Page 110 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE BODY AS PAN-CULTURAL UNIVERSAL 103

reticence to extrapolate, most particularly a reticence to aver something
of those hominids who were our ancestors, who invented stone tools, who
conceived of death, who conceived of themselves as sound-makers, who,
by artifactual evidence, likely conceived of numbers,^ who drew replicas
of animals and other artistic forms on the walk of caves, and who, to
begin with, began walking in a consistently bipedal manner, thus radically
changing the morphological/visual relationship of their social bodies,^^ is
a reticence to look ourselves in the eye. Either this or it means looking
ourselves in the eye and seeing only gene pools. If we consider what is
of central importance in paleoanthropology—that all humans are hominids
but not all hominids are human—there is no justification for hedging with
respect to extrapolation. Taking evolution seriously means taking our own
historical past seriously, to the point that we realize that, short of
avouching the truth of creationist doctrine, we humans did not arrive
here deus ex machina; short of avouching the truth of related received
wisdom, we humans did not invent all the cognitive wheels on which we
run; short of avouching the truth of postmodern theory, we humans are
not cultural artifacts. What is of moment beyond this historical obligation
to embrace and comprehend our paleoanthropological past is that to
temper what is actually there by trying to lessen its actual experienced
impact is to invalidate the description. Indeed, why not understand how
the experience comes to be what it is by unbuilding inwardness and
attempting to fathom its origin and impact? Most importantly too, if
relatedness is of seminal significance in Portmann's concept of inwardness,
then certainly it is of moment in terms of any eyes that have the power
to recognize inwardness in others, and this because any eyes that, in their
relatedness to what is about them, can see centricity in others—and

^ 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 Oriffns and
Evolution of Language and Speech, edited by Stevan 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.