This blogpost is followed by a brief interview with the author.
Acknowledgement: This piece, its style and reasoning, is indebted to historian of science Michel Serres.
This story is oft-told: With our hands we point to the places in the world, where we want to invest the attention of others. “Show it to me,” demanded the person who wanted to found a claim of knowledge on evidence and demonstration. “Look, see? There it is,” was the response of the investigator who pursued the construction of evidence. To the extent that we can point to something we can persuade ourselves and others that that something is there. The index finger is an ordinary prerequisite of knowledge. But what does the other hand do?
In Raphael’s School of Athens, where all the fathers of Western knowledge figure, we can see those fingers. Most pointing fingers are on the right hands. How should we understand the function of the left hand? And what does this hand say about the Homo Sapiens and his life of knowledge? Do the left hands play the mere supporting role? They seem to be supporting, but merely?
In the center of the Raphael’s painting are depicted Plato, on the left, and Aristotle on the right. Plato points upwards, as if that is the place where the eternal forms have their home, in unity. Aristotle’s gesture covers the world beneath his middle, to the myriad of things. “This is where we have to look.”
Plato and Aristotle are holding books. They are, moreover, holding them differently. Shouldn’t that tell us about a second difference between the philosophers? Shouldn’t the left hands reveal yet another variety in ways of relating to the world, or to text and words at least? What difference has Raphael imagined and depicted in their use of their left hands, or their use of books? Is it anything other than the imitation of his own painting gesture–the brush in his right hand and the color palette in his left? Or would he have held himself onto his place with his left hand, while he was painting this wall? Or maybe someone else gave him a hand?
Can the other figures in the painting help decipher what the left hand is supposed to do? Almost all visible left hands are holding something. To the left of the man beneath the stairs and leaning onto the stone block, a dark-skinned man stands to hold open a book. With the right hand he points to something in the book while with his face he is asking for the attention of a scribing figure, the bald man. Does the upright man know the difference between written words and the things to which those words refer? He does not get to receive the gaze of anyone; is he attached too obsessively to the text like the Arab scholars who ardently translated and preserved Greek texts? Anyway, whether this is a version of ‘orientalism’ or not, his gesture seems out of joint. The left hand holds too awkwardly onto the thinner half of the binding, already wanting to turn the page while the right hand desires to remain on the current page. His right hand and his gaze diverge and divide rather than unify the attention. A confused coordination of the body exemplifies a clouded mind; a clouded mind is visible through a confused body. Lastly, he is asking for the attention of someone who is already engaged with writing himself (the bald man, he could be Pythagoras) and who is already in a better learned circle, or learning circle; this bald man does not merely write, he writes in relating to an object (even though, and even more so, to an object that itself refers still to yet another thing…), to the small drawing board in front him, held with another left hand, with the hand of a boy – young Archimedes showing his “principle.”
And all the while a third and older figure is learning from him (Pythagoras) making notes with the usual distribution of tasks among the hands. This is Anaximander, another geometrician (it does not matter for the sake of our treatise what his contributions were). Paradoxically, Anaximander was born before Pythagoras. And Archimedes set foot on earth long after Pythagoras passed. The order of learning is depicted in the wrong direction! But no, the message is that they were all working towards the same orderly laws. If they would be alive at one and the same time, as they do in Raphael’s masterpiece, the older men would surely learn from the young Archimedes because his results are the purest and closest to the truth, all condensed onto one diagram. But this is so only because Archimedes had to learn from the prolific texts and tales of Pythagoras, who absorbed the scribbles and notes of Anaximander.
How could we know our world and coordinate ourselves within it, if not by learning to direct our gaze, fix our attention, and follow our wise elders even more closely than they have done themselves? And could they know anything if not by making things that also gesture towards, for example, the sun, even when it is night, to a building that is yet to be built, to the here-after, which is arriving but always beyond a horizon? And how could we know the greater existence and the dark side of the moon if not by somehow holding it here and now, and so, manipulate it?
How could we point out those things, sensations in our bodies, the force of wind, the order of the movement of the stars, the regularities of falling bodies, the process that gives forth new living creates, things do not lie in front of as objects and moreover objects that fit in our hands, between our arms and fall within the scope of our vision? This is the theme of “indexicality,” which itself is a meaning of objectivity, that Bruno Latour has ethnographically proposed as what scientists seek to construct and maintain: we should be able to point at a piece of evidence at any point of our investigation. What I seek to add is to connect this to a certain posture and bodily composition, so that we get to know how we insert our human bodies into environments where science is practiced. The reader has probably guessed by now that we can do this thanks to the genius of Raphael’s visual knowledge of bodies and his knowledge of the Greek men.
