy and physiology and essentially similar behaviors (carrying, striking, pushing, pulling, chewing, biting, walking, throwing, and the like), so living these things feels very similar or the same. Language is not necessary to understanding and sharing this uniformity because these experiences are bodily, not linguistic. "The concept of hardness, for instance, is latent in the tactile-kinesthetic act of brushing the tongue across the teeth, just as the concept of softness is latent in the act of brushing the tongue across the lips. No word or words are necessary to the recognition of these pan-hominid tactile qualities. They are latent in corporeal experience. While such experiences are most often submerged in the course of everyday adult 20th century western living, they cannot on that account be either denied or claimed to be a function of language."

The Communal Task

Allow your body to be heard, to be felt. Run your tongue across your teeth and lips feeling the hardness and softness that billions like you have felt before. You can easily verify the evidence before you, perhaps more so than anything else. If the above descriptions are adequate to their task, they should meet with your agreement. And this task open-ended. "One can always go back to experience, not only in order to validate empirically what is described, but to discover if there is more to be learned in the experience of the things themselves." Return to your body and uncover it because it has been covered over by many kinds of other concerns, the most recent predominant one being the concern with language. "Heralded earlier this century by the work of Levi-Strauss in anthropology and of Wittgenstein in philosophy, the linguistic turn has produced extraordinary insights. A corporeal turn would assuredly do no less."

Summary

Human thinking originates from the template of the tactile-kinesic (feeling-moving) body.

Human bodies experience invariants of their hominid existence (suckling, eating, breathing, walking, speak etc. etc.)

Humans are aware (as infants become aware) of being ale to suckle, eat, breathe, walk, speak etc. etc. This awareness is the understanding that "I can.." suckle, eat, etc.

From the template of bodily "I cans" concepts are formed. E.g. from eating is the awareness of grinding/mashing food down. With it, the awareness of softness (lips, tongue, some food) and hardness (teeth, some food). The hard teeth have their own properties (fell how different your incisors are to your molars) - edges, bluntness, irregularity, etc. In eating we are also aware of transforming hard food into soft mush.

From hard, edged teeth analogies can be drawn to other experienced senses of hardness/edge - like with rocks (the homonid learns to make tools from rocks) or utensils (the infant learns that forks and knives do a similar job to teeth).

Such bodily experiences are invariant - all paradigmatic humans experience them, they are universal.

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