Abstract
In addition to implicitly carrying forward a Cartesian-inspired depreciative assessment of the body, many cultural disciplines (including philosophy) have been heavily influenced by postmodern dogma which basically regards the body as little more than a cultural artifact. Received wisdom and dogma together preclude an appreciation of the body as pan-cultural universal. A consideration of early stone tools in the light of phenomenological corporeal matters of fact shows how the body is the source of fundamental meanings, a semantic template. The analogy between the two major hominid tooth forms—molars and incisors—and the major early stone tools—core tools and flake tools—is in fact obvious once animate form and the tactile-kinesthetic body—the sensorily felt body—is recognized. A consideration of the experience of eyes as windows on two worlds exemplifies a further dimension of the body as pan-cultural universal. The experience of eyes as centers of light and dark is tied to an intercorporeal semantics that is rooted in morphological/visual relationships and attested to by biologist Adolf Portmann’s notion of inwardness. The experience is furthermore shown to be the basis of cultural practices and beliefs related to the creation of circular forms such as the mandala. Phenomenological attention to corporeal matters of fact as exemplified by paleoanthropological artifacts, by the experience of inwardness, and by cultural drawings of circular forms underscores the desirability of a corporeal turn, an acknowledgment of animate form and of the tactile-kinesthetic experiences that consistently undergird hominid life.
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The essay is actually an essay within an essay. See “Some Simple Reflections on the Body,” in Aesthetics (Collected Works, vol. 13), translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon, 1964), 35–40.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Thinking (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). See also Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Existential Fit and Evolutionary Continuities,” Synthèse 66 (1986), 219–248.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “The Materialization of the Body: A History of Western Medicine, A History in Process,” in Giving the Body Its Due, edited by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 132–158.
This section of my paper is based on a section of “The Hermeneutics of Tool-Making: Corporeal and Topological Concepts,” Chapter 2 of The Roots of Thinking.
Jacques Bordaz, Tools of the Old and New Stone Age (Garden City: The Natural History Press, 1970), 8.
The phrase comes originally from Frank A. Beach “Human Sexuality and Evolution,” in Reproductive Behavior, edited by William Montagna and William A. Sadler (New York: Plenum Press, 1974), 357. But see also Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 106. For a critical discussion of the characterization, see Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Corporeal Archetypes and Power: Preliminary Clarifications and Considerations of Sex,” Hypatia 7.3 (Summer 1992): 39–76. (The latter article is a version of chapter 3 of The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies (forthcoming from Rowman and Littlefield, 1993).
For a critical analysis of how the living body is put sous rature by postmodernism, see Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Corporeal Archetypes and Postmodern Theory,” a paper delivered at the symposium “Philosophy of Bodymind,” American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting, Portland, March 1992. The paper is a version of chapter 4 of The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies.
For a discussion of paleoanthropological methodology and its possibilities, see Sheets-Johnstone, chapters 13 and 14 (“Methodology: The Hermeneutical Strand” and “Methodology: The Genetic Phenomenology Strand”) in The Roots of Thinking. It is pertinent to point out that paleoanthropologists are not above self-admonishments and-criticisms with respect to engaging in what they commonly call “story-telling,” but what one well-known authority more dramatically and derisively called “theatre.” See Lord Zuckerman, “Closing Remarks to Symposium,” in The Concepts of Human Evolution, edited by Lord Zuckerman, Symposia of the Zoological Society of London 33 (New York: Academic Press, 1973), 451. It is pertinent to point out too that a lack of recognition of the experiential dimensions of hominid corporeal invariants and a concentration instead on the body as mere featured surface can egregiously skew interpretations of the fossil evidence. One need only consider the status of Neandertals. Until recent times, when multicultural awareness and pluralism have become de rigueur and new theories have been to upset the long protected and privileged applecart of Homo sapiens sapiens, Neandertals were paleoanthropological outcasts. With their prognathous features, strongly recessive chins, prominent brow ridges, and bulky frames, they were not appealing creatures, at least not to most white European male evolutionary scientists. No matter that their cranial capacity was larger than ours—that fact was either brushed quickly aside or explained away—and no matter that they buried their dead—not only the first such known practice, but a practice carried out in extraordinary ways that necessarily signify a concept of caring as well as death—they were simply not comely. In view of the facts and non-facts of the matter, it is difficult not to interpret their long disinheritance as merely a felt repugnance: “We don’t want to be related to them!” The abhorrence is similar to the reaction of people in Darwin’s time who recoiled from the thought of being related to apes. One hundred-thirty and more years later, some people are still fussy. For discussions of recent re-evaluations of Neandertals, see Bruce Bower, “New Evidence Ages Modern Europeans,” Science News 136.25 (16 December 1989), 388; Bower, “Tracking Neanderthal Hunters,” Science News 138.15 (13 October 1990), 235; Bower, “Neandertals’ Disappearing Act,” Science News 139.23 (8 June 1991), 360–361, 363. For an early discussion of the facts and non-facts of the matter, see C. L. Brace and M. F. Ashley Montagu, Man’s Evolution (New York: Macmillan, 1965).