Let us study the painting further. On the right side of the fresco there are a few young students collected around a board laid down on the ground on which an older man in a red robe (they say it is Euclid) is exercising geometry. Here we see the teacher drawing with his right hand stretched maximally, while he is supporting his bent posture, presumably, with his left. The floor not only holds the surface on which he exercises his art, but its flatness is a perfect match for the purposes of his drawing. And what do the pupils do? Their attention shifts to everywhere. The point here (imagine my right hand pointing) is not just that they are learning to grasp and master geometry, but that they learn geometry to the extent that they learn to properly use their hands and gaze. In this current situation only the learner closest to the board is close enough to retracing the circle that the teacher is producing, with fingers of the left hand imitating the teacher’s. Other pupils either lack coordination of hands and eyes (in the middle), have two left hands (upper right), or have reversed the usual functions of the hands and are (thus) pointing incorrectly (upper left young man).
To know the world is to know how to hold it and how to point to (clear and distinct) things in it. It is a matter of the right position, the right distribution of tasks in the body, the right technical extensions for both tasks of holding (surface, paper) and pointing (pen, compass). It even includes privilege just as it is a question of proximity. It is a matter of learning how to use one’s body in the proper relations to what is to be handled.
Learning geometry, and doing philosophy, then, are not very different from sawing wood, screwing a screw, knotting a knot, threading a thread. They are just another sort of practice, to them belonging certain disciplines of the body.
But perhaps this distribution of the holding hand and the hand that draws, saws, knots and threads, I mean this lateral function of our bodies, has changed more recently. Perhaps with driving cars we still give directions with the right hand and hold onto to the energies of the car with the left–with the exception of many members of the Commonwealth of Nations. But with the typing machine and the computer? Right-handedness and left-handedness have changed. It is a new meaning in construction, a new ambidexterity. What is clear is that it corresponds to a new distribution of things in our world, and thus a new bodily posture appropriate to it. What is clear is that this is as historical a matter as it is physiological.
I eye the painting once again; The man lost in thought, leaning onto the block to the left of the middle–not with an iPad but pen and paper! He is the quasi-Heraclitus who is said to have received his ideas exclusively from things in the mind: words, inspirations, epiphanies. His left hand does not hold onto a book but a head, his head. He is not pointing to his head (which, we’d expect by now, he would do with his right hand), which would have a very different meaning –one of which is: I am mad. Rather, he is evidently thinking; he is holding his head as if getting a grip on his thoughts. His left hand in turn is supported by the stone table, which also keeps a paper in its place. Is the left hand the model for tables, and are tables substitutes for left hands? Is the table ever invented to free the left hand of its burdens of holding objects for the right hand to manipulate? Does the table make the difference, among others, between the farmer, who holds a scythe (left) and swings it (right) and the man of knowledge who depends on others for holding, stands on their “shoulders,” so to say, whilst pointing to beyonds with a visionary finger? It is not an unusual hypothesis at all if one is familiar with the argument of “the extended mind.” That he places his left hand on his heap or grips a book, misguides us into thinking that he did all by himself, out of his head and merely by words on papers.
Do the hands refer to two complementary meanings of the world? That there are separable things and objects in the world to which we can give differentiated attention, all of which together form a supported and supporting whole? Do the differences between the right and the left hand, in Raphael’s depiction at least, point to the difficult relationship of wholes and parts? It is plausible that hands are differentiated in their functions. It is hopefully plausible too that this differentiation corresponds to the possibility of practicing deeds that produce knowledge of the world. Is it possible that what we call whole and parts, which still has an enigmatic place in the world of the sciences (especially that of the complex systems and also in the hypotheses on lateralization of human brain functions) is, at last, explicable thanks to the left and the right hand?
And a few more hands. Let us notice the old man on the stairs, beneath Aristotle. He does not care for his posture or his cover. His care is for holding the plate or paper at the right distance, on which he reads. His right hand is relieved of duty (he is retired and does not command anyone any longer, does not teach or communicate), while his right arm is also a pillar that holds his reading shoulders and head (his energies go into sustaining his old days and his aging body). He does not point out anything even though we can see he has great interest in knowledge. We won’t know whether what is going on inside his dark head is genius or a lost mind–until he is tested and succeeds or fails in convincingly pointing out what he has learnt and can learn us too.
