Page 101 - Contribution To Phenomenology

94 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

same way that the earlier Oldowan tools are conceptually linked with
teeth. Not that the tactile-kinesthetic character of stone tools disappeared
in the course of the development of the handaxes. On the contrary, it
was elaborated in visual terms as is evident from the fact that the
contour of an Acheulian handaxe can be followed not only manually, but
visually, that is, as a Unear form. This shift toward rectilinearity added a
new dimension to the tactile-kinesthetic foundations of stone tool-making.
There are several points to be made in conjunction with the innovation.
To begin with and as indicated earlier, a stone made into a tool is
first of all transformed by touch. The stone is given a new tactile
character, one whose power is tested not by looking but by feeling along
the edge created by flaking. Second, to understand the passage from an
essentially tactile-kinesthetic object to an essentially tactile-kinesthetic-
visual one is to understand the way in which an edge, while losing
nothing of its original tactile character, comes to be seen as a line.
Where vision and tactility are confused rather than understood, an
understanding of sensory differences is compromised. Lines are visual
translations of tactile contour. They are a semantic advance, an advance
in meaning. An Acheulian handaxe is not simply the result of more
refined hand-eye coordinations, as some paleoanthropologists claim;^^ it
is the result of a sensory-kinetic development in perceptual meaning, a
transfer of sense in the double sense of that term. Consideration of
straight edges clarifies the nature of that transfer and exemplifies a third
distinctive feature of stone tool-making as an evolving art. Straight edges
are paradigmatic of synaesthesia, straightness being a visual datum, edges
being a tactile one. Tactility, in other words, determines the evenness of
an edge, not its straightness, as any few moments with a blindfold will
attest. Thus, with respect to straight edges, vision appropriates what is
originally a tactile datum and makes it its own. In the process, a new

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.