Page 95 - Contribution To Phenomenology

88 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

My paper deals with both of these principal modes of meaning of our
"second body"—^with conceptual offshoots as it were, and with an inter-
corporeal semantics. In both cases corporeal invariants, tactile-kinesthetic
and visual, come into play. My first concern will be with conceptual
offshoots. I will first describe how the tactile-kinesthetic body is a
semantic template and then how, in an epistemological sense, vision
learns from touch, that is, how the visual body, fashioning itself after the
tactile-kinesthetic body, itself becomes a model upon which tactile-
kinesthetic concepts are elaborated.^ I will then describe how our own
seen bodies are the ground of our social relations and how those
relations are part of an intercorporeal semantics more ancient than we.
I will interweave the two themes originally set for the 1992 Research
Symposium in the process of treating both of these phenomena: the
theme of what philosophical reflection on a non-philosophical discipline
might bring forth and the theme of **what the 'cultural disciplines' in
general might be."

I

Paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists have all
consistently remarked on how ancestral hominids, in fashioning stone
tools, made tools do the work of teeth. They speak consistently of how
te^Xh were replaced by tools. For example, one archaeologist writes,
"Seen in an evolutionary perspective, the use of hands and tools, sticks,
bones, and stones, to tear, cut, and to pound and grind foodstuffs is but
a simple extension of the functions performed by the jaws."* He goes on
to describe flaking techniques and the creation of edges. What he and
other evolutionary scientists do not speak of, and what they do not even
stop to question is "the simple extension," that is, how the replacement
came to be. Where did the notion of a tool come from? What similarity
was conceived between teeth and stones? Where did the notion of an
edge come from? Such questions never surface in paleoanthropology and
related disciplines not simply because there is typically no interest in
conceptual origins, but because there is no explicit acknowledgment of a

^ 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.