And this question of genius or madness, perhaps, brings about the dismayed hands of the young person who has his back turned to us. “Look at him”, asks the left hand, “what do we do with this condition of being”, asks the right hand. Is this young figure also learning, as his left hand is doing right hands’ work? Not possible to deny. But as our previous figures did, this left hand is actually holding the whole of the man, so that the right hand can pose a question about a part of him. Just notice how the left hand is meticulously oriented flatly towards the pith of old body’s matter, and the right hand is inviting to question by directing itself at him with open and undetermined gesture. It is undeniably the job of a master painter.
Possibly, what is under our attention is given by the right to the left hand to hold, so that afterwards we can lay our focus further towards the parts of what is now a whole in its own right–or better, its own left.
Prominent wholes, the earth and the heavens, are in fact held by noble figures to the right of the students of geometry – we can enumerate the variety of disciplines here in this one painting. A geographer is holding a globe with his left hand (young Ptolemy?), and the other has the sphere of the heavens balancing, curiously, on his right hand (perhaps the older Ptolemy, or Hipparcus). Does my narrative break down here? Is the neat distribution of functions of holding and pointing, supporting and manipulating, among right and left nevertheless arbitrary and wishful thinking on my part? (And looking at the statue of the soldier on the right, we have the functions of attacking and defending. With the musician, though also somewhat ambiguous, we also have holding and striking.) Not quite if we see how the sphere of the heavens are resting on the stretched fingers of the astronomer. Not, if we ask ourselves, as if we were contemporaries of Raphael, “could we get a hold of the stars?” It is impossible for Raphael to use the left hand when the heavens are concerned. They have a hold on us, not us of them. The astronomer can have the heavens spinning on his fingers, only as a puzzle, with a paradoxical look.
It is a beautiful lesson, if I am correct, that to know the heavens properly is to know that it is impossible to hold them, impossible, in fact, to map their infinity like we map the finite earth on a globe. And it is also to speculate, that they are already held for us (and what do we call the creature that hold the heavens for us?); we only need to point. It is a second marvel, another lesson, that to do geometry means a different repertoire of holding and pointing than doing astronomy.
Until, of course, left hands start to fix spectacles, series of lenses, telescopes, in front of our eyes. Heavens and stars can be brought closer to us. While the right hand is busy individuating heavenly bodies, the crafty left hand does not sit still. A little exchange between the hands has transformed quite a few destinies. A few instruments placed in between the eyes and ears on the one hand and the stars on the others have transformed the programming of our muscles.
And so the right hands of Plato and Aristotle have to point differently in our times, even if their concern remains with philosophy. The world of Ideas is now no more in the heavens than it is a supposed non-place, with no spatial coordinates. No more are the layered skies the greater place that holds us and our little world in its place. Nowadays we even find non-places on Earth. For them we have to look at any generic metro station, thanks to the point made by Marc Augé – at least before art works were especially commissioned to make it possible to tell stations from one another.
So, things have become somewhat more complicated now. But we still feel the need to give anything its proper place, and a way of pointing things out in trying to relate to them. And there is no other way than to count our bodies in when we do so, no other way than to be ambidexterous about it. The ways we use our hands remain efforts towards such a world. We never stop using them some way or other.
For this text, to stay with Raphael’s philosophers, why, again, are Plato and Aristotle employing their left hands differently? With Aristotle we can play on his similarity with Pythagoras, the fuzzy scholar. Both of them hold their books in use, or ready to be used–more than Plato does, who pretends to already speak from the book. Left feet of both Aristotle and Pythagoras are visibly helping along. Their books are grounded in that way. What is written in their books is supported by what is here and near or is brought nearby. Yes, even Pythagoras brings things nearby with his art of numbers and geometry of distances.
But Plato understands Pythagoras differently (and Raphael agrees, in painting Pythagoras on Plato’s side). There is no point in closing in on anything or taking a distance, no use for manipulating and experimenting. What is there in the book is already as close as possible to the truth, which is in another world of Ideas. One has to have learned by heart. And this accomplishment is signaled by the restful way of holding the book under one’s arms. If for Aristotle the book must be constantly opened to consult, to check, make additions and subtractions, for Plato, the book is already finished. If for Aristotle the book must change steadily, as if there is no difference between a book and a notebook, because it refers to constant change in the empirical world, for Plato the book must refer to the ultimate truth and once written the book itself will be ultimate. For Plato everything is already at the right distance, including the paradox of knowing truths that are infinitely far away. And so, manipulation, experimentation is unnecessary. He is the armchair philosopher, with the left hand resting while the right writes. (At least, this is the received idea of Plato, in Raphael’s time and in our time still.) With Aristotle the left hand will never rest, even if from our point of view he misunderstood the varieties of change in the world.
