Page 119 - Contribution To Phenomenology

112 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

same, is to come to deeper and fuller understandings of the ties that
bind us in a common evolutionary heritage.^^ Facets of animate form
have the potential of leading us to corporeal invariants, to pan-cultural
universals, to archetypal meanings, to fundamental human self- and world-
understandings. What philosophical reflection on non-philosophical
disciplines has shown is that what is required is a corporeal turn, that is,
an acknowledgment of animate form and of the tactile-kinesthetic
experiences that consistently undergird the lives of living creatures. What
the cultural disciplines might be is foreshadowed in this turn. An
appreciation of "my body'* is not only rarely apparent in Western biology,
anthropology, paleoanthropology, and psychology. It is rarely apparent in
Western philosophy. Were people in all of these disciplines disposed in
the context of their investigations to consider kinesthesia, for example,
they would discover the intimate connection between tactility and
movement and with it, fundamental distinctions between the tactile-

^^ 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 flrst 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 ourseh^es 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.