Page 102 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE BODY AS PAN-CULTURAL UNIVERSAL 95

meaning is forged. Straight edges produce straight lines, as both
Euclidean constructions and projective sightings presuppose.
Viewing the evolution of stone tools from a sensory-kinetic perspective
provides understandings of the way in which a hominid sensorium
functions. It furthermore provides understandings of analogical thinking,
the roots of which lie in a gnostic tactility-kinesthesia—"gnostic" in the
original etymological sense of "knowing." Analogical thinking is both basic
to hominid thinking and basically corporeal.

Ill

The tactile-kinesthetic invariants I have described are pan-hominid
corporeal invariants: what we each separately discover in our individual
mouths is essentially the same. I would like now to consider how a pan-
hominid corporeal invariant is linked to an /nr^rcorporeal invariant, or in
both finer and broader terms, how fundamental tactile-kinesthetic
experiences, being the ground of fundamental visual experiences, are in
turn the ground of fundamental social experiences. I will in these terms
progressively elucidate how a fundamental intercorporeal semantics
informs our social lives. To begin with, I will describe a corporeal
archetype within that semantics, perhaps the most basic corporeal
archetype insofar as it both anchors and intensifies our sense of ourselves
and anchors and intensifies our sense of others.
When we close our eyes, another world comes to the fore, and in a
regular cycle every day of our hves. Though illuminated from time to
time by flashes or dots of light, by images, and by dreams, this world is
typically described as quintessentially dark. There is more in the
experience of sightless eyes however than a quintessential darkness. When
we close our eyes, we exit one sensory world and enter another. With the
closing off of vision, a clear-cut boundary is established between an outer
world and an inner world—or in more precise sensory-kinetic terms,
between a seen world and the felt tactile-kinesthetic world of my body.
The purely tactile boundary felt between myself and the outside world is
in fact much less clear. Indeed, tactile boundaries between ourselves and
what we touch are vague and in a way we cannot clarify. Moreover we
cannot perform any tactile act which would nullify our surface tactility
and thus possibly intensify sight in a way commensurate with the way a