We inherit both of these philosophers and others. Somehow they are united, or mingled, in our endless repertoire of gestures and meanings. Is the smartphone more Platonist or Aristotelian? Does it help us with accessing the world or does it alienate and confuse us? Does it try to clear up our place in the greater cosmos, or give us the feeling of a universal mind without a particular place, a mind in completely free relation to all things? Does it make us cosmopolitan, or create new ways for us to be localized? The answer is not one or the others, but somewhere in the direction of having to learn anew how to properly grasp and index the new arrangement of things. This is what Michel Serres meant with the new law that will emerge out of the Internet.
And so, we live in a world with even more figures demonstrating an even larger diversity in the use of hands. Could we represent that diversity in an image or series of images? What would those series say about our skills and presuppositions about the cosmos? If the image and the appreciation of hands is in a rubble, because we hear and see so many things but hardly sense what they point out, at least the morale here is straightforward, and can hopefully be apprehended as more than a banality: that whatever happens we will have to make sure that we know the right hand from the left.
And not to forget the basic precondition that it is a privilege to have two hands free, and to be able to go to school–which indeed means: free time–a privilege that is still not universal as well as badly implemented in State education. As such the following ideals are both intelligible and sensible: to give others a (left) hand, to emancipate, to convene together in holding our world and join our gaze, and share knowledge. In the least, can we, come closer to this little justice, in accounting for the efforts of the left hand as much as we have praised the right in our historiography of knowing? For the care that must be given to all the things before we can point so effortlessly to them? And more broadly, to take on matters of our existence more evenhandedly? Not mere abstractions, but still an ideal to reach for.
Interview with the author, Nima Madjzubi
First things first: one of our editors is left-handed. Does that complicate things or can they just silently substitute ‘left’ for ‘right’ and vice versa?
I am left-handed myself and can sympathise. To “just… substitute” would actually not be complicated enough. Theory and common sense of handedness is too strongly thought of in terms of dominance and preference, while it is only about a subset of our manual repertoire, however important. And even within that subset a differential cooperation of hands is required for optimal fulfilment of tasks. Just try throwing a ball with either hand while the other hand is incapacitated or writing with a pen on a paper that you don’t fix on the surface with the non-writing hand. (And don’t forget about the equal dexterity of both hands in typing.) The prototypical tasks for a handedness questionnaire are actually writing, throwing, and hammering. These are traditionally masculine things to do, which also correspond with professional hierarchies. The semiotics of handedness (dominance, preference, refinement, skill), I believe, has a parallel to that of the worldly male and the invisible female at home. (Iris Marion Young’s 1980 Throwing Like a Girl is a classical exposition of such connections.) Our idea of handedness is a theory of one hand for a limited though important repertoire. Correlatively, neuroscientists say it is “efficient” for fine-grained motor skills to be lateralised in the brain. But I have not seen the problem posed how inefficient the whole would be if the other brain half did close to nothing.
So, I think our thinking about our manual repertoire is not yet close to covering all its complexities and lateral (bi)manualities. The very historicity of the theories of handedness should be a warning to the historian not to import them as biological fixations in studies of scientific and technical manipulation. Of course, you are right to ask the question since I am not very explicit on this matter; my own insights have evolved since the time of writing. Anyway, in the essay I do try to break open the uniformity of right/pointing and left/holding towards the end and emphasise the overall co-dependence of holding and pointing and that these functions can change, e.g. be delegated (or for that matter substituted) depending on variable technologies.
Can you say something about the extent to which we can extrapolate the style of reasoning and interpretation of this fresco? Do you think the ways in which epistemic functions are distributed among the hands of philosophers in Raphael’s fresco point to more general conventions or modes? And do you think there are connections to be made here to other questions or motifs in history of science?
I questioned this fresco on a specific topic of the relations between dexterity and knowledge. I would say that the questioning, which is the methodical part, can be extended to other visual materials, but it would be difficult to do the same with texts as the data for the detailed corporeal situation of the practitioners are hardly ever recorded. Whether the results of these questions can be generalised depend on the fruitfulness of the method, which I have not tried due to very economic reasons.