David Pilbeam, The Ascent of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 59.
Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Prehistoric Man (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), 66.
There is a single recent reference in the literature—by British anthropologist K. P. Oakley—to a correspondence between Acheulian handaxes and hominid hands. The correspondence was originally suggested by German archaeologist R. R. Schmidt (See his superimposed drawing of a hand on the outline of an Achuelian handaxe in his The Dawn of the Human Mind [London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1936], 96–97.) Oakley interestingly comments that “a bifacial hand axe was perhaps subconsciously visualized as representing a third hand, a hand that unlike the flesh-and-blood original had the capability to cut and skin the carcasses of the animals scavenged or hunted.” He speaks of this representation as “symbolic thought,” but offers no further analysis. “Emergence of Higher Thought 3.0-0.2 Ma B.P.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, Biological Series, Vol. 292 (8 May 1981): 205–211; quote from p. 208.
See, for example, Milford Wolpoff, Paleoanthropology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 186.
Aristotle On the Soul 435b 16–17.
Freud is reputedly the source of this notion. It is ironic then that, credited with such a rich insight, he actually left the body behind and unattended: he developed the idea that anatomy is destiny only in terms of a single bodily organ. Indeed, he never mined his initial insight that, in his own words, “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego.” (Standard Edition XIX, translated by James Strachey [London: Hogarth Press, 1955], 26. The phrase is repeated on p. 27.) The ontogenetical corporeal psychoanalytic ego is phenomenologically related to the phylogenetic heritage of the body as semantic template.
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 61: “If you haven’t had the experience, how can you know what it is?”
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, translated by R. Rojczwicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic: 1989), 333.
I borrow the phrase from Erwin W. Straus. (“Born to See, Bound to Behold: Reflections on the Function of Upright Posture in the Esthetic Attitude,” in The Philosophy of the Body, edited by Stuart F. Spicker [Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970], 334–361.)
Animal Forms and Patterns, translated by Hella Czech (New York: Schocken Books, 1967).
Marjorie Grene, “The Characters of Living Things, I,” in The Understanding of Nature: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), 272–73.
Ibid., 273.
Ibid., 275.
Ibid., 274.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 275.
Ibid.
Ashley Montagu’s remark with respect to a two-sided Acheulian handaxe is noteworthy. He states that “It is clear that each flake has been removed in order to produce the cutting edges and point of the tool with the minimum number of strokes; for if one examines this tool carefully, one may readily perceive that no more flakes have been removed than were minimally necessary to produce the desired result.” “Toolmaking, Hunting, and the Origin of Language,” in Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech, edited by Steven R. Harnad, Horst D. Steklis, and Jane B. Lancaster, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 280 (1976), 271. For a phenomenological analysis of the origin of counting, see Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Thinking, chapter 3.
For a discussion of the import of these radical changes, see Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Thinking, particularly chapters 3, 4, 5, and 7.
Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns, 197. It is important to note what Portmann himself emphasizes, namely, that his concentration on visual form should not make us forgetful of “how great the social importance of stimuli of touch may also be in animals; nor how powerfully scents and sounds may act on ourselves as well as on animals.” Animal Forms and Patterns, 185.
Perhaps the most immediately telling examples are those in which one animal devices another by enacting a behavior within the species’s normal repertoire but for other than “normal” purposes. See A. Whiten and R. W. Byrne, “Tactical Deception in Primates,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1988): 233–273.
For a discussion of this relationship, see Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies, especially Chapter 1.
Although in general, and as mandala scholars Jose and Miriam Arguelles point out, “literature concerning the Mandala is not extensive,” cross-cultural evidence demonstrating the universality of the mandala is not lacking. (Jose and Miriam Arguelles, Mandala [Berkeley: Shambala, 1972], 20.) Mandalas are circular drawings common to Navajo Indians, for example, as well as to Buddhists. Moreover the Aztec stone calendar was drawn in the form of a mandala. In addition, there are ancient architectural constructions that have a notably circular form. Stonehenge is a well-known example. The rounded barrows believed to have been constructed by King Sil (or Zel) in England during the Bronze Age are further cases in point. With respect to these burial or treasure barrows, the “Great Round” that is Silbury Hill is an extraordinary formation. (Regarding “The Great Round,” see Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, translated by Ralph Manheim [New York: Pantheon Books, 1955], Bollingen Series, Vol. 47). The significance of its rounded form, as Michael Dames describes it, has striking parallels with the psychocosmological significance of mandalas as explained in the present text. (Michael Dames The Silbury Treasure [London: Thames and Hudson, 1976]. Clearly what is lacking is not cross-cultural evidence demonstrating the universality of the mandala but a phenomenologically worked out concept of the mandala. The Arguelles’s say as much when they write that “most of [the literature] deals with the Mandala as a sacred art form of the Orient, and although some thinkers—such as Eliade and Jung—have related the Mandala to other cultures and traditions, no one has developed a concept of its universality to any extent.” As the present paper will show, what is needed is a phenomenological analysis that recognizes and elucidates the psychophysical unity of the mandala.