My theme laterally connects to studies of scientific objects from which the studies of techniques and skills are further derived–from Rheinberger to Dupré, so to say. These are all attempts at putting sciences (back) into the formative circumstances in which they are practiced. In relation to these topics I do shift the attention slightly to the very specific human body as a differentiating tool/instrument. Most studies on the theme of body as instrument, or as part of ensembles of knowledge production, either focus on the accounts of perception given by men of science (I know of a volume edited by Wolfe & Gal, 2010) or they use body and hand as metaphors for labour, industry, dualism and hierarchy of scholar and artisan (for example: 2007 The Mindful Hand edited by Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer and Peter Dear; mind the singular “Hand“). Admittedly, these approaches allow for better historical sourcing. Yet they remain on the cultural side of the nature/culture divide, ignoring our corporeal specificity and history. Biologists are trying to bridge or dismantle this divide. In my turn I found it to be a prerogative to escape the pervasive dualism of mind and body, and nature and culture (which the historiographies above always risk reproducing). And part of that escape was adopting styles which post-Cartesians like Serres developed that try to evade digestion merely by a scholar’s mind, among others through rationing of intertextual references and instead experimenting with pointing to our (sensory-)motor apparatus, making the reader wonder along with the author about the things beyond the text, our hands for example.
Your argument involves you interpreting the gestures and poses of ancient philosophers in a 16th-century fresco. How, in your eyes, is the meaning of these gestures distributed among these different layers, ages, and historical figures? Is it already in the ancients, is it in Raphael’s fresco, or is it a new layer added by your pointing it out? Or is there a universality to these gestures that transcends the question of historical contexts? What I am getting at is the question where the answers lie (whether they are accessible or not) to the questions you ask along the way.
Is our (bi)manual repertoire universal and trans-historic? It’s neither, it is evolutionary, contingent, historical, and able to shift on all scales. I can say that much. But are my hermeneutics, my attributions and distributions historiographically responsible? I think this category of questioning seeks to learn of history, whereas I wanted to learn from history. The former category consists mainly of whodunit questions, but are whodunits always relevant?
I asked other questions because I wanted to escape the gravity of a historiography that let itself be captured by “who said what” due to the (un)availability of historical material. Instead I let myself be seized by a question to which the painting seemed to respond, not with definite answers, but with insightful suggestions and a surprising consistency. In other words, your questions aim at an objectivity that seeks to put the historical material in the clear light of the metalanguage of current historiography. I don’t object, but I went for a different objectivity: my object is the very hands in which are inscribed all these inherited skills and which co-determine what we can know and how we know. Like oral transmission or hidden curricula, the historical traces of these skills are largely absent, but I believe it matters if we can nevertheless imagine this and other histories that transcend what is recorded, however arduous the development of the methodology that they require.
You describe this piece as being indebted to Michel Serres. Can you explain what that means, in terms of choices you made regarding the style of the piece and of the argument?
For various reasons Serres is not very well known in the Netherlands and it would be an impossible task to introduce him here for the sake of explaining my debt. Another French thinker subsumed him under the category of French thinkers to whom “language is the very material on which to experiment for any argument to gain some meaning.” Serres was a mathematician and specialist of Leibniz and Descartes. Like several other thinkers he tried to break free from the Cartesian reduction of language to a minimum set, a shrinking metalanguage that aims to explain all else, and the vain reduction of everything to cognition. Thus to him, “style” was a matter of method and experiment. The text had to emancipate itself from Descartes, in theme and style, and speak again of the senses (see The Five Senses for example, condensed in 1999’s Variations sur le Corps but not translated in English). This is what I took from him. For example, I avoided introducing a framework at the beginning in terms of which the material would be explained, and largely avoided intertextual reference which I exposed earlier. Instead of framing I tried to face the material with incessant questioning, confronting the question of dexterity and a canonical Renaissance depiction of bodies of men of knowledge. Serres tried similar confrontations of two registers; for example, with his Turner Translates Carnot (1982), facing the paintings of the former with the thermodynamics of the latter. If Serres hadn’t done it with some relative success (despite all the charges of obscurity that the French get for their trying to live up to the consequences of what they have learnt) I would have never dared to write an unconventional text like this let alone share it!
o-o-o
Roberts, Lissa, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear. The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Industrialization. Edita KNAW, 2007.
Serres, Michel. “Turner Translates Carnot.” Hermes: literature, science, philosophy. The John Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Serres, Michel. The five senses: A philosophy of mingled bodies. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008.
Serres, Michel. Variations sur le corps. Editions le Pommier, 1999.
Wolfe, Charles T., and Ofer Gal, eds. The body as object and instrument of knowledge: Embodied empiricism in early modern science. Vol. 25. Springer Science & Business Media, 2010.
Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality.” Human studies 3.1 (1980): 137-156.