An initial analysis of the evil eye was given as part of a paper presented at a panel session titled “The Corporeal Turn,” Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Boston, October 1992.
Carl G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd ed., translated by R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 356.
Giuseppe Tucci, The Theory and Practice of the Mandala, translated by Alan H. Brodrick (London: Rider & Company, 1961), 25.
Ideas II, 112.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 310, 341.
See Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, and Campbell, The Power of Myth, for drawings and graphic incorporations of mandalas. In light of the evidence—the drawings and the graphic incorporations—and of the extraordinary cognate relationships outlined in the present paper, it is puzzling to find analyses of the corporeal origin of the mandala lacking and indeed to find the question of why the mandala is first and foremost a circle rather than a square or a cone, for example, entirely omitted. A pervasive cultural inattention to the body and to bodily experience would seem to explain the omissions. Tucci, for example, casts experience in the role of follower rather than leader in the generation of the concept of a mandala. He speaks of the mandala as a geometric projection of the world, and though he explicitly states that he is not concerned with its origin, he nevertheless emphasizes its “worldly” genesis, i.e., the mandala is a pictorial representation of cosmic processes. In fact, Tucci explicitly states that “experience … suggested certain analogies” with the drawn figure after it was conceived and drawn. The mandala thus appears to be tied to experience only after the fact and only in the most general sense. (Tucci, Theory and Practice of the Mandala, 23–26; quote from p. 25.)
Ibid., 25–26.
Ideas II, 292, 293.
The act is dimly prefigured each time we close our eyes to sleep. As an actual journey inward, it is presaged in a psychological sense by the world we find awakened in the darkness of our fantasies and dreams. Like the eye itself, the eye that is the mandala leads to the I, to the self, to the subject; so also it leads to the fullness of myself as person, to my potential for wholeness, to the mandala that is my body. (See Tucci, The Theory and Practice of the Mandala, specifically chapter 5: “The Mandala in the Human Body.”) Note also that Jung’s “self-reflections,” carried out over seven years and forming the basis of his analytic psychology, document the symbolic connections between creative act and inwardness. Through “active imagination,” Jung actively generated and entered into a fantasy world through which he charted the unconscious and its archetypal forms. See, for example, his The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. In this illustrated work, Jung discusses mandalas and their significance.
The line is from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (“Burnt Norton,” IV) (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. 1943).
See Shigenori Nagatomo’s “An analysis of Dogen’s ‘Casting Off Body and Mind’,” International Philosophical Quarterly 27.3 (September 1987): 227–242. See also his “An Eastern Concept of the Body: Yuasa’s Body-Scheme,” in Giving the Body Its Due, edited by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, 48–68.
See Evelyn Fox Keller’s A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (New York: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1983).
Our common evolutionary heritage binds us primatologically as well as cross-culturally, and in ways strongly suggestive of the theme of inwardness. At least two chimpanzees, when given the experimental opportunity, placed objects in a container, in preference to placing them on something or under something. Moreover, after sniffing and licking a chalk-made circle, both put themselves inside it—the one chimpanzee at one moment sitting in it, and at another moment rolling about in it and making sweeping motions on the floor with her arms. The other chimpanzee “suddenly jump[ed] into the middle of the circle, rubbing all around herself (in a circle) with the back of her hands,” then sat down, then rubbed again. (David Premack, “Symbols Inside and Outside of Language,” in The Role of Speech in Language, edited by James F. Kavanagh and James E. Cutting [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975], 45–61; see in particular pp. 48–51.) The actions of the chimpanzees strongly recall evidence from developmental psycholinguistics. The first preposition a child learns as both locative state and locative act is the preposition “in” and its derivatives, “inside,” and “being inside.” This linguistic fact is related in substantive ways to an appreciation of the body as a semantic template. Bodily experiences dispose all of us as infants toward a knowledge of “in.” From our first acts of suckling to being put in a crib or other container, from being enclosed inside arms to being inside houses or other shelters, from being put inside wrappings to putting our arms inside sleeves, we all have had (and we continue to have) multiple experiences of in, insides, and being inside. Moreover though we think of ourselves only as being born into the world, we all came from insides, miraculous insides that protected us by shutting out the outside and holding our insides together. In effect, all humans and in fact all gestated creatures were once inside the mandala which is the womb. In a Jungian psychoanalytic sense, that experience, though no longer remembered, may resonate within our collective unconscious as an archetypal experience of in, of being inside, of inwardness.
The phrase “persistent wholes” is J. S. Haldane’s. See his The Philosophical Basis of Biology (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co. 1931), 13.
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Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1994). The Body as Cultural Object/The Body as Pan-Cultural Universal. In: Daniel, M., Embree, L. (eds) Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28556-6_